Themes in Modern European History since 1945 (Themes in Modern European History Series)

Themes in Modern European History since 1945 This collection explores the most important transformations and upheavals of post-1945 Europe in the light of recent scholarship. Ten chapters consider key socio-political, cultural and economic changes of an era that needs re-evaluation and reconsideration from a historical perspective. Themes in Modern European History Since 1945 is structured around recent theoretical debates on the postwar. The era saw unprecedented economic growth in the “golden age” of prosperity up to 1973, and it witnessed a social flux that dramatically transformed the fabric of European society. After 1989, Europe grappled with the East European revolutions and faced the challenge of reintegrating the continent after 75 years of partition and conflict. At the beginning of the 21st century, the concept of “European civilization” remains ambiguous. This authoritative survey provides an indispensable guide to the crucial subjects in postwar history for all students of History or European Studies. Rosemary Wakeman is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, New York. She has published Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse 1945–1975 (1998).

THEMES IN MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY General editor: Michael Biddiss University of Reading Already published

Themes in Modern European History 1780–1830 Edited by Pamela M.Pilbeam Themes in Modern European History 1830–1890 Edited by Bruce Walker Themes in Modern European History 1890–1945 Edited by Paul Hayes Themes in Modern European History since 1945 Edited by Rosemary Wakeman

Themes in Modern European History since 1945

Edited by

Rosemary Wakeman

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 Rosemary Wakeman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Themes in Modern European History since 1945/[edited by] Rosemary Wakeman. p. cm. 1. Europe-Politics and government—1945- 2. Europe—Economic conditions—1945–3. Europe-Intellectual life-20th century. 4. Europe Social conditions—20th century. I. Wakeman, Rosemary. D840.T48 2003 940.55-dc21 ISBN 0-203-93008-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-21987-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-21988-4 (pbk)

Contents

Chronology Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction ROSEMARY WAKEMAN 1 Divided Europe: the long postwar, 1945–89 STEVEN MOREWOOD 2 The collapse of world dominion: the dismantling of the European colonial empires and its impact on Europe JEAN-JACQUES JORDI 3 The golden age of prosperity, 1953–73 ROSEMARY WAKEMAN 4 Social class and social change in postwar Europe DON KALB 5 Changing margins in postwar European politics MICHAEL HANAGAN 6 European mass culture in the media age ROSEMARY WAKEMAN 7 The boundaries of the avant-garde SIMON SADLER 8 The Central and Eastern European Revolution, 1989–2000 IVAN T.BEREND 9 The politics of European unification ROBERT H.LIESHOUT 10 European economic integration: from business cycle to business cycle WIM MEEUSEN Index

vi xxii xxiv 1 11 31 45 66 92 115 134 152 168 186 208

Chronology 1944

June D-Day Allied landing in Normandy July Dumbarton Oaks Conference conceives United Nations Organization July Bretton Woods Conference creates World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Elections in France. Women receive right to vote 1945

February

Yalta Conference

May

Defeat of Nazi Germany. End of the Second World War in Europe

July

British Labour Party wins elections. Winston Churchill resigns

July—Aug.

Potsdam Conference

August

First use of atomic bomb on Japan brings end of Second World War in Asia

October

United Nations established

Nuremberg Trials (1945–46) Nationalizations in Britain, Austria, and France (1945–47) Uprisings in Algeria and Vietnam against French rule 1946

March

Winston Churchill delivers “Iron Curtain” speech

October

French Fourth Republic established. Charles de Gaulle resigns

December

Indochinese War begins (1946–54)

Jean Monnet launches first French economic plan Republic proclaimed in Italy. Women receive right to vote in Italy, Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Existentialism and Human Emotions

1947

March

Truman Doctrine announced

June

Marshall Plan proposed

August

India and Pakistan declare independence from British rule

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) ratified Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria(1947–48) Christian Dior introduces “New Look” fashion collection Sculptor Alberto Giacometti begins making “transparent constructions”

Romania,

1948

January

Benelux customs union enters into force

Jan.—Feb.

Burma and Ceylon become independent from British rule

June

Berlin Blockade and Airlift (1948–49)

June

Yugoslavia’s Tito breaks with Stalin

National Health Service becomes operative in Britain Marshall Plan aid begins (1948–52) Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) formed 1949

January

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) created

April

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) founded

April

Independent Republic of Ireland proclaimed

May

Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) established

May

Konrad Adenauer becomes Chancellor (1949–63)

July

Age of mutual nuclear deterrence begins with the testing of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb

October

Foundation of German Democratic Republic (East Germany), led by Walter Ulbricht

December Dutch rule in Dutch East Indies ends December Indonesia wins independence

George Orwell publishes 1984 Simone de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex

1950

May

Schuman Plan for single authority in coal and steel industries

June

Korean War begins (1950–53)

September

European Payments Union established

1951

December

Libya granted independence from Italy

British J.Lyons & Company begins first commercial use of electronic computer 1952

May

European Defence Community (EDC) Treaty signed, subject to ratification

July

European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) begins, with

Jean

Monnet as President

Kenya’s Mau-Mau revolt against Britain 1953

March

Death of Stalin. Khrushchev begins to emerge as leading figure in the Soviet Union

June

Workers’ uprising in East Berlin

November Cambodia gains independence from French rule

Watson and Crick publish DNA findings in British scientific journal Televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II 1954

May

French defeat in Vietnam with surrender at Dien Bien Phu

August

French National Assembly rejects European Defense Community

November

Algerian War begins (1954–62)

Construction begins on Sarcelles housing project outside Paris First televised World Cup matches, held in Switzerland 1955

April Bandung Conference establishes Non-Aligned movement in Third World countries May

West Germany admitted to NATO

May

Warsaw Pact created

May

Four Power occupation of Austria ends

French Citroën DS introduced at Paris Auto Show 1956

February

Khrushchev s de-Stalinization speech at Twentieth Congress of Communist Party

March/May Tunisia and Morocco achieve independence from France October

Workers’ uprising in Poland

Oct.—Nov. Hungarian Revolution crushed by Soviet intervention Oct.—Nov. The Suez Crisis. Britain and France invade Egypt

Release of film And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco First Eurovision Song Contest staged in Switzerland 1957

March

Treaty of Rome establishes European Economic Community (EEC)

March

European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) Treaty signed

March

British Gold Coast Colony becomes independent Ghana

October

Soviet Union tests first ICBM and launches space race with Sputnik I satellite

Roland Barthes’ Mythologies launches field of semiology Italian designer Giò Ponti introduces Superleggera chair

1958

March

Khrushchev becomes premier of Soviet Union

April

All-African People’s Conference on Imperialism in Accra

June

De Gaulle returns to power. French Fifth Republic established

June

Execution of moderate Hungarian communist Imre Nagy

October

Guinea achieves independence from France

British Overseas Airways launches first transatlantic passenger-jet service 1959

July

European Free Trade Association (EFTA) established

German Braun Company introduce Hi-Fidelity phonograph system Olivetti Company launches Italy’s first electronic typewriter French “New Wave” films win Cannes Film Festival Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum published 1960

May

U-2 spy plane shot down by Soviet Union

July

Independent Somalia created from British Somaliland and Italian Somalia

August

Belgian Congo (Zaire) becomes independent

First episode of Coronation Street on ITV 1961

April

Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes first human in space

August

Berlin Wall erected

October

French police kill Algerian demonstrators in Paris

Angolan War for independence against Portugal begins (1961–75) Albania breaks off relations with Soviet Union London s Young Contemporaries Exhibition introduces Pop Art movement Ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defects from Soviet Union First publication of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

1962

Aug.—Nov.

Cuban Missile Crisis

October

Pope John XXIII opens Vatican Council II

Beatles release first national hit single, “Love Me Do” Ian Fleming’s James Bond, 007, appears in first film, Dr. No Telstar satellite transmits first transatlantic television signal Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes The Savage Mind 1963

January

De Gaulle vetoes British membership in EEC

January

Franco-German Treaty of Cooperation signed

June

Philby and Profumo scandals shake British Conservatives

August

First Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty signed

December

Kenya achieves independence from Britain

John Le Carré publishes The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Premier of Federico Fellini’s film 81/2 1964

October

Khrushchev ousted as Soviet leader. Succeeded by Brezhnev

October

Labour return to power in Britain with Harold Wilson

Jean-Paul Sartre wins Nobel Prize for Literature 1965

January

Winston Churchill dies

March

Nicolai Ceauşescu takes over Romania’s communist party

July

France paralyzes Common Market over Common Agricultural Policy

December

De Gaulle wins presidential election against François Mitterrand

Oil and natural gas discovered in North Sea Designers André Courrèges and Mary Quant introduce mini-skirt The Rolling Stones release single, “Satisfaction”

1966

March De Gaulle announces French withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military command

Première of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up England wins Football World Cup Final against West Germany at Wembley Stadium 1967

April Military dictatorship takes over in Greece July Merger of EEC, Economic Coal and Steel Community, and Euratom creates European Community (EC)

Summer of Love Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” broadcast worldwide 1968

March

Prague Spring begins, followed by August Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia

May

Student protests in France

May

Student unrest in Germany and Italy

October Spain grants independence to Spanish Sahara and Equatorial Guinea

British introduce immigration restrictions Riots and violence engulf Northern Ireland (1968–69) Collapse of Ronan Point high-rise housing project in London French skier Jean-Claude Killy wins clean sweep of Olympic gold medals in Alpine races 1969

April

De Gaulle resigns, succeeded by Georges Pompidou in France

October

Willy Brandt becomes Chancellor of West Germany

December

High point of strikes and demonstrations in Italy’s “Hot Autumn”

First flight of Anglo-French Concorde aircraft Premier of BBC television series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus Millions watch worldwide as NASAs Apollo 11 lands on moon

1970

August Brandt’s Ostpolitik achieves détente and normalized relations with Soviet Union as well as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany (1970–73) June

Conservatives return to power in Britain with Edward Heath

Divorce legalized in Italy Premier of Marcel Ophuls’ film The Sorrow and the Pity 1971

May

Erich Honecker assumes leadership of East German communist party

Breakdown of Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates (1971–73) 1972

January

Bloody Sunday violence in Northern Ireland

April

European Community introduces exchange rates coordinated in the “snake”

May

SALT I Treaty signed between US and Soviet Union

September

Terrorists take Israeli athletes hostage at Munich Olympics

Gerhard Richter’s artwork chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale 1973

January

Britain, Ireland, and Denmark join EC

October

First oil crisis begins (1973–74)

Heinrich Böll wins Nobel Prize for Group Portrait with Lady 1974

April Left-wing military coup topples Salazar dictatorship. Portuguese Revolution begins (1974–76) May

Brandt resigns, Helmut Schmidt takes over as Chancellor of West Germany

May

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing elected President of France

August

Greek referendum restores democracy

1975

June/Nov.

Mozambique and Angola gain independence from Portugal

August

Helsinki Accords on security and human rights signed

November

Death of Francisco Franco. King Juan Carlos begins reign in Spain

Escalation of terrorism by West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigade, and Irish Republican Army 1976

June

Working-class unrest and riots in Poland

September

Socialists defeated in Sweden after forty-four year monopoly

Eurocommunism makes gains in Italy, France, and Spain Trial of Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe State-controlled television ends in Italy 1977

January

“Charter 77” signed in Czechoslovakia

September

Nuclear proliferation pact curbing spread of nuclear weapons signed

Euromissile crisis begins (1977–84) Pompidou National Centre for Art and Culture opens in Paris 1978

March

Christian Democrat Aldo Moro kidnapped and killed by Red Brigade terrorists in Italy

October Karol Wojtyla becomes Pope John Paul II

Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious charged with murder of girlfriend French Minitel begins service

Supertanker Amoco Cadiz runs aground off Brittany coast, creating environmental disaster 1979

April

Second oil shock begins (1979–80)

March

European Monetary System (EMS) introduced

March

Margaret Thatcher becomes British Prime Minister

June

SALT II agreement signed

June

First direct elections to European Parliament

December

Soviet army invades Afghanistan

Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting published 1980

April

British Rhodesia becomes independent Zimbabwe

September

Solidarity formed in Poland amid worker unrest

1981

January

Greece joins EC

February

Failed military coup against Spanish democracy. Spain joins NATO

May

François Mitterrand elected French President

October

Socialist Andreas Papandreou elected Prime Minister in Greece

December

Martial law declared in Poland under General Wojciech Jaruzelski

Marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer Assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II French TGV train begins service 1982

April—June

Falklands War between Britain and Argentina

November

Death of Leonid Brezhnev in Soviet Union

First Fête de la Musique street festival celebrated in Paris

1983

March

Greens enter West German Parliament

David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross appears in London 1984

January

France receives first deliveries of Soviet natural gas

February

Italy and Vatican agree to end Roman Catholicism as state religion

March

Coal miners’ strike in Britain begins (1984–85)

Michel Foucault publishes The Care of the Self just before his death I.M.Pei’s pyramid opens at Louvre Museum Bertelsmann and Ufa Film buy 40 percent stake in German RTL television network 1985

March

Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in Soviet Union, introduces glasnost and perestroika

April

Stalinist Enver Hoxha dies after governing Albania for 40 years

October PLO terrorists hijack Italian cruise ship. Italian government toppled

European Commission presents “White Paper” on completing the internal market 1986

January

Spain and Portugal join EC

February Single European Act lays out plan for single European economic market February Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme assassinated March

Kurt Waldheim wins Austrian presidential election despite outcry over Nazi past

April

Explosion and meltdown at Chernobyl nuclear power plant

Fire at Sandoz chemical plant causes environmental disaster on Rhine River Piet Derksen expands his Dutch Sporthuis Centrum villages into Center Parcs resorts

1987

October

US Stock Market crash spreads to Europe

300 Italian mafia leaders sentenced in “maxi-trial” Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” tried 1988

April

Free elections held in Soviet Union

December

Pam Am flight 103 blown up by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland

1989

April

Delors Report on three-stage progression to European monetary union

May

Gorbachev named Soviet president

June

Solidarity wins Polish elections

November

Fall of the Berlin Wall

November

Communist Party head Zhivkov loses power in Bulgaria

December

Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” brings Václav Havel to power

December

Collapse of East German government

December

Romanian uprising overthrows Ceauşescu’s communist government

London writer Salman Rushdie condemned to death by Iran after publication of Satanic Verses British physicist Tim Berners-Lee proposes hypertext system: the World Wide Web Spectators crushed during football tournament at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield 1990

March

Lithuania declares independence

March

First free elections in Hungary and East Germany

July

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) stage one inaugurated

August

Persian Gulf War begins (1990–91)

October German Reunification. Chancellor Helmut Kohl wins first all-German federal election

November

Margaret Thatcher forced to resign. John Major takes over Conservative Party

December

Solidarity’s Lech Wałęsa becomes president of Poland

“Three Tenors” perform at World Cup football finals in Rome Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall televised from Berlin 1991

February

Warsaw Pact officially dissolved

June

Slovenia and Croatia declare independence. Civil war begins in Yugoslavia (1991–94)

August

Baltic Republics gain independence from Soviet Union

August

Attempted coup in Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigns, and Yeltsin takes power

December Soviet Union breaks up into Commonwealth of Independent States. Civil war begins in southern republics

Tabloid tycoon Robert Maxwell dies in boating accident 1992

February

Bush and Yeltsin proclaim formal end to Cold War

February

Maastricht Treaty formalizes path to single European currency. European Community becomes European Union (EU)

April

Siege of Sarajevo begins (1992–96)

June

Danish voters say “no” to Maastricht. Ireland votes in favor of Maastricht

September French pass Treaty on European Union by narrow margin. French farmers riot against Maastricht and propose agricultural subsidy cuts

Political corruption scandals engulf Italy. Rise of Northern League First female priests ordained in Church of England 1993

January Formal break-up of Czechoslovakia into Czech Republic and Slovakia. Václav Havel elected as Czech president October Yeltsin crushes hard-line rebels barricaded in Moscow’s Parliament building November

Maastricht Treaty takes effect

Anti-immigrant violence and riots escalate in Germany The Uffizi Gallery in Florence bombed

1994

January

European Monetary Institute is established as the forerunner to the European Central Bank. Stage 2 of EMU

August

Irish Republican Army announces cessation of military operations

October

Media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi becomes Prime Minister of Italy

November Norway votes against joining European Union December First Chechen war begins between Russia and Chechnya

Channel Tunnel opens, connecting Britain and France 1995

January

Austria, Finland, and Sweden join European Union

May

Jacques Chirac elected President of France

September

France explodes nuclear device in Pacific

December

Dayton Peace accords on Yugoslavia signed

Race riots in Bradford, England. Wave of anti-immigrant violence in Germany 1996

May

Russians pull out of Chechnya

June—July

Peace in Bosnia declared. Yeltsin wins re-election in Russia

Mad cow disease hits Britain 1997

May

Labour Party’s Tony Blair wins election

July

British cede Hong Kong to China

August

Princess Diana dies in car crash

September

Swiss plan first payment to Holocaust victims

December

European Growth and Stability Pact approved

Scottish scientists introduce “Dolly,” the first cloned sheep Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opens

1998

April

Good Friday Peace Accord reached in Northern Ireland

June

Establishment of European Central Bank

September Chancellor Helmut Kohl defeated by Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder in Germany

François Mitterrand’s Bibliothèque Nationale opens in Paris Spice Girls world tour begins in Dublin 1999

January

Introduction of the Euro (Stage 3 of EMU)

March

NATO admits Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic

March

NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia

June

Kosovo refugee crisis and agreement on peace plan

October

Second war begins between Russia and Chechnya

December

Yeltsin resigns Russian presidency on New Year’s Eve

Norman Foster’s Reichstag opens in Berlin 2000

January

European accession negotiations open with Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania, and Malta

February

European dispute over Austria’s far right Freedom Party headed by Jörg Haider

March

Vladimir Putin elected President of Russia

August

Russian submarine Kursk sinks in Barents Sea

September Danish voters reject Euro October

Nationwide uprising overthrows Serbian president Milosevic

British find bodies of illegal Asian immigrants suffocated in Dutch truck Concorde crash kills 113 near Paris “I Love You” virus disrupts computers worldwide New Tate Modern opens in London Millennium celebrations across Europe

