Instead of unity among the great powers – both political and economic – after the war, there is complete disunity between the Soviet Union and the satellites on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There are, in short, two worlds instead of one.
Charles E. Bohlen, diplomat, expert on the Soviet Union, and adviser to President Truman, August 1947
From the beginning of the 1950s, exacerbated by the international superpower confrontation over Korea and the terrifying escalation of nuclear destructive capability, the political arteries in Europe hardened. The divide between the political systems of Eastern and Western Europe, inexorably growing since 1945, widened to become an unbridgeable chasm.
Travellers in pre-modern times had seen a division running from north to south through Europe, usually at the line where allegiance to the Orthodox Church began. And well before the Second World War a clear fault line had divided the more prosperous, more industrialized northern and western parts of Europe from the much poorer, overwhelming agrarian south and east. But the division that emerged after 1945 was of a different nature altogether. The Iron Curtain that had descended soon after the end of the war ensured that East and West were now separated by irreconcilably opposed political systems, driven by mutually hostile ideologies, which meant in turn that economies, societies and the mentalities of citizens developed along utterly different lines.
As the era recedes into a more distant past the division seems increasingly surreal. For generations familiar only with Europe since the end of the Cold War it is difficult to ‘feel’ (even if it can be abstractly understood) what it was like for Western Europeans to be cut off from great capitals like Warsaw, Prague or Budapest, or for citizens from Eastern and Central Europe to be unable to travel to Paris, Rome or London. Not only were the two halves of Europe physically separated from each other; to cross the Iron Curtain in either direction was to experience a wholly different world, a sense of alienation mixed with apprehension and isolation in an intimidating as well as strange environment.
The Cold War determined the new geography. Neutral countries, even if formally ‘non-aligned’ to either of the superpower-dominated defensive organizations (NATO and the Warsaw Pact), could not in practice avoid being seen (like Austria or Finland) as part of ‘the West’ or (like Yugoslavia) ‘the eastern bloc’. Greece and Turkey, despite their geographical position, were regarded as part of ‘the West’ whereas their Balkan neighbours belonged to ‘the East’. Spain and Portugal, although dictatorships stuck in a time warp, were also incorporated into ‘the West’ because of their vehement anti-communism and strategic significance as the bridge between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
The two blocs separated by the Iron Curtain were by no means monolithic. Within the blocs Europe, east as well as west, remained a continent of nation states. The nation state was the accepted basis of political organization and identity. In this sense, the Second World War, for all its unparalleled destructiveness, had at the outset of the new era changed nothing. But there was a significant difference. Most of the nation states in the east had been newly created at the end of the First World War. They had often looked west for their political inspiration. Most in the west had a longer – sometimes extremely long – history of development behind them. National identities, histories, traditions, cultures and political developments that had shaped a continent of nation states ran too deep to be easily or quickly diluted by supra-national attachments. Soviet communism had proved incapable of forcing Yugoslavia, a nation state itself only a generation old, into line. And other countries in the eastern bloc, as Poland and Hungary in particular were also soon to show, were prepared to struggle to uphold national interests and resist pressure to comply with Moscow’s demands – even if they had to realize that power ultimately came out of the turret of a Soviet tank. This military power ensured that the challenge to Soviet domination could not prevail. After seeming to loosen between 1953 and 1956, the grip of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe tightened remorselessly again and was not to be broken for over three decades.
The varied character of nation states in Western Europe, their recent history and their dominant features of political culture, all determined that there would be far less uniformity in political development than was the case east of the Iron Curtain. Nevertheless, certain features crossed national boundaries. The destabilizing pressures of the interwar era no longer existed. Fascism and National Socialism were now only favoured by discredited residual minorities. Communism, as the Cold War set in, lost popularity, its revolutionary alternative to liberal democracy unappealing, except for a minority – sizeable in Italy, France and Finland, but otherwise negligible.
If the political constraints were less overt than in the Soviet bloc, they nonetheless existed, largely determined by the Cold War. American influence, shaped above all by the need to harden Western Europe into a firm bulwark against communism, was a vital unifying factor. International bonds were forged and strengthened by the Western defensive alliance in NATO – in good measure the arm of American foreign policy in Europe. Whatever the variations in the Western European political systems, anti-communism provided a unifying ideological force.
A level of political convergence among the countries of Western Europe was also imposed by the demands of rapidly growing market economies (see Chapter 4). The specific interests of the individual nation states posed, it is true, a major barrier, more than in Eastern Europe, to supranational politics that threatened to compete with, let alone override, issues touching on national sovereignty. The two pre-war ‘great powers’ and victors in the war, Britain and France, were especially sensitive to any such perceived threat to national interests. Nevertheless, in Western Europe, too, governments of individual countries faced similar pressures and had in their aims and policies much in common. Some of these were starting to push in the direction of greater integration, initially at least of their economies, which would find formal recognition in the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) comprising France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux countries, established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
International and economic pressures combined in the first post-war decades to mould Western Europe, whatever the national differences, into a recognizable political entity, sharing established principles of liberal democracy, based on increasingly interwoven capitalist economies, and with far closer bonds with the United States than had existed before the war. Another, quite dramatic, change came over this half-continent in these years. Its nation states ceased (apart, for a little while yet, from Portugal) to be colonial powers. The war had left European imperialism on the defensive, but intact. The once great powers, Britain and France, had no intention of giving up their immense colonial possessions. Yet two decades after the end of the war they were gone, apart from a few minor remnants. The speed of the demolition of empires marked an astonishing shift, with far-reaching consequences not just for the newly independent countries but also for the political consciousness of the former colonial powers, and for their international status. It meant in the long run, too, that Western Europe looked predominantly to the consolidation of its own political, economic and cultural identity. Any expansionist notions, whether overseas or within Europe itself, now belonged to the past.
In the 1950s the western half of the European continent comprised seven constitutional monarchies (the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece), a grand duchy (Luxembourg), and ten republics (Austria, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, West Germany, Portugal and Spain – the last two of these being authoritarian states that would last until the mid-1970s). In addition there were some tiny independent states, principalities left over from feudal times: Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco, the ancient little republic of San Marino (where Communists participated in government between 1945 and 1957), and the Vatican City (whose independence had been established by the Lateran Treaty of 1929). Malta was to gain its independence from Britain only in 1964. Gibraltar remains to this day an anomalous British dependency.
Western Europe, even geographically no more than a loose conglomerate of nation states, did not exist as a political concept before the Cold War. The making of Western Europe was a gradual and piecemeal process, but was taking shape by 1949 as a group of liberal democracies based on the rule of law and international cooperation that were institutionally bound together through common interests, particularly in defence. It was forged in the first instance by commitment to the US-led anti-Soviet alliance, formalized in the foundation of NATO in April 1949.
That same year ten countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, all apart from Sweden founder members of NATO) came together in the Council of Europe, established to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law (building on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in December 1948). Within little more than a year they had been joined by Greece, Turkey, Iceland and West Germany. By the mid-1960s membership had been extended to Austria (1956), Cyprus (1961), Switzerland (1963) and Malta (1965). The first major step taken by the Council of Europe was to establish in 1950 (ratified in 1953) the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which set up that same year the European Court of Human Rights to offer recourse to individuals for alleged breaches of the Convention by member states. The Convention sought to establish a basis for preventing any recurrence of the grotesque assault on humanity that had taken place during the Second World War and to offer a different framework for social and political development than that unfolding in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
The crucial development during the 1950s and first half of the 1960s was the firm establishment, directly or indirectly assisted by American military and financial support, of liberal democracy in most of Western Europe. Without this foundation the freedom that soon benefited from the extraordinary and sustained economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s would not have flourished. It was a clear case of the primacy of politics.
On much of the southern rim of Western Europe, however, democracy either did not exist, or struggled to establish itself. The overriding priority of defence against communism nevertheless necessitated American (and other Western) backing here too, although this went in support of repressive regimes or countries where democracy was upheld more in lip service than practice.
The weakness of democracy in Southern Europe had deep roots. Turkey, Greece, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, the more heavily industrialized Spain had been among the poorest countries in Europe before the Second World War. Wealth had been (and continued to be) concentrated in the hands of small, powerful elites while much of the population, still heavily dependent upon agricultural production, lived in dire poverty. Where pluralist politics existed they had been clientelist. The role of the military had frequently proved the dominant factor in political systems contested by irreconcilably hostile sectors of ideologically divided societies. Political violence had been commonplace. Authoritarianism of one kind or another had predominated, or had at least never been far from the surface. In Portugal and Spain the Catholic Church had also exerted its great influence in support of repressive right-wing authoritarianism. During the war, Greece had undergone huge destruction and massive human suffering under German occupation, followed immediately by a ruinous and horrifically violent civil war between 1946 and 1949. Turkey, Portugal and Spain had avoided devastation by their neutrality during the Second World War. All three countries had, however, long been under forms of authoritarian rule – Turkey in the one-party regime that had existed since 1925, following the establishment of Turkey as a nation state by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), Portugal after a military takeover in 1926, and Spain since the nationalist victory in 1939 following a devastating civil war.
The accoutrements of General Francisco Franco’s atavistic dictatorship did not prevent the United States from welcoming Spain as part of the West’s anti-communist defensive umbrella. The worst of Franco’s savage revenge against his socialist and communist opponents during the Civil War had indeed subsided by the mid-1940s. But Spain remained desperately poor. Returning to the country where he had lived before the Civil War, Gerald Brenan was forcibly struck everywhere he went in 1949 by the extreme poverty afflicting the population. He found the country ‘corrupt and rotten and conditions are so bad that everyone except for a few black marketeers wants a change. But no revolution can take place. The police and the army see and will continue to see to that: they are the one solid and dependable thing in this ramshackle regime.’ A veneer of national unity was layered over a still deeply divided country, in which the defeated left-wing elements, especially in the industrial regions of Catalonia, Asturias and the Basque Country, were sullenly forced to comply with the demands of a reactionary and repressive dictatorship backed by a narrow ruling caste, economic elites, the Catholic Church and the numerically bloated officer corps of the army. There was sufficient left-wing opposition in other European countries to prevent Spain’s admission to NATO. But the United States entered an agreement in 1953 to place naval and air bases in Spain, which received American military aid in return. By the end of the 1950s Spain, by now accepted as a member of the World Bank, the IMF and the GATT trading arrangements, was starting to liberalize its economy and to recognize the potential of the tourist trade that was beginning to entice citizens from Northern Europe to spend some of their increased wealth on holidays in the Spanish sun.
For the time being the regime, increasingly anachronistic, could coexist alongside, and profit from, rapid economic modernization. But it was living on borrowed time. By the later 1960s as economic growth rates soared, the traditional rural heartlands of regime support declined with the drain of labour to the cities and more prosperous sectors of the economy. And as industrial workers recognized their increased bargaining power, even under repressive conditions, their new militancy started to challenge the rigid controls of the authoritarian state.
