Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Basque terrorism

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In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in the streets of Derry. In that same year 146 members of the security forces and 321 civilians were killed in Ulster, and nearly five thousand people injured.

It was not by chance, therefore, that ‘revolutionary terror’ took its most menacing form in Germany and Italy.

Two years later Baader escaped from prison in the course of an armed raid planned and led by Ulrike Meinhof.

The most distinctively repressive governmental action of the time was the passing of the Berufsverbot in 1972 by the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt. This decree excluded from state employment any person who engaged in political acts considered detrimental to the Constitution, and was ostensibly aimed at keeping supporters of Left and Right political extremes out of sensitive posts.

Neither the terrorist Left nor the apparently renascent neo-Nazi Right—notably responsible for killing 13 people and wounding 220 others in a bomb attack on Munich’s Oktoberfest in 1980—succeeded in destabilizing the Republic, although they did provoke careless talk in conservative political circles of the need to curb civil liberties and enforce ‘Order’.

The Americans have stolen our history through Holocaust.’

‘Capitalism’, ‘the profit system’ and National Socialism are presented as equally reprehensible and indefensible, with the terrorists emerging as latter-day resisters:

helped account for the German radical Left’s distinctive insensitivity on the subject of Jews.

والله حسيت من الهحوم المبالغ فيه منك انهم ناس محترمه و عندهم مبدأ (اكيد غلطانين في الوساءل)

The link between Palestinian organizations and European terrorist groups was already well-established—Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof all ‘trained’ at one time with Palestinian guerillas, along with Basques, Italians, Irish Republicans and others.

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The net effect of years of would-be revolutionary subversion at the heart of Western Europe was not to polarize society, as the terrorists had planned and expected, but rather to drive politicians of all sides to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground.

Most young people were now less concerned with changing the world than with finding a job: the fascination with collective ambitions gave way to an obsession with personal needs. In a more threatening world, securing one’s self-interest took precedence over advancing common causes.

Instead they sought to undermine the very concept of the human subject that had once underlain them.

The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge: knowledge

A second assumption, one that was to acquire an even stronger grip on intellectual fashions, went considerably further. This was the seductive insistence upon subverting not just old certainties but the very possibility of certainty itself.

Michel Foucault’s radical skepticism was in large measure an adaptation of Nietzsche. Other influential French authors, notably the literary critic Jacques Derrida, looked instead to Martin Heidegger for their critique of human agency and their ‘de-construction’, as it was becoming known, of the cognitive human subject and his textual subject matter.

‘the greatest achievement of the thinkers of the Sixties was to convince their audience that incomprehensibility was the sign of greatness.’

Secondly, the prosperity and social reforms of the Sixties and early Seventies had effectively exhausted the programs and vision of the traditional parties. Their very success had deprived politicians of moderate Left and Right alike of a credible agenda, especially after the spate of liberal reforms of the Sixties.

The fascination with sex and sexuality led naturally to sexual politics;

The prosperity of the time had encouraged a shift in people’s attention from production to consumption, from the necessities of existence to the quality of life.

Three of the new political groupings—the women’s movement, environmentalism, and peace activism—are of particular significance, for their scale and their lasting impact.

The first feminist demonstration in Spain was organized in January 1976, within two months of Franco’s death. Two years later adultery was de-criminalized and contraception legalized.

by the Seventies voices on Right and Left alike were starting to express some unease at the collateral costs of progress, productivity and ‘modernity’.

The idea that the effort to subdue and dominate nature to human ends—the project of the Enlightenment—might come at too high a price was already familiar to readers on both sides of the Cold War divide

The (relative) autonomy of the Italian Communists was complemented by Berlinguer’s 1973 decision to commit his party to the defense of Italian democracy, even if it meant abandoning its outright opposition to the Christian Democrats: this was the so-called ‘historic compromise’. This shift was driven in part by the shock of the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, which convinced Berlinguer and other Communist intellectuals that even if the Communists won a parliamentary majority they would never be allowed—by the Americans, or their allies in Italian military, business and Church circles—to form a government of their own. But it was also a reaction, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the very real threat to Italian democracy itself from Right and Left terrorists for whom the Communist Party was as much the enemy as the Italian state.

Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.

the United States had demonstrated its unwillingness to risk war to keep the Berlin frontier open: and America, as President Lyndon Johnson confirmed in October 1966, would no longer allow its foreign policy to be held hostage to the principle of future German reunification. The message was clear: instead of insisting on the resolution of the ‘German problem’ as a precondition for détente, a new generation of German diplomats would have to reverse their priorities if they wished to achieve their objectives.

