Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances and Paris dictated its policies. The West German desire to be part of the European Community was thus bought at a high price, but for many decades Adenauer and his successors would pay that price without complaining, cleaving closely to the French alliance—rather to British surprise. The French, meanwhile, ‘Europeanized’ their farm subsidies and transfers, without paying the price of a loss of sovereignty.

By the end of its first decade, and notwithstanding the shadow of De Gaulle, the European Economic Community had acquired an aura of inevitability, which is why other European states began lining up to join it. But there were problems, too. A high-priced, self-serving customs union, directed from Brussels by a centralized administration and an unelected executive, was not an unalloyed gain for Europe or the rest of the world. Indeed, the network of protective agreements and indirect subsidies put into place at France’s bidding was altogether out of keeping with the spirit and institutions of the international trading system that had emerged in the decades following Bretton Woods. To the (considerable) extent that the EEC’s system of governance was modeled on that of France, its Napoleonic heritage was not a good omen. Lastly, France’s influence in the European Community’s early years helped forge a new ‘Europe’ that was vulnerable

to the charge that it had reproduced all the worst features of the nation-state on a sub-continental scale: there was always more than a little risk that the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism. For all its growing wealth the world of the EEC was quite petty. In certain respects it was actually a lot smaller than the world that the French, or Dutch, had known when their nation-states opened on to people and places flung far across the seas. In the circumstances of the time this hardly mattered to most West Europeans, who in any case had little option. But it would lead in time to a distinctly parochial vision of ‘Europe’, with troubling implications for the future.

The task now facing Khrushchev and his colleagues was to bury Stalin and his excesses without putting at risk the system that Stalinist terror had built and the advantages that accrued to the Party from its monopoly of power. Khrushchev’s strategy, as it emerged in the following years, was fourfold. First, as we have seen, he needed to stabilize relations with the West, following the re-armament

of West Germany, its incorporation into NATO and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time Moscow began building bridges to the ‘non-Aligned’ world—starting with Yugoslavia, which Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin visited in May 1955 (just one month after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty) in order to rekindle Soviet-Yugoslav relations after seven years of very cold storage. Thirdly, Moscow started to encourage Party reformers in the satellite states, allowing circumspect criticism of the ‘mistakes’ of the Stalinist old guard and rehabilitation of some of their victims, and bringing to an end the cycle of show trials and mass arrests and Party purges. It was in this context that Khrushchev gingerly advanced to the fourth (and in his understanding, final) stage of controlled reform: the break with Stalin himself.

The dictator was accused of ‘ignoring the norms of Party life and trampling upon the Leninist principles of collective Party leadership’: which is to say that he made his own decisions. His junior colleagues (of whom Khrushchev had been one since the early 1930s) were thus absolved of responsibility both for his criminal excesses and, more importantly, for the failure of his policies.

The secret speech achieved its purpose, at least within the CPSU. It drew a firm line under the Stalinist era, acknowledging its monstrosities and disasters while preserving the fiction that the present Communist leadership bore no responsibility.

embarrassment, an anachronistic impediment to Soviet projects. With high-level Soviet-Yugoslav negotiations taking place in Moscow in June 1956, it seemed unnecessarily provocative to maintain in power in Budapest an unreconstructed Stalinist so closely associated with the bad old days—the more so as his past record and present intransigence were beginning to provoke public protests in Hungary.

Imre Nagy again went on Hungarian radio. This time he announced that his government would henceforth be based ‘on democratic cooperation between the coalition parties, reborn in 1945.’ In other words, Nagy was forming a multi-party government. Far from confronting the opposition, Nagy was now basing his authority increasingly on the popular movement itself. In his final sentence, celebrating a ‘free, democratic and independent’ Hungary, he even omitted, for the first time, the discredited adjective ‘socialist’. And he appealed publicly to Moscow ‘to begin the withdrawal of Soviet troops’, from Budapest and the rest of Hungary as well.

But even as they made this concession they were getting reports of student demonstrations in Timişoara (Romania) and of ‘hostile sentiments’ among Bulgarian intellectuals sympathetic to the Hungarian revolutionaries. This was beginning to sound like the start of the contamination effect that the Soviet leaders had long feared, and it prompted them to adopt a new approach.

The Hungarian uprising, a brief and hopeless revolt in a small outpost of the Soviet empire, had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. In the first place, it was an object lesson for Western diplomats.

Indeed, ever since the repression of the Berlin revolt in 1953, the State Department had concluded that the Soviet Union was, for the foreseeable future, in unshakeable control of its ‘zone’. ‘Non-intervention’ was the West’s only strategy for Eastern Europe. But the Hungarian rebels could not know this.

And when Hungary did appear on the NSC agenda, at a meeting on November 8th, the general consensus—from Eisenhower down—was that it was all the fault of the French and British. If they hadn’t invaded Egypt, the Soviet Union would not have had the cover to move against Hungary. The Eisenhower Administration had a clean conscience.

