DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL
Aneurin Bevan visits a patient of the British National Health Service, 1948. Source: Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
In February 1945 the leaders of the victorious powers met at Yalta, in the balmy climate and scenic surroundings of the Crimea, in order to consult on the transition to peace. “Waging a fierce struggle for the shape of the post-war world,” they were an impressive group, consisting of Winston Churchill, the indomitable conservative from London; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the ailing president from Washington; and Joseph Stalin, the revolutionary dictator from Moscow. In the hope that Allied cooperation would carry over from the conduct of the war, the trio of statesmen discussed the establishment of the United Nations, Russian participation in the defeat of Japan, and Polish frontiers. The conference signaled their “inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism in order to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world.” In “liberated Europe” the victors hoped “to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems.” Euphorically, all agreed that the postwar order of European peoples should be based on “democratic institutions of their own choice.”1
The task of restoring self-government was daunting because much of Europe lay in utter ruin. News photographs show that except for some fortunate stretches of untouched countryside, the combination of saturation bombing and savage ground fighting had reduced most larger cities to moonscapes of gutted buildings in which a few forlorn souls made their way through piles of rubble.2 With water mains ruptured, power lines cut, railroad tracks destroyed, bridges broken, and roads clogged, the most important task was to restore basic services and to provide enough food and fuel to assure the survival of the remaining inhabitants. Disposing of the physical remains of the dead so as to prevent epidemics and coping with the psychological traumas of mass murder and mass death by finding a way to mourn the losses posed other existential challenges. In order to pacify wartorn society and help restore civility, the rampant violence needed to be reigned in and bonds of sociability retied. But above all, new forms of domestic and international politics had to be developed so as to prevent another relapse into barbarity.
Renewing democracy was also complicated by the erosion of cooperation in the Grand Alliance, since the victory over Hitler revived prior differences. After all, it was the fascist menace that had forced the competing ideologies of liberal democracy and Stalinist communism into an unlikely wartime alliance that they had been unable to negotiate on their own. In spite of goodwill between soldiers and ideological affinity among intellectuals, the defeat of the Nazis removed the shared objective, allowing the divergence of political cultures and national interests to resurface. Intensive consultations notwithstanding, the western powers and the Soviet Union failed to conclude World War II with a peace treaty, since they were unwilling to compromise on their different interpretations of a postfascist order. Instead, Poland was moved west and Germany became divided along the lines of military occupation after U.S. troops withdrew from Leipzig in exchange for a share of control over Berlin.3 For the western countries this separation into contrasting spheres had the advantage of giving democracy a second chance.
Ironically, the greater physical destruction and loss of life during the Second World War inspired a more intensive soul-searching than after the First about how “to create conditions for a genuinely democratic government.” Among the victors, the U.S. leaders decided to remain involved in international affairs in order to help advance capitalism and democracy; the British public resolved to soften the class antagonisms of its parliamentary monarchy by extending the welfare state; and the French tried to stabilize their republican government. Shocked by the totality of the defeat and the depth of their own suffering, the losers in Germany and Italy also sought to forswear force and to democratize their societies on the western pattern that had proven superior.4 Though hardly visible to contemporaries, such collective learning processes reversed the direction of European development away from catastrophe toward civility, making 1945 the hinge around which its trajectory turned. While the Cold War initially obscured this qualitative change, the second half of the twentieth century turned out much more prosperous and peaceful for Europeans then the first.
The method that resurrected Western Europe after 1945 was a paradoxical form of conservative modernization that attempted to revive traditions while moving forward at the same time. Much of the physical rebuilding tried to resurrect as many houses and factories as possible in order to reconstruct the previous environment. Conservative parties also sought to restore prewar patterns of family life, religious values, and social deference so as to re-create order and stability according to accustomed norms. But at the same time, postwar Europeans continued to be enamored of technological progress, admiring the automobiles, refrigerators, and television sets that improved their mobility, consumption, and entertainment. Moreover, leftist parties pushed for social reforms and the artistic avant-garde resumed its experimentation in music and architecture, making modernism the dominant artistic style of western democracy.5 In many ways this attempt to recover the benign potential of modernity helped Europe to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, but its inherent contradictions also created those tensions which would inspire the revolt of 1968.
UBIQUITOUS DEVASTATION
The joyful victory celebrations in the Allied capitals were an emotional release that helped revive spirits for the grim task of reconstruction ahead. When an AP broadcast reported that the war in Europe had ended, over a million New Yorkers gathered in Times Square to dance, shout, and cavort in the streets. After the announcement of the unconditional surrender, enthusiastic crowds also assembled in Moscow’s Red Square, forming an impromptu parade to fete the victorious Red Army soldiers. A couple of weeks later fifty thousand troops paraded through Paris, cheered by over two million spectators seeking to reaffirm the recovery of French independence. During an official celebration in London in August, the king urged the British to work for peace, declaring: “Our sense of deliverance is overpowering.”6 In defeated Germany the Nazis feared retribution, but the liberated camp inmates were overjoyed, while most citizens were just relieved to still be alive. Victors and losers alike, however, faced the enormous challenge of repairing an unprecedented amount of physical and psychological devastation.
