Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Behind the steady increase in productivity, however, lay a deeper, permanent shift in the nature of work. In 1945, most of Europe was still pre-industrial. The Mediterranean countries, Scandinavia, Ireland and Eastern Europe were still primarily rural and, by any measure, backward. In 1950, three out of four working adults in Yugoslavia and Romania were peasants. One working person in two was employed in agriculture in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and Poland; in Italy, two people in every five. One out of every three employed Austrians worked on farms; in France, nearly three out of every ten employed persons was a farmer of one kind or another. Even in West Germany, 23 percent of the working population was in agriculture. Only in the UK, where the figure was just 5 percent, and to a lesser extent in Belgium (13 percent), had the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century truly ushered in a post-agrarian society.4 In the course of the next thirty years vast numbers of Europeans abandoned the land and took up work in towns and cities, with the greatest changes taking place during the 1960s. By 1977, just 16 percent of employed Italians worked on the land;