What the Kremlin could not condone was the Hungarian Party’s abandonment of a monopoly of power, the ‘leading role of the Party’ (something Gomułka, in Poland, had taken care never to allow). Such a departure from Soviet practice was the thin edge of a democratic wedge that would spell doom for Communist parties everywhere. That is why the Communist leaders in every other satellite state went along so readily with Khrushchev’s decision to depose Nagy.

Even Tito eventually conceded that the breakdown of Party control in Hungary, and the collapse of the state security apparatus, set a dangerous example.

The precedent of unconstrained Soviet interference in the affairs of a fraternal Communist state was not calculated to endear the Soviet leadership to the Yugoslavs. Relations between Moscow and Belgrade deteriorated once more, and the Yugoslav regime initiated overtures to the West and the non-aligned countries of Asia. Tito’s response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary was thus mixed. Like the Soviet leaders he was relieved at the restoration of Communist order; but the way in which it had been accomplished set a dangerous precedent and left a bad taste. Elsewhere the response was altogether less ambivalent. Khrushchev’s secret speech, once it leaked out in the West, had marked the end of a certain Communist faith. But it also allowed for the possibility of post-Stalinist reform and renewal, and by sacrificing Stalin himself in order to preserve the illusion of Leninist revolutionary purity, Khrushchev had offered Party members and fellow-traveling progressives a myth to which they could cling. But the desperate street fighting in Budapest dispelled any illusions about this new, ‘reformed’ Soviet model. Once again, Communist authority had been unambiguously revealed to rest on nothing more than the barrel of a tank. The rest was dialectics. Western Communist parties started to hemorrhage.

But whatever the motives of the insurgents in Budapest and elsewhere—and these were far more varied than was clear at the time—it was not the Hungarians’ revolt but rather the Soviet repression which made the greater impression on foreign observers. Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution.

Shorn of the curious magnetism of Stalinist terror, and revealed in Budapest in all its armored mediocrity, Soviet Communism lost its charm for most Western sympathizers and admirers.

A shrinking minority of unreconstructed apologists for Leninism clung to the past; but from Berlin to Paris a new generation of Western progressives sought solace and example outside of Europe altogether, in the aspirations and upheavals of what was not yet called the ‘Third World’.

The difference in Eastern Europe, of course, was that the disillusioned subjects of a discredited regime could hardly turn their faces to distant lands, or rekindle their revolutionary faith in the glow of far-off peasant revolts. They were perforce obliged to live in and with the Communist regimes whose promises they no longer believed.

after Hungary the dominant sentiment was one of cynical resignation.

Kádár established the model ‘post-political’ Communist state. In return for their unquestioning acceptance of the Party’s monopoly of power and authority, Hungarians were allowed a strictly limited but genuine degree of freedom to produce and consume. It was not asked of anyone that they believe in the Communist Party, much less its leaders; merely that they abstain from the least manifestation of opposition. Their silence would be read as tacit consent. The resulting ‘goulash Communism’ secured the stability of Hungary; and the memory of Hungary ensured the stability of the rest of the Bloc, at least for the next decade. But this came at a cost. For most people living under Communism, the ‘Socialist’ system had lost whatever radical, forward-looking, utopian promise once attached to it, and which had been part of its appeal—especially to the young—as recently as the early fifties. It was now just a way of life to be endured. That did not mean it could not last a very long time—few after 1956 anticipated an early end to the Soviet system of rule. Indeed, there had been rather more optimism on that score before the events of that year. But after November 1956 the Communist states of Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union itself, began their descent into a decades-long twilight of stagnation, corruption and cynicism.

In Western Europe the three decades following Hitler’s defeat were indeed ‘glorious’. The remarkable acceleration of economic growth was accompanied by the onset of an era of unprecedented prosperity. In the space of a single generation, the economies of continental Western Europe made good the ground lost in forty years of war and Depression, and European economic performance and patterns of consumption began to resemble those of the US. Less than a decade after staggering uncertainly out of the rubble, Europeans entered, to their amazement and with some consternation, upon the age of affluence.

A major contributory factor in this story was the sustained increase in overseas trade, which grew much faster than overall national output in most European countries. Merely by removing impediments to international commerce, the governments of the post-war West went a long way towards overcoming the stagnation of previous decades.1 The chief beneficiary was West Germany, whose

share of the world’s export of manufactured goods rose from 7.3 percent in 1950 to 19.3 percent just ten years later, bringing the German economy back to the place it had occupied in international exchange before the Crash of 1929.

Indeed, all industrialized countries gained in these years—the terms of trade moved markedly in their favor after World War Two, as the cost of raw materials and food imported from the non-Western world fell steadily, while the price of manufactured goods kept rising. In three decades of privileged, unequal exchange with the ‘Third World’, the West had something of a license to print money.2 What distinguished the western European economic boom, however, was the degree of de facto European integration in which it resulted.

The European Community (later Union) did not lay the basis for an economically integrated Europe; rather, it represented an institutional expression of a process already under way.3 Another crucial element in the post-war economic revolution was the increased productivity of the European worker.

Behind the steady increase in productivity, however, lay a deeper, permanent shift in the nature of work.

