Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism—the forms in which it was familiar to most readers of the time—its inherently difficult vocabulary had attained a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation of students and their teachers. The junior faculty recruited to staff the expanded universities of the time were themselves in most cases graduates of the Sixties, raised in the fashions and debates of those years. But whereas European universities of the previous decade were preoccupied with grand theories of various sorts—society, the state, language, history, revolution—what trickled down to the next generation was above all a preoccupation with Theory as such. Seminars in ‘Cultural Theory’, or ‘General Theory’ displaced the conventional disciplinary boundaries that had still dominated even radical academic debate a few years before. ‘Difficulty’ became the measure of intellectual seriousness. In their disabused commentary on the heritage of ‘’68 Thought’, the French writers Luc Ferry and Alain Renault tartly concluded that ‘the greatest achievement of the thinkers of the Sixties was to convince their audience that incomprehensibility was the sign of greatness.’ With a ready-made audience in the universities, newly lionised theorists like Lacan and Derrida elevated the vagaries and paradoxes of language into full-fledged philosophies, infinitely flexible templates for textu...

Hall himself would in later years concede that his Centre was ‘for a time, over-preoccupied with these difficult theoretical issues.’ But in fact this narcissistic obscurantism was very much of its time, its detachment from daily reality bearing unconscious witness to the exhaustion of an intellectual tradition. Moreover, it was by no means the only symptom of cultural depletion in these years. Even the sparkling originality of 1960s French cinema declined into self-conscious artistry. In 1974 Jacques Rivette, the witty and original director of Paris Nous Appartient (1960) and La Religieuse (1966), directed Céline et Julie vont en bateau (‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’). At 193 minutes in length, a plot-less, stylized parody (albeit unintended) of the French New Wave, Céline et Julie marked the end of an age. Artistic theorizing was displacing art.

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to shock. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’

The predictable effect of such a system was to encourage not just stagnation and inefficiency but a permanent cycle of corruption. It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives—medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities—people are required to bend the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways.

The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which—in return for political quiescence—offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’

Economic stagnation was in itself a standing rebuke to Communism’s claims to superiority over capitalism. And if not a stimulus to opposition, it was certainly a source of disaffection. For most people living under Communism in the Brezhnev era, from the late Sixties through the early Eighties, life was no longer shaped by terror or repression. But it was grey and drab. Adults had fewer and fewer children; they drank more—the per capita annual consumption of alcoholic spirits in the Soviet Union quadrupled in these years—and they died young. Public architecture in Communist societies was not only aesthetically unappealing, it was shoddy and uncomfortable, a faithful mirror of the shabby authoritarianism of the system itself. As a Budapest taxi-driver once remarked to the present author, pointing to the serried ranks of dank, grimy apartment blocks that disfigure the city’s outer suburbs: ‘We live in those. Typical Communist building—summer is hot, winter very cold.’

‘We cannot go on living like this’. Mikhail Gorbachev (to his wife, March 1985)

‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself’. Alexis De Tocqueville

‘Historical experience shows that Communists were sometimes forced by circumstances to behave rationally and agree to compromises’. Adam Michnik

Back in September 1981 Reagan had warned that without a verifiable nuclear arms agreement there would be an arms race and that if there were an arms race the US would win it. And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate. The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974. But bankruptcy alone would not have brought Communism to its knees. The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system. The Soviet Union had built a military machine that defeated Hitler, occupied half of Europe and matched the West weapon for weapon for forty years—but at a terrible price. At their peak, somewhere between 30–40 percent of Soviet resources were diverted to military spending, four to five times the American share. It was already obvious to many Soviet experts that their country could not indefinitely maintain such a burden. In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.

It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one—albeit spectacularly unsuccessful—neo-colonial adventure. But the disaster in Afghanistan, like the cost of the accelerating arms race of the early ‘80s, would not in itself have induced the collapse of the system. Sustained by, fear, inertia and the self-interest of the old men who ran it, Brezhnev’s ‘era of stagnation’ might have lasted indefinitely. Certainly there was no countervailing authority, no dissident movement—whether in the Soviet Union or its client states—that could have brought it low. Only a Communist could do that. And it was a Communist who did.

The guiding premise of the Communist project was its faith in the laws of history and the interests of the collectivity, which would always trump the motives and actions of individuals. It was thus ironically appropriate that its destiny should in the end have been determined by the fate of men. On November 10th 1982, at the age of 76, Leonid Brezhnev finally gave up the ghost, having long since come to resemble it. His successor, Andropov, was already 68 and not in good health. In just over a year, before he could implement any of the reforms that he planned, Andropov died and was replaced as General Secretary by Konstantin Chernenko, himself aged 72 and in such poor health that he could hardly complete his speech at Andropov’s funeral in February 1984. Thirteen months later he, too, was dead.

then in a two-sentence official communiqué. But Chernobyl could not be kept secret: international anxiety and the Soviets’ own inability to contain the damage forced Gorbachev first to make a public statement two weeks later, acknowledging

But Chernobyl could not be kept secret: international anxiety and the Soviets’ own inability to contain the damage forced Gorbachev first to make a public statement two weeks later, acknowledging some but not all of what had taken place, and then to call upon foreign aid and expertise. And just as his fellow citizens were thus made publicly aware for the first time of the scale of official incompetence and indifference to life and health, so Gorbachev was forced to acknowledge the extent of his country’s problems. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.

