Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

As early as 1927 the UK Parliament had passed a law instituting a quota system, under which 20 percent of all films released in Britain by 1936 had to be British made. After World War Two the British Government’s goal was to set this quota at 30 percent for 1948. The French, Italians and Spanish all pursued similar or even more ambitious objectives (the German film industry, of course, was in no position to demand such protection). But heavy lobbying by Hollywood kept State Department pressure on European negotiators, and agreement to allow entry for US films was part of every major bipartite trade deal or loan agreement reached by the US and its European allies in the first post-war decade.

when European governments after 1949 took to taxing cinema receipts in order to subsidize domestic film producers, American producers began investing directly in foreign productions, their choice of European venue for the making of a film or group of films often depending on the level of local ‘domestic’ subsidy then available. In time, then, European governments found themselves indirectly subsidizing Hollywood itself, via local intermediaries. By 1952, 40 percent of the US film industry’s revenue was generated overseas, most of it in Europe. Six years later that figure would stand at 50 percent.

the European films of this period are not always the most reliable guide to European filmgoers’ experience or sensibilities. The British viewer especially was quite likely to form a sense of contemporary Englishness as much from Hollywood’s presentation of England as from his or her own direct experience. It is a matter of some note that among the films of the forties, Mrs Miniver (1942)—a very English tale of domestic fortitude and endurance, of middle-class reticence and perseverance, set symptomatically around the disaster at Dunkirk where all these qualities were taken to be most on display—was a pure product of Hollywood. Yet for the English generation that first saw it the film would long remain the truest representation of national memory and self-image.

What made American films so appealling, beyond the glamour and lustre that they brought to the gray surroundings in which they were viewed, was their ‘quality’. They were well-made, usually on a canvas far beyond the resources of any European producer. They were not, however, ‘escapist’ in the manner of 1930s ‘screwball’ comedies or romantic fantasies. Indeed, some of the most popular American films of the late forties were (as later continental admirers would dub them) ‘film noir’. Their setting might be a detective story or social drama, but the mood—and cinematographic texture—were darker and more sombre than American films of earlier decades. It was Europeans who were often more likely to make escapist films at this time—like the frothy German romances of the early fifties, set in fairy-tale landscapes of the Black Forest or Bavarian Alps, or British-made lightweight genre comedies like Piccadilly Incident (1946), Spring in Park Lane (1948) or Maytime in Mayfair (1949), all made by Herbert Wilcox, set in London’s fashionable (and comparatively undamaged) West End, and starring Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding or Rex Harrison as witty debutantes and capricious aristocrats. Their ...

films reflect not so much the European world as it then was as that same world passed through the grid of wartime memories and myths. Workers, the undamaged countryside, above all young children (boys especially) stand for something good and uncorrupted and real—even in the midst of urban destruction and destitution—when set against false values of class, wealth, greed, collaboration, luxe et volupté.

Like other amusements of its era, cinema-going was a collective pleasure. In small Italian towns the weekly film would be watched and commented on by most of the population, a public entertainment publicly discussed.

Their roots in late-Victorian times could be seen in the sort of headgear worn by spectators: the beret (France) and flat workingmen’s cap (England) both became popular around the 1890s and were still the norm in 1950. Boys still dressed like their grandfathers, except for the ubiquitous short trousers.

Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ of February 1947—an aggressively indulgent style meant to contrast with wartime shortages of cloth, with ankle-length skirts, stuffed ‘leg of mutton’ shoulders and a plethora of bows and pleats—was favored, where they could afford it, by women of all ages; external appearance was still a function of class (and income) rather than age.

a French film of 1949, Rendezvous de Juillet, makes much of the spoilt younger generation’s lack of gravitas: at lunch, the conventional father of a traditional bourgeois household is appalled at the behavior of his youngest son, above all by his insistence on eating without a tie.

At the beginning of the 1950s, one Italian family in four lived in poverty and most of the rest were little better off. Less than one house in two had an indoor toilet, only one in eight boasted a bathroom. In the worst-off regions of the far south-east of Italy poverty was endemic: in the village of Cuto, in the Marchesato di Crotone, the fresh water supply to the town’s 9,000 inhabitants consisted of a single public fountain.

in West Germany in 1950 17 million of the country’s 47 million residents were still classed as ‘needy’, chiefly because they had nowhere to live. Even in London a family whose name was on the waiting list for a house or flat could expect on average to wait seven years before being housed; in the meantime they were placed in post-war ‘prefabs’—metal boxes installed on empty lots around the city to shelter the homeless until the construction of new dwellings could catch up with need.

