The perils of peace

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

POSTWAR by Tony Judt Heinemann, £25, pp. 878, ISBN 0434007498 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever.

That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914. Three decades thereafter saw a terrifying regression, two wars on a scale surpassing anything ever known, totalitarian regimes called Communist and Fascist of a kind also never known before, economic collapse and mass-murder: in the title of Mark Mazower’s book about 20th-century Europe, this was a Dark Continent. Even at the moment Hitler killed himself, there was no necessary reason to suppose that it was the previous appalling 30 years which had been aberrant rather than the century before them. How that question was answered how Europe recovered and came to enjoy for the past 60 years what has been, for all of many woes and setbacks, by any standards another golden age — is the subject of Judt’s masterly and exhilarating Postwar.

Immediately after VE-Day the prospects were by no means all promising. The Wehrmacht had been defeated but the Red Army (which had done most of the defeating) stood on the Elbe, and for several years, in Denis Healey’s phrase, needed only boots to reach the Atlantic. Half of Europe had exchanged one tyranny for another; for a time it looked as though Stalin could increase his reach by democratic means — in 1946, the Communists won 28.6 per cent of the vote in France, 38 per cent in Czecholslovakia — and it also looked very much as though the Americans might withdraw from Europe as they had after 1918. Instead the Marshall Plan began the economic reconstruction of shattered Europe at enormous cost, maybe $200 billion in today’s prices (although that may yet be small change beside the present enterprise in Iraq). The rapid reduction of American forces in Europe was halted by the Berlin crisis in 1948 which led to the formation of Nato the following year, an Atlantic alliance consolidated almost fortuitously by the outbreak of the Korean war. At the same time, after the vengeful settling of scores, and what Judt calls ‘the rehabilitation of Europe’, the first halting steps towards European co-operation were underway. For many Europeans, and not only the French, the real threat in the postwar years was a possible German revival rather than Russia, and it was farsighted and courageous to build Germany into a new Europe. Three great men who created the first framework for European unity were to a remarkable degree similar. The Frenchman Robert Schumann had grown up in Lorraine when it was part of the German empire between Franco-Prussian and Great wars, the Italian Alcide de Gaspari was born in Trentino a subject of Franz-Josef and had studied in Vienna, the German Konrad Adenauer was a Rhinelander who detested Protestant Prussia. When they met they spoke German, their common language; they were all guided by a Catholic political vision and an older cosmopolitan tradition; their ‘Europe’ was well-nigh the Holy Roman Empire reborn.

If the light sometimes flickered unevenly in western Europe during the postwar decade, eastern Europe was plunged into dark night as the absorption of one country after another into the Soviet empire was marked by a horrible litany of show trials echoing the prewar Moscow Trials. Almost the worst of it was the continuing enthusaism for Communism among the alleged intelligentsia in the West, especially in France. This grande illusion was apparently ended by the brutal suppression of the Hungarian rising in 1956, although it lingered like a spore beneath the skin and erupted again in the following decades. Judt has made the ‘culture wars’ between Communism and antiCommunism a special subject, and he deals with this brilliantly once more.

By the 1950s a peaceful social and economic revolution was transforming western Europe. In France, which took that leadership in the European project which the British could have had for the asking, one aspect of this was the belated migration from country to town, one of whose consequences still with us is the Common Agricultural Policy about which Judt is scathing. Behind domestic change was the background of decolonisation, handled better by the British than by the French, who took a very long time to recover from the traumas of Vietnam and Algeria.

Here there is a paradox Judt might have emphasised. When his story began 60 years ago, a widespread belief stretched beyond the hard Left — Orwell was positively repetitious on the subject — that Europe enjoyed its comforts thanks to the exploitation of distant coolies. Then Europe shed its empires and prospered mightily, while the former colonies suffered terrible economic decay, relatively in many cases, aboslutely in some, suggesting that empire had been burden more than blessing for the imperial powers.

By the 1960s the Cold War reached a stalemate after the building of the Berlin wall (secretly welcomed by some western leaders, Judt suggests) and the defusing of the Cuban crisis. This greatly benefited western Europe, as rapid economic growth became explosive. Judt has a fine eye for telling detail, whether remarking that in 1951 only one French houshold in 12 possessed a motor-car, or that in 1959 just three million tourists visited Spain, which rose to 34 million within 14 years.

As Eugen Weber has said, the interwar years divide unmistakably into two parts, 1918-29 and 1930-39, the one ‘postwar’ and the other ‘prewar’. While that doesn’t apply to Judt’s period, an unmistakable caesura falls in the 1970s. Economic crisis ended the trente glorieuses, as the French called the three miraculous decades of expansion, and ‘the Social Democratic Moment’, in the title of one chapter, ran into the buffers (not that corporatist statism was finished: in another delightful footnote we learn that in 1982 the state corporation IRI controlled a quarter of Italian ice-cream production).

