Chapter 18
Europe Rides Again
In This Chapter
Watching western Europe recover and flourish
Seeing the European Union grow
Weighing up different ideas on how to run a country
Tracing the rise and fall of the communist bloc
No one driving round the bomb sites and destruction of Europe’s cities in 1945 could have imagined that it would ever recover. No sooner had the fighting ended than the continent was cut in two by the Cold War. Yet western Europe did recover, and pretty quickly too, to become a high-tech economic powerhouse. Eastern Europe meanwhile was in the grip of communist dictatorship and falling farther and farther behind the West. When the Cold War was over, Europeans had some painful readjustments to make.
Sunrise in the West
Western Europe recovered quickly after the war because of American economic aid. Known as Marshall Aid, it was named after General George C. Marshall who organised it. The main idea was simply to help Europe get going again, but supplying aid was also a good way for America to win friends and, presumably, influence people. For this reason the Soviet Union wanted nothing to do with Marshall Aid and told all the countries it controlled in eastern and central Europe not to accept it either. So western Europe recovered much more quickly than eastern Europe. Western Europe kept its lead over the East right up to the end of the century.
C’mon, c’mon, let’s get together
Thanks to Marshall Aid, western Europe was able to brush itself down and get going again. But the western Europeans also saw the advantage of working together more closely. The old days of the European Great Powers were well and truly over, but together the Europeans might still be able to play their part on the world stage.
The destruction from the Second World War was much worse than the First World War: All over the continent towns and cities had been bombed into rubble and people were stranded hundreds of miles from their homes. The whole continent was shattered.
Many people thought the two world wars showed what happened if you let nations follow their own paths and their own narrow self-interests. If nations acted together for a change, wouldn’t it mean no more wars? The victorious Allies had already set up the United Nations Organisation; why not have a United Nations for Europe?
In 1949 representatives of different European states met in Strasbourg and set up the Council of Europe dedicated to upholding peace and human rights in a continent that had been pretty careless with both. The Council of Europe set up a European Court of Human Rights, which soon played an essential role in upholding human rights across the continent. But the member states made sure that the Council of Europe only had the power to advise them, not to force them to do anything they didn’t want to do. Not quite such a step forward, then.
What else can you build with coal and steel? The European Community
If you have to rebuild a continent shattered by war, a great deal of construction work will be necessary and in the 1940s that meant using a lot of coal and steel. Three men thought this necessity might be an opportunity to build something rather bigger and longer-lasting than houses or factories. France’s Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer signed an agreement to pool their two countries’ coal and steel resources. This agreement was significant because disputes between France and Germany had been at the root of both world wars. If these two old enemies could start working together, it might mean an end to European wars.
The agreement was called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which suggested that the three men had rather wider visions for where it might lead. Sure enough, four other European countries soon joined in – Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Before long they asked themselves, ‘Why pool only coal and steel? Why not trade freely in everything?’ So in 1957 they signed the Treaty of Rome turning the ECSC into the European Economic Community (EEC), known to its friends as the ‘Common Market’.
That’s enough butter, thank you
The most controversial aspect of the EEC was its policy on farming and food production. It paid farmers generous subsidies to produce large quantities of butter and milk, regardless of whether or not the market wanted them. Result: Farmers filled whole warehouses with food that couldn’t be sold. These ‘butter mountains’ and ‘wine lakes’ were a scandal, when other parts of the world didn’t have enough to eat. The EEC’s refusal to change the subsidy system that had produced this surplus in the first place made the situation even worse. When the EEC became the European Union, its rules said that member states had to stop subsidising their own producers and bring in EU subsidies instead. That was too much for the Norwegians, who repeatedly rejected the idea of joining the EU.
The muscles of Brussels
The EEC set up its headquarters in Brussels, though it also had a base in Strasbourg and had to decamp there once a year to keep the French happy. It set up a Council of Ministers to make decisions and a European Parliament to advise them (but not to pass laws – no one wanted a rival for their own national parliaments). Brussels was also the headquarters of the EEC’s atomic energy agency, Euratom. As the EEC countries began to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s, Brussels became a major international political centre.
