It is the same with history as with nature, as with all profound problems, whether past, present or future: the more deeply and seriously one enters into problems, the more difficult are those that arise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In 1950 Europe was reawakening from the dark years of the worst war in history. The physical scars were to be seen throughout the continent in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. The mental and moral scars would take far longer to heal than the time to rebuild towns and cities. The inhumanity of the recent past would, in fact, cast a deep shadow over Europe throughout subsequent decades. Important steps towards shaping a new Europe had been taken since the war’s end in 1945. But the most striking legacy of the war for the immediate post-war world was twofold: Europe was now a continent divided down the middle by the Iron Curtain; and the new age was a nuclear era, with both of the superpowers in possession of super-weapons of mass destruction.
Europe was no longer at war. But a nuclear war, which seemed far from a distant prospect, threatened the entire basis of the continent’s capacity to survive as a civilization. And the threat of nuclear war, hanging over Europe like the sword of Damocles, did not depend solely upon events in Europe itself. For Europe was now fully exposed to the global confrontation between the nuclear superpowers. Events far from European shores, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, mark the beginning and end of the most dangerous phase of the Cold War for Europe (though a second, briefer period of heightened threat occurred in the early 1980s).
The children, products of the post-war ‘baby boom’, born into this new era would live to see changes that their parents could not have imagined. They would also experience an acceleration of change – political, economic, social and cultural – that exceeded anything known in earlier peacetime conditions. They were born into a time of searing austerity, much of it the direct consequence of war. Living accommodation was often makeshift as housing programmes tried to find homes for the millions of displaced and bombed-out families in much of the continent, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Even houses left standing after the war were often in a poor state of repair. Sanitary conditions for much of the population were primitive. There were widespread shortages of food and clothing. Only wealthy families would have such crucial pieces of household equipment, which freed women from regular household drudgery, as a washing machine, or a telephone, a fridge, a car. Even then, few probably possessed a television.
The post-war baby-boom generation benefited in their lifetimes from astounding medical advances. They were immeasurably helped by the establishment and extension of the welfare state, made possible by high levels of economic growth. Although living standards in countries behind the Iron Curtain soon lagged well behind those in Western Europe, far-reaching systems of social welfare and support were intrinsic to communist systems (if usually corrupt in their practice). This was the first crucial breakthrough, offering a level of social security that earlier generations had not known in both halves of Europe. In some respects, at least in Western Europe, the lengthy post-war economic boom, the social advances that it facilitated, and the early flourishing of consumerism that also encouraged optimism about the future, distracted from the underlying insecurity of a continent endangered by the potential for nuclear war.
The material progress since those times has been astonishing. The plethora of food available in the average supermarket in any European country today would have been met with sheer disbelief in 1950 or indeed in any previous time. Today’s families would look with horror at a home without a bathroom and with a toilet (often shared with other families) outside in the yard. Commodities that would have been extreme luxuries available only to a tiny minority are now commonplace. Most families have a car. Two cars for a single household is nothing unusual. A fridge to keep food cool is taken for granted. Foreign travel – the preserve of the wealthy in 1950 – is now available to millions. Nearly every home has a television. Satellites in space allow people to see television news, or watch a sporting event, live from the other side of the globe. Unimaginable until relatively recently, television can now even be viewed on mobile phones. And where once a trip abroad invariably necessitated phone calls home from a telephone box or a post office, mobiles now serve not just for making such calls effortlessly, or for sending instant messages around the world, but as mini-computers that offer an array of services. These include constant access to news and the possibility of not just speaking to but actually seeing on screen friends and relatives who live thousands of miles away. The availability of ever smaller and more readily available computers has transformed life in ways unthinkable only a short time ago, let alone in 1950.
Not just material possessions, but attitudes and mentalities have changed drastically as well. Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).
Such patterns of transformation – and many others – can be seen as part of the process of what has come to be termed ‘globalization’. This describes not just economic integration arising from the free movement of capital, technology and information, but the interweaving of social and cultural patterns of progress across national boundaries and throughout developing areas of the world. Globalization was far from simply a positive trajectory to ever better material provision. It had obvious dark sides. It has caused, for example, massive damage to the environment, a widening gulf between rich and poor, intensified (largely uncontrollable) mass migration, and loss of employment through automation made possible by technological change – and it continues to do so. The transformation brought through globalization runs like a thread through the following chapters. It is far from an unequivocal story of success. Europe’s new era of insecurity is inextricably enmeshed with the deepening of globalization.