Portugal, one of the poorest and most backward countries of Western Europe, had been ruled since 1932 by António de Oliveira Salazar, a former professor of economics at Coimbra University. The ideological basis of the Salazar regime comprised little more than belief in the Portuguese nation, strong anti-communism, fervent commitment to traditional Catholic values, and maintenance of its overseas empire (the oldest of any imperial power). The commitment to its empire, which it controlled with an iron fist, was an obstacle to American support. But Cold War strategy outweighed objections. Portugal was a recipient of Marshall Aid and a founding member of NATO in 1949. The key to Portugal’s admission to NATO had been the strategic significance of the Azores to the United States in the emerging Cold War. In the early 1960s the importance of the Azores bases meant that the USA, though in principle supportive of anti-colonial movements in Africa, was prepared to overlook Portuguese repression of Angolan rebels.
The American commitment to military and financial aid to Greece and Turkey, announced by President Harry Truman in 1947 in the ‘doctrine’ he promulgated to defend ‘free nations’ against communism, was a strong inducement to the Turkish elite to move towards democracy and liberalization of the economy. By 1950 Turkey had joined the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, benefiting from Marshall Aid, and was a member of the Council of Europe. A Turkish contingent of troops had been among the first to join the United Nations Expeditionary Force to Korea in 1950, and had helped pave the way for NATO membership – the cause of great national rejoicing as the guarantee of Western military support against any Soviet aggression, and also as a source of American financial aid – two years later.
The pluralist political system introduced in Turkey in 1946 was only superficially democratic. And as the country was beset by mounting economic difficulties in the later 1950s the government became increasingly illiberal and repressive until it was toppled by a military coup in 1961. Although a return to pluralist politics soon followed, the influence of the military lurked as a constant threat and a second, more right-wing, strongly anti-communist coup followed a decade later. Despite its doubtful democratic credentials, Turkey’s strategic position ensured strong American backing.
Like Turkey, Greece – deeply polarized and poverty-stricken – had a pivotal position in NATO’s Cold War defence strategy. Greece was heavily dependent upon extensive American aid, while the CIA gave support to the strongly anti-communist military and security services. The complex internal politics of the country were strongly influenced by the deep split between the socialist left (the Communist Party had meanwhile been banned) and the conservative right, the historic enmities with Turkey (though relations improved somewhat during the 1950s) and continued tension in the British colony of Cyprus, where the majority of the population favoured union with Greece while the Turkish minority wanted partition. The intense anti-communism of Greece’s political leaders helped to ensure American backing for a parliamentary system that was often murky and corrupt, descending by the mid-1960s into great governmental instability and eventually a coup d’état in 1967 by military leaders fearful that elections planned for that year would bring a predicted lurch to the left and open the door to communist influence.
Beyond the politically and socio-economically backward southern rim of Western Europe, however, liberal democratic forms of government were able to establish themselves during the 1950s more firmly than ever before as the accepted framework of society. Inevitably, the characteristics of democracy varied from country to country. A number of democracies, notably in the British Isles, France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Switzerland, could extend long-existing firm roots, whatever the drastic interruptions some had suffered through German occupation. Vital for Europe’s future, though, was that democracy became consolidated during the 1950s in the former Axis countries – Italy, Austria and, above all, West Germany – that had earlier destroyed the peace of Europe.
This was a major advance, not only on the troubled interwar period but also on the first years after the war, which had inevitably seen continued great political upheaval. How the reformation of political parties and restoration of pluralistic politics would work out was at that time uncertain. Initially, it looked as if the left might profit from the prestige of its wartime resistance. But conservative parties had generally gained ground as the Iron Curtain descended, and until the mid-1960s conservatism triumphed throughout most of Western Europe.
The main exception to the general pattern of conservative dominance was Scandinavia, where there was a deepening of the distinctive form of social and political development that had started before the war, which proved an interruption rather than a fundamental break. The key before the war had been the readiness, deriving from perceived common interest, to reach a basis of cooperation both between labour and capital and between the political representatives of labour and the agrarian parties. The relatively high degree of consensual politics continued in the post-war decades. Geographical distance from most of the European continent probably played its part in the cultural underpinning of Scandinavian exceptionalism. A relatively low population size (no more than a total of around 20 million citizens in the whole of Scandinavia in 1950) and a small number of major urban and industrial centres were conducive to promoting social cohesion. But above all, the model worked. Although the internal development of Sweden, Norway and Denmark varied, the compromises that underlay consensual politics helped to turn the Scandinavian countries from a relatively poor part of Europe into one of its most prosperous regions. A stepping stone along the way was the establishment in 1952 of the Nordic Council, allowing citizens free movement without passports and providing the framework for a common labour market (joined by Finland in 1955). As elsewhere, Scandinavian prosperity benefited from the extraordinary economic growth throughout Europe in the post-war era. A hallmark of the Scandinavian development (with national variations) was, however, the extensive network of social services and welfare provision, paid for by high taxation, carried through by stable governments dominated not by Conservatives, as was more common in post-war Europe, but by Social Democrats.
Finland was a partial exception, forced by its proximity to the Soviet Union to tread a careful path, cooperating with the other Scandinavian countries while upholding its neutrality (as did Sweden) and avoiding becoming part of the western bloc. (Finland did not join NATO and became a member of the Council of Europe only in 1989.) It remained during the first post-war decades the poorest part of Scandinavia, with an electorate divided in the main between four blocs (Social Democrats, Agrarians, Communists and Liberal-Conservatives), unstable governments (twenty-five between 1945 and 1966), and a high communist presence of around 20 per cent of the electorate. This was in stark contrast to Sweden, where the Communists were, with no more than 5 per cent of the vote, a negligible presence and Social Democrats, at around 45 per cent, remained the dominant political force throughout the post-war years. Soviet pressure helped to ensure that Finland’s Social Democrats played little part in government before the mid-1960s. Gradually, even so, Finland moved inexorably into the Western orbit, with a social and economic system growing closer to that of the other Scandinavian countries and the beginnings of the transformation from a poor agrarian nation to a technologically advanced country with a high standard of living.
On Europe’s western perimeter Ireland also stood in some ways outside the more typical political development. Class was not, as was usually the case, the determining factor in political allegiance. Particularly in the south, politics reflected the legacy of the civil war of 1922–3. Ideologically, there was little to distinguish Fianna Fáil, the dominant party of government, from the main opposition party, Fine Gael (whose short periods in government were only attainable through coalition with smaller parties). Local patronage and family connections, rather than a distinctive political vision, were often the key to political power. A Labour Party existed, but, like Sinn Féin – the most uncompromising voice of the struggle to unite Ireland – it had only minority support. Most obvious of all in the Republic was the political and social dominance of the Catholic Church – welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the population (whose church attendance outstripped that of any other Western European country) – which left a big imprint on the social welfare, education and public morality of a still largely agrarian country. Even after the mid-1950s, when new initiatives started to be adopted to stimulate economic growth, the Republic remained a European backwater.
In Northern Ireland, too, the partition was a crucial determinant of political and social life. The six counties of the province of Ulster had a population rigidly divided on near-apartheid lines between the majority Protestants, whose loyalties towards the British Crown veered from firm to fanatical, and the minority Catholics, discriminated against in housing, education, the workplace and most other forms of life, who often looked towards the Irish Republic across the border for their identity and in the hope of a better future. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was electorally unchallengeable, regularly winning more than two-thirds of the vote, thereby ensuring continued Protestant dominance in the province – a dominance that began to be eroded only in the rapidly changing, and increasingly turbulent, conditions from the mid-1960s onwards.
In most of Western Europe, however, the consolidation of democracy rested on the more conventional lines of a division between socialism and conservatism, which had already been established in the immediate post-war years. As communist parties lost ground in the late 1940s under the impact of the Cold War, socialism meant in practice Social Democratic parties rooted mainly in the industrial working class and supportive of pluralistic democracy. Conservatism most commonly expressed itself as Christian Democracy. This attached considerable importance to traditional religious values, though its concrete form varied. In West Germany it consciously set out to transcend the narrowly denominational politics that had been so damaging between the wars. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, the continuation of the pre-war ‘pillarized’ subcultures (Catholic, Protestant and socialist) meant that Christian Democracy, in the shape of the Catholic People’s Party, did not reach out beyond its denominational support. Italian Christian Democracy differed again. In a country with no major denominational divide, it penetrated Catholic organizational networks and built its substantial basis of support in the countryside and among the urban middle class in good measure on its appeal to Catholic social and moral values, and by its outright opposition to communism (as well by its dispensation of political patronage). Unlike some of its ideological antecedents, Christian Democracy, whatever its form, was unequivocally committed to democratic principles and prepared to accommodate (and manipulate) rather than resist social change. Although in electoral terms there was often only a narrow gap between left- and right-wing levels of support, conservative parties of one kind or another tended to dominate between 1950 and the mid-1960s, building on the platform they had established during the early years of post-war recovery.
Reinforcing the resort to conservatism was the widespread desire for ‘normality’, for peace and quiet, for settled conditions after the immense upheaval, enormous dislocation and huge suffering during the war and its immediate aftermath. Stability was paramount for most people. As the ice formed on the Cold War, every country in Western Europe set a premium on internal stability. Governments saw this as their key objective, and were prepared to support the welfare reforms that they saw as a prerequisite to sustaining it. It was a virtuous circle. Stability gave people a sense of security that underpinned the likelihood of further stability (and continued conservative success). Where political systems had been newly established or wholly reconstructed after the war, following German occupation and the deep internal enmities it had engendered, this required a level of collective amnesia – a readiness to avoid dwelling on the painful past in order to favour the stability and prosperity of the present.
A strong desire for ‘normality’ would probably not have been enough in itself but for the fact that these were years of unparalleled economic growth (to be explored in Chapter 4) which produced unheard-of levels of prosperity. The rapid material improvement in the standard of living for most people encouraged a readiness to stick with what appeared to be working so well. Political parties proposing radical alternatives faced an uphill task. That would start to change by the mid-1960s, aided by a declining deference towards authority, especially among a new generation born since the war, and by the diminishing influence of the Churches, which had stood firmly behind Christian Democracy.
Underpinning the success of conservatism in the consolidation of liberal democracy in Western Europe was the Cold War. By the early 1950s the Cold War was itself contributing substantially to the stabilization of politics as support for communism dwindled more or less everywhere. Awareness of the ruthlessness of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and fear of communist expansion were easy to exploit by Western anti-communist propaganda, much of it sponsored by the United States. Although nowhere as paranoid as in the USA (where the ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria that accompanied the witch-hunts pursued by Senator Joe McCarthy in the US Senate was at its height during the 1950s), the vehemence of anti-Soviet feeling helped to solidify Western liberal democracy. The Korean War in the early 1950s intensified anti-communism and further boosted conservative parties (of different kinds) which were its chief beneficiaries, while Social Democratic parties on the more moderate left joined in the outright rejection of Soviet communism.