I say, that looks fun! Can we join?
Churchill had spoken passionately in favour of the Council of Europe and had even called for a United States of Europe, but he’d never considered Britain being part of it. The British were wary of the EEC and set up their own European Free Trade Area with the Austrians and Scandinavians but it never matched the EEC’s success. Eventually the British decided to ask to join the EEC, even though doing so would mean dropping all Britain’s special trading links with the Commonwealth. France’s President de Gaulle was having none of it. ‘Non!’ he declared, ‘England is not a part of Europe: She is, ‘ow you say? A stooge for ze Americans. She come in over ma dead bodee!’ He was right too: De Gaulle died in 1970 and Britain finally joined in 1973. Some Britons have spent their lives since then trying to get Britain out again.
In 1967 the EEC dropped the ‘Economic’ from its name and in 1992 it changed to European Union, which made its political agenda crystal clear. It also took on new members, including Ireland (1973), Denmark (1973), Greece (1981), and Spain and Portugal (both 1986).
Boom bang-a-bang (not to be confused with Ding ding-a-dong)
One of the most exciting technological developments of post-war Europe was meant to be Eurovision, a continent-wide (make that a western-half-of-the-continent-wide) TV service binding nations together in a celebration of European culture and heritage. Er, right. In fact the only aspect of Eurovision that has ever come to general notice has been its annual song contest, famous for such cultural treats as over-the-top costumes and songs with catchy titles like the two in the title of this sidebar (I promise you, I did not make those up). Most of the original countries have got so used to Eurovision that they hardly take it seriously any more but the newer states of central and eastern Europe take it very seriously indeed and mount impressive spectacles with fire and troupes of dancers leaping about to the thumping beat, all interspersed with traditional shepherds’ bagpipes from their country’s picturesque hills. The voting always brings out all the worst of Europe’s national prejudices so that people all over the continent can enjoy giving their ancient enemies nul points. The Eurovision Song Contest is frankly bizarre – kitschy, compulsive, and sometimes even quite musical, but definitely bizarre.
Refining the EC
Before decisions were taken within the European Community all countries had to agree, which was fine when it only had six members, but wasn’t such a good idea when more members joined. Once the Cold War was over the states of central and eastern Europe would want to join too. You couldn’t run such a huge union if every member had a veto, so the EC (EU from 1992, remember) took steps to strengthen Brussels and make it harder for any individual state to hold things up:
1986 Single European Act: Creates a single market with complete freedom of movement for goods, money, and people. Decisions on the market to be taken on a majority vote: Say good-bye to the veto, lads.
1992 Treaty of Maastricht: Changes the European Community into the European Union, with a common foreign and security policy (not that that worked in practice) and closer co-operation on justice and police matters. It also gives greater powers to the European Parliament and draws up plans for a single European currency.
1999 Single European currency: The first international currency since ancient times, though the Eurocrats come up with a very boring name for it: The euro. Most member states (though not all) opt to join it.
Yes, but who pays for all this?
Western Europe recovered from the Second World War thanks to American handouts. Some Europeans thought that they could go on living on money provided by the State. Others had different ideas.
Social democracy the Swedish way
The Scandinavians led the way in this thinking. Sweden developed a social security system with education, health care, child care, and a whole range of other benefits all provided by the State. Taxation provided the money to pay for it all. The Swedes were rather proud of their system and liked to hold it up as an example for other countries to follow. Not all countries went quite as far down the road of State intervention as Sweden, though, and by the 1990s the Swedes were running into serious cash-flow problems. In 1995 the Swedes finally gave in and joined the European Union.
Socialism-lite
In the rest of western Europe two main political groups fought for their vision of the future:
Socialists: Wanted the State to be responsible for as much as possible, certainly all social services and preferably the essential industries as well. The State should provide pensions and benefits for all and should step in to protect workers’ jobs when firms got into difficulty.
Christian Democrats: These were Conservative political parties in Germany and Italy, though other right-wing groups thought the same way. They wanted to preserve some elements of capitalism, but they were happy to work with the socialists and to support a big State-run sector of the economy.