Rationing continued longest in Britain, where bread rationing was introduced between July 1946 and July 1948, clothes coupons remained in force until 1949, the wartime utility clothing and furniture regime was not abandoned until 1952, and food rationing on meat and many other foods was not finally ended until the summer of 1954—though it was temporarily suspended for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, when everyone was allocated an extra pound of sugar and four ounces of margarine.8 But even in France, where rationing (and therefore the black market) disappeared rather sooner, the wartime obsession with food supply did not abate until 1949 at the earliest.

Almost everything was either in short supply or else small (the recommended size of the much-coveted new family dwellings being built by the Labour Government in Britain was just 900 square feet for a 3-bedroom house). Very few Europeans possessed a car or a fridge—working-class women in the UK, where the standard of living was higher than most countries on the continent, shopped twice a day for food, either on foot or by public transport, much as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. Goods from distant lands were exotic and expensive. The widespread sense of restriction and limits and containment was further reinforced by controls on international travel (to save valuable foreign currency) and legislation keeping out foreign workers and other migrants (the post-war Republic in France maintained in force all the legislation from the 1930s and the Occupation designed to bar foreign labor and other undesirable aliens, allowing exceptions, mostly for skilled manual laborers, only according to need).

In many ways, Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was less open, less mobile and more insular than it had been in 1913. It was certainly more dilapidated, and not just in Berlin, where only one quarte...

Whereas in the US by the end of the 1940s most industrial equipment was under five years old, in post-war France the average age of machinery was twenty years. A typical French farmer produced food for five fellow Frenchmen; the American farmer was already producing at three times this rate. Forty years of war and economic depression had taken a heavy toll.

As The New Yorker’s Janet Flanner had noticed back in May 1946, the second highest priority (after underclothes) in France’s post-war agenda for ‘utility’ products was baby-carriages. For the first time in many years, Europeans were starting to have babies again. In the UK the birthrate in 1949 was up by 11 percent on 1937; in France it had risen by an unprecedented 33 percent.

‘To most people it must have been apparent, even before the Second World War made it obvious, that the time when European nations could quarrel among themselves for world dominion is dead and gone. Europe has nothing more to look for in this direction, and any European who still hankers after world power must fall victim either to despair or to ridicule, like the many Napoleons in lunatic asylums’. Max Frisch (July, 1948)

In his classic study of the growth of political stability in early-eighteenth-century England, the English historian J. H. Plumb wrote: ‘There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, farther from the truth ( . . . ) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.’1 Something of the sort occurred in Europe, quite unexpectedly, in the first half of the 1950s.

In July 1951 the Western Allies had declared their ‘state of war’ with Germany to be over,

with the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, Western Europe stumbled half unawares into a remarkable era of political stability. For the first time in four decades the states of the continent’s western half were neither at war nor under the threat of imminent war, at least among themselves. Domestic political strife subsided. Communist parties everywhere except Italy began their slow retreat to the political margins. And the threat of a Fascist revival no longer carried conviction, except perhaps at Communist political rallies.

Unofficially, the Americans, like the West Europeans, were not at all unhappy to see Germany divided indefinitely. As John Foster Dulles would put it to President Eisenhower in February 1959, there was ‘a great deal to be said for the status quo’, but this wasn’t ‘a position we could take publicly’.

In a series of Notes in the spring of 1952 Stalin proposed that the four occupying powers draw up a Peace Treaty aimed at establishing such a united Germany, neutral and demilitarized, with all occupying forces removed and its government chosen by free, all-German elections. Historians have criticized Washington for its failure to take Stalin up on these proposals—a ‘missed opportunity’ to end the Cold War or at least to draw the sting from its most dangerous point of confrontation.

The Soviet leaders themselves attached little importance to their own proposals and didn’t seriously expect the Americans, British and French to withdraw their occupying troops and allow a neutral, unarmed Germany to float loose in the middle of a divided continent. If anything, Stalin and his successors were not unhappy to see a continuing American military presence on German soil; from the point of view of the Soviet leaders of this generation, the presence of US troops in West Germany was one of the more reliable guarantees against German revanchism.

