Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Read Online Free Page A

Europe, above all those written before 1989—just as it was the tone adopted by European statesmen when reflecting upon their own achievements in these decades. The mere survival and re-emergence of the separate states of continental Europe after the cataclysm of total war; the absence of inter-state disputes and the steady extension of institutionalized forms of intra-European cooperation; the sustained recovery from thirty years of economic meltdown and the ‘normalization’ of prosperity, optimism and peace: all these invited a hyperbolic response. Europe’s recovery was a ‘miracle’. ‘Post-national’ Europe had learned the bitter lessons of recent history. An irenic, pacific continent had risen, ‘Phoenix-like’, from the ashes of its murderous—suicidal—past.
    Like many myths, this rather agreeable account of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century contains a kernel of truth. But it leaves out a lot. Eastern Europe—from the Austrian border to the Ural Mountains, from Tallinn to Tirana—doesn’t fit. Its post-war decades were certainly peaceful when contrasted with what went before, but only thanks to the uninvited presence of the Red Army: it was the peace of the prison-yard, enforced by the tank. And if the satellite countries of the Soviet bloc engaged in international cooperation superficially comparable to developments further west, this was only because Moscow imposed ‘fraternal’ institutions and exchanges upon them by force.
    The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War—and the pre-war decades and the war before that—forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option—to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s—was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.
    In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda—and of Communism—faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn—indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn—had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. 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.
    This becomes easier to grasp when we recall that authorities in the Soviet bloc were in essence engaged in the same project. They, too, were above all concerned to install a barrier against political backsliding—though in countries under Communist rule this was to be secured not so much by social progress as through the application of physical force. Recent history was re-written—and citizens were encouraged to forget it—in accordance with the assertion that a Communist-led social revolution had definitively erased not just the shortcomings of the past but also the