This strange hybrid of socialism-lite with a dash of capitalism was peculiar to Europe and for a long time this approach seemed to work very well. In the 1960s western Europeans enjoyed almost full employment, high wages, and financial security and felt rather superior to the State-run system in the communist bloc and the State-runs-nothing system in America.
We’ll keep the sort-of-red flag flying here: Eurocommunism
Communists played a crucial part in resisting the Nazis during the war and they hoped to take power after the war: In France the communists nearly did. Communists regularly stood for election across western Europe, and in some areas they did very well. The Italians regularly elected communists to their regional councils and the city of Bologna had a communist council for years. But these ‘Eurocommunists’ didn’t try to set up a secret police or send people to labour camps. They worked within the democratic system and didn’t try to tear it down. Above all, they didn’t take orders from Moscow. They were disgusted with the way the Russians had crushed the Hungarians and Czechs when they’d tried to show a bit of independence (see Chapter 10 to find out what this was all about) and they were determined to work things their own way.
Market forces
By the 1980s the Christian Democrat idea of getting chummy with the left was beginning to wear a bit thin. The Italian Christian Democrats were caught up in a series of corruption scandals and were even accused of being in cahoots with the Mafia. But the country which knocked the old left–right consensus on the head was Britain.
British Labour and Conservative governments had proved utterly incapable of controlling the powerful trade unions, who paralysed the country with strikes so often that other Europeans talked of strikes as the ‘British disease’. In 1979 the British elected a doctor who took drastic measures to cure the British disease: Margaret Thatcher. She passed laws to break the power of the unions and she sold off whole sectors of the State-run economy to private investors. She wanted a completely free market and she had no patience with anyone, trade union or European Union, who stood in her way.
Mrs Thatcher’s philosophy – low taxes and keep to what you can pay for – won her three elections. Other Europeans disliked the way she tried to force her ideas on them but by the 1990s more of them were coming round to her way of thinking.
Hang up the uniform, General
Some European states took a bit of time to wake up to the fact that they were living in a continent that was meant to be a shop window for democracy. These included:
Spain: General Francisco Franco ruled Spain from his victory in the Civil War (see Chapter 5 for the details) until his death in 1975. Franco worked closely with the Catholic Church to keep Spain a strict one-party dictatorship, though when the economy started going downhill, he had to allow more of a free market economy than he would’ve liked. When he died, the monarchy took over again under King Juan Carlos.
Portugal: The first Portuguese republic had been a fairly chaotic affair until 1926 when the military staged a coup. Antonio Salazar set Portugal up as a fascist state and ruled as its dictator from 1933 to 1968 when he had a stroke. Salazar kept Portugal agricultural, backward, and poor, and nearly bankrupted the country by fighting to keep hold of its African colonies (see Chapter 11). In 1974 the military staged another coup, this time to get rid of the dictatorship and move Portugal towards democracy.
Greece: Greece had suffered a terrible civil war after 1945 between monarchists and communists: The monarchists only won with massive American help. Then the Greeks argued about the rights of the crown and the rights of the army until in 1967 a gang of Greek colonels seized power for themselves. The colonels weren’t very good at governing, but they were very good at imprisoning and torturing people. In 1974 they tried to seize hold of Cyprus but lost, which brought their government crashing down and created a democratic republic in its place.
Not everyone was happy to move towards democracy. In Spain in 1981 some officers tried to close down the Spanish parliament and set up another military government, but King Juan Carlos held firm and the coup was beaten. All three countries were rewarded for their commitment to democracy by being admitted to the European Union.
Cyprus
Cyprus was a tricky problem that nearly caused a war between two NATO members, Greece and Turkey. Cyprus was Greek until the Turks conquered it in the sixteenth century: Both sides’ descendants still live on the island. The Greek Cypriots fighting to get the British out (see Chapter 11) wanted ‘Enosis’ – union with Greece. But the British wanted to set up an independent Cyprus where they could station some of their troops, so that’s what they did. In 1974 the Greek government tried to take Cyprus over but the Turks sent their troops into the northern, Turkish part of the island and declared it a separate state. Only Turkey recognises ‘Turkish Cyprus’, but Greece gave up its claim to Cyprus when it entered the European Union.