2001

February

Treaty of Nice on European enlargement

July

Violent demonstrations at Genoa G8 meeting

September Terrorist attacks on World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington, DC

Contributors Ivan T.Berend is Professor and Director of the Center for European and Russian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His many books include History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the “Long” 19th Century, forthcoming; Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (1998); Central and Eastern Europe 2944–1993; Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (1996); Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988 (1990); The Crisis Zone of Europe (1986); The Hungarian Economy in the Twentieth Century (1985); The European Periphery and Industrialization 1780–1914 (1982). Michael Hanagan teaches at the New School University in New York City. He is the author of several books on labor history and has also co-edited a number of books, most recently, Expanding Rights: Reconfiguring States with Charles Tilly and Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics with Leslie Moch and Wayne Te Brake. He is a senior editor of the journal International Labor and Working-class History. He is currently collaborating on a world history textbook and on a comparative study of the welfare state in England, France and the United States. He has written numerous articles on world history, globalization, and violent social movements. Jean-Jacques Jordi is an historian and researcher at the “Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme,” Aix-en-Provence. He is also Director of the Memorial de la France d’Outre-Mer, based in Marseilles. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Spain, Algeria, colonization and decolonization, repatriation, the pieds-noirs and the harkis. These include De I’Exode à l’exil: repatriés et pieds-noirs en France, I’exemple marseillais, 1954–1991 (1993); 1962, L’Arrivée des pieds-noirs (1995); Les Harkis: une mémoire enfouie (1999); and Espagnol en Oranie: Histoire d’une migration (1996), as well as the recently edited collection, Alger, 1860–1939: Le modèle ambigu du triomphe colonial with Jean-Louis Planche, (1999) and Alger en guerres: 1939–1962 with Guy Pervillé, (1999). Don Kalb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, teaching at University College Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was the Director of the Social Consequences of Economic Transformation in East Central Europe Program (SOCO) at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna (1998–2000). His publications include Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950, (1997), and he has edited The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In, (2000). He has published on globalization, cultural class formation, class theory, urban restructuring and general issues in social and cultural theory, including the conjunction of anthropology and history. His recent research focuses on problems of economic restructuring, culture, class and citizenship in Eastern Europe. See, for example, his afterword to Chris Hann (ed.), Postsocialism, Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, (2002). Robert H.Lieshout is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Director of the Nijmegen Centre for German Studies. His

publications include Between Anarchy and Hierarchy: A Theory of International Politics and Foreign Policy (1995); The Struggle for the Organization of Europe. The Foundations of the European Union (1999), and several articles on the theory and history of international relations. Wim Meeusen is Professor of Economics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He has edited Economic Policy in the European Union: Current Perspectives (1999) and has published in major professional journals such as the European Economic Review, International Economic Review and Journal of Econometrics. He has also edited with Henri Capron, The National Innovation System of Belgium (2000) and with José Villaverde, Convergence Issues in the European Union (2002). His present research interest is in the economics of innovation and technological progress. Steven Morewood is a Lecturer in International History at the University of Birmingham. His publications include Eastern Europe since 1918 with Derek Aldcroft (1995); “Europe at the Crossroads 1974–2000,” in D.H.Aldcroft and A.Sutcliffe (eds), Europe in the International Economy 1500–2000, (1999); “Towards a United Europe, 1990–2000,” Chapter 10 in D.H.Aldcroft, The European Economy, 1914–2000, 4th edition, (2001); “Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century,” in M.Oliver (ed.), Studies in Economic and Social History, (2002). Simon Sadler is an architectural historian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in experimental and radical design since World War II. He is the author of The Situationist City (1998), and co-editor of Non-Plan, (2000). He has been a Fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, where he completed research on the Archigram group of architects. His book, Amazing Archigram, is forthcoming from MIT Press. Rosemary Wakeman is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Fordham University in New York City. She is the author of Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945–1975, (1998) as well as articles on contemporary France and on urban history. She is currently working on a study of Paris during the 1950s.

Acknowledgements Michael Biddiss has been an outstanding editor for the Themes in Modern European History series. He has stuck by this volume, offered invaluable suggestions on many drafts, and has been instrumental to its success. My heartfelt thanks to all of the chapter contributors, who have worked so diligently to see the book through and who gave so generously of their time, their knowledge and wisdom. I am also very grateful to Victoria Peters, Senior Editor at Routledge, and to editorial assistant Sünje Redies for their unwavering enthusiasm and expert guidance. My colleagues and students at Fordham University are always a source of ideas and inspiration. I am indebted to them for their continual help and encouragement.

Europe after 1945

Europe in 2000

Introduction Rosemary Wakeman This volume is not so much about the well-known ups and downs of contemporary European politics and society as it is about the structural changes, the longer-range trends, that have taken place in Europe, and the reasons why. Traditionally, historians refer to a good portion of this epoch from 1945 to the century’s end in 2000 as “postwar” or “post1945” Europe—glaring evidence that the Second World War marked a major turning point in European history. It is customary to begin contemporary analysis with a description of “Year Zero” or 1945, and its lamentable landscape of destruction. And, indeed, it is all there: a ravaged Europe was tragic testament to the viciousness of the conflict. Appalling suffering and carnage overwhelmed the continent from London to Stalingrad. Cities were in ruins. Ports, bridges, roads, and railroads were wrecked in what can only be described as a geography of rubble. Millions had died. Millions more were lost and homeless. The war certainly still represents an unforgettable, in some cases almost unspeakable, tragedy and even second- and third-generation Europeans remain influenced by it. But beyond the final battle for Berlin and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Year Zero, or 1945, has come to represent a dividing line of extraordinary proportions in other ways. Initially, at the war’s end, public opinion marked it as the boundary between an old, discredited order and a new order, a revolutionary society. It was the dividing line between fifty years of dramatic political and social hyperbole—that abruptly ended in 1945—and then fifty years of reconstruction and a new ordinariness won of consensus and prosperity. It was the border between the great age of ideological rivalries and an age stigmatized by an “end of ideology,” in the familiar words of Daniel Bell, in which it was “impossible to write poetry,” in the verdict of Theodor Adorno. 1945 marked the line between the past and what was considered appropriate for historical research, and the present, which was “contemporary studies,” open to political scientists, sociologists, and journalists. But a tried-and-true adhesion to this traditional chronology obscures some of the most fundamental transformations in modern European development. As we move into an era in which the great European wars of the first half of the twentieth-century no longer play the predominant role, in which Europe as a continental entity is reuniting, history since 1945 takes on a different analytical cast. Events and crises that may have claimed exorbitant attention by historians only ten to fifteen years ago now pale in comparison to the upheavals of the late 1980s and 1990s that must be explained and interpreted. Much recent scholarship on twentieth-century Europe argues that the structural narrative of largescale institutional, economic and social change unfolded independently of the timeframe of the twentieth century or the traditional demarcation of post-1945. Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the “short twentieth century,” for example, starts in 1914 and concludes in 1989 with the collapse of communism. Mark Mazower’s dark European century follows much the same general trajectory, while Francis Fukuyama has taken a step further in arguing that communism’s demise marked the “end of history” and the

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birth of a new, less heroic era.1 The breakdown of communist rule, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has opened entirely new perspectives on the eastern half of the continent and shifted the understanding of what we once complacently defined as “Europe.” Since the end of the great ideological battles, whether against fascism during the Second World War or between communism and capitalism during the Cold War, much scholarship has focused on the perceived winner—capitalism, and the dilemmas of the global economy. Giovanni Arrighi has proposed a “long twentieth century” divided by the cycles of capitalism while Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein opt for a transitional passage in capitalist evolution that extends from 1945 to 2025.2 All this scholarship has been instrumental in placing the period in historical perspective and re-evaluating its significance and features. Yet assigning meaning and coherence to the phenomena of recent European history and understanding what indeed will endure remain a matter of heated discussion. Written by leading scholars in both Europe and the United States, the selections in this volume are structured around these debates. Together, they explore the most important themes and transformations in post1945 Europe and attempt to come to grips with the current understandings about them. The rigid break marked by 1945 is more moderate in our analysis. Both the Cold War and the long process of European decolonization, for example, are sharp litmus tests for the value of the traditional 1945 frontier. This volume treats the First and Second World Wars as much a brutal European civil war as two international wars, which did not see their completion until the reunification of Germany in 1989. The Cold War and partition of Europe can thus be seen as a continuation of the great ideological struggles that defined the first half of the century. In the same sense, the divestiture of empire had its roots in the early part of the century and did not reach its conclusion until the 1960s, and even later in some cases. Yet for all the rethinking of twentieth-century chronologies, in many ways 1945 still approximates a Year One. Mark Mazower, for example, comments that on one essential point Europe’s twentieth century “divides sharply into two halves.” Before 1950, more than sixty million people died in wars and state-sponsored violence. After 1950, that number dropped to well under one million.3 And there is little doubt that the years after 1945 were the chrysalis through which European culture and society emerged in contemporary form. Eric Hobsbawm also sees 1945 as the birth of a new era and argues that it is the extraordinary transformations of the second half of the twentieth century, rather than the ravages of the first half, that will capture the lion’s share of historical attention. One might argue that Europe’s fabrication of twentieth-century modalities, a process that pursued a route of extraordinary savagery and upheaval during the first half of the century, only began to take on a more enduring form after 1945. The Second World War was followed by a twenty- to twentyfive-year period of unprecedented economic growth and social flux that dramatically altered the fabric of European society. Structure of the book This volume begins with Steven Morewood’s study of the Cold War’s impact on Europe (Chapter 1). No history of post-1945 Europe would be complete without an examination of its political and economic influence. Despite the speed of reconstruction, the lack of a

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viable peace settlement and the continent’s incapacitated state invited the influence of the new superpowers. In Europe, the Cold War confrontation was direct and acute. It reduced the continent to eastern and western halves that obscured the diversity of culture and experience that has always been the European hallmark. Capitalist Western Europe followed the lead of an emergent American colossus. While by 1949, Eastern Europe had fallen under complete communist control and the dictates of the Soviet Union. A vanquished and divided Germany remained the troubled frontier between them. Yet for all the verbosity of the struggle, the Cold War provided a practical solution to the German problem and a needed time of “stability and peace through division.” The two rival camps accepted each other s zones of influence and clashed in a complicated struggle for political dominance and nuclear parity that suited both sides and did not overtly upset the status quo. Washington promoted democracy, productivity, and the “American way of life” in Western Europe, while Moscow instituted an iron grip over its Eastern European security zone. The strategic importance of Eastern Europe to Soviet defense was all too evident in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. Europe rapidly chafed under a partition that left little room for independent policy and conceived of the continent only as a “theater of war.” Thus in spite of pressure from both superpowers, the continent began to re-knit long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the West, Charles de Gaulle’s rebellion against American policy and his withdrawal from NATO were followed by Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and a new era of European détente. The Euromissile crisis of the 1980s ignited antinuclear protest and the revival of Eurocommunism, while economic exchanges between Eastern and Western Europe flourished despite the threat of American sanctions. In the East, Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership opened the door to revolution and the crumbling of Soviet power. In Chapter 8, Ivan Berend offers an in-depth analysis of the evolution of communism in Eastern Europe and its eventual demise. Soviet domination generated fundamental resistance from its inception, initially in Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948 and then in the 1956 “October Revolutions” in Poland and Hungary that—despite their defeat—resulted in a permanent reform process. “Social democratic” oppositions and movements such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland, and the Democratic Opposition in Hungary openly condemned the duplicity of the communist regime. However, it was the economic crisis of the 1970s and the transformations in the global economy that spelled communism’s doom. Although the era of détente and Gorbachev’s perestroika provided massive Western loans, little could be done to resuscitate Soviet bloc economies mired in corruption and inflexibility. Nor could Gorbachev’s glasnost budge antediluvian hard-line governments in Romania, East Germany, or Bulgaria until they were finally toppled in 1989. The popular revolutions that quickly felled them “like dominos” paved the way for the coming together of the European continent’s divided halves. The wartime division of Europe simply could not be sustained. Nor for that matter could Europe’s far-flung world empires, a subject that JeanJacques Jordi takes up in his examination of decolonization and its impact (Chapter 2). Globally, Europe had lost its primacy. Given the military defeat of the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the Second World War and Britain’s difficulty in maintaining its Asian supremacy, there was little chance that their colonial possessions would somehow remain intact. Even more, faced with the reconstruction and modernization of their own

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realms, with the challenge of American competition, and the threat of the Soviet bloc, the European imperial powers generally viewed their colonial obligations as a drawback rather than a blessing. The rising tide of native discontent had turned into a torrent. Although there were some deadly and tragic efforts to retain imperial dominance—the Indochinese and Algerian Wars being the worst examples—the divesture of empire was generally peaceful. In a short twenty-year period, from 1945 to 1965, the quasi-totality of European possessions was “decolonized.” The first waves of ethnic European refugees or “repatriates” who arrived on the continent from the former colonies faced daunting challenges, as did the state administrations set up to receive them. Yet despite serious problems that provoked hostility and racial strife, this process, as well, did not provoke either economic or social calamity. In general, the repatriates assimilated into Europe’s cities, rebuilt their lives in new immigrant communities, and contributed to the continent s reconstruction and the resurgence of its economy. It was only the second great wave of immigrants—native peoples escaping political and economic disintegration in the newly independent states, particularly from the 1970s—that provoked real crisis and forced Europeans to reconsider their national identities and cultures. Thus even with the threatening oratory of the Cold War and the trauma of decolonization, the political arrangements imposed on postwar Europe from outside its borders provided a measure of real stability for perhaps the first time in the twentieth century. It provided the foundation for an extraordinary “catching up” and convergence that made European nations increasingly alike—and those similarities appeared across the political, economic, social, and cultural spectrums. It took place within the context of economic modernization, which is examined in Chapter 3. In the space of a short twentyyear period from 1953 to 1973, Europe underwent a rapid, dramatic transformation into an urban, fully industrialized, consumer society—an accelerated transition into Fordism. Although this is truest for Western Europe, it was also the case in Eastern Europe. The change was begun by a remarkable consensus at the end of the Second World War that extensive Keynesian growth policies and state management would assure the “better life,” the sweeping economic and social reforms, that the wartime sacrifices had demanded. Capitalist and communist nations alike adapted policy-making to the great task of rapid, extensive economic growth. The magnitude of this transformation has perhaps best been captured in the term “golden age.” It entailed a relentless dismantling of earlier economic and social arrangements, and promoted modernization through mixed market economies and state planning, massive investments in infrastructure and industrialization, full employment and the settlement of labor conflict. Big business prospered. European companies churned out a myriad of products for waiting consumers. Mass production and mass consumption created a more homogenized landscape that obliterated differences and hastened the “catching-up” and convergence that were unique features of these boom years. Of all the upheavals of the twentieth century, this “golden age” may, in retrospect, be the defining event precisely because it involved a whole new material world and with it, a new society and culture that transformed the lives of Europeans almost beyond recognition. The social consequences were striking, as Don Kalb’s analysis of the transformation in European social relations attests (Chapter 4). The postwar years brought an unprecedented migration of people—from countryside to city, and from country to country. Europe changed from a rural landscape into an urban one, as the peasant

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population living off the land was slashed by well over half by the 1980s. Modernization thirsted for mobile labor. Millions left behind their ancient villages and farms and headed for the city to find work. Many were from southern Europe migrating to the continent’s northern industrial heart. They joined “guest workers,” refugees, foreign immigrants, and natives to make up the millions whose productivity fueled the unprecedented economic growth of the golden age. As part of the postwar settlement, Europe’s traditional working classes profited from the “social contracts” and welfare protections negotiated between labor, management, and government. This postwar solidarity and reduction in class tensions that had long plagued Europe provided a remarkable social stability to the postwar age. It collapsed social distances. Class distinctions were blurred. Prosperity was broadly shared as nearly everyone became dependent on salaried jobs. More equal access to housing, health and social security benefits, and public education vastly improved the quality of life for the average family. Prosperity, combined with the postwar baby boom, produced a youth culture with a concentrated mass of purchasing power by the early 1960s. Particularly in Western Europe, the “proletariat” were replaced by “affluent workers” and professionals, teenagers, women, and young families who came to regard themselves increasingly as consumers rather than producers, with their identities shaped by a new materialism—the commodities they chose, cars they drove, the sort of holidays they could afford. The social designation of class intersected with that of generation, gender, and ethnicity to produce a plethora of identities that converged in a culture that seemed to metabolize everything into the homogenized spectacle of modernity. Even the convergence around a common urban form was conspicuous. Modernism became the leitmotif of reconstruction planning. Europe’s densely woven urban regions were filled with the signature public housing estates, apartment blocks, and infrastructure emblematic of the “golden age.” Whether in the suburbs of Paris or Prague, whether in “new towns” or rebuilt ones, waves of urban settlers took up residence in spanking new apartments and homes filled with accoutrements that had mostly been dreams before the war. Television, films, fashion, and rock and pop music became the springboard for a veritable cultural revolution that collapsed the rigid traditions of Europe’s past and replaced them with a youthful, democratic mass phenomenon, which is studied in Chapter 6 of this volume. There was an essential optimism to mass culture, a liberating sense that anything was possible. Don Kalb’s description of his father, settled into a social housing district in Eindhoven, joyfully watching John Lennon and Yoko Ono lounging in their luxury hotel on TV is testament to the seeming arrival of the good life for everyone—even a working-class bloke from Liverpool. The “swinging sixties” were perhaps its earliest victory, but the longer-term influence of this all-pervasive, universalized mass culture continued through the revolution in telecommunications and the media empires that controlled the flow of information, and with it values and behavior. By the turn of the century, urban life and the everyday spaces of existence were infused with the sights and sounds of a common cultural ethos and a deepening materialism. Whether in major cities such as London or Budapest, or cities on the margins of Europe, in Trieste or Marseilles, the similarity of experience and the ubiquity of contemporary urban place were stunning. The images and desires of commodity culture filtered down to the remotest corner of Europe’s geography. As Steven Morewood remarks, Nicolai Ceauşescu’s greatest mistake was to allow Dallas to be screened on Romanian television. Although Europeans traditionally translated the

