Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Hopeful illusions about the Soviet realm were accompanied by widespread misgivings—and worse—about America.

The US was not wildly popular in western Europe, despite and in some places because of its generous help in Europe’s economic reconstruction.

The Soviet Union might pose an immediate threat to Europe but it was America that presented the more insidious long-term challenge.

The Communists’ attitude towards their mass movements was strictly instrumental—the Peace Movement was only ever a vehicle for Soviet policy, which is why it suddenly adopted the theme of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in 1951, taking its cue from a shift in Stalin’s international strategy. Privately, Communists—especially in the eastern bloc—had little but scorn for the illusions of their fellow-travellers. During organized visits to the popular democracies, Peace Movement supporters (overwhelmingly from France, Italy and India) were fêted and honored for their support; behind their backs they were derided as ‘pigeons’, a new generation of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.

But the point was not so much to sell books as to remind readers and others that Communists stood for culture—French culture.

the America House programs were sometimes undermined by the crude propaganda imperatives emanating from Washington.

Fortunately for the West, American popular culture had an appeal that American political ineptitude could do little to tarnish. Communists were at a severe disadvantage in that their official disapproval of decadent American jazz and American cinema closely echoed the views of Josef Goebbels. While east European Communist states were banning jazz as decadent and alien, Radio Free Europe was broadcasting into eastern Europe three hours of popular music every weekday afternoon, interspersed with news on the hour for ten minutes. Cinema, the other universal medium of the time, could be regulated in states under Communist control; but throughout western Europe the appeal of American films was universal. Here, Soviet propaganda had nothing with which to compete and even Western progressives, often drawn to American music and cinema, were out of sympathy with the Party line. The cultural competition of the early Cold War years was asymmetrical. Among European cultural elites there was still a widespread sentiment that they shared, across ideological divides and even bridging the Iron Curtain, a common culture to which America posed a threat. The French in particular took this line, echoing the early post-war efforts of their diplomats to trace an international policy independent of American control.

The US spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to win over European sympathies, but many of the resulting publications and products were heavy-handed and counter-productive, merely confirming the European intelligentsia’s innate suspicions. In Germany, America’s excessive attention to Communist crimes was seen by many as a deliberate ploy to forget or relativise the crimes of the Nazis. In Italy the lurid anti-Communist campaigns of the Vatican undercut the anti-Stalinist arguments of Silone, Vittorini and others. Only in art and literature, where the absurdities of Stalinist cultural policy impinged directly upon the territory of painters and poets, did Western intellectuals consistently distance themselves from Moscow—and even here their opposition was muted for fear of offering hostages to American ‘propaganda’.13 On the other hand, in the struggle for the sympathies of the large mass of the Western European population, the Soviets were rapidly losing ground. Everywhere except Italy the Communist vote fell steadily from the late 1940s, and—if opinion polls are to be believed—even those who did vote Communist often saw their vote either as a symbolic protest or else as an expression of class or communal solidarity. Well before the cataclysms of 1956, when the sympathies of most European intellectuals would swing sharply away from the Soviet bloc, the Atlantic orientation of most other Western Europeans had been decided.

Post-war Europe was still warmed by the fading embers of the nineteenth-century economic revolution that had almost run its course, leaving behind sedimentary evidence of cultural habits and social relations increasingly at odds with the new age of airplanes and atomic weapons.

It was the Catholic Church’s association with the old order, indeed its firm stand against modernity and change, which gave it a special appeal in these transitional years.

But the main problem, in West Germany as elsewhere, was that Protestant churches did not offer an alternative to the modern world but rather a way to live in harmony with it.

But at a time when the West European state was embarking on a much enhanced role as the spiritual and material guardian of its citizens, the distinction between church and state as arbiters of public manners and morals became rather blurred. The late forties and early fifties thus appear as a transitional age, in which conventions of social deference and claims of rank and authority still held sway, but where the modern state was beginning to displace church and even class as the arbiter of collective behavior.

This was the golden age of the cinema.

In general, American films were part of America’s appeal, and as such significant assets in the cultural Cold War.

In many ways, Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was less open, less mobile and more insular than it had been in 1913.

In the years preceding World War One Europe was an optimistic continent whose statesmen and commentators looked to a confident future. Thirty years on, after World War Two, people had their eyes firmly and nervously fixed upon the terrible past.

far from turning to extreme solutions, in the manner of the years following World War One, the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned away from politics. The implications of this could be discerned only vaguely at the time—in the failure of Fascist or Communist parties to cash in upon the difficulties of daily existence; in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action; in the emergence of domestic recreations and domestic consumption in place of participation in public affairs.

Communist parties everywhere except Italy began their slow retreat to the political margins. And the threat of a Fascist revival no longer carried conviction, except perhaps at Communist political rallies.

Political issues that in an earlier age would almost certainly have led to violence and war—the unresolved problem of Germany, territorial conflicts between Yugoslavia and Italy, the future of occupied Austria—were all contained, and would in due course be addressed, within the context of Great Power confrontations and negotiations over which Europeans had very little say.

from the point of view of the Soviet leaders of this generation, the presence of US troops in West Germany was one of the more reliable guarantees against German revanchism.

The German Question had not exactly been answered; but with both parts fully integrated into their respective international alliances it would now be set aside for a while, its place to be taken in due course by the still unresolved dilemma of the divided former capital, Berlin.

