Witnessing Postwar Europe: The Personal History of an American Abroad

---

The latter was published bi-monthly in twenty-five languages and had at its peak a circulation of 2. Signal was patterned after Life magazine, with attractive photo- essays and an appealing lay-out; most issues had some color photographs. Signal , however, came out on newsprint instead of glossy paper; moreover, it did not carry advertisements. Signal, while focusing on the war, also carried human-interest stories.

In contrast with Signal , Victory was printed on higher quality coated paper. The OWI assumed that the magazine would be more effective and trusted as a commercial, rather than governmental, publication; the OWI however took care of the costs involved. Despite this nod towards the commercial market, the magazine lacked advertisements until the end of the war.

It was produced six times a year, and at its peak in , it was translated intonine languages with a circulation of over one million copies. It was sold via vendors and was very popular. But the magazine was not always favorably received, with criticism reaching the OWI through the Outposts. People, especially in the U. And that was new in the Netherlands. In the pre-war period, illustrated magazines were very popular, and each denominational group had its own magazines: Some of the Dutch pre-war magazines complied with the guidelines set by the Germans, while others were discontinued.

Signaal , consistent with Signal , published many anti-American stories. Together with De Amerikaansche Vrouw and Victory , these magazines represent different stages and strategies within the OWI, with the emphasis shifting ever more to the post-war world. A Picture Parade of the United Nations. Photo Review was produced in New York and sent to outposts around the world, including London. This visual approach resembles the layout ofthe magazine Parade , after which it was modeled. Moreover, parts of the magazines were tailored to fit specific national audiences, taking into account local stories and circumstances.

The impact of local circumstances on size and format can be seen with the Norwegian version, Fotorevy. The text was prepared in English, in London, and sent to the OWI Outpost in neutral Stockholm, and there translated and printed as a small-size illustrated magazine. The reason for this small size was that the OWI wanted it to be smuggled into German-occupied Norway. Approximately two-thirds of each issue was made up of photographs with the remaining third being text.

Each issue contained on average ten articles and sixty photos, and another three or four illustrations of other kinds: The magazine was published in black and white, sometimes with a touch of red or blue in the maps.

After years of German occupation, there was a pent-up hunger for real news. And due to a shortage of paper, the Dutch press was not yet functioning properly. To begin with, this town is three or four miles from the battle-line. When I arrived in our lorry with a load of KIJK , it took me several hours to find our chief distributor there. The reason was that the town has been leveled almost completely and that the business was being carried on nevertheless in the heart of shambles.

We finally located our man behind several ruined buildings. He was endeavoring to repair his small printing plant in half his shed. When we started to unload, the word got around the town that KIJK had arrived. Then, before we had a chance to tally everything properly, a queue began to form. Soon KIJK was being sold over a packing case, with people standing in line over heaps of rubble. It contained eighty pages of much higher quality paper than KIJK , but it was less glossy than Victory.

The magazine consisted of three parts: It was produced for four countries, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands, countries that shared, according to the OWI, a conservative attitude towards women. The magazine is exactly the same for each of the four countries without any local modulations aside from language. De Amerikaansche Vrouw was shipped to Europe in March with a circulation of about 40, for the Dutch market, and was distributed at the end of the war.

The focus was on the American role in the war, but Dutch contributions to the war were more than generously acknowledged. This is consistent with the approach that Ruth Benedict suggested. Moreover, even as the first issues were distributed in the newly liberated parts of the Netherlands in September , the war continued in the rest of the country, and in the Dutch East Indies now Indonesia.

KIJK provided the Dutch with stories and photographs of the ongoing war in all parts of the world, the battles fought, and the joys of victory, region by region. It acknowledged the difficulties and hardships facing the population: KIJ K, however, maintained a silence regarding the fate of Dutch Jews, a silence consistent with other American publications and documentaries from the period.

