Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Like its American equivalent, the European under-class was determined not only by poverty and unemployment (or under-employment) but also and increasingly by race: in the mid-’90s the unemployment rate in London for young black men was 51 percent. The poor, like Europe as a whole by the end of the century, were strikingly multinational—or ‘multicultural’ as it had become custom to describe it, in acknowledgement of the fact that many dark-skinned Dutchmen or Germans or Brits were the native-born children or even grandchildren of the original Moroccan or Turkish or Pakistani immigrants. Towns like Rotterdam or Leicester were now multi-lingual and multi-colored in a way that would have amazed anyone returning after an absence of even just two decades. In 1998, white children were a minority in the local authority (i.e. public) secondary schools of inner London. Europe’s major cities, London above all, were now truly cosmopolitan. If the high-paying city jobs were still going to white Europeans (and North Americans) nearly all the low-paying work, from street-cleaning to child-care, was now done not by traditional ‘second-class’ Europeans from the Alentejo or the Mezzogiorno but by ‘minorities’, often black or brown, many of them without working papers. According to official figures the net increase in foreigners living in London and the south-east of England in the years 1992–2002 was 700,000; but the actual number was distinctly higher.