Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The films of the early fifties had all starred either well-groomed middle-class actors with BBC accents—Kenneth More, Dirk Bogarde, John Gregson, Rex Harrison, Geoffrey Keene—or else lovable London ‘types’ usually portrayed by Jewish character actors (Sidney James, Alfie Bass, Sidney Tafler or Peter Sellers). The later films, dubbed ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ for their gritty depiction of everyday life, starred a new cohort of younger actors—Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Richard Harris and Alan Bates. They were typically set in northern working-class communities, with accents and language to match. And they represented England as a divided, embittered, cynical, jaundiced and hard-faced world, its illusions shattered. About the only thing that the cinema of the early fifties and early sixties had in common was that women almost always played a secondary role, and everyone was white.

As for Britain itself: America might be the indispensable ally, but it could hardly furnish the British with a renewed sense of purpose, much less an updated national identity. On the contrary, Britain’s very dependence on America illustrated the nation’s fundamental weakness and isolation. And so, even though little in their instincts, their culture or their education pointed them toward continental Europe, it was becoming obvious to many British politicians and others—not least Macmillan himself—that one way or another, the country’s future lay across the Channel. Where else but to Europe could Great Britain now look to recover its international standing?

But by November 1955 the British had dropped out, alarmed at the prospect of just the sort of pre-federal Europe they had always suspected. The French, however, decided to take the plunge. When the Spaak Committee reported back in March 1956 with a formal recommendation in favor of a Common Market, Paris concurred. British observers remained doubtful. They were certainly aware of the risks of being left out—as a British government committee confidentially observed just a few weeks before Spaak’s recommendations were made public, ‘should the Messina powers achieve economic integration without the United Kingdom, this would mean German hegemony in Europe’.

the Treaty establishing a European Economic Community (and Euratom, the atomic energy authority) was signed at Rome on March 25th 1957, and became effective on January 1st 1958, the new EEC—its headquarters in Brussels—comprised the same six countries that had joined the Coal and Steel Community seven years before. It is important not to overstate the importance of the Rome Treaty. It represented for the most part a declaration of future good intentions. Its signatories laid out a schedule for tariff reductions and harmonization, offered up the prospect of eventual currency alignments, and agreed to work towards the free movement of goods, currencies and labor. Most of the text constituted a framework for instituting procedures designed to establish and enforce future regulations. The only truly significant innovation—the setting up under Article 177 of a European Court of Justice to which national courts would submit cases for final adjudication—would prove immensely important in later decades but passed largely unnoticed at the time.

the EEC’s notorious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), inaugurated in 1962 and formalized in 1970 after a decade of negotiations. As fixed European prices rose, all of Europe’s food production became too expensive to compete on the world market. Efficient Dutch dairy combines were no better off than small and unproductive German farms, since all were now subject to a common pricing structure. In the course of the 1960s the EEC devoted its energies to forging a set of practices and regulations designed to address this problem. Target prices would be established for all food items. EEC external tariffs would then bring the cost of imported agricultural products up to these levels—which were typically keyed to the highest priced and least efficient producers in the Community. Each year, the EEC would henceforth buy up all its members’ surplus agricultural output, at figures 5–7 percent below the ‘target’ prices. It would then clear the surplus by subsidizing its re-sale outside the Common Market at below-EU prices. This manifestly inefficient proceeding was the result of some very old-fashioned horse-trading. Germany’s small farms needed heavy subsidies to remain in business. French and Italian farmers were not especially high-priced, but no-one dared instruct them to restrict production, much less require that they take a market price for their goods. Instead each country gave its farmers what they wanted, passing the cost along in part to urban consumers but above all to tax...

Modern agriculture has never been free of politically motivated protections of one kind or another. Even the US, whose external tariffs fell by 90 percent between 1947 and 1967, took care (and still does) to exclude agriculture from this liberalization of trade.

As world food prices fell in the late 1960s, EEC prices were thus stranded at absurdly high levels. Within a few years of the inauguration of the Common Agricultural Policy, European maize and beef would be selling at 200 percent of world prices, European butter at 400 percent. By 1970 the CAP employed four out of five of the Common Market’s administrators, and agriculture was costing 70 percent of the budget, a bizarre situation for some of the world’s most industrialized states. No single country could have sustained so absurd a set of policies, but by transferring the burden to the Community at large, and tying it to the broader objectives of the Common Market, each national government stood to gain, at least in the short run. Only the urban poor (and non-EEC farmers) lost out from the CAP, and the former at least were typically compensated in other ways.