The Roosevelt administration and the military had urged the OWI to present the Soviet society and its contributions in a positive light, both at home and abroad, to counter old hostilities recently reactivated by the Nazi-magazine Signal , that covered the Soviet Union extensively and in a very negative way. The military contributions and the Russian war industry were praised in many photo essays in KIJK ; De Amerikaansche Vrouw highlighted the contributions by Russian women.

KIJK described collective agriculture and the state-run schools and orphanages positively, presenting them as just another way of organizing a society; the kolkhoz was presented as the Russian equivalent of the highly cherished American town hall democracy, and so on. This may reflect different choices made at the Outpost in London and in the US based offices. In the following I will sketch the approaches taken by these OWI publications to a number of US - centered topics, in particular the American way of life, with its promise of mass production, consumption and democracy; and the role of women and African Americans in American society.

No other country was able to produce so many jeeps, tanks, airplanes, bombs and ships. The very first issue of KIJK stated: Bombs roll down the assembly line, dominating the much smaller appearance of humans in the photos. And we see rows of landings barges and super fortresses in action as well— an impressive sight. And we see soldiers in rehab, illustrating the high human costs of the war, also on the American side. These and other examples were designed to show that the US did its very best, on all fronts, to help its allies. The stories are often personalized in the photos and captions, rather than in the main text.

And there was a promise: Where production was once used to save democracy, now it will again serve the democracy of consumption. Town hall meetings and Congress were discussed in detail, and used to illustrate democracy at work. KIJK and Victory carried some of the same stories, with the difference that Victory used also color photos. Yet the OWI wanted to do more; it wanted to show that America had a democratic culture. Unconstrained by European art conventions, it was to connect all aspects of American life, functioning as a social and educational force.

A few generations ago, the people of this country were taught by their writers and by their critics and by their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves - something imported from another continent and from an age which was not theirs - something they had no part in, save to go to see it in a guarded room on holidays or Sundays.

But recently, within the last few years, - yes, in our lifetime - they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors - people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen, across these last few years, rooms full of paintings by Americans, walls covered with the paintings of Americans - some of it good, some of it not good, but all of it native, human, eager and alive - all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.

Musicals fit this description of a genuine American popular culture quite well. In addition, the musical generated attractive photos, showing the chorus dancing and other dramatic scenes. KIJK also carried a spread on folk dancing, complete with accompanying texts. The pages of KIJK , but also of Victory , are generously illustrated with contributions on children taking painting and sculpture classes in a museum — something that would have struck Dutch readers as rather unusual at the time. De Amerikaansche Vrouw carried articles on women enjoying art exhibits.

Editor's Introduction: Postwar Europe as History

Music was presented in this context as well, with domestically situated pianos making a frequent appearance in the magazines, as people listened to and above all played the instrument. One place where they appeared most was in the cultural section, which served to give their accomplishments in jazz, opera and theater some attention. The position of African American as second class citizens was an easy target for Axis propaganda, but allies also questioned this practice, since they witnessed a segregated army fighting to secure democracy for all. They were certainly famous for their artistic endeavors, but they were also well known as civil rights activists.

He was the son of a slave who had escaped to the North, and had risen to be one of the most talented and successful singers and actors of his time, implying that in the U. The magazine also gave Robeson and his wife the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the civil rights situation: The focus on Paul Robeson is also ironic, knowing that during the Cold War he would be persona non grata due to his sympathy for the Soviet Union and his ongoing criticism of racial injustice in the U. Yet, in the fifth issue there is a series on women and the war, cut from the fabric of Rosie the Riveter.

We see for example, a woman working behind an enormous hydraulic press, dwarfed by the machine. We see her from behind, while she confidently handles the machine. There are also other photographs of women in jobs usually associated with men: Pains were often taken to explain that these women were not yet married. In that sense, their jobs were presented as temporary as well. The magazine presented women working in the war industry in a significantly different way than KIJK.

On the first page we see a full-page photograph of two women, facing the reader, busy behind a workbench. The main figure looks well cared for, with manicured nails, lipstick and depilated eyebrows. Whereas in KIJK , women worked with large machines, these women work with machines more comparable to appliances at home. This is reflected in subsequent stories focusing on the world of white middle class women in small town and suburban America, where the war was no longer present in the photographs.