The destruction of Europe in 1945 was much greater than in 1918, since more areas had been involved in the fighting and new weapons proved much more lethal. Where there had been little Allied bombing or German ground fighting, stretches of the countryside and towns such as picturesque Rothenburg, in Bavaria, escaped largely unscathed. But the relentless bombing attacks had reduced the city centers of Rotterdam and Coventry, for instance, as well as the downtown areas of Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden to heaps of rubble, in which streets lined by shattered buildings disappeared under mountains of debris. The artillery barrages and scorched-earth tactics of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht had destroyed not just military targets but also civilian neighborhoods, and house-to house-combat in Stalingrad and Warsaw had left hardly a building standing. As a result, in a wide swath from France to Norway, from Italy to the Balkans, from Germany to the Soviet Union, housing stock, factories, railroad tracks, highways, and bridges lay in ruins. In the areas most affected, it appeared to American observers that the entire infrastructure of modern civilization had been destroyed.7
The horrendous death toll during World War II was also more than twice as high as during the First World War. Approximately 40 million Europeans perished as a direct result of the fighting, with the Allies suffering about twice as many military and almost fifteen times as many civilian casualties. With about 26.6 million dead, Russia lost the most people, followed by Germany with between 6.7 and 8.8 million killed and Poland with between 5.6 and 5.8 million murdered. In relative terms, more than 16 percent of the Polish population died, almost 14 percent of the Russians perished, and 10.5 percent of the Germans lost their lives. While about 30 percent of Wehrmacht soldiers fell in battle, the much larger Red Army had a casualty rate of about 25 percent. Due to the war of annihilation, about half the dead were civilians, with recent estimates of the Holocaust ranging between 4.87 and 5.85 million.8 Falling especially on men between ages eighteen and forty-five, this carnage left 1.6 women of marriageable age for each surviving male. The mass deaths thus propagated as children that were never born, so that the war left a deep and continuing gash in the population structure of the main combatants.
At the same time European streets and trains were clogged with an unending stream of prisoners of war, liberated slave laborers, and ethnic Germans expelled from the East. The several hundred thousand Allied POWs were only too glad to be free, but millions of Wehrmacht soldiers soon took their place in the camps, some of whom remained in Russian and French captivity for years. Moreover, the about seven million slave laborers and concentration-camp survivors were classified as “displaced persons,” or DPs, waiting to be returned to their countries of origin. While western politicians wanted to send them back, many DPs no longer had a home to go to, and others who did nevertheless refused to be sent back to cities now in a different state under communist rule, hoping for emigration papers instead. Finally, the fear of Red Army atrocities and the subsequent expulsion from their former residences in Eastern Europe and the territories conquered by Russia and Poland sent twelve million ethnic Germans on desperate treks toward the West.9 Only the organization and food provided by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration helped stave off a greater humanitarian catastrophe.
The disruption of the European economy and Allied punitive policy toward Germany also slowed down the recovery. Since essential goods were in short supply, rationing continued as well into the postwar years, thereby inspiring a black market in which heirlooms were bartered for food, with U.S. cigarettes such as Lucky Strikes serving as currency in the West. The lack of livestock, fertilizer, and manpower limited food production to only two-thirds of prewar levels, drastically dropping calorie intake and leading to widespread starvation. The destruction of the transportation network kept coal from being delivered to factories, reducing industrial output to about half the peacetime amount. Scouring parks and woods for anything to burn, many Europeans froze during the bitterly cold winter of 1946–47. Moreover, the demilitarization of the German economy through widespread dismantling of factories also incapacitated the industrial heartland of Europe, inhibiting the restoration of international trade. Finally, labor calls for socialization and bureaucratic planning further slowed the revival of the postwar economy.10
Another poisonous legacy complicating reconstruction was the widespread hatred that stoked demands of revenge for past injuries. Not just the actual Nazi and fascist perpetrators but Germans and their auxiliaries in general became international outcasts, with little sympathy for their postwar plight. Allied newspapers seriously discussed radical proposals such as shooting the entire officer corps of the Wehrmacht for its alleged crimes. While some punitive politicians suggested partitioning the defeated country, others like the U.S. secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau proposed stripping it of industry in order to reduce its entire population to mere agricultural subsistence.11 Within the liberated states, the resistance movements similarly called for a strict reckoning with collaborators who had profited from doing business with the despised enemy. Popular passion fed spontaneous acts of violence against Germans and those who had done their bidding, often ignoring the rule of law. This understandable insistence on retribution not only vented pent-up anger but also created a climate of fear that hindered recovery.
A final difficulty was the widespread corruption of values that left a trail of debilitating cynicism, especially among the disenchanted young. The barbarity of the warfare shocked European thinkers because the veneer of humanist civilization had proven too thin to prevent horrible atrocities. Many conservative defenders of cultural tradition were tarnished by their cooperation with fascism, undercutting their appeals for a restoration of order and authority. But leftist admirers of revolution also lost credibility owing to their association with Stalinist repression, weakening their calls for socialist reform. Many intellectuals therefore flirted with nihilism or sought to find a reaffirmation of life in the existentialism promoted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Less blemished than most other institutions, religion made a popular comeback since for many the present misery could be endured only with a transcendent faith.12 Stripping off their uniforms or reemerging from bomb shelters, many among the younger generation did not know where to turn and withdrew from public affairs in an effort simply to rebuild livable cities and resume private careers.