The growing emphasis in US and Soviet strategic thinking on nuclear weapons, and the intercontinental missiles with

which to deliver them, released European states from the need to compete in an arena where they could not hope to match the resources of the superpowers, even though central Europe remained the most likely terrain over which any future war might be fought.

Nuclear weapons made both Moscow and Washington more belligerent in form—it was important to seem ready and willing to use them—but far more restrained in practice.

There are various reasons why the Americans were never able to realize their plans for quitting Europe.

neither the British nor the French were willing to relinquish control of nuclear weapons to a European defense entity; the French especially were suspicious of any hint that the Americans might allow Germans access to a nuclear trigger.

A second issue binding the Americans to Europe was the problem of Berlin.

The ostensible objective of Khrushchev’s offensive, which took on a greater urgency when the Soviet leader demanded two weeks later that the West make up its mind to withdraw from Berlin within six months, was to get the Americans to abandon Berlin and allow it to become a ‘free city’. If they did so, the credibility of their general commitment to the defense of Western Europe would be seriously dented, and neutralist, anti-nuclear sentiment in West Germany and elsewhere would probably grow.

If Moscow undertook not to raise again the question of Allied status in Berlin, Washington would accept the reality of East German government there and would resist West German pressure for nuclear weapons.

The promise of a non-nuclear Germany was the quid pro quo Moscow sought for the Berlin compromise;

The stabilization of the Cold War in Europe, the reduced likelihood of it ever becoming ‘hot’, and the fact that these matters lay largely out of their hands, induced among West Europeans the rather comfortable conviction that conventional armed conflict was obsolete.

Indeed, the hard ideological edge of American Cold War rhetoric allowed many in Western Europe, once the immediate threat of nuclear war had passed, to tell themselves that they were in effect doing the United States a favor by allowing it to defend them.

The most remarkable aspect of the European political scene in the 1950s was not the changes it saw but the changes it didn’t see. The re-emergence in post-war Europe of self-governing democratic states—with neither the means nor the desire to make war, and led by elderly men whose common if unstated political creed was ‘No experiments’—came as something of a surprise.

In politics, corruption is largely a by-product of opportunity.

And yet: Italy’s post-war stability was the crucial permissive condition for the country’s economic performance and subsequent social transformation. And that stability rested, paradoxical as it may appear, upon the rather peculiar institutional arrangements just described. The country lacked a stable majority in favor of any one party or program, and the complicated electoral system of proportional representation generated parliaments too divided to agree on substantial or controversial legislation: the post-war Republican constitution did not acquire a Constitutional Court to adjudicate its laws until 1956, and the much-discussed need for regional autonomy was not voted upon in Parliament until fourteen years later. Accordingly, as in Fourth Republic France and for some of the same reasons, Italy was in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of

the many para-state agencies.

But the main source of Austria’s successful post-war political settlement lay in the widely acknowledged need to avoid ideological confrontations of the sort that had torn the country apart before the war.

confrontation usually triumphed over local self-interest. Just as Austria’s newfound neutrality was enthusiastically adopted as the country’s identity tag, displacing awkward memories of more contentious identities from the past—‘Habsburg’, ‘German’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Christian’—so the post-ideological (indeed post-political) implications of government-by-coalition and administration-by-Proporz came to define Austrian public life.

In a curious way Austria resembled East Germany, and not only in the rather monotonously bureaucratic quality of its civic facilities. Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested on a tacit agreement to fabricate for common consumption a flattering new identity—except that the exercise proved considerably more successful in the Austrian case. A reform-minded Christian Democrat party, a parliamentary Left, a broad consensus not to press inherited ideological or cultural divisions to the point of political polarization and destabilization, and a de-politicized

citizenry; these were the distinctive traits of the post-World War Two settlement in Western Europe.

The experience of war and occupation, and the memory of contentious civic divisions in earlier decades, encouraged a greater tendency towards cooperation across these communitarian divides.

It was this distinctive post-war mix of self-sustaining cultural communities and reformist parties of the left- and right-center that established political equilibrium in the Low Countries.

Under Konrad Adenauer’s direction West Germany had navigated safely between the Scylla of neo-Nazism and the Charybdis of philo-Soviet neutralism, and was anchored securely within the Western alliance, despite the misgivings of critics at home and abroad.

This concern to deflect or contain conflict shaped the whole public culture of the Bonn Republic.

But regulated markets and close government-business relations sat comfortably in the Christian Democratic schema, both on general social principles and from pragmatic calculation.

Whereas the Italian Christian Democrats colonized the state, in Germany the CDU colonized the issues. On economic policy, on social services and welfare, and especially on the still sensitive topics of the East-West divide and the fate of Germany’s many expellees, the CDU under Adenauer was firmly entrenched as an umbrella party of the majority center—a new departure in German political culture.

For the Socialists, the restoration of a sovereign, unified and politically neutral Germany must take precedence over all international entanglements.

A space would now open up outside parliament for a new and destabilizing generation of political radicals.

The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over:

Adenauer’s own attitude to these matters was complicated. On the one hand he clearly felt that a prudent silence was better than a provocative public recital of the truth—Germans of that generation were too morally compromised for democracy to work, except at this price.