In a page and a third spread, we see a photo of a woman reading to her son: We see her buying groceries, making breakfast, helping the kids to school, taking pictures of the family, doing laundry with the washing machine, making clothing on the electric sewing machine.

The time saved by using these household appliances was not, as Dutch pre-war illustrated magazines suggested, spent in idleness on herself. The magazine was produced for France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, countries, according to the OWI, that held conservative values when it came to the position of women. In her report on the Netherlands, Ruth Benedict came to the same conclusion. In the next image, the two are sitting in the living room, listening to the radio together, implying that these time- saving devices lead to a better quality of family-life.

These ads literally sell the Dutch the same American lifestyle as earlier portrayed in De Amerikaansche Vrouw. All they had to do was follow the American example…. In the latter case, the story appears in Victory and was accompanied by an ad for Beech Aircraft, offering its services. America — and particularly the fruits of its industry -- is now for sale. For years, the Dutch would not be able to afford the life-style depicted in these magazines, yet these publications, together with Hollywood films, helped to pave the way for a society of mass production and consumption, with the U.

America was still a far away country. Its approach was systematic. American soldiers, as first-line ambassadors, were briefed on the countries they were about to liberate. For the Netherlands, the anthropological reports by Ruth Benedict speak to this endeavor.

Post-1945, post-1968, and post-1989 Europe are all different — and none of them make sense anymore.

In this context, films and photos were seen as very effective carriers of propaganda messages. This essay focused on one aspect of this larger whole: Most obvious of these is of course the Cold War, which divided the continent in a way that defined it for forty years and whose after-effects are still evident.

I will say more about the Cold War shortly, but it should not be taken as synonymous with the postwar period tout court , for this would lead one to overlook many other significant pressure points. It was not just a classic territorial struggle best understood in terms of military strategy, but an ideological clash, in which a racialized vision of a Europe united under German domination fought, after , against an uneasy alliance of liberals and communists. This war of ideologies, inspired primarily by Nazi chiliasm, gave the war its millenarian character, and accounts for the fact that in every state there was a mini-war going on, with large sections of the European population believing—with a peak in about —42—that a Nazified Europe was an unstoppable reality.

Military and ideological collaboration with Nazism meant that the viciousness of the fighting was akin to a civil war. In their efforts to liberate Europe from the German yoke Poles were killing Poles, Greeks were killing Greeks, Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen, Rumanians were killing Rumanians, and Jugoslavs were killing Jugoslavs … While the Allies were allowing themselves to be killed in the attempt to liberate Italy from the Germans, we Italians were killing one another.

In the Yugoslav context, renegade communist Milovan Djilas put it even more succinctly: Even so, it is remarkable that, after the violence of the war, retribution was not more terrible. Displaced persons DP camps, especially housing Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps and of postwar antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe, were a blot on the Central European landscape until more than ten years after the war, when the establishment of the state of Israel permitted the last remaining DPs to go where they wanted.

Violence and civil war continued in many parts of Europe. Communist authorities did not put down the last pockets of nationalist resistance in Poland until the early s; civil war in Greece precipitated British withdrawal from Great Power status and permanent American intervention in Europe, in the shape of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan the European Recovery Programme. In the midst of the bloodiest war of European decolonization, in Algeria, France nearly succumbed to civil war in , following a right-wing military plot. Decolonization in general was a great shock to European notions of superiority and power, which had long been casually assumed.

The leaders of the decolonization movements simply continued the struggles they had fought against the Japanese or in service in Europe during World War II against the colonial powers that sought to reassert their control after liberation. Even in the continuing arrangements of neocolonialism and clientelism, which benefited the former colonial powers, decolonization brought new challenges: Dictatorships continued to exist in Spain and Portugal until the s, as the Franco and Salazar regimes played on their supposed wartime neutrality and their anti-communist credentials to persuade the US and its allies that in the context of the Cold War they ought to be tolerated.