All countries great and small
Despite all the talk of European unity the different countries of western Europe developed in some very diverse ways.
France
France spent the first fifteen years after the war afraid that it was going to have another revolution. The wars in Indo-China and Algeria divided opinion in France so deeply that by 1960 the French were expecting revolution and invasion (by the French Algerians) at any moment (see Chapter 11 for lots more on what was causing all this angst in France). France’s Fourth Republic didn’t give anything like enough power to the president to deal with this sort of emergency, so the French turned to General de Gaulle and said he could redraft the constitution any way he liked. So he did (creating France’s Fifth Republic, still going today), giving lots of power to, well, himself. De Gaulle saw France through the boom years of the sixties but he was badly thrown when French students rioted in 1968 and resigned the following year.
Gaullism carried on under Georges Pompidou and the very lordly Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, who always gave the impression he found having to speak to the plebs a chore. In 1981 the French decided to take him down a peg or two and elected the socialist (and, as it turned out, equally lordly) François Mitterrand, a wily old bird who completely ran rings round the Gaullist leader, Jacques Chirac. Mitterrand kept France dependent on its system of State subsidies, which stored up lots of economic trouble for Chirac when he finally succeeded Mitterrand in 1995.
West Germany
That’s the Federal Republic of Germany but ‘West Germany’ for short. Its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was a remarkable man who did much to help Germans recover from the stigma of the war and become accepted again on the world stage. Adenauer realised that West Germany must stick close to America, a lesson also learned by the mayor of West Berlin, Willi Brandt, who went on to become chancellor. Brandt was the first West German leader to start talking with East Germany to try to relax some of the tension, though no one expected the conversations to lead anywhere. His rather dashing successor, Helmut Schmidt, steered the country through the effects of the Arab oil embargo (see Chapter 17 for the lowdown on this) but he lost support when he allowed the Americans to station long-range missiles on West German territory and was forced out of office.
Italy
The Italians’ system of proportional representation led to a string of coalition governments, not all of which lasted longer than a wine gum, yet somehow the system – and the country – survived. The Italians achieved a difficult balancing act between communism, socialism, and Catholicism, made more difficult and dangerous by endless strikes and a campaign of left-wing terrorism by the Red Brigade (see the ‘Terrorism’ section later in this chapter). The veteran prime minister Giulio Andreotti was charged with corruption and links with the Mafia, which rather summed up Italy’s problems by the 1990s.
Britain
That’s the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the ‘UK’ as the country’s generally known nowadays. The British surprised the world in 1945 by voting against Churchill and for the Labour Party, who promptly nationalised the major industries and introduced a welfare state, including a free health service for all. The Conservatives soon accepted these changes, but neither party was able to control the militant trade unions who, by the 1970s, were regularly paralysing the whole country with nationwide strikes.
Meanwhile Britain seemed to be the big exception to the western European economic miracle: In 1976 it even had to apply to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s turned the picture round, however, crushing the unions after a bitter year-long battle with the miners, selling off nationalised industry, and stopping government subsidies: If an industry couldn’t pay its way, it had to go under even if doing so meant massive unemployment until the economy adjusted. Thatcherism hit the old industrial areas very hard: Factories and mines closed and thousands of people found their whole way of life suddenly disappearing. In time, these areas would adjust to the new IT and service industries that were replacing the old heavy industries, but this change was very painful.Britain’s economy was forging ahead at last, but it was leaving a lot of very angry, disillusioned people in its wake.
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg
Known as ‘Benelux’ for short, these three small countries became more important thanks to the European Union. Brussels got both the EU and NATO headquarters and little Luxembourg got the European Court of Justice and the Secretariat of the European Parliament, as well as more banks than it knew what to do with. Hosting these organisations didn’t make either country very interesting, though. The Netherlands had social problems arising out of large-scale immigration from their former colonies in Asia and the most liberal drugs and pornography laws in Europe. Much more interesting.
Street fighting man
Western Europe seemed to have it all – money, fast cars, big houses, money – but underneath the prosperous facade a lot of anger was simmering.
