Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The chief purpose of planning in post-war continental Europe was public investment. At a time of acute capital shortage and with huge demand for investment in every sector, government planning consisted of hard choices: where to place the limited resources of the state and at whose expense.

The British, as we shall see, were constrained to accept years of ‘austerity’ as the price for economic recovery. In France or Italy, where there was almost no long-term private capital market, all major investments had to be publicly funded—which was why the first Monnet Plan was skewed towards capital investment in major industries at the expense of domestic consumption, housing and services. The political consequences of this were predictable: by 1947 France, like Italy, was threatened with strikes, violent demonstrations and a steady increase in support for the Communist Party and its trade unions. Deliberate neglect of the consumer goods sector and the diversion of scarce national resources to a handful of key industrial sectors made long-term economic sense: but it was a high-risk strategy.

But the ‘welfare state’—social planning—was more than just a prophylactic against political upheaval. Our present discomfort with notions of race, eugenics, ‘degeneration’ and the like obscures the important part these played in European public thinking during

the first half of the twentieth century: it wasn’t only the Nazis who took such matters seriously. By 1945 two generations of European doctors, anthropologists, public health officials and political commentators had contributed to widespread debates and polemics about ‘race health’, population growth, environmental and occupational well-being and the public policies through which these might be improved and secured. There was a broad consensus that the physical and moral condition of the citizenry was a matter of common interest and therefore part of the responsibility of the state.

As a consequence, rudimentary welfare provisions of one kind or another were already widespread before 1945, although their quality and reach varied widely. Germany was typically the most advanced country, having already instituted pension, accident and medical insurance schemes under Bismarck, between 1883 and 1889. But other countries began to catch up in the years immediately before and after World War One. Embryonic national insurance and pension schemes were introduced in Britain by Asquith’s Liberal governments in the first decade of the centu...

Compulsory unemployment insurance, first introduced in Britain in 1911, was instituted in Italy (1919), Austria (1920), Ireland (1923), Poland (1924), Bulgaria (1925), Germany and Yugoslavia (1927) and Norway (1938). Romania and Hungary already had accident and sickness insurance schemes in place before World War One, and all the countries of eastern Europe introduced national pension systems between the wars. Family allowances were a key element in plans to increase the birth rate—a particular obsession after 1918 in countries badly hit by wartime losses—and were introduced first in Belgium (1930), next in France (1932) and in Hungary and the Netherlands just before the outbreak of war. But none of these arrangements, not even those of the Nazis,...

Nowhere was there yet any recognition of an obligation upon the state to guarantee a given set of services to all citizens, whether male or female, employed or workless, old or young.

It was the war that changed all this. Just as World War One had precipitated legislation and social provisions in its wake—if only to deal with the widows, orphans, invalids and unemployed of the immediate post-war years—so the Second World War transformed both the role of the modern state and the expectations placed upon it. The change was most marked in Britain, where Maynard Keynes correctly anticipated a post-war ‘craving for social and personal security’. But everywhere (in the words of the historian Michael Howard) ‘war and welfare went hand in hand’.

In isolation, social insurance, however generous, was not in principle politically radical—we have seen how relatively early it was introduced in even the most conservative of regimes. Comprehensive welfare systems, however, are inherently re-distributive. Their universal character and the sheer scale on which they operate require the transfer of resources—usually through taxation—from the privileged to the less well off. The welfare state was thus in itself a radical undertaking, and the variations among the European welfare states after 1945 reflected not just institutional procedures but also political calculation.

Even in Switzerland, a country distinctly under-provisioned by European welfare standards, the December 1948 Federal Old Age and Survivors’ Insurance Act is regarded by many citizens as one of their country’s finest achievements.

Why were Europeans willing to pay so much for insurance and other long-term welfare provisions, at a time when life was still truly hard and material

shortages endemic? The first reason is that, precisely because times were difficult, the post-war welfare systems were a guarantee of a certain minimum of justice, or fairness. This was not the spiritual and social revolution for which many in the wartime Resistance had dreamed, but it was a first step away from the hopelessness and cynicism of the pre-war years. Secondly, the welfare states of western Europe were not politically divisive. They were socially re-distributive in general intent (some more than others) but not at all revolutionary—they did not ‘soak the rich’. On the contrary: although the greatest immediate advantage was felt by the poor, the real long-term beneficiaries were the professional and commercial middle class. In many cases they had not previously been eligible for work-related health, unemployment or retirement benefits and had been obliged, before the war, to purchase such services and benefits from the private sector. Now they had full access to them, either free or at low cost. Taken with the state provision of free or subsidized secondary and higher education for their children, this left the salaried professional and white-collar classes with both a better quality of life and more disposable income. Far from dividing the social classes against each other, the European welfare state bound them closer together than ever before, with a common interest in its preservation and defense. But the chief basis of support for state-funded welfare and so...

agrarian reform, which many well-informed contemporaries saw as Europe’s most pressing dilemma. The weight of the past still hung heavily upon the continent’s peasantry. Only in England, the Low Countries, Denmark, the Alpine lands and parts

of France was it possible to speak of a prosperous, independent class of farmers. The overwhelming majority of Europe’s predominantly rural population lived in conditions of indebted penury.

