Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

One of the achievements of the Soviet-backed ‘Peace Movement’ of the early 1950s was its success in convincing many West Germans that their country could be both reunified and secure if it declared itself ‘neutral’.

But it was one of the oddities of post-war West Germany that their country’s privileged position as a de facto American protectorate was for some of its citizens as much a source of resentment as of security. And such sentiments were only strengthened when it became clear from the later fifties that a war in Germany might see the use of battlefield nuclear weapons—under the exclusive control of others.

For a brief period it seemed as though the Bonn Republic’s allegiance to Washington might be transferred to De Gaulle’s Paris, with whom it was bound by a common resentment at high-handed Anglo-American treatment and a shared suspicion that the US was wriggling free of obligations to its European clients.

During the Cold War some blamed America for putting Germany at the center of ‘its’ conflict with the Soviet Union and exposing the country to risk. Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’. And West Germany’s growing prominence on the eastern edge of the Western alliance subliminally recalled Nazi Germany’s self-assigned role as Europe’s cultural bulwark facing down the Asiatic Soviet hordes.

the idea of Europe could itself substitute for the void opened up in German public life by the evisceration of German nationalism—as Schuman explicitly hoped that it would.

At the end of the war, according to the British Labour politician Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill had expressed the wish that Germany might grow ‘fat but impotent’. And so it did, faster and to greater effect than Churchill could have dared to hope. The attention of West Germans in the two decades after Hitler’s defeat did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction. Making, saving, getting and spending became not just the primary activity of most West Germans, but also the publicly affirmed and approved purpose of national life.

Internationally condemned after Hitler’s fall for blindly obeying immoral orders, Germans thus turned the defect of their industrious obedience into a national virtue. The shattering impact of their country’s total defeat and subsequent occupation made West Germans amenable to the imposition of democracy in a way that few could have imagined a decade earlier. In place of the ‘devotion for its rulers’ that Heine had first observed in the German people a century before, Germans in the nineteen-fifties attracted international respect for their similarly wholehearted devotion to efficiency, detail, and quality in the manufacture of finished products.

The ‘skeptical generation’—men and women born in

the last days of the Weimar Republic, and thus old enough to have experienced Nazism but young enough to bear no responsibility for its crimes—were particularly mistrustful of the newfound German order.

In the German turn away from politics towards private accumulation, Grass and others saw a denial of civic responsibilities past and present. They ardently seconded the dissent from Bertold Brecht’s aphorism ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (‘Eating comes first, then morality’) expressed by Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin, in March 1947: ‘No sentence is more dangerous than “Eating comes first, then morality”. We are hungry and freezing because we permitted the erroneous doctrine which this sentence expresses.’

For Fassbinder and a coming generation of angrily dissenting West Germans, the newfound qualities of the new Germany in its new Europe—prosperity, compromise, political demobilization and a tacit agreement not to arouse the sleeping dogs of national memory—did not deflect attention from the old defects. They were the old defects, in a new guise.

To many in Britain, France or the Netherlands, their countries’ colonies and imperial holdings in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas were balm for the suffering and humiliations of the war in Europe; they had demonstrated their material value in that war as vital national resources. Without access to the far-flung territory, supplies and men that came with colonies, the British and French especially would have been at an even greater disadvantage in their struggle with Germany and Japan than they already were.

In the longer run the enforced Dutch retreat from the colonies facilitated a growing national sentiment for ‘Europe’.

Making a virtue of necessity, the Dutch retooled as ultra-enthusiastic proponents of European economic and later political integration.

National independence movements were the strategic headache for much of the 1950s, not Moscow and its ambitions—though in some cases the two overlapped.

To speak of Empire in France was to be reminded of defeat as well as victory.

if the French were not, in their own eyes, quite reduced to a ‘helpless, hopeless mass of protoplasm’ (Eisenhower’s description of them in 1954) this was in large measure due to their continued credibility as a leading colonial power, which was thus a matter of some importance.

the USA underwrote post-war French economic modernization while France dedicated its own scarce resources to the war.

The French bargained hard before consenting to support the doomed European defense project and conceding West German membership in NATO: what they got in return (for allowing the US to protect them, as it seemed to aggrieved Washington insiders) was very substantial American military aid.

Nevertheless, if there was a France-outside-France it was in Algeria—confirmed, as we have seen, by Algeria’s technical presence inside France as part of the metropolitan administrative structure. The closest analogy elsewhere was Ulster, another overseas enclave in a former colony, institutionally incorporated into the ‘mainland’ and with a long-established settler community for whom the attachment to the imperial heartland mattered far more than it did to the metropolitan majority.

Colonial Algeria was fast becoming an anachronism, as De Gaulle fully understood.

The Fourth Republic

had lasted just twelve years. Unloved and unlamented, it was cruelly weakened from the outset by the absence of an effective executive—a legacy of the Vichy experience, which had made post-war legislators reluctant to establish a strong presidency. It was handicapped by its parliamentary and electoral systems, which favored multiple parties and produced unstable coalition governments.

But above all, the first post-war French republic was brought low by its colonial struggles.

