Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

East Germans, too, had concerns of their own. One of the paradoxes of Ostpolitik, as practiced by Brandt and his successors, was that by transferring large sums of hard currency into East Germany and showering the GDR with recognition, attention, and support, West German officials unintentionally foreclosed any chance of internal change, including reform of Eastern Germany’s polluted, antiquated industrial economy. By ‘building bridges’, twinning towns, paying their respects, and distancing themselves from Western criticism of East bloc regimes, Bonn’s statesmen afforded the leadership of the GDR a false sense of stability and security.

in East Germany the peace movement found a deep local resonance. No doubt this was in part thanks to links with West Germany. But there was something else. The GDR—an accidental state with neither history nor identity—could with some shard of plausibility describe peace, or at least ‘peaceful coexistence’, as its true raison d’être. Yet at the same time it was by far the most militarized and militaristic of the socialist states: from 1977 ‘Defense Studies’ were introduced into East German schools, and the state Youth Movement was unusually para-military even by Soviet standards. The tension generated by this glaring paradox found its outlet in an opposition movement which derived a large part of its support from its concentration on the issue of peace and disarmament. In 1962 the East German regime had introduced a compulsory military service of eighteen months for all men aged 18–50. But two years later it added an escape clause: those who wished to be excused military service on moral grounds could join the Bausoldaten, an alternative labor unit. Although membership of the latter could prove a handicap in later life, its mere existence meant the GDR acknowledged the fact and the legitimacy of conscientious objection. By 1980 thousands of East German men had passed through the Bausoldaten and represented a substantial potential network for peace activists.

The intellectual opposition in Central Europe had little immediate impact. This surprised no-one: the new realism of the Seventies-era dissidents encompassed not just a disabused grasp of Socialism’s failure but also a clear-sighted appreciation of the facts of power. There were limits, moreover, on what could be asked of people: in his ‘Essay on Bravery’ the Czechoslovak writer Ludvík Vaculík argued persuasively that one can ask only so much of ordinary people struggling to get through their daily lives. Most people lived in a sort of moral ‘grey zone’, a safe if stifling space in which enthusiasm was replaced by acceptance. Active, risk-laden resistance to authority was hard to justify because—again, for most ordinary people—it appeared unnecessary. ‘Un-heroic, realistic deeds’ were the most one could expect.

The crippling defect of Communist economies by this time was endemic, ideologically-induced inefficiency. Because of an unbending insistence upon the importance of primary industrial output for the ‘construction of socialism’, the Soviet bloc missed the switch from extensive to intensive, high-value production that transformed Western economies in the course of the Sixties and Seventies. Instead it remained reliant upon a much earlier model of economic activity, redolent of Detroit or the Ruhr in the 1920s, or late nineteenth-century Manchester.

The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’.

Economic stagnation was in itself a standing rebuke to Communism’s claims to superiority over capitalism. And if not a stimulus to opposition, it was certainly a source of disaffection. For most people living under Communism in the Brezhnev era, from the late Sixties through the early Eighties, life was no longer shaped by terror or repression. But it was grey and drab. Adults had fewer and fewer children; they drank more—the per capita annual consumption of alcoholic spirits in the Soviet Union quadrupled in these years—and they died young. Public architecture in Communist societies was not only aesthetically unappealing, it was shoddy and uncomfortable, a faithful mirror of the shabby authoritarianism of the system itself.

In March 1979 a shopper in Washington DC would have had to work 12.5 hours to afford a generic ‘basket’ of basic foods (sausages, milk, eggs, potatoes, vegetables, tea, beer, etc). A similar basket would ‘cost’ 21.4 work-hours in London, but 42.3 work-hours in Moscow, despite high levels of subsidy.15 Moreover the Soviet or East European consumer had to spend many more hours finding and purchasing foods and other goods. Measured in time and effort, if not in rubles or crowns or forints, life under Communism was expensive as well as exhausting.

