Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The presence in increasing numbers of a visible and culturally alien minority in their midst—and the prospect of even more foreigners feeding at the welfare trough or taking ‘our’ jobs once the floodgates from the East were opened—was icing on the cake for the new Right. Charging that the ‘boat is full’—or that their governments had abandoned control of its frontiers to ‘cosmopolitan interests’ or the ‘bureaucrats of Brussels’—populist demagogues promised to stop immigration, repatriate ‘foreigners’ and return the state to its embattled white citizenry, outsiders in their own country. Compared with the Fascism of an earlier age this latest manifestation of xenophobia might appear mild—though Germany saw a wave of hate crimes against foreigners and minorities in the early Nineties that prompted some commentators to raise broader concerns: Günter Grass pointed accusingly to the self-centered indifference of West German political culture and the country’s myopic enthusiasm for an ‘unmerited’ unity, arguing that responsibility for the racist violence (especially in the festering, defunct industrial towns of the former GDR where anti-foreigner feeling was most intense) should be placed squarely at the feet of the country’s complacent and amnesiac political elite. But even if the level of violence was contained, the scale of public support for the new Right was cause for serious concern. Under Jörg Haider, its youthful and telegenic leader, the Freedom Party (FP) in neighbouring...