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spectacle of consumer society into a battle against americanization, the evolution of mass culture created an entirely new European dynamic and challenged the very nature of identity and civic life. Not every part of Europe shared equally in the prosperity, nor did every worker benefit from modernization. Welfare states were not all of a kind. There were limits to the bounty of the “golden age.” In his study of Europe’s changing social margins (Chapter 5), Michael Hanagan explains that while organized, native workers and their families profited from the postwar social contract, other groups were clearly excluded. Europe’s “guest workers,” who underpinned postwar recovery, were excluded from civic life. Various national and religious minorities, women, homosexuals, all felt the weight—at times violent—of discrimination. Foreign migrants, especially non-white minorities, were among the newly marginalized. The unemployed adolescent of North African, Turkish, or East Asian origin became the new pariah on Europe’s social landscape. Their numbers swelled into the millions as new waves of immigration, especially from the 1970s, brought non-European laborers and their families to Europe’s cities. They took up residence in the deteriorating housing blocks and slum areas that made up a suburban geography of exclusion—from jobs, and sometimes from citizenship. Refugees from as far away as Afghanistan and as close as the Balkans fueled suspicions and heightened ethnic tensions, especially after the economic crisis of the 1970s ended the easy affluence and left Europe with the heavy burdens of unemployment, “stagflation” and deindustrialization. The advanced economies of the West evolved away from manufacturing to a service and financial orientation. Fordism was exchanged for the flexible mobility and specialization made possible by automation and the information revolution. The New World Economy was made up of huge private corporations and banks that moved their facilities in and out of Europe, and moved money around the world in a matter of minutes. The capacity for any one nation to manage its own economy and control the impact of these global forces on its currency, business, or employment was severely tested. Sometimes the threat was as distant as Sony Electronics in Japan; sometimes it was as close as the Bundesbank. The challenge of the postindustrial global economy was initially problematic for Europe. The mood of disheartening gloom was summed up in the diagnosis of a festering “Eurosclerosis” that explained the continent’s anemic reaction to its robust global competitors. The social contract negotiated in the halcycon days of postwar consensus was broken as governments turned toward “free market” strategies as a cure. The disarray in Eastern Europe added to the anxiety. As Ivan Berend explains in Chapter 8, in the East the effects of the economic crisis and arrival of globalization were aggravated by the collapse of communism and the first years of capitalist transition. Yet free market capitalism alone did not succeed in transforming the region’s long-standing problems. The economic chaos of the post-communist era promoted the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobic violence, particularly in the Balkans where, once again, bloody ethnic cleansing plunged the region into war. Whether the new line of demarcation is based on politics or economics—the fall of the golden age or the fall of communism—confusion and a gray cloud of glumness mark the period after the oil crisis of 1973. Writing at the end of the century, many historians argued (with some melancholy), that by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Europe’s place in history had changed. It no longer occupied the central role it had once played as the

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unquestioned center of power, wealth, and culture. That decline began with the disaster of the Second World War and proceeded through an age marked increasingly by a new constellation of superpowers and by the spectacular influence of global capitalism and mass culture. “There is a strong sense of futility about Europe in the second half of the twentieth century,” Norman Davies remarks in his magisterial history of the continent. The “wasted years” were spent divided between East and West, and then reunited without a clear sense of identity.4 Charles Maier echoes the sense of malaise about the late twentieth century: “Sometime between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1980s, beset by doubts and uncertainty about the viability of democracy and capitalism, we lived through our own fin de siècle”5 For well over two centuries, Europeans saw themselves as the model of progressive, enlightened civilization for the globe. Yet by the end of the twentieth century the image of “European civilization,” so long the measure of all things cultured and advanced that everything else was neglected, was far more ambiguous. What “Europe” was and what role it would play in the world were vague and undecided. European officials themselves often echoed the end-of-millennium intellectual malaise. In 1999, one French official described Europe as “a tired continent, in late middle age, looking only for a comfortable retirement, with the United States as its eternal protector.”6 By 2003, this kind of complacency was severly tested by the tensions over war in Iraq. This volume takes a more benign, even optimistic tone toward contemporary Europe. The post-1945 era was certainly more democratic, prosperous, and peaceful than was the first half of the twentieth century. Europe survived the Cold War without becoming a scene of nuclear annihilation, and in many ways profited from the stability enforced by the superpowers. The divesture of empire was negotiated peacefully for the most part. Europe also underwent a massive process of modernization and emerged reunited, capable of steering its way through a postindustrial world with sound money and substantial, and more equally distributed, wealth. A fan of protest and revolutionary turmoil—from the 1950s’ “October Revolutions” and the 1968 protests to the fall of the Berlin Wall—took place without bringing the continent to the brink of widespread slaughter and civil war. The process of convergence helped to dissolve some of the most long-standing and politically conflicted injustices in Europe—many of the grievances, for example, of the traditional working classes, of women devoid of civil rights until after the Second World War, or of the poverty-stricken regions of the south. There is no doubt that key social and economic inequities remained, especially those between East and West. New social groups certainly appeared on the margins, suffering from discrimination and dreadful exclusion. New economic and geographic peripheries existed. But it is important to point out the extraordinary successes of the contemporary era. The current European identity crisis is in part due to the reality that we are all far more bound together as a western or even global culture by travel, trade, technology and communication than was the case in 1945. Yet the caldron of mass culture and globalization produced a dialectic process of both convergence and divergence. Compared to other world regions, as Don Kalb argues in Chapter 4, Europe’s urban landscape retained a compact, socially and economically complex character that preserved historic legacies, local distinctiveness, and a multifaceted civic life. Even an avant-garde politics emerged that was more flexibly contingent on the particularities of local circumstance, rather than strictly on class identity. Harder to deal with are the

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challenges imposed by the intersection of class, citizenship, and ethnicity—especially the consequences of social exclusion. A sharpened sense of cultural citizenship vied with national citizenship for the loyalties of Europe’s increasingly diverse population, and the results were sometimes unfortunate, if not devastating. Yet even here, the continent managed to successfully absorb uninterrupted waves of mass migration and foreign immigration from the end of the Second World War through to the century’s end. The urban landscape of Europe became an extraordinary mixture of cultures and ethnic spaces. The avant-garde, examined by Simon Sadler in Chapter 7, is an excellent barometer of these social and cultural tensions. Burdened by its own history and theory, the avantgarde ceased to be a revolutionary force after the Second World War. Beset by ennui and pessimism, cutting-edge artists and intellectuals had few choices: they found themselves either stifled by the very communism they had once seen as the future, officially sponsored in the mind-numbing artistic institutions they had once hoped to destroy, or they found their creative production instantly absorbed by capitalist mass culture. Postwar affluence left little room for class struggle. Modernism itself had become mainstream, as had the strategies of novelty and shock. Avantgarde art was just one more cultural commodity. Yet despite this convergence around mass cultural norms, avantgarde representation of difference and otherness captured a postmodern “decentering” of European culture. The challenge of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and multiculturalism, class mobility and migration—even globalization and the telecommunications revolution themselves—made cultural production more diverse and inquiring. It maintained the dissent and invention that were the heart of the avant-garde mission and laid bare the uncertainties of contemporary European culture and identity. One group attempting to define the meaning of Europe was the growing corps of “Europeanists” clustered in Brusseis. The vision they offered was a step-by-step process from sectoral integration to monetary union and eventually to political union. This process is considered in two chapters that examine both its political and economic evolution. Robert Lieshout argues in Chapter 9 that integration was primarily a political process driven by attempts to find a peaceful solution to the violent French—German power struggle. Even enlargement from the original six members to fifteen took place within the framework of French—German relations. Progress vacillated between supranational initiatives and those that preserved state autonomy, the latter usually championed by France with agricultural policy as the most dramatic stage for its influence. Here as well, the turning point was the economic crisis of the 1970s and the New Economy, which eventually pushed Europe forward into monetary union. In Chapter 10, Wim Meeusen examines economic integration from the perspective of the postwar business cycles, arguing that the steps toward union not only contributed to recovery in each cycle, but also succeeded in creating a European economic identity. This type of interdependence, however, has been fraught with the uncertainties and swerves inherent in the global economy. Responding to world markets and to the challenge of American economic predominance, finding a suitable monetary policy from the snake to the euro—is the difficult arena in which Europe has gradually moved toward integration. For most Europeans, the euro is now accepted as the bold extension of a successful experiment in economic integration. But whether this will set the stage for meaningful political unity is not clear. European integration is multifaceted, complicated and fraught

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with obstacles. There are more nation-states in Europe than ever before: processes of fragmentation have been as strong as those of integration. Globalization challenges the very meaning of citizenship, and most turn back to their own national language and culture to rediscover it. For the moment, the idea of Europe may also have lost its galvanizing appeal. Europe has little resonance for the lines of unemployed. The high toll taken by the budgetary squeeze required for the euro is associated with a thick-skinned technocracy in Brussels. The discontent with transnational institutions such as the European Union, or global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, comes in good part from their lack of transparency and the fear that they undermine democracy. These criticisms amplified just as the European Union faced its greatest challenge yet— membership for the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet both Robert Lieshout and Wim Meeusen suggest that integration should be pushed forward, and that far-sighted “European statesmanship” in the tradition of Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer is now called for. Each of the thematic chapters that follow examines the key structural changes and transformations that characterized Europe in the period 1945–2000. The narratives weave together a complex portrait of Europe’s nations and regions, and the diversity of experiences. Yet they also attempt to unearth some structure to post-1945 history and consider its relationship to the twentieth century as a whole. In this sense, the volume’s purpose is also to analyse the key interpretations about the recent European past. Collectively our work hopes to contribute to this ongoing debate and to broaden the knowledge and understanding of an extraordinary era. Further reading Richard Vinen’s A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2000 is an outstanding recent history as is Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999- Both offer refreshing new approaches and lively writing styles. Walter Laqueur, Europe in Our Time: A History 1945–1992, New York, Viking Press, 1992, and R. Paxton’s Europe in the Twentieth Century, New York, Harcourt, 1975 are both filled with useful insights and information. G.Ambrosius and W.H.Hubbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989 is an essential source. Excellent discussions of contemporary Europe and questions of contemporary chronology can also be found in broader world histories such as David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945, New York, W.W.Norton, 2000; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, London and New York, Verso, 1994; as well as E.J.Hobsbawm’s classic The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York, Pantheon, 1994. The tumultuous events of the twentieth century are encapsulated in Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, 1952–1999, New York, William Morrow, 1999. On Western Europe, A. Sutcliffe, An Economic and Social History of Western Europe Since 1945, London, Longman, 1996 provides a wealth of information as does A. Sampson, Anatomy of Europe, New York, Harper & Row, 1968 and D.W.Unwin, A Political History of Western Europe Since 1945, Harlow, Addison-Wesley Longman,

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1995. M.-S.Schulze (ed.), Western Europe: Economic and Social Change Since 1945, New York, Longman, 1998 is a wide-ranging study. A. Milward’s The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51, London, Methuen, 1984 is an outstanding study of the reconstruction years. An older but insightful collection of articles is found in S.R.Graubard (ed.), A New Europe?, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Guilio Sapelli provides an analysis of the southern European nations in Southern Europe Since 1945: Tradition and Modernity in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, New York, Longman, 1995. On Eastern Europe, D.Aldcroft and S.Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe since 1918, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995; and I.T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1991: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 are both indispensable. A.Teichova (ed.), Central Europe in the Twentieth Century: An Economic History Perspective, Brookfield, VT, Ashgate, 1997 and G.Swain and N.Swain, Eastern Europe Since 1945, London, Macmillan, 1998 are also useful. Good overviews are provided in G.Schöpflin, Politics in Eastern Europe 1945–1992, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993 and R.J.Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, London, Routledge, 1994. Finally, Europe’s prospects in the new millennium are examined by D.Calleo, Rethinking Europe’s Future, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001. Notes 1 E.J.Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York, Pantheon, 1994; M.Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York, Alfred A.Knopf, 1999, and Francis Fukuyama, the End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992. 2 G.Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, London, Verso, 1994, and T.Hopkins and I.Wallerstein, The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System 1945–2025, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 3 Mazower, Dark Continent, p. 399. 4 Norman Davies, Europe: A History, New York, Harper Perennial, 1996, pp. 1057–8. 5 Charles Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” The American Historical Review, 105 (June 2000): 825. 6 The New York Times, 3 January 1999.

1 Divided Europe The long postwar, 1945–89 Steven Morewood Over the period under review Europe divided sharply between free democracies and quasi-democracies, between open and closed societies, a split that prompted Winston Churchill to encapsulate the situation in his famous “Iron Curtain” address. On one side stood free Europe, protected by an emergent American superpower, determined to eschew the isolationist stance that helped bring about the Second World War. On the other stood the captive nations of Eastern Europe dominated by the Kremlin. The fault line would remain rigidly in place until the 1989 revolutions and symbolized the Cold War more than anything else. Some key questions suggest themselves in considering this seminal period of modern European history. Was the Cold War, which literally divided Europe, inevitable? What was the nature of the divisions that emerged? How did the Cold War affect Europe? To what extent could and did Europe’s split personalities pursue economic and foreign policies that conflicted with the interests of their superpower protector? Was the outcome of the Cold War predetermined by the inherent advantages of democracies and free market economies over authoritarianism and command economies? Or did the Soviet leadership commit fundamental errors that cumulatively brought down the “outer empire” in Eastern Europe and ultimately the Soviet Union itself? There is no consensus view on any of these questions and, like George Bernard Shaw’s jibe—that if all economists “were laid from end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion”—the debates will rumble on. Ideological bias also comes into play—although current research is much more archives-centered or driven by international relations theory, reflecting the fact that the Cold War is now past history. The origins of the Cold War and the division of Europe The onset of the Cold War has been subjected to several interpretations. The long-term view sees American-Russian hostility as the natural state of affairs following the Bolshevik Revolution. The Grand Alliance of the Second World War was therefore a false one and once its objective—defeat of the tripartite powers—was achieved, the coalition was bound to collapse and the normal distant and frosty relationship resumed. In this interpretation, the Cold War could only end with the collapse of capitalism or communism and therefore lasted from 1917 to 1991. More usually, the origins of the

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Cold War have been rooted in the immediate postwar period. The traditional school, centered on the memoirs of senior American political figures, blamed Soviet actions and ambitions for starting the Cold War. It was based on a literal interpretation of Soviet ideology: the notion that the Kremlin was intent on spreading communism across the globe and containment led by the United States was necessary to stop it. The revisionist school suggested that Soviet policy was in fact reactive and laid the primary blame on Western anti-communism, which grossly exaggerated Soviet intentions. In this interpretation, it was American actions, including the refusal to share atomic secrets and the employment of economic pressures, which ignited the Cold War. The post-revisionist school considered both sides at fault to varying degrees and recognized that contributing factors differed according to the particular situation. These schools tended to reflect different phases of the Cold War. Thus, for example, post-revisionism emerged during the 1970s, when détente prevailed and it was politically correct to apportion blame evenly. More recently, the collapse of the Soviet Union has begun to bring forth fresh perspectives from its archives and those of former satellites, while Britain has been accorded a more important role in starting the Cold War.1 To quote Melvyn Leffler: The Cold War in Europe was the result of an interactive process in which leaders in many capitals were responding to multiple threats and opportunities to their interests, power, and security (meaning not just territorial security but also regime-type). The threats and opportunities that policymakers perceived emanated from a unique set of geopolitical configurations in the international system interacting with equally unique sets of indigenous variables within their own countries. Ideological predilections, cultural dictates, and historical experience helped shape these officials’ assessments of these threats and opportunities. Parsimonious theory and singleminded interpretations cannot do justice to the complexity of the historical process.2 What has been termed “new Cold War history” is still being written. The situation is therefore in a state of flux with archival revelations and new approaches casting fresh light on what had become a sterile debate. Whatever view is taken of the causes of the Cold War, Europe was its epicenter. The failure to agree on a lasting peace settlement for the Continent led the superpowers to establish spheres of influence there. The fact was that Western Europe was so weakened by its exertions in the Second World War that the United States felt compelled to act as a buttress lest the Soviets took advantage. Soviet archives have so far yielded no plan to invade Western Europe. Whether or not this was the Kremlin’s intention is beside the point—the option was there if Washington stepped aside and military planners could not afford to disregard the possibility. Walter Laqueur recognized some home truths about the division of Europe: The Soviet Union quite likely never intended to invade Western Europe, as many feared at the time. But it is also true that a vacuum of power in Western Europe would have constituted a permanent temptation to the superpower in the East, with its formidable military power headed by a

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leadership that knew neither scruples nor internal divisions. Fear of Russia was probably the single most important cause of greater willingness in Europe to co-operate.3 Indeed, NATO held annual exercises centered on the assumption of a Soviet invasion and its forces remained in a constant state of readiness for such an eventuality. Superpower confrontation was therefore inherent in the postwar situation and compounded by disagreement over the future of Germany. The Soviets wanted to extract punitive reparations to keep Germany down whereas the Western powers, controlling the lion’s share of German industrial resources, wished to promote German recovery as a platform for European economic recovery. The eventual result—a divided Germany— became a key frontline of the Cold War. At the same time, this outcome suited both superpowers because it resolved the German problem and ensured that a resurgent Germany could not, by itself, instigate another European war as it had after 1918. This was also true of the Continent: there could be no return to the “old Europe” and the closing of the Iron Curtain created a measure of stability through locking the advanced and relatively backward halves together under the aegis of their patron superpower. It was the acceptance by each that military intervention in their sphere of influence would turn the Cold War “hot” that sustained the division for over four decades. The doctrine was one of “stability and peace through division.” As Richard Villers states: “There was a decline in the cordiality of relations after 1947, but no attempt to challenge the frontiers that divided a Soviet-dominated East from an American-dominated West.”4 Again, Eric Hobsbawm recognizes that: “Both sides tacitly accepted the boundaries of each other s zones of influence, and during the 1950s and 1960s no indigenous revolutionary changes appeared on the globe, except in Cuba.”5 The Cold War was therefore fought in different ways by the superpowers: through brinkmanship, as in the Berlin crises of 1948 and 1961; military confrontation, both conventional and atomic; a political, psychological and ideological propaganda battle to try to win over the hearts and minds of rival populations; and in the economic domain with separate trading systems centered on the industrial might of the respective superpowers, echoing Stalin’s concept of “two world economies.” “There were,” remarks Georges-Henri Souti, “no common values, no common culture, no free movement of people and goods and ideas.”6 The division of Europe into rival camps assumed a number of forms. Opposing political systems reflected those of the hegemonic power. Thus Western Europe, Greece and Turkey embraced democracy where Eastern Europe and most Balkan regimes—ironically styled “people s democracies”— followed the Soviet autocratic model to different degrees. George Soros considers that: “The Soviet system was probably the most comprehensive form of closed society ever invented by man. It penetrated into practically all aspects of experience: not only the political and military but also the economic and the intellectual.”7 The surveillance societies that emerged were police states wherein security forces intimidated and spied on the general population to ensure passive compliance with the system and to root out troublemakers. Economically, Washington actively promoted the integration of Western Europe through the Organization for European Economic Co-operation, which led to the European Economic Community (EEC), which in turn became the European Community (EC). Originally comprising six members, by the mid-1980s there had been three EC enlargements. The first involved Britain, Denmark and Ireland in 1973. The second

