Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

it merely added to the obscurities of an already confused time.

The culture of the Seventies turned not on the collective but the individual. Just as anthropology had displaced philosophy as the Ur-discipline of the Sixties, so psychology now took its place.

adapting Marxist background language to Freudian subjects, self-styled ‘post-Freudians’ now emphasized the need to liberate not social classes but aggregated individual subjects.

They were not much concerned with traditional projects of social revolution (which the feminists correctly identified with political movements led by and primarily for men). Instead they sought to undermine the very concept of the human subject that had once underlain them. Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge: knowledge about the natural world; knowledge about the public sphere; knowledge about oneself; and above all, knowledge about the way in which knowledge itself is produced and legitimized. The maintenance of power in this account rested upon the capacity of those in control of knowledge to maintain that control at the expense of others, by repressing subversive ‘knowledges’.

In short, one had to substitute revolutionary knowledge, so to speak, for that of the masters: or, in the language of Antonio Gramsci so fashionable a few years earlier, one had to combat the ‘hegemony’ of the ruling class. A second assumption, one that was to acquire an even stronger grip on intellectual fashions, went considerably further. This was the seductive insistence upon subverting not just old certainties but the very possibility of certainty itself. All behavior, all opinion, all knowledge, precisely because it was socially derived and therefore politically instrumental, should be regarded with suspicion. The very idea that judgments or evaluations might stand independent of the person making them came to be treated in certain quarters as itself the expression and representation of a partisan (and implicitly conservative) social position. All iterations of judgment or belief could in principle be reduced in this way. Even critical intellectuals could themselves be thus ‘positioned’. In the words of the French sociology professor Pierre Bourdieu, the most influential European exponent of the new sociology of knowledge, ‘professorial discourse’ is but the expression of ‘the dominated fraction of the dominating class.’ What this beguilingly subversive way of positioning all knowledge and opinion did not disclose was how to determine whether one ‘discourse’ was truer than another: a dilemma resolved by treating ‘truth’ as itself a socially positioned category—a stan...

their critique of human agency and their ‘de-construction’, as it was becoming known, of the cognitive human subject

and his textual subject matter.

But the renewed interest in criticizing optimistic assumptions about progress, in questioning the underpinnings of enlightened rationalism and its political and cognitive by-products, established a certain affinity between early-twentieth-century critics of modernity and technical progress like Heidegger and the disabused skeptics of the ‘post-modern’ age—and allowed Heidegger and others to launder their earlier associations.

In their disabused commentary on the heritage of ‘’68 Thought’, the French writers Luc Ferry and Alain Renault tartly concluded that ‘the greatest achievement of the thinkers of the Sixties was to convince their audience that incomprehensibility was the sign of greatness.’

Marxism was relieved of its embarrassingly atavistic attachment to economic categories and political institutions and recycled as cultural criticism.

But in fact this narcissistic obscurantism was very much of its time, its detachment from daily reality bearing unconscious witness to the exhaustion of an intellectual tradition.

Artistic theorizing was displacing art. If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk’ rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural’ it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends. The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to shock. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’ Musical subversion now consisted of angry songs decrying ‘hegemony’, their counterfeit political content masking ...

However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s cynicism at least was real, and honestly come by. They were the sour and mostly untalented end of a growing spectrum of disrespect: for the past, for authority, for public figures and public affairs. In its wittier incarnations, this scorn for pomposity and tradition took its cue from the disabused young British political satirists who had first surfaced nearly two decades earlier: the theatre review Beyond the Fringe; the BBC late-night show That Was the Week That Was; and the weekly magazine Private Eye. Exploiting the rapidly growing television audience and the steady retreat of state censorship, Monty Python and its successors and imitators blended broad slapstick, ribald social commentary and sardonic political mockery—a mixture last seen in the trenchant political cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank. The close interplay between rock music and the new burlesque is nicely illustrated in the financial backing for two of the Python films, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) and Life of Brian (1979): underwritten respectively by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and by George Harrison of the Beatles.

The spectrum of political options available to European voters in 1970 would not have been unfamiliar to their grandparents. The longevity of Europe’s political parties derived from a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate. The choice between Labour and Conservatives in Britain, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in West Germany, no longer reflected deep divisions over particular policies, much less profound ‘lifestyle’ preferences as they would come to be known. In most places it was an echo of longstanding, trans-generational voting habits, determined by the class, religion or locality of the voter rather than by the party’s program. Men and women voted as their parents had voted, depending on where they lived, where they worked and what they earned. But beneath the surface continuity a tectonic shift was taking place in the political sociology of European voters. The block vote of the white, male, employed working class—the universal bedrock of Communist and Socialist party support—was contracting and splitting. In much the same way, the ‘ideal-typical’ conservative voter—older, female, churchgoing—could no longer be counted upon to furnish the core electorate of Christian Democrat or Conservative parties. To the extent that they persisted, such traditional voters were no longer the majority. Why?