The IMF, the World Bank and private bankers were all happy to lend to Soviet bloc countries: the Red Army was a reassuring guarantee of stability, and Communist officials misrepresented their countries’ output and resources to convincing effect.16 In the course of the 1970s alone Czechoslovakia’s hard currency debt rose twelve-fold. Poland’s hard currency debt increased some 3,000 percent, as First Secretary Gierek and his colleagues sucked in subsidized Western goods, introduced expensive new social insurance programs for peasants and froze food prices at 1965 levels. Once borrowing at these levels took off it was hard to contain. Gierek’s food price increases of 1976 triggered angry riots and were quickly repealed, the regime choosing instead to keep borrowing: between 1977 and 1980 one-third of Poland’s external line of credit was used to subsidize domestic consumption. Communist economists in Prague recommended phasing out subsidies and introducing ‘real’ prices, but their political masters feared the social consequences of such a retreat and preferred to increase their debts instead. As in the inter-war years, the fragile little states of eastern Europe were once again borrowing capital from the West to finance their autarkic economies and avoid hard choices. Miklós Németh, the last Communist prime minister of Hungary, was to acknowledge as much a few years later. A loan of one billion Deutschmarks from Bonn, granted in October 1987 and portrayed by West German politi...

In post-’89 retrospect the rise of Solidarity appears as the opening fusillade in the final struggle against Communism. But the Polish ‘revolution’ of 1980–81 is better understood as the last in a rising crescendo of workers’ protests that began in 1970 and were directed against the Party’s repressive and incompetent management of the economy. Cynical incompetence, careerism and wasted lives; price increases, protest strikes and repression; the spontaneous emergence of local unions and the active engagement of dissident intellectuals; the sympathy and support of the Catholic Church: these were familiar staging posts in the re-birth of a civil society, movingly portrayed by Andrzej Wajda in Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), his didactic cinematic account of the betrayed illusions and reborn hopes of Communist Poland.

Gorbachev may well have been more ideologically serious than some of his Soviet predecessors: it is not by chance that whereas Nikita Khrushchev had once famously declared that, were he British, he would vote Tory, Mikhail Gorbachev’s favorite foreign statesman was Felipe González of Spain, whose brand of social democracy the Soviet leader came in time to think of as closest to his own. To the extent that hopes were vested in Gorbachev, this reflected more than anything the absence of any domestic opposition in the Soviet Union. Only the Party could clean up the mess it had made, and by good fortune the Party had elected as its leader a man with both the energy and the administrative experience to make the effort. For in addition to being unusually well educated and widely read for a senior Soviet bureaucrat, Gorbachev displayed a distinctively Leninist quality: he was willing to compromise his ideals in order to secure his goals.

Drifting helplessly, the authorities oscillated between gestures and threats: replacing ministers, denying any plans for negotiations, promising economic change, threatening to close the Gdansk shipyard. The public’s confidence in the state, such as it was, collapsed. On December 18th 1988—symptomatically if coincidentally just one week after Gorbachev’s seminal UN speech—a Solidarity ‘Citizens Committee’ was formed in Warsaw to plan for full-scale negotiations with the government. Jaruzelski, his options seemingly exhausted, at last conceded the obvious and forced a somewhat reluctant Central Committee to agree to talks. On February 6th 1989 the Communists officially recognized Solidarity as a negotiating partner and opened ‘round table’ negotiations with its representatives. The talks lasted until April 5th. On that day (once again a week after major Soviet developments, this time the open elections to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies), all sides agreed to the legalization of independent trade unions, far-reaching economic legislation and, above all, a new elected Assembly. In hindsight the outcome of the round-table talks was a negotiated termination of Communism in Poland, and at least to some of the participants this much was already clear. But no-one anticipated the speed of the dénouement. The elections to be held on June 4th, while allowing an unprecedented element of real choice, were rigged to ensure a Communist majority: voting for the national Senate was to be...

How Communism in Poland fell

On May 2nd 1989, in the course of relaxing the control of movement and expression within Hungary itself, the authorities in Budapest had removed the electrified fence along the country’s western frontier, although the border itself remained formally closed. East Germans began to swarm into Hungary. By July 1st 1989 some 25,000 of them had made their way to ‘vacation’ there. Thousands more followed, many of them seeking temporary refuge in West German embassies in Prague and Budapest. A few made their way across the still-closed Austro-Hungarian frontier without being stopped by border guards, but most just stayed in Hungary. By early September there were 60,000 GDR citizens in Hungary, waiting. Asked on a Hungarian television news program on September 10th what his government’s response would be if some of these people started walking west, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn replied: ‘We will allow them through without any further ado and I assume that the Austrians will let them in.’ The door to the West was officially open: within seventy-two hours some 22,000 East Germans had rushed through it.