Magazine reports, nonetheless, demonstrate that life continued among the ruins, revealing the tenacity of the human spirit amidst shocking devastation. Snapshots picture half-destroyed houses, where interior rooms turned into balconies allowed washing to be hung out to dry or tobacco to be grown in planters. They show women in drab smocks and head scarves clearing the rubble from streets and chipping mortar from bricks so that they could be used for rebuilding. Photos portray hollow-cheeked men in torn uniform coats picking through the ruins of factories, seeking to salvage pieces of equipment in order to resume production. They depict crowds gathering in black markets, intent on converting family china into scraps of edible food. But they also show laughing girls swimming in lakes, ignoring the fresh birch-wood crosses with steel helmets on top that marked the graves of victims of the final battles. And they capture cheerful U.S. soldiers distributing chocolate candy from their jeeps to curious children playing in the rubble.13 It was this elemental drive to go on living that inspired the effort to reconstruct a more benign modernity.
PEACE WITHOUT TREATY
The main political difference between the end of the First and the Second World War was the lack of a formal peace treaty with the chief enemy, the German Reich. Since the war against Japan had yet to be won, the victorious Allies postponed final decisions at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference until the end of the fighting in Asia. Instead, provisional border changes were agreed upon and an occupation regime instituted in which each of the “Big Three” powers—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—possessed ultimate authority over its occupation zone. The Paris Peace Treaty of February 1947 formally ended the war with the former Nazi allies Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland, imposing territorial losses and reparations to help rebuild their ravaged neighbors. When negotiations for a peace treaty with Germany began thereafter, the ideological differences and diverging interests between the victorious powers had grown to such an extent that the Soviet Union and the United States could no longer agree on terms. Instead, the makeshift arrangements governing the border shifts and occupation zones gradually became permanent, initiating a profound division of Europe that would last for almost five decades.14
The provisional postwar order was the result of intensive wartime consultations within the Grand Alliance, formalized in summit meetings. At Tehran in November 1943 Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin discussed war strategy and the invasion of France in order to create a second front. The Bretton Woods meeting of 1944 set up an International Monetary Fund and a Bank for Reconstruction and Development so as to restore international trade, and the subsequent conference at Dumbarton Oaks established the United Nations to replace the defunct League of Nations. Many of the crucial decisions, such as the initial partition of Germany into three occupation zones, the division of Berlin into sectors, and the creation of an Allied Control Council, were prepared by staff talks in the European Advisory Commission in London. In February 1945 the Big Three met again at Yalta and accepted Poland’s westward displacement, German dismemberment, and Russian control over the liberated states in East-Central Europe. These interim arrangements reflected the Red Army’s territorial occupation, which left the West little choice but to accept.15
Before a settlement could be reached, the last German ally, Japan, had to be defeated in the Far East. Assembled at Potsdam, the leaders of the Grand Alliance also insisted on the unconditional surrender of the Japanese imperial army. In order to increase the pressure on Japan, the United States began to draw down its European forces, shifting them to the Pacific. Moreover, Washington asked Stalin for help, inviting the Red Army into Manchuria, where it not only attacked the Japanese enemy but also began supplying the Chinese Communist uprising led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In order to avoid a costly invasion of the main islands of Japan, the U.S. Air Force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively, which completely devastated these two cities, killing several hundred thousand inhabitants. This unprecedented attack on their homeland convinced the militarist leaders of Japan to sue for an armistice on August 14, finalized in a ceremonial surrender on board the battleship Missouri on September 2. After costing fifty-five million lives, the Second World War had finally come to an end.16
Still inspired by an antifascist consensus, the Potsdam Conference during the second half of July 1945 made the territorial decisions that shaped the postwar order of Europe. As host of the meeting in a Russian-held city, Stalin was in the driver’s seat, the more so since Churchill had lost his election to Clement Attlee and Harry Truman, FDR’s successor, had little diplomatic experience. It was only logical that Germany would be stripped of its Nazi conquests, returning the country to its 1937 borders. Concretely that meant reestablishing Austrian independence and returning the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, Alsace-Lorraine to France, and West Prussia to Poland. More momentous was the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland and of half of East Prussia (oblast Kaliningrad), which pushed the reconstituted Polish state westward to the Oder and Neisse rivers, giving it the other half of East Prussia around Gdańsk. This border shift triggered the expulsion of 12.5 million Germans, to be conducted in an “orderly and humane manner,” but which killed about half a million on the way. Reflecting the Red Army’s advances, these territorial revisions left the Soviet Union in control of Eastern Europe.17
The chief aim of Allied policy toward Germany was the prevention of another world war by stripping the defeated country of its military capacity. In an unprecedented step, the Allies deposed the post-Hitler government of Karl Dönitz and dissolved German statehood on June 5, taking the administration of Germany into their own hands by creating an Allied Control Council (ACC). What was left of German territory would be split into four occupation zones, with Russia in control of the East, Britain of the industrial Rhine-Ruhr area, and the United States of Hesse and Bavaria, while a French zone was carved out of the border area in the Saar, Palatinate, and Württemberg. Berlin, the capital, was to be administered jointly by all victorious powers, which in fact created a West Berlin island in the middle of a Soviet-occupied sea. All war-making potential was to be eliminated through the dismantling of industries and through the payment of $23 billion of reparations in money and in kind, with about half the amount going to Russia. Based on the assumption of continued Allied cooperation, these severe provisions barely left the Germans enough resources to survive.18
The subsequent punishment of German allies restored much of the interwar map but preserved the Soviet conquests achieved during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In spite of changing sides, Italy was stripped of its gains and colonies, while Austria got off lightly as “the first Nazi victim” so as to shore up its independence. Slovakia was reincorporated in Czechoslovakia; similarly Croatia was reassigned to Yugoslavia. Hungary lost its territories gained from the Vienna awards, while the Romanian province of Moldova was annexed by Russia. Finland was also forced to cede some border areas. At the same time, the former Nazi allies had to pay considerable reparations to the neighbors whom they had previously despoiled. In undoing the Nazi order, these territorial decisions restored the interwar state system on the Balkans, favoring the pro-Allied resistance movements and reviving the barrier states of the Versailles Treaty.19 Although the pro-western exile governments of all these areas insisted on holding free elections to determine their postwar course, the liberation of their states by the Red Army meant that East-Central Europe would fall under Soviet domination.