Men and women no longer lived in the same places as their parents and often did very different jobs.

Secondly, the prosperity and social reforms of the Sixties and early Seventies had effectively exhausted the programs and vision of the traditional parties. Their very success had deprived politicians of moderate Left and Right alike of a credible agenda, especially after the spate of liberal reforms of the Sixties.

Thirdly, there were now alternative denominators of political allegiance. Ethnic minorities, often unwelcome in the white working-class communities of Europe where they had arrived, were not always invited into local political or labour organizations and their politics reflected this exclusion. And lastly, the generational politics of the Sixties had introduced into public discussion concerns utterly unfamiliar to an older political culture.

But within a few years, many—notably among the educated young adults of north-west Europe—came to look upon the commercialism and material well-being of the Fifties and Sixties as a burdensome inheritance, bringing tawdry commodities and false values. The price of modernity, at least to its main beneficiaries, was starting to look rather high; the ‘lost world’ of their parents and grandparents rather appealing. The politicization of these cultural discontents was typically the work of activists familiar with the tactics of more traditional parties in which they or their families had once been active. The logic of politics thus changed relatively little: the point was still to mobilize like-minded persons around a program of legislation to be enacted by the state. What was new was the organizing premise. Hitherto—in

The price of modernity, at least to its main beneficiaries, was starting to look rather high; the ‘lost world’ of their parents and grandparents rather appealing.

in Europe—political constituencies had emerged from the elective affinities of large groups of voters defined by class or occupation, bound by a common, inherited, and often rather abstract set of principles and objectives. Policies had mattered less than allegiances. But in the Seventies policies moved to the forefront. ‘Single-issue’ parties and movements emerged, their constituencies shaped by a variable geometry of common concerns: often narrowly focused, occasionally whimsical.

But in the Seventies policies moved to the forefront. ‘Single-issue’ parties and movements emerged, their constituencies shaped by a variable geometry of common concerns: often narrowly focused, occasionally whimsical.

Three of the new political groupings—the women’s movement, environmentalism, and peace activism—are of particular significance, for their scale and their lasting impact. For obvious reasons, the women’s movement was the most diverse and far-reaching.

Equal pay and the workplace provision of childcare facilities thus emerged early as the main demands of most working women in the West and have remained at the forefront ever since.

It is thus not surprising that the demand for reform of abortion laws became a leitmotif of the new women’s politics—a rare point of intersection where the politics of radical feminism encountered the needs of apolitical everywoman.

Within a few years of the reforms of the Seventies, no west European country except Ireland had a birthrate sufficient to replace the previous generation.

The social changes wrought by the women’s movement were not, however, mirrored in politics itself. No ‘women’s party’ emerged, capable of siphoning off votes and getting its representatives elected. Women remained a minority in national legislatures and governments.

Environmentalists, men and women alike, had considerably more success in translating their sentiments into electoral politics. At one level ‘environmentalism’ (a neologism dating from the Thirties) was indeed a new departure: the collective expression of middle-class fears about nuclear power stations and galloping urbanization, motorways and pollution. But the Green Movement in Europe would never have been so effective had it been just a footnote to the Sixties: well-heeled weekend Luddites in stone-washed natural fibres triangulating between their instincts and their interests. The longing for a more ‘natural’ world and the search for a personal politics of ‘authenticity’ had deep roots on both sides of the ideological divide, traceable to the Romantics and their horror at the depredations of early industrialism. By the early twentieth century both Left and Right had their cycling clubs, vegetarian restaurants, Wandervogel movements and ramblers, affiliated variously to socialist or nationalist dreams of emancipation and return.

The German nostalgia for uniquely German landscapes, for the mountains and rivers of the Harz and the Pfalz, for Heimat; the French nationalist dream of peasant harmony in la France profonde, unsullied by cities and cosmopolitanism; the English reverie of a once and future country harmony, Blake’s lost Jerusalem: these had more in common than any of their followers might have felt comfortable admitting.

The modern environmentalist revolution thus benefited twice over: it was a break from the callous nostrums of the recent past—and it had roots in a more distant history, unremembered but atavistically reassuring. Environmentalism (like pacifism) often aroused in its wake a revival of nationalism—or regionalism—but with a human face.

But their anger against the pollution of the local environment above all (and their relative indifference to similar havoc being wreaked elsewhere) suggests otherwise. The ‘not in my backyard’ quality of the incipient Green Movement harked back to an earlier model.