Britain fitted the common European pattern in the turn to conservatism – the country was run by Conservative governments between 1951 and 1964. It was nevertheless in many ways an exception among the states of Western Europe. Britain had been the only European belligerent power to escape enemy occupation. It had emerged from the war victorious, if exhausted and nearly bankrupted, with its political, economic and social institutions intact. The war had produced unprecedented levels of national solidarity, temporarily at least overriding deep class divisions, and there was national pride in the victory over Nazism. The monarchy enjoyed great popularity. The British parliamentary democracy had almost total backing from the population. The ‘first past the post’ electoral system, unlike the proportional representation systems of most countries in Western Europe, strongly militated against small parties and tended to produce stable governments with sizeable majorities.
Clear election winners emerged even though, in fact, the electorate was almost evenly split between Conservative and Labour. At five general elections between 1950 and 1964 the Conservative vote ranged between 43.4 and 49.7 per cent of votes cast, Labour’s vote between 43.9 and 48.8 per cent. Most of the remainder voted for the Liberals, a once-mighty party but now reduced to only around 9 per cent of the vote (falling in 1951 in fact to as low as 2.6 per cent). Parties of the extremes were in electoral terms an irrelevance. Fascism, never in possession of a single parliamentary seat in Britain even during the 1930s, was a non-entity, completely discredited. The Communist Party was almost devoid of electoral support; the 100 Communist Party candidates in the 1950 election averaged no more than 2 per cent of the vote. All these factors went far towards ensuring a high level of continued stability and policy adjustments rather than seismic shifts.
For many in Britain the Conservative victory at the polls in 1951, returning to office as Prime Minister the war-hero Winston Churchill, by now almost seventy-seven years old, was reassuring. There was, in fact, no sharp break with the policies of the previous Labour government. The Conservatives, placing a high premium upon social peace, were conciliatory towards the powerful trade unions (backed by nearly ten million members). They did not try to reverse the nationalization of industries carried through by their Labour predecessors, apart from denationalizing iron, steel and road haulage in 1953. The welfare state was sustained. Expenditure on the National Health Service was increased. The programme of house-building was extended. There was even a new term ‘Butskellism’, coined by journalists in 1954, to indicate convergence of economic policy between the former Labour Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, and his successor, the Conservative R. A. Butler (‘Rab’). Continuity was also marked in foreign and defence policy. The winding-up of the empire, begun under Labour, was extended as the move to a self-governing free Commonwealth advanced in Africa and Asia. There was no change in commitment to the Korean War, NATO, the building of an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, or relations with the United States. The Conservatives also followed directly from Labour in keeping their distance from the early tentative steps towards integration in continental Europe. Britain still saw itself as a great power, playing an important role in world affairs. The bridge across the Atlantic was far more important than the bridge across the English Channel.
The Conservative government in Britain was, in fact, though unwilling to admit it, the beneficiary of the austerity that the post-war Labour administration had been forced to endure. By the early 1950s economic conditions were improving markedly. The terms of trade were running in Britain’s favour. Fewer exports were needed to pay for imports. By 1955 national income was as much as 40 per cent higher than it had been in 1950. Rationing had finally been ended. Income tax at the standard rate was reduced to 42.5 per cent, where it would remain for a quarter of a century. The vital ‘feel-good factor’ was sustained, with a buoyant economy and expanding availability of consumer goods, throughout the remainder of the 1950s. It was the basis of further Conservative electoral victories in 1955 and 1959. The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had aptly captured the positive popular mood three months before the 1959 election. He claimed that levels of prosperity surpassed anything in Britain’s history. ‘Let us be frank about it,’ he declared in a speech in July 1959, ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’
By the early 1960s, however, economic problems were starting to mount, unpopular wage controls were introduced, the government was beset by a scandal involving the sexual pecadillos of the War Minister, John Profumo, and the image of a tired and failing government was compounded by President de Gaulle’s rebuff in January 1963 of Britain’s belated attempt to join the EEC. In 1964 Labour, under the wily Harold Wilson, a leader with the popular touch who seemed to point the country towards the future, not the past, won a wafer-thin majority. Thirteen years of Conservative government were over. Britain entered a new and, as it proved, far less stable phase.
British conservatism, with its deep roots, differed from the more overtly religious ideals that underpinned the conservative parties on much of the continent, the more important of them explicitly committed to ‘Christian Democracy’. The emerging success of Christian Democratic parties had, in fact, been the most significant development in the internal politics of Western Europe in the immediate post-war years. The more stable conditions of the 1950s were to provide the framework for the consolidation of this initial success.
Although the pattern varied, in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and West Germany, Christian Democratic parties (in tone, if not always by name) played a significant, often the dominant, role in politics during the 1950s and early 1960s, their prominence generally waning only by the mid-1960s. Government in Switzerland was made more complex by strong cantonal loyalties and by frequent direct participation of the people in plebiscites (which makes for party-political compromise and cooperation, generally favouring conservatism in practice). Coalitions in each of these countries were the norm, driven by electoral systems based on proportional representation. As in the Netherlands, where the traditional ‘pillars’ of Catholic, Social Democratic and liberal-conservative subcultures continued to exist side by side until their erosion in the mid-1960s, there was a readiness to work with rival parties to ensure stability and effective government.
The complexities of ‘pillarized’ subcultures in Belgium were compounded by the linguistic division of the country into the Flemish- and French-speaking regions. This made compromise between the major parties, the Socialists and the Christian Socialists, more difficult, and gave rise to continuing bitter conflict. The monarchy was, at least in the early post-war years, itself not a unifying element. King Leopold III’s chequered wartime record – he was accused of being too friendly towards the German occupiers, and even of treason – was held against him by much of the population. In 1951, after his return from Swiss exile had provoked huge strikes in protest and he had gained the support of only a slight majority of the population in a referendum, he abdicated in favour of his son, Baudouin. Here, too, there was a regional split. Only 42 per cent of voters in Wallonia, where the Socialists were dominant, supported the monarch, whereas Flanders, where the Christian Socialist strongholds were located, provided him with 70 per cent support. Baudouin, who ruled Belgium until his death in 1993, did offer the symbol of unity that his father had not been able to supply. Somehow the country avoided falling apart. Ultimately, the two halves of Belgium had more to gain through staying together than through breaking up, especially once prosperity spread, though the country’s linguistic antagonisms would continue to afflict politics for decades to come.
A willingness to look for compromise and cooperation was especially important in Austria in ensuring that there was no repeat of the crippling divisions that had paved the way for Hitler. Electoral support was almost evenly split during the 1950s and early 1960s between the Christian Democratic Austrian People’s Party (the conservative descendant of the pre-war Christian Social Party) and the Socialist Party. Other parties, including the Communists (who had a tiny level of support), were of only minor significance. The Nazi Party had of course ceased to exist, although many former Nazis were able to conceal their own dubious pasts behind a wall of silence and amnesties for all but the very worst crimes of the Nazi era, not least since Austria was conveniently regarded internationally as Hitler’s ‘first victim’, thereby overlooking the warmth of his welcome at the Anschluss in 1938 and the subsequent total absorption in his regime. Crucial in the Austrian politics of the post-war world was that the bitter hostility of the 1930s, which had led to a brief civil war in 1934 and the establishment of a quasi-fascist authoritarian state (ended with the German invasion of 1938), was now transcended.
Between 1947 and 1966 government in Austria was run by a ‘grand coalition’ of the two major parties. In this duopoly the Christian Democratic right and the Social Democratic left divided up government ministries and public administration by allocation of posts in accordance with their proportion of support in the country (which was almost equal). This inevitably produced a patronage system in which party allegiance provided the ticket to status and advancement, housing, jobs, trade licences and much more. But it worked. Economic growth and spreading prosperity brought with it a readiness to avoid labour disputes that could rock the boat. And Austria’s close geographical proximity to the communist eastern bloc (and memories of the Soviet occupation until 1955 of part of the country) played its part in concentrating minds. From being a focal point of instability and upheaval in Central Europe in the 1930s, Austria was transformed into a pillar of democratic solidity.
Christian Democracy had emerged in the late 1940s as the largest political force in Italian politics, and retained around 40 per cent of electoral support during the 1950s and early 1960s. The combined socialist and communist left could usually garner some 35 per cent, though the better-organized and socially more radical Communists proved able to increase their support, especially in the northern industrial belt, at the expense of the divided Socialists. By the early 1960s the main opponents of Christian Democracy were the Communists, who were backed by about a quarter of the electorate and controlled bastions of support in the big industrial cities of the north. The rest of the votes went to a range of small parties – Liberals, Republicans, Monarchists and Neo-Fascists. The political split between the Christian Democrats (CDs) and the left-wing parties reflected the country’s deep social and ideological divisions. What emerged were separate subcultures in which political allegiance – party membership was the largest of any country in Western Europe – was a necessary passport to jobs and personal advancement.
Italian governments came and went, each lasting in the period 1945–70 on average less than a year. And after Alcide de Gasperi, the towering figure of the formative years of Christian Democracy, was ousted in 1953 – he was to die the following year – his successor Guiseppe Pella was the first of twelve premiers to hold office by the end of the 1960s. De Gasperi had himself presided over eight administrations. Pella’s government lasted for less than five months, the cabinet of his successor Amintore Fanfani a mere twenty-one days. But beneath the superficial change there was much continuity, both in personnel and policy. Cabinet ministers played musical chairs, much as they had done before the First World War. Fanfani was Prime Minister five times in all, Antonio Segni twice, Giovanni Leone twice. And the CDs remained the mainstay of every administration. In the intensely factionalized party, ideology was secondary to retaining the hold on power and, crucially, patronage – of the often corrupt kind that the Italians called sottogoverno (literally, ‘sub-government’). In the impoverished south, the mezzogiorno, the success of the CDs owed much to the way they were able to take over deeply embedded clientelism through dispensation of the state’s resources. And in the north, where the CDs had some of their greatest strongholds, they could exploit the extensive network of big Catholic associations to cement their support – and the important backing of the Catholic Church.
The ineffectiveness of the series of weak and short-lived centrist coalitions in the 1950s led to a brief attempt in 1960 to incorporate the neo-fascist right in government. But this provoked widespread protests in which the police killed a number of demonstrators. The CDs consequently did a volte-face and began overtures to the anti-communist centre-left. This eventually produced in 1963, under Aldo Moro, a coalition that even included the Socialists, though the Socialist Party split as a result when a significant faction on its left, including many trade unionists, found collaboration with Christian Democracy an intolerable prospect.
Moro’s three administrations lasted for five years, but most of the promised social reforms came to nothing. The bloated civil service, which doubled in size between 1948 and 1969, remained unreformed and chronically inefficient. The judiciary, presiding over a legal system that operated with painful slowness and drawing disproportionately on the law schools of southern Italy for its membership, was a highly conservative caste with an anti-left bias, concerned above all to defend career prospects and independence from government interference. The large and well-financed armed forces had little to do, but maintained two admirals for every ship and a general for every 200 metres of the border with Yugoslavia. This was social and institutional stasis. But, for the Christian Democrats, holding on to power was an end in itself.
The obstacles to radical change in Italian politics and society were great and numerous. But Christian Democracy’s efforts to bring about such change were modest indeed. At the same time it proved capable of blocking reformist forces on the left. Italy remained a deeply divided country, its divisions and internal problems simply managed rather than overcome throughout the long years of CD dominance. For the leaders of Christian Democracy that was enough. And though a hallmark of Italian politics, governmental instability was in fact quite compatible with stability of the system itself.
