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Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.
Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.
there were many non-Germans who had fought against the Allies alongside the Germans or under German command: the Russian, Ukrainian and other soldiers of General Andrei Vlasov’s anti-Soviet army; volunteers for the Waffen SS from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France; and auxiliary German fighters, concentration camp staff and others liberally recruited in Latvia, Ukraine, Croatia and elsewhere.
Whereas Germans had comprised 29 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia in 1930, by the census of 1950 they were just 1.8 percent.
There had never been any question of returning Jews to the east—no-one in the Soviet Union, Poland or anywhere else evinced the slightest interest in having them back. Nor were Jews particularly welcome in the west, especially if educated or qualified in non-manual professions. And so they remained, ironically enough, in Germany. The difficulty of ‘placing’ the Jews of Europe was only solved by the creation of the state of Israel: between 1948 and 1951 332,000 European Jews left for Israel, either from IRO centers in Germany or else directly from Romania, Poland and elsewhere, in the case of
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but the domestic support they could count on at the time was not negligible, and certainly not obviously less than that of their most aggressive opponents, the Communist-led partisans. The anti-Fascist resistance was in reality one side in a struggle among Italians whose memory came to be conveniently occluded in the post-war decades.
In these circumstances, fine distinctions between ideological warfare, inter-communal conflict and the battle for political independence lost their meaning: not least for the local populations, the primary victims in every case.
Thus Ante Pavelic’s Ustase regime in the Croatian puppet state murdered Serbs (well over 200,000) and Muslims. But Mihajlović’s (mostly Serb) royalist partisans also killed Muslims. For this reason if no other the Muslims of Bosnia sometimes cooperated with the German armies in their own defence.
Why some muslims joined germany ,wwii
The post-war impact of these European civil wars was immense. In a simple sense they meant that the war in Europe did not finish in 1945, with the departure of the Germans: it is one of the traumatic features of civil war that even after the enemy is defeated he remains in place; and with him the memory of the conflict. But the internecine struggles of these years did something else. Together with the unprecedented brutality of the Nazi and, later, Soviet occupations they corroded the very fabric of the European state. After them, nothing would ever be the same. In the truest sense of a
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The liquidation of old social and economic elites was perhaps the most dramatic change.
but also the utter collapse of law and the habits of life in a legal state.
Curiously enough, it was precisely in these circumstances that the state lost its monopoly of violence.
They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals,
For most Europeans in the years 1939–45 rights—civil, legal, political—no longer existed. The state ceased to be the repository of law and justice; on the contrary, under Hitler’s New Order government was itself the leading predator.
In 1941 the Germans were able to run occupied Norway with just 806 administrative personnel. The Nazis administered France with just 1,500 of their own people.
mere 6,000 German civil and military police to ensure the compliance of a nation of 35 million. The same was true in the Netherlands.
Contrast Yugoslavia, which required the unflagging attention of entire German military divisions just to contain the armed partisans.11
France some 10,000 people were killed in ‘extra-judicial’ proceedings, many of them by independent bands of armed resistance groups,
in Italy, where reprisals and unofficial retribution, especially in the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions, resulted in death tolls approaching 15,000 in the course of the last months of the war—and continued,
Prussian origins of Nazism,
As "islamic origins of terrorism"
Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party.
it would now be necessary to intervene in economic affairs to regulate imbalances, eliminate inefficiencies and compensate for the inequities and injustice of the market. Before 1914 the main emphasis in such reformist projects was confined to calls for progressive taxation, protection of labour and, occasionally, state ownership of a restricted number of natural monopolies. But with the collapse of the international economy and the ensuing war, planning took on a greater urgency and ambition. Competing proposals for a national Plan, in which the state would intervene actively to support,
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In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social costs. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the ‘condition of the people’ question must be addressed.
Beveridge made four assumptions about post-war welfare provision, all of which were to be incorporated in British policy for the next generation: that there should be a national health service, an adequate state pension, family allowances and near-full employment.