A year after the Common Market was inaugurated, the British—still trying to head off the emergence of a super-national European bloc—suggested that the EEC be expanded into an industrial free-trade zone including the EEC member-states, other European countries and the British Commonwealth. De Gaulle, predictably, rejected the idea. In response, and at the initiative of the UK, a number of countries then met in Stockholm in November 1959 and formed themselves into the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The member states—Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the UK, later joined by Ireland, Iceland and Finland—were mostly prosperous, peripheral, and enthusiastic proponents of free trade. Their agriculture, with the exception of Portugal, was small-scale but highly efficient and oriented to the world market.

EFTA was (and remains) a minimalist organization, a reaction to the defects of Brussels rather than a genuine alternative. It was only ever a free-trade zone for manufactured goods; farm products were left to find their own price level. Some of the smaller member-states, like Austria, Switzerland or Sweden, could thrive in a niche market for their high-value-added industrial goods and their attraction for tourists. Others, like Denmark, depended heavily on Britain as a market for their meat and dairy products. But Britain itself needed a vastly larger industrial export market than its tiny Scandinavian and Alpine allies could provide. Recognizing the inevitable—though still hoping to influence the shape of EEC policy—Harold Macmillan’s government formally applied to join the European Economic Community in July 1961, six years after London’s disdainful disengagement from the Messina talks. Ireland and Denmark, their economies umbilically linked to that of the UK, applied alongside it. Whether the British application would have been successful is uncertain—most of the EEC member states still wanted Britain in, but they were also justifiably skeptical of London’s commitment to the core goals of the Rome Treaty. But the issue was moot—De Gaulle, as we have seen, publicly vetoed Britain’s entry in January 1963. It is an indication of the speed with which events had unfolded since the Suez crisis that Britain’s rejection from the hitherto disparaged European community prompted t...

Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution. For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered. In a memorandum dated September 8th 1957, the Hungarian writer István Bibo observed that ‘in crushing the Hungarian revolution, the USSR has struck a severe, maybe mortal blow at “fellow-traveler” movements (Peace, Women, Youth, Students, Intellectuals, etc) that contributed to Communism’s strength.’

Whereas Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, or the hesitant moves to rehabilitate show-trial victims, had suggested up until then that Communism might yet contain within itself the seeds of renewal and liberation, after Hungary the dominant sentiment was one of cynical resignation. This was not without its benefits. Precisely because the populations of Communist Eastern Europe were now quiescent, and the order of things restored, the Khrushchev-era Soviet leadership came in time to allow a limited degree of local liberalization—ironically enough, in Hungary above all. There, in the wake of his punitive retaliation against the insurgents of 1956 and their sympathizers, Kádár established the model ‘post-political’ Communist state. In return for their unquestioning acceptance of the Party’s monopoly of power and authority, Hungarians were allowed a strictly limited but genuine degree of freedom to produce and consume. It was not asked of anyone that they believe in the Communist Party, much less its leaders; merely that they abstain from the least manifestation of opposition. Their silence would be read as tacit consent.

Italy, Ireland, parts of Scandinavia and France—moved directly from an agricultural to a service-based economy in a single generation, virtually bypassing the industrial stage in which Britain or Belgium had been caught for nearly a century.5 By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind.

these people were brown or black—and, being Commonwealth citizens, had a presumptive right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the imperial metropole. Already in 1958, race riots in west London alerted the government to the perceived risk of permitting ‘too many’ immigrants to enter a historically white society. And so, even though the economic case for unskilled immigrants remained strong and the overall totals insignificant, the UK brought in the first of many controls on non-European immigration. The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 introduced ‘employment vouchers’ for the first time, and placed rigorous controls on non-white immigration to the UK. A successor Act of 1968 tightened these still further, restricting UK citizenship to persons with at least one British parent; and in 1971 a further Act, overtly directed at non-whites, severely restricted the admission of the dependents of immigrants already in Britain.11