In October 1950, René Pleven, the French Prime Minister, suggested that a European Defense Community be established, analogous to the Schuman Plan. In addition to an Assembly, a Council of Ministers and a Court of Justice, this Community would have its own European Defense Force (EDF). The Americans, like the British, were not happy with the idea but agreed to go along with it as a second-best solution to the problem of defending Europe.

Janet Flanner shrewdly observed in November 1953, ‘for the French as a whole the EDC problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans.’ France’s hesitations frustrated the Americans—at a NATO Council meeting in December 1953 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of American policy if the EDC were to fail. But even though the Pleven Plan was the brainchild of a French prime minister, public debate had revealed the extent of French reluctance to countenance German rearmament under any conditions. Moreover, the proposals for German rearmament and a European army could not have come at a worse time: the French army was facing defeat and humiliation in Vietnam, and the new French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendès-France, rightly calculated that it would be imprudent to stake the future of his fragile coalition government on an unpopular proposal to re-arm the national enemy.

The Brussels Treaty of 1948 would be extended into a Western European Union (WEU), and Germany and Italy would join it (even though the 1948 Treaty, as we saw, was drawn up for the explicit purpose of mutual protection against Germany). In return, the French would agree to allow the Federal Republic an army of no more than half a million men; and Germany would join NATO as a sovereign state.4

The new men in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev in particular, took seriously their own agenda for ‘peaceful co-existence’ in Europe and shared the American desire to minimize the risk of future confrontations. The day after the Warsaw Pact was announced, the four occupying powers signed the Austrian State Treaty. Austria was to be independent and neutral, attached neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact and free to choose its own path.5 All four armies of occupation were to withdraw—though the Soviet Union, which had already extracted about $100 million from its Zone of Occupation in eastern Austria, secured a final pound of flesh in the form of an obligation on Austria to ‘buy out’ Soviet economic interests in the country’s eastern sector for a further $150 million.

The Danes reached agreement on minor border issues and compensation for German war crimes in 1955, the Belgians a year later (the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, however, did not come to an agreement with the Germans until 1959, and the Dutch only in 1960). Without anyone actually saying so, the book was closing on the crimes and punishments of the European war and its aftermath.

Ballistic weapons—intercontinental missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads from the Soviet hinterland to American targets—had considerable appeal for Nikita Khrushchev in particular. They were cheaper than conventional weapons. They allowed Khrushchev to maintain good relations with heavy industry and the military while diverting resources to consumer goods production.

There are various reasons why the Americans were never able to realize their plans for quitting Europe. Towards the end of the 1950s the US was pressing the case for a European nuclear deterrent, under collective European command. But neither the British nor the French were happy with the idea. This was not because their governments were opposed in principle to nuclear weapons. The British exploded their first plutonium bomb in the Australian desert in August 1952; fourteen months later the first British atomic bomb was delivered to the Royal Air Force. For military and economic reasons the British governments of the time were quite keen to switch from a strategy of continental defense to one of nuclear deterrence: indeed, British urgings had played a role in persuading Eisenhower to come up with his ‘New Look’ strategy, and the British offered no objection to the stationing of nuclear-capable US bombers on British soil.7 The French also had an atomic weapons program, approved by Mendès-France in December 1954, although the first independent French bomb was not successfully exploded until February 1960. However, neither the British nor the French were willing to relinquish control of nuclear weapons to a European defense entity; the French especially were suspicious of any hint that the Americans might allow Germans access to a nuclear trigger. The Americans reluctantly conceded that their presence in Europe was indispensable—which was just what their European allies wante...

Berlin’s curious status was thus a standing embarrassment and public-relations disaster for East Germany’s Communist regime. As the Soviet Ambassador to the GDR tactfully advised Moscow in December 1959: ‘The presence in Berlin of an open and, to speak to the point, uncontrolled border between the socialist and the capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which, unfortunately, does not always turn out in favour of Democratic Berlin.’ The situation in Berlin had its uses for Moscow, of course, as for others—the city had become the primary listening post and spy center of the Cold War; some 70 different agencies were operating there by 1961, and it was in Berlin that Soviet espionage agencies scored some of their greatest successes.