Ever so gradually these provisional arrangements became permanent, shaping Europe for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Elated over their joint victory, the Allies agreed on a negative program of destroying the Nazi system and preventing the revival of Germany, but the postponement of final decisions revealed disagreements on positive plans for the future. The unequal contributions of the Soviet Union and the western powers to the defeat of the fascist enemy left the Red Army in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while the Anglo-American forces dominated Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and Scandinavia, with Germany split in half. The longer the military occupation lasted, the more the interpretations of the antifascist consensus diverged, since “democracy” meant control by the Communist Party in Russia while it signified free elections in the West. Once both sides had started to transform the areas under their control in their own image, there was no turning back. The result of the temporary solutions of 1945 was therefore the long-term division of Europe into eastern and western spheres of influence.20
During the Cold War the Potsdam decisions sparked much controversy over their substance and interpretation. Pro-democratic groups in Eastern Europe felt abandoned, since the feeble protests of the western governments proved unable to deter Soviet repression. Refugee groups in Germany clamored for the borders of 1937, yet ethnic cleansing was turning Germany’s lost territories into western parts of Poland and Russia. Moreover, Soviet propaganda kept accusing the West of violating the Potsdam agreement by ceasing to provide reparations and rebuilding only its own occupation zones. Agreed upon before the liberation of France, the apportionment decisions of the European Advisory Commission had undoubtedly favored the Soviet Union. Moreover, General Eisenhower’s insistence on establishing logistics and fear of friendly fire had slowed the western Allies’ advance; he had failed to appreciate that military possession would guarantee postwar control.21 Since the Russians conquered Eastern Europe, while the Anglo-Americans liberated the West, their forces met in Central Europe, dividing the continent and creating a competition that prevented the establishment of a truly peaceful postwar order.
REBUILDING DEMOCRACY
In Western Europe the Allied victory gave proponents of democratic modernity a second chance to fashion a more representative and stable political system than had existed in the interwar period. During the struggle, the tenacity of Britain’s parliamentary government and the support of New Deal America’s resources had ultimately proven superior to fascist dictatorship. The British and American publics therefore considered the parliamentary system vindicated, while liberation allowed continental Europeans like the French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians to rebuild their prewar institutions so their citizens could once again govern themselves. Nonetheless, political commentators heatedly debated the lessons of the prior disenchantment with democracy so as to make it more resilient in the face of political extremism. Moreover, the bourgeois nationalists and working-class communists, the dominant forces within the resistance movements, battled over implementing their competing visions of the postwar world.22 The challenge of modernizing democracy was to make it more socially inclusive and politically responsive to its citizens.
A prerequisite for rebuilding democracy was the purge of native fascists and Nazi collaborators from politics and society. The pent-up resentment against Nazi repression exploded in a populist épuration in France, killing about ten thousand collaborators. The minority who had actively resisted seized the chance to settle accounts and to take over power as the sole political force endowed with antifascist legitimacy. Vindictive crowds gathered in French streets to shave the heads of women who had slept with the enemy, making them wear placards that proclaimed “I am a Nazi whore.” In Norway occupation children were taken away from their biological mothers and reassigned to foster parents so as to eradicate the shame of cohabitation. While some prominent collaborators were summarily lynched, others were tried for treason and either executed or given lengthy prison sentences. Such cases of retaliation against collaborators were justified by the concept of a “militant democracy” defending itself against extremist enemies. Only gradually did it dawn on the righteous avengers that restoring the rule of law also required their own observing of legal rules.23
American elites lent a helping hand in restoring democracy, since they had learned from the interwar debacle that they needed to stay engaged in Europe in the spirit of “democratic internationalism.” With about 50 percent of the world’s industrial production, the United States had become the dominant western power because it had remained relatively unscathed from the fighting with losses of 418,500 men, which amounted to only 0.32 percent of the population. Repudiating the legacy of isolationism, both political parties understood their responsibility for rebuilding the Old Continent so as to prevent another calamity. This new commitment also made economic sense, because ravaged Europe would be a profitable market for U.S. business if only it possessed sufficient credit to purchase such goods. In spite of the necessary drawdown of a draft army, the United States left a sizable occupation force in Germany, which provided its neighbors with security and assured Washington a voice in decisions regarding Germany’s future. Finally, the exhausted continent was eager for Hollywood-style entertainment and receptive to the prosperity of the “American way of life.”24
In victorious Britain, the electorate chose to reaffirm democracy by a massive expansion of the welfare state. In a stunning upset, they dumped the fiery wartime leader Winston Churchill in July 1945 and brought the Labour Party into power in order to end wartime austerity as quickly as possible, organize an equitable recovery, and soften the sharp edges of class hierarchy. Exhausted from fighting, the majority chose the vision of a “cradle to grave” system of social security sketched by the Beveridge Report of 1942. While rather uncharismatic, the new prime minister Clement Attlee embarked on a program of nationalization, converting wartime coordination into public ownership by taking over such industries as mining, power, and the railroads. At the same time the Labour government expanded access to education and built more public housing. The creation of “a comprehensive scheme of insurance” culminated in the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, which provided medical care free of charge.25 Though Great Britain was virtually bankrupt and rationing continued for years, the expansion of the welfare state rewarded the ex-soldiers for years of sacrifice and advanced social peace through greater equality.