the growing share of non-whites in the UK population would be a function of high African, Caribbean and South Asian birth rates within the UK. On the other hand, these drastic restrictions on the right of blacks and Asians to enter the UK were accompanied, in due course, by a considerable improvement in their life chances once there. A Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public places, introduced remedies for job discrimination, and set out penalties for incitement to race hatred. A successor Act eleven years later finally outlawed all discrimination based on race and established a Commission for Racial Equality. In certain respects, the new, non-European populations of the UK (and, later, France) were more fortunate than the second-class Europeans who found work north of the Alps. English landladies could no longer display signs announcing ‘No Blacks, Irish or Dogs’; but notices forbidding entry to ‘dogs and Italians’ were not unknown in Swiss parks for some years to come.

Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe—as elsewhere in the world—had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew.

By far the largest expense in a traditional household budget was food and clothing, which together with housing took up much of a family’s earnings. Most people did not shop or ‘consume’ in the modern sense; they subsisted. For the overwhelming majority of the European population up to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘disposable income’ was a contradiction in terms. As recently as 1950, the average western European household spent more than half its cash outlay on necessities: food, drink and tobacco (sic). In Mediterranean Europe the figure was distinctly higher. Once clothing and rent were added, there was not much left over for non-essential items.

People had money to spare and they were spending it. In 1950, West German retailers sold just 900,000 pairs of ladies’ nylon stockings (the emblematic ‘luxury’ item of the immediate post-war years). Four years later, in 1953, they moved 58 million pairs. In more traditional commodities the major impact of this revolution in spending came in the way goods were packaged and the scale on which they were sold. Supermarkets began to appear, notably in the 1960s, the decade when the impact of the increase in purchasing power was felt most dramatically. In the Netherlands, which boasted just seven supermarkets in 1961, there were 520 ten years later. In the same decade, the number of supermarkets in neighboring Belgium rose from 19 to 456; in France from 49 to 1,833.12

Until the 1950s, the motor car was a luxury for most Europeans and in many parts was scarcely to be seen. Even in major cities its arrival had been very recent. Most people did not travel great distances for pleasure, and when travelling to work or school they used public transport: trains, trams and buses. At the beginning of the 1950s there were just 89,000 private cars (not counting taxis) in Spain: one for every 314,000 persons. In 1951, just one French household in twelve possessed a car. Only in Great Britain was car ownership a mass phenomenon: there were 2,258,000 private cars there in 1950.

In each Western European country there was a dominant local make and model of car, but in essence they were all remarkably alike. The Volkswagen Beetle, the Renault 4cv, the Fiat 500 and 600, the Austin A30 and the Morris Minor were tiny, two-door units of family transport: cheap to buy, cheap to run and easy to fix. They had thin, tinny frames; small, under-powered engines (designed to consume as little fuel as possible); and were equipped with the minimum of accessories and fixtures. The Volkswagens, Renaults and Fiats were rear-engined and had rear-wheel drive, leaving the compartment in front of the driver to accommodate a small amount of luggage, as well as the battery, spare wheel, crank handle and tools. The front-engined Morris, like its contemporary and competitor the Ford Popular (American-owned but made at Ford’s UK plant in Dagenham, near London, for the domestic market), aspired to a slightly higher level of comfort—and would later spawn a four-door model, as befitted the rather greater prosperity of Britain in the years of its first appearance. Citroën of France introduced its utterly distinctive 2CV (initially marketed to farmers seeking to upgrade or replace their ox wagon), complete with four doors, removable roof and seats, and the engine of a medium-sized motorbike. Despite these cultural variations the little cars of the fifties had a common purpose: to render automobile ownership accessible and affordable for almost every west European family.

Motor scooters appeared on the scene—in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated—the Vespa model in particular—in every contemporary film from or about Italy.

Railway networks had peaked in length and user-volume in the years following World War One; now, unprofitable services were cut back and thousands of miles of track pulled up. In the UK the railways carried 901 million passengers in 1946, close to their historic peak. But thereafter the numbers declined each year.