On October 18th some of his colleagues, led by Egon Krenze, staged a coup and removed the old man from power, after 18 years.22 Krenze’s first act was to fly to Moscow, endorse (and seek the endorsement of) Mikhail Gorbachev and return to Berlin to prepare a cautious East German perestroika. But it was too late. At the most recent Leipzig demonstration, an estimated 300,000 people had come together to press for change; on November 4th half a million East Germans gathered in Berlin to demand immediate reforms. Meanwhile, on that same day, Czechoslovakia opened its border; in the next forty-eight hours 30,000 people left through it. By now the authorities were truly panicked. On November 5th, the GDR government hesitantly proposed a mildly liberalized travel law, only to have it dismissed by critics as pitifully inadequate. The East German cabinet then dramatically resigned, followed by the Politburo. The following evening—November 9th, anniversary of both the Kaiser’s abdication and Kristallnacht—Krenze and his colleagues proposed yet another travel law to head off the stampede. At a news conference carried live on German television and radio, Günter Schabowski explained that the new provisions, in immediate effect, authorized foreign travel without advance notice and permitted transit through the border crossings into West Germany. The Wall, in other words, was now open. Before the broadcast was even finished people were in the streets of East Berlin and heading for the bo...

Bärbel Bohley, the leading figure in Neues Forum, even described the opening of the Berlin Wall as ‘unfortunate’, because it forestalled ‘reform’ and precipitated elections before the parties or the voters were ‘ready’. Like many of East Germany’s ‘dissenting’ intellectuals (not to speak of their West German admirers) Bohley and her colleagues still envisaged a reformed Socialism, shorn of secret policemen and a ruling party but keeping a safe distance from its predatory capitalist doppelganger to the west. As events were to show, this was at least as unrealistic as Erich Honecker’s fantasy of a return to neo-Stalinist obedience. Neues Forum thus condemned itself to political irrelevance, its leaders reduced to carping resentfully at the improvidence of the masses.23

Compared with Dej’s vicious dictatorship of the Fifties, Ceauşescu’s regime got by with relatively little overt brutality; but the rare hints of public protest—strikes in the Jiu mining valley in August 1977, for example, or a decade later at the Red Star tractor works in Braşov—were violently and effectively suppressed. Moreover, Ceauşescu could count not only on a cowed population but also upon a remarkable lack of foreign criticism for his actions at home: eight months after imprisoning the strike leaders in the Jiu Valley (and murdering their leaders) the Romanian dictator was visiting the United States as the guest of President Jimmy Carter. By taking his distance from Moscow—we have seen how Romania abstained from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia—Ceauşescu bought himself freedom of maneuver and even foreign acclaim, particularly in the early stages of the ‘new’ Cold War of the 1980s. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians (and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics), Americans and others kept quiet about his domestic crimes.28 Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearin...

In the early Eighties, Ceauşescu decided to enhance his country’s international standing still further by paying down Romania’s huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism—starting with the International Monetary Fund—were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceauşescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption. In contrast to Communist rulers elsewhere, unrestrainedly borrowing abroad to bribe their subjects with well-stocked shelves, the Romanian Conducator set about exporting every available domestically-produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40–watt bulbs at home (when electricity was available) so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were strictly rationed. To ratchet up productivity, fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labour on Sundays and holidays (the corvée, as it was known in ancien régime France). Petrol usage was cut to the minimum: in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in by scythe and sickle. This was something truly new: all socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages, but in Romania an economy based on over-investment in unwa...