One reason for this was that large tracts of the best arable and, especially, pasture land were still in the hands of a relatively few wealthy landowners, often absent and in many cases adamantly opposed to any improvement in the conditions of their land, their tenants or their workers. Another factor was the long decline in agricultural prices relative to industrial ones, a process exacerbated since the eighteen-seventies by the importation of cheap grain and later meat from the Americas and the British Dominions. By the 1930s European peasants had lived for nearly three generations with this relentless deterioration in their circumstances. Many—from Greece, Southern Italy, the Balkans, central and eastern Europe—had emigrated: to the US, Argentina and elsewhere. Those who stayed behind had often proved easy prey for nationalist and Fascist demagogues. After the war it was thus widely believed, particularly on the Left, that Fascism appealed espec...

Between 1944 and 1947 every east European country saw the creation of a large class of smallholders beholden to the new authorities for their land. A few years later those same smallholders would in their turn be dispossessed by the Communist regimes in their drive for collectivization. But in the meantime whole classes of landed gentry and large farmers, in Poland, East Prussia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia simply disappeared.

In western Europe only Southern Italy saw anything comparable to the dramatic changes further East. Sweeping reform laws in 1950 announced the redistribution of estate land across Sicily and the Mezzogiorno, following land seizures and occupations in Basilicata, the Abruzzi and Sicily. But for all the fuss, little

changed—much of the land redistributed from the old latifundia lacked water, roads or housing. Of 74,000 hectares redistributed in Sicily after World War Two, 95 percent was ‘marginal’ or inferior land, unsuited to cultivation. The impoverished peasants to whom it was offered had no money and no access to credit; they could do little with their new holdings. The land reforms in Italy failed. Their stated goal—the solution of the ‘Southern Question’—would only be met a decade later, and then only in part, when the...

In Italy, France and Belgium women finally secured the vote. In June 1946 the Italians voted to become a Republic, but the margin was narrow (12.7 million votes in favour of abolishing the monarchy, 10.7 million for retaining it) and the country’s historical divisions were if anything further exacerbated by the outcome: the South, except for the region of Basilicata, voted overwhelmingly for the king (by a ratio of 4:1 in Naples).

The Greeks, in contrast, voted in September 1946 to retain their monarchy. Belgians kept theirs, too, but removed the incumbent, King Leopold III, as punishment for his cooperation with the Nazis. This decision, taken under public pressure in 1950 against the wishes of a slight majority of the population, sharply divided the country along communal and linguistic

lines: francophone Walloons voted to remove Leopold from the throne, whereas 72 percent of Dutch-speaking Flamands expressed a preference for letting him stay. The French had no monarch on whom to vent their memory of wartime humiliation, and merely voted in 19...

In Italy, France and Czechoslovakia Communist Parties did well after the war. In the Italian elections of 1946 the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) obtained 19 percent of the vote; the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) won 28.6 percent of the vote in the second French elections of that year, its best result ever. In Czechoslovakia, in the free elections of May 1946, the Communists secured 38 percent of the national vote (40 percent in the Czech lands). Elsewhere Communists did not fare so well in free elections, though better than they would ever manage again, ranging from 13 percent in Belgium to just 0.4 percent in the United Kingdom.

outside Britain and the Nordic countries the ‘old Left’ of Communists and Socialists was never able to govern alone. In western Europe the balance was always held, and in many cases dominated by, a new political animal, the Christian Democratic parties. Catholic parties were familiar in continental Europe—they had long thrived in the Netherlands

and Belgium. Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany had a Catholic Center Party and the conservative wing of Austrian politics has long been closely bound up with the (Catholic) People’s Party. Even ‘Christian Democracy’ itself was not an altogether new idea—its origins lay in early-twentieth-century Catholic reformism and Catholic movements of the political center that tried without success to make their way in the turbulent years following World War One. But after 1945 the situation was quite different and wholly to their advantage.

these parties—especially the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in West Germany, the Christian Democrats (DC) in Italy and the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) in France—now had a near-monopoly of the Catholic vote. In 1945 Europe, that still mattered a lot: the Catholic vote was still heavily conservative, especially on social questions and in regions of high Catholic practice. Traditional Catholic voters in Italy, France, Be...

