Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The net impact of these movements of people is hard to overestimate. Taken all in all, they amounted to some forty million people in transit, moving within countries, between countries and into Europe from overseas. Without cheap and abundant labour in this vulnerable and mostly unorganized form, the European boom would not have

been possible. The post-war European states—and private employers—benefited greatly from a steady flow of docile, low-paid workers for whom they frequently avoided paying the full social cost. When the boom ended and it came time to lay off excess labour, the immigrant and migrant workforce was the first to suffer.

the little cars of the fifties had a common purpose: to render automobile ownership accessible and affordable for almost every west European family.

Wireless radio was thus a naturally conservative medium, both in its content and in the social patterns that it encouraged and sustained.

There was very little choice—one or at best two channels in most places—and the service operated only for a few hours of the afternoon and evening. Nevertheless, television was a medium of social subversion.

Being ‘French’, or ‘German’ or ‘Dutch’ was now something shaped less by primary education or public festivities than by one’s understanding of the country as gleaned from the images thrust into each home.

Now, within the span of less than two decades, political leaders had to become television-friendly: capable of conveying authority and confidence while feigning egalitarian ease and warm familiarity to a mass audience—a

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.

Around 1957, for the first time in European history, young people started buying things themselves. Until this time, young people had not even existed as a distinct group of consumers. Indeed, ‘young people’ had not existed at all. In traditional families and communities, children remained children until they left school and went to work, at which point they were young adults. The new, intermediate category of ‘teenager’, in which a generation was defined not by its status but by its age—neither child nor adult—had no precedent. And the notion that such persons—teenagers—might represent a distinct group of consumers would have been quite unthinkable a few years before. For most people the family had always been a unit of production, not consumption. To the extent that any young person within the family had independent cash earnings, these were part of the family income and used to help defray collective expenses.

young people were spending a lot of money on clothes, but even more—far more—on music. The association of ‘teenager’ and ‘pop music’ that became so automatic by the early Sixties had a commercial as well as a cultural basis. In Europe as in America, when the family budget could dispense with a teenager’s contribution, the first thing the liberated adolescent did was to go out and buy a gramophone record.

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.

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.

commercial breaks on Radio Monte Carlo and elsewhere were aimed above all at the ‘young adult’ market.

This was the brave new world that the British novelist J. B. Priestley described in 1955 as ‘admass’. For many other contemporary observers it was, very simply, ‘Americanization’: the adoption in Europe of all the practices and aspirations of modern America. A radical departure though it seemed to many, this was not in fact a new experience. Europeans had been ‘Americanizing’—and dreading the thought—for at least thirty years.

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.

America in 1950 had three fifths of the capital stock of the West and about the same share of output, but very little of the proceeds flowed across the Atlantic. Post-1945 investment came above all from the US government.

The American economic presence in Europe was felt less in direct economic investment or leverage than in the consumer revolution that was affecting America and Europe alike. Europeans were now gaining access to the unprecedented range of products with which American consumers were familiar: phones, white goods, televisions, cameras, cleaning products, packaged foods, cheap colorful clothing, cars and their accessories, etc. This was prosperity and consumption as a way of life—the ‘American way of life’. For young people the appeal of ‘America’ was its aggressive contemporaneity. As an abstraction, it stood for the opposite of the past; it was large, open, prosperous—and youthful.

Contemporary critics worried that the smug conformism of American popular culture, combined with the manifest or subliminal political messages conveyed in films aimed at mass audiences, would corrupt or tranquilize the sensibilities of European youth. If anything, the effect seems rather to have been the opposite.

The American impact on young Europeans contributed directly to what was already being widely bemoaned as the ‘generation gap’.

Anti-Americanism—the principled distrust and dislike of American civilization and all its manifestations—was typically confined to cultural elites whose influence made it appear more widespread than it was.

Just as European teenagers identified the future with an America they hardly knew, so their parents blamed America for the

loss of a Europe that had never really been, a continent secure in its identity, its authority and its values, and impervious to the sirens of modernity and mass society. 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. As Maurice Duverger informed the readers of the French weekly L’Express in March 1964, Communism was no longer a threat: ‘There is only one immediate danger for Europe, and that is the American civilization’—‘a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires’, as the poet Louis Aragon had dismissed it thirteen years before. But notwithstanding the haughty disdain of Parisian intellectuals, a civilization of bathtubs and frigidaires—and indoor plumbing and central heating and television and cars—was what most Europeans now wanted. And they wanted these commodities not because they were American but because they represented comfort and a degree of ease. For the first time in history, ease and comfort were now within the reach of most people in Europe.

The sources of this ironic reversal of fate are instructive. The background to the German economic ‘miracle’ of the fifties was the recovery of the thirties. The investments of the Nazis—in communications, armaments and vehicle manufacture, optics, chemical and light engineering industries and non-ferrous metals—were undertaken for an economy geared to war; but their pay-off came twenty years later.

The essential infrastructure of German business survived the war undamaged. 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. German business costs were kept down by sustained investment in new and efficient production methods—and by a compliant workforce.

The Bonn government unashamedly supported such ‘national champions’, just as the Nazis had done before it, nurturing them in early years with favorable loans and encouraging the banking-business nexus that provided German companies with ready cash for investment.