The pivotal country in the stabilization and democratization of Western European politics was unquestionably West Germany (meaning the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin – the latter still under the four-power occupation of the former capital city and not formally part of the FRG). At the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949 stability had been far from guaranteed. The new state had been a product of defeat and division. Until 1952, when it was granted sovereignty in foreign affairs, it remained technically an occupied country and only gained full recognition as a sovereign state in 1955. It had no armed forces. It had no established political system. Its ideological divisions ran deep. Its very recent Nazi past left it intensely morally damaged, strongly distrusted by its European neighbours (as well as the United States and the Soviet Union), and facing the problem of integrating in a new democracy millions of refugees and expellees (whose pressure groups were able to exert significant influence on the government) – as well as the many citizens who had at one time avidly supported Hitler’s dictatorship, including those directly implicated in its crimes against humanity.
More than anything else, West Germany was pivotal because its borders were not settled. And at the start of the 1950s the question of its borders divided the German public, much of which – according with the stance of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats – favoured early reunification and political neutrality rather than the country’s indefinite division and its integration into the orbit of Cold War politics as practised in the West.
At the first federal elections in August 1949 the multiplicity of parties, though mostly now bearing new names, in many ways resembled that of the Weimar era. Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with the support of no more than 31 per cent of the electorate emerged only narrowly ahead of its main rival, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which gained 29.2 per cent. Adenauer, who had been Mayor of Cologne during the Weimar Republic and was already aged seventy-three, managed through arm-twisting and hard bargaining to piece together a coalition dependent especially on the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), though he also co-opted smaller parties. Bonn, a small town on the Rhine, rather than the more obvious Frankfurt am Main, was chosen as the capital of the Federal Republic. It was sarcastically dubbed the ‘capital village’; for Adenauer it had the notable advantage that it was so close to his Rhineland home. Adenauer was elected Federal Chancellor by a majority of a single vote (his own). Yet by 1963, when he finally resigned office, most West Germans thought he had been a greater statesman than Bismarck.
Fourteen years of the Weimar Republic had ended with Hitler in power. Fourteen years of the Bonn Republic saw liberal democracy consolidated. Why did the second German democracy succeed so completely when the first failed so catastrophically?
Constitutional changes helped. They were not, however, the main reason. The framers of the Basic Law were certainly conscious of the flaws in the Weimar Constitution and successfully sought to overcome them. The Federal President was now given largely representative functions. It was made far more difficult to overthrow an existing government through a vote of no confidence. And, perhaps most significant in preventing small parties from exercising undue influence, only parties gaining more than 5 per cent of the vote (initially at regional, but from 1953 at federal, level) were allowed representation in the Bundestag.
Crucial above all in the successful consolidation of democracy in West Germany were two factors. The first was the extraordinarily rapid and strong economic growth, ‘the economic miracle’ as it was labelled, that enabled Germans to improve their standard of living beyond anything they might have imagined possible at the foundation of the Federal Republic. This gave ordinary citizens a big stake in the new political system. It showed them that democracy worked to their material advantage – something that the Weimar Republic had never achieved.
West Germany was fortunate, as were all Western European states, in profiting from the worldwide boom that followed the Second World War. It also had a number of uniquely favourable conditions for growth. It benefited from the flow of often well-qualified refugees, over ten million of them, who poured into the country, highly motivated, anxious to improve their lives, and willing to work for low wages. They were much needed, since the immense task of rebuilding the country itself, of course, offered vast opportunities for employment. Germany’s formidable industrial capacity, though badly damaged, had not been completely destroyed by the war, had in fact partly been modernized, and was able to rebound swiftly. The Korean War brought an unexpected bonus to the economy. Since production of armaments was prohibited, West German industry turned to consumer goods that found ready markets abroad and fed a remarkable export boom as well as satisfying rapidly growing domestic demand. Economic growth was also spurred by the need to build new homes to cope with the acute housing shortage left by the war and the influx of refugees. Over five million homes were constructed during the 1950s, stimulating the myriad subsidiary industries that supplied the building trade.
The resurgence of world trade, liberalized and regulated under the arrangements agreed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) three years later, provided the international framework within which West Germany’s buoyant economy could flourish. The regulation of West Germany’s commercial debt, agreed in London in 1953, to pay off at low and completely manageable rates of interest a total amount of around $15 billion over more than thirty years, down to 1988 (what was owed from before and during the war to external creditors, mainly American firms), was a further important step in the recovery in firmly establishing the country’s debt-worthiness. In fact, the debt was, thanks to the scale of economic growth, already largely paid off by the end of the 1950s. The question of payment of reparations to Nazi victims, overwhelmingly located in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, was, however, postponed until a negotiated peace treaty. (A separate agreement was reached to pay a total of 3.45 billion marks in compensation (Wiedergutmachung) to Jews in Israel and elswhere.)
The second reason why democracy could firmly establish itself in West Germany by the mid-1960s was the Cold War. The Korean War, which gave rise to renewed fears of a new world war, appeared to many West Germans, like others in Western Europe, to confirm the acute dangers of communism. And the existence of ‘the other Germany’ provided ideological cement. Even for opponents of Adenauer and the CDU, the existence of what almost all of them took to be a highly unattractive alternative model in Communist East Germany, so close to home – an image constantly reinforced by the mass media – built on and extended the anti-communism that been relentlessly hammered home by the Nazis.
The Cold War enhanced close dependence on the United States, and drove Adenauer’s determination to seek forms of integration with other European countries, most especially – laying aside longstanding bitter enmities – with France. For Adenauer, a Rhinelander, this was a palatable as well as necessary move. The turn to the West was, however, highly controversial since it had a direct corollary: accepting that for the indefinite future there could be no expectation of East and West Germany uniting. This was a bitter pill to swallow. The leader of the SPD, Kurt Schumacher (whose personal standing drew on the ten years he had spent in a Nazi concentration camp), was unwilling to abandon the priority of reunification, though he shared the view that this could only come about under the absolute guarantee of freedom. For Schumacher and the third or so of the population that supported his party, a reunified and neutral Germany was a far more attractive proposition than binding the Federal Republic to the American-dominated capitalist (and militarized) West.
On 10 March 1952, alarmed by the prospect of West German integration in a Western military alliance directed against the Soviet Union, and just before the signing of a fundamental treaty between the Western powers and the Federal Republic aimed at restoring much of West German sovereignty (becoming fully effective in 1955), Stalin made an offer to the Western powers aimed at creating a united, neutral Germany. He envisaged a peace treaty and ‘free activity of democratic parties and organisations’. The Americans, after consultation with the British and French, gave a cool though not altogether dismissive answer. A second ‘Note’ from Stalin on 9 April then specifically offered free elections in a united Germany, which would ‘have its own national armed forces’ for the country’s defence.
Adenauer had immediately recognized the danger to his hopes of Western integration – for him the absolute priority – and, backed (after some initial hesitation) by his cabinet, rejected the initiative out of hand. For much of the West German population, however, there were distinct attractions to Stalin’s offer. Putting Western integration before reunification was inevitably highly controversial. Adenauer had to tread carefully. He was, though, unbending in his stance. He argued that reunification could only come about through Western strength. The Western powers accepted his arguments and did not reply to the second ‘Stalin Note’. On 26 May the ‘Germany Treaty’ between the Federal Republic and the Western powers cemented their relations for the foreseeable future. By then, the ‘Stalin Note’ was history.
At the time, and since, it has been asked whether this was a missed opportunity. It was not. The probability is that the establishment and consolidation of a stable liberal democracy would have proved far more difficult, if indeed at all possible, had the terms of the ‘Stalin Note’ been accepted. The risk that the whole country, even presuming that the terms offered had been genuinely upheld – a doubtful assumption – might gradually be sucked into the Soviet sphere of influence, was not worth taking. As it was, West Germany remained totally committed to integration into the West, above all to the defensive shield of the United States. It paid dividends. Although the proposal for a European Defence Community was eventually, in 1954, torpedoed by France, the very country that had advanced it in the first place, the upshot (as noted in Chapter 1) was the initially highly controversial creation of a West German army, the Bundeswehr, to form an integral part of NATO, and the fulfilment of Adenauer’s aim of full sovereignty for the Federal Republic.
Reunification unsurprisingly held an emotional appeal for much of the population. Two-thirds of West Germans continued even in the mid-1960s, when asked in opinion polls, to state that unification of Germany was their key political objective. Most of them nonetheless accepted that this would remain for many years an unrealistic expectation. The Adenauer government itself held to national unity as the ultimate objective and refused to recognize the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign state. In practice, however, reunification was a dead letter long before the division of Germany became quite literally concrete with the erection of the Berlin Wall starting in August 1961.
By then Adenauer had twice, in 1953 and 1957, won convincing electoral victories. The narrow margins of 1949 had been replaced by a huge increase in support for his party. In the 1957 election to the Bundestag, the Federal Parliament, the CDU and its Bavarian sister-party the CSU (Christian Social Union) won an absolute majority (50.2 per cent of the vote), the only time that any party won such an outright victory in the history of the Federal Republic. Adenauer’s slogan ‘no experiments’ had chimed perfectly with the popular mood, reflecting the satisfaction of the growing affluence resulting from the ‘economic miracle’. The extraordinary record of growth allowed the Chancellor to offer an important extension of social benefits that proved a significant factor in his triumph: the guarantee of pensions index-linked to the cost of living. Affluence was now set to extend into old age.
In an age of growing affluence the old vocabulary of class warfare had lost much of its resonance. The SPD leadership drew its conclusions and in 1959, at a party conference in Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine adjacent to Bonn, dropped the Marxist rhetoric – it had in practice been no more than that – which by now appealed at best to a minority of its core vote in industrial regions. Aiming to court the middle classes and win the centre ground of politics, the SPD turned away from its hostility to capitalism and rejected the ultimate objective of state ownership of the means of production. The party had already abandoned its insistence on a foreign policy directed towards reunification. The following year, 1960, it confirmed its acceptance of Western integration, (West) German rearmament and membership of NATO. The fundamental changes in the SPD’s programme were an indication that West Germany had turned into a modern democracy which, for all its own peculiarities arising from its history and the division of the Cold War, had a party-political system in essence similar to that elsewhere in Europe. Policy was now largely a matter of adjustments rather than any advocacy of an alternative system.
By the early 1960s the authority of the aged Chancellor, by now in his mid-eighties, was starting to weaken. In the 1961 elections the CDU/CSU’s proportion of electoral support declined slightly for the first time. In October the following year Adenauer’s standing was badly tarnished by the repercussions of a government raid, using methods reminiscent of those of the Nazis, on the offices of the news magazine Der Spiegel, after the publication of an article attacking the Minister of Defence, Franz-Josef Strauss, and highlighting West Germany’s inadequate conventional defence capability. Adenauer was seen by many, mobilized in mass protests, as ready to override legality in supporting a high-handed action that raised doubts about the firmness of democracy and fears of a return to arbitrary state power. The ‘Spiegel-Affair’ marked the beginning of the end for Adenauer’s long Chancellorship. Even at eighty-seven years of age Adenauer did not leave office willingly. But he had stayed in government too long. He was effectively forced out by his own party in October 1963. This ushered in a more unsettled era in politics and society. The years of conservative dominance were over.
