Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.

Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945–89 would now

come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever.

Central preoccupation

because Germany didn’t pay its First World War debts the cost of victory to the Allies exceeded the cost of defeat to Germany, which thus emerged relatively stronger than in 1913.

The violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs—into nationalist polemics, racial prejudice, class confrontation and civil war.

Indeed economic life in Europe was struck a triple blow in those years. The First World War distorted domestic employment, destroyed trade and devastated whole regions—as well as bankrupting states. Many countries—in central Europe above all—never recovered from its effects. Those that did were then brought low again in the Slump of the Thirties, when deflation, business failures and desperate efforts to erect protective tariffs against foreign competition resulted not only in unprecedented levels of unemployment and wasted industrial capacity but also the collapse of international trade (between 1929 and 1936 Franco-German commerce fell by 83 percent), accompanied by bitter inter-state competition and resentment. And then came the Second World War,

The cumulative impact of these blows was to destroy a civilization.

On the eve of the continent’s final descent into the abyss the prospect for Europe appeared hopeless. Whatever it was that had been lost in the course of the implosion of European civilization—a loss whose implications had long since been intuited by Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka in Zweig’s own Vienna—would never be recaptured.

Europe’s recovery was a ‘miracle’. ‘Post-national’ Europe had learned the bitter lessons of recent history. An irenic, pacific continent had risen, ‘Phoenix-like’, from the ashes of its murderous—suicidal—past.

There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.

Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.

But the Communist myth bears unintended witness to the importance (and the difficulty) in both halves of Europe of managing a burdensome inheritance. World War One destroyed old Europe; World War Two created the conditions for a new Europe. But the whole of Europe lived for many decades after 1945 in the long shadow cast by the dictators and wars in its immediate past. That is one of the experiences that Europeans of the post-war generation have in common with one another and which separates them from Americans, for whom the twentieth century taught rather different and altogether more optimistic lessons. And it is the necessary point of departure for anyone seeking to understand European history before 1989—and to appreciate how much it changed afterwards.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status.

Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European

history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East.

Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations.

by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

This new Europe was not a preconceived common project: no-one set out to bring it about. But once it became clear, after 1992, that Europe did occupy this novel place in the international scheme of things, its relations with the US in particular took on a different aspect—for Europeans and Americans alike.

This is the fourth theme interwoven into this account of post-war Europe: its complicated and frequently misunderstood relationship to the United States of America. Western Europeans wanted the US to involve itself in European affairs after 1945—but they also resented that involvement and what it implied about Europe’s decline.

Finally, Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations.

Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people.

But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future.

Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

Is all this public remembering a sign of political health? Or is it sometimes more prudent, as De Gaulle among others understood all too well, to forget? This question will be taken up in the Epilogue. Here I would simply note that these latest hiccups of disruptive recall need not be understood—as they sometimes are understood (notably in the United States), when juxtaposed to contemporary outbreaks of ethnic or racial prejudice—as

As this book tries to show, the long shadow of World War Two lay heavy across postwar Europe. It could not, however, be acknowledged in full. Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today—in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country—it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well-intentioned official memory. We may not be very comfortable with this; it may not even be a good portent. But it is a kind of closure. Sixty years after Hitler’s death, his war and its consequences are entering history.

It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.

With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever

before.

from 1934 through 1949, Europe saw an unprecedented sequence of murderous civil conflicts within the boundaries of existing states.

it is one of the traumatic features of civil war that even after the enemy is defeated he remains in place; and with him the memory of the conflict. But the internecine struggles of these years did something else. Together with the unprecedented brutality of the Nazi and, later, Soviet occupations they corroded the very fabric of the European state. After them, nothing would ever be the same. In the truest sense of a much-abused term, they transformed World War Two—Hitler’s war—into a social revolution. To begin with, the serial occupation of territory by foreign powers inevitably eroded the authority and legitimacy of local rulers.

This leveling process, whereby the native populations

of central and eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler’s most enduring contribution to European social history.

with the arrival of the Red Army and the expulsion of the Germans the new situation proved uniquely well adapted to the more truly radicalizing projects of the Soviets. One reason for this was that the occupation years had seen not just rapid and bloodily-enforced upward social mobility but also the utter collapse of law and the habits of life in a legal state.

To live normally in occupied Europe meant breaking the law: in the first place the laws of the occupiers (curfews, travel regulations, race laws, etc) but also conventional laws and norms as well.

Above all, violence became part of daily life.

Curiously enough, it was precisely in these circumstances that the state lost its monopoly of violence.

Violence bred cynicism. As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all. They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals, and on the whole they were successful.

Everyone, in short, had good reason to be afraid of everyone else. Suspicious of other people’s motives, individuals were quick to denounce them for some presumed deviation or illicit advantage. There was no protection to be had from above: indeed, those in power were often the most lawless of all. For most Europeans in the years 1939–45 rights—civil, legal, political—no longer existed.

The ‘right’ of possession was shown to be fragile, often meaningless, resting exclusively on the goodwill, interests or whim of those in power. There were winners as well as losers in this radical series of involuntary property transactions.

The local administrations in France, Norway and the Benelux countries had not covered themselves in glory. On the contrary, they had on the whole performed with alacrity the occupiers’ bidding.

This was one difference between western and eastern Europe. Another was the Nazis’ own treatment of occupied nations.

Hitler had successfully discredited at least one radical alternative to political pluralism and the rule of law. The exhausted populations of continental western Europe aspired above all to recover the trappings of normal life in a properly regulated state.

The war changed everything. East of the Elbe, the Soviets and their local representatives inherited a sub-continent where a radical break with the past had already taken place. What was not utterly discredited was irretrievably damaged. Exiled governments from Oslo, Brussels or the Hague could return from London and hope to take up the legitimate authority they had been forced to relinquish in 1940. But the old rulers of Bucharest and Sofia, Warsaw, Budapest and even Prague had no future: their world had been swept aside by the Nazis’ transformative violence. It remained only to decide the political shape of the new order that must now replace the unrecoverable past.

If post-war governments’ legitimacy rested merely on their military victory over Fascism, how were they better than the wartime Fascist regimes themselves? It was important to define the latter’s activities as crimes and punish them accordingly.

The only source of collective national pride were the armed partisan resistance movements that had fought the invader—which is why it was in western Europe, where real resistance had actually been least in evidence, that the myth of Resistance mattered most.

The first task of the new authorities was to assert a monopoly of force, legitimacy and the institutions of justice.

In the first place, any law addressing the actions of collaborators with the Germans would necessarily be retroactive—before 1939 the crime of ‘collaboration with the occupier’ was unknown.

Any judicial process brought about as the direct consequence of a war or a political struggle is political.

The very scale of destruction and moral collapse in 1945 meant that whatever was left in place was likely to be needed

as a building block for the future.