Twenty years after the end of its civil war, Greece in fell prey p. The Cold War itself—in the broader context of US—Soviet rivalry—obviously threatened the stability not just of Europe but of the world as a whole. Moving away from high politics, many other spheres of life changed dramatically in the postwar period, so that simplistic notions of stability and normality cannot do justice to the complex realities.

In the field of gender relations and sexuality, the period was the first in human history in which women could take control of the reproductive process. In Eastern Europe, the period saw the creation of police states backed up by powerful and all-pervasive secret police forces that were far more extensive than the Gestapo; the homogenization of living and working conditions; and the dominance of ideology over the private sphere, with sometimes tragicomic, sometimes lunatic results.

Recognizing that fact and explaining it is the historian's task, and thus we can see that postwar Europe is fast becoming history.

Latest issues

This process of historicization is being set in train in many ways, but clearly, comfortable notions of stability and progress are insufficient for the job. Some clear-cut conceptual parameters are therefore required in order to make sense of this mass of material, encompassing every conceivable sphere of human activity. Since the end of the Cold War, Europe's postwar years have increasingly been historicized. Where earlier postwar Europe was—understandably—confined to the sphere of current affairs, and was written about by journalists, politicians, political scientists, and sociologists, now historians have made their mark, with a stream of research on all aspects of the period, from diplomacy to consumerism.

How did a continent in ruins in become one of the most prosperous and privileged corners of the world? The objective of this Handbook is to attempt to maintain a productive tension between, on the one hand, bringing some coherence to the field and, on the other hand, giving readers a sense of the multifaceted nature of the existing and forthcoming research.

Thanks to its size, the Handbook differs from the few existing thematic collections in that it has unusually wide coverage, with a considerable stress on cultural history. This structure allows a number of interesting chronological questions to be raised, rather than taken as given. It also means that among the authors there are not only historians but historical geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, and literary scholars.

The result is a collection of essays that indicate how what remains for many people a living part of the present is being historicized in inventive and innovative ways. Instead, lines of continuity as well as discontinuity are traced from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The following questions have been borne in mind: This questioning of chronology in turn permits the thematic investigation of various facets of postwar life—from high politics to economics to tourism and consumerism—in a far-reaching way, around the axes of time and place.

Many of the ways in which the past is discussed in this Handbook have been developed within the contexts of the changes that have taken place in the historical profession since Where before the war, the field was dominated by diplomatic history, high politics, and the historical development of nations, with other approaches, such as social and intellectual history, regarded as distinctly inferior, since the postwar profession has been vastly expanded in terms of the numbers of historians researching and teaching at higher education institutions and the variety of approaches that are considered acceptable.

Political history remains important, for good reason, and diplomatic history, especially in the context of human rights and international relations, is undergoing something of a renaissance, but social, cultural, economic, and intellectual history are all now enormously productive areas of historical research.

Within these major divisions, new fields such as gender, the history of the body or of the emotions, the history of the book, memory studies, environmental history, media history, or the history of science and medicine are all major developments. Some existed in a nascent state before , but only with the expansion of the profession since then have they come into their own. In other words, the descriptions of the past that the chapters of this Handbook provide have themselves only become possible because of—and are thus products of—changes in the postwar world.

Even a book of thirty-six chapters cannot cover everything, but my aim as editor has been to represent as wide a variety of historical approaches as possible, for this variety in itself tells us something about the period the book is describing and narrating. The contributions stress the interplay between the local, national, and international, and between the political and the intimate, especially in the Cold War context.

As well as highlighting the variety of historical approaches, the Handbook also seeks to break down disciplinary boundaries where appropriate i. Doing so provides two things: Throughout the Handbook , strict chronological divisions have been avoided, in order to stress that long-term historical factors were at work after as much as, if not more than short-term self-contained matters, as well as to suggest the interconnectedness of political, social, economic, cultural, and other factors.