The first move in the ‘Berlin crisis’ came on November 10th 1958, when Khrushchev made a public speech in Moscow, addressed to the Western powers: The imperialists have turned the German question into an abiding source of international tension. The ruling circles of Western Germany are doing everything to whip up military passions against the German Democratic Republic . . . Speeches by Chancellor Adenauer and Defense Minister Strauss, the atomic arming of the Bundeswehr and various military exercises all speak of a definite trend in the policy of the ruling circles of West Germany . . . The time has obviously arrived for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to give up the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic. The Soviet Union, for its part, would hand over to the sovereign German Democratic Republic the functions in Berlin that are still exercised by Soviet agencies. The ostensible objective of Khrushchev’s offensive, which took on a greater urgency when the Soviet leader demanded two weeks later that the West make up its mind to withdraw from Berlin within six months, was to get the Americans to abandon Berlin and allow it to become a ‘free city’. If they did so, the credibility of their general commitment to the defense of Western Europe would be seriously dented, and neutralist, anti-nuclear sentiment in West Germany and elsewhere would probably grow. B...

Behind the scenes many Western leaders were secretly relieved at the appearance of the Wall. For three years Berlin had threatened to be the flashpoint for an international confrontation, just as it had been in 1948. Kennedy and other Western leaders privately agreed that a wall across Berlin was a far better outcome than a war—whatever was said in public, few Western politicians could seriously imagine asking their soldiers to ‘die for Berlin’. As Dean Rusk (Kennedy’s Secretary of State) quietly observed, the Wall had its uses: ‘the probability is that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier.’

Both sides had an interest in stability in central Europe; but more to the point, the US and the USSR were both tired of responding to the demands and complaints of their respective German clients. The first decade of the Cold War had given German politicians on either side of the divide unparalleled leverage over their patrons in Washington and Moscow. Afraid of losing credibility with ‘their’ Germans, the Great Powers had allowed Adenauer and Ulbricht to blackmail them into ‘hanging tough’.

As for Bonn, the longstanding fear there was that the ‘Amis’ (Americans) would just get up and walk away. Washington had always bent over backwards to reassure Bonn that it had America’s unswerving support, but after the Wall went up and the Americans conspicuously acquiesced, West German anxiety only increased. Hence the reiterated post-Wall promises from Washington that the US would never quit their zone—the background to Kennedy’s famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (sic) declaration in June 1963. With 250,000 troops in Europe by 1963, the Americans like the Russians were clearly there for the duration.

the Soviet ambassador to Washington later observed in his memoirs, ‘Kennedy overestimated the readiness of Khrushchev and his allies to take decisive actions on Berlin, the most aggressive of which really was the erection of the Berlin Wall.’11

The British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was launched in London on February 17th 1958. From the outset it was squarely in the great dissenting tradition of British radical politics: most of its supporters were educated, left-leaning and non-violent, and their demands were addressed in the first instance to their own government, not to the Russians or Americans (both major parties in Britain were convinced of the need for an independent British nuclear deterrent, even though it was clear by the end of the 1950s that without American-provided missiles and submarines a British bomb would never reach its target).

There is no doubt that most West Europeans, when they thought about it at all, were in favor of nuclear disarmament: polls taken in 1963 showed that Italians in particular would welcome the abolition of all nuclear weapons. The French were somewhat less overwhelmingly abolitionist, while Germans and British were divided, though with a clear anti-nuclear majority in each case. But in contrast with the fraught debates over disarmament of the 1920s and early ’30s, the nuclear question in Europe did not move people much. It was too abstract. Only the British and (nominally) the French had nuclear arms, and of the others only a minority of the West German political establishment sought them.

Italians, Danes and the Dutch worried on occasion about having US bases on their soil, which exposed them to danger should a war break out. But the weapons that caused concern belonged to the superpowers; and most Europeans, reasonably enough, concluded that they could do nothing to influence decisions made in Moscow and Washington. Indeed, the hard ideological edge of American Cold War rhetoric allowed many in Western Europe, once the immediate threat of nuclear war had passed, to tell themselves that they were in effect doing the United States a favor by allowing it to defend them. And so, rather than engage one way or the other in debates over disarmament, they cultivated their gardens instead.

Europeans turned away with relief from the politics of mass mobilization. The provision of administration and services replaced revolutionary hopes and economic despair as the chief concern of voters (who in many places now included women for the first time): governments and political parties responded accordingly. In Italy the change was especially striking. Unlike Europe’s other Mediterranean states—Portugal, Spain and Greece—Italy became a democracy, however imperfect, and remained a democracy throughout the post-war decades.