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

Who was to blame for the tragedy of Yugoslavia? There was certainly enough responsibility to go around. The United Nations showed little initial concern—its inadequate and unconcerned Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described Bosnia as ‘a rich man’s war’—and when its representatives did arrive in the Balkans they spent most of their time blocking any decisive military action against the worst offenders. The Europeans were little better. France in particular displayed a distinct reluctance to place any blame for the course of events upon Serbia—and indeed a marked disinclination to get involved at all. Thus when, in September 1990, Washington sought to place Yugoslavia on the agenda of an upcoming OSCE summit in Paris, François Mitterrand accused the Americans of ‘over-dramatizing’ and refused. Four months later, when the issue arose again, the French foreign office now claimed that it was ‘too late’ for foreign intervention . . . Paris remained similarly uncooperative even after international forces had been obliged to engage in the region: the French General Bernard Janvier, commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, personally forbade air strikes against the Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica.12 As for the Dutch government, it went so far as to veto any NATO strikes on Bosnian Serb strongholds until all Dutch soldiers were safely out of the country. Other countries performed a little better, but not much. Although London eventually backed American pressure ...

At its most shameless, in Russia under the rule of Boris Yeltsin and his friends, the post-transition economy passed into the hands of a small number of men who became quite extraordinarily rich—by the year 2004 thirty-six Russian billionaires (‘oligarchs’) had corralled an estimated $110 billion, one quarter of the country’s entire domestic product. The distinction between privatization, graft and simple theft all but disappeared: there was so much—oil, gas, minerals, precious metals, pipelines—to steal and no-one and nothing to prevent its theft. Public assets and institutions were pulled apart and re-allocated to one another by officials extracting and securing quite literally anything that moved or could be legally re-assigned to private parties. Russia was the worst case, but Ukraine came a close second. Kuchma and other politicians were elected with huge cash backing from ‘businessmen’ in the form of down payments on future income: in post-Soviet Ukraine, as these people well understood, power led to money, not the other way around. Public goods, state loans or subsidies passed directly from the hands of government to the pockets of a few clans, much of it then transiting on to private accounts overseas. The new ‘capitalists’ in these countries did not actually make anything; they merely laundered public assets for private benefit. Nepotism flourished, much as it had under Communism but for far greater private gain: when Ukraine’s Kryvorizhstal, one of the largest st...

In the late Eighties, before the revolutions, East Europeans were avid cinemagoers. By 1997 cinema attendance in Latvia had fallen by 90 percent. The same was true everywhere—in Bulgaria it was down 93 percent, in Romania it was down by 94 percent, in Russia it had fallen 96 percent. Interestingly, cinema attendance in Poland in the same years was only down by 77 percent, in the Czech Republic by 71 percent, in Hungary by 51 percent. In Slovenia it had hardly fallen at all. These data suggest a direct relationship between prosperity and film-going and confirm the explanation offered in one Bulgarian poll for the decline in local cinema attendance: since the fall of Communism there was a better choice of films . . . but people could no longer afford the tickets.

By concentrating power, information, initiative and responsibility into the hands of the party-state, Communism had given rise to a society of individuals not merely suspicious of one another and skeptical of any official claims or promises, but with no experience of individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices. It was not by chance that the most important journalistic initiative in post-Soviet states was the appearance of newspapers devoted to providing hard information: Facts and Arguments in Moscow, Facts in Kiev.

Voters who wished to register their protest or express their pain were thus drawn to the margins. In the early Nineties observers saw in the rise in post-Communist Europe of national-populist fringe parties and their demagogic leaders a dangerously anti-democratic reaction, the atavistic retreat of a backward region imprisoned for half a century in a time-warp. In more recent years, however, the success of Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and their close counterparts everywhere from Norway to Switzerland has tended to dilute the patronizing tone of Western European commentary. Atavism is no respecter of frontiers.

In places where there never really was a transition—where Communists or their friends remained in power under a new nomenclature and with freshly laundered ‘Western’ agendas—the past remained untouched. In Russia, as in Ukraine or Moldova or what remained of Yugoslavia, the issue of retribution never really arose and high-ranking officials from the old regime were quietly recycled back into power: under Vladimir Putin, Communist-era siloviki (prosecutors, police, and military or security personnel) constituted over half the President’s informal cabinet.