But, and this was the peculiarity of the post-war era, even conservative Catholics in many count...

to vote Christian Democrat, despite the reformist bent of Christian Democrat politicians and policies, because conventional right-wing parties were either under a shadow or else banned outright. Even non-Catholic conservatives turned increas...

Christian Democracy avoided class-based appeals and emphasized instead social and moral reforms. In particular, it insisted upon the importance of the family, a properly Christian theme with significant policy

implications at a time when the needs of single-parent, homeless and destitute families had never been greater.

Thus Christian Democratic parties were ideally placed to capitalize on virtually every aspect of the post-war condition: the desire for stability and security, the expectation of renewal, the absence of traditional right-wing alternatives and the expectations vested in the state—for in contrast to conventional Catholic politicians of an earlier generation, the leaders of Christian Democratic parties and their more radical younger followers had no inhibitions about enrolling the power of the state in pursuit of their goals. If anything, Christian Democrats of the first post-war years saw free-market liberals rather than th...

As a consequence, in Italy and West Germany Christian Democrat parties secured (with some American assistance) a near monopoly of political power for many years to come. In France—thanks to the corrosive effects of two colonial wars, followed in...

The leaders of Christian Democratic parties, like Britain’s Winston Churchill, were men of an earlier time: Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, Alcide de Gasperi five years later, Churchill himself in 1874. This was no mere coincidence or biographical curiosity. By 1945 many continental European countries had lost two generations of potential leaders: the first to death and injury in the Great War, the second to the temptation of Fascism or else to murder at the hands of Nazis and their friends. This shortfall manifested itself in the generally rather mediocre quality of younger politicians in these years—Palmiro Togliatti (who had spent much of the previous twenty years as a political operative in Moscow) was an exception. The special appeal of Léon Blum, who returned to public life in France after imprisonment by Vichy and incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, was not just his heroism but also his age (he was born in 1872).

they all came from the remarkable generation of European social reformers who reached maturity during the years 1880–1910—whether as socialists (Blum, Attlee), liberals (Beveridge, or the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi, born in 1874) or progressive Catholics (De Gasperi, Adenauer). Their instincts and interests were very well suited to the post-war mood.

most important, the old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity. The vogue between the wars had been for the new

and the modern. Parliaments and democracies were seen by many—and not just Fascists and Communists—as decadent, stagnant, corrupt and in any case inadequate to the tasks of the modern state. War and occupation dispelled these illusions, for voters if not for intellectuals. In the cold light of peace, the dull compromises of constitutional democracy took on a new appeal. What most people longed for in 1945 was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms. Wher...

Statesmen whose experience reached back beyond the troubled inter-war decades to the more settled and self-confident era before 1914 thus had a particular attraction. In the continuity of their person they could facilitate a difficult transition from the over-heated politics of the recent past to a coming era of rapid social transformation. Whatever their party ‘label’, the elder statesmen of Europe were all, by 1945, skeptic...

inter-war politics faithfully reflected the mood of their constituents. A post-‘ideol...

London, where three and a half million homes in the metropolitan area were destroyed, was greater than that wrought by the Great Fire of 1666. Ninety percent of all homes in Warsaw were destroyed. Only 27 percent of the residential buildings in Budapest in 1945 were habitable. Forty percent of German housing stock was gone, 30 percent of British, 20 percent of French. In Italy 1.2 million homes were destroyed, mostly in cities of 50,000 or more people. The problem of homelessness, as we have seen, was perhaps the most obvious consequence of war in the immediate post-war era—in West Germany

and Britain the housing shortage would last well into the mid-1950s.

the destructive economic impact of the war against Hitler was by no means as total as they had first thought, even in Germany itself. The bombing campaign, for all its human costs, had wrought less economic damage than its advocates expected. Little more than 20 percent of German industrial plant had been destroyed by May 1945; even in the Ruhr, where much Allied bombing had been concentrated, two thirds of all plant and machinery had survived intact. Elsewhere, in the Czech lands for example, industry and agriculture thrived under the German occupation and emerged virtually unscathed—Slovakia, like parts of Hungary, saw accelerated industrialization during the war years and actually emerged better off than before.

The dramatically skewed nature of much of the damage, such that it was people and places that suffered terribly while factories and goods were relatively spared, contributed to an unexpectedly speedy recovery after 1945 of core economic sectors.

The UK, the USSR, France, Italy and Germany (as well as Japan and the USA) all emerged with a larger stock of machine tools than they started with. In Italy only the aeronautic and shipbuilding industries suffered serious damage. Engineering firms situated in the North, and thus out of reach of the heaviest fighting during the Italian campaign, did rather well (as they had in World War One), their wartime output and investment more than compensating for any harm they suffered....