In liberated France the military hero Charles de Gaulle pushed for the establishment of a more stable parliamentary system than had prevailed in the highly polarized Third Republic. Born in the industrial North in 1890 to a devout Catholic professor’s family, he was trained at the military school of St. Cyr, served with distinction in World War I, but was captured by the Germans. During the interwar period, he advocated the buildup of armored forces, which he successfully commanded in World War II. After the defeat and surrender of France, he fled to Britain and rallied the Free French troops against the Nazi invaders. Angered that he was not treated as an important cobelligerent by the Anglo-Saxons, he made a triumphal entry into liberated Paris in 1944, claiming the mantle of national leadership. His authority was, however, contested by the resistance fighters of the French Communist Party (PCF), who had borne the brunt of the struggle within occupied France. The new constitution of the Fourth Republic, ratified in October 1946, strengthened the executive and finally gave women the right to vote. But when de Gaulle resigned in a huff, the previous parliamentary instability returned. Nonetheless, the rebuilding succeeded in achieving the overdue modernization of the economy.26
The smaller West European countries similarly reemerged as nation-states with democratic governments after the Second World War. In the Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina returned from exile, and a constitutional monarchy was restored on the previous pattern. In Belgium King Leopold III had to abdicate because he had collaborated too much with the Nazi occupiers. Both countries together with Luxembourg formed the Benelux customs union in 1948 in order to speed economic recovery through the construction of a broader market. In Scandinavia the Danes and Norwegians also revived their national states as functioning democracies. With Finland forced to sign a neutrality treaty, efforts at cooperation resulted only in the creation of a Nordic Council as an interparliamentary consultative body, which created a joint labor market and free passage across borders but fell short of a real customs union. Though understanding that small states such as theirs had been unable to resist Nazi aggression, their citizens preferred to return to their prior institutions and were willing to engage only in limited cooperation.27
Distancing themselves from various levels of collaboration with the Third Reich, the neutrals retained their independence and reinvigorated their democracies. Switzerland had to pay compensation for profiting from the Nazis’ looting of banks and withdrew into political isolation while participating in the economic revival. Similarly Sweden reemphasized its neutrality during the Cold War, preferring instead to perfect its domestic welfare state, which set a global standard for social support. The Irish Free State was initially shunned for having maintained its distance to Britain, since it was preoccupied with liberating Northern Ireland. Having refused to join Hitler’s war, the Spanish dictator Franco survived in isolation as punishment for his pro-fascist leanings. But during the Cold War the United States renewed contacts with his anticommunist regime and invited autocratic Portugal into NATO, the U.S.–Western Europe military alliance, since the Iberian Peninsula was important as a naval staging area. In general, the neutrals abandoned their earlier ties with Germany and reoriented themselves culturally toward the victorious Anglo-American model.
In Western Europe the liberation restored democracy through a novel mixture of tradition and modernity. The prewar institutions of representative government and nation-states reemerged with only minor modifications, since their citizens viewed them as having been vindicated. But after the flirtation with fascism had turned out to be disastrous, the bourgeois center-right repudiated authoritarianism and embraced the new movement of Christian Democracy, which sought to reconcile religious and humanistic values with parliamentary institutions. Yielding to labor pressure, governments also extended the welfare state, providing a stronger social safety net so as to cope with the demographic consequences of the war and provide buying power for the masses during the process of economic recovery. Though there was much sentiment for socialization, the influence of the United States and fears of communist expropriation allowed capitalism to return in a regulated fashion that limited the vagaries of the market. Abandoning prior skepticism, western intellectuals resumed with intense interest their discussions about renewing democracy.28
REHABILITATING ENEMIES
Allied policy toward the defeated enemies envisaged a deeper intervention than in 1918 in order to eliminate any possibility of another world war. Initially, graphic reports about the brutality of the war of annihilation and the atrocities of the Holocaust inspired a punitive approach that would inflict retribution on the losers and reduce their population to a survival level. Moreover, there was a clear consensus that perpetrators had to be prosecuted, the entire fascist apparatus dissolved, and the military establishment disbanded. But occupation practice soon made it clear that in taking over a country, the Allies had also assumed the responsibility for feeding and policing the vanquished population—which could turn out to be costly unless it was permitted to rebuild. As a result, public sentiment in the western capitals gradually swung toward a more therapeutic approach, seeking to rehabilitate the erstwhile antagonists.29 Viewed with suspicion by the Soviet leadership, this shift from punishment to reconstruction offered the defeated a chance for recovery that many of them embraced with enthusiasm.