There are three factors that help account for Belgium’s improbable survival, and more broadly for the persistence of all the states of Western Europe. In the first place, with the passing of generations and the implementation of constitutional reforms, the separatist case lost its urgency. The old communitarian ‘pillars’—hierarchically organized social and political networks that substituted for the nation-state—were already in decline. A younger generation of Belgians was proving far less susceptible to appeals based on sectarian affinity even if older politicians were slow to appreciate the fact. The decline in religious practice, the accessibility of higher education, and the move from countryside to town loosened the grip of the traditional parties. For obvious reasons this was especially true of the ‘new’ Belgians: the hundreds of thousands of second- and third-generation immigrants from Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Morocco or Algeria. Like the new Basques, these people have pressing concerns of their own and little interest in the dusty agendas of ageing separatists. Opinion polls through the Nineties indicated that most people, even in Flanders, no longer put regional or language issues at the head of their concerns. Secondly, Belgium was rich. The obvious difference between Belgium and other, less fortunate parts of Europe where nationalists were able successfully to exploit communal sensibilities is that for the vast majority of residents of modern Belgium life was ...

If Hungary, or Slovakia or Lithuania—much less Poland, with its 38 million inhabitants—were admitted to the Union on the same terms as its present members the cost in subsidies, regional assistance, infrastructure grants and other transfers would surely break the EU budget. In December 1994 the Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany published a study suggesting that if the six countries of Central Europe then seeking entry (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria) were admitted on the same terms as existing members, the cost in structural funds alone would exceed thirty billion Deutschmarks a year. This, it was widely feared, could provoke a backlash in the electorates of the countries paying most of the Union’s bills and who would surely have to be asked to contribute even more: the Netherlands and Britain but especially, and more ominously, Germany. In any case, the recipient countries in the East were in no position to put up even the minimum matching funds required under existing EU regulations. What post-Communist Europe really needed was a Marshall Plan, but no-one was offering it.

In the immediate aftermath of 1989 the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher initially proposed that the European Union absorb all the countries of Eastern Europe as soon as possible, as a prophylactic measure against a nationalist backlash. But he was soon brought to heel; and although Margaret Thatcher continued to press enthusiastically for early enlargement (calculating that an enlarged Union would inevitably be diluted into the pan-European free trade area of British dreams) it was the French approach that came to dominate EU strategy.

Spain ‘qualified’ for euro membership by what one Spanish observer tartly described as a combination of fortuna and virtu: an upswing in the economy allowed the government to pay down the country’s public debt just in time for the 1999 introduction of the currency. Even Italy managed to pass the Teutonic tests (which many Italians rightly suspected had been set up to keep them out), albeit with more than a little juggling of figures and the one-time sale of public assets. By 2003 the euro-zone encompassed twelve countries, ranging from Ireland to Greece. But—as many skeptics had predicted—the strains of a ‘one size fits all’ currency soon began to tell. The newly established European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt maintained from the outset a relatively high interest rate, to support the new currency and secure it against inflation. But the economies of the euro-zone states differed with respect both to their level of development and their point in the economic cycle. Some, like Ireland, were booming; others—notably Portugal—lagged far behind and could have used the boost to domestic activity as well as exports that would traditionally have been achieved by lowering interest rates and ‘softening’ the currency. Shorn of the power to implement such measures, the government of Portugal was obliged by the terms of the ‘pact’ to reduce government expenditure—or else face substantial fines—just when it ought, in conventional economic theory, to have been spending its way out of...

The dominant member states—Britain, Germany and above all France—could not always count on getting what they wanted; but whatever they truly did not want did not come to pass. This was a unique set of arrangements. It bore no relation to the condition of the separate states of North America in 1776, all of which had emerged as satellites of a single country—Britain—whose language, culture and legal system they shared. Nor was it really comparable to the Swiss Confederation, although that analogy was occasionally suggested: in their centuries-old web of overlapping sovereignties, administrative enclaves and local rights and privileges the cantons of Switzerland more closely resemble old-regime France without the king.9 The member-states of the European Union, by contrast, remained completely independent and separate units in a voluntary association to which they had, over time, conceded a randomly accumulated set of powers and initiatives without ever saying what principle lay behind the arrangement and how far this common undertaking was to go. ‘Brussels’—an appropriately anonymous headquarters for an undefined administrative entity, neither democratic nor authoritarian—governed only through the consent of its member governments. From the outset it had presented itself to all of these as a straightforwardly positive-sum undertaking: the Community/Union would contribute to its members’ well-being without subtracting anything of significance from their independence. But this...