Recreational travel in Europe was not new, though it had hitherto been confined first to the aristocracy and latterly to the better-heeled and more culturally ambitious middle classes. But like every other economic sector, ‘tourism’ had suffered through war and economic recession. The Swiss tourist industry in 1913 boasted 21.9 million nights of lodging; it would not recover such numbers until the mid-1950s. And when it came, the tourist boom of the 1950s was different. It was facilitated and encouraged by the availability of private transport and above all by the growing number of people enjoying paid vacations: by 1960 most employees in continental Europe were legally entitled to two weeks of paid holiday (three in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and France) and increasingly they took that holiday away from home.

the French and Italian coasts and mountains were still inexpensive for travelers from Britain or Germany, exchanging sterling and Deutschmarks for the undervalued francs and lire of the day. But domestic seaside holidays, still much sought-after by British, Dutch and Germans in particular, were now truly cheap.

Foreign travel may not have broadened the mind: the more popular a foreign destination, the quicker it came to resemble—in all essential features save climate—the tourist’s point of origin. Indeed, the success of large-scale tourism in the 1960s and after depended upon making Brits, Germans, Dutch, French and other neophyte travelers feel as comfortable as possible, surrounded by fellow-countrymen and insulated from the exotic, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. But the mere fact of going somewhere distant on a regular (annual) basis, and the novel means of transport used to get there—private car, charter flight—offered millions of hitherto insular men and women (and especially their children) a window onto a far bigger world.

Ownership of radios, already widespread before the war, was near universal by 1960: in that year there was one radio for every five people in the USSR, one for every four people in France, Austria and Switzerland, one for every three people in Scandinavia and East Germany. In effect, almost every family owned a radio.19 Most domestic radio sets had evolved little from the large, unwieldy, valve-driven wireless units of the inter-war decades. There was usually one per family. It occupied a prime site in the parlor or kitchen and the family had perforce to listen to it while gathered in one place. Even car radios altered little in this respect—the family that traveled together, listened together, and parents chose the programs. Wireless radio was thus a naturally conservative medium, both in its content and in the social patterns that it encouraged and sustained. Transistors would change all this. The transistor radio was still rare in 1958—in all of France, for example, there were just 260,000. But three years later, in 1961, the French owned two and a quarter million transistor radios. By 1968, when nine out of every ten people in France owned a radio, two thirds of those radios were portable models. Teenagers no longer needed to sit around with their families, listening to news and drama directed at the taste of adults and scheduled for ‘family listening hours’, usually following the evening meal. They now had their own programmes—‘Salut les Copains’ on French national ra...

radio was still an aural medium, and thus restricted in its capacity to adapt to what was an increasingly visual age. For older people radio remained a primary source of information, enlightenment and entertainment. In Communist states the radio set was also the only means of access, however inadequate, to uncensored news and opinion, from Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and, above all, the BBC World Service. But young people everywhere now listened to radio above all for popular music. For everything else they turned increasingly to television.

Cinema in Europe declined from a social activity to an art form. Whereas audiences in the 1940s and 1950s had automatically gone to see whatever happened to be showing at the local cinema, they now went only if they were attracted by a particular film. For random entertainment, to see whatever was ‘on’, they turned instead to television.

By the end of the 1950s, the European economy was beginning to feel the full commercial impact of the baby boom. First there had been the explosion in products for babies, toddlers and children: baby carriages, cribs, diapers, baby food, children’s clothing, sporting equipment, books, games and toys. Then came a vast expansion in schools and education services, bringing in its wake a new market for school uniforms, desks, schoolbooks, school equipment and an ever-widening range of educational products (including teachers). But the buyers for all these goods and services had been adults: parents, relatives, school administrators and central governments. Around 1957, for the first time in European history, young people started buying things themselves.

with real wages rising rapidly, most families could subsist—and better—on the income of the primary wage-earner; all the more so if both parents were employed. A son or daughter who had left school at fourteen (the typical school-leaving age for most young west Europeans in these years), who was living at home, and who had a steady or just a part-time job, was no longer automatically expected to hand over all his or her earnings every Friday. In France, by 1965, 62 percent of all 16- to 24-year-olds still living with their parents were retaining all their own earnings to spend as they wished.