Until then most European politicians of the age, Left or Right, believed in state direction of the economy, although, as Judt says, the British economy, for all of high taxation, nationalisation, futile prices and incomes policies, and in general ceaseless governmental medddling, was actually about the least ‘planned’ in Europe. Another revolution transformed this country in the 1980s, with consequences felt throughout Europe. But then by the 1990s, ‘among Margaret Thatcher’s chief victims was her very own Conservative Party,’ which ended the century an almost unelectable shell, its subsequent leaders declining from ‘the tiresomely humdrum (John Major), through the bumptiously inadequate (William Hague), to the terminally inept (Iain Duncan Smith)’.

As that suggests, and as Judt acknowledges at the outset, his book ‘is opinionated’. He dishes out some gratifying opinions on various topics, from the dismal public architecture of most of this period to the charm of the French new wave movies (though was Truffaut really the greatest of the group? Discuss), and he briskly reassesses one decade after another. The 1950s are reclaimed as much more culturally vigorous than used to be allowed, while the 1960s are indulgently judged as a time of genuine liberation, for some at least, although Judt can’t deny that much supposed radicalism was play-acting. The horrible old Stalinists of the French Communist party were right about the événements of 1968: this was street party, not revolution.

And he finds very little to admire in the 1970s. Economic paralysis apart, the street party metastatised into the murderous nihilism of Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades and IRA. As bad in its own way, ‘in the life of the mind, the 1970s was the most dispiriting decade of the 20th century,’ distinguished by the absurdities of structuralism, Cultural Theory and sundry other forms of intellectual charlatanry in which an ‘inherently difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation of students and their teachers’.

If both the regression of the 1970s and the revival of the competive market in the 1980s were unforeseen, so was the rapid implosion of Soviet Russia and its empire. But then that great illusion was a long time a-dying. It was to be expected that Aneurin Bevan on the Left of the Labour party would say publicly in 1959 that the challenge to the capitalist West would come from those countries which ‘are at long last being able to reap the material fruits of economic planning and public ownership’; more alarmingly, Harold Macmillan (or ‘Howard Macmillan’ as the index most amusingly misprints him) believed privately in 1960 that the Soviet Russians ‘have a buoyant economy and will soon outmatch capitalist society in the race for material wealth’. In fact, of course, Soviet Russia was already ‘Upper Volta with rockets’, a vast Potemkin political economy fated to collapse sooner or later. The peaceful absorption of much of the old Soviet empire into the European Union has been a marvellous achievement, especially viewed against the disaster in the Balkans. Here Judt veers from the opinionated to the polemical in fierce Serb-bashing vein, although he does at least acknowledge the view that the European powers exacerbated the problem when Yugoslavia began to break up by precipitate recognition of new statelets. The deeper problem was that ‘Europe’ lacked both means and will to deal with disaster on its borders. After the war Churchill had said that he wanted a Germany which was ‘fat but impotent’, and that was a pretty good description of Europe as a whole by the end of the century; it may even have been what most Europeans wanted.

In an epilogue, Judt addresses the question of memory, which has haunted his whole book. After the war a degree of amnesia or oblivion about the horrors of the immediate past had been necessary, and the Germans had been, as it were, let off with a caution. In recent decades there has been a steady recovery of memory, above all about the great genocide of the Jews which took place just before this story begins. If ‘Europe’s postwar history is a story shadowed by silences,’ as Judt says, the silence has turned into a crescendo, and that recovered memory permeates life today.

This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice. So many subjects are adroitly dealt with, from the truly drastic transformation of southern European countries to the rapid decline of religion. But then that last is indirectly part of Judt’s theme: this period saw ‘the withering away of the “master narratives” of European history’ — from the narrative of Christendom to the narrative of national greatness to the narrative of dialectical materialism.

It is now 50 years since the great Raymond Aron proposed an ‘end to the Ideological Age’, and that has at last happened, both for worse and for better. As Judt writes:

In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. In 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-years cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.

Europe in these six decades has avoided just those miseries which had plagued it before, destitution, violent class conflict, tryranny and war. Ours is an unheroic age, when Europe has lost its beliefs but has stopped killing because of them, in marked contrast to its immediate neighbours. We are irreligious and depoliticised, prosperous but bored, fat but impotent — and happy?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s latest book, The Strange Death of Tory England, is published in paperback by Penguin.