But by the mid-Eighties, a few years before it unexpectedly took place, re-unification no longer mobilized mass opinion. Polls taken in the Fifties and Sixties suggested that up to 45 percent of the West German population felt unification was the ‘most important’ question of the day; from the mid-Seventies the figure never exceeded 1 percent.

The standard of living in southern Spain and most of Portugal and Greece was comparable to that of Eastern Europe and parts of the developing world. All three countries were governed in the early 1970s by authoritarian rulers of a species more familiar in Latin America than Western Europe;

If this mattered so much, it was because Greek nationalism was peculiarly insecure, even by regional standards.

Greece’s conservative post-war politicians emphatically opted for order and stability over democracy or post-war reconciliation. Conflating old Greek concerns with new international divisions the Greek king, his army and his ministers presented themselves to the West as the most reliable allies in an unstable region.

Indeed—and much like the traditional Spanish officer corps in this respect—Greek officers saw themselves, rather than the ephemeral constitutional documents they were sworn to defend, as the guardians of the nation and its integrity.

Proferring just this excuse—the ‘Communist threat’ insistently invoked in Greece since 1949—and pointing to the undoubted inadequacies of Greece’s democratic institutions and the incompetence of its political class, a group of officers working inside the army’s long-established right-wing networks seized power on April 21st.

Initially violent and always repressive, Papadopoulos and his colleagues dismissed nearly a thousand civil servants, imprisoned or expelled politicians of the left and center, and turned Greece in upon itself for seven stifling years. Anti-modern to the point of parody, the colonels censored the press, outlawed strikes and banned modern music along with mini-skirts. They also banned the study of sociology, Russian and Bulgarian in addition to Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes.

as in Spain, low wages (abetted by the repression of all labour protest) and a regime predicated on ‘law and order’ offered a benevolent environment for foreign capital.

arrangement dominated by the presidency of Archbishop Makarios, once exiled by London as an armed and violent terrorist, now the respected spokesman of ‘reasonable’ Greek Cypriot ambitions.

The general standard of living in Salazar’s Portugal was more characteristic of contemporary Africa than continental Europe:

Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability—upon being informed that oil had been discovered in Portugal’s Angolan territories he commented merely that this was ‘a pity’.

In February 1976 the Portuguese military, still in effective control of the country nearly two years after their coup, officially handed over power to the civilian authorities.

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who saw in Soares another Kerensky, an unwitting stalking horse for undemocratic forces that would replace him at the earliest opportunity. But Soares survived—and more. The armed forces remained confined to barracks, the role of their politicized fringes increasingly marginal.

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But against all expectations Portugal had avoided both a ‘White Terror’ and a ‘Red Terror’.

At first sight the Sixties appeared to have passed Spain by altogether: rigid censorship, strict enforcement of laws regulating public dress and behavior, an omnipresent police and draconian penal laws for political critics all suggested a land frozen in time, its historical clock set permanently at 1939.10

Already, by the mid-Sixties, Spain had ceased to qualify as a ‘developing nation’ under UN criteria.

Spain’s traditional role as a bulwark of Christian civilization against materialism and atheism was a staple of the primary-school curriculum; but the Catholic hierarchy itself (unlike the modernizing ‘crypto monks’ of Opus Dei) was kept well away from the reins of power, in marked contrast to the neo-Crusading ‘National Catholicism’ spirit of the regime’s first decade.12

But because formal political opposition was banned, it was from inside these same ruling circles—rather than amongst an intelligentsia whose leading lights remained in exile—that reforming ideas and pressure for change would come, prompted by frustration at local inefficiency, foreign criticism or the example of Vatican II.

The transition to democracy was thus managed from within the ranks of Franco’s own ministers and appointees, which helps account for its speed and success.

targeting policemen and soldiers in the hope of provoking a backlash and bringing down a democratic process that seemed increasingly likely to weaken the extremists’ case.

To its critics on the Right, democratic Spain appeared leaderless and on the verge of breaking up.

What determined the outcome, and the shape of subsequent Spanish history, were King Juan Carlos I’s outright rejection of the conspirators’ demands and his televised speech uncompromisingly defending the Constitution and unambiguously identifying himself and the monarchy with the country’s emerging democratic majority.

As in the short-lived Republic of the 1930s, Spain was building a democracy in the teeth of an economic recession, and there was much talk of the country going the way of Argentina, with indexed wages and government-subsidized prices degenerating into hyper-inflation. If this was averted, much of the credit must go to the signatories of the so-called Moncloa Pacts of October 1977,