Many West Germans, especially left-liberal intellectuals, found much to criticize in what they saw, with some justification, as the stuffy, dull provincialism of the Adenauer era. They frequently bemoaned what they saw as a lack of artistic creativity, innovation and dynamism. The Weimar Republic had provided these in abundance. But its chronic political instability had ended in Hitler. The Bonn Republic was certainly a pale shadow in terms of cultural excitement. It did, however, create lasting stability and prosperity.
Some literati thought the critique among intellectuals had gone too far. The writer Johannes Gaitanides acknowledged in 1959 ‘the weaknesses, mistakes and failings of the Federal Republic’, but claimed it was a mistake to dismiss its notable achievements. ‘How would this critique of the Federal Republic look,’ he asked, ‘if it had not produced an economic miracle, full employment, improvement in the social status of workers, integration of expellees from the east and refugees from central Germany [by which he meant from the regions that had become the German Democratic Republic], further development of social security, shortened working hours, co-determination of workers in heavy industry and restitution to victims of Nazism?’ He thought little of criticism that ignored the advances made, including reconciliation with France (for so long the ‘arch-enemy’), the growing integration of West Germany into Europe, greater intellectual and artistic interchange with the West, and the breaking-down of barriers between Catholics and Protestants. Another writer, Kasimir Edschmid, raised similar points in January 1960: ‘If in 1948 you had told one of the million poor mites who now drive round in their own cars that he would be seen as well-off, nicely set up, going on foreign trips with hard-currency deutschmarks in his pocket, overall a respectable person (so soon after collecting the cigarette ends of occupying soldiers on the streets), he would have rubbed his eyes and thought you were a madman.’
Adenauer’s successes at home and abroad, most of all the securing of stable democracy in West Germany, had been remarkable. They had come, however, at a high price. This was not just the painful division of Germany (and the lasting, seemingly permanent, loss of its former eastern provinces beyond the Oder–Neisse line – West and East Prussia, most of Silesia, much of Pomerania and part of Brandenburg). There was also a moral price: the readiness to draw a veil over the crimes of the recent Nazi past and even accept former active Nazis into the federal government. The political activities of those still harbouring hopes of returning to a nationalist authoritarian government were strictly curtailed. The Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei), numbering around 40,000 members, was banned in 1952. But most of the Allied denazification, limited as it had been, was reversed. Under amnesties between 1949 and 1954 all but the tiny minority of civil servants who had been convicted of the most serious offences in the Nazi era were rehabilitated, and allowed their pensions. Judges and lawyers, many with a dubious past, were able to continue in post. One of Adenauer’s closest aides, Hans Globke, had served in the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Hitler’s regime and had been the main author of the commentary on the racial laws introduced at Nuremberg in 1935. Another former Nazi, Theodor Oberländer, Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War in Adenauer’s governments between 1953 and 1960, had before the war been involved in racial planning for a future Eastern Europe under Nazi rule. Pensions paid to war widows included one for Lina Heydrich, whose husband, Reinhard, assassinated in June 1942 by a Czech resistance group trained by a British Special Operations Executive unit, had been chief of the Reich Security Head Office. Continuities with the Nazi past were also marked in the personnel of the Foreign Ministry. Many former Nazis, including some guilty of heinous actions before and especially during the war, managed to rebuild post-war careers and eventually die peacefully in their beds.
Morally, the rapid rehabilitation of former Nazis – even including some who had been involved as members of the security police in some of the worst crimes against humanity in Eastern Europe – was shameful. Was it politically worthwhile, or even necessary? The Allied denazification had been widely unpopular. People were all too ready to push the blame for the catastrophe of which they saw themselves as victims on to Hitler and other leading Nazis. Unsurprisingly, most people, according to opinion polls, did not welcome the involvement of Nazi functionaries in the running of West Germany. But delving too closely into the actions of ordinary people during the dictatorship had implications for so many Germans that there was a widespread willingness to draw a line under what had happened and focus on the present and future. For the vast majority of the population, maximizing the benefits of the ‘economic miracle’ without rocking the boat by undue preoccupation with the recent past was what counted. Adenauer’s amnesties and rehabilitation accorded, therefore, in good measure with popular mentalities in an age of amnesia. They involved him in some sharp controversies, over Globke for instance. But as election results showed, they did not dent his popularity. The reintegration of former Nazis perhaps also contributed to neutralizing undemocratic forces. More aggressively pursued denazification and prosecution of Nazi criminals might instead have continued to underscore the divisions and pain of the recent past, possibly making the swift stabilization of a functioning democracy more difficult. If the ends are seen to justify the means, then it could be argued that the high moral price for the political prize of a consolidated West German democracy was worth paying. The Federal Republic bore a stain, however, that would accompany it for decades to come.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the only country of Western Europe where the governmental system failed during the 1950s was France. Despite the bitter legacy of German occupation and the wartime Vichy regime, this would have been hard to foresee at the foundation of the Fourth Republic in October 1946. However, within twelve years, amid endemic governmental instability and a mounting crisis of the state, the Fourth Republic collapsed.
What is the explanation when, despite at least equally chronic governmental instability, the Italian Republic continued to stagger on? As a defeated country emerging from civil war in the final phase of the Second World War, it might have seemed improbable that Italy’s political structures would survive those of liberated France, ranked among the victorious Western Allies. Yet they did.
Certainly, the constitution of the French Fourth Republic was a major handicap. Political instability was guaranteed by the ease with which governments could be brought down (though a well-functioning civil service ensured a significant level of economic stability). The powers given to the legislature over the executive more or less mirrored those of the weak Third Republic, encouraging factionalism and lack of party discipline among members of the National Assembly. If anything, in fact, such tendencies were even more pronounced in the Fourth Republic. Léon Blum, who had been Prime Minister in the Popular Front government of 1936, reflected in 1949 that the Fourth Republic was a repeat of the Third, ‘as if French history had begun, in a senile way, to stutter its old thoughts, having refused to learn anything new’. However, Italy’s constitution also promoted severe parliamentary factionalism and a similar readiness to topple governments (within a relatively stable state system). The main reasons for the divergent fates of the Italian and French political systems were not primarily constitutional.
They lay, first, in the relative cohesion – or lack of it – of the conservative right in the two countries. In France, a divided right was unable to exert anything remotely resembling the dominance of the conservative right attained by Christian Democracy in Italy. In the 1951 elections the nearest French equivalent to a Christian Democratic party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP, Popular Republican Movement), seen to represent Catholic interests, was able to win only 13.4 per cent of the vote, slightly less than the total gained by various smaller conservative parties and significantly less than its main challenger, the Gaullists, who gained 21.7 per cent. The centre and left were also divided between the Radicals (the party of small business and the countryside) with 10 per cent, the Socialists with 15 per cent and the Moscow-aligned Communists – who stood outside all alliances – with 26 per cent. (As in Italy, the strength of early post-war communism owed much to the depth of pre-war social and ideological divisions that had been then sharply intensified in the fight for liberation in the last years of the war.) No party won even a fifth of the seats in the National Assembly, and all coalition arrangements were flimsy. The political landscape was as a consequence irredeemably fragmented.
Closely associated with the splintering of the right in France was the second reason: the unique figure of Charles de Gaulle. The war had turned de Gaulle into a national hero, the emblem of French resistance to Nazi rule. It had also elevated de Gaulle’s sense of his own indispensability to France’s return to national greatness. Seeing himself as standing above the squabbling and bickering of parliamentary politics that filled him with disgust, his self-image was that of the national saviour in waiting. He had resigned in 1946 as head of the Provisional Government, created a new political movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Rally of the French People) in 1947, but six years later, as its fortunes waned and it suffered a bad electoral defeat, he abandoned it and in July 1955 once more withdrew from politics, ostensibly to write his memoirs. From then on, he was an aloof, brooding presence in retreat at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, disdainful of the Fourth Republic, certain that the time would come when France would need him again.
The crisis that indeed brought de Gaulle back to power was an expression of the most important of all the factors that undermined the Fourth Republic: the colonial question, and specifically the issue of Algeria (to which we will shortly return). Had Italy faced any external problem of such gravity, its political system might well have cracked under the strain. In France the issue of Algeria was a running sore in domestic politics. The intensifying gravity of the issue was sufficient to split the country, and ultimately to destroy the Fourth Republic.
France under the Fourth Republic was barely governable. The idealism that had followed the Liberation seemed light-years away. Immobilisme was the term used to describe the stagnation. As in Italy, governments came and went – twenty of them in all before de Gaulle – but to no noticeable effect. Constructing a government capable of surviving even for a short time was a difficult process. On occasion France was left for weeks in a state of near paralysis without a government. In early 1951, with the country beset by big strikes in the face of steeply rising prices, there was no government for nine days. In July and August there was a gap of thirty-two days between governments. In spring 1953 France went through what Janet Flanner, a well-informed American observer who had long lived in Paris, described as a ‘record-breaking five-week political crisis’ without a government. In autumn 1957 the country again went for over five weeks without a government and renewed waves of strikes by public employees, protesting at the inability of their pay to keep up with rapidly rising prices even though industry was prospering and the better off were sustaining a consumer boom.
The most impressive Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic, Pierre Mendès-France, a left-leaning member of the Radical Party, was able through bold decisions and great tactical skill to hold together his ministry for eight months in 1954–5 before his enemies on the right brought him down. By then France was embroiled in the deepening crisis over the civil war in Algeria that would beset the country for years to come. Yet French governments were ill-equipped to deal with the crisis. Elections to the National Assembly in January 1956 produced another hamstrung parliament. And now a new disruptive force on the right, the Poujadists (the creation, initially as a tax protest, of Pierre Poujade, a shopkeeper from southern France, which rapidly won support from small business) – a quasi-fascist movement that won 11.6 per cent of the vote and fifty-one seats in parliament – contributed to a bloc of relentless opposition, alongside their ideological enemies, the Communists and the Gaullists, to ensure parliamentary stalemate and continued political turmoil.
By May 1958 the four-year civil war in Algeria had exploded into an uprising of colonial white settlers led by army generals who threatened outright revolt by the French army unless General de Gaulle returned to power as head of a new national government. De Gaulle had long awaited the call. It now came. That month he made a triumphant return to politics. In circumstances of grave crisis the saviour-in-waiting agreed to fulfil what he saw as his sacred destiny. By the end of the year he had received wide plebiscitary backing for a new constitution, establishing the Fifth Republic as effectively a presidential regime. Foreign and defence affairs, in particular, were the prerogative of the President. Constitutional reforms introduced in 1962 gave de Gaulle even wider powers, now extended over many areas of domestic policy. The powers of parliament were in contrast greatly reduced. The National Assembly was in any case dominated by the Gaullists, tame adherents of the President, guaranteeing his complete control, while that of the left withered. It amounted to a conservative revolution from above.
