Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It is one of the ironies of the 1960s that the ruthlessly ‘renewed’ and rebuilt cityscapes of the age were deeply resented above all by the young people who lived there. Their houses, streets, cafés, factories, offices, schools and universities might be modern and relentlessly ‘new’. But except for the most privileged among them, the result was an environment experienced as ugly, soulless, stifling, inhuman, and—in a term that was acquiring currency—‘alienating’. It is altogether appropriate that when the well-fed, well-housed, well-educated children of Europe’s benevolent service states grew up and revolted against ‘the system’, the first intimations of the coming explosion would be felt in the pre-fabricated cement dormitories of a soulless university ‘extension campus’, heedlessly parked among the tower blocks and traffic jams of an overspill Parisian suburb.

Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age.

The self-congratulatory, iconoclastic impulse—in clothing or ideas—dated very fast; conversely, it would be some years before the truly revolutionary shift in politics and public affairs that began in the late 1960s could take full effect.

As more and more children entered and passed through the secondary school systems, a breach opened up between their world and the one their parents had known.

In the first place, Europe was going to need many more universities.

Post-war government spending on education, which had everywhere risen very steeply, had concentrated upon the provision of primary and secondary schools, equipment and teachers. This was surely the right choice, and in any case one dictated by electoral politics. But it carried a price.

Of necessity, this non-student majority experienced the Sixties rather differently: particularly the later Sixties, when so much seemed to turn on events in and around universities. Their opinions, and especially their politics, should not be inferred from those of their student contemporaries. In other respects, however, young people shared what was already a distinctive—and common—culture.

Every generation sees the world as new. The Sixties generation saw the world as new and young. Most young people in history have entered a world full of older people, where it is their seniors who occupy positions of influence and example. For the generation of the mid-1960s, however, things were different. The cultural eco-system was evolving much faster than in the past. The gap separating a large, prosperous, pampered, self-confident and culturally autonomous generation from the unusually small, insecure, Depression-scarred and war-ravaged generation of its parents was greater than the conventional distance between age groups. At the very least, it seemed to many young people as though they had been born into a society reluctantly transforming itself—its values, its style, its rules—before their very eyes and at their behest. Popular music, cinema and television were full of young people and increasingly appealed to them as its audience and market. By 1965 there were radio and television programs, magazines, shops, products and whole industries that existed exclusively for the young and depended upon their patronage.

many of the popular cultural forms of the age flowed with unprecedented ease across national boundaries. Mass culture was becoming international as a matter of definition. A trend

(in music, or clothing) would begin in the English-speaking world, often in England itself, and would then move south and east: facilitated by an increasingly visual (and therefore cross-border) culture and only occasionally impeded by locally generated alternatives or, more often, by political intervention.

The most successful musicians of the time—the Beatles and their imitators—took the rhythms of American blues guitarists (most of them black) and paired them with material drawn directly from the language and experience of the British working class.4 This highly original combination then became the indigenous, trans-national culture of European youth. The content of popular music mattered quite a lot, but its form counted for more. In the 1960s people paid particular attention to style. This, it might be thought, was hardly new. But it was perhaps a peculiarity of the age that style could substitute so directly for substance.

If much of the mainstream musical culture of the Sixties seemed to be about sex—at least until it shifted, briefly, into drugs and politics—this, too, was largely a matter of style. More young people lived away from their parents, and at a younger age than hitherto. And contraceptives were becoming safer, easier and legal.5 Public displays of flesh and representations of unconstrained sexual abandon on film and in literature became more common, at least in north-west Europe. For all these reasons, the older generation was convinced that sexual restraints had completely collapsed—and it pleased their children to nourish the nightmare.

when compared with the 1920s, or the European fin-de-siècle, or the demi-monde of 1860s Paris, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were quite tame. In keeping with the emphasis upon style, the generation of the Sixties placed unusual insistence upon looking different. Clothing, hair, make-up and what were still called ‘fashion accessories’ became vital generational and political identification tags. London was the source of such trends: European taste in clothing, music, photography, modeling, advertising and even mass-market magazines all took their cues from there. In view of the already-established British reputation for drab design and shoddy construction this was an unlikely development, a youthful inversion of the traditional order of such things, and it proved short-lived. But the false dawn of ‘Swinging London’—as Time magazine dubbed it in April 1966—cast a distinctive light upon the age.

The frivolous side of the Sixties—fashion, pop culture, sex—should not be dismissed as mere froth and show. It was a new generation’s way of breaking with the age of the

grandpas—the gerontocracy (Adenauer, De Gaulle, Macmillan—and Khrushchev) still running the continent’s affairs.

The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by ‘doing their own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’ and ‘making love, not war’—was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.

The 1960s were the great age of Theory.

In its newly fashionable usage, ‘Theory’ meant something quite different. It was largely taken up with ‘interrogating’ (a contemporary term of art) the method and objectives of academic disciplines: above all the social sciences—history, sociology, anthropology—but also the humanities and even, in later years, the laboratory sciences themselves. In an age of vastly expanded universities, with periodicals, journals and lecturers urgently seeking ‘copy’, there emerged a market for ‘theories’ of every kind—fuelled not by improved intellectual supply but rather by insatiable consumer demand.