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extended to Greece in 1981, and the third to Spain and Portugal in 1986, with these three southern countries being admitted as much for politico-strategic as economic reasons, all of them having experienced recent destabilizing dictatorships. Stalin was suspicious of European federalism and refused to allow Soviet satellites to become involved, a stance continued by his successors. Militarily, the division was symbolized by the rivalry between NATO, formed in 1949 and soon extended to incorporate Greece and Turkey, and the Warsaw Pact, established in 1955 after West Germany joined NATO’s ranks. Some historians suggest that the Cold War began on July 2, 1947 when the Soviet deputation was withdrawn from the Paris talks considering the Marshall Plan. This is debatable, but perhaps more than anything else the extension of Marshall Aid symbolized the economic divisions. The American benefactor sought to replicate its own successful economic model in Europe to sustain and inculcate democracy by means of raised productivity, banished shortages and higher living standards. Some $13.2 billion was made available between 1948 and 1952. Stalin would not permit bloc countries to participate because of the “imperialist” overtones, thereby restricting the recovery program to Western Europe and Greece. The Soviet response to Marshall Aid was Comecon, or the CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) founded in 1949.8 This never achieved the integration of the EEC and tended instead to promote bilateral relations between Moscow and its satellites. Both economic systems had political overtones. The EEC sought to entwine member economies—not least West Germany’s— to prevent another internecine European conflict. “No more war between us” was an early rallying slogan. The CMEA provided a mechanism for the Soviet Union to promote its dominance over the strategically vital captive nations of Eastern Europe through the provision of abundant raw materials and acceptance of poor quality manufactured goods. Geir Lundestad argues that the United States was drawn into Western Europe for economic, political and military reasons at the instigation of its European allies.9 They desperately needed and sought American aid. This constituted “empire by invitation” and was on a greater scale than Soviet expansion. But there were strings attached. Britain and France had to open up their empires to outside trade and Marshall Aid recipients needed to minimize trading links with Eastern Europe and promote economic integration between themselves. Washington consciously sought to inculcate the “American way of life” in Western Europe, which was seen as an important overseas market for goods produced in the United States. Culture was exported in a number of guises, including mass consumer goods and movies that tended to idealize the American way of life, and troops at various overseas bases. In line with this, US investment in Western Europe mushroomed from $1.7 billion in 1950 to $21.5 billion by 1969. Moscow was initially intent on plundering Eastern Europe for economic resources to promote its own economic recovery from the war. It is estimated that in the decade after 1945, some $13 billion worth of reparations were extracted. Following the 1953 East German uprising and the 1956 Hungarian revolt, this policy gave way to the heavy subsidization by Moscow of its satellites to sustain their puppet regimes in power, including paying for any Soviet troops stationed on their territory. The critical importance of Eastern Europe to Soviet security, a key force for the Sovietization of the region after 1945, re-emerged as a reason for reasserting an iron grip there in the 1960s. From the middle of the decade a new generation of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) allowed the Soviet Union to catch up with the United States to

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create a virtual nuclear stand-off: an attack by one side would inevitably lead to mutual annihilation. In this context, the possibility was heightened of a conventional war fought between the superpowers in Europe. As a result, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reversed Nikita Khrushchev’s plans to reduce conventional forces. The enhanced strategic significance of Eastern Europe was one reason why, while a degree of deviation could be tolerated from Nicolai Ceauşescu’s Romania, Alexander Dubcek’s efforts to create “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia could not. For while the former’s strategic location was peripheral the latter occupied a central geographical position. Soviet military intervention along with its Warsaw Pact allies (bar Romania) in August 1968 to crush the “Prague Spring” gave rise to the Brezhnev Doctrine. This decreed that bloc countries must maintain an acceptable socialist outlook both internally and internationally. It was intended to ensure that satellites remained loyal to Soviet interests and signaled that they could expect military retribution if they overstepped the mark. In Czechoslovakia a loyal communist apparatchik, Gustav Husák, was installed with a Soviet garrison deployed to underwrite his authority and ensure “normality.” Emerging differences: the United States and its European allies 1963–82 It was French president Charles de Gaulle who led the European charge against subservience to Washington—at least publicly (Britain secretly kept nuclear weapons at Cyprus and Singapore without alerting its superpower ally). The Kennedy administration had devised the concept of “flexible response,” that is the initial deployment of conventional weapons escalating, if necessary, to nuclear warfare. The West Germans, who were in the front line, were uneasy at this. De Gaulle attempted to draw Bonn away from Washington, but was disenchanted with the pro-American preamble of the January 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation. The same month De Gaulle rejected Washington’s offer of Polaris missiles and vetoed the British application to join the EEC, seeing Britain as the USA’s Trojan horse. The following year De Gaulle broke ranks and established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. De Gaulle further destabilized the Transatlantic Alliance by demanding gold for dollars under the Bretton Woods monetary system, denouncing American involvement in Vietnam and withdrawing French forces from NATO in 1966, which meant shifting its headquarters from Paris to Brussels. De Gaulle even had the effrontery to fly to Moscow to discuss with Brezhnev the prospect of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” bereft of American influence. The French president perceived that Soviet power was waning as evidenced by its growing difficulties in keeping control over Eastern Europe. The Soviets were clearly already over-stretched and faced a hostile China. To seek to absorb Western Europe by military conquest in the certain knowledge that such a move invited nuclear annihilation could not be part of their agenda. To De Gaulle, therefore, the Soviet Union could be seen as a status quo power with which it was possible, even desirable, to do business. France was not the only ally creating ructions in the Transatlantic Alliance. In May 1967 West Germany agreed to meet the majority of the foreign exchange costs of basing American and British troops on its territory, thereby nullifying threats to withdraw them on cost grounds. Bonn instigated a thaw in relations with the Soviet bloc in May 1969

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when it ended implementation of the Hallstein Doctrine—the policy of severing relations with countries (except the Soviet Union) that recognized East Germany. After Willy Brandt became Chancellor in October 1969, he pursued a policy of Ostpolitik. As he defined it: “While remaining in touch with our allies and retaining their confidence, we became the advocates of our own interests vis-à-vis the governments of Eastern Europe.” Diplomatic relations were soon established with Romania and Yugoslavia, the maverick socialist states. By 1973 this strategy had resulted in bilateral treaties with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany that normalized relations, recognized the borders established at Potsdam and renounced the use of force. The agreement with East Germany acknowledged the principle of two states in one nation. Moreover, the four occupying powers signed the Quadripartite Agreement in September 1971 on access to West Berlin, which stabilized the position there and substantially increased Soviet trade with the western sectors. Washington was not nearly so keen on Ostpolitik. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger worried that closer ties would strengthen the Soviet bloc and feared “creeping dissociation” by Bonn. In Paris, Georges Pompidou, De Gaulle’s successor, was sufficiently alarmed to move towards the British and finally allow them into the European Community. The Nixon administration proclaimed 1973 “the year of Europe” and sought a new Atlantic Charter. It did so in vain. The Europeans found the American diplomatic initiative condescending and patronizing. His words loaded with sarcasm, Pompidou pointed out to Kissinger that “for Europeans every year is the year of Europe.” Pompidou continued De Gaulle’s policy and through a series of summits with Brezhnev strengthened relations with Moscow. In a similar vein, his successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, received Brezhnev in December 1974. By the 1970s and early 1980s there was growing concern in the United States at the prospect of the Soviet “Finlandization” of Western Europe. Although not a communist state or a member of the Warsaw Pact, Finland was recognized to be within the Soviet sphere of influence and its foreign policy was largely dictated by Moscow. In March 1976 neo-conservatives formed the Committee of the Present Danger (CPD), which suggested that the United States had become complacent, allowing the Soviets to steal a march on the West. Its twin themes were that the Soviet Union was intent on isolating and dominating Western Europe and that, once this was achieved, China and Japan would gravitate to the Soviet bloc, leaving the United States isolated. In the late 1970s the Soviets perceptibly expanded their influence in the Third World—airlifting Cuban troops in Angola, persuading Ethiopia and South Yemen to join the Soviet camp and installing a Marxist regime in Afghanistan. The CPD encapsulated the projection of Soviet power into a worst-case scenario whereby, in conjunction with a nuclear build-up, the Soviet Union exerted mounting political pressure upon Western Europe. After dismissing the prospect of a conventional invasion, CPD member Richard Pipes attributed to the Kremlin an altogether subtler and more cunning approach: The most effective form which this threat takes is first, an enormous military build-up on the European frontier, which has the psychological effect of intimidating European public opinion and creating a sense of helplessness; and secondly, through a flanking movement, via the Middle East and Africa, which endangers European oil supplies and a large

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proportion of European mineral supplies from South Africa. These measures can bring Europe to its knees without any shots necessarily being fired.10 The suggestion that there was a Soviet pincer movement from Africa and Central Asia on the Persian Gulf finally resonated with the détente-inclined Carter administration following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. It belatedly initiated a rearmament program, set aside the unratified Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) II Treaty and declared the “Carter Doctrine” that any Soviet move on the oil-rich Persian Gulf represented a casus belli. Some sixty CPD members, including the president himself, were involved in the new Reagan administration whose harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric, massive arms build-up and actions initiated a new Cold War. Prone to gaffes, the geriatric president once famously told reporters that he could conceive of “the exchange of tactical weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button.” This remark alarmed West European leaders because if nuclear war were limited, their countries would be on the receiving end. By 1985 the military confrontation between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces was in the balance. NATO held the edge in air power while the Soviets had a decided advantage in battle tanks. There were five American divisions held in reserve, based in the United States, which meant that the Warsaw Pact forces could move their reserves into action much more quickly. Conversely, there was a big question mark over the loyalty of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and East German troops and NATO was superior in training and equipment. NATO had a 600-kilometer frontier to defend, which was vulnerable to a concerted Soviet attack on one sector. The common assumption was that NATO forces might hold out for two weeks before being overwhelmed by Warsaw Pact divisions. At this point, western leaders would need to decide whether reinforcements, flown from across the Atlantic, could stop the enemy tide, or whether tactical nuclear weapons should be introduced, which risked escalation to all-out nuclear conflict. NATO’s position was not improved by Bonn’s insistence that it was not willing to concede territory for tactical reasons, necessitating a “forward” defense posture, which excluded mobile “defense in depth.” In 1977 new Soviet missiles were deployed along the Chinese border. The SS-20 was a formidable weapon. With three independently targetable warheads, it was alarmingly accurate and destructive. And with a range of 4–5,000 kilometers—just beyond the constraints of SALT I—missiles based in western Russia could hit all major West European targets. Moreover, the SS-20s were mobile and solid-fuelled, which rendered them difficult to take out. The effect was to create a Euromissile crisis. Since the SS-20s could not reach the United States, the Reagan administration quickly declared that they were intended to blackmail Western Europe. Reagan himself proclaimed on February 22, 1983: The Soviets’ fundamental foreign policy aim is to break the link that binds us to our NATO allies. Their growing nuclear threat to Europe…has a political as well as a military purpose—the deliberate fostering of a sense of insecurity among the peoples of Western Europe and pressure for accommodation to Soviet power. The ultimate Soviet goal in Europe is to

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force the nations to accommodate themselves to Soviet interests on Soviet terms.11 In December 1979 NATO ministers accepted the American proposal for an intermediate nuclear force program to provide Washington with the capability of striking Soviet territory from Europe. Some 572 missiles would be deployed in West Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, with the German Federal Republic to receive 108 Pershing II ballistic missiles that were capable of devastating targets in western Russia with tremendous accuracy. The missiles served as tangible evidence of the continued American commitment to their European allies and as a bargaining counter to persuade Moscow to remove the SS-20s. This was eventually achieved in the December 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The Euromissile crisis also re-ignited the anti-nuclear movement, which seized the opportunity to protest before the scheduled deployments in autumn 1983—an interlude suggested by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to allow time for negotiations. A further symptom of European unease at American subservience was the revival of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and early 1980s. The movement was especially strong in Italy, whose Communist Party was the largest in Europe and momentarily enjoyed the prospect of sharing power. In France a socialist government did come to power in 1981 under François Mitterrand. Britain bucked the trend when the Labour Party gave way in 1979 to the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher. A significant area of divergence with Washington was in economic relations with the Soviet bloc. In 1980, following the imposition of American sanctions, US exports to the Soviet Union fell by half while, conversely, French, West German and British exports rose by 30 percent. The recession afflicting Western Europe following the first oil shock and the end of the “golden age” made trade with Eastern Europe much more remunerative because, although it represented only a fraction of overall trade, it served to protect jobs in vulnerable sectors. In 1977 Schmidt enthused that the Soviet bloc: offers markets which are especially attractive for the West because they are not, or not fully, involved in the synchronisation of Western business cycles. In 1975, for instance, due to the world recession, German exports dropped by almost 4 per cent in nominal terms whereas the exports to the Soviet Union rose by 46 per cent, thus making a valuable contribution towards improved use of capacities and a better employment situation in my own country.12 Such an attitude led to negotiations with Moscow for a 5,000-kilometer pipeline emanating from Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula; thence over the Urals, Russia, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia into Western Europe. There were manifest advantages to both sides in this grandiose project. For the Soviets, Western Europe was an increasingly important energy market earning much needed hard currency. Moreover, new fields in Siberia were dogged by climatic and geological obstacles, which demanded advanced western technology to resolve. For Western Europe, the second oil shock (1979) emphasized once more its over-dependence on oil from the Organization of Petroleum and Exporting Countries (OPEC). It was turning to natural gas as an alternative, but its own resources

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were not sufficient. The Urengoi field in Siberia, the largest natural gas field in the world, dwarfed the Dutch Groningen field. American critics attributed the pipeline project to Soviet intimidation. Nothing could be further from the truth. As well as diversifying its energy sources, Western Europe stood to gain from the vast quantities of steel required which meant that British and French firms, among others, could employ around half their workforce on the project. In June 1980 Schmidt flew to Moscow to initial the pipeline agreement. Washington responded by sending the Rashish delegation to allied capitals plying the alternative of Norwegian gas and American coal. But Norway had elected not to rapidly exploit its gas fields and coal from the United States, while plentiful, carried environmental drawbacks. In December 1981, after the imposition of martial law in Poland, the Reagan administration threatened to include gas and oil equipment in anti-Soviet sanctions. A standoff followed until June 1982 when, in contravention of its assurances at the G-7 Versailles Summit,13 Washington acted unilaterally to impose retrospective sanctions on the pipeline technology. West European leaders reacted defiantly. Schmidt insisted that “the pipeline will be built.” “We wonder,” mused Mitterrand, “what concept the United States has of summit meetings when it becomes a matter of agreements made and not respected.” His foreign minister spoke of a “progressive divorce” of transatlantic partners that “no longer speak the same language.” Even Mrs Thatcher, normally a staunch supporter of Washington, suggested that “one very powerful nation” could not be allowed to interfere in existing contracts. The Europeans considered that this was a matter of sovereignty and Helmut Kohl, Schmidt’s successor, made a point of renewing the commitment to the pipeline. Faced with this, the Americans backed down on November 13, 1982 when they lifted their counter-sanctions. In return, their European allies agreed to participate in a study of East—West trade’s security ramifications on condition the findings were not binding. As it turned out, the pronounced fall in world oil prices from 1985 led to the compression of European contracts for Siberian gas, thereby much reducing the potential for Soviet hard currency earnings. What the CIA perceived to be the Soviet’s “window of vulnerability”—its woeful economic performance—therefore remained firmly open. Eastern Europe’s break from the Soviet Union “The collapse of Soviet power,” Mark Mazower remarks, “was fast, unexpected and peaceful, and it swept across the region as a whole.”14 In 1984 Hungarian writer György Konrad suggested in jest that, following the repressed risings of 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and 1980–91 in Poland, it was the turn of the Russians. Only the following year did the Soviet Union gain a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who would indeed herald the revolution that paved the way for the coming together of the European continent’s divided halves. It was done to give reality to his vision of “a common European home.” Gorbachev’s precise intentions when he assumed power are a matter of debate. There is general agreement that he was not seeking to dismantle the Soviet system but wanted to save it from collapse through making it more accountable and efficient. The “era of stagnation” (zastoi) under Brezhnev had to be reversed. This meant introducing an element of democracy and capitalism. Gorbachev was riding a tiger and

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failed to recognize that, once unleashed, communism could not long withstand the surging democratic tide of “openness” (glasnost) while a command economy was illsuited to “restructuring” (perestroika). After his reforms ran into trouble, he was compelled to become more radical. The logic, which Gorbachev belatedly grasped after he was swept from power, was that only full-blooded democracy and a proper market economy would suffice. Boris Yeltsin was prepared to seize the nettle and eventually usurped Gorbachev. While Gorbachev should be seen as having given the crucial impetus to the events of 1989—“the Gorbachev effect”—further factors bear consideration. Among the first was the growing lack of credibility of the Marxist—Leninist system whose doctrine became as outdated as command economies (see below). The claim of the regimes that they were the “vanguard” of the working class and best suited to represent their interests, which was never tested in free elections, became a transparent tissue of lies. East Germany claimed to be the “first German state of the workers and peasants” and yet the leadership pursued selfish interests. The corruption of leading party officials, who often enjoyed relatively extravagant lifestyles, served to eat away at what little genuine support they enjoyed. Ceauşescu’s building of palaces for himself and his corrupt family while his people struggled to survive was but the most extreme example of this tendency among the East European ruling elite. A second factor was the emergence of what has been called an alternative “civil society” comprised of disaffected intellectuals who held clandestine discussion meetings at first but increasingly emerged into the open as revolution drew nigh. They drew their inspiration partly from the Helsinki Accords of August 1, 1975. To the Soviets their advantage lay with the western recognition of the postwar division of Europe and the promise of economic cooperation. To achieve this, however, meant paying lip service to respect for human rights, including free speech, by signing the Basket III agreement. Seemingly inconsequential at the time, “the non-implementation of Basket III was later to have a significant influence on emerging East European reform movements.”15 Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland and Democratic Opposition in Hungary were among the human rights movements to emerge. Mrs Thatcher recognized their growing importance and on state visits to communist countries insisted on meeting dissidents. A month after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Mejla Hlavsa formed a psychedelic rock band, “The Plastic People of the Universe,” which drew its name and the title of its debut album (Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned) from western influences. After the Czech communist daily, Rude Pravo, dismissed the band as “long-haired, neurotic drug addicts and mental cases who take delight in the grossest of perversions and deliberately sing vulgar, anti-social songs,” it was forced to go underground. Secret concerts were held, lyrics smuggled out of Bohemia and bootleg cassettes widely circulated. The band assumed political significance in 1976 when its founder was arrested and imprisoned for “organized disturbance of the peace.” The future leader of the velvet revolution, Václac Havel, took up the cause and in 1977, Charter 77 was founded to promote human rights. The coincidental appointment of a Polish Pope in 1978 helped to re-ignite Polish nationalism, leading on to Solidarity, whose economic grievances carried political overtones that alarmed the Kremlin. The dissident movements provided the backbone and organizational infrastructure for the 1989 revolutions.