No book on postwar Europe can exclude the Soviet—American rivalry and the way in which it played out in and was in turn affected by developments in Europe. But the Cold War does not provide the only focus or conceptual framework for the Handbook. Silvio Pons and Federico Romero write that. The pervasiveness of the Cold War has often been used as an argument for studying it on its own terms: But its very pervasiveness means that it was also porous, permeable and subject to myriad influences and transformative trends.

In other words, one can show how the ubiquitous Cold War context shaped and informed all areas of life, not just politics in the narrow sense of international relations or military strategy. They were affected not only at an institutional level, in terms of funding or status, but also at the level of the imagination, as Cold War fears and insecurities crept, for example, into popular culture or family life.

The reverse is also true: Certainly the focus on explaining the origins and course of the Cold War has tended to obscure the significance of the first two or three postwar years, in which the future was open and the formal division of the continent was by no means inevitable. Indeed, for many people, they were more so than the thought of nuclear destruction, which many preferred to box off in order to remain sane—and can equally validly be the subjects of historical analysis.

The many studies that have recently appeared on tourism, consumerism, family life, religion, industry, fashion and design, science and technology, art, architecture, music, film, the press and photography all intersect with conventional narratives of the postwar period that take it as synonymous with the Cold War; but they also offer ways of understanding postwar society, culture, and economics that do not see those spheres of life as overdetermined by the capitalism—communism rivalry.

The following chapters assume a working knowledge of the series of events of the period, and so I will use the rest of this introduction to provide a basic high political and institutional chronological framework that can help orient the reader. It is helpful to break up the postwar period into distinct phases, following Tony Judt and Charles Tilly. Tilly's periodization is based largely on economic indicators: Here Judt is more helpful, dividing the period into four: This chronology broadly makes sense, and although the sections of this Handbook are not structured around it, they nevertheless confirm its appositeness.

But by seeing these immediate postwar years as no more than precursors to the definitive postwar settlement, the radical contestation and openness that characterized them can easily be overlooked. These claims can be tested by taking as an example the communist takeover of Europe, and the way in which that process has been interpreted by historians. One of the longest running debates in Cold War historiography has been the question of Stalin's role: But it is also clear that the Soviets did not intend to divide the continent in —45, and that, for the first years after the war, the countries of p.

Stalin undoubtedly acted to secure the Soviet Union's new westward-shifted borders by installing friendly regimes in Poland and Romania. Yet it remains the case that elsewhere, notably Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Stalin was far more relaxed about the progress of communism. Thus, although one can trace its origins back to the Bolshevik Revolution, and tensions between the Allies began shortly after the German invasion of the USSR in June , the Cold War did not begin in earnest until The Treaty of Brussels created a military alliance in Western Europe, aimed at defending the region from the Soviet Union rather than Germany, and within a few years the new Germanies, which lay at the heart of Cold War Europe in all senses, had been relieved of their very short period of denazification purdah and, now functioning as independent states, were willingly incorporated into NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Editor's Introduction: Postwar Europe as History - Oxford Handbooks

The birth of the new German states and the reluctant French agreement to the rearming of West Germany in the context of NATO after the National Assembly first demanded and then eventually rejected a European Defence Community also help explain the emergence of another key postwar institution: This was a realization that the haughty British came to later. It would be strange to explain the readiness of states to enter into this sort of multilateral, international agreement if notions of federalism were wholly irrelevant.

The key moments of the union's development, from the creation and renegotiation of the Common Agricultural Policy to the Maastricht Treaty and the post-communist accessions, have been driven by national interests, especially French fear of Germany, far more than by federalism. In the context of the early Cold War, the rearming of West Germany, the establishment of NATO, and the creation of the EEC, what we see in Western Europe is a period in which the glimpse of the radical new political opportunities that briefly shone in the immediate aftermath of the war was gradually but surely snuffed out.