In some countries, of course, there was no war damage. Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden all remained neutral throughout the conflict. This does not mean that they were not affected by it. On the contrary, most of the European neutrals were intimately engaged, albeit indirectly, in the Nazi war effort. Germany depended heavily on Franco’s Spain for its wartime supply of manganese. Tungsten reached Germany from Portugal’s colonies, via Lisbon. Forty percent of Germany’s wartime requirements in iron ore were met from Sweden (delivered to...

The Swiss did more than act as money-launderer and conduit for German payments, in itself a substantial contribution to Hitler’s war. In 1941–42 60 percent of Switzerland’s munitions industry, 50 percent of its optical industry and 40 percent of its engineering output was producing for Germany, remunerated in gold. The Bührle-Oerlikon small arms firm was still selling rapid-fire guns to the Wehrmacht in April 1945. All told, the German Reichsbank deposited the gold equivalent of 1,638,000,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland during the Second World War. And it was Swiss authorities before the outbreak of the conflict who asked that German passports indicate whether their holders were Jewish, the better to restrict unwanted arrivals. The Swiss authorities, in their defence, had good r...

was a grim reminder of the fate awaiting vulnerable neutral states that got in Hitler’s way. For similar reasons the Swedes also extended their cooperation to Berlin, on whom they were historically dependent for coal. Selling iron ore to Germany was something Sweden had been doing for many years—even before the war half of German iron-ore imports came across the Baltic, and three-quarters of all Swedish iron-ore exports went to Germany. In any case, Swedish neutrality had long been slanted toward Germany out of fear of Russian ambitions. Co-operation with the Nazis—allowing the transit of 14,700 Wehrmacht troops at the start of Operation Barbarossa, as well as German soldiers on leave f...

After the war the Swiss (though not the Swedes) were initially the object of resentful international suspicion as accomplices to Germany’s war effort; in the Washington Accords of May 1946 they were constrained to offer a ‘voluntary’ contribu...

final settlement of all claims relating to Reichsbank transactions through Swiss banks. But by that time Switzerland was already rehabilitated as a prosperous island of fiscal rectitude: its banks highly profitable, its farms and engineering industries set to supply food and machinery to needy European markets. Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous—indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war has proved lasting: both are now at the top of the European league and have been there steadily for four decades. Elsewhere the path to recovery was a little steeper. But even in Eastern Europe the economic infrastructure at least was repaired with remarkable speed. Despite the worst efforts of the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing Red Army, the bridges, roads, railways and cities of Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia were rebuilt. By 1947, transportation networks and rol...

the Polish economy recovered quite rapidly—in part because the western territories newly seized from Germany were actually more fertile and better supplied with industrial towns and factories. In western Europe, too, material damage was repaired with remarkable speed—quickest, on the whole in Belgium, somewhat slower in France, Italy and Norway, slowest in the Netherlands, where the worst harm (to farms, dykes, roads, canals and people) had all come in the last months of the war. The Belgians benefited from Antwerp’s privileged status as the only major European port more or less intact at the end of the war, and from the high concentration of Allied troops in their country, pumping a steady flow of hard cash into an economy that had long specialized in coal, cement and semi-finished metals, all vital for reconstruction work. Norway, by contrast, was considerably worse off. Half the nation’s vital fishing and merchant fleet was lost in the war. Thanks to deliberate German destruction in the course of the Wehrmacht’s retreat, Norway’s industrial output in 1945 was just 57 per cent that of its 1938 level, with nearly a fifth of the country’s capital stock gone. In later years the c...

To contemporary observers, however, it was Germany’s capacity to recover which seemed the most remarkable of all. This was a tribute to the efforts of the local population who worked with a striking singularity of purpose to rebuild their shattered country. The day Hitler died, 10 percent of German railways were operational and the country was at a literal standstill. A year later, in June 1946, 93 percent of all German rail tracks had been re-opened and 800 bridges had be...

One reason for the speed of Germany’s initial recovery was that once the workers’ houses had been rebuilt, and the transport networks put back in place, industry was more than ready to deliver the goods. At the Volkswagen works 91 percent of the machinery had survived wartime bombing and post-war looting, and by 1948 the factory was equipped to produce one in every two cars made in western Germany. Ford of Germany was largely undamaged. Thanks to wartime investment, one-third of German industrial equipment was less than five years old in 1945, compared to just 9 percent in 1939. And the industries in which wartime Germany had invested most heavily—optics, chemicals, light engineering, vehicles, non-ferrous metals—were precisely those which would lay the foundations for the boom of the Fifties. By early 1947 the chief impediment to a German recovery was no longer war damage, but rather raw material and other shortages—and, above all, uncertainty over the country’s political future.