Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

psychological and even emotional one, a product of the utter peculiarity of recent British experience. In Anthony Eden’s summary of the British decision, to a New York audience in January 1952, ‘This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.’ The decision was not final; but, taken when it was, it proved fateful. In the absence of Britain (and, in Britain’s wake, the Scandinavians) power within the ‘little Europe’ of the West fell by default to France. The French duly did what the British might have done in other circumstances and made ‘Europe’ in their own image, eventually casting its institutions and policies in a mould familiar from French precedent. At the time it was the continental Europeans, not the British, who expressed regret at the course of events. Many prominent European leaders deeply wanted Britain to join them. As Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian and European statesman, noted in regretful retrospect: ‘This moral leadership—it was yours for the