Postwar Read online

  Table of Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface & Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART ONE - Post-War: 1945-1953

  I - The Legacy of War

  II - Retribution

  III - The Rehabilitation of Europe

  IV - The Impossible Settlement

  V - The Coming of the Cold War

  VI - Into the Whirlwind

  VII - Culture Wars

  CODA - The End of Old Europe

  PART TWO - Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971

  VIII - The Politics of Stability

  IX - Lost Illusions

  X - The Age of Affluence

  POSTSCRIPT: - A Tale of Two Economies

  XI - The Social Democratic Moment

  XII - The Spectre of Revolution

  XIII - The End of the Affair

  PART THREE - Recessional: 1971-1989

  XIV - Diminished Expectations

  XV - Politics in a New Key

  XVI - A Time of Transition

  XVII - The New Realism

  XVIII - The Power of the Powerless

  XIX - The End of the Old Order

  PART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-2005

  XX - A Fissile Continent

  XXI - The Reckoning

  XXII - The Old Europe—and the New

  XXIII - The Varieties of Europe

  XXIV - Europe as a Way of Life

  Photo Credits

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Praise for Tony Judt’s Postwar

  “If anyone can bring off the impossible task that Tony Judt has set himself in Postwar, it is he. . . . He brings to Postwar an astonishing range of knowledge and an intense political, intellectual and emotional engagement; these are nicely offset by the intellectual distance that the Channel and the Atlantic have helped to provide and by a wry sense of the innumerable ways in which events play tricks on all of us. The result is a book that has the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia; it is a very considerable achievement. . . . Brilliant.”—The New York Review of Books

  “Postwar is a remarkable book. . . . The excellence of Postwar was no doubt hard to achieve . . . but it is easy to describe. The writing is vivid; the coverage—of little countries as well as of great ones—is virtually superhuman; and, above all, the book is smart. Every page contains unexpected data, or a fresh observation, or a familiar observation freshly turned.”

  —Louis Menand, The New Yorker

  “Massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable . . . [Judt’s] book becomes the definitive account of Europe’s rise from the ashes and its take-off into an uncertain future.”—Time (One of the Must-Read Books of 2005)

  “Tony Judt is one of our most dazzling public intellectuals, as thoughtful as he is knowledgeable. Postwar is like having an extended personal seminar on Europe’s journey back both from the ashes of World War Two and the cruel, totalitarian hold of Soviet communism.”—David Halberstam

  “Nobody is more qualified than Judt to combine serious descriptive history with incisive, original political analysis, to cover both western and eastern Europe, and to pass stinging yet informed judgments on the behavior and evasions, the deeds and the failings, of his subjects. . . . This monumental work is a tour-de-force.”—Foreign Affairs

  “Professor Judt knows more about contemporary Europe than almost any American (or any European, for that matter). In Postwar, he brings that formidable knowledge to bear on the inspiring story of Europe’s transformation from lethal division and devastating war to a peaceful, prosperous pan-continental union. His history of how the Iron Curtain crumbled is definitive.”—T. R. Reid, author of The United States of Europe

  “An epically important subject—Europe as both the epicenter of political and ideological catastrophes in the last century and the principal laboratory for an experiment in whatever chance humanity has of a peace in the century just begun—has, to the benefit of us all, found the author it deserves. Tony Judt, long one of the wisest heads and clearest voices around, has produced a magisterial history and a solid foundation for clear thinking about the future. Postwar is meticulous in its scholarship, compelling in the story it tells, and passionate in its judgments. A true masterpiece.”

  —Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution

  “Truly superb. It is hard to imagine how a better—and more readable—history of the emergence of today’s Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written.”—Ian Kershaw

  “Magisterial . . . He has written a magnificent conventional history of modern Europe, but its quality and its power come from the way he insists that his narrative is also a history of ideas and of the peculiar vulnerability of the European mind to ideologies and to the patterns of thought and political loyalty they impose.”—National Affairs

  “As soon as you realize how good it is, this book will frighten you. . . . This is a work which, on almost every page, evokes to readers over the age of forty what they once felt, hoped for, took part in, or fled from. Judt has written, in great detail and at great length, the biography of a middle-aged continent trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go straight.”

  —Neal Acherson, London Review of Books

  “Rich and immensely detailed.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “Tony Judt . . . has produced not only the heaviest history of modern Europe ever written, but probably the best. . . . [He] moves fluently and deftly from politics and economics to films and television, whisking the reader through West German coalition-building, past the French New Wave, and on toward the Eurovision Song Contest. . . . [A] magnificently rich and readable book.”—The Sunday Times (London)

  “Masterly and exhilarating . . . Judt has made the ‘culture wars’ between communism and anticommunism a special subject and he deals with this brilliantly once more. . . . Judt has a fine eye for telling detail. . . . This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice. So many subjects are adroitly dealt with.”—Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Spectator

  “This is the best history we have of Europe in the postwar period and not likely to be surpassed for many years. . . . Here [Judt] combines deep knowledge with a sharply honed style and an eye for the expressive detail. . . . Insightful analysis and excellent writing . . . overall, this is history writing at its very best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[A] lively and thoughtful historical overview of today’s Europe from the end of World War II through the economic, social, cultural and political changes and continuities of the last sixty years. . . . Judt sees the bigger picture of the trends, events, and people that have made contemporary Europe. . . . This book is certain to be a major addition to postwar European studies.”—Library Journal

  “Elegant and provocative . . . a genuinely magisterial account.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “[Judt’s] prose is lean, his metaphors vivid . . . He impressively covers a broad array of cultural themes.”—The New York Sun

  “Compelling and fluidly written.”—The Oregonian

  “Postwar, Judt’s learned, massive, and often quite wonderful summary of European public life since World War II . . . A triumph of narrative.”