Italy was a profoundly divided country. Indeed, its very existence as a country had long been a controversial issue—and would become so again in later years. Studies from the early 1950s suggest that fewer than one adult Italian in five communicated exclusively in Italian: many Italians continued to identify above all with their locality or region, and used its dialect or language for most of their daily exchanges.

A parliamentary enquiry of 1954 revealed that 85 percent of Italy’s poorest families lived south of Rome. A rural laborer in Apulia, in south-eastern Italy, could expect to earn at best half the wages of his counterpart in the province of Lombardy. Taking the average Italian per capita income in that year to be 100, the figure for Piedmont, in Italy’s wealthy North-West, was 174; that of Calabria, in the far South, just 52. The war had further exacerbated the historical division of Italy: whereas the North, beginning in September 1943, had experienced nearly two years of German rule and political resistance, followed by Allied military occupation of its radicalized cities, the South of Italy had been effectively taken out of the war by the arrival of the Western Allied troops.

The function of the Republican state was not very different from its Fascist predecessor—from whom it had inherited most of its bureaucrats12: the role of Rome was to provide employment, services and welfare to the many Italian citizens for whom it was the only refuge. Through a variety of intermediaries and holding agencies—some of them, like the IRI (Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) or the INPS (the National Institute for Social Security) founded by Mussolini, others like the ENI (the National Agency for Hydrocarbons) established in the 1950s—the Italian state either owned or controlled large sections of the Italian economy: energy, transport, engineering, chemicals and food-production in particular.

A Christian Democrat mayor in a southern town hall or a representative in the national parliament was elected and re-elected on the promise of electricity, indoor plumbing, rural mortgages, roads, schools, factories and jobs—and thanks to the Party’s monopoly of power, he could deliver. Christian Democracy in Italy resembled in many respects similar parties in West Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. It lacked ideological baggage.

Government Italian-style was not especially edifying, but it worked. Over time whole areas of public and civic activity were carved up de facto into political families. Entire industries were ‘colonised’ by the Christian Democrats. Control and employment at newspapers and radio—later television—were divided among Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists; occasional allowance was made for the somewhat shrunken constituency of old-school anti-clerical liberals. Jobs and favors were created and delivered proportional to local, regional and national political clout. Every social organism from trade unions to sporting clubs was split among Christian Democrat, Socialist, Communist, Republican and Liberal variants. From the point of view of Economic Man the system was grossly wasteful, and inimical to private initiative and fiscal efficiency. The Italian ‘economic miracle’ (as we shall see) happened in spite of it rather than because of it.

The country lacked a stable majority in favor of any one party or program, and the complicated electoral system of proportional representation generated parliaments too divided to agree on substantial or controversial legislation: the post-war Republican constitution did not acquire a Constitutional Court to adjudicate its laws until 1956, and the much-discussed need for regional autonomy was not voted upon in Parliament until fourteen years later.

as in Fourth Republic France and for some of the same reasons, Italy was in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of the many para-state agencies. This distinctly un-democratic outcome has led historians to treat the Italian political system with some disdain. The opportunities for graft, bribery, corruption, political favoritism and plain robbery were extensive and they worked above all to the advantage of the virtual one-party monopoly of the Christian Democrats.

Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable. In part this was due to the uncomfortable proximity of the Red Army, occupying Lower Austria until 1955 and thence withdrawn just a few kilometers to the east—a reminder that Austria’s neighbors now included three Communist states (Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and that the country’s vulnerable location made it prudent to pursue conciliatory and un-contentious policies at home and abroad.

The solution on which the country’s leaders settled was to eliminate the very possibility of confrontation by running the country in permanent tandem. In politics, the two major parties agreed to collaborate in office: from 1947 to 1966 Austria was governed by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Socialists and People’s Party. Ministries were carefully divided up, with the People’s Party typically providing the Prime Minister, the Socialists the Foreign Minister and so on.

Austria’s newfound neutrality was enthusiastically adopted as the country’s identity tag, displacing awkward memories of more contentious identities from the past—‘Habsburg’, ‘German’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Christian’—so the post-ideological (indeed post-political) implications of government-by-coalition and administration-by-Proporz came to define Austrian public life.