* * *
This book explores the twists and turns, ups and downs, that have led from one era of insecurity to another – from the threat of nuclear war to the multilayered and pervasive sense of present-day insecurity. It attempts to explain the complex, multifaceted patterns of change in Europe between 1950 and the present day. Epochal turning points – 1973, 1989, 2001, 2008 – mark the way. Advances, progress and improvements lie alongside setbacks, disappointments and at times disillusionment.
A continuing thread of Europe’s transformation over the seven decades since 1950 has been the central importance of Germany. Change here, in the country that did more than any other to destroy the continent during the first half of the twentieth century, has been especially profound. Despite its destruction as a nation state at the end of the Second World War, Germany has remained at the heart of Europe’s development – central to post-war economic recovery, central to the Cold War, central to the ending of the Cold War, central to widening European integration, central to the creation of the Euro, central to the crisis of the Eurozone, central to the migration crisis, and central to the still-embryonic steps to reform the European Union after its recent serious travails. In the meantime Germany has become a vital pillar of stable liberal democracy, it presides over Europe’s strongest economy, has overcome forty years of division to attain national unity, and has reluctantly acquired the mantle of European leadership. Germany’s own transformation has played a key role in Europe’s post-war story – and is far from the least successful part.
No simple explanations of Europe’s transformation will suffice. Political, economic and cultural dynamics were too closely interwoven to permit a neat parcelization of the agents of change. Much of the transformation reflects deep-rooted social and economic change, not confined to Europe, which the term ‘globalization’ encapsulates. The rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War took shape under the impact of unprecedented global, not just European, economic growth that lasted over two decades. The collapse of that growth in the 1970s marked a decisive turn in development that influenced the remainder of the twentieth century.
Europe’s astonishing recovery in the immediate post-war decades had been conditioned by what might be called a ‘matrix of rebirth’, already outlined in the concluding part of To Hell and Back, the first volume on the history of Europe from 1914 to today. The elements of this matrix were the end of German great-power ambitions, the geopolitical reordering of central and eastern Europe, the subordination of national interests to those of the two superpowers, the upsurge of unprecedented economic growth, and the deterrent threat of nuclear weapons. By about 1970 all the points in this matrix had much less salience than they did in the early years after the Second World War. But the most crucial change was that economic growth was manifestly slowing. The long boom was over. The post-war economic order was about to alter fundamentally. The paradigm shift signified the beginning of what, in retrospect, can be viewed as an embryonic new matrix, which only gradually took shape over the subsequent two decades. What turned eventually into a ‘matrix of new insecurity’ comprised liberalized, deregulated economies, unstoppable globalization, a dramatic revolution in information technology, and, after 1990, the growth of multipolar bases of international power. Over time, the amalgamation of these components transformed Europe in many positive ways – but also led to kinds of insecurity that were quite different in character from the existential insecurity caused by the threat of nuclear war during the 1950s and early 1960s.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain the pace of globalization intensified markedly, the result in no small measure of the explosion of technological change and the rapid spread of the internet, especially after the World Wide Web (invented in 1989) became widely available from 1991 onwards. Already before then major cultural change was well under way. Central to this were the fight for social liberties, an emphasis on individualism and the onset of identity politics. From the mid-1960s onwards, value systems and lifestyles were altering in ways that would make Europe in many ways more tolerant, more liberal and more internationalist in outlook than had earlier been the case. But many earlier certainties and norms were dissolving.
Into these wide-ranging impersonal dynamics, the role of individuals and short-term political decision-making has to be added. The actions of a small number of key individuals – Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl prominent among them – cannot be reduced simply to reflections of structural determinants of change. At crucial junctures such individuals personally played a decisive part in Europe’s transformation.
The balance sheet of Europe’s transformation over the seven decades since 1950 will present itself in the chapters that follow. It is by no means an unqualified success story. Europe’s recent history has been far from purely benign. There have been some extraordinarily positive developments. But the picture is chequered.
And grave problems lie ahead.