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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.
Indeed, industrial capital in ‘socialist’ Sweden was concentrated into fewer private hands than anywhere else in western Europe. The government never interfered either with private wealth accumulation or with the marketplace for goods and capital. Even in Norway, after fifteen years of Social Democratic government, the directly state-owned or state-run sector of the economy was actually smaller than that of Christian Democratic West Germany. But in both countries, as in Denmark and Finland, what the state did do was ruthlessly and progressively tax and redistribute private profits for public
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Anyone familiar with Nordic culture, from Ibsen and Munch through Ingmar Bergman, will recognise another side of Scandinavian life: its self-interrogating, incipiently melancholic quality—popularly understood in these years as a propensity to depression, alcoholism and high suicide rates. In the 1960s and at times since, it pleased conservative critics of Scandinavian politics to blame these shortcomings on the moral paralysis induced by too much economic security and centralised direction.
But the critics had a point: there was indeed a darker side to the all-embracing state.
And just a little beyond the use of the state to adjust incomes, expenditures, employment and information there lurked the temptation to tinker with individuals themselves.
The line separating progressive taxation and paternity-leave from forcible interference in the reproductive capacities of
‘defective’ citizens seems not to have been altogether clear to some post-war governments in Social Democratic Scandinavia.
what distinguished Austria from Sweden, for example, was the near-universal allocation of employment, influence, favours and funds according to political affiliation. This appropriation of the Austrian state and its resources to stabilize the market in political preferences had less to do with social ideals than with the memory of past traumas. In the wake of their inter-war experience, Austria’s socialists were more interested in stabilizing their country’s fragile democracy than in revolutionizing its social policies.
In West Germany the SPD waited until 1959 and its Congress at Bad Godesberg to recast its goals and purposes. The new Party Program adopted there baldly stated that ‘Democratic socialism, which in Europe is rooted in Christian ethics, in humanism, and in classical philosophy, has no intention of proclaiming absolute truths.’
Part of the explanation for this contrast in behaviour lay in recent experience: the memory of destructive struggles and the close proximity of the totalitarian threat, whether in the immediate past or just across a border, helped focus the attention of German and Austrian Social Democrats—like Italian Communists—on the virtues of compromise.
If there was any sense in which British politics, too, were shaped by past shocks it came in the widespread, cross-party acknowledgement that a return to mass unemployment must be avoided at almost any cost.
Wilson himself was heir to the Attlee-Beveridge tradition of Fabian theory and Keynesian practice and showed little interest in economic (or political) innovation. Like most British politicians of every stripe he was deeply conventional and pragmatic, with a proudly myopic view of public affairs: as he once put it, ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ Nevertheless, there was a certain distinctiveness about the British Social Democratic state, beyond the insular refusal of all parties concerned to describe it thus. What the British Left (and, at the time, much of the Centre and
Centre-Right of the political spectrum) were taken up with above all was the goal of fairness. It was the manifest injustice, the unfairness of life before the war that drove both the Beveridge reforms and the overwhelming vote for Labour in 1945. It was their promise that they could liberalize the economy while maintaining a fair distribution of rewards and services that brought the Conservatives to power in 1951 and kept them there for so long. The British accepted progressive taxation and welcomed universal health provision not because these were presented as ‘socialist’, but because they
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And the most important innovation of the Labour governments of the nineteen sixties—the introduction of un-streamed comprehensive secondary education and the abolition of entrance examinations to selective grammar schools, a longstanding Labour commitment judiciously ignored by Attlee after 1945—was welcomed less on its intrinsic merits than because it was deemed ‘anti-elitist’ and thus ‘fair’.
The Labour Party’s dependence on trade union backing led it to postpone the sorts of industrial reforms that
many (including some of its own leaders) knew to be long overdue. British industrial relations remained mired in adversarial shop-floor confrontations and craft-based piece-rate and wage disputes of a kind virtually unknown in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria or the Netherlands.
The net effect of the re-distributive policies of the first three post-war decades was to shift income and assets from the top 10 percent to the next 40 percent; the bottom 50 percent gained very little, for all the general improvement in security and welfare.
Even the creation of a self-interested class of welfare bureaucrats and white-collar beneficiaries was not without its virtues: like the farmers, the much-maligned ‘lower middle class’ now had a vested interest in the institutions and values of the democratic state. This was good for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats alike, as such parties duly noted. But it was also bad for Fascists and Communists, which mattered rather more.
The rise in the influence of the state upon the employment and welfare of its citizens was accompanied by a steady reduction in its authority over their morals and opinions. At the time this was not seen as a paradox. Liberal and Social Democratic advocates for the European welfare state saw no reason in principle why government should not pay close attention to the economic or medical welfare of the population, guaranteeing citizens’ well-being from cradle to grave, while keeping its nose firmly out of their views and practices on strictly personal matters like religion and sex, or artistic
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Ever since the First Vatican Council of 1870, held under the influence and auspices of the avowedly reactionary Pope Pius IX, the Catholic Church had taken an all-embracing and decidedly dogmatic view of its responsibilities as moral guardian of its flock.
Catholics in Italy especially were left in no doubt as to the spiritual impropriety, and worse, of voting against the Christian Democrats; but even in relatively liberal Belgium or Holland the local Catholic hierarchy was under strict instructions to turn out the Catholic vote for the Catholic parties and only them.
Upon Pacelli’s death, his successor Pope John XXIII called a new Vatican Council, to attend to these difficulties and bring up to date the attitudes and practices of the Church.