The most immediately obvious symptom of this new adolescent spending power was sartorial. Well before the baby-boom generation itself discovered miniskirts and long hair, its immediate predecessor—the generation born during the war rather than just after it—asserted its presence and its appearance in the gang cults of the late Fifties. Dressed in dark, skin-hugging outfits—sometimes leather, sometimes suede, always sharply cut and vaguely threatening—the blouson noirs (France), Halbstarker (Germany and Austria) or skinknuttar (Sweden), like the teddy boys of London, affected a cynical, indifferent demeanour, something between Marlon Brando (in The Wild One) and James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause). But despite occasional bursts of violence—most seriously in Britain, where gangs of leather-clad youths attacked Caribbean immigrants—the chief threat that these young people and their clothes posed was to their elders’ sense of propriety. They looked different.

The reason "subcultures" started in the 50s is because that's when young people first had disposable income.

there was nothing very angry about it, much less violent, and even the sex was kept firmly under wraps by record company producers, marketing managers and radio broadcasting executives. This is because the initial pop music revolution was a Fifties phenomenon: it did not accompany the cultural transformation of the Sixties but preceded it. As a consequence it was frequently the object of official criticism. Disapproving local council watch committees banned Rock Around the Clock—as they did Elvis Presley’s decidedly superior rock musical, Jailhouse Rock.

Johnny Hallyday, a half-successful French attempt to clone US rockers of the Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran mould, inspired outrage among a generation of French conservative intellectuals when his first record appeared in 1960. In retrospect, the horrified response of parents, teachers, clerics, pundits and politicians across Western Europe appears quaintly disproportionate. Within less than a decade Haley, Donegan, Steele, Hallyday and their like would seem hopelessly outdated, relics of an innocent prehistory.

More even than their parents, they were the target of the advertising industry that followed, accompanied and prophesied the consumer boom. More and more goods were being made and purchased, and they came in unprecedented variety. Cars, clothes, baby carriages, packaged foods and washing powder all now came to market in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes and colors.

Advertising had a long history in Europe. Newspapers, especially the popular newspapers that flourished from the 1890s, had always carried advertisements. Roadside hoardings and placards were a longstanding blight in Italy well before the nineteen fifties, and any traveler in mid-century France would have been familiar with the exhortations painted high up on the side of rural farmhouses and urban terraces to drink St Raphael or Dubonnet. Commercial jingles as well as still photographs had long accompanied newsreels and the second feature in cinemas across Europe. But such traditional advertising took little account of targeted product placement, or markets segmented by age or taste. From the mid-1950s, by contrast, consumer choice became a major marketing consideration; and advertising, still a relatively small business expense in pre-war Europe, took on a prominent role.

Moreover, whereas the cleaning products and breakfast cereals advertised on early commercial television in Britain were directed towards housewives and children, commercial breaks on Radio Monte Carlo and elsewhere were aimed above all at the ‘young adult’ market. Teenage discretionary spending—on tobacco, alcohol, mopeds and motor bikes, modestly-priced fashion clothing, footwear, make-up, hair care, jewelry, magazines, records, record-players, radios—was a huge, and hitherto untapped, pool of cash: advertising agencies flocked ...

Nazis and Communists both made great play with their role as the preservers of culture and values in the face of unrestricted American capitalism and a ‘mongrelized’ rootless cosmopolitanism symbolized by New York and its spreading example. And yet, for all its presence in the European imagination—and the very physical reality of American soldiers based all over western Europe—the United States was still a great unknown for most Europeans. Americans spoke English—not a language with which most continental Europeans had any acquaintance in these years. The history and geography of the USA were not studied in European schools; its writers were unknown even to an educated minority; its political system was a mystery to all but a privileged few. Hardly anyone had made the long and expensive journey to the US: only the wealthy (and not many of them); hand-picked trade unionists and others paid from Marshall funds; a few thousand exchange students—and a number of Greek and Italian men who had emigrated to America after 1900 and returned to Sicily or the Greek islands in old age. East Europeans often had more links to the US than westerners, since many Poles or Hungarians knew a friend or relative who had gone to America, and many more would have gone if they could.