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Across the Soviet bloc the reasons for Gorbachev s reform agenda can be traced to the 1970s. It was in this decade, as Mazower relates, that the seeds of discontent were laid that led to the events of 1989–91. Housing shortages meant young couples waiting until they were middle-aged to acquire their own accommodation. More and more time was consumed in queuing for basic commodities. Even life expectancy remained stagnant. The situation was compounded by the well-intentioned but misguided effort to improve living standards through an import-led growth strategy in the 1970s. The United States responded to the Brezhnev Doctrine with the so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, named after a State Department official. It backed Western economic aid to communist regimes in Eastern Europe to exploit Soviet inefficiency. Détente made possible massive loans from western sources but corruption, inefficiency, and the unsuitability of command economies to absorb new technology left participants with little more than huge external debts by 1980. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union became much less inclined to bail out its satellites, not least because of its own deteriorating economic position. The pronounced drop in world oil prices from the mid-1980s led to a catastrophic fall in its hard currency earnings. This compelled Moscow to reduce oil supplies to its Comecon partners, which prevented at least two (Bulgaria and East Germany) from re-exporting excess stocks to the West for extra revenue. In November 1986, convinced that Moscow could no longer sustain “artificial respiration” solutions, Comecon members met to reconfigure their economic relationship. Increasingly, however, the USSR acted unilaterally and by 1989 was short-changing its trading partners in raw materials and energy supplies, much to their leaderships’ consternation. They suspected that Moscow’s need for hard currency was leading it surreptitiously to reorient its trade towards the West at their expense. Although the 1970s and 1980s tested Western Europe politically and economically, there was never any question that the democratic system would survive. “For the communist system,” Hobsbawm concedes, “which at least in the Soviet sphere, was inflexible and inferior, it was a matter of life and death, which it did not survive.”16 Archie Brown considers that, notwithstanding warmer superpower relations, “the most profound changes of the Gorbachev era took place within Europe and in the Soviet Union’s relations with European countries, both West and East.”17 It was Mrs Thatcher who famously pronounced, after Gorbachev’s December 1984 visit to London, that here was a Soviet leader to do business with. “That trip,” he mused, “led me to reflect on the role and place of Europe in the world.”18 Her frank criticisms of the Soviet system opened up Gorbachev’s eyes to western perceptions while she urged Reagan to encourage Gorbachev’s “new thinking.” Once in power, Gorbachev quickly established good relations with West European leaders on the basis that superpower relations should not be the prisms through which they were judged. He was determined to banish the Cold War concept of Europe as a “theater of war” and boldly proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. His peace offensive sought to appeal to West European public opinion and neuter the USSR s image as an “enemy state.” In a confidential keynote speech before staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 23, 1986, he indicated that relations with Eastern Europe should be more respectful and detached: “It is impermissible to think that we can teach everyone. No one gave us that right.”19 During 1988 a joke circulated in East European capitals, which asked the difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek, the ill-fated leader of the 1968 “Prague Spring.” There was none, came the reply, but Gorbachev did not yet know it. “Gorbachev appears to

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have been convinced,” notes his recent biographer, “that the peoples of Eastern Europe had made their choice, for socialism. Reform within the region would therefore be socialist and thereby strengthen socialism.”20 Since Soviet bloc countries were not regarded as foreign, the staff at Soviet embassies were predominantly party officials who played down problems in reports to Moscow. At the same time, some realities hit home. In 1981, to prop up the socialist regime in Poland, the Kremlin extended an estimated $2.9 billion in aid. McCauley argues that Gorbachev was not aware of the effect of his reforms on the ruling parties in Eastern Europe until 1989 when to have sought to reverse the revolutions would have risked re-igniting the Cold War. In a variation on this theme, Brown suggests that while Gorbachev promoted “freedom to choose,” at the same time he sought reforming socialist leaders to manage evolutionary rather than revolutionary change.21 The problem was that none of the East European leaders fitted the bill. Hardliners such as Honecker and Ceauşescu simply refused to change anything; the wily old dogs, Todor Zhivkov and Husák, made cosmetic adjustments in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia; only the Polish and Hungarian leaderships sought reforms remotely comparable to developments in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s intentions changed over time. To long-established leaders used to Moscow’s old ways, his unfamiliar philosophy created confusion and some resentment. For example, the Honecker regime in East Germany was alarmed by Gorbachev’s reforms and saw no need to emulate them. Indeed, Kurt Hager, a member of the Politburo, curtly remarked in April 1987 that simply because a neighbor was revamping his apartment did not require next door to follow suit. The Soviet journal Sputnik and even Pravda were banned in a futile effort to prevent the dissemination of heretical ideas. This effort to isolate the population was doomed to fail, not least because developments in the Soviet Union were daily apparent from West German television. “In reality,” wrote Gorbachev’s assistant in charge of the “socialist bloc,” Georgi Shaknazarov, in a memorandum to his leader in 1988, “all of them [bloc leaders] need changes, although we do not tell them this publicly to avoid criticism for trying to impose perestroika on our friends.”22 Moscow’s more lenient line fatally led the Eastern European leaders to believe that they could carry on regardless. “The partners expressed their support for what I said,” Gorbachev recounted of a Warsaw Pact meeting in March 1985, “but I had the feeling that they were not taking it altogether seriously.”23 Yet their power was based on the Brezhnev Doctrine—the threat of Soviet tanks should their populations seek to oust them. They were soon walking on thin ice. As early as 1985 Gorbachev had warned several privately of the dangers of this presumption and once he went public, at his December 1988 United Nations speech, and announced the phased withdrawal of Soviet divisions from Eastern Europe, the scene was set for a region-wide peoples’ revolution. Not without justification did The New York Times compare the significance of the speech to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. David Charters surmises “that sometime in 1988 Gorbachev decided he must head off the danger before it was too late to prevent a catastrophic crisis.”24 This has to remain conjecture until the documents become available, but what is known so far suggests that Gorbachev encouraged “refolution” and accepted whatever consequences resulted. Gorbachevs announcement reflected a fundamental shift in Soviet military strategy: no longer was Eastern Europe seen as a vital buffer zone. This approach had simply led to the West increasing its conventional forces and intermediate nuclear

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weapons to counteract the Soviet military presence in the region. The reduction of defense spending was now a key element of Gorbachev’s plans, which in turn entailed an improvement in East—West relations. This meant casting aside the old policy of repression of rebellious satellites. Over 500,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Eastern Europe in 1989, but none were called out to reverse the widespread revolutions that, with the exception of Romania, were not bloody affairs. Instead, “people power” toppled autocratic edifices. “The collapse of communism,” remarks Vinen, “was, in large measure, a generational revolution, as a group that had been excluded from power by a gerontocratic leadership finally came to the fore.”25 Those under forty-five years of age— the postwar generation—could not identify with austerity nor tolerate the shortage economy for long just to support a discredited ideology. They acted accordingly when the opportunity came. Erich Honecker insisted that East Germany and the Berlin Wall were permanent. They represented the kernel of the Cold War. The May 1989 municipal elections produced the usual 99 percent support for the communists. The growing letters of protest to the Central Committee (148,000 between 1986 and June 1988) were ignored and the police cocooned members of the government from the growing popular discontent. However, Honecker could not insulate his regime from surrounding events. Hitherto only a trickle of refugees had been allowed to go to West Germany but once Hungary opened its western border with Austria on September 11, 1989, the trickle became a flood. In turn, demonstrations calling for free speech and free elections that began on a small scale on September 4 in Leipzig attracted around one million demonstrators in the capital of East Berlin within two months. Gorbachev fanned the flames when he came to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic and remarked that history punished those who acted too late. Such pressure could not be withstood for long. On October 9 Honecker resigned but his sacrifice, and the promise of reform and freedom of travel, were not enough. The Socialist Unity (Communist) Party was compelled to surrender its monopoly of power and announce free elections. Following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the year ended with the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, which had been closed for twenty-eight years. Although Gorbachev did not seek German reunification, he was forced to accept it because of the tide of events in Eastern Europe, as socialist regimes were swept from power, and because of his growing need for Western political and economic support. In July 1989, following the Hungarian and Polish revolutions, he addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and confirmed the demise of the Brezhnev Doctrine. “Any interference in domestic affairs,” he pronounced, “and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states, both friends and allies or any others, are inadmissible.” Once the East German communist regime had gone, those in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania followed in rapid succession. The effect was not entirely as Gorbachev had intended, for now the embers of nationalism were fanned within the Soviet Union itself. The inspiration that Soviet nationalities drew from 1989 brought the collapse of the metropolitan center within two years. As Vladimir Tismaneanu recognizes, “The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union…was directly and intimately related to the previous dissolution of the East European ‘outer empire’ provoked by the revolutions of 1989.”26 Gorbachev formally terminated the Cold War at the close of 1989 in the Malta Accord with President George Bush and subsequently the superpowers cooperated effectively

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over the Gulf crisis of 1990–1. Nevertheless, while an anticapitalist ideology prevailed and the Soviet Union continued, there was still the chance that Cold War tensions could return, as they had in 1979–80. New Year’s Eve 1991, therefore, when the hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, marks the proper end of the final chapter of the Cold War. Conclusion In retrospect, it is apparent that for much of the Cold War’s duration its existence suited the opposing sides. For the Soviet Union, the portrayal of the West as an evil force helped to unite the population and make it tolerant of the sacrifices and low standard of living prevalent under the communist system. Once, however, the perception of the West began to change, then the writing was on the wall. This process started in the era of détente and accelerated under Gorbachev until the divisions engendered by the Cold War could not be sustained. Succesive American administrations often found it convenient to pay governments to exaggerate the scale and extent of the Soviet threat to justify vast military expenditure on research and development (R&D) and advanced weaponry. The Cold War also allowed the United States to project its power and culture into Western Europe and Southeast Asia, generally finding a more receptive welcome because of the security dimension. It was, as Lundestad emphasizes, the interaction between East and West, initiative and counter-initiative, which sparked and sustained the Cold War and ultimately brought it to a conclusion.27 It is this process, rather than one-factor explanations, which needs to be studied to make sense of what happened. At the heart of it all was a divided Europe, which began to come together, regardless of the wishes of the superpowers, long before the 1989 revolutions brought the Iron Curtain crashing down. By the 1960s, France, West Germany, and Italy were all experiencing higher rates of growth than the United States. With their economic position secured, unlike the immediate postwar period, the French and Germans were prepared to pursue foreign policies independent of and sometimes in defiance of the United States, which had transparently lost its way in Vietnam. European détente, which significantly preceded American détente, initiated a process of engagement and entanglement with the other side. As Jussi Hanhimäki contends: Détente of the early 1970s had a long-term impact: that is, it accelerated the process of exchanges between East and West, a process that, it seems safe to argue, bore fruit in the late 1980s as the communist order in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully.28 Stalin was afraid that Western ideas, if they were allowed to penetrate the Soviet system, would prove too popular and overwhelm it. He was right. Western culture was shut out for several decades but ultimately could not be denied. Ceauşescu made the mistake of allowing Dallas to be screened on Romanian television. But what he saw as confirming the decadence of capitalism attracted a captive audience intent on escaping from the privations of communism. East German viewers watched the same series and entertained similar aspirations. The flourishing black market across the Soviet bloc also provided

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enticing glimpses of the goods that were available to western consumers. Gorbachev, who long before he came to power had visited Western Europe in the 1960s during an economic boom, recognized that capitalism brought happiness to the people. He attempted to square the circle and to combine an element of capitalism with socialism. In the end, tinkering with a discredited system would not suffice and the people’s desire for complete change could not be resisted. Further reading The current state of the Cold War debate can be followed in O.A.Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London and Portland OR, Frank Cass, 2000. J.L.Geddes’ We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998, which pays due consideration to the European perspective, and M.Leffler’s articles “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (1996) and “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review, 104 (2) (1999) offer summaries of archival revelations. The best publication to follow fresh interpretations arising from newly released documents from both sides of the Cold War divide is Cold War International History Project Bulletin, published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center since 1992. There are several journals in which the latest research appears. These include Journal of Cold War Studies, Russian Studies in History, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, East European Politics and Societies and Communist and Post-Communist Studies. In the year 2000 Frank Cass began a new journal, Cold War History, to reflect the growing interest aroused by archival releases across the Cold War spectrum of major and minor players. There are relatively few works covering the specific subject of the European dimension of the Cold War outside general histories (many of which are listed in the Introduction to this volume) and accounts of superpower relations. This situation is changing as the opening up of the archives of European powers, as well as those of the former Soviet Union, makes possible a detailed evaluation of the policies and perspectives of the smaller players in the great Cold War drama. Somewhat dated now is A. De Porte, Europe between the Super-Powers: The Enduring Balance, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1979. The edited volumes by C.S.Maier, The Cold War in Europe: Era of a Divided Continent, New York, Weiner, 1991 and R Stirk and D. Willis, Shaping Postwar Europe: European Unity and Disunity 1945–1957, London, Pinter, 1991, offer useful collections of essays while C. Black et al., Rebirth: A History of Europe since World War II, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1992, is good for factual background both on the Cold War context and on regions and countries. Other titles include J.P.D.Dunbabin, The Cold War: The Great Powers and Their Allies, London and New York, Longman, 1994; A.Varsori (ed.), Europe 1945–1990s: The End of An Era?, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, and J.Young’s Cold War Europe 1945–1991: A Political History, 2nd edition, London, Arnold, 1996. For overviews of the origins of the Cold War debate see M.P.Leffler’s “The Interpretative Wars over the Cold War, 1945–60,” in G.Martel (ed.), American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993, London, Routledge, 1994; O.A.Westad’s “Secrets of the Second World: The Russian Archives and Reinterpretations of Cold War History’,

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Diplomatic History, 21:2 (Spring 1997) and A.Stephanson, “Rethinking Cold War History,” Review of International Studies, 24 (1) (January 1998). Although now somewhat dated, W.Loth’s The Division of the World 1941–1955, London, Routledge, 1988, remains a useful guide to the sequence of events. For the Marshall Plan, M.Hogan’s The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, is outstanding. D.W.Ellwood’s Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction, London, Longman, 1992, is also useful. For the European origins of the Cold War, D.Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1994, remains indispensable. G. Lundestad brings his engaging ideas together in “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. M.Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement 1945–1963, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999, provides a different slant on the mechanics behind divided Europe. Another recent interpretation, arising from a Florence conference, is A.Varsori and E.Calandri (eds), The Failure of Peace in Europe (1943–48), Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000. On the role of individual European countries in the Cold War there is a growing list of titles. J.Becker and F.Knipping (eds), Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945–50, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 1986, and Rolf Ahmann, A. Birke and M. Howard (eds), The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918–1957, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, are good starting points. For the British perspective, J.Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1993, sees the traditional AngloRussian imperial rivalry of the nineteenth century re-emerging and playing an important part in the beginning of the Cold War. A.Deighton’s The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, throws light on London s attitude to the German problem, while S.Greenwood’s Britain and the Cold War 1945–91, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000, offers a succinct overview. France’s role is considered in J.Young’s France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, 1944–1949, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1990, and W.I.Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944–1954, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1998. The German dimension has received saturation coverage. More recent interpretations of the division of Germany have included: C.Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Derision to Divide Germany 1944–1949, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, M.P.Leffler, “The Struggle for Germany and the Origins of the Cold War,” Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, Occasional Paper No. 16, 1997; S. Bjornstad, The Soviet Union and German Unification during Stalin’s Last Years, Oslo: Institutt for forsvarsstudier, 1998; N.Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995; and W.Loth, Stalin’s Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question and the Founding of the GDR, London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996. For the establishment of communist rule in Eastern Europe there is a wealth of literature. A good overview is provided by N. Naimark and L.Gibianski (eds), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, Boulder, CO,