Here was history informed by social theory, and by an insistence upon the importance of class, particularly the lower classes. The point was not just to narrate or even explain a given historical moment; the point was to reveal its deeper meaning. Historical writing in this vein seemed to bridge the gap between past and present, between scholarly speculation and contemporary engagement,

Borrowing from an earlier vein of speculation in the field of linguistics, cultural anthropologists—led by Claude Lévi-Strauss—proposed a comprehensive new explanation for variations and differences across societies. What counted was not surface social

practices or cultural symptoms but the inner essences, the deep structures of human affairs. ‘Structuralism’, as it came to be called, was intensely seductive.

But of greater relevance was structuralism’s immediate accessibility to intellectuals and non-specialists. As explicated by Lévi-Strauss’s admirers in cognate disciplines, structuralism was not even a representational theory: the social codes, or ‘signs’, that it described related not to any particular people or places or events but merely to other signs, in a closed system. It was thus not subject to empirical testing or disproof—there was no sense in which structuralism could ever be demonstrated to be wrong—and the iconoclastic ambition of its assertions, allied to this impermeability to contradiction, guaranteed it a wide audience.

‘Structuralism’ was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, ‘structuralists’ were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs.

This might or might not be a subversive scholarly impulse—it certainly was not in Braudel’s case—but it does gloss over or minimize change and transition. Decisive political events in particular proved resistant to this approach: you could explain why things had to change

at a given stage, but it wasn’t clear just how they did so, or why individual social actors opted to facilitate the process. As an interpretation of human experience, any theory dependent on an arrangement of structures from which human choice had been eliminated was thus hobbled by its own assumptions. Intellectually subversive, structuralism was politically passive.

When it came to changing the world there was still only one grand theory purporting to relate an interpretation of the world to an all-embracing project of change; only one Master Narrative offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself. The intellectual affinities and political obsessions of the Sixties in Europe only make sense in the light of this continuing fascination with Marx and Marxism.

there was general agreement across the political spectrum that anyone wishing to understand the world must take Marxism and its political legacy very seriously.

Official Marxism, as incarnated in the history and teachings of Leninist parties, was largely discredited—especially in the territories over which it continued to rule. Even those in the West who chose to vote Communist evinced little interest in the subject. At the same time there was widespread intellectual and academic interest in those parts of the Marxist inheritance that could be distinguished from the Soviet version and salvaged from its moral shipwreck.

Trotskyist parties could be found in every European state that did not explicitly ban them. They were typically small and led, in the image of their eponymous founder, by a charismatic, authoritarian chief who dictated doctrine and tactics. Their characteristic strategy was ‘entryism’: working inside larger left-wing organizations (parties, trade unions, academic societies) to colonize them or nudge their policies and political alliances in directions dictated by Trotskyist theory.

There was a crucial distinguishing point of dogma—Trotskyists continued to speak of ‘permanent revolution’ and to accuse official Communists of having aborted the workers’ revolution by confining it to a single country—but

To a new and politically innocent generation, the truly appealing failures were European Communism’s lost leaders, the men and women who never had a chance to exercise any political responsibilities at all. Thus the 1960s saw the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish Socialist assassinated by German Frei Korps soldiers in the doomed Berlin revolution of January 1919; György Lukacs, the Hungarian Communist thinker whose political writings of the 1920s briefly suggested an alternative to official Communist interpretations of history and literature before he was forced publicly to abjure them; and above all Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and author of a cycle of brilliant, unpublished papers on revolutionary politics and Italian history, most of them written in the Fascist prisons where he languished from 1926 until his death, at the age of 46, in April 1937.

The new Left, as it was starting to call itself by 1965, sought out new texts—and found them in the writings of the young Karl Marx, in the metaphysical essays and notes written in the early 1840s when Marx was barely out of his teens, a young German philosopher steeped in Hegelian historicism and the Romantic dream of ultimate Freedom.

The Young Marx was seemingly preoccupied with strikingly modern problems: how to transform ‘alienated’ consciousness and liberate human beings from ignorance of their true condition and capacities; how to reverse the order of priorities in capitalist society and place human beings at the center of their own existence; in short, how to change the world.

But it was also implicitly subversive: if anyone could just go to the texts themselves and interpret Marx at will, then the authority of the Communist (and in this case also the Trotskyist) leadership must crumble, and with it much of the justification for mainstream revolutionary politics as then understood.