The huge problem of Algeria remained. The surprising solution that de Gaulle came to was among his greatest achievements. The Algerian question that poisoned French politics in the 1950s was, however, part of the wider issue of decoupling from empire – an issue that also caused problems in varying ways for a number of European countries, especially Britain.
The Second World War marked the beginning of the end for European imperialism. Germany’s brutal imperialist ambitions in Eastern Europe had, at enormous cost, been halted once and for all. Italy had formally renounced its claims to colonies in the Treaty of Peace with the Allies of September 1947. But five Western European countries – Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal – still held huge overseas possessions as hostilities ceased. And they had no intention of letting them go. Yet within twenty years of the end of the war these were nearly all gone, apart from Portugal’s increasingly anachronistic colonies (which would be liquidated only in the mid-1970s) and a few remnants of the once mighty British and French empires.
Nationalist independence movements were emboldened by ideas of universal human rights embodied in the United Nations Charter. Doctrines of racial supremacy, the ideological basis on which imperialist rule rested, lost all legitimacy. And the weakening position of colonial powers was compounded by the increasingly unsustainable costs of empire. As it became both costly and ideologically indefensible to uphold colonialism as globalization gathered pace, and as anti-colonial forces gained strength (and encouragement from the success of parallel independence movements), imperialist powers gradually yielded to the pressures for independence.
The Dutch empire was the first to go. The Japanese conquest had revealed the sheer weakness of the Western colonial powers in East Asia and fostered the growth of nationalist movements that, once occupation ceased, took up the armed struggle for independence in the Dutch East Indies, what was to become Indonesia. The nationalist guerrilla movement sustained the anti-colonial struggle for four years. The Dutch tried to re-establish their colony – a rich supplier of rubber and other resources – but their forces were too weak to prevent the nationalist insurgents succeeding by 1949 in attaining independence, though the Dutch managed to hold on to two eastern provinces, which they called Netherlands New Guinea, until 1962.
Belgium’s colony in the Congo had not been directly involved in conflict during the Second World War, which probably slowed the movement towards independence, compared with equivalent movements in East and South Asia or North Africa. With mounting difficulties, the Belgians – who in earlier decades had treated their possession with marked brutality and only belatedly introduced a more benign, paternalistic policy – were able to sustain their colony until armed conflict broke out in 1959. By then, the tide of anti-colonialism, backed by the United Nations, was surging strongly. Recognizing their own weakness and realizing the futility of trying to sustain colonial rule, the Belgians conceded independence to the Congo within a year, though they left behind a fragile state wracked by internal divisions that would soon descend into civil war.
The size and geographical spread of the British empire meant that decolonization was bound to be a more complex process than it was for the Netherlands or Belgium. As they had done when building their empire, British representatives usually tried to co-opt nationalist leaders and local power-brokers into the process of dissolving imperial rule. It was far from an invariable success, though it often helped to smooth the process of transition and avoid the descent into colonial war. Decisively, however, the growing independence movements encountered from the mid-1950s onwards a sharply diminished appetite for empire.
Surprising in some ways is how relatively painless – for the British people, though seldom those fighting for independence and inhabitants of the newly formed successor states – the unravelling was of such an immense overseas empire. This was probably at least in part because so few British citizens had any detailed knowledge, let alone any personal or direct experience, of the former colonies. Although many families had relatives in the white Dominions of Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, the empire had, in any tangible sense, mainly touched the lives of an elite educated in Britain’s public schools with a view to later appointment to the colonial civil service, to an officer’s commission in the army, or to a career in banking and commerce involving trade with overseas possessions. In any case, by the 1960s the Dominions were loosening their ties with Britain, and popular support for the empire was waning fast. There was no doubt much wider residual pride when people recalled schoolroom maps showing how much of the world Britain had once dominated, particularly among the population old enough to remember the empire at its height. But for many, perhaps most, among the younger generation growing up after the war, the empire was not much more than a historical relic, often little more than an array of exotic faraway places with strange-sounding names known only by the colourful contents of a stamp album.
That the dissolution of the empire caused so little trauma at home was a consequence, too, of its far from monolithic character and of the gradual process of change to the freer association of nations in a ‘commonwealth’. The term ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ dated from as early as 1917 – even then adapting still earlier expressions of a ‘commonwealth of nations’ reaching back to the 1880s. The formal equality of the Dominions was established in 1931. Indian independence in 1947 led to another change in nomenclature. In 1949 ‘British’ was dropped from the title of what now became ‘The Commonwealth of Nations’. That year the British monarch was accepted as the head of the Commonwealth, whose members were regarded as standing in free association, and could include independent nation states, which might themselves (as in the case of India) be republics. Although not all British overseas possessions chose to become members, most that went on to attain their independence did so. That a patchwork quilt of possessions lost dependent status piecemeal and adopted association with Britain through the Commonwealth meant that for most British people there was a relatively seamless transition – one certainly, in contrast especially with France, accepted fairly passively and with little political disturbance at home.
For the British government the liquidation of empire usually meant cutting losses. This had been the policy already in 1947 when Britain bowed to the inevitable and granted independence to India, Pakistan and Burma (and Ceylon the following year). India was no longer the ‘jewel in the crown’ of age-old cliché. British exports to India had already before the war been declining fast as Indian domestic industries, especially in textiles, expanded. Moreover, Britain, though once a major creditor, emerged from the war owing huge debts to India. Financially exhausted and unable to cover the costs of sustaining British rule, especially in the face of massive unrest and mounting internal violence between Hindus and Muslims, Britain yielded to the demands for independence that had already been so loudly voiced before the war as well as during the great conflict. Attempts to hand over a unified and peaceful country were hopeless. Uncontrollable religious violence and appalling atrocities prompted Britain’s announcement in early 1947 that it would withdraw by the following summer come what may. Inability to calm the violence led to the decision to partition the South Asian subcontinent in order to create an independent Pakistan with an almost entirely Muslim population. India and Pakistan became independent nations on 15 August 1947 (eastern Pakistan would itself become a separate nation, Bangladesh, in March 1971).
Britain left India in a horrific mess. Far from leaving ‘with honour and dignity’, the historian Piers Brendon commented, ‘the British left amid the clamour of homicide and the stench of death’. The religious violence, massive even before the British departure, far from subsiding escalated wildly thereafter. It spread through much of the country, but was especially bad in the densely populated provinces of Bengal in the east and Punjab in the north. Muslims, Hindus and Punjabi Sikhs had lived side by side there for generations but now discovered that new borders were to be driven straight through their provinces. Fear and violence went hand in hand as people fled, or were forced, across the frontier of the new countries. Those slaughtered are estimated to have numbered around a million, while about thirteen million refugees fled in an immense process of ‘religious cleansing’ in both directions across the new borders to safer havens. Tens of thousands of women were raped. Villages were set on fire. Relations between India and Pakistan would remain tense for decades. But the tragedy of the Indian and Pakistani people, and the loss of what for two centuries had been regarded as the cornerstone of Britain’s overseas possessions, caused no great stir among a British public beset by post-war austerity and concerned chiefly with its own hardships and problems.
Cutting losses and withdrawal in the face of uncontrollable violence had also marked Britain’s retreat from its involvement in the mandated territory of Palestine in 1947. ‘Mandates’, established by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War as the former Ottoman empire was carved up, were technically holding operations by colonial powers during a transition to self-government. Britain was given mandates in Palestine, Transjordan (later Jordan) and Iraq, and France mandates in Syria and Lebanon. Through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain had supported the Zionist cause for the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. The chief motive behind the Declaration was less humanitarian than to win the backing of Jews in the United States for American support for the Allies in the war and to encourage Russian Jews not to entertain notions of a separate peace with Germany. But the naive as well as somewhat cynical move laid down a minefield that, generations later, has still showed no signs of being cleared.
The Declaration did not specifically refer to a Jewish state, and Arthur Balfour, then the British Foreign Secretary, specifically pointed out that there was to be no prejudice to the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine. But that was wishful thinking. Arab hostility was magnified by the rapidly increasing numbers of Jewish settlers in the wake of persecution of Jews in Europe in the 1930s. The British rulers brutally suppressed what turned into a full-scale Arab revolt between 1936 and 1939. But their proposals first for partition, then for a unitary state with restricted Jewish immigration, satisfied neither Arabs nor Jews. When they persisted with their low immigration quotas even after the Second World War – while the Americans, backed by world opinion, pressed for large numbers of Holocaust survivors to be admitted to a safe haven in Palestine – the British had to contend with a wave of Zionist terrorist attacks. But they knew they were on the horns of a dilemma: to accept the American demand for higher levels of Jewish immigration would almost certainly trigger a new Arab revolt. Moreover, the costs of maintaining the mandate in Palestine – £40 million a year to keep 100,000 troops there – were far too high for post-war austerity Britain. ‘The time has almost come,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, advised the Labour government in early 1947, ‘when we must bring our troops out of Palestine altogether.’
With no way out of the impasse, and with the growing unpopularity of the mandate within Britain, the British government gave up, leaving the United Nations to do its best in 1947 to find a solution. But when the UN agreed to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Britain refused to implement the plan because of the considerable Arab hostility to it, and gave notice that it would end its mandate on 14 May 1948. At that point the Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a state of Israel. Many nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, immediately recognized the new state. The suffering of European Jews in the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany had in the eyes of much of the world provided an urgent moral imperative to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Israel. But the Arab states utterly rejected what they saw as the outright annexation of Palestinian land. The scene was set for the first war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–9.
Divisions among the Arab armies enabled Israel, by the time a series of armistice agreements were signed in February 1949, to extend its territorial hold beyond that envisaged in the initial United Nations proposal for partition. Israel had consolidated its existence by force of arms. But it had engendered deep, unquenchable hatreds among its neighbours as well as among the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees in Jordan (formerly Transjordan), Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Armistice agreements in 1949 resolved nothing. It guaranteed, in fact, the eventual resumption of hostilities. The later ramifications of the Palestinian problem for Britain, and for the whole of Europe (as for most of the world), would be profound indeed. But at the time there was relief in the one-time colonial power that it had extricated itself from such an intractable issue. People in Britain got on with their lives, glad to be rid of a problem in the Middle East for which they had for the most part neither understanding nor concern.
Britain’s withdrawal from India and Palestine did not signal a swift end to its other overseas possessions. British forces held back – for the time being – a nationalist movement in Malaya, a region with precious dollar-earning rubber resources, through the imposition of a state of emergency in June 1948 and the deployment of military power against insurgent communists. And they were engaged in Kenya between 1952 and 1956 in the brutal repression – in which thousands were killed – of the vicious Mau-Mau, whose anti-colonial struggle involved terrible atrocities. The dam walls of colonialism were yet to burst. However, they were soon to do so. And, curiously, what brought the surge that finally swept away Britain’s former colonies took place in a country that was already independent and had never formally been part of the empire: Egypt.