It is one of the curiosities of Communist reformers that they always set out with the quixotic goal of reforming some aspects of their system while keeping others unaffected—introducing market-oriented incentives while maintaining central planning controls, or allowing greater freedom of expression while retaining the Party’s monopoly of truth. But partial reform or reform of one sector in isolation from others was inherently contradictory. ‘Managed pluralism’ or a ‘socialist market’ was doomed from the start. As for the idea that the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party could be sustained while the Party itself shed merely the pathological excrescences of seven decades of absolute power, this suggests a certain political naiveté on Gorbachev’s part. In an authoritarian system power is indivisible—relinquish it in part and you must eventually lose it all. Nearly four centuries earlier, the Stuart monarch James I understood these things much better—as he put it in a succinct rebuff to Scottish Presbyterians protesting at the power vested in his bishops: ‘No Bishop, no King’.

Gorbachev and his controlled revolution were in the end swept aside by the scale of the contradictions they aroused. Looking back, he observed with some regret that ‘naturally, I feel troubled by the fact that I did not succeed in keeping the entire process of perestroika within the framework of my intentions’. But the intentions and the framework were incompatible. Once the sustaining supports of censorship, control and repression were removed, everything of consequence in the Soviet system—the planned economy, the public rhetoric, the monopoly of the Party—just collapsed. Gorbachev did not achieve his objective, a reformed and efficient Communism, shorn of its dysfunctions. Indeed, he failed utterly. But his achievement was impressive none the less. In the USSR there were no independent or even semi-autonomous institutions for critics and reformers to mobilize on their behalf: the Soviet system could only ever have been dismantled from inside and by initiative coming from above. By introducing first one element of change and then another and then another, Gorbachev progressively eroded the very system through which he had risen. Employing the vast powers of a Party General Secretary, he eviscerated the Party dictatorship from within.

In addition, the plotters were an unintentional caricature of everything that was wrong with the Soviet past: old, grey men from the Brezhnev era, slow and wooden in speech, out of touch with changes in a country whose clock they were clumsily trying to turn back thirty years. In times past when such men as these schemed in the Kremlin they were hidden from public view, their only appearances confined to distant viewing stands at public ceremonies. Now, however, they were constrained to appear on television and to the press to explain and defend their actions—and the public was given ample opportunity to observe close-up the physiognomy of official Socialism in its dotage.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a remarkable affair, unparalleled in modern history. There was no foreign war, no bloody revolution, no natural catastrophe. A large industrial state—a military superpower—simply collapsed: its authority drained away, its institutions evaporated. The unraveling of the USSR was not altogether free of violence, as we have seen in Lithuania and the Caucasus; and there would be more fighting in some of the independent republics in the coming years. But for the most part the world’s largest country departed the stage almost without protest. To describe this as a bloodless retreat from Empire is surely accurate; but it hardly begins to capture the unanticipated ease of the whole process.

Bolstered by this evidence of Western pusillanimity, on July 11th Bosnian Serb forces under Mladić brazenly marched into one of the so-called UN ‘Safe Areas’, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, by then overflowing with terrified Muslim refugees. Srebrenica was officially ‘protected’ not just by UN mandate but by a 400–strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladić’s men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladić had given his ‘word of honor as an officer’ that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them—7,400—were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned safely home to Holland.

Although it took Washington an extraordinarily long time to focus upon events in the Balkans, once the US did engage there its record is distinctly better. Indeed the fact that it was American initiative that drove forward each stage of international intervention was a source of serial humiliation for the Western European allies. But the US, too, dragged its feet—for the most part because the American defense establishment was reluctant to take any risks and because many US politicians continued to believe that their country had ‘no dog’ in this war. The idea of deploying NATO in these novel circumstances—or that the US might unilaterally intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state with which it had no quarrel—was not an easy sell. It was, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher observed at the height of the Bosnian war, ‘a problem from hell’. As for

Capitalism, in the gospel that spread across post-Communist Europe, is about markets. And markets mean privatization. The fire-sale of publicly owned commodities in post-1989 eastern Europe had no historical precedent. The cult of privatization in western Europe that had gathered pace from the late Seventies (see Chapter 16) offered a template for the helter-skelter retreat from state ownership in the East; but otherwise they had very little in common. Capitalism, as it had emerged in the Atlantic world and Western Europe over the course of four centuries, was accompanied by laws, institutions, regulations and practices upon which it was critically dependent for its operation and its legitimacy. In many post-Communist countries such laws and institutions were quite unknown—and dangerously underestimated by neophyte free-marketers there.

The troubling aspect of the new anti-Semitism was that while, once again, Jews were the victims, now it was Arabs (or Muslims) who were the perpetrators. The only exception to this rule appeared to be in Germany, where the renascent extreme Right did not trouble itself to distinguish between immigrants, Jews and other ‘non-Germans’. But Germany, for obvious reasons, was a special case. Elsewhere the public authorities worried more about the growing alienation of their Arab and other Muslim communities than they did about any putative revival of Fascism. They were probably right.

‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’. Ernest Renan

This change in mood was driven in large measure by a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism at the end of the Fifties and by growing evidence that young Germans were utterly ignorant about the Third Reich: their parents had told them nothing and their teachers avoided the subject. Beginning in 1962, ten West German Länder announced that henceforth the history of the years 1933–1945—including the extermination of the Jews—would be a required subject in all schools. Konrad Adenauer’s initial post-war assumption was thus reversed: the health of German democracy now required that Nazism be remembered rather than forgotten. And attention was increasingly directed to genocide and ‘crimes against humanity’, rather than the ‘war crimes’ with which National Socialism had hitherto been primarily associated. A new generation was to be made aware of the nature—and the scale—of Nazi atrocities. No longer would popular magazines like Stern and Quick be able to downplay the significance of the camps, as they had done in the Fifties, or sing the praises of ‘good’ Nazis. A certain public awareness of the unacceptability, the indecency of the recent German past began to take hold.