What Communists and other conservative Marxists rightly foresaw was how easily this new, humanist Marx could be adapted to contemporary tastes and fashions. The complaints of an early-nineteenth-century Romantic like Marx against capitalist modernity and the dehumanizing impact of industrial society were well adapted to contemporary protests against the ‘repressive tolerance’ of post-industrial Western Europe. The prosperous, liberal West’s apparently infinite flexibility, its sponge-like capacity to absorb passions and differences, infuriated its critics. Repression, they insisted, was endemic in bourgeois society. It could not just evaporate. The repression that was missing on the streets must perforce have gone somewhere: it had moved into people’s very souls—and, above all, their bodies. Herbert Marcuse, a Weimar-era intellectual who had ended up in Southern California—where he handily adapted his old epistemology to his new environment—offered a helpful conflation of all these strands of thought. Western consumer society, he explained, no longer rested upon the straightforwardly economic exploitation of a class of property-less proletarians. Instead it diverted

human energy away from the search for fulfillment (notably sexual fulfillment) and into the consumption of goods and illusions. Real needs—sexual, social, civic—are displaced by false ones, whose fulfillment is the purpose of a consumer-centered culture.

The Old Left had never been culturally dissident or sexually adventurous even when it was young: that had been the affair of bohemians, aesthetes and artists, often of an individualistic or even politically reactionary bent.

What caused far deeper offence was the emerging tendency of young radicals to identify Marxist theory with revolutionary practices in exotic lands, where none of the established categories and authorities seemed to apply.

The working-class vote, especially the male working-class vote, was the foundation of the power and influence of the British Labour Party, the Dutch and Belgian workers’ parties, the Communist parties of France and Italy and the Social Democratic parties of German-speaking central Europe.

Traditional Left-wing parties were nonetheless heavily dependent on the votes of the working class and thus identified closely with it. But by the mid-1960s this class was disappearing.

But for anyone not wedded to this version of European history, the proletariat was no longer the only available vehicle of radical social transformation. In what was now increasingly referred to as the ‘Third’ world, there were alternative candidates: anti-colonial nationalists in North Africa and the Middle East; black radicals in the US (hardly the third world but closely identified with it); and peasant guerillas everywhere, from Central America to the South China Sea. Together with ‘students’ and even simply the young, these constituted a far larger and more readily mobilized constituency for revolutionary hopes than the staid and satisfied working masses of the prosperous West.

This new taste for the exotic was fuelled in part by contemporary decolonization and the aspirations of national liberation movements, in part by the projection on to others of Europe’s own lost illusions. It rested on remarkably little local knowledge, despite an emerging academic cottage industry in ‘peasant studies’.

The peasant revolutions in the non-European world had a further attribute that appealed to West European intellectuals and students at the time: they were violent.

When Italian students proposed that, in the new service economy, universities constituted the epicenters of knowledge production and students were thus the new working class, they were stretching the terms of Marxist exchange to the limit.

The Vietnam War was not a divisive issue in Europe—it found disfavor all across the political spectrum—but it served as a catalyst for mobilization across the continent:

hearted support of it). It says something about the peculiar circumstances of the Sixties, and the social background of the most prominent public activists, that so many of the disputes and demands of the time were constructed around a political agenda and not an economic one. Like 1848, the Sixties was a Revolution of the Intellectuals. But there was an economic dimension to the discontents of the hour, even if many of the participants were still oblivious to it. Though the prosperity of the post-war decades had not yet run its course and unemployment in Western Europe was at a historic low, a cycle of labor disputes throughout Western Europe in the early sixties hinted at troubles ahead. Behind these strikes, and those that were to come in 1968–69, was some discontent at declining real wages, as the post-war growth wave passed its peak; but the real source of complaint was working conditions; and in particular relations between employees and their bosses. Except in the distinctive cases of Austria, Germany and Scandinavia, management-worker relations in European factories and offices were not good: on a typical shop floor in Milan—or Birmingham, or the Paris industrial belt—resentful, militant workers were overseen by intransigently autocratic employers, with very little communication between them.

Factories and offices were run from the top down with no input from below. Managers could discipline, humiliate or fire their staff at will. Employees were often accorded little respect, their opinions unheeded. There were widespread calls for greater worker initiative, more professional autonomy, even ‘self-management’ (autogestion in French). These were issues that had not featured prominently in European industrial conflicts since the Popular Front occupations of 1936. They had largely escaped the attention of unions and political parties, focused as they were on more traditional and easily manipulated demands: higher wages, shorter hours. But they overlapped readily enough with the rhetoric of the student radicals (with whom shop-floor militants had little else in common) who voiced similar complaints about their overcrowded, poorly managed universities. The sense of exclusion, from decision-making and thus from power, reflected another dimension of the Sixties whose implications were not fully appreciated at the time.

These arrangements ensured political stability and continuity; but as a consequence, in the three major democracies of western Europe, radical opposition was pushed not just to the fringes but out of parliament altogether. ‘The system’ seemed indeed to be run exclusively by ‘them’, as the New Left had for some time been insisting. Making a virtue of necessity, radical students declared themselves the ‘extra-parliamentary’ opposition, and politics moved into the streets instead.

It is worth insisting upon the parochial and distinctly self-regarding issues that sparked the May Events, lest the ideologically charged language and ambitious programs of the following weeks mislead us.

But the accompanying Marxist rhetoric, while familiar enough, masked an essentially anarchist spirit whose immediate objective was the removal and humiliation of authority.