a decision-taking system designed for six member-states and already cumbersome for twelve, much less fifteen, would simply grind to a halt with fifty European Commissioners (two from each country), or a European Council representing twenty-five member-states—each with a power of veto. The likely difficulties were all too well foreshadowed at a meeting in Nice in December 2000. Ostensibly called to lay the groundwork for enlargement and to devise a new voting system in the EU Council of Ministers—one that would weight member-states’ votes by population while still ensuring that majority decisions could be reached—the conference ended in acrimonious and deeply embarrassing horse trading. The French insisted on maintaining parity with Germany (despite a population disparity of twenty million people) while countries like Spain and Poland, the latter accorded observer status at the meeting, sought to maximize their own future voting strength in the Council by selling their backing to the highest bidder. The unseemly scramble for influence at Nice, as leading European statesmen like Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder spent sleepless nights bargaining and bickering for status and influence in their common European home, illustrated the price that was now being paid for previous neglect of constitutional niceties. By bringing the Union to a new low, Nice led directly to the establishment of a ‘European Convention’: a sort of unelected constituent assembly authorized ...

the decline was unbroken—in France it fell from 60 percent in 1979 to 43 percent in 2004; in Germany from 66 percent to 43 percent; in the Netherlands from 58 percent to 39 percent.11 The contrast between the level of interest that electors exhibited for national politics and their growing unconcern for the parliament in Strasbourg is especially revealing. At the European elections of June 2004, the first since the Union’s enlargement, the vote in the UK was down by 20 percentage points from the most recent national elections, in Spain by 23 percentage points; Portugal saw a drop of 24 percentage points, Finland 39 percentage points, Austria 42 percentage points and Sweden 43 percentage points (from an 80 percent turnout in Sweden’s own elections to just 37 percent for the European vote). The pattern is far too consistent to attribute to local circumstances. Moreover—and with more serious implications for the Union’s future—it was closely replicated in the new member-states of the East, even though this was their first opportunity to vote in an election to the parliament of Europe that they had waited so long to join. In Hungary the turnout in the June 2004 European elections fell short of the last national elections by 32 percentage points; in Estonia by 31 points; in Slovakia, where the latest national elections had seen a 70 percent turnout, the share of the electorate that bothered to come and vote in the European elections was 17 percent. In Poland the turnout of just...

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.

Christians remained in the overwhelming majority, albeit non-practicing in most cases. Jews were now a small minority, their numbers significant only in Russia, France and to a much lesser extent the UK and Hungary. But Hindus and above all Muslims were now a substantial and visible presence in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as in the main cities of Scandinavia, Italy and Central Europe. And—uniquely among the major world religions in Europe—the number of adherents to Islam was rising rapidly. By the first years of the twenty-first century there were perhaps six million Muslims in France (the majority of North African extraction) and almost as many in Germany (chiefly of Turkish or Kurdish background). Together with the nearly two million Muslims in the UK (mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh) and a significant presence in the Benelux countries and Italy, these figures suggested a total of perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the Union as a whole. The Muslim presence in communities that were hitherto overwhelmingly secular posed difficult questions of social policy: what provision should be made for the wearing of religious clothing or symbols in public schools? How far should the state encourage (or discourage) separate cultural institutions and facilities? Was it good policy to support multi-cultural (and thus effectively separate) communities or should the authorities seek rather to facilitate and even enforce integration? Official policy in France ...

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...

Haider’s influence peaked at the very end of the century, in the wake of the elections of October 1999 when his party received the backing of 27 percent of Austria’s voters: pushing the People’s Party into third place and coming within 290,000 votes of the first-place Socialists. In February 2000, to somewhat exaggerated gasps of horror from Austria’s European partners, the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party (though not including Haider himself). But the new Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, had made a shrewd calculation: the Freedom Party was a movement of protest, an anti-‘them’ party that appealed to ‘the ripped-off, lied-to little people’ (to quote Pierre Poujade, the eponymous populist prototype). Once in government, exposed to the wear and tear of office and constrained to share responsibility for unpopular policies, it would soon lose its appeal. In the elections of 2002 the FP scored just 10.1 percent (while the People’s Party had risen to nearly 43 percent). In the European elections of 2004 Haider’s party was reduced to 6.4 percent of the vote. The rise and decline of Haider (who remained nevertheless a popular governor of his native Carinthia) was emblematic of the trajectory of anti-foreigner parties elsewhere. After winning 17 percent of the vote in 2002, in the wake of its leader’s assassination, the List Pim Fortuyn rose briefly into the ranks of Dutch government only to see its support collapse to just 5 percent at the...