In July 1952 a group of Egyptian army officers overthrew King Farouk – a playboy monarch whose squandrously lavish lifestyle compounded his utter uselessness as a ruler. One of the officers, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, swiftly established himself as the dominant figure in the newly proclaimed republic. Within two years he had become its President and was regarded beyond Egypt’s shores as the champion of Arab anti-colonialism. His anti-Western stance and overtures of friendship with the Soviet bloc (which provided arms denied him by the USA) stirred growing antagonism in the United States as well as in Britain and France. Nasser was viewed as a grave danger to the influence of the West in such a volatile region and threatened the rich oil resources so vital to Western economies. The British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, who had succeeded an old and infirm Winston Churchill in April 1955, had in the 1930s witnessed at first hand the failure of appeasement to deal with the aggression of Hitler and Mussolini. This badly affected his judgement of Nasser, whom he portrayed, somewhat hysterically, as a dictator who this time had to be stopped in his tracks. The French Socialist Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, worried about the influence of Nasser’s pan-Arabism on the Muslim inhabitants of French possessions in North Africa, wholeheartedly agreed; Nasser’s intentions reminded him, he said, of Hitler’s aims as laid down in Mein Kampf. The French, Janet Flanner reported, were united by ‘the Munich complex’, regarded Nasser as ‘an Arab Hitler’, and were prepared ‘to risk a small war’ to prevent a great war being ignited by ‘pan-Arabism’.
Under an agreement dating back to 1936, British troops had been allowed to stay in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal zone, the crucial conduit of cheap oil supplies. But in 1954 Britain agreed to evacuate its forces, seen by Egyptians as no more than colonial occupiers, and British troops left the canal zone in June 1956. On 19 July the Americans, increasingly angered by Nasser’s attempts to play them off against the Soviets, withdrew funding, which had always seemed highly likely to be forthcoming, for the building of the Aswan dam on the Nile, a major construction project important for national prestige and vital for Egyptian water supplies. The following week Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
When diplomatic efforts to change Nasser’s mind failed, Britain and France decided to take the matter to the United Nations where, unsurprisingly, a Soviet veto put paid to hopes of a solution. Already behind the scenes, in any case, British and French leaders were preparing to ignore the UN and were plotting a military solution. Astonishingly, they thought they could act without even informing the American government of what they had in mind – a last show of the colonial powers’ hubris in foreign-policy affairs. A top-secret conspiracy was hatched involving Israel. Its troops would occupy the Sinai peninsula before Britain and France, after demanding the withdrawal of both sides in the certainty that the proposal would be rejected, would launch air and sea attacks, ‘restore order’, and so regain control over the Suez Canal.
The Israeli invasion went ahead on 29 October 1956. Two days later Nasser closed the Suez Canal to shipping; it would not open again until early the following year. On 5 November British and French troops began an airborne landing in Egypt. Their early military successes – it was subsequently estimated that these would have led within a day or two to the retaking of the Canal – were, however, rapidly brought to a halt by intense international pressure. The Soviets raised the prospect of rocket attacks on the invaders and a crisis escalating into nuclear war. Serious or not, this encouraged the United States to bring the crisis to a speedy end. American leaders were furious at being kept in the dark about the invasion plot and their threat to undermine sterling if no ceasefire was forthcoming proved decisive. As the losses of its currency reserves – huge already during the first two days of the Suez operation – mounted to dangerous levels, the British bowed to necessity and agreed to a ceasefire without even consulting the French. A United Nations peacekeeping force was sent to Egypt. The British and French withdrawal duly took place by 22 December. The diplomatic debacle was complete.
The left in Britain was outraged at this return to gunboat colonial adventurism. The right was more appalled at the government’s gross ineptitude in the Suez fiasco. Eden resigned as Prime Minister, officially on grounds of ill-health. He had waited in the wings for years as the heir apparent while Churchill clung to power. He had been an experienced and much respected Foreign Secretary, before and after the war. It was all the more ironic that he should make such a profound and damaging error in an issue of foreign policy. In domestic politics, though, Suez did remarkably little harm to the Conservative government that had so disastrously implemented it. Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan, went on to triumph in the 1959 election while Labour, which had vigorously attacked the government over Suez, remained in the doldrums. When it came down to what mattered most in the lives of ordinary people, Suez had a low ranking. Even so, Suez was a pivotal moment in Britain’s post-war history, a lasting blow to national self-confidence and to the standing in the world of a country that had only recently been one of the ‘Big Three’.
Relations with the United States were soon repaired. The much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ would be repeatedly emphasized and Anglo-American friendship advertised in the early 1960s by their contrasting leaders – Macmillan, the personification of patrician conservatism in Britain, and John F. Kennedy, the face of a youthful, dynamic American leadership. But it was a heavily imbalanced ‘special relationship’. It was more obvious than ever after Suez that Britain could make no significant moves in international affairs without the backing of ‘Uncle Sam’.
The British government realized that the game was up. Britain could no longer afford to sustain its military presence in so many parts of the globe. It had to accept that colonialism belonged to the past, that the most important consideration for the future was to establish friendly relations with the new independent states that would emerge from the end of the imperialist era. Once this fundamental reassessment was made, the end of empire came rapidly – and with remarkably little lamentation within Britain. Sudan’s independence in January 1956 had in fact preceded Suez. Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) gained its independence in March 1957. Malaya, the most economically valuable colony that remained, became independent in July 1957. In Cyprus independence (with British retention of military bases) was declared in August 1960, though in this case only after a violent and superficially resolved internal struggle between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Between 1960 and 1966 a further nineteen former colonies (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, Western Samoa, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Malta, Singapore, Gambia, the Maldives and British Guiana) attained their independence.
Harold Macmillan captured the mood as well as stating the obvious in a speech in Cape Town in 1960 when he spoke of ‘the wind of change’ blowing through the African continent. The main resistance came not from Britain itself, but from white settlers in the Union of South Africa and in adjacent Southern Rhodesia. South Africa, refusing to yield on its system of racist apartheid, left the Commonwealth in 1961. The Rhodesian government declared independence in November 1965 in the teeth of British opposition to such a move, aiming to retain the dominance of the white minority despite condemnation by the rest of the Commonwealth. This led Rhodesia into a brutal fifteen-year civil war but merely delayed the inevitable. Rhodesia eventually would be given independence as the new state of Zimbabwe in April 1980.
By then the British empire was – other than lingering, unimportant remnants – long gone, its obsequies effectively pronounced in the government’s withdrawal in 1968 of British forces from bases ‘East of Suez’. Britain could no longer afford expensive and unnecessary global commitments. And already by the early 1960s trade with the Commonwealth was shrinking fast. The Dominions were increasingly going their own way, loosening their once close bonds with the United Kingdom. Many political and business leaders were increasingly coming to recognize that Britain needed to reorientate its interests, to look for future prosperity less towards its former colonial possessions and more towards its European neighbours, whose economies were booming. Britain was on the way from a global imperialist to becoming little more than a European power. In 1962 the former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’. Decades later the remark was still apposite.
Suez had nothing like the same significance for the French as it did for the British. The bitter political debate and soul-searching about a global role that consumed the British political class were absent in France. There had been widespread support for the campaign in Egypt, and much of the blame for its failure was attributed not to the French government but to the United States and the United Nations which, it was claimed, had halted the attack when victory was imminent. Guy Mollet, unlike Eden, faced little serious clamour for his resignation and was given a big vote of confidence in the French parliament. Not Suez but Indochina and, beyond all else, Algeria symbolized the French retreat from empire. While the British surprisingly easily adjusted to the need to withdraw from their imperial commitments, the winding-up of the French empire was a traumatic business.
France’s colonial empire – second only to that of Britain in size – had been put under great strain by the war. Political loyalties in the French colonies had at first mainly favoured the Vichy regime after France’s calamitous defeat in 1940, but, often after bitter conflict, had by the middle of the war mostly been turned to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. At the same time France’s military humiliation had strengthened anti-colonial feeling in its Middle Eastern and African possessions. The mandated territories in Lebanon and Syria emerged from the war as independent nations. Anti-colonial movements had gained ground notably in North Africa, where an armed uprising in Algeria was put down with force in 1945. The French possessions in Equatorial and West Africa remained quiet. But a revolt against French rule in the geographically isolated colony of Madagascar in 1947 was eventually suppressed with great cruelty. By some estimates as many as 100,000 Madagascans were killed before the rebellion was crushed the following year. An uneasy French colonial domination resumed and lasted until Madagascar finally gained its independence in June 1960.
The Provisional Government in France after the Liberation made a number of minor concessions of political and citizenship rights to its African colonies, granting limited extension of voting rights and representation in the French parliament. The new constitution in 1946 chose the name ‘French Union’ instead of ‘empire’, trying as with the British emphasis on ‘commonwealth’ to defuse the sense of subservience in the overseas territories. The worst instances of colonial abuse were greatly diminished. But outwardly the French colonial empire remained largely intact. And none of the insubstantial changes made much mark on opinion in France itself. While the French generally approved of them, few contemplated granting independence to the overseas possessions. There was certainly much liberal sentiment in favour of colonial reform, and opposition on the left to colonialism itself. But for most French people the empire remained a matter of national prestige.
This was about to be sorely tested in Indochina. The French Vichy authorities had continued to run Indochina (comprising the present-day countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) effectively as Japanese puppets until late in the war. In March 1945, fearing the transfer of allegiance to de Gaulle, the Japanese had moved to direct rule, encouraging national independence movements as a weapon against the imperialist powers. The problems that were to beset the French arose from their post-war attempts to restore their colonial supremacy. The main difficulties occurred in Vietnam, where Emperor Bao-Dai had abdicated and the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, whose anti-colonialism had strongly emerged during his years in Paris immediately following the First World War, had declared a republic within days of the Japanese defeat in August 1945. (Remarkably, Ho had been significantly helped to establish his power base by American supplies of arms and military training for his guerrilla forces in the fight against Japan, provided by the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during the final months of the war.) The French, backed by public opinion in France, refused to accept the end of their rule and sent in over 30,000 troops to repel Ho’s determined peasant army, the Viet Minh, setting up a puppet government in the south of the country (then known as Cochin-China). French obduracy brought the escalation of what would turn into a long and brutal, but unwinnable, war against Viet Minh guerrilla forces.
Increasing numbers of colonial troops were poured into the fight. By 1952 the total reached 560,000, though only about 70,000 of them were French volunteers while the remainder were drawn from the colonies, mostly from Vietnam itself. By that time the Indochina War was intolerably expensive for France, taking up 40 per cent of the entire defence budget, and could be sustained only through substantial and growing financial aid from the United States – where after Mao’s triumph in China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War there was intense worry about the ‘domino effect’ of the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
The war in Vietnam was meanwhile highly unpopular within France. Losses were mounting. The numbers killed among the French colonial forces in Vietnam would eventually reach 92,000. While 52 per cent of the public questioned in an opinion poll in 1947 had been in favour of the war to keep Indochina as a colony, by February 1954 this had fallen to only 7 per cent. This was even before the greatest disaster in French colonial history: the defeat inflicted by the Viet Minh on 7 May 1954, following an eighty-day siege, on the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in north-west Vietnam. The French lost over 1,500 men in the siege, and a further 11,000 were captured. Dien Bien Phu was regarded as a national humiliation.