The first—very tentative—steps were taken towards reconciliation with other Christian denominations and there was some (not much) acknowledgement of the Church’s responsibility to discourage anti-Semitism by re-casting its longstanding account of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus.
What Vatican II did achieve—or at least facilitate and authorize—was the final divorce between politics and religion in continental Europe.
This rupture culturelle, as it became known in Belgium and elsewhere, between religion and politics and between the Catholic Church and its recent past, played a crucial role in the making of ‘the sixties’. There were, of course, limits to the Vatican’s reforming mood—for many of its participants the strategic impulse behind Vatican II was not to embrace radical change, but to head it off.
In a society well on the way to being ‘post-religious’, the Church accepted its reduced place and made the best of it.
Penguin Books were acquitted of obscenity, having called thirty-five expert witnesses in their defense, and the decline of the moral authority of the British Establishment can be dated from that acquittal.
It was the responsibility of a well-run public authority to deliver cultural nourishment no less than food, lodging and employment. In such matters Social and Christian Democrats thought alike, and both were heir to the great Victorian-era improvers, though with far greater resources to hand.
But in fact the 1950s saw much original work—a lot of it, in theatre, literature and cinema especially, of more enduring interest than what was to follow.
With the premiere in Paris’s Théâtre de Babylone of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, in March 1953, European theatre entered a golden age of modernism.
That did not mean, it should be noted, that theatre became a more popular form of entertainment. On the contrary: ever since the decline of the music halls, theatre had been the purview of the middling sort—even when the subject matter was ostensibly proletarian.
It was in the 1950s, too, that the European arts were swept by a ‘new wave’ of writers and film directors whose break with narrative convention and attention to sex, youth, politics and alienation anticipated much of what the generation of the Sixties came to think of as its own achievement.
Notwithstanding the decline in cinema attendance already noted, it was in the course of the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s that European films acquired a lasting reputation for artistry and originality. Indeed, there
was probably a connection, as cinema in Western Europe graduated (or declined) from popular entertainment into high culture.
In any case, European mass audiences continued to show a marked preference for American popular films.
Despairing of the thematic clichés and rococo décor of their elders, a group of young Frenchmen—dubbed ‘The New Wave’ in 1958 by the French critic Pierre Billard—set out to re-invent film-making in France: first in theory, then in practice. The theoretical aspect, adumbrated in the new journal Cahiers du Cinéma, centred around the notion of the director as ‘auteur’: what these critics admired in Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, for example, or in the work of the Italian neo-realists, was their ‘autonomy’—the way they had managed to ‘sign’ their own films even when working within studios.
And it was this combination of intellectual seriousness and visual accessibility that was so important for foreign emulators. As the response to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) suggests, French film had become the preferred vehicle for international moral debate.
What Truffaut, Godard and their colleagues had admired in the black-and-white American films of their youth was a lack of ‘artifice’. What American and other observers envied in the French directors’ own riffs on American realism were their subtlety and intellectual sophistication: the uniquely French ability to invest small human exchanges with awe-inspiring cultural significance.
Italian cinema lacked the seductive intellectuality of French (or Swedish) films, but what they shared in abundance was style. It was this European style—a variable balance of artistic self-confidence, intellectual pretension and cultivated wit—that distinguished the continental European scene for foreign (especially American) observers.
New York had the money and perhaps, too, the modern art. But America was still, as it seemed even to many Americans, a little raw. Part of the attraction of John F. Kennedy, as candidate and as President, was the cultivated cosmopolitanism of his Washington entourage: ‘Camelot’. And Camelot, in turn, owed much to the European background and continental self-presentation of the President’s wife.
European ‘design’ in the later Fifties and Sixties flourished as never before, the imprimatur of status and quality. A European label—attached to a commodity, an idea or a person—ensured distinction, and thus a price premium. This development was actually quite recent. To be sure, ‘articles de Paris’ had a longstanding place in the luxury goods trade, dating at least to the late eighteenth century; and Swiss watches had been well regarded for many decades. But the notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian
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What was remarkable about European commercial style was its segmentation by product as well as country.
Both qualities, however—‘style’ and ‘value’—were now inextricably identified with ‘Europe’: often in contrast with America.
Europe’s reputation as the capital of style and chic was secure, but the future lay with more eclectic vogues, many of them European adaptations of American and even Asian prototypes, something at which Italians proved especially adept. In clothing as in ideas, Paris dominated the European scene and would do so for a little while to come. But the future lay elsewhere.
The western European state, as it emerged in those years, was increasingly detached from any doctrinal project; and, as we have seen, the rise of the welfare state had defused the old political animosities. More people than ever before had a direct interest in the policies and expenditures of the state, but they no longer came to blows over who should control it. Western Europeans seemed to have arrived rather sooner than anticipated at the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ (Churchill) of prosperity and peace: where politics was giving way to government, and government was increasingly confined to
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In Britain as elsewhere, urban ‘planning’ was at best tactical, a patch-up: no long-term strategies were worked out to integrate housing, services, jobs or leisure
Just why post-war European politicians and planners should have made so very many mistakes remains unclear, even if we allow that in the wake of two world wars and an extended economic depression there was a craving for anything fresh, new and unlinked to the past.
The sheer scale of urban destruction, the pan-European urge to have done with the past and leap in one generation from ruins to ultra-modernity, was to prove its own nemesis
In the physical history of the European city, the 1950s
and 1960s were truly terrible decades. The damage that was done to the material fabric of urban life in those years is the dark, still half-unacknowledged underside of the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic development—analogous