Austria and Bavaria share more than just south-German Catholicism and Alpine scenery: in the course of recent decades both have been transformed into high-wage service economies dependent on technology rather than labour, outstripping in productivity and prosperity the older industrial regions further north. Like Catalonia, Italy’s Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, France’s Rhône-Alpes region and the Île-de-France, Southern Germany and Austria—together with Switzerland, Luxembourg and parts of Belgian Flanders—constitute a common zone of European economic privilege.

At the end of the twentieth century, of England’s ten administrative regions only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reached or exceeded the national average wealth per capita. All the rest of the country was poorer, sometimes very much poorer indeed. The North East of England, once the heartland of the country’s mining and shipping industries, had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Länder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU. The country’s modest overall employment figures, a much-advertised source of pride for Thatcherites and Blairites alike, were skewed by the disproportionate size of the thriving capital city: unemployment in the North of England remained much closer to the worst levels in continental Europe

The absorption of the eastern Länder into a unified Germany had cost the Federal Republic more than one thousand billion euros in transfers and subsidies between 1991 and 2004. But far from catching up to the West, the eastern region of Germany by the late Nineties had actually begun to fall further behind. Private German firms had no incentive to locate in the East—in Saxony or Mecklenburg—when they could find better workers for lower wages (as well as a superior transportation infrastructure and local services) in Slovakia or Poland. Ageing populations, poor education, low purchasing power, the westward departure of skilled workers and an entrenched hostility to foreigners on the part of those left behind meant that eastern Germany was distinctly unappealing to outside investors who now had many other options. In 2004, unemployment in the former West Germany was 8.5 percent; in the east it exceeded 19 percent. In September of that year the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party won 9 percent of the vote and returned twelve deputies to the parliament of Saxony.

To one side stood a sophisticated elite of Europeans: men and women, typically young, widely traveled and well-educated, who might have studied in two or even three different universities across the continent. Their qualifications and professions allowed them to find work anywhere across the European Union: from Copenhagen to Dublin, from Barcelona to Frankfurt. High incomes, low airfares, open frontiers and an integrated rail network (see below) favoured easy and frequent mobility. For the purposes of consumption, leisure and entertainment as well as employment this new class of Europeans traveled with confident ease across their continent—communicating, like medieval clercs wandering between Bologna, Salamanca and Oxford, in a cosmopolitan lingua franca: then Latin, now English. On the other side of the divide were to be found those—still the overwhelming majority—who could not be part of this brave new continent or else did not (yet?) choose to join: millions of Europeans whose lack of skills, education, training, opportunity or means kept them firmly rooted where they were. These men and women, the villeins in Europe’s new medieval landscape, could not so readily benefit from the EU’s single market in goods, services and labour. Instead they remained bound to their country or their local community, constrained by unfamiliarity with distant possibilities and foreign tongues and often far more hostile to ‘Europe’ than their cosmopolitan fellow citizens.

In small countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, it had long been accepted that monolingualism in a tongue spoken by almost no-one else was a handicap the nation could no longer afford. Students at the University of Amsterdam now studied in English, while the most junior bank clerk in a provincial Danish town was expected to be able to handle with confidence a transaction conducted in English. It helped that in Denmark and the Netherlands, as in many small European countries, students and bank clerks alike would long since have become at least passively fluent from watching un-dubbed English-language programmes on television. In Switzerland, where anyone who completed a secondary education often mastered three or even four local languages, it was nonetheless thought easier, as well as more tactful, to resort to English (no-one’s first language) when communicating with someone from another part of the country. In Belgium, too, where—as we have seen—it was far less common for Walloons or Flemings to be comfortably conversant with the other’s language, both sides would resort readily to English as a common communications medium. In countries where regional languages—Catalan, for example, or Basque—were now officially taught, it was not uncommon for young people (‘Generation E’—for Europe—as it was popularly known) dutifully to learn the local language but to spend their spare time—as a gesture of adolescent revolt, social snobbery and enlightened self-interest—speaking Eng...