With that, the French had had enough. The government predictably fell. On taking office the new premier, Pierre Mendès-France, promised to resign if he did not accomplish a peace settlement in Vietnam within a month. Remarkably, he achieved his goal. A ceasefire was agreed at Geneva on 21 July 1954 and approved by a huge majority in the National Assembly, which gave the premier ‘a tremendous ovation’. Mendès-France became ‘practically a national hero’ in the eyes of the French public, weary of the costly and ruinous conflict in a distant part of the world known directly to only few French citizens. It was the signal for a rapid process of French disengagement from Indochina. There was no stomach for prolonging the presence of French troops in the region. By 1956 they were gone. The French government was more than happy to pass a poisoned chalice to the Americans and let them take over responsibility for the Vietnamese imbroglio.
In accordance with what was meant to be an interim arrangement reached at Geneva, Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel. Elections were envisaged two years later to unify the country. The elections never took place. American opposition to a deal that they viewed as leading to conclusive victory for Ho Chi Minh saw to that. The Americans had given ten times as much aid to the French as Soviet and Chinese backers had given Ho. But such vast expenditure would have been in vain, Washington believed, if communism were to triumph after all in Vietnam. So the Americans continued to prop up a corrupt puppet government in the south of the country, which had as little interest as they had themselves in allowing the elections to take place – with the near certain outcome that the whole of Vietnam would become a communist state under the rule of Ho Chi Minh. French intransigence before rapidly vacating what they knew was a lost cause was replaced by American short-sightedness in failing to recognize a lost cause when they saw one. It meant that the worst of the torment for the people of Vietnam was yet to come. The tragedy would deepen much further, and last for another twenty years.
As one colonial war ended for the French another began. And while Indochina was far away, the new war that began in 1954 in Algeria was close to home. In a sense, in fact, it was home, for Algeria (colonized since 1830) had been administered as an integral part of France since 1848 and, unlike other parts of the French empire, had attracted settlement by hundreds of thousands of European (not just French) colons or pieds-noirs (as they came to be known, perhaps, it was thought, because of the black boots that early settlers had worn). The level of political and economic discrimination by the settlers against the Muslim majority had led to protests against colonial rule already in the 1930s and the suppression of a nascent nationalist movement. Demands for reform arose again in the middle of the war. Anger at the limited French concessions to reform led to an outburst of violent protest at the end of the war, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the army and police, who killed several thousand Muslims. In the aftermath the French set up an Algerian Assembly, though granting only a severely limited franchise to the majority Muslim population.
The tensions simmered just beneath the surface. An explosion was inevitable at some point. It came on 1 November 1954 when the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, the Algerian National Liberation Front) attacked a number of targets of the colonial authorities, starting what became an eight-year war for an independent Algerian state based upon the principles of Islam. Mendès-France, fresh from his popular triumph in winding up the war in Indochina, was in this case prepared to make no concessions. He dismissed out of hand any notion that Algeria, a département of France, could break away. It was a popular stance.
Mendès-France had, in fact, set in train in 1954 the steps that would lead, by 1956, to independence for Tunisia and Morocco. Independence movements in those countries had faced colonial violence, and the anti-colonial struggle had involved bloodletting and atrocities, but the French government, also under international pressure, had eventually taken the sensible way out of a worsening situation. But Tunisia and Morocco were regarded as colonies; Algeria was seen as an integral part of France, administered from the Ministry of the Interior, not the Colonial Office. In French eyes (though not Algerian) the deepening conflict in Algeria was not a colonial but a civil war. This was the fundamental difference that determined French inflexibility over Algeria and produced long years of misery for so many of its inhabitants.
A pattern set in of escalating violence and extreme retaliatory counter-violence. In one flashpoint in August 1955 over a hundred civilian settlers were killed in a planned FLN action, prompting savage retaliation that left well over a thousand Muslims dead (by some estimates a far higher number). Terrorist attacks and localized atrocities met by a regime reliant upon gruesome reprisals was a recipe for a spiral of continued disaster. Guy Mollet, the Prime Minister, briefly tried a conciliatory policy in 1956 but in the face of the vehement opposition of the colons swiftly retreated to the objective of crushing the uprising. The number of troops was doubled. Torture was used extensively against FLN suspects. Great military force was deployed. But the FLN responded with further terrorist attacks. Public opinion turned against the savage war and, led by notable intellectuals on the left (prominent among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Paul Sartre), there were strong protests against the inhumanity of the French army in Algeria.
French opinion, however, while desperately wanting the war to end, did not favour independence for Algeria. In any case, the huge obstacle preventing any attempt to grant independence was the outright and violent refusal of the settlers to contemplate such an outcome. By early 1958 a crisis not just of the French government but of the state itself was brewing. When Pierre Pflimlin became Prime Minister on 14 May 1958 the crisis broke. Pflimlin favoured negotiations with the FLN. For the pieds-noirs this smelt of betrayal from Paris. They seized the government building in Algiers and chose the paratroop leader, General Jacques Massu, who had directed the ruthless counter-terrorist campaign the previous year, to head what amounted to a revolt against the French government. It was plain that the army backed the revolt. This was the background to the call for de Gaulle to take power. Pflimlin, newly installed as Prime Minister, was forced out of office towards the end of the month. It was the overture, described earlier, to the creation of the Fifth Republic.
The colons had thought de Gaulle was their man. They expected his prestige would succeed in ending the Algerian War to their satisfaction. But they were soon bitterly disappointed and incensed as de Gaulle, quickly realizing how intractable the problem was, gave indications that he was open to a negotiated settlement. This left the President uneasily balanced between the extremes of the FLN, unyielding in their demands for independence, and the pieds-noirs, ready to take up armed resistance against those demands. Disaffected generals, led by the one-time de Gaulle supporter General Raoul Salan, formed the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS). They planned more than one embryonic coup against the government, carried out a campaign of bombing in France, and tried to assassinate de Gaulle. Altogether the OAS was responsible for around 2,700 deaths, nearly all of them Algerian Muslims.
The Algerian War continued, amid huge violence, throughout 1960 and 1961. But de Gaulle prevailed. He was enough of a realist to know that eventual peace could only come through Algerian independence, and gradually moved to acceptance of that outcome. He used his immense standing and authority to gain the backing of 90 per cent of the French electorate for the ceasefire signed on 18 March 1962, which led to the declaration of Algerian independence on 5 July. Most of the embittered pieds-noirs, over 800,000 of them, recognized that they had no future in Algeria and moved to southern France, as did the Algerian Jewish community. Those Algerians, known as Harkis, who had worked in some capacity for the colonial regime, often as lowly administrators, policemen or soldiers, faced terrible retribution by the FLN at the end of the war. A minority of them managed to flee to mainly southern France where they were treated abysmally by the French authorities, subjected to social discrimination, and shunned or despised by the majority population. The total numbers of victims of the vicious eight-year conflict are hotly disputed, though at a minimum they numbered not less than around 170,000. In all probability the number far exceeded this total. The great majority of those killed were Algerian Muslims. No Frenchmen were put on trial for murder in French courts. France’s ‘civilizing mission’ – its ideological justification for rule over other peoples – had resulted in barbarity.
Remarkably, at the height of the dirty war in Algeria, de Gaulle was liquidating French colonialism throughout almost all of the rest of Africa. The constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958 had replaced the ‘French Union’ with the ‘French Community’, which gave overseas territories extensive rights of self-government though it stopped short of granting them full independence. Only French Guinea initially rejected attachment to the Community. But this set an example, one rapidly to be followed by other former colonies. The wind of anti-colonialism was blowing strongly by the end of the 1950s, and Algeria was hardly a glowing advertisement for French rule. De Gaulle had offered overseas territories the right to choose. They chose. Between 1958 and the end of 1960 as many as fifteen former French colonies (Madagascar, French Sudan, Senegal, Chad, Middle Congo, Gabon, Mauritania, Ubangi-Shari, Cameroun, Togo, Mali, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta and Ivory Coast) followed Guinea into independence. By 1961 the French Community had dwindled into near obsolescence. The contrast is stark between the swift winding-up of empire elsewhere in recognition of the obviously unstoppable desire for independence and the tortured acceptance of the inevitable in Algeria only after the huge bloodshed of a lengthy war. The unique status of Algeria was the essential difference. It took de Gaulle’s statesmanship and realism to end the largely nominal integration into France of what, despite the official denials, had in reality all along been a colony resting on discrimination against the nine million indigenous inhabitants by a million settlers.
By the mid-1960s only fragments of the once-mighty French and British empires were left. The age of empire was over.
The state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill – the last survivor of the ‘big three’ wartime leaders – on 30 January 1965 symbolized the passing of a generation wedded to the certainties of the nation state, imperialist domination and European great-power politics. The President of France, General de Gaulle, and the former President of the United States, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had stood alongside Churchill in the fight against Nazi Germany, were among the representatives from 112 countries who attended his funeral, an extraordinary display of pomp and ceremony. They saw a Europe that bore only scant resemblance to that which had emerged from the war twenty years earlier.
Most obviously, it was a Europe broken into two irreconcilable halves. The divide, already inexorably taking shape in the immediate post-war years, had widened to a point where, other than diplomatic formalities, there was little or no contact between the eastern and western parts of the continent. The two blocs, east and west, had meanwhile solidified. Western Europe, which had not existed even as a notion in 1945, was by now a definable entity. Two developments, examined above, had been of crucial significance to the making of Western Europe.
Most important of all was the consolidation of pluralist liberal democracy. This varied in its form from one country to the next, but was built everywhere on principles of law, human rights and personal freedom. It rested, too, on restructured capitalist economies that provided the platform for economic growth, prosperity and welfare systems which ensured a basis of social security for all citizens. The Cold War had provided an ideological impetus for the stabilization of Western European democracy. The American presence had provided a basis of security for its development. It was certainly far from perfect in any of its manifestations. When compared, however, with the chronic instability, divisive politics and social misery of the interwar years, the progress in the consolidation of democracy, the indispensable foundation of all that followed, was little short of astonishing.
The second major transformation had been the end of empire. This converted Western Europe into nation states of essentially similar status. Britain and France in particular, still clinging to notions of national grandeur, would not easily adjust to the fact that they were no longer great powers. They remained the most militarized states of Western Europe, possessors of nuclear weapons and seats on the United Nations Security Council. But in reality they were now little more than European powers. Dreams of empire increasingly became no more than the fading and often distorted nostalgia of a dwindling minority.
A third development remains to be explored. Economically, and in embryonic fashion also politically, Western Europe was moving in a direction difficult if not impossible to forecast in the early post-war years. It was starting to come together in institutions that coexisted with but to some extent transcended the nation state. This would prove a long, chequered and incomplete process, accompanied throughout by intrinsic tensions and conflicts but at the same time providing levels of cooperation and integration that would have seemed inconceivable in the years before the Second World War. It marked a major advance in building a foundation of lasting peace.
Eastern Europe stood wholly outside these patterns of fundamental transformation. There was change there, too, though it was much less far-reaching. Room for manoeuvre for Eastern European countries was closely confined. Its limits were tightly controlled by the clamp of Soviet domination.