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 part of the desperate search for foreign currency earnings to offset the country’s huge war debts

The company duly and deliberately neglected quality control in favor of rapid output. The resulting shoddy quality of British cars mattered little at first. British firms had a captive market: demand both at home and in Europe exceeded available supply.

But once the reputation for low quality and poor service was established, it proved impossible to shake. European buyers abandoned British cars in droves as soon as better home-produced alternatives became available When they did decide to update their fleets and modernize their production lines, British car firms had no affiliated banks to turn to for investment cash and loans, in

the German manner. Nor (unlike Fiat in Italy or Renault in France) could they count on the state to make up the shortfall. Yet under heavy political pressure from London, they built plants and distribution centers in uneconomic parts of the country—to conform to official regional policies and to appease local politicians and unions.

Governments actively encouraged the inefficiency of British producers. After the war, the authorities distributed scarce supplies of steel to manufacturers on the basis of their pre-war market share, thus freezing a major sector of the economy in the mould of the past and decisively penalizing new, and potentially more efficient producers. The guarantee of supplies, the artificially high demand for anything they could make, and political pressure to behave in economically inefficient ways all combined to lead British firms down into bankruptcy.

The British economy did not initially do so very badly: in 1951 Britain was still the major manufacturing center of Europe, producing twice as much as France and Germany combined. It provided full employment and it did grow, albeit more slowly than everywhere else. It suffered, however, from two crippling disadvantages, one a product of historical misfortune, the other self-imposed. The UK’s endemic balance of payments crisis was in large measure a result of the debts racked up to pay for the six-year war against Germany and Japan, to which should be added the enormous costs of supporting an effective post-war defense establishment (8.2 percent of the national income in 1955, against a German outlay of less than half that figure). The pound—still a major unit of international transactions in the 1950s—was overvalued, which made it hard for Britain to sell enough abroad to compensate for sterling’s chronic deficit against the dollar. 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.

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.

In some measure the relative economic decline of Britain was thus inevitable. But Britain’s own contribution should not be underestimated. Even before World War Two, Britain’s manufacturing industry had gained a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency, for coasting on past success.

One problem was the workforce. Britain’s factories were staffed by men (and some women) who were traditionally organized into—literally—hundreds of long-established

established craft unions:

This was an era of full employment. Indeed, the maintenance of full employment was the cardinal social objective of every British government in these years. The determination to avoid a return to the horrors of the thirties, when men and machines decayed in idleness, thus trumped any consideration of growth, productivity or efficiency. Trade unions—and especially their local representatives, the factory shop stewards—were more powerful than ever before or since. Strikes—a symptom of labour militancy and incompetent management alike—were endemic to post-war British industrial life.

Back in the 1930s the future Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had accurately identified the British economic malaise as a problem of under-investment, lack of innovation, labour immobility and managerial mediocrity. But, once in office, there seemed little that he or his successors could do to stop the rot. 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.

In France, a similar heritage of managerial incompetence and inertia was overcome by public investment and aggressive indicative planning. British governments, however, confined themselves to collective bargaining, demand management and exhortation. For a state that had nationalized such sweeping tracts of the economy after 1945, and that was by 1970 responsible for spending 47 percent of the country’s GNP, this caution seems a curious paradox. But the British state, although it owned or operated most of the transport, medical, educational and communications sectors, never boasted any overall national strategic ambition; and the economy was for practical purposes left to its own devices.

The notion that such matters might better be left to enlightened self-interest and the workings of a free market in commodities and ideas was regarded in mainstream European political and academic circles as a quaint relic of pre-Keynesian times: at best a failure to learn the lessons of the Depression, at worst an invitation to conflict and a veiled appeal to the basest human instincts.

In most of continental Europe the state eschewed direct ownership of industry (though not of public transport or communications), preferring to exercise indirect control; often through notionally autonomous agencies, of which Italy’s tentacular IRI was the biggest and best known

The European state had forged a unique market for the goods and services it could provide. It formed a virtuous circle of employment and influence that attracted near-universal appreciation.

The welfare state was avowedly social, but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological. Nevertheless, within the general post-war European consensus there was a distinctive vision, that of the Social Democrats.

Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies. The politics of social democracy were not always seductive to impatient young people, as later events were to show. But they were intuitively appealing to men and women who had lived through the terrible decades since 1914, and in certain parts of Western Europe social democracy by the mid-Sixties was no longer so much a politics as a way of

Scandinavian societies inherited certain advantages. Small and socially homogenous, with no overseas colonies or imperial ambitions, they had been constitutional states

for many years.

If Scandinavia—and Sweden in particular—did not follow the path of other economically depressed societies on the European margin between the wars, much of the credit

belongs to the Social Democrats.

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’. The embittered and destitute peasants of inter-war central and southern Europe formed a ready constituency for Nazis, Fascists or single-issue Agrarian populists. But the equally troubled farmers, loggers, crofters and fisherman of

Europe’s far north turned in growing numbers to the Social Democrats, who actively supported agrarian cooperatives—especially important in Denmark, where commercial farming was widespread and efficient, but very small-scale—and thereby blurred the longstanding socialist distinctions between private production and collectivist goals, ‘backward’ country and ‘modern’ town that were so electorally disastrous in other countries.