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Westview, 1997. Individual countries have also been widely covered. Among more recent work is K.Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1991. Soviet security concerns are reprised in C.Kennedy-Pipe, Stalin’s Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995; I.B.Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, London, Routledge, 1996, and V.Zubok and C.Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996. The repression of the Hungarian Uprising is considered in J.Gyorkei and M.Horvath (eds), Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956, Budapest, Central European University Press, 1999. On the American attitude, G.Lundestad’s The American Non-Policy towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947, New York, Columbia University Press, 1978, remains useful. Recent historical calculations on growth rates are reviewed in D.F.Good and T.Ma, “The Economic Growth of Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective, 1870–1989,” European Review of Economic History, 3, (2) (1999). There are numerous works on superpower détente, of which the best is R.Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American—Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington, DC, Brookings Institute, 1994. D.Allin’s Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 1969–1989, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994, provides a solid account of the growing divisions in the Transatlantic Alliance. There is the view that the Soviet Union was constantly seeking détente—see J.van Oudenaren, Détente in Europe: The Soviet Union and the West since 1953, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991. J.Haslam’s The Soviet Union and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1969–87: The Problem of the SS-20, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989, considers the Euromissile crisis from a contemporary perspective. For the European dimension, see R.Davy (ed.), European Détente: A Reappraisal, London, Sage, 1992, and J.van Oudenaren, Détente in Europe: The Soviet Union and the West since 1953, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991. France’s leading role under De Gaulle is covered in L.Pattison De Ménil, Who Speaks for Europe?: The Vision of Charles de Gaulle, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977, H.Gough and J.Horne (eds), De Gaulle and Twentieth Century France, London, Edward Arnold, 1994; M. Harrison, France: A Reluctant Ally, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981; J.Lacouture, Charles de Gaulle, Volume 2: The Ruler, 1945–1970, London, Harvill, 1991; and R.Paxton and N.Wahl (eds), De Gaulle and the United States: A Centenary Appraisal, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1994. For the West German role, see W. Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1989; A.Stent, From Embargo to Ostpolitik, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981; and M.Sodaro, Moscow, Germany and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990. For documents on the Helsinki Conference, a magnificent source is Documents on British Foreign Policy Overseas: The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, Series III, Vol. II, London, Stationery Office, 1997. There are few specialized studies on the link between Helsinki and the human rights movements. They include A.Boed and P.van Dijk (eds), Essays on Human Rights in the Helsinki Process, Boston, MA, M.Nijhoff, 1985; J.Bugajska, Czechodovakia: Charter 77’s Decade of Dissent, New York, Praeger, 1987; and B.Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges, New York, New York University Press, 1991. The best account so far of the overall effect is V.Mastruy, The Helsinki Process and the

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Reintegration of Europe 1986–1991, New York, New York University Press, 1992. P. Kennedy, “What is the History of 1989? New Scholarship from East-Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies, 13, (2) (1999) considers the impact of political and environmental social movements in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Ukraine. To gain perspective on the reasons for the 1989 revolutions, useful starting points are W.Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; C.Gati, The Bloc that Failed: Soviet—East European Relations in Transition, Bloomington/ Indianapolis, IN, Indiana University Press, 1990; G.Schöpflin, Politics in Eastern Europe 1945–1992, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993; H.Friedmann, “Warsaw Pact Socialism: Détente and the Disintegration of the Soviet Bloc,” in A.Hunter (ed.), Rethinking the Cold War, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1998; L.R.Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996; and V.Zubok, “The Soviet Union and European Integration from Stalin to Gorbachev’, Journal of European Integration History, 2 (1) (1996). Overviews are provided by B.Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, 2nd edition, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995; D.Mason, Revolution in East-Central Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism and the Cold War, Boulder, CO, Westview, 1992; A. HydePrice’s The International Politics of East Central Europe, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996, illuminates the growing interaction between the divided halves of Europe. Country studies include D.Deletant, Romania under Communist Rule, Romania, Foundation for Romanian Culture and Studies, 1999; G.-J.Glaessner and I.Wallace (eds), The German Revolution of 1989: Causes and Consequences, Oxford, Berg, 1992; and P.D.Stachura, Poland in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999. G.Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, is based on interviews with those who experienced communism over its last twenty years. Perhaps the best eye witness accounts of the revolutions are T.Garton Ash, We the People: The Revolution of 89, London, Granta, 1990, and the BBC overseas correspondent J.Simpson’s Despatches from the Barricades: An Eye Witness Account of the Revolutions, London, Hutchinson, 1990. There is an ever-growing body of titles on “the Gorbachev effect.” To place Gorbachev’s international relations strategy within the context of Soviet history, see G.Gorodestsky (ed.), Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1991, London, The Cummings Centre Series, 1994. For a sympathetic treatment of the last Soviet leader see A.Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996. Gorbachev himself seeks to defend his policies in his Memoirs, London, Bantam, 1997. More critical is M.McCauley’s Gorbachev, London, Longman, 1998. Short and to the point is M.Galeotti’s Gorbachev and his Revolution, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997. Gorbachev’s reforms are appraised in R.Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms, 1985–1990, London, Phillip Allan, 1990; A.Ashlund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform, 2nd edition, London: Pinter, 1991; and S. White, Gorbachev and After, 3rd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, among others. On the specific impact on Eastern Europe, see K.Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge, 2nd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, and V.Tismaneanu (ed.), The Revolutions of 1989, London, Routledge, 1999-Also worth consulting are the special issue of Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), 121 (2) (Spring 1992), entitled “Exit from Communism,” J.Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The

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USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997, and M. Bowker’s Russian Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, Aldershot, Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1997. Notes 1 J.Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, Leicester Leicester University Press, 1993. 2 M.Leffler, “Bringing it Together: The Parts and the Whole,” in O.A.Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London and Portland, OR, Frank Cass, 2000, p. 53. 3 W.Laqueur, Europe in Our Time: A History 1945–1992, New York, Viking, 1992, p. viii. 4 R.Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, London, Little Brown, 2000, p. 296. 5 E.J.Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, p. 397. 6 G.-H.Souti, “Was There a European Order in the Twentieth Century? From the Concert of Europe to the End of the Cold War,” Contemporary European History, 9 (3) (2000), p. 339. 7 G.Soros, “Who Lost Russia?” The New York Review of Books, XLVII (6) (2000), p. 10. 8 The original members of Comecon were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the USSR, and Albania. The GDR joined in 1950. Yugoslavia, however, never joined the Warsaw Pact or Comecon. Instead Tito turned Yugoslavia down its own independent road, which included better relations with the West and American aid. 9 G.Lundestad, “How (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold War,” in Westad, Reviewing the Cold War, p. 66. 10 R.Pipes, “How to Cope with the Soviet Threat: A Long-Term Strategy for the West,” Commentary, 78, 2(1984), 26. 11 New York Times, “Report of Reagan Speech,” 23 February 1983. 12 D.Allin, Cold War Illusiom: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 1969–1989, New York, St.Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 143. 13 The annual Summits of heads of state or government of the seven (G-7) leading industrial democracies (the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy) began in 1975. They are the occasions to discuss major international issues, particularly related to trade, finance, and the international economy. 14 M.Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, Penguin, 1998, p. 368. 15 D.Aldcroft and S.Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe since 1918, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, p. 158. 16 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 420. 17 A.Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 242. 18 M.Gorbachev, Memoirs, London, Bantam, 1997, p. 551. 19 Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 242. 20 M.McCauley, Gorbachev, London, Longman, 1998, p. 133. 21 Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, pp. 248–51. 22 V.Zubok, “Why Did the Cold War End in 1989? Explanations of The Turn,’ “in Westad, Reviewing the Cold War, p. 354. 23 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 600. 24 David Charters (1999, 31). D.Chirot. “What Happened in Eastern Europe in 1989?” in V.Tismaneanu (ed.), The Revolutions of 1989, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 31.

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25 Vinen, A History in Fragments, p. 469. 26 Tismaneanu, The Revolutions of 1989, p. 1. 27 Lundestad, “How (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold War,” p. 75. 28 J.Hanhimäki, “Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective,” in Westad, Reviewing the Cold War, p. 327.

2 The collapse of world dominion The dismantling of the European colonial empires and its impact on Europe Jean-Jacques Jordi It has recently become popular to look back nostalgically at the “golden decades” following the Second World War in Europe. The enthusiasm at the war s end was followed by an unprecedented economic boom and demographic rejuvenation. It is easy to forget that Europe was cut in two, that it was undergoing a painful reconstruction, and that daily life (food, housing, and jobs) was still for the most part inadequate. Until 1950, supplying the basic needs of the population was one of the chief preoccupations of European governments and that often still meant rationing. The housing crisis marred the landscape everywhere in Europe. It was not at all unusual to see shantytowns “blooming” on the outskirts of the largest cities or hastily constructed settlements set up to shelter the local population. The passage from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy took a number of years. One positive effect was that the industrialization and reconstruction of Europe generated a wealth of new jobs. From 1948, unemployment plummeted and jobs were more numerous and more diversified than in the past. Britain enjoyed full employment, while between 1947 and 1956 France, on average, had only 100,000 unemployed. In West Germany, the total number of unemployed was higher (500,000 in the mid-1950s), but the country absorbed nearly four million refugees from the East. The ovenvhelming needs of reconstruction meant that Britain and France, as well as Belgium to a lesser degree, would all recruit foreign labor made up of “colonial workers” from their troubled empires as well as European “guest workers” (Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese). In 1950 for example, some 40,000 immigrant workers (“colonial laborers” coming from Algeria were not counted in this number)1 arrived in France. By 1955 there were four times this number.2 Even at this point, ten years after the war, the goals of modernization and progress made the foreign workforce indispensable. In Western Europe, the political parties, trade unions, and churches defined the framework of a moral and social democracy based, above all, on the middle classes, and on which government would rest. In the Soviet Union and the populist democracies of Eastern Europe, there was far from doctrinaire certainty on how to deal with the harsh realities of daily life. The problems of employment, housing, even of food were obvious and would remain so for some time.3 Thus despite the political cleavages created by the Cold War, all of Europe aspired to “modernity” and a new way of living in the 1950s and 1960s. It is in the context of this notion of modernity (which also meant rejecting any return to the calamities before the war) that one of the most important phenomena in contemporary

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history was produced: decolonization. The historic repercussions of decolonization are measured not only in the number of newly emergent states that henceforth became actors in political life,4 but also in the changed relationships between the imperial powers and their emancipated former dependencies.5 Imperial disentanglements that were rarely free of intense struggle produced migratory waves of undreamt of magnitude that governments and public opinion alike hurriedly called “repatriation.” Between 1945 and 1975, nearly eight million people of European settler extraction arrived on the soil of the former colonial powers. For the majority of them, the European “homeland” had little resonance other than as a powerful myth and image that had been in place since the earliest colonial years. Long ignored by historical and sociological research, it is only recently that the impact of their “return” on the imperial powers themselves has been studied. This chapter looks at the collapse of empire from this point of view. The demographic consequences are perhaps most obvious, but the economic, political, and social effects are just as significant.6 By its successes as much as by its failures, European colonialism germinated forces that rapidly rose up against it as an increasingly disparaged, even despised system. If the interwar years laid bare the crisis of colonialism, the Second World War accentuated the phenomenon of decolonization, particularly in two related ways. First, the nature of colonial nationalism changed. The movement no longer stemmed from a minority of native elites, but now struck home with the popular masses, who were mostly led by charismatic personalities such as Mohandas Gandhi in India, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, Ferhat Abbas in Algeria, Ahmed Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho-Chi-Minh in Viet Nam, or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. In fact, the elite’s dream of “self-rule” opened the door to a powerful mass movement for complete independence without concessions. Second, the military defeat of the Netherlands, Belgium, and finally France in June 1940 as well as Britain’s difficulty in maintaining its supremacy in the Pacific with the fall of Singapore and the loss of Hong Kong were all events that turned upside down not only the idea of empire, but that of colonialism itself. Japanese expansion gravely undermined the British, French, and Dutch empires. There was little chance that European nations coming out of the war would somehow find their colonial possessions intact just as they had left them. Although the postwar period did not have important repercussions in black Africa (with the obvious exception of Madagascar), it was not the same in Southeast Asia and North Africa. In these areas, the impact of the Atlantic Charter (signed on August 12, 1941) with its ringing declaration that all people had the right to freely choose their own government was substantial. At the war’s end, the creation of the United Nations and the willingness of both the United States and the Soviet Union to support, either according to historic tradition or ideological orientation, the strategy of emancipating countries and territories colonized by “old Europe” during the nineteenth century added further to the pressure, as did the first violent tremors of independence. France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium faced painful decisions that only further dramatized their own disappearance from the world stage. At the same time, the participation of colonial countries in the great Third World conferences (Bandung in 1955 and Accra in 1958) provided them a significant public forum. From this point on, decolonization became a recurring demand at the United Nations. It justifiably necessitated arbitration and nearly always condemned the imperial powers. Finally, and this was certainly significant, there appeared to be a “domino effect”

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by which the independence of one colony led in rapid succession to similar movements throughout the same region. The transition to statehood in Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in August 1947, for example, led to the independence of Burma and Ceylon at the beginning of 1948,7 and then of Indonesia in 1949.8 It was much the same for French Indochina, where Vietnam (recognized for the first time as autonomous in 1946), Cambodia, and Laos became self-governing, associated states within the French Union in 1949–50 amid the Indochinese War, and eventually achieved independence in 1954. In North Africa, Tunisia demanded that France treat it in the same manner and as rapidly as it had Morocco. The recognition of Moroccan independence on March 2, 1956 sparked that of Tunisia some days later (March 20), while Algeria (officially part of France) was embroiled in the longest and most difficult of the wars for independence that France faced. Finally, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the granting of independence succeeded at a frenetic pace with the inde-pendence of Ghana in 1957, and then of Guinea in 1958. The result was that no less than seventeen newly sovereign countries joined the United Nations in 1960. By 1964 the continent of Africa was “quasiindependent.”9 Only a few bastions of white colonialism held out either through old-fashioned imperial force such as that used by Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola,10 or by a policy of racism carried out through systematic segregation (apartheid) in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.11 Distant spaces, nearby spaces Just as there had been numerous forms of colonization, there was also a range of decolonizations. However, it is conventional to distinguish the British and the French forms as two divergent paths. The first was guided by a policy of pragmatism that emerged amid negotiated and peaceful processes of colonial relinquishment (in India and Anglophone black Africa). The second was characterized by violent struggle from the Indochinese War (1945–54) to the Algerian War (1954–62). The Algerian conflict and the refusal to relinquish authority in a country considered an integral part of metropolitan France were largely responsible for the demise of the Fourth Republic in 1958. In between these two experiences, a wide mixture of decolonizations were put in place: the dismantling of the Belgian empire came close to British pragmatism while that of the Dutch and the Portuguese were more like the French approach. Portugal was involved in a long and debilitating struggle to retain control over its African empire. The 1974–76 Portuguese Revolution, which ended forty years of dictatorship, was sparked by the proposals of General Antonio de Spinola to restructure the empire and end the warfare. Both Italy and Spain lost their dependencies by virtue of assorted international agreements (Libya in 1951 and Somalia in 1960 for Italy; the Spanish Sahara, Ifini and Equatorial Guinea in 1968) without breakdown into violence. Nonetheless, in looking closer, this traditional typology is somewhat unsatisfactory. Two points make this clear and perhaps shed more light on the phenomenon of these various forms of decolonization. First, the emancipation of the British colonies, including India, did not always take place without a test of strength. The British army was put to poor use in Malaysia, Cyprus, and Kenya. For example, a rebel movement in Kenya, called the Mau Mau, launched a terror campaign against British rule and led to significant British

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military intervention. On its side, the French reached, despite some bloody events, a negotiated decolonization in its protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia, and brought about peaceful emancipation to Francophone black Africa.12 The second point is that the phenomenon of decolonization remained overall a peaceful process, a fact that the three great wars of liberation (the Indochinese War and the Algerian War for France, and the war between Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and Portugal), deadly as they were, too often masks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the European nations, already weakened by the Second World War, were not going to hang on to imperial supremacy in some intransigent way. The concept of “colonial burden” had already been debated during the interwar years. It took on singular resonance in reconstruction Europe. As a general rule, all of the European powers developed the notion that far from being a blessing, colonial empire was becoming an onerous responsibility, all the more so in overseas territories where European settlers had been established for generations. Various economic and political circles debated whether the cost of war expenditures (in Indonesia, Indochina, in the Congo, and especially in Algeria) and the vital economic and social investments necessary to demonstrate the “benefit” of European rule were compatible with modernization and an increased standard of living for Europeans themselves. Although claiming sovereignty outside the French empire, Algeria in the 1950s actually found itself in a position of mounting dependency vis-à-vis France. French public expenditures in Algeria amounted to more than half the total public expenditures on its overseas territories. Taking into account the population increase in Algeria (mainly among Muslims) and the expenditures linked to the onset of war, social investments in Algeria represented a significant portion of the French budget. A crescendo of criticism decried the colonies as enormous financial drains that slowed down, even blocked, the indispensable modernization of the European economies. “It [is] time to devote to the Lot-et-Garonne and to the Basses-Alpes the tens of thousands squandered in Senegal and Madagascar”13 was a frequent refrain by a political and economic current of opinion prone to simply abandoning the colonies altogether. The same claims took place in Belgium, for which the Belgian Congo was a tremendous outlay.14 By the mid-1950s, European economic elites generally viewed colonial dependencies as an economic drawback rather than an advantage. The Dutch experience of decolonization in Indonesia gave credence to their interpretation. The Dutch had long thought of Indonesia as their engine of economic development. According to a Dutch proverb: Indië verloren, rampsoed geboren (the Indies gone, prosperity done). Yet less than ten years after yielding to Indonesian independence, there was the sense that the initial trauma over the loss of their most cherished colony would be followed by a rapid remobilization of Dutch resources. Economic policy would be freed up to develop chemical, mechanical, optical instrument, and electric export industries.15 An article in the Enterprise journal of November 1, 1955, for example, rather leaves the impression that the loss of Indonesia constituted a catastrophe for the Netherlands. That was certainly not the case. The Dutch themselves admitted that not only did homeland industrial development produce more benefit than Indonesian commerce ever had, but that investment in industry would have been less advantageous if the Netherlands had held on to its empire. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands acknowledged that “We are not repudiating our past, nor its proud accomplishments… But a nation should be strong