The centre-right governments in power and the institutions that took shape in the s and s helped to give a conservative cast to Western European political culture. Stability through parliamentary democracy was certainly one result—though not in southern Europe—especially since it came nicely wrapped in shiny consumer goods. Christian Democrats succeeded where socialist parties did not in creating some cross-class participation. I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.

Infiltration indicates something objective; ambiguous figures make their comeback and occupy positions of power for the sole reason that conditions favour them. Although many of the overseas colonies, such as Singapore, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies were occupied during the war, the European powers considered it their right to reassert their rule at the conclusion of the conflict. But the newly empowered colonial subjects disagreed and, in one of the more remarkable phenomena of postwar history, the decolonization process became an unstoppable force.

Decolonization had taken place before World War II Brazil in , for example , but the year brought European colonial history—barring a few exceptions—to a close, at least in the formal sense informal empire and exploitative relationships did not end. Here the European self-image was severely tried. The British decolonization process was neither as peaceful nor ordained from above as the official and popular narrative would have us believe. When the French army surrendered at Dien Bien Phu in , and lost Indochina, Algeria was the only remaining colony of significance for the French.

In fact, it was not formally a colony but part of metropolitan France, split into three departments and returning deputies to the National Assembly. Thus, it was all the more galling that the Algerians rejected the benefits of French civilization. These events help set Fanon's violent anti-colonial tirades into a meaningful context. When he wrote that p. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them and vomit them up.

Allan Mitchell (1933–2016)

Fanon was merely echoing the reality of the decolonization struggle. Their actions began the process that saw the end of dictatorship in Portugal as well as independence for the Portuguese colonies although, for Angola especially, this would usher in several decades of vicious warfare. In , President Dwight Eisenhower said of the Salazar regime that: The same forces that oppressed the peoples of the former territories under Portuguese administration also oppressed the Portuguese people. It is with great modesty and humility that we must say, without ambiguities, that the struggle of the colonial peoples against Portuguese fascism also aided our liberation from the same fascism.

Thus, as well as contributing to European prosperity in general, both economically and morally, decolonization in Portugal also helped to bring about the passage from dictatorship to democracy in that country—though not in Lusophone Africa—at the same time as the dictatorship in Spain was also coming to its negotiated end. But it faced different problems altogether.

First, in terms of defence, the communists were not only concerned to shore up their region against the perceived threat from the West by creating the Warsaw Pact, but had to face down considerable internal opposition too. In terms of economics, while Comecon was established to rival the Marshall Plan, and was not without achievements, it lacked the flexibility of the ERP system and failed to adapt. But if communism managed to sustain a standard of living comparable with the West for the first decade and half after the war, no such comparison can be made in the sphere of politics.

If, in Western Europe, the postwar atmosphere was fundamentally conservative, this was largely a reflection of popular will; in Eastern Europe, the suppression of national sovereignty, especially in the Baltic States, the Polish kresy , and other regions incorporated directly into the Soviet Union, and the elimination of opposition, at least in the public sphere, was centrally, and violently, imposed.

As the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova laconically wrote: The sight of tanks on the streets of Budapest shocked western fellow travellers, whose image of the golden age being realized in the here and now was shattered, 54 and provided an echo of Brecht's comment on the uprising: Once the tanks had cleared the streets there was no opportunity for further reform and the period of gerontocratic stagnation set in. The conditions of —Tito's and Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist reformism—were not present in Thus although Prague marked the last chance for reform in the Soviet bloc, its real importance lay in its adumbration of Gorbachev.

But there were exceptions. The year was not only a year of revolt in Eastern Europe. Conservatives trod a delicate balance between anti-communism as in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom 59 and anti-Americanization, with the latter usually losing out, but not without generating a substantial repertoire of distaste for supposed American vulgarity and brashness, as if a continent that had recently destroyed itself had a claim to greater civilization.

Hence student leader Rudi Dutschke could argue that:. Our life is more than money. Our life is thinking and living. It's about us, and what we could do in this world … It is about how we could use technology and all the other things which at the moment are used against the human being … My question in life is always how we can destroy things that are against the human being, and how we can find a way of life in which the human being is independent of a world of trouble, a world of anxiety, a world of destruction.