The role of government and planning in the European economic miracle is harder to gauge. In some places it appeared all but superfluous. The ‘new’ economy of northern Italy, for example, drew much of its energy from thousands of small firms—composed of family employees who often doubled as seasonal agricultural workers—with low overheads and investment costs, and paying little or no tax.

At the same time the role of the state was crucial in

financing large-scale changes that would have been beyond the reach of individual initiative or private investment: non-governmental European capital funding remained scarce for a long time, and private investment from America did not begin to substitute for Marshall Aid or military assistance until the later fifties.

Government officials were able to exercise fairly effective control over domestic investment especially because, throughout these initial post-war decades, currency laws and the limited mobility of international capital held back foreign competition. Restricted in their freedom to seek out more profitable short-term returns abroad, bankers and private lenders in France and elsewhere invested at home.6 In West Germany, where the abiding inter-war memory was of conflict and instability (political and monetary alike), the authorities in Bonn were much less active than their French or Italian counterparts in designing or directing economic behavior, but paid far closer attention to arrangements aimed at preventing or mitigating social conflict, notably between employers and workers.

In Britain, the government intervened more directly in the economy.

Such active involvement as there was took the form of demand-management—manipulating interest rates and marginal tax bands to encourage saving or spending. These were short-term tactics. The main strategic objective of British governments of all colors in these years was to prevent a return to the traumatic levels of unemployment of the 1930s. Throughout Western Europe, then, governments, employers and workers conspired to forge a virtuous circle: high government spending, progressive taxation and limited wage increases. As we have seen, these goals were already inscribed in the widespread consensus, forged during and after the war, on the need for planned economies

and some form of ‘welfare state’. They were thus the product of government policies and collective intention. But the facilitating condition for their unprecedented success lay beyond the direct reach of government action. The trigger for the European economic miracle, and the social and cultural upheaval that followed in its wake, was the rapid and sustained increase in Europe’s population.

The striking feature of Europe in the nineteen fifties and sixties—it can immediately be gleaned from any contemporary street scene—was thus the number of children and youths. After a forty-year hiatus, Europe was becoming young again.

It was not just that millions of children had been born after the war: an unprecedented number of them had survived. Thanks to improved nutrition, housing and medical care, the infant mortality rate—the number of children per thousand live births who died before reaching their first birthday—fell sharply in Western Europe in these decades.

Old people lived longer too—at least in Western Europe, where the death rate fell steadily over the same period.

But fertility rates in Communist states tailed off rather sooner than in the West, and from the mid-sixties they were more than matched by steadily worsening death rates (especially among men). There are many explanations for the recovery of European fertility after World War Two, but most of them reduce to a combination of optimism plus free milk.

For the first time since records were kept, western Europe was experiencing full employment. In many sectors there were now endemic labor shortages. In spite of the leverage this afforded to organized labor, trade unions (with the distinctive exception of Britain) were either weak or else reluctant to exercise their power. This was a legacy of the inter-war decades: militant or political unions never fully recovered from the impact of the Depression and Fascist repression. In return for their newfound respectability as national negotiating partners, union representatives through the fifties and early sixties

often preferred to collaborate with employers rather than exploit labour shortages to their immediate advantage.

Another reason why the old blue-collar unions were no longer so significant in Western Europe is that their constituency—skilled male manual workers—was in decline.

The insatiable demand for labour in Europe’s prosperous northwest quadrant accounts for the remarkable mass migrations in the 1950s and early 1960s. These took three forms. In the first place, men (and to a lesser extent women and children) abandoned the countryside for the city and moved to more developed regions of their own country.

A second route taken by migrants involved moving from one European country to another.

But in the course of the 1950s the economic expansion of northwest Europe was outrunning local population growth: the ‘baby-boom’ generation had yet to enter the workforce but demand for labor was peaking.

Their earnings in Germany and other northern countries played an important part in sustaining the economies of the regions they had left behind, even as their departure alleviated local competition for jobs and housing. In 1973, the remittances of workers abroad represented 90 percent of Turkish export earnings, 50 percent of export earnings in Greece, Portugal and Yugoslavia. The demographic impact of these population transfers was significant. Although the migrants were officially ‘temporary’ they had in practice left their homes for good.

9 It is estimated that between 1961 and 1974, one and a half million Portugese workers found jobs abroad—the greatest population movement in Portugal’s history, leaving behind in Portugal itself a workforce of just 3.1 million.

The Germans—like the Swiss, French, Belgians or British—did not especially welcome the sudden eruption of so many foreigners on their soil. The experience of living among so many people from unknown foreign lands was unfamiliar to most Europeans. If it was tolerated reasonably well, with only occasional outbreaks of prejudice and violence against communities of foreign workers, this was in some measure because the latter lived apart from the local population, in the drearier outer suburbs of the larger cities; because they posed no economic threat in an era of full employment; because at least in the case of Christians from Portugal, Italy and Yugoslavia they were physically and culturally ‘assimilable’—i.e. not dark or Muslim; and because it was widely understood that they would one day be gone. Such considerations did not apply, however, to a third

source of imported labour: immigrants from past and present European colonies.

What made the difference, of course, was that these people were brown or black—and, being Commonwealth citizens, had a presumptive right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the imperial metropole.