the European Union was now large enough to bring effective pressure on the US Congress and on individual American manufacturers to conform to its norms and regulations or else risk being squeezed out of its markets: a development that caught many US Congressmen and businesses by surprise. Not only was Europe no longer in America’s shadow, but the relation was if anything reversed. European direct investment in the US in the year 2000 had reached $900 billion (against less than $650 billion of American direct investment in Europe); nearly 70 percent of all foreign investment in the US was from Europe; and European multi-nationals now owned a large number of iconic American products, including Brooks Brothers, Random House, Kent cigarettes, Pennzoil, Bird’s Eye and the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.

What was really driving the two continents apart was a growing disagreement about ‘values’. In the words of Le Monde, ‘the transatlantic community of values is crumbling’. Seen from Europe, America—which had become superficially familiar in the course of the Cold War—was starting to look very alien. The earnest religiosity of a growing number of Americans—reflected in their latest, ‘born-again’ president—was incomprehensible to most Christian Europeans (if not to their more devout Muslim neighbours). The American fondness for personal side arms, not excluding fully equipped semi-automatic rifles, made life in the US appear dangerous and anarchic, while for the overwhelming majority of European observers, the frequent and unapologetic resort to the death penalty seemed to place America beyond the pale of modern civilization.7 To these were added Washington’s growing disdain for international treaties, its unique perspective on everything from global warming to international law, and above all its partisan stance in the Israel-Palestine crisis. In none of these instances did American policy completely reverse direction following the election of President George W. Bush in 2000; the Atlantic gap had begun to open up well before. But the new Administration’s harsher tone confirmed for many European commentators what they already suspected: that these were not mere disagreements on discrete policy issues. They were mounting evidence of a fundamental cultural antagonism.

the fact that they were highly regulated and inflexible by American standards did not mean that Europe’s economies were necessarily inefficient or unproductive. In 2003, when measured in terms of productivity per hour worked, the economies of Switzerland, Denmark, Austria and Italy were all comparable to the US. By the same criterion Ireland, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and France (sic) all out-produced the US. If America was nevertheless more productive overall—if Americans made more goods, services and money—it was because a higher percentage of them were in paid jobs; they worked longer hours than Europeans (three hundred more hours per year on average in 2000); and they had far fewer and shorter holidays. Whereas the British were legally entitled to 23 paid vacation days annually, the French to 25 and the Swedes to 30 or more, many Americans had to settle for less than half as much paid vacation, depending where they lived. Europeans had made a deliberate choice to work less, earn less—and live better lives. In return for their uniquely high taxes (another impediment to growth and innovation, in the eyes of Anglo-American critics) Europeans received free or nearly free medical services, early retirement and a prodigious range of social and public services. Through secondary school they were better educated than Americans. They lived safer and—partly for that reason—longer lives, enjoyed better health (despite spending far less10) and had many fewer people in poverty.

According to the annual ‘Eurobarometer’ polls, an overwhelming majority of Europeans took the view that poverty was caused by social circumstances and not individual inadequacy. They also showed a willingness to pay higher taxes if these were directed to alleviating poverty.

One hundred and seventy years earlier, at the dawn of the nationalist era, the German poet Heinrich Heine drew a revealing distinction between two sorts of collective sentiment: ‘We [Germans]’, he wrote, were ordered to be patriots and we became patriots, for we do everything our rulers order us to do. One must not think of this patriotism, however, as the same emotion which bears this name here in France. A Frenchman’s patriotism means that his heart is warmed, and with this warmth it stretches and expands so that his love no longer embraces merely his closest relative, but all of France, the whole of the civilized world. A German’s patriotism means that his heart contracts and shrinks like leather in the cold, and a German then hates everything foreign, no longer wants to become a citizen of the world, a European, but only a provincial German.