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began in Britain in the 1950s as a protest against American nuclear missiles being stationed there, but the movement soon spread to other countries. Thanks to nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, the anti-nuclear campaign also opposed the use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Some nuclear protesters went further than just marching and broke into American nuclear bases to do what damage they could before the guards got them.
Student riots
Students in the sixties and seventies gained a reputation for protest marches, usually against the Vietnam War or General Pinochet’s regime in Chile (see Chapter 13 to find out what they had against him). Most governments shrugged their shoulders and took no notice, but in 1968 students in Paris rioted against the government of General de Gaulle and seemed to come close to bringing him down. He actually left the country briefly, though he soon came back and unleashed the dreaded riot police, who dealt with the students and have patrolled French campus corridors ever since.
Terrorism
Prosperous capitalist western Europe threw up a variety of different – and very deadly – terrorist groups. These included:
The Baader–Meinhof gang: West German anti-capitalist gang led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. They attacked American military installations and other symbols of the triumph of capitalism, killing six people before they were rounded up. Baader and Meinhof committed suicide in prison.
The Red Brigade: Italian group with a similar agenda to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Their greatest coup came in 1978, when they captured the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, and left his dead body in a car parked halfway between the headquarters of the two main parties. The Italian police eventually managed to turn the tables on the Red Brigade, mainly by persuading members to turn informer.
The Provisional IRA: That’s the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The IRA campaigned against the British presence in Northern Ireland. They killed hundreds of people in Northern Ireland but their most spectacular coups were a series of bomb attacks in mainland Britain, including one that came within an ace of killing the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
ETA: ETA stands for Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna (Basque Territory and Freedom). It campaigns for independence for the Basque territory in the Pyrenees between France and Spain. It specialises in assassination and in 1973 it managed to kill the Spanish prime minister Carrero Blanco, though it just led Franco’s government to take savage reprisals.
Nowhere was safe from terrorists. In 1986 the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme, who had actually demonstrated against the Vietnam War while prime minister, was shot. His assassin was never found so we still don’t know why.
No-no NATO
The western Europeans were key players in NATO, the Western alliance the Americans put together in 1955, but some countries had an uneasy relationship with it. De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO in 1966, preferring to rely on France’s own independent Force de Frappe (strike force); Greece pulled out for a while after democracy was restored in 1974; Spain kept its own independent forces when it joined in 1982. Until the Cold War ended, being in NATO meant having US nuclear missiles stationed on your territory, which inevitably led to big protest marches. The Germans were particularly dubious about NATO: If it came to war, they’d be in the front line.
Western European governments were generally very pro-NATO but they were wary of being dictated to by the Americans.
In 1975 NATO leaders and leaders from the Warsaw Pact met in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, and drew up a set of agreements which laid down:
A warning system to stop little incidents starting a nuclear war by accident: Most people were probably alarmed to discover that no one had thought of putting this in place before.
Co-operation in economics and technology: Though this didn’t extend to helping each other with their ballistic missiles.
A commitment to human rights: From now on countries that ignored human rights could be held to account.
Eastern Promises, Promises
Eastern and central Europe were controlled by the Soviet Union, which rejected American Marshall Aid in favour of putting its trust in the communist system. The rest of the Soviet bloc didn’t get any choice in the matter: It had to go along with it.
The Soviet response to the European Union was Comecon, a sort of trading and industrial union of all the Soviet bloc countries. Essentially it worked as a supersize planned economy: Instead of just planning the Soviet economy from Moscow, Comecon planned the whole of the communist bloc’s economy, laying down what each country should produce. Planning everything centrally, however, led to widespread corruption and inefficiency. The Soviet media always liked to show TV footage of Western workers on strike or unemployed, so as to contrast their situation with the full employment, high wages, and guaranteed housing workers in the Soviet bloc enjoyed thanks to State subsidies. The reality, however, was chronic over-manning, with no incentive to expand or even change. Eastern Europe fell badly behind the West in scientific and technological development.