By the 1950s, the impact of American example on a European audience came overwhelmingly through the medium of film. European audiences had near-unrestricted access to anything Hollywood could export: by the later 1950s, the US was marketing about 500 films a year, to Europe’s collective output of about 450. American films suffered the disadvantage of language, of course (though in many places, notably Italy, they were simply dubbed en masse into the local tongue). And partly for this reason audiences above a certain age continued to prefer the domestic product. But their children felt otherwise. Younger audiences increasingly appreciated American feature films—often made by European directors who had fled Hitler or Stalin.

Stock American film themes—science-fiction, detective stories, Westerns—were domesticated in stylized European versions. Millions of West Germans learned about cowboys from paperback novels written by local authors who had never been to America; by 1960 German-language ‘Western’ novels were selling at the rate of ninety-one million a year in the Federal Republic alone. The second most popular European cartoon character after the Belgian boy-detective Tintin was another Belgian product: Lucky Luke, a hapless and appealing cowpoke featured weekly in French- and Dutch-language comics. America, real or imagined, was becoming the natural setting for light entertainment of all genres.

These sentiments were not yet widely encountered in Germany or Austria, or even Italy, where many older people still regarded Americans as liberators. Conversely, anti-Americanism was more frequently espoused in England and France, the two former colonial powers directly displaced by the rise of the United States.

‘Of course, if we succeeded in losing two world wars, wrote off all our debts—instead of having nearly £30 million in debts—got rid of all our foreign obligations, and kept no force overseas, then we might be as rich as the Germans’. Harold Macmillan

For the second time in one generation, Germany was the defeated power—its cities shattered, its currency destroyed, its male workforce dead or in prison camps, its transportation and service infrastructure pulverized. Britain was the only European state to emerge unambiguously victorious from World War Two. Bomb damage and human losses aside, the fabric of the country—roads, railways, shipyards, factories and mines—had survived the war intact. Yet by the early 1960s, the Federal Republic was the booming, prosperous powerhouse of Europe, while Great Britain was an under-performing laggard, its growth rate far behind that of the rest of Western Europe.1 Already by 1958 the West German economy was larger than that of Britain. In the eyes of many observers the UK was well on its way to becoming the sick man of Europe.

Manufacturing firms, banks, insurance companies, distributors were all back in business by the early ’50s, supplying a voracious foreign market with their products and services. Even the increasingly high-valued Deutschmark did not impede German progress. It made imported raw materials cheap, without restricting foreign demand for German products—these were typically high-value and technically advanced, and they sold on quality, not price. In any case, during the first post-war decades there was little competition: if Swedish or French or Dutch firms wanted a certain sort of engineering product or tool, they had little option but to buy it from Germany, and at the asking price.

The Federal Republic benefited from a virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap labor—skilled young engineers fleeing East Germany, semi-skilled machine minders and assembly workers from the Balkans, unskilled laborers from Turkey, Italy and elsewhere. All of these were grateful for stable hard-currency wages in return for steady employment, and—like an un-protesting older generation of German workers inherited from the Thirties—they were not disposed to make trouble.

Like so much of post-war West German industry, Volkswagen benefited from all the advantages of a free-market economy—notably growing demand for its products—without suffering any of the drawbacks of competition or the costs of research, development and tooling. The company had been given inexhaustible resources before 1939. Nazism, war and military occupation had all done well by it—the Allied Military Government looked kindly on Volkswagen precisely because its productive capacity had been built up before the war and could be put to work without further ado. There was no serious domestic competition for the VW Beetle when demand for mass-produced small family cars took off, and even at a fixed and low price the cars turned a profit—thanks to the Nazis, the company had no old debt to pay off. In Britain, too, there was a ‘national champion’—the British Motor Corporation (BMC), a conglomerate of various formerly independent car manufacturers like Morris or Austin, and itself later merged with Leyland Motors to produce British Leyland (BL). As late as 1980, BL was selling its products as emblematically British: ‘Drive the flag—buy an Austin Morris’. And like the German manufacturers, British carmakers laid increasing emphasis on the overseas market. But there the similarities ended. After the war, successive British governments urged BMC especially (they had less influence over US-owned Ford, or General Motors’ subsidiaries in the UK) to sell every car they could overseas—as...