The disjunction between the conservative cultural atmosphere of Western Europe in the s and s and the burgeoning consumer society, with its unheard-of excess wealth, was no longer sustainable. The internal tension and limited effectiveness of the New Left were due to the fact that it could not assume power without destroying itself.

In France, for example, the revolts certainly shook the Gaullist regime, but it ultimately came out strengthened. Apart from the fact that the radical actions of the extreme left split the left alliance—the Radicals could no longer cooperate with the Communists, and neither could the SFIO Socialists —de Gaulle's appeal to the people to choose between Gaullism and communism brought hundreds of thousands of pro-government demonstrators onto the streets of Paris.

The subsequent cleverly timed general election in June provided an opportunity for the shocked middle-classes to register their distaste for street action.

Edited by Dan Stone

And while a tiny minority of the rebels went on to careers as terrorists in the paranoid worlds of the RAF, the BR, or the extreme right, 66 most successfully negotiated the perils of the recessions and economic challenges that lay only a few years ahead. But if the students could never overthrow the postwar p. Somewhat ironically, however, the greatest impact of this liberalizing process was to be felt in the sphere of economics in the years after The postwar economic boom—which was in fact a continuation of interwar economic trends—could not be sustained indefinitely, and not just because of the inevitable loss of market share brought about by the rise to prominence of new capitalist economies, especially in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

From an average in OECD countries of 4. OPEC's decision to punish countries it deemed to have supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war simply exacerbated a trend that was already in train. And apart from the economic blows, the unseemly scrabble for oil exemplified the problem of Eurosclerosis that afflicted the EEC in the s, with individual states desperately trying to ensure their own continuity of supply rather than working towards a collective solution.

The response to the oil crisis and to the novel problem of stagflation—which combined the phenomena of high inflation and unemployment, thought to be mutually exclusive in orthodox Keynesianism—was, over a fairly short time frame and with dramatic social consequences, to shut down the industries on which postwar prosperity had been built and to turn the Western European economy into a high-tech service sector. The process was carried through most radically in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, with her monetarist advisors, but applied also to West Germany, France, Italy, and even the Scandinavian countries, where the long-dominant Social Democrats saw their grip on power weaken and where, in a rare moment of excitement in Swedish politics, Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated in As well as increasing unemployment, the restructuring also saw conservative retrenchment in the social and cultural sphere: This meant a new liberalism which de-emphasized the social contract that had been accepted in as a necessary component of reconstruction: But it owed little to traditional conservative values of probity, social order, and economic caution.

The extraordinary changes that took place in the European economy in the s and s, which largely did away with heavy industry exceptions include the industrial belt of the Ruhr and car p. Economics, however, is not in itself the main driving force of historical change. The decisions taken by OPEC reveal that clearly enough. And nowhere is this fact more evident than in the history of the collapse of communism. Although by the s living standards behind the Iron Curtain had fallen way behind those of Western Europe, vanishingly few commentators believed that that meant the end of the communist regimes.

Daniel Chirot elegantly notes:. By the s the USSR had the world's most advanced late nineteenth-century economy, the world's biggest and best, most inflexible rustbelt. It is as if Andrew Carnegie had taken over the entire United States, forced it into becoming a giant copy of US Steel, and the executives of the same US Steel had continued to run the country into the s and s.

And indeed, not economic factors in the narrow sense—appalling though all the indicators were—but political ones hold the key to the collapse. Much has been written, in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism, to try and explain a sequence of events that almost no one had been able to p. To a large extent, the collapse is overdetermined, and it is impossible to provide a definitive explanation of such large-scale, continent-wide events.

All of these factors Reagan included did have some bearing on communism's collapse. But none of them would have mattered were it not for the decisions taken by the CPSU's new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, first to initiate reform in the USSR and, second, not to intervene militarily when the reform process took on a life of its own. As Gorbachev noted, with more prescience than he knew, shortly after initiating the programmes of perestroika and glasnost that were to spiral irretrievably out of his control,.