We caught him telling the truth, sir
All governments use spin and propaganda and all politicians can be caught out avoiding the truth, but life in the Soviet bloc was based on a regime of systematic lying. Eastern European governments censored all expressions of opinion, and even bugged the homes of prominent people to check up on what they were saying in private. Government news programmes would announce endless lists of statistics which were supposed to prove that production was breaking all records and that life in the communist bloc was better than anywhere else. Schoolbooks were altered to present the official point of view, especially about history and culture. People growing up in eastern Europe learned how to give the ‘correct’ answer to questions, while always reserving judgement in case it later turned out they’d been told a pack of lies.
The impulse to lie was so ingrained that the Soviets even started denying that major events such as Stalin’s death or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had happened. For this reason Gorbachev began his campaign of reform by encouraging Russians, and the rest of the Soviet bloc, to speak openly and to face up to the truth. Chapter 16 gives you the lowdown on Gorbachev’s changes.
You don’t want to mix with them westerners, comrade
Countries in the eastern bloc controlled travel very strictly. Foreigners visiting the East could expect to be followed and watched and to have a ‘minder’ attached to their group. Eastern bloc citizens could almost never travel to the West. Official permission had to be given to leave their countries, and it was generally granted only for travel to another communist country. Sports or cultural groups travelling to the West had to have a minder from the secret police to keep tabs on the group members and prevent them from mixing with westerners.
You fools! You let him get away!
Even secret policemen are human, and some very prominent figures, including the Russian ballet stars Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Czech tennis ace Martina Navratilova, and even Stalin’s own daughter, Svetlana, all managed to give their minders the slip and defect to the West. Defecting was a very dangerous business, though: The authorities at home never let families travel to the West together, so defectors really had to be prepared to leave everyone they loved behind. Even worse: The authorities often punished the families of defectors. Doing so helped discourage others from getting the same idea.
Despite the risks many people were willing to try to escape to the West. Some of the most ingenious attempts were made in Berlin by people trying to get through ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, the most notorious crossing point between East and West Berlin. People tried tunnels, hot air balloons, and bizarre hiding places in impossibly small cars to try to get across. Some tried the most direct way – by running – but many were shot trying to cross no-man’s land between East and West. The eastern bloc countries were ruthless in making sure the workers stayed in their workers’ paradise.
Please sir, I want some more (freedom, that is)
The people of eastern Europe didn’t just sit back and let their governments trample on their freedoms:
East Berlin 1953: Workers demonstrate against the slow pace of economic recovery. Measured response of the Soviet government: Sends in tanks and crushes the demonstrations.
Hungary 1956: Government of Imre Nagy allows freedom of opinion and releases political prisoners. Also announces that Hungary will leave the communist military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Oops. Measured response of the Soviet government: Sends in tanks and crushes the Hungarians.
Czechoslovakia 1968: Government of Alexander Dubcek allows freedom of opinion and releases political prisoners. Doesn’t say anything about leaving the Warsaw Pact. Measured response of the Soviet government: Sends in tanks and crushes the Czechs.
Ironically, Dubcek had actually cleared his reforms with Moscow first, but the other eastern European governments were scared that their own people would get ideas from the Czech example so they were determined to stop it. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was having second thoughts anyway, so he welcomed this invitation to show a bit of force.
One eastern bloc leader stood by the Czechs in 1968. Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania spoke up in support of Dubcek, which made many people in the West think that maybe he was a bit of a liberal himself. Bad mistake. Ceausescu soon proved one of the most brutal and repressive of the eastern bloc’s many brutal and repressive dictators.
All Change! All Change!
By the 1980s, the communist states of eastern Europe had strayed a long way from their Marxist ideals. Instead of being workers’ paradises where everyone worked for the common good in a spirit of equality and comradeship, they’d become corrupt and inefficient dictatorships, with an inner elite living very well while the great majority of the people had to make do without even the most basic consumer goods. The economic inefficiency was so acute that only the far-from-inefficient machinery of State repression prevented popular uprisings. So when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started loosening up the State’s grip on free speech and allowing people in eastern Europe to speak their minds, the people’s anger and resentment finally boiled over.
Poland: The cracks show
Poland provided the first sign that the eastern European regimes might not be able to go on keeping their people down forever. The Poles had a history of giving their communist masters grief: Polish workers had staged major protests in 1956, and in 1970 they forced President Gomulka to resign by coming out on strike.