The Welfare State did not come cheap. Its cost, to countries not yet recovered from the slump of the thirties and the destruction of the war, was very considerable. France, which devoted just 5 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to social services in 1938, was committing 8.2 percent in 1949—a 64 percent increase. In Britain by 1949 nearly 17 percent of all public expenditure was on social security alone (that is, not including the public provision of services and facilities not included under this heading), a 50 percent increase over the 1938 level
Why were Europeans willing to pay so much for insurance and other long-term welfare provisions, at a time when life was still truly hard and material shortages endemic? The first reason is that, precisely because times were difficult, the post-war welfare systems were a guarantee of a certain minimum of justice, or fairness. This was not the spiritual and social revolution for which many in the wartime Resistance had dreamed, but it was a first step away from the hopelessness and cynicism of the pre-war years.
Far from dividing the social classes against each other, the European welfare state bound them closer together than ever before, with a common interest in its preservation and defense.
The post-war state all across Europe was a ‘social’ state, with implicit (and often constitutionally explicit) responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.
Whatever their party ‘label’, the elder statesmen of Europe were all, by 1945, skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible. This personal distance from the over-confident dogmas of inter-war politics faithfully reflected the mood of their constituents. A post-‘ideological’ age was beginning.
As one middle-class woman expressed it, upon emerging from a Post-War Homes Exhibition in London: ‘I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition.’3
The Swiss did more than act as money-launderer and conduit for German payments, in itself a substantial contribution to Hitler’s war. In 1941–42 60 percent of Switzerland’s munitions industry, 50 percent of its optical industry and 40 percent of its engineering output was producing for Germany,
سويسرا "المحايده"
Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous—indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war has proved lasting: both are now at the top of the European league and have been there steadily for four decades.
To contemporary observers, however, it was Germany’s capacity to recover which seemed the most remarkable of all. This was a tribute to the efforts of the local population who worked with a striking singularity of purpose to rebuild their shattered country. The day Hitler died, 10 percent of German railways were operational and the country was at a literal standstill. A year later, in June 1946, 93 percent of all German rail tracks had been re-opened and 800 bridges had been rebuilt.
And the industries in which wartime Germany had invested most heavily—optics, chemicals, light engineering, vehicles, non-ferrous metals—were precisely those which would lay the foundations for the boom of the Fifties.
To begin with, the fundamental problem of food supply was not yet overcome.
Europeans had nothing to sell to the rest of the world;
In Germany there was no functioning currency. The black market flourished and cigarettes were the accepted medium of exchange:
That is why Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Minister, responded to Marshall’s Commencement Address by describing it as ‘one of the greatest speeches in world history’, and he was not wrong.
France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation,
French policy makers sought was the complete disarmament and economic dismantling of Germany: arms
Such a schedule, had it been imposed, would surely have destroyed Germany for many years to come: that
Stalin thus initially pursued a tactic already familiar from the Popular Front years of the thirties and from Communist practice during the Spanish Civil War: favouring the formation of ‘Front’ governments, coalitions of Communists, Socialists and other ‘anti-Fascist’ parties, which would exclude and punish the old regime and its supporters but would be cautious and ‘democratic’, reformist rather than revolutionary. By the end of the war, or very shortly thereafter, every country in eastern Europe had such a coalition government.
Coalitions were the route to power for Communist parties in a region where they were historically weak;
like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and much else. An integrated Allied command in peacetime, after all, was an unheard of departure from practice.
So it was just six West European states that signed the April 1951 Paris Treaty founding the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).
بدايه الاتحاد الاوروبي
All six foreign ministers who signed the Treaty in 1951 were members of their respective Christian Democratic parties.
project for European cooperation made cultural as well as economic sense: they could reasonably see it as a contribution to overcoming the crisis of civilization that had shattered the cosmopolitan Europe of their youth.
and basic food rationing in Britain only ended in 1954—long after the rest of western Europe.
But income and wealth really were redistributed as a result of post-war legislation—the share of the national wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the population fell from 56 percent in 1938 to 43 percent
The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.