The treatment of the chief enemy, Germany, was initially quite harsh in order to emphasize the totality of its defeat and prevent any possibility of revanchism. Inspired by a punitive spirit, the Joint Chief of Staff directive 1067 emphasized that “Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.”30 The Potsdam Agreement insisted on “demilitarization” in order to dismantle the Wehrmacht and erase the militarist spirit by civilianizing the country. It also called for “denazification” so as to dissolve the Nazi Party and discredit its ideology by vetting all members and functionaries in civil tribunals. The International Criminal Tribunal and other war-crime trials sentenced 668 political, military, and economic leaders to death and about four thousand to incarceration. Finally, the Potsdam decisions proposed a “decartelization,” breaking up the monopolistic structure of the heavy steel, machinery, and chemical industries and the banks so as to prevent the production of arms. Only after these preconditions were fulfilled did they mention the possibility of democratization, hinting at eventual rehabilitation.31
With his “speech of hope” Secretary of State James F. Byrnes signaled a switch of U.S. policy toward reconstruction in September 1946. The head of the American Military Government in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, was convinced that U.S. taxpayers would have to pay for meeting the survival needs of the defeated country unless the Germans were allowed to raise their level of industrial production. When Washington pushed for cooperation between the occupation zones, the Soviets refused, since they were intent on introducing socialism into their area. In March 1948 Ludwig Erhard, a liberal economist who headed the Economic Council, gambled on a currency reform, devaluing the old reichsmark by ten to one, which reignited economic growth. Together with the lifting of economic controls the western powers allowed the resumption of political life, first on the local and then on the state level, by reconstituting political parties and holding elections.32 They also promoted cultural reorientation by licensing media, instituting exchange programs, and sponsoring America Houses as positive examples of democracy. Hence the western zones began to recover with surprising speed.
In the spring of 1949 this dynamic of western reconstruction and Soviet refusal to cooperate led to the founding of a separate West German state, called the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Combining the three western occupation zones, this new creation was the culmination of a political revival that had started with local efforts at self-government in which proven antifascists took over the administration of cities so as to organize relief and rebuilding. Eventually local elections led to the establishment of federal states, loosely modeled on the tradition of regional representation. These postwar leaders met in a constitutional convention at Herrenchiemsee in 1948 in order to work out a democratic political order under the supervision of the western Allies. Their product, the so-called Basic Law, was a provisional constitution that sought to correct the mistakes that had overthrown the Weimar Republic. This second, more successful attempt at democracy instituted a federal system of about a dozen states, a 5 percent hurdle for a political party to win parliamentary representation, a constructive vote of no confidence, and a ceremonial presidency.33
In a tight election, Konrad Adenauer, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union, won the chancellorship with the help of minor conservative parties. He was born in 1876 into a devout Catholic family and trained as a lawyer, already gaining political notice in Imperial Germany. Intensely disliking Prussian authoritarianism, he was a successful mayor of Cologne who was twice briefly incarcerated during the Third Reich. As a committed anticommunist, he was instrumental in broadening the appeal of the prewar Catholic Center Party by merging it into a general Christian Democratic Union that also appealed to Protestants as a moderate middle-class party. Unlike his Social Democratic rival Kurt Schumacher, who put a premium on preserving national unity with the Soviet zone, the septuagenarian Adenauer favored western integration as a way of regaining political sovereignty. Carefully, he balanced the reintegration of former Nazis with restitution payments to Israel. Under the patriarchal leadership of “Der Alte” (the Old One) and buoyed by the Economic Miracle, the Federal Republic gradually became the first successful democracy in German history.34
Thanks to its change of sides, Italy got off more easily and was left rather to its own devices in reviving its parliamentary tradition. Its territorial losses in Gulia and Trieste were limited, and Allied occupation remained transitory. Already in 1946 a referendum abolished the monarchy, and by 1948 a new republican constitution was adopted. Since the papacy had rescinded its ban on politics, the Catholic and conservative party Democrazia Cristiana overwhelmingly won the first postwar election under its leader Alcide de Gasperi. Nonetheless, it was continually challenged by a large Communist Party, which attacked the corruption and clientelism typical of Italian elites, calling for more radical social reforms. This endemic cultural conflict was immortalized in the movie comedy Don Camillo and Peppone. During the 1950s the country also experienced its own economic miracle in the North and center, which left behind the agricultural regions of the Mezzogiorno. But in contrast to Germany, the Italian public was reluctant to confront its collaboration with fascism, hiding instead behind the myth of a general resistenza.35
The Austrian case was similarly paradoxical, since the country was treated both as a perpetrator and a prey of National Socialism. Already in 1943 the Allies proclaimed Austria to be the first Nazi victim, promising to restore its independence, but nonetheless returned South Tyrol to Italy. Though the Red Army conquered Vienna, the country was divided into four occupation zones, with the capital coadministered like Berlin. The Russians ruthlessly exploited the eastern regions, which hampered their efforts to gain political control. As a result the local Communists lost the November 1945 election to the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), which together dominated Austrian politics in the following decades. In order to prevent the Federal Republic of Germany’s entry into NATO in 1955, Soviet diplomats surprisingly offered to withdraw their troops if Austria were to embrace neutrality. The state treaty, also signed by the western Allies, finally ended the occupation and reestablished the independence of the country on the Swiss model.36 As a result, the Austrian public was not really compelled to reckon with its own Nazi complicity.