Most Poles found a less dramatic way of defying the regime: By going to church. Poland remained defiantly Catholic, despite all the communist regime could do to discredit the Church. In 1978 Poland’s Catholics got a massive boost when the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtila, was elected Pope John Paul II. No sooner had he settled into the Vatican and chosen new curtains than he was back in Poland for a state visit. No one’s saying the pope was the only cause of what happened next, but he was certainly a major cause of it.
In 1980 workers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk came out on strike in protest at the poor living conditions and lack of freedom in Poland. (Savour the irony for a moment, of workers at a shipyard named after Lenin, coming out on strike in protest against a communist government. If you’re not sure why you should find this ironic, have a look at Chapter 4.)
The strikers were led by an electrician called Lech Walesa, who sported the heavy moustache Poles always admire in their leaders. Walesa announced that the shipworkers were launching a new trade union to be called Solidarity, open to any workers in any industry who wanted to stand up for freedom in Poland. Measured response of the Polish government: Solidarity was banned and the government introduced martial law.
But this time the military didn’t get away with using violence. Solidarity continued underground, the rest of the world applied economic sanctions to Poland, and Lech Walesa won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize.
Solidarity didn’t bring the Polish government down, but it did provide an important sign to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the old days of just sending in the tanks were over.
And they all lived happily ever after?
Mikhail Gorbachev’s coming to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 signalled the end for the eastern bloc (see Chapter 16 to find out more on Gorbachev and his changes in Russia). Gorbachev knew he would have more than enough to do holding Russia together: He had no intention of trying to prop up the eastern Europeans. He announced that they must each find their own way forward, without help from Moscow.
In 1989 anti-communist revolutions took place all over the Soviet bloc, with communist governments collapsing all over eastern Europe:
Hungary: Had been more liberal than the rest of the bloc since 1956 anyway. Opened its border with the West, whereupon thousands of East Germans suddenly decided they’d always wanted a holiday in Hungary, and started selling off pieces of the barbed wire barrier as souvenirs.
East Germany: Had its fortieth birthday celebrations spoiled by major protests in Leipzig and huge numbers of East Germans suddenly deciding to go to Hungary to visit the border. In November, the government opened its own borders, including the Berlin Wall. The world watched in disbelief as crowds of people climbed on top of the Wall and started hacking the hated thing to pieces.
Czechoslovakia: Pulled down its own communist regime a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The event was so peaceful it was called the ‘Velvet Revolution’.
Bulgaria: Protests on the street forced its veteran dictator, Todor Zhivkov, to resign.
Romania: When news reached the capital, Bucharest, that the army had killed peaceful demonstrators in the town of Timisoara, the crowd stormed Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist party headquarters while he was still addressing them, and he had to escape by helicopter. The Securitate, the secret police, kept up a fierce gun battle against the army (who had switched sides) before they were finally overcome and Ceausescu and his wife were tried and shot.
The countries of eastern Europe became democracies, and their peoples were hoping that the future would bring the sort of freedom and prosperity they imagined existed in the West. The Germans got the first taste of this new life, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl virtually frogmarched his East German counterpart into a reunification of the country in October 1990. From now on, eastern Europe would be taking its cue from the West.
Romanian holiday
Romania was a good example of the sort of conditions that led the people of communist Europe to turn against their leaders. Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, had set up a personal dictatorship and personality cult while his people starved. He also started a programme of ‘systematisation’, which meant bulldozing peoples’ villages and forcing them into ugly, half-built concrete blocks. He kept the country under firm control through the Securitate, the secret police. But he handled repression better than he did industrial development and by 1982 the country was deep in debt. To balance the books, Ceausescu simply exported everything Romania produced, leaving nothing much in the shops for ordinary Romanians to buy. The country was returning virtually to a barter economy and the people were living in Third World-style poverty and squalor. Meanwhile Ceausescu and his wife Elena lived very comfortably and appointed members of their family to important positions throughout the country. In 1989 the people’s anger finally boiled over and brought the hated regime crashing down.