To threaten the socialist order, try to undermine it from outside, and tear one country or another from the socialist community means encroachment not only on the will of the people but also on the entire post-war order and, in the final analysis, on peace. We must bear in mind that there are a number of theoretical and practical deviations, both on the right and on the left. Of course, both of them are equally dangerous … However, it is my opinion that the main danger today comes from the rightist deviations, which can seriously harm socialist construction and the struggle for disarmament, peace, and mankind's overall progress.

In the cases of revolution and reform and the aspirations of the reformers ended in the attainment of the exact opposite of what was intended: Ironically, the drive to free countries from communist rule , , ended by tightening it, while the desire to reform and improve communist rule Gorbachev's accession in ended in its collapse.

In fact, one could go so far as to say that it was precisely because the signals emanating from Moscow were for limited and gradual reform rather than for a complete overhaul of the system that major change could take place. Only because the impetus for reform came from the heart of the system itself could the dreams of the and reformers finally be realized, even if that was the opposite of what Gorbachev set out to achieve. On 8 December , two years after the unplanned collapse of the Berlin Wall, following the renunciation of a treaty preventing East German tourists holidaying in Hungary from crossing the border into Austria and thence to West Germany , the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus conspired against Gorbachev's wishes and signed the Belovezha Accord, which abolished the superpower and replaced it with the CIS.

The Supreme Soviet was powerless to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union, and p. Who could have predicted that communism would die not with a bang but with a whimper? At this point, the postwar histories of Eastern and Western Europe converged in a way that had not been true for forty years.

Twenty years is insufficient time for a meaningful historicization process to have occurred, if only because many of the sources that historians will need remain inaccessible. What is abundantly clear is that the postwar consensus is, if not dead, semi-comatose. Both west and east failed to live up to the fundamental premises that underpinned them, as Susan Buck-Morss points out:. Probably the most pressing concern from a Western European point of view following the end of the Cold War was German unification. So too was Gorbachev, though Russia was in no position really to influence the course of events.

Although international authorization was formally required for this process, Bonn set the pace, backed by overwhelming popular support in both Germanies. At the time, no one cared. With respect to international communist structures, it was only once Gorbachev had signalled his unwillingness to use force to hold on to the East European satellite states that the communist bloc discovered a sense of unity of purpose. As Mastny says with respect to the Warsaw Pact, it is ironic that.

Certainly, there were many problems: In the communist countries, such services were provided by the state less out of solidarity with the working class than as a stick with which to force people especially women into work. But still, exposure to the harsh realities of western capitalism, especially in its short-lived robber—capitalist variant, sent many running to the illusory warmth of Ostalgie nostalgia for the east. And if in some instances—Russia, most obviously—we see democratic structures without democratic practice, it is still stability, albeit wobbly, rather than disintegration or rising radicalism that is the most striking characteristic of 's aftermath.

The exception, of course, is the break-up of Yugoslavia and the series of wars that engulfed it. Yugoslavia was a remarkable creation, in both its monarchical and republican forms. In terms of events, the facts are both complex and straightforward. But it was straightforward too, because the driving force was the same throughout: Certainly Croatian Serbs were being mistreated in Croatia, and there is no room either for trying to make Franjo Tudjman, the head of independent Croatia, look like a respectable politician he was a Holocaust denying admirer of the Nazi-backed NDH.

The mistreatment of Serbs and Romanies by ethnic Albanian Kosovars following the Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo in was a shabby reminder that victimhood does not make people nicer. Following Tudjman's victory in Croatia's first post-communist election in April and Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia on 25 June , the JNA Yugoslav National Army , which was largely in Serbian hands, was used to step up the level of violence in Croatia.

• Hobsons Choice
• A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I France and England in North America
• The Millennium of Revelation 20
• Ignatius Critical Editions: Frankenstein
• Hot Topics for Couples: What Husbands and Wives Arent Telling Each Other