With some justification, the rehabilitation of these former enemies of western democracy features prominently among the successful cases in the nation-building literature. In contrast to 1918, the defeat of 1945 had been so total as to exclude thoughts among the vanquished of reversing the outcome. The policy of the western Allies was just the right mixture of toughness to purge fascists and their collaborators as well as assistance to put the affected countries back on their feet. Unlike in later failures, there were also strong pro-democratic minorities in these Central European states who were eager to resume the tradition of prior self-government. Helped by the expansion of the welfare state, the speed of economic recovery associated capitalism with prosperity instead of with depression, thereby making democracy seem more attractive. Finally, the Cold War confrontation facilitated the acceptance of the penitent sinners into the western camp. The restoration of democracy among the defeated countries was therefore due to a rather exceptional set of circumstances that could not easily be replicated elsewhere around the globe.37
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
A final lesson of the Second World War was the need to modernize international organization by strengthening cooperation so as to prevent another such catastrophe. The collapse of world trade during the Great Depression suggested the importance of reviving transnational exchanges as a basis for economic recovery. The horrendous suffering of the war also encouraged efforts at solving political disputes so that a similar resort to force could be avoided in the future. Concretely, initiatives to weave a tighter organizational web developed on three competing levels: The optimism of the Grand Alliance encouraged global solutions such as the founding of the United Nations, the creation of the International Monetary Fund, and the establishment of regulated exchange rates in Bretton Woods. When East-West tensions prevented universal approaches, the focus shifted to transatlantic initiatives such as the Marshall Plan or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which provoked mirror-reverse counterparts in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact. Finally, the pan-European vision of the anti-Nazi resistance movements inspired the initial postwar initiatives at European integration.38
Surprisingly enough the nation-state reemerged unscathed from World War II although its sovereignty had proven unable to stave off economic depression and military aggression. While critical intellectuals continued to predict its imminent demise, neither transnational capitalist trade nor communist internationalism convinced citizens to give up on the nation as key political unit. The failure of the Nazis’ bid for imperial domination had restored the attractiveness of Wilsonian self-determination along the lines of the state system established after the First World War. In victory or defeat the nation remained the legitimate frame of reference, since it provided the collective identity to be celebrated in shared triumph or the solidarity to be embraced in common suffering. When they lost their overseas possessions, the colonial powers also simply chose to fall back on the existing nationstate. Even the American “empire by invitation” and the Soviet satellite system nominally respected the separate statehood of its clients.39 Regional, continental, or global cooperation was therefore possible only between sovereign countries, which remained an obstacle limiting its effectiveness.
The chief innovation that was supposed to guarantee “peace and security” was the creation of the United Nations (UN) as an improved successor to the League of Nations. President Roosevelt promoted the establishment of such an organization so as to perpetuate the cooperation of the twenty-six nations that were fighting the Axis. In the Dumbarton Oaks Conference between August and October 1944 China, Britain, the United States, and the USSR hammered out the basic structure of the UN General Assembly, Security Council, International Court of Justice, and Secretariat. A subsequent meeting of fifty nations in San Francisco drafted the United Nations Charter, signed on June 26, 1945, which sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” reaffirmed “faith in fundamental human rights,” tried to strengthen “international law,” and promised “to promote social progress.” Going far beyond Europe, this global initiative intended to provide “collective security” by discussing problems and mediating disputes. President Truman therefore welcomed the United Nations as a “solid structure upon which we can build a better world.”40
Though limited by the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and often deadlocked by Cold War rivalry, the United Nations nonetheless proved useful for addressing a number of international problems. In the immediate postwar period the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) assured the survival of starving Europeans by providing food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. Drawing on the horrible prewar and wartime experience of dictatorial repression and mass murder, the United Nations also adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Two years later it took advantage of the Soviet Union’s temporary boycott of the Security Council to organize the defense of South Korea against aggression from the Communist North. Though it proved incapable of preventing the Suez crisis of 1956, the United Nations did stabilize the Near East by providing a peacekeeping force. Finally, in reinterpreting the trusteeship mandate as a call for independence, it facilitated decolonization by accepting newly independent states as members.41 While the New York location of the UN headquarters showed that Europe was no longer the center of world affairs, many UN initiatives benefited the Old Continent.
The Marshall Plan, which provided American aid for the recovery of the war-torn European economies, was even more successful. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall promised in a speech at Harvard University that the United States would “assist in the return of normal economic health” to Europe in order to alleviate the suffering, which increased the appeal of communism. Initiated in 1948 and formally named the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan was a product of enlightened self-interest, since it committed American financial resources but called on the European nations themselves to cooperate in creating an organization (OEEC) to administer the program. Ignoring lingering hatreds, Washington included Germany as the industrial heart of the continent, but the Soviets forced their satellites to rebuff the offer as capitalist enslavement. The $13 billion in credits offered to the western countries bought American food and industrial products, thereby benefiting U.S. producers, while at the same time making essential materials available for repairing infrastructure and modernizing factories. Though economists are still disputing its precise effect, the Marshall Plan’s message of hope accelerated recovery, triggering the postwar boom.42
Another transatlantic link was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which responded to European security fears in the Cold War. When Soviet occupation forces temporarily blocked the western Allies’ access to Berlin in 1948, Britain, France, and the Benelux countries concluded a West European Union to defend themselves against possible Russian attack. In April 1949 the addition of the United States, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland enlarged this cooperation, signaling an American commitment to the defense of Europe. The first NATO secretary, Lord Ismay, succinctly quipped that the alliance pursued the triple purpose “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The Chinese military support of Communist North Korea during the Korean War inspired closer military cooperation in NATO’s command and field operations, creating a ground force large enough to stop potential Soviet aggression into Europe, supplemented by extensive airpower and naval support. After the French rejected the European Defense Community, West Germany was included in the alliance in 1955 in order to make use of its manpower potential. Though dominated by the United States, NATO provided a stable form for West European defense.43
Seeking to overcome historic enmities, the West Europeans also took initial steps toward political integration so as to revive their prostrate continent. In 1946 Winston Churchill dramatically suggested in Zurich to build a United States of Europe in order to assure a more peaceful future—though he also ruled Britain out. Adherents of national sovereignty founded the Council of Europe in 1949, which tried to improve cooperation between nation-states in the area of human rights by establishing an international court in Strasbourg. Advocates of supranational integration like Altiero Spinelli instead founded a Union of European Federalists (UEF) in December 1946 in Paris. Believing that only the creation of a European federation would be able to guarantee peace and progress in the future, they campaigned for transforming the Council of Europe into a constituent assembly for a European state. Though thousands of intellectuals and citizens supported the UEF’s petition for a federal pact, this project was too visionary to succeed. While these initiatives suggested the goal of integration, the path to realizing it remained unclear.44
Propelled by the shock of the war, the impulse for international cooperation grew stronger after 1945, but it failed to produce a modern order that would guarantee peace in Europe and the world. The retention of the nation-state as the basic unit of politics meant that insistence on national sovereignty would hamper all efforts to collaborate. The concurrent establishment of global (UN), transatlantic (Marshall Plan), and European (Council of Europe) initiatives created a series of overlapping institutions with competing jurisdictions that often failed to work together. Moreover, the deepening ideological conflict between communism and capitalism divided Europe into Soviet and western spheres, limiting organizational innovations like NATO and the Warsaw Pact to separate blocs and inspiring hostility between them. Within this confusion, some visionary Europeans like Jean Monnet searched for more far-reaching solutions that would eventually develop a momentum toward unifying the European continent.45 While the necessity of greater cooperation was evident, it was not at all obvious which of these forms would win out.
REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY
During the postwar years most Europeans simply longed for a return to normalcy, so that their personal lives could resume without being disrupted by forces beyond their control. In many ways people wanted to get back to the “good times” of the prewar, interwar, or even imperial years when they had earned enough in order to enjoy life without having to fear for the next day. The prevailing wish for peace and prosperity required the restoration of order and stability, based on accepted authority rather than experimentation with new forms of government. In the western democracies this meant a strengthening of parliamentary institutions, while among the defeated countries it required the reintroduction of self-government, derided by fascists and communists alike. Older leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi were therefore quite popular, since they epitomized a continuity reaching all the way back to the halcyon years before the First World War. No wonder that in the reconstruction of democracy much effort was devoted to restoring what had been lost in the interval.46
At the same time, however, the push for modernization continued, since mass death and mass murder had made it patently impossible to recapture an earlier way of life. Even if science had been associated with destruction, technological advances such as the introduction of television and the development of jet airplanes continued unabated. In spite of preservation efforts, it was simply too expensive to rebuild city centers according to medieval patterns with narrow cobblestone streets when the use of automobiles demanded broad thoroughfares. In spite of the reassertion of patriarchy, many women who had worked in war production or cleared the rubble were unwilling to return to the hearth and subordinate themselves to their husbands coming home from the front. Overcoming the resistance of cultural traditionalists, modernist styles like abstract paintings, absurdist plays, and twelve-tone music captured the galleries, theaters, and concert halls. To remain viable, democracy therefore could not just be restored in its somewhat elitist prewar guise, but had to update its form in order to come to terms with demands for broader participation.47
One way of revitalizing parliamentary government was to reform those structural weaknesses that had led to its demise in many countries during the interwar period. Participation could be enlarged by abolishing the remaining property-ownership restrictions on voting and giving women greater rights like the vote, as it happened in France. Constitutions might be altered to make governing more predictable by introducing hurdles against the representation of splinter parties or by allowing the prohibition of antidemocratic extremists, as was done in Germany. Political leaders could also pay more attention to shifts in public sentiment outside parliaments through the novel method of opinion polling, as they began doing in the United Kingdom. Election campaigns might use new methods of appealing to the public, such as through American-style advertising rather than by drafting elaborate party programs. Interest groups like farmers could learn that influencing the legislative process would be more profitable than trying to destabilize elected governments by populist opposition. Finally, strengthening the executive as in the Federal Republic’s “chancellor democracy” and the presidential system of the French Fifth Republic would create more political stability.48
Another method of making democracy more modern was the broadening of its social base through the expansion of the welfare state. Recalling government coordination of the wartime economies, the unions, intellectuals, and leftist media clamored for the nationalization of key industries after 1945. But American counterpressure, exerted through the Marshall Plan, kept key countries like the Federal Republic of Germany from socializing production, promoting instead the dynamism of free-market competition. Nonetheless, Britain and France embarked on major extensions of the welfare state after the war in order to reward both soldiers and civilians for the sacrifices they had made for the national cause. Even the center-right Christian Democratic parties in Germany and Italy were willing to extend benefits beyond pensions, unemployment insurance, and health coverage to help the many war victims such as widows, orphans, veterans, and expellees. By lessening inequality, such social measures reduced class warfare, saved capitalism, and thereby strengthened public commitment to democracy.49
The successful renewal of democracy after the Second World War therefore rested on a mixed welfare-state and free-market model that became distinctly European. The revival of parliamentary institutions was easiest in those western countries which had gradually developed traditions of self-government, whether they formally remained constitutional monarchies like Great Britain or republics like France. But the reintroduction of democracy into the defeated nations also made gradual progress through the conversion of middleclass and conservative voters who had formerly supported fascism to Christian democracy. The postwar recovery of democracy was moreover facilitated by the lobbying of the labor unions and the social democratic parties for the extension of the welfare state, since it created a social basis for citizenship. The abhorrent example of Stalinist communism as well as American pressure and aid kept the dynamic competition of the market sufficiently alive to spark the postwar boom.50 Though varying considerably in detail, the second time around European postwar democracy would prove more resilient and stable than ever before.