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enough to begin anew.” The remark echoed Charles de Gaulle’s assertion during an April 11, 1961 press conference: We have no regrets about what France has accomplished… It is a great human undertaking that, despite some abuses or errors, has always been honorable. But today, things have changed. Now our most important national ambition has become our own progress …and to see it through, we need first of all to employ for ourselves, in our own homeland, all means at our disposal… It is a fact, decolonization [referring here particularly to Algeria] is in our interest, and as a result, is our policy. Why should we remain tied to these costly, bloody, and inextricable dominations?16 Thus faced with the challenges of the newly created European Common Market, with American competition, and with the menace of the Soviet bloc, empire was no longer a source of power but one of weakness. The climate of opinion changed, even if some dramatic convulsions—particularly the extremely long and costly war Portugal waged in Angola from 1961 to 1975—made it clear that decolonization had not come to a close for all of Europe. In less than twenty years, from 1945 to 1965, nearly all the European possessions in Asia, Africa, and Indonesia had gained independence. Other movements followed in 1975 for Mozambique, in 1980 for Zimbabwe, in 1990 for Namibia, and finally Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China in 1999. The “debris of empire” that remained here and there in no way corresponded to the European colonial possessions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, the conclusion of this chapter argues that contrary to the pessimistic prophesies by adversaries of decolonization, the process provoked neither economic nor social crisis in Europe. All in all, two human consequences were most significant. First, the great majority of ethnic Europeans in the overseas territories left for their European “homelands,” where they were categorized under the rubric of “repatriates.” Second, there was a tremendous surge of emigration by native peoples leaving behind their countries of origin. This was due in part to agreements signed between the colonial powers and their former dependencies, but also to the economic and political crises that almost immediately gripped the newly independent states and made the higher standard of living in Europe all the more attractive. There is no doubt that the coexistence of these two forms of colonial immigration to Europe, and the transformation of initial economic relocation into actual settlement (it is clear that from the mid-1960s in Britain and France, the “return” of immigrants to their country of origin was rapidly becoming a myth) posed serious problems that provoked hostility and conflict. But in the immediate context of decolonization and the achievement of independence, repatriation represented a kind of ultimate form of political migration, which is how it should be treated. Repatriation, a lesson in numbers The numbers given in Table 2.1 are semi-official and are extremely low estimates. The total number of newcomers should probably be increased by at least a factor of ten in

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order to have a better, if not exactly precise, idea of repatriation. This reassessment upward takes better into account relocation that was sometimes spread out over several years and took diverse routes. In the case of both the United Kingdom and France, for a variety of reasons, some of those who immigrated did not opt for immediate arrival in their country of adoption. Stages along a migratory route sometimes passed through former French North Africa or through African countries belonging to the British Commonwealth. Migrants who eventually established themselves in Europe were also not actually considered repatriated for several years. Although these people escaped the statistics, they did not contribute any less to fueling the repatriate community. In the same sense, the legal status of “repatriate” evolved over the years and did not apply to political refugees caught in the turmoil the collapse of empire provoked, such as the Jews of newly independent Morocco and Tunisia,17 the Jews of Egypt after the Suez Crisis (1956), or the Indians expelled from Burma at the beginning of the 1960s and from Uganda in 1972. The Lebanese driven out of Africa and the Table 2.1 Estimate of repatriates to Europe between 1945 and 1990 Country

European

Non-European

Total

The Netherlands

270,000

250,000

520,000

Italy

480,000

20,000

500,000

90,000

15,000

105,000

Belgium United Kingdom

380,000

1,350,000

1,730,000

1,450,000

350,000

1,800,000

Portugal

500,000

75,000

575,000

Spain

170,000

10,000

180,000

Total

124–25,

2,070,000

5,410,000

France

Guineans who found refuge in Spain fall under this same category of victimized ethnic minorities. Thus, whatever future corrections to present research will be required, it appears that the flood of immigrants included around 6 to 6.5 million people over a little more than thirty years. The significance of this movement is incontestable. It represents nearly 8 percent of migration created by European expansion from 1500 to 1930.18 Finally, we need to look at these totals in terms of their weight in the European populations. The 600,000 Portuguese who repatriated in the short period between June 1975 and February 1976 represented nearly 10 percent of the total population of Portugal. The French who arrived from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia represented only a little less than 4 percent of the total population of France, but their settlement in specific areas of the country made this proportion balloon to 10 percent, even 12 percent of the local population in places such as Toulon, Montpellier, and Marseilles. On the other hand, the strength of the British Commonwealth and the sense of belonging by the British in whatever area of the United Kingdom they found themselves, succeeded in moderating the movement for repatriation to Britain. Here, it was more to the advantage of the non-British, rather than to the British, to migrate to the United Kingdom, and former

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British India played a considerable role in this movement. Within the framework of the Commonwealth, British subjects of the former empire were able to enter Britain without restriction. In 1948, the British Nationality Act even allowed migrants from newly independent countries rights of citizenship upon entry into the United Kingdom. Although the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 restricted this right, the United Kingdom became a refuge for Indians holding British passports coming from India as well as from Indian communities in East Africa. For example in 1963, Uganda expelled nearly 40,000 Indians who headed for the United Kingdom. In 1967 in Kenya, of the 120,000 Asians who left following the nationalizations in that country, 60,000 took up residence in Britain to start a new life. These repatriations were highly visible, with the result that a reaction in British public opinion brought about a revision of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, at least in terms of controlling immigration from countries outside the former British Empire.19 In 1968, the new Commonwealth Immigrants Act, approved by a substantial parliamentary majority, considerably reduced the opportunities for entry.20 Closest to the British experience was the Netherlands, where repatriation “brought back” two-thirds of the Dutch and one-third of the Indonesians of Surinam (Dutch Guyana). These examples also reveal the serious incongruence in refugee-repatriate status. Thus the Moluccans arriving in the Netherlands during the 1950s were considered Dutch subjects, but without nationality. It was the same for the Harkis in France, native Algerians who fought for the French during the Algerian War, who, nearly forty years after their departure from Algeria, were still considered a displaced community. No matter what the classification, however, everyone lived through the same experience. When Europeans or indigenous peoples left the colonies—sometimes fleeing a disintegrating situation—their departures were an uprooting from their native soil that produced utter confusion. In the immediacy of their arrival in Europe, the states concerned quickly put together welcome procedures and developed legislation specifically aimed at the integration of immigrants from the former colonies as an obligation and to demonstrate solidarity. But it is clear that the suddenness and the amplitude of the phenomenon completely surprised the European powers. All of them minimized immigration both quantitatively and qualitatively and found themselves overwhelmed by the massive arrivals. The result among the repatriates themselves was the sense that they were abandoned, poorly welcomed, scorned, unwanted, even victims of an anti-foreign “racism” practiced by the local population. Reception measures and legislative devices For all the colonial powers, a national response required the establishment of reception procedures and the development of a range of legislative measures to deal with the newcomers. On the whole, those who made their way to Europe were in dire circumstances. For the most part they were without family and without a place to live. Europe was an unknown, mythical world to most of them. Out of necessity, they had little choice other than to rely on public and private assistance. After the Second World War, Italy took the first legislative measures concerning Italians driven out of Libya and living in “assistance camps.” At the same time, the Netherlands created a Central Aid Bureau

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for War Victims in order to deal with the first immigrants from Indonesia. They received a special allocation to cover immediate needs for the first six months after their arrival. In this specific case of the Netherlands after the Second World War, most had family who were able to provide them with lodging and their integration did not seem to pose insurmountable problems. From 1950, those who arrived suffered far more profound destitution and had to be lodged in camps and hurriedly requisitioned family hostels. Initially a special service of the Foreign Ministry (from 1948 to 1952) and then the Ministry for Social Affairs (created in 1952) took responsibility for receiving them. However, this did not necessarily signify any resolution of the problems the Netherlands would face with the arrival of other repatriates, principally from the Moluccas Islands, from Surinam, and from the Dutch Antilles, into the 1980s.21 The problem was far more difficult with the French repatriates (1954–62) and the Portuguese (1975). The decolonization of North Africa forced France to pass a law in 1961 concerning the reception and re-establishment of French from the overseas territories. It fixed the principle of assistance and resettlement, but did not provide for any indemnity for material losses or for property nationalized by governments in the throes of independence. This issue heavily marked political relations in France with the massive arrival of the pieds noirs from Algeria in 1962. They could certainly count on national generosity, but in a limited way: the pieds noirs received monthly food assistance for one year and resettlement aid for the purchase of everyday consumer goods. Anticipating the arrival of 400,000 people in four years, reception centers for Algerian immigrants were actually faced with 980,000 people in 1962, of whom 520,000 arrived from May through August. Public agencies were overwhelmed and little took place according to plan. Antagonism between the “hosts” and their “guests” intensified with the escalating social and economic crisis. During the summer of 1962, the situation in reception areas, especially in Provence and particularly at Marseilles, was extremely delicate. The specter of riots further heightened fears. The government tried to reduce the number of immigrants at Marseilles (300,000 in June-July) but without much result. Calm was only restored in the autumn and it would take three to four years to resolve the housing, employment, and schooling problems. Portugal found itself in an even trickier situation in 1975. Unlike France, which welcomed the repatriates during favorable economic times, the country was faced with the appearance of half a million people while in the throes of both economic and political crisis. The rapid creation of the Institute for the Support of National Repatriates was little more than window dressing, and the retornados received only limited help. Here as well, the result was a growing feeling among the immigrant community that they had been abandoned, outcast, or even betrayed. Putting down urban roots One of the characteristics of repatriation was the desire of the majority of newcomers to settle in large cities. In a general manner, urban settlement was a way to reclaim the comforts of life most closely associated with those of their native land and offered rapid reintegration into professional life. In France, the pieds noirs established themselves principally in the large cities of the Mediterranean south, mainly at Marseilles but also in Montpellier, Perpignan, Nice, and Toulon. In the Netherlands, the two cities of The

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Hague and Amsterdam welcomed the most important contingents from the Moluccas and Surinam. In Britain, London and its suburbs were where nearly half of the expatriates in search of a better life put down roots, especially those from the Caribbean, while the cities of the Midlands and West Yorkshire attracted Asian migrants. Migrants to Italy chose the industrial north, the Latium and the Romagna regions. Even when their country of adoption was experiencing political and economic difficulties, as in Portugal in 1975, metropolitan areas still remained the privileged spaces of welcome. The three cities of Lisbon, Porto, and Setubal accommodated between them half of the retornados. As a result, counter to government attempts to distribute this mass of humanity evenly across their territories, the new settlers instead reinforced national imbalances between attractive urban regions and declining areas. The preference for Europe s cities also meant building schools, hospitals, and housing,22 developing communication and infrastructure networks, and creating jobs for an urban population that had increased by 5 to 12 percent in a matter of weeks. The arrival of the repatriates thus constituted a heavy public burden. At the same time, they also offered potential. Immigrants filled in gaps in the labor market and revitalized the active population everywhere they settled: 66 percent of the retornados and 60 percent of the pieds noirs were less than 40 years old in 1976, while these percentages were respectively 56 percent and 53 percent for native Portuguese and French. The rare socioprofessional studies that we have available reveal that the pieds noirs, the repatriates of the Netherlands, the retornados were better trained than their homeland compatriots, especially in professional domains. Immigrants helped create economic growth and a notable increase in monetary wealth. Wherever they were located, they began to “rebuild” their lives and prove their value. The result was a host of economic innovations and advances, as in the south of France where agriculture was profoundly modified by the use of new techniques and mechanization. Elsewhere, the food, medical engineering, and building industries underwent substantial progress. In fact, reclassification usually took place in two to three years even if that often meant a drop in social standing from that enjoyed in their country of origin.23 The immediate consequence was that the social make-up of immigrant communities was quite different than it would have been overseas. Urban re-settlement was naturally accompanied by an appropriation of urban space or territory. “Repatriate” neighborhoods, pieds-noirs spaces, and retornados areas dotted the urban landscape. But lacking precise research, it is impossible to say much further about them. The anxiety and tensions that were born of these years of war, the uprooting from their native homes, the loss of emotional belonging, the disappearance of daily structure, and the difficulties of often tragic exile brought on material and moral crises that had to be overcome no matter what the origin of the immigrant. Once they found themselves in Europe, anti-foreign “racism” reinforced their feeling of being victims of injustice. This had a double consequence. First, the repatriates essentially rejected the political world they held responsible for their outcast status. No migrant groups set up political parties and their efforts at restitution were short-lived. Even if they carried weight in political elections on an ad hoc basis, they did not create a “repatriate lobby.” In France, for example, their anti-de Gaulle protest vote fluctuated from the extreme right in the first round of the 1965 presidential election to support for the socialists in the second round of these same elections. After the death of General de Gaulle, immigrants returned to their original political predilections. Although in Italy there was concern they would swell the

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Communist Party, it was the Italian right, and in particular the MSI (Italian Social Movement), that benefited from their support. Without doubt, it was in Portugal that discontent was most clearly expressed in voting patterns. In the legislative elections of April 1976, the Social and Democratic Center, which posed as a defender of the retornados and proposed settlement assistance and indemnities, benefited from their vote and increased its number of parliamentary deputies from twelve to forty-two. But here as well, after initial relocation difficulties passed away (although this took several years), there is the sense that the retornados retreated from their conservative ideology and politics. In general, governments preferred re-settlement assistance to compensation for lost goods, and this dilemma played a crucial part in the politics of the colonial displaced. The second consequence was the sense of being a new oppressed minority in Europe; a minority that would at times take a strong stand against mainstream opinion in their own defense. The very high number of associations and their expression in numerous journals and newspapers did not just reflect nostalgia or a defense of common interests, it articulated a conscious identity and the readiness to preserve their way of life. A distinctive pieds-noirs and retornados culture emerged in France and Portugal and the awareness of cultural and ethnic origins was reinforced and handed down to the second generation. As is obvious, twenty, thirty, even forty years after the grands départs, some problems are left unresolved. They do not concern repatriated ethnic Europeans as much as the colonial natives who supported and fought on the side of the European powers. Whether it was the native elements of the KNIL (Royal Army Forces of Indonesia) under Dutch command, the Harkis or French Muslims (since 1947) fighting on the side of the French Army against the Algerian FLN, or the natives of the Portuguese territories of Sao Tomé, Principe and Cap-Vert, all experienced the same difficulties. The newly independent populations subjugated those who remained to punishment and massacre. If they left, they faced the stumbling blocks of repatriation. As ethnic minorities, they were detained in refugee camps for years under severe conditions. They faced isolation and a lack of education, as well as obstacles to integration. In 1975 35,000 Moluccans were living in Dutch refugee camps, and in France more than two-thirds of French Muslim repatriates (some 60,000 men, women, and children) were interned in refugee camps and “forest hamlets.” Obviously, these banished, forgotten people amassed bitter memories of misery that at times exploded into rancor. Train attacks and kidnappings by Moluccans increased during the 1970s in the Netherlands. In France, after a series of hunger strikes by Harkis, their sons took Algerian immigrant workers hostage, while others chained themselves to the iron gates of prefecture offices, blocked roads, and occupied administration buildings.24 Everywhere, the goals were the same: gaining the attention of the authorities and demanding reparations as well as recognition of their own role in history. Conclusion It is clear that the number of colonial immigrants is itself significant for Europe. The extent of their impact is often only known locally, but it is undeniable just the same. As a general rule, the newcomers assimilated into urban settings that were themselves increasingly heterogeneous. In some circumstances, immigrants were truly innovative,

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but the success of some should not mask the difficulties the more destitute faced. Without doubt they contributed their skills and energy to the resurgence of the European economy between 1955 and 1975. This chapter’s panorama does not include a portrait of the other actors in decolonization: the Europeans faced with repatriate settlers, and the native peoples of the former colonies who were increasingly part of the European social landscape. The latter are taken up in Chapters 4 and 5 of this volume. The research needed on these subjects will lead us far from the political ideology and “partisan memories” that often dominate current understanding. If the repercussions of this vast movement of decolonization were not as dramatic as anticipated in Europe, it was not the same in the countries that attained formal independence. Whether gained in the midst of war or by diplomacy, self-government brought with it tragedy, instability, renewed hopes, and at times thwarted dreams. Whether we speak of the countries of Southeast Asia, black Africa, or North Africa, all experienced, and still experience, chronic economic difficulties and severe political crises. No country was sheltered from military dictatorship. No country was free from one-party rule, tyranny and nepotism—including countries that were provided with western-style democratic institutions.25 Nearly everywhere, with the exception of India and Senegal, disenchantment followed the joy of the first years of independence. Certainly, neocolonialist policies played a part in these crises. Quandaries over artificial territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism provoked dangerous setbacks and military conflicts between India and Pakistan, between Algeria and Morocco, between Ghana and Togo, between Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, to take the most flagrant cases. And they remain unfinished. It is also important to remember that political independence does not always coincide with economic independence far from it. Financial links and aid from the European powers as well as the presence of large corporations that for the most part are headquartered in Europe— francophone black Africa, for example, is the private reserve of France—weigh heavily on these emerging economies and control their markets. On the other hand, the complicity of the leaders of these newly emergent states must also be taken into account. Frequent military coups d’état,26 the resurgence of ethnic conflict, the desire to revive a historic past in an attempt to fabricate an idealized national history, the bribery, corruption, and at times incapability of political leadership have all played their role in making instability a permanent state of affairs. The delicate balance between time-honored rural, tribal authority and increasingly centralized western-style authority as well as the failures of the Organization of African Unity further aggravate the situation. The complexity of these factors makes the work of the contemporary historian difficult indeed. Numerous controversies remain and will continue for some years, as will the heavy cost—material, cultural, and psychological—of these independence movements. At the most, we can concur with a statement by the French historian Guy Pervillé: “The post-colonial era is different from the colonial era; it is not necessarily better.”27 The European nations and their former dependencies must work together jointly to write a history of colonization and decolonization free from any ideology. This is the historians’ task. New research is already beginning to shed light on these vast processes without recourse to the anti-colonial and third world dogma that held sway during the 1960s. A more consensual memory is needed. A background of ignorance, bad conscience, and guilt has produced antagonistic memories that have too long been a