The institutions of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth French Republic were designed to avoid precisely the defects of its predecessor. The Assembly and the political parties were reduced in significance, the executive was dramatically strengthened: the constitution gave the President considerable control and initiative in the making of policy, and absolute sway over prime ministers whom he could appoint and dismiss virtually at will.

In domestic affairs, De Gaulle was for the most part content to leave daily business to his prime ministers.

De Gaulle understood economic stabilization and modernization largely as weapons in the struggle to restore national glory.

The US could not be trusted, but it was at least predictable; the important thing was not to be dependent on Washington, as French policy had been in Indo-China and again at Suez. France must stand its ground as best it could—for example, by acquiring its own nuclear weapon.

France was vetoing Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. If Britain wished to be a US satellite, so be it. But it could not be ‘European’ as well.

What the Treaty of 1963 and the new Franco-German condominium really confirmed was France’s decisive turn towards Europe. For Charles de Gaulle, the lesson of the twentieth century was that France could only hope to recover its lost glories by investing in the European project and shaping it into the service of French goals.

The country’s resources were hopelessly overstretched, and the costs of maintaining even the Indian empire were no longer balanced by economic or strategic advantage:

By 1956, then, the British were coming increasingly to regard Nasser as a threat—both in his own right as a radical despot sitting athwart a vital waterway, and by the example he was setting to others.

London was always more than a little skeptical of American motives in the region: Washington, it was believed, harbored plans to supplant Britain in the Middle East, which was why American spokesmen indulged in occasional anti-colonialist rhetoric, the better to seduce local elites.

The Suez crisis coincided almost to the hour with the Soviet occupation of Hungary. By indulging in so patently imperialist a plot against a single Arab state, ostensibly in retribution for the exercise of its territorial sovereignty, London and Paris had drawn the world’s attention away from the Soviet Union’s invasion of an independent state and destruction of its government. They had placed their own—as it seemed to Washington, anachronistic—interests above those of the Western alliance as a whole. Worse, they had given Moscow an unprecedented propaganda gift.

But by allowing Moscow to perform, even if only symbolically, the role of protector to the injured party, France and Britain had initiated the Soviet Union into a role that it would improvise with gusto in the coming decades. Thanks to the Suez crisis, the divisions and rhetoric of the Cold War were to be imported deep into the Middle East and Africa.

The first lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer maintain a global colonial presence. The country lacked the military and economic resources, as Suez had only too plainly shown, and in the wake of so palpable a demonstration of British limitations the country was likely now to be facing increased demands for independence.

The second lesson of Suez, as it seemed to the overwhelming majority of the British establishment, was that the UK must never again find itself on the wrong side of an argument with Washington.

The lasting consequences of the Suez crisis were felt in British society.

The British Labour Party, in opposition at the time of Suez, was unable to turn Eden’s failure to its advantage because the electorate no longer filtered experience through a primarily party-political grid. Like the rest of Western Europe, the British were increasingly interested in consuming and being entertained.

The retreat from Empire contributed directly to a growing British anxiety about the loss of national direction.

After the Suez débâcle Canada, Australia, South Africa and India had all taken the measure of British decline and were re-orienting their trade and their policies accordingly: towards the US, towards Asia, to what would soon be dubbed the ‘third’ world.

Britain’s very dependence on America illustrated the nation’s fundamental weakness and isolation. And so, even though little in their instincts, their culture or

their education pointed them toward continental Europe, it was becoming obvious to many British politicians and others—not least Macmillan himself—that one way or another, the country’s future lay across the Channel. Where else but to Europe could Great Britain now look to recover its international standing?

The emphasis, it seemed clear, should be placed on European economic integration, an arena in which national self-interest and cooperation could be pursued in concert without offending traditional sensibilities.

The only truly significant innovation—the setting up under Article 177 of a European Court of Justice to which national courts would submit cases for final adjudication—would prove immensely important in later decades but passed largely unnoticed at the time.

It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.

But the promotion of exports; the redirection of resources from old industries to new ones; the encouragement of favored sectors like agriculture or transport: all these required cross-border cooperation. None of the West European economies was self-sufficient. This trend towards mutually advantageous coordination was thus driven by national self-interest, not the objectives of Schuman’s Coal and Steel Authority, which was irrelevant to economic policy making in these years. The same concern to protect and nourish local interests that had turned Europe’s states inwards before 1939 now brought them closer together. The removal of impediments and the lessons of the recent past were perhaps the most important factors in facilitating this change.

German interests were mixed. As Europe’s main exporting nation Germany had a growing interest in free trade within Western Europe—the more so because German manufacturers had lost their important markets in eastern Europe and had no former colonial territories to exploit. But a tariff-protected European customs union confined to six countries was not necessarily a rational German policy objective, as Erhard understood. Like the British, he and many other Germans might have preferred a broader, looser European free trade area. But as a principle of foreign policy, Adenauer would never break with France, however divergent their interests. And then there was the question of agriculture.

In exchange for an undertaking to open their home market to German non-agricultural exports, the French effectively shifted their domestic system of rural guarantees onto the backs of fellow EEC members, thereby relieving Paris of an intolerably expensive (and politically explosive) long-term burden.

a number of countries then met in Stockholm in November 1959 and formed themselves into the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).