  —The Nation

  “For those who want to understand the course of contemporary Europe, the primary material is almost too copious and familiar; it takes a gifted historian to shape it into something fresh and coherent without sacrificing the details. [Postwar] does just that . . . it offers a brilliant and compelling synthesis of the past sixty years.”—Time Europe

  “Postwar . . . is a stupendous contribution to understanding developments in pos
twar Europe, especially in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. [Judt’s] brilliant survey of the culture wars is matched by his dramatic narrative of the political turmoil.”—15 Minutes

  “Unusually comprehensive and highly readable scholarship.”

  —International Herald Tribune

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other journals in Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Permanent Fellow of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna).

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  First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Tony Judt, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Map illustrations copyright © ML Design, 2005

  Photograph credits appear on pages 833-34.

  eISBN: 9781101379615

  1. Europe—History—1945- I. Title.

  D1051.J84 2005

  940.55—dc22 2005052126

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  For Jennifer

  Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present? THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

  Preface & Acknowledgements

  Europe is the smallest continent. It is not really even a continent—just a sub-continental annexe to Asia. The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique. At the last count it comprised forty-six countries. Most of these consist of states and nations with their own languages; quite a few of them incorporate additional nations and languages without states; all have their distinct and overlapping histories, politics, cultures and memories; and every one of them has been copiously studied. Even for the brief, sixty-year period of Europe’s history since the end of the Second World War—indeed, for this period above all—the secondary literature in English alone is inexhaustible.

  No one, then, can aspire to write a fully comprehensive or definitive history of contemporary Europe. My own inadequacy to the task is aggravated by proximity: born not long after the war ended, I am a contemporary to most of the events described in this book and can remember learning about or watching—or even participating in—much of this history as it unfolded. Does this make it easier for me to understand the story of post-war Europe, or harder? I don’t know. But I do know that it can sometimes render the dispassionate disengagement of the historian quite difficult to find.

  This book attempts no such Olympian detachment. Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness, Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past. In a word that has acquired undeservedly pejorative connotations, it is opinionated. Some of its judgments will perhaps be controversial, some will surely prove mistaken. All are fallible. For good and ill they are my own—as are any mistakes which are bound to have crept into a work of this length and scope. But if the errors are contained, and at least some of the assessments and conclusions in this book prove durable, then I owe this in large measure to the many scholars and friends on whom I have relied in the course of researching and writing it.

  A book of this kind rests, in the first instance, on the shoulders of other books.1 The classics of modern history writing to which I have looked for inspiration and example include Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, George Lichtheim’s Europe in the Twentieth Century, A J P Taylor’s English History 1914-1945 and the late François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion. Utterly different in every other respect, these books and their authors share an assurance born of wide learning and the sort of intellectual self-confidence rarely found among their successors—as well as a clarity of style that should be a model for every historian.

  Among those scholars from whose own writings on recent European history I have learned the most I should especially mention and thank Harold James, Mark Mazower and Andrew Moravcsik. The imprint of their work will be clear in the pages that follow. To Alan S. Milward I—along with everyone who studies modern Europe—owe a special debt for his learned, iconoclastic studies of the postwar economy.

  To the extent that I can claim familiarity with the history of central and eastern Europe—a subject often slighted by general European histories, written as they are by specialists in the continent’s western half—I owe this to the work of a gifted cohort of younger scholars, including Brad Abrams, Catherine Merridale, Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, as well as to my friends Jacques Rupnik and István Deák. From Timothy Garton Ash I have learned not only about central Europe (a subject that for many years he made his own) but also and especially about the two Germanies in the era of Ostpolitik. In the course of many years of conversation with Jan Gross—and thanks to his path-breaking writings—I have learned not only some Polish history but also how to understand the social consequences of war, a subject on which Jan has written with matchless insight and humanity.

  The sections on Italy in this book owe a transparent debt to the work of Paul Ginsborg, just as the chapters dealing with Spain reflect what I have learned from reading and listening to the remarkable Victor Perez-Diaz. To both of these, and to Annette Wieviorka—whose magisterial analysis of post-war France’s ambivalent response to the Holocaust, Déportation et Génocide, has deeply marked my account of that troubled story—I owe particular thanks. My closing reflections on ‘Europe as a Way of Life’ were much influenced by the writings of a brilliant international lawyer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, whose work on ‘disaggregated states’ argues forcefully for the EU form of international governance not because it is inherently better or because it represents an ideal model but because—in the world in which we find ourselves—nothing else will work.

  All across Europe, friends, colleagues and audiences have ta
ught me far more about the continent’s recent past and its present than I could ever have gleaned from books and archives. I am especially grateful to Krzysztof Czyzewski, Peter Kellner, Ivan Krastev, Denis Lacorne, Krzysztof Michalski, Mircea Mihaes, Berti Musliu, Susan Neiman and David Travis for their hospitality and their help. I am indebted to Istvan Rév for his invaluable insistence that—however distasteful the experience—I must visit Budapest’s House of Terror. In New York my friends and colleagues Richard Mitten, Katherine Fleming and Jerrold Seigel have been generous with their time and ideas. Dino Buturovic kindly scrutinized my account of the Yugoslav linguistic imbroglio.

  I am grateful to successive deans of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at New York University—Philip Furmansky, Jess Benhabib and Richard Foley—for supporting both my own research and the Remarque Institute which I founded to encourage others to study and discuss Europe. I could not have developed the Remarque Institute—which hosted many of the workshops and lectures from which I have learned so much—without the generous support and patronage of Yves-André Istel; and I could not have written this book while running Remarque without the uncomplaining and ultra-efficient collaboration of its Administrative Director Jair Kessler.