With a Heideggerian twist—the suggestion that Communism

itself was an illicit Western import, touched with the hubristic illusion of endless material progress—these ruminations formed the basis of an intellectual opposition that would surface in the Seventies, combining ethical dissent with ecological critiques,

Single-issue parties, as we have seen, often emerged in

the wake of a crisis, a scandal or an unpopular proposal:

The proliferation of single-issue parties and programs, and their steady absorption into mainstream public life, took its toll upon the traditional organizations of the Left in particular. Communist parties in Western Europe, undermined by the steady erosion of their proletarian constituency and discredited by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, were most vulnerable.

The (relative) autonomy of the Italian Communists was complemented by Berlinguer’s 1973 decision to commit his party to the defense of Italian democracy, even if it meant abandoning its outright opposition to the Christian Democrats: this was the so-called ‘historic compromise’. This shift was driven in part by the shock of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, which convinced Berlinguer and other Communist intellectuals that even if the Communists won a parliamentary majority they would never be allowed—by the Americans, or their allies in Italian military, business and Church circles—to form a government of their own. But it was also a reaction, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the very real threat to Italian democracy itself from Right and Left terrorists for whom the Communist Party was as much the enemy as the Italian state.

The new approach of the Italian Party, and rather less convincing efforts by the French Party to emulate its success if not its ideas, became known as ‘Eurocommunism’—a term first coined at a November 1975 meeting of Italian, French and Spanish Communists and given official currency by the secretary-general of the Spanish Communists, Santiago Carrillo, in his 1977 essay Eurocommunism and the State. The Spanish Party was only just emerging from decades of clandestinity and its leaders were keen to establish their democratic credentials. Like their Italian comrades, they understood that the best way to achieve this was by taking their distance, both from the contemporary Soviet Union but also, and more significantly, from their common Leninist past. ‘Eurocommunism’ proved briefly seductive, though less to electors than to intellectuals and academics who mistook for a political revival of Marxism what was in fact an expression of doctrinal exhaustion.

Until the disappearance of the Soviet Union itself the Communist parties of Western Europe were shackled to it—if not in their own eyes then most assuredly in the opinion of voters.

But then, for all the support they continued to furnish in cash and kind, the Soviet leaders were losing interest in Western Communist parties, who had limited

political impact and seemed unlikely to take power in the foreseeable future. Social Democrats, however, especially those in positions of influence, were another matter. And Social Democrats in Germany, still the crucible of a divided continent, were of very particular interest indeed.

To these men it was obvious that the Western Allies would take no untoward risks to overcome the division of Europe—an interpretation reconfirmed by the West’s passive acceptance of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. If West Germans wanted to break the

central European stalemate, they would have to do it themselves, by dealing directly with the authorities in the East.

Henceforth, Bonn would continue to affirm the fundamental unity of the German people, but the undeniable facticity of East Germany would be acknowledged: ‘one German nation, two German states’.7

There were three distinct constituencies whom the framers of Ostpolitik had to consider if they were to succeed in their ambitions. Western Europeans needed reassurance that Germany was not turning East.

The second constituency was Germans on both sides of the divide. For many of them Brandt’s Ostpolitik brought real dividends.

One of the unintended consequences of these developments was the virtual disappearance of ‘unification’ from the German political agenda. To be sure, re-unification of the divided country remained the Lebenslüge (‘life-lie’) of the Federal Republic, as Brandt put it. But by the mid-Eighties, a few years before it unexpectedly took place, re-unification no longer mobilized mass opinion.

As part of their ambitious strategy of détente with the USSR and China, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, were more open than their predecessors to negotiations with Moscow—and

Not only were the political divisions of post-war Europe now officially and publicly accepted, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the GDR and other satellite regimes officially conceded; the Western powers had for the first time foresworn all ‘armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State’.

But also included in the so-called ‘third basket’ of Helsinki principles was a list of the rights not just of states, but of persons and peoples, grouped under Principles VII (‘Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’) and VIII (‘Equal rights and self-determination of peoples’). Most of the political leaders who signed off on these clauses paid them little attention—on both sides of the Iron Curtain it was generally assumed that they were diplomatic window dressing, a sop to domestic opinion, and in any case unenforceable: under Principles IV and VI, outsiders could not interfere in the internal affairs of signatory states. As one embittered Czech intellectual remarked at the time, Helsinki was in practice a re-run of Cuius Regio, Eius Religio: within their borders, rulers were once again licensed to treat their citizens as they wished. It did not work out that way. Most of the 1975 Helsinki principles and protocols merely gift-wrapped existing international arrangements. But Principle VII not only committed the signatory states to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought,

conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.’ It also enjoined all thirty-five states to ‘promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms’, and to ‘recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience’. From this wordy and, as it seemed, toothless checklist of rights and obligations was born the Helsinki Rights movement. Within a year of getting their long-awaited international conference agreement, Soviet leaders were faced with a growing and ultimately uncontrollable flowering of circles, clubs, networks, charters and individuals, all demanding ‘merely’ that their governments stick to the letter of that same agreement, that—as enjoined by the Final Act—they ‘fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field’.