Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

‘It is essential that the draft resolution which will be put to the Security Council on the Hungarian question should not contain any disposition which may disturb our action in Algeria . . . We are particularly against the formation of a committee of inquiry.’

For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered.

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.

Another crucial element in the post-war economic revolution was the increased productivity of the European worker. Between 1950 and 1980 labor productivity in western Europe rose by three times the rate of the previous eighty years:

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;

Farming and dairy production became more efficient and less labor-intensive—especially

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’.

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. ∙

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 experience of living among so many people from unknown foreign lands was unfamiliar to most Europeans.

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.

and placed rigorous controls on non-white immigration to the UK. A successor Act of 1968 tightened these still further, restricting UK citizenship to persons with at least one British parent;

Without cheap and abundant labour in this vulnerable and mostly unorganized form, the European boom would not have been possible.

As recently as 1950, the average western European household spent more than half its cash outlay on necessities: food, drink and tobacco (sic). In Mediterranean Europe the figure was distinctly higher. Once clothing and rent were added, there was not much left over for non-essential items.

In 1957 most west European households still did not possess a fridge (the figure ranging from 12 percent in West Germany to less than 2 percent in Italy).

partly because in the mid-1950s running water had still not arrived in more than half of all households in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Spain and many parts of France and Scandinavia,

Most television programming in the early decades of the medium was conventional, stuffy and more than a little patronizing—confirming rather than undermining traditional norms and values.

were ‘not to undermine the institution of the family’ or portray ‘attitudes, poses or particulars which might arouse base instincts’.20

Until television, politics in Paris or Bonn, Rome or London were an élite affair, conducted by distant leaders known only from their disembodied voices on radio, lifeless newspaper photographs or brief, stylized appearances on formulaic cinema newsreels.

The association of ‘teenager’ and ‘pop music’ that became so automatic by the early Sixties had a commercial as well as a cultural basis.

European intellectuals between the wars had bemoaned the ‘soulless’ world of American modernity that lay ahead for everyone;

whole generation of West Germans grew up in the military, economic and cultural shadow of the United States; Ludwig Erhard once described himself as ‘an American invention.’

Just as European teenagers identified the future with an America they hardly knew, so their parents blamed America for the loss of a Europe that had never really been, a continent secure in its identity, its authority and its values, and impervious to the sirens of modernity and mass society.

For the first time in history, ease and comfort were now within the reach of most people in Europe.

The background to the German economic ‘miracle’ of the fifties was the recovery of the thirties. The investments of the Nazis—in communications, armaments and vehicle manufacture, optics, chemical and light engineering industries and non-ferrous metals—were undertaken for an economy geared to war; but their pay-off came twenty years later.

But since 1945 that relationship had come increasingly to be characterised by a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around.

Doctrinal differences over the ostensible goals of the state might noisily oppose Left and Right, Christian Democrats and Communists, Socialists and Conservatives, but almost everyone had something to gain from the opportunities the state afforded them for income and influence.

The welfare state was avowedly social, but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological.

The Scandinavian welfare states that evolved after 1945 had their origins, then, in the two social pacts of the 1930s: between employees and employers, and between labour and farming.

but in Sweden especially, the private ownership and exploitation of the means of production were never put into question. Unlike the British Labour movement, whose core doctrine and program ever since 1918 rested on an ineradicable faith in the virtues of state ownership,

The government never interfered either with private wealth accumulation or with the marketplace for goods and capital.

that of Christian Democratic West Germany. But in both countries, as in Denmark and Finland, what the state did do was ruthlessly and progressively tax and redistribute private profits for public ends.

popularly understood in these years as a propensity to depression, alcoholism and high suicide rates. In the 1960s and at times since, it pleased conservative critics of Scandinavian politics to blame these shortcomings on the moral paralysis induced by too much economic security and centralised direction. And then there was the concurrent propensity of Scandinavians to take off their clothes in public (and on film)

further evidence, to some observers, of the psychic damage wrought by an over-mighty state that provides everything and forbids nothing.

But the critics had a point: there was indeed a darker side to the all-embracing state. Early-twentieth-century confidence in the capacity of the state to make a better society had taken many forms: Scandinavian Social Democracy—like the Fabian reformism of Britain’s welfare state—was born of a widespread fascination with social engineering of all kinds. And just a little beyond the use of the state to adjust incomes, expenditures, employment and information there lurked the temptation to tinker with individuals themselves. Eugenics—the ‘science’ of racial improvement—was

as it emerged many years later, Scandinavian authorities at least had not abandoned an interest in the theory—and practice—of ‘racial hygiene’. Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark,

The intellectual driving force behind these programmes—the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden—had

In Austria as in Sweden or Norway, an overwhelmingly rural, historically poor country had been transformed, as we have seen, into a prosperous, stable, politically tranquil oasis of state-furnished well-being.

In Austria, too, a de facto pact had been agreed, in this case between the Socialists and the conservative People’s Party, to avoid any return to the open conflicts of the inter-war decades.

Part of the explanation for this contrast in behaviour lay in recent experience: the memory of destructive struggles and the close proximity of the totalitarian threat, whether in the immediate past or just across a border, helped focus the attention of German and Austrian Social Democrats—like Italian Communists—on the virtues of compromise. Britain’s Labour Party had no such nightmares to exorcise.

What the British Left (and, at the time, much of the Centre and Centre-Right of the political spectrum) were taken up with above all was the goal of fairness. It was the manifest injustice, the unfairness of life before the war that drove both the Beveridge reforms and the overwhelming vote for Labour in 1945.

the welfare states moved on to systems of entitlement, benefits, social justice and income redistribution—and managed this substantial transformation at almost no political cost.

Until the early 1960s, public authorities throughout Western Europe (with the partial exception of Scandinavia) had exercised firm and mostly repressive control over the private affairs and opinions of the citizenry. Homosexual intercourse was illegal almost everywhere,

This rupture culturelle, as it became known in Belgium and elsewhere, between religion and politics and between the Catholic Church and its recent past, played a crucial role in the making of ‘the sixties’.

The transition was most striking in Britain. Until the end of the 1950s, British citizens were still forbidden to gamble; to read or to see anything that their betters judged ‘obscene’ or politically sensitive; to advocate (much less engage in) homosexual acts;

Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969)

Interesting french film

Both qualities, however—‘style’ and ‘value’—were now inextricably identified with ‘Europe’: often in contrast with America.

If much of the mainstream musical culture of the Sixties seemed to be about sex—at least until it shifted, briefly, into drugs and politics—this, too, was largely a matter of style. More young people lived away from their parents, and at a younger age than hitherto. And contraceptives were becoming safer, easier and legal.

In fact, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike.

The frivolous side of the Sixties—fashion, pop culture, sex—should not be dismissed as mere froth and show. It was a new generation’s way of breaking with the age of the grandpas—the