An island country, utterly dependent on imports of food and vital raw materials, Britain had historically compensated for this structural vulnerability by its privileged access to protected markets in the Empire and Commonwealth. But this dependence on far-flung markets and resources, an advantage in the initial post-war years as the rest of Europe struggled to recover, became a serious liability once Europe—and especially the EEC zone—took off. The British could not compete with the US, and later Germany, in any unprotected overseas market, while British exports to Europe itself lagged ever further behind those of other European producers. British manufactured exports represented 25 percent by value of the world’s total in 1950; twenty years later they constituted just 10.8 percent. The British had lost their share of the world market, and their traditional suppliers—in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the African colonies—were now turning to other markets as well.

Whereas German industry inherited all the advantages of the changes wrought by Nazism and war, Britain’s old-established, uncompetitive industries inherited stagnation and a deep fear of change. Textiles, mines, shipbuilding, steel and light engineering plants would all need restructuring and retooling in the post-war decades; but just as they chose to accommodate trade unions rather than attack inefficient labour practices, so British factory managers preferred to operate in a cycle of under-investment, limited research and development, low wages and a shrinking pool of clients, rather than risk a fresh start with new products in new markets. The solution was not obvious. Keynes, once again: ‘If by some sad geographical slip the American Air Force (it is too late now to hope for much from the enemy) were to destroy every factory on the North East coast and in Lancashire (at an hour when the Directors were sitting there and no-one else) we should have nothing to fear. How else are we to regain the exuberant inexperience which is necessary, it seems, for success, I cannot surmise.’

Scandinavian societies inherited certain advantages. Small and socially homogenous, with no overseas colonies or imperial ambitions, they had been constitutional states for many years. The Danish constitution of 1849 had introduced limited parliamentary government but extensive press and religious freedom. The Swedish (and at the time Norwegian) constitution of 1809 established modern political institutions, including proportional representation and the exemplary system of the ombudsman—the latter adopted throughout Scandinavia in later years—and provided the stable framework within which the party political system could develop. It would remain in force until 1975.

Scandinavian Social Democrats were open to such compromises because they had no illusions about the putative ‘proletarian’ constituency on whom other socialist parties relied for their core support. Had they depended upon urban working-class votes alone, or even working-class votes allied to middle-class reformers, the Socialist parties of Scandinavia would forever have remained in the minority. Their political prospects rested upon extending their appeal to the overwhelmingly rural populations of the region. And thus, unlike almost every other socialist or social-democratic party of Europe, Scandinavian social democrats were not scarred by the instinctive antipathy to the countryside that characterized much of the European Left, from Marx’s remarks about the ‘idiocy of rural life’ to Lenin’s distaste for ‘kulaks’.

This alliance of labour and farming—facilitated by the unusual independence of Scandinavian peasants, conjoined in fervently Protestant communities unconstrained by traditional rural subservience to priest or landlord—was to form the long-term platform on which Europe’s most successful social democracies were built. ‘Red-green’ coalitions (at first between Agrarian and Social Democratic parties, later within the latter alone) were unthinkable everywhere else; in Scandinavia they became the norm. The Social Democratic parties were the vehicle through which traditional rural society and industrial labour together entered the urban age: in that sense Social Democracy in Scandinavia was not just one politics among many, it was the very form of modernity itself.

the Scandinavian ‘model’ reflected these origins, emphasizing universality and equality—universal social rights, equalized incomes, flat-rate benefits paid from steeply progressive taxation. They thus stood in marked contrast to the typical continental European version in which the state transferred or returned income to families and individuals, enabling them to pay in cash for what were, in essence, subsidized private services (insurance and medicine in particular). But except for education, which was already universal and comprehensive before 1914, the Scandinavian system of welfare was not conceived and implemented all at once. It came about incrementally. Health care in particular lagged behind: in Denmark, universal health coverage was achieved only in 1971, twenty-three years after Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service was inaugurated across the North Sea in the United Kingdom. Moreover, what looked from the outside like a single Nordic system was in reality quite varied by country. Denmark was the least ‘Scandinavian’. Not only was it critically dependent upon an overseas market for farm produce (dairy and pork products especially) and thus more sensitive to policies and political developments elsewhere in Europe; but its skilled work force was much more divided by traditional craft-based loyalties and organisations. In this respect it resembled Britain more than, say, Norway; indeed, Denmark’s Social Democrats were constrained on more than one occasion in the Si...