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substitute for historical analysis. Finally, France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium as well as the Netherlands, Spain and Italy all need to learn from their history of decolonization.28 Further reading The repatriation movement that directly resulted from decolonization is an area of research that has hardly been touched. However, the initial scholarship published during the 1990s has given us a better understanding of this phenomenon, which was for so long perceived as an illegitimate object of historical analysis. The published proceedings of three conferences have given us a comparative perspective on Europe: J-L.Miège and C.Dubois (eds), L’Europe retrouvée: les migrations de la decolonisation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994; A.Smith (ed.), Europe’s Invisible Migrants: Consequences of the “Colonists’ Return”, New York, New York University—Institute of French Studies (March 1999), Amsterdam Press, 2002; and C.Quétel (ed.), Decolonisation—Décolonisations, Journées internationales d’Histoire, Memorial de Caen (October 2000), Caen, Memorial de Caen, 2002. These three conferences brought together the scholars working in this field (in Britain, Michael Twaddle and Anthony Clayton; in the Netherlands, Wim Willems and Herman Obdeijn; Pierre Salmon in Belgium; Antonio Dias Farinha and Ricardo E.Ovalle-Bahamon in Portugal; Colette Dubois, Jean-Jacques Jordi, Jean-Louis Miège, and Andrea Smith in France; and in Italy, Romain Rainero). Particularly important is the pioneering article by J.-L.Miège, “Repatriés,” in the Encyclopedia Universalis, 2nd edition, Paris, Encyclopedia Universalis SA, 1989, as is the excellent article by A.Stoler and F.Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in F. Cooper and A.Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997. Other studies concentrate on individual countries. Repatriation in the United Kingdom is explored in R.L.King and S.Oberg, Mass Migration in Europe: The Legacy and the Future, London, Belhaven Press, 1993, A.Dummett and A. Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Laws, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990, D.Coleman and J. Salt, The British Population. Patterns, Trends, and Processes, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; R.Moore and T. Wallace, Slamming the Door: The Administration of Immigration Control, London, Martin Robertson 1975; and finally M.Kahler, Decolonization in Britain and France: The Domestic Consequences of International Relations, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984. The French case is studied by J.-J.Jordi in De I’Exode a I’exil: Rapatriés et piedsnoirs en France, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993, and 1962, Varrivée des Pieds-Noirs, Paris, Autrement, 1995, as well as in J.-J.Jordi and E.Temime (eds), Marseille et le choc des décolonisatiom’, Aix-en-Provence, Edisud, 1996. Also interesting is A.G.Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, London, Routledge, 1995. The Dutch experience of repatriation is treated by Wim Willems (ed.) in De repatriëring, Leyde, Université de Leyde, 1993, and J.E.Ellemers and R.E.F.Vaillant in Indische Nederlanders en gerepatriëerden, Muiderberg, Coutinho, 1985. J. Stengers explores Belgian repatriation in Emigration et immigration en Belgique au XIXème et XXème siècles, Brussels, Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, vol. XLVI, 1978. The

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important case of the retornados in Portugal is studied by R.Pena Pires, M.José Maranhäo, J. P.Quintela, F.Moniz, and M.Pisco, Os Retornados: Um estudo sociogràfico, Lisbon, IED, 1984. Spain and Italy both remain largely unstudied. The specific case of the Colonial Auxiliaries is examined in R. Cohen, “Repatriates and Colonial Auxiliaries,” in the Cambridge Survey of World Migration, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, and J.-J.Jordi and M.Hamoumou, Les Harkis: Une mémoire enfouie, Paris, Autrement, 1999. On the broader issues of decolonization, see F. Ansprenger, The Dissolution of Colonial Empires, London, Routledge, 1989, as well as R.F.Betts, Decolonization, London, Routledge, 1998, and M.E.Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of European Empires, 2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999. The British experience is taken up in J.Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-war World, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988, and the French in Raymond Betts, France and Decolonisation, 1900–1960, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1991. Portugal receives attention from Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, London, Longman, 1997. Notes 1 Algeria was divided into French administrative departments in 1848, but nevertheless not all of its inhabitants were given French nationality. After the Second World War, the French government granted “French of Algerian origin” (that is to say Muslims) freedom to circulate within France in 1946 and then a 1948 decree made all the inhabitants of Algeria “French.” Thus the Algerians who arrived to work in France were not counted as foreigners even though, in reality, they perceived themselves and were always perceived as immigrants. With the independence of Algeria in 1962, the Algerian became the emblematic figure of the immigrant worker, a position up until then held by the Italian, Spanish, or Pole, depending on the region. 2 At the end of the war, there were no more than one and a half million foreigners in France, that is to say, a million less than before the war. There was little change between 1946 and 1954. It is only from 1954 that one sees a notable increase in the number of foreigners in France: 2.1 million in 1962, 2.6 million in 1968, and 3.4 million in 1975. 3 With the exception, however, of Yugoslavia. 4 While the League of Nations counted fifty or so states after the major decolonization movements, the United Nations counted three times more! 5 To this should be added the awakening of patriotic sentiment and nationalism among liberated peoples—ideas inherited from Europe in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In this sense, there was a universalization of the decolonization phenomenon originating in Europe. At the same time, paradoxically, the newly independent countries propounded a rediscovery of their uniqueness that contested the very universality of European civilization that had been the basis of colonization in the first place. 6 See Further reading for an introduction to recent works on the consequences of repatriation for the imperial powers. 7 However, Malaya only recovered its independence some years later, in 1957, by reason of the problems inherent in the country’s complexity: the coexistence of archaic sultanates, the diversity of ethnicities, and the strategic presence of Singapore for Britain. 8 The internationalization of the Indonesian question forced the Dutch government to recognize the independence of Indonesia after a test of force.

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9 It is important to note here that political independence does not always coincide with economic independence. 10 These countries became independent in 1974 and 1975. 11 Southern Rhodesia, an independent “white” segregationist state, only converted to the multiracial state of Zimbabwe in 1980. Namibia gained independence in March 1990 as a result of the abandonment of apartheid in South Africa and the transformation of this latter country into a multiracial, multi-cultural state. 12 It is interesting to note, however, that Britain understood how to deal economically with prolonged wars, while France and Portugal did not. 13 Cited in C.R.Ageron, La Decolonisation française, Paris, Armand Colin, 1991, p. 121. 14 See B.Etemad, La Possession du monde, Brussels, Editions Complexe, 2000, p. 268. 15 J.Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français, Collection Points—histoire, Paris, Albin Michel, 1984, p. 359. 16 Etemad, La Possession du monde, p. 269. 17 Algerian Jews, having been French since 1870, are considered Europeans in the statistics, and counted as such in Table 2.1. 18 See Etemad, La Possession du monde, p. 273 and especially J-L.Miège and C.Dubois (eds), L’Europe retrouvée, les migrations de la decolonisation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994, p. 18. 19 In 1961 a Gallup Poll reported 67 percent support for reducing immigration from the “new” commonwealth. 20 M.Twaddle, “British nationality law, Commonwealth immigration and the ending of the British Empire”, in Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, pp. 35–48. See also R.Moore and T.Wallace, Slamming the Door: The Administration of Immigration Control, London, Martin Robertson, 1975. Henceforth, free entry into Britain was limited to those with a parent or grandparent born, adopted, or naturalized as British. 21 H.Obdeijn, “Vers les bords de la Mer du Nord, Les retours aux Pays-Bas induits par la decolonisation,” in Miège and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, pp. 49–74. 22 Thus, in the Netherlands, the government was to reserve 5 percent of all newly constructed public housing for Indonesian repatriates. France reserved 10 percent of newly constructed public housing, and developed a special housing program, for repatriates from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from 1963 to 1966. In fact, all of Europe continued with construction beyond the 1950s. 23 Despite some advantages, six years after their return, the retornados still experienced heavy unemployment (14.5 percent in comparison to 7 percent for their fellow citizens). However, Portuguese membership in the European Union, from 1981, helped to ameliorate their status. 24 J.-J.Jordi and M.Hamoumou, Les Harkis: une mémoire enfouie, Paris, Autrement, 1999. 25 It is proverbial to say that Britain typically exported its parliamentary system to its colonies. However, at independence, it was not clear that this system would be adapted by local societies, nor that it would create the basis for “national” sentiment. 26 Between 1960 and 1969, fifty military coups d’état were registered in Africa, of which half were carried through. 27 G.Pervillé, De I’Empire français a la décolonisation, Paris, Hachette, 1991, p. 245. 28 A precise assessment of the processes of decolonization for the decolonized countries as well as for the imperial powers has yet to be written.

3 The golden age of prosperity, 1953–73 Rosemary Wakeman Economists agree that it is impossible to find an historical precedent for the extended period of prosperity enjoyed by Europe during the “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s. A variety of names have been used to describe these thirty years of spectacular economic expansion: les trente glorieuses, the golden age of capitalism, and das Wirtschaftswunder. Whatever it might be called, it transformed Europe from a continent devastated by war to a modern economic powerhouse. Both production and consumption soared. Real domestic product grew by 4.8 percent annually throughout Europe. Nothing close to this had been achieved in either the nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century.1 It was a uniquely European phenomenon that characterized virtually all countries, regardless of political persuasion. Aside from a few slack periods, there was no halt in the advance, no reversal into the “boom and bust” business cycles that had plagued pre-war Europe. Even more, the benefits of the new wealth were widely diffused. Jobs were plentiful, real wages grew, and Europeans enjoyed the highest standards of living they had ever known. Welfare legislation and comprehensive social security schemes were adopted almost everywhere. A consumer revolution swept through Europe completely transforming everyday culture with a cascade of commodities from washing machines to telephones and televisions. What had once been luxuries were now available to almost everyone. This rising affluence was the unique feature of the golden age of prosperity. It made the postwar economic system a total way of life. Certainly the material benefits of growth took some time to be felt. The northern European countries and Britain enjoyed the highest living standards in the early years after the war. But by the mid-1950s Britain’s growth began to lag while France and Germany began to enjoy the fruits of the golden age. In southern Europe, even in prosperous regions such as Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, the benefits of the affluent society did not become general until the 1960s. But even the inclusion of Eastern Europe does not substantially change the picture. There was an unprecedented growth in productivity, investment, and capital accumulation. Throughout the entire postwar period, the growth of Real National Product in the centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (an astounding 5.6 percent annually between 1950 and 1960, and then 4.9 percent between 1962 and 1973) paralleled or even exceeded that of Western Europe.2 The countries of southern Europe all achieved higher national growth rates than the classic industrialized countries of Britain or Germany. Regions that had formerly been relegated to the underdeveloped margins of the European economy now made up lost ground and began to close the gap in productivity, technology, and income levels. Greece, for example, enjoyed among the most rapidly rising income levels, as did Spain and Portugal.3 This “catching up” process was one of the most significant features of the

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golden age and it signaled a convergence of economic trends across the European landscape. Whether divided politically into East—West, or economically into North— South, prosperity and modernization were the mantras of the age. In a larger sense, the golden age was one of making up for ground lost in two devastating world wars and the most severe economic depression yet known. In the twenty-five years after the Second World War, labor productivity increased almost three times more than it had in the previous eighty years. The boom catapulted Europe into a leading position in the world economy (see Table 3.1). From 1950 to 1970, Europe’s share of the world output of goods and services increased from 37 to 41 percent. The increasing global role of its industrial production was even more striking, 39 to 48 percent.4 Rapid industrialization was the mechanism for this “miracle” from France and the Netherlands to Romania. Economic policy decisions are clearly dictated by politics, but the commonalities that transcend the traditional East—West division in post-1945 Europe are difficult to ignore. Within the context of the Cold War and the fall of Soviet bloc, it was common to refer to the ideological dichotomies between capitalism and communism and to attribute any differences to that distinction. However, a fresh debate has since ensued as to the logic of both systems as they materialized as actual economic policy. This has refocused attention on the complexities of the experiences and the informalization of economic decision-making. Was the state socialism of Eastern Europe distinct from Western capitalism or did both apply Fordist methods and merge around a compromise mixed economy? Were both systems to be treated as versions of a more general pattern of development? Were the differences in experience between East and Table 3.1 GDP growth rates in Western and Eastern Europe, 1950–98 1950–73

1973–98

Austria

5.35

2.36

Belgium

4.08

2.08

Denmark

3.81

2.09

Finland

4.94

2.44

France

5.05

2.10

Germany

5.68

1.76

Italy

5.64

2.28

Netherlands

4.74

2.39

Norway

4.06

3.48

Sweden

3.73

1.65

Switzerland

4.51

1.05

United Kingdom

2.93

2.00

Greece

6.98

2.22

Ireland

3.20

4.75

The golden age of prosperity, 1953–73

47

Portugal

5.73

2.88

Spain

6.81

2.47

Total Western Europe

4.81

2.11

Albania

6.49

1.72

Bulgaria

5.98

–0.75

Czechoslovakia

3.81

(0.98)

Hungary

4.10

0.50

Poland

4.78

1.50

Romania

5.92

–0.45

Former Yugoslavia

5.62

0.28

Total Eastern Europe

4.86

0.73

Source: Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris, OECD, 2001, Appendix.

West explained more by regional exigencies and historic patterns of economic development than by economic dogma? The argument in this chapter is that neither capitalism nor communism were totalizing entities in Europe, nor was modernization a hegemonic event. Instead, European economic development in the second half of the twentieth century evidenced the diverse, fluid nature of economic policy. What constituted a modern political economy was derived from a variety of sources—on the left and the right of the political spectrum, and from the public and private domains. Both capitalism and communism remained flexible concepts in the economic imagination and were applied within the context of national paths to development. Their characteristics were both regime-specific and region-specific. They evolved in response to war and reconstruction, and to political and social contingencies. Both promoted modernization through state planning, massive investments in infrastructure and rapid industrialization, and the settlement of labor conflict. Interpreting the golden age On the face of it, Europe’s economic boom appears to be a result of reconstruction and pent-up demand that would be expected in the initial years after a devastating war. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, Europe was in disarray and close to destitute. A trail of human and material devastation stretched across the continent from London to Stalingrad. Manufacturing and commerce were paralyzed, agricultural production shattered, infrastructure and communications badly disrupted. Shortages of almost everything prevailed. The conventional explanation is that the period of dynamic growth following the Second World War represents a successful phase of reconstruction, a postwar “boom” or “economic miracle” fueled by the Marshall Plan. Rapid economic growth continued until demand was fulfilled and economic normalcy reached. At the war’s end, all of Europe was committed to policies of reconstruction and economic growth, but governments were financially depleted and strapped with large public debts

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and inflation as well as with social and political upheaval. From July 1945, the United States began pouring aid into poverty-stricken Europe through various organizations such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. By early 1948 some $25 billion had already been disbursed throughout the continent including Eastern Europe. But it was barely enough. The Marshall Plan, which began operation in April 1948, amounted to some $13.2 billion between 1948 and 1952. Britain ($3.17 billion) and France ($2.7 billion) were the two largest recipients. The sixteen countries of Western Europe joined together to form the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) that coordinated and divided the aid to recipient countries. The immediate impact was to give Europe an immediate, temporary infusion of investment capital that facilitated reconstruction without further depressing living standards. In 1948 the industries of France and of most other European countries (except West Germany) were already producing more than before the war. In certain key industries the advance was even more striking: steel production increased by 70 percent between 1947 and 1950, cement by 80 percent, vehicles by 150 percent, and refined oil products by 200 percent. Exports rose by 91 percent.5 Europe seemed well on the way to recovery. However, the golden age of prosperity entailed far broader economic and social transformations than a simple postwar rejuvenation. It may in fact be the defining phase of the twentieth century. A second “hypothesis of structural discontinuity” argues that both world wars effected major changes in Europe’s demographic patterns, its system of nation-states, its social structure, and its political economy. From this perspective it is clear that in the wake of the Second World War, capitalism passed through an unprecedented phase in its history. The Great Depression was so catastrophic that no one could imagine returning to the gloom of unemployment and destitution that had haunted the years before the war. The progressive ambitions of the Resistance and the influential role of the working classes in general at the war’s end further sharpened the expectation of sweeping economic and social reform. Once reconstruction began, the central premise of American strategy and the Marshall Plan was that deteriorating economic conditions would increase the strength of communism and Soviet power. Mass unemployment and the slump conditions of the 1930s could not be allowed to return. In short, conditions at the end of the Second World War propelled a remarkable consensus of public sentiment and government policies that capitalist practices needed reform. The leaders of liberated Europe and the UK on both the political left and right advocated full employment, welfare benefits, Keynesian growth policies, and economic modernization. In Britain, the Labour Party with its trade union base emerged victorious in the 1945 election on the “Let Us Face the Future” platform of full employment and the welfare state. Labour MP John Strachey argued that “British capitalism has been compelled…to do what we used to say it would never do; it has been forced to devote its productive resources to raising the standard of life of the population as a whole.”6 Prosperity for All! was the title of a 1957 volume of speeches and writings by Ludwig Erhard, the long-serving Economics Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. Government involvement in economic policy was certainly not new to Europe. France for example had a long tradition of étatisme, or state intervention. The municipal socialism of the 1920s, Soviet economic planning, as well as social Catholic reform policies and early corporatist ideas all provided models. The Second World War had also revolutionized economic management and made it more acceptable. The West European economy was more mobilized for the

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Second World War than it had been for any previous conflict, and the planning and control of economic resources were far more extensive. Even countries like Italy and Germany, which came out of the war with a deep mistrust of the state’s role, had nevertheless instituted the conceptual and bureaucratic framework for economic oversight. However ambivalent they may have felt about the politics associated with these various methods, both capitalism and communism adopted successful strategies from each other, from the war, and from fascism to the great task of postwar modernization. All were prepared to achieve it through management of mixed market economies that varied from country to country, and by cooperating with labor. For some thirty years, there was general agreement around this formula as the answer to the failures of the past and the challenges of the postwar age. Full employment, a living income with moderate wage raises, and social welfare services were the material gains for cooperating with modern capitalism in what Harold Wilson called a “social contract.” Up to this point, working-class political parties and the representatives of capital had been locked in a virtually irreconcilable conflict. This negotiated halt in the class struggle that had long plagued Europe provided a remarkable social stability to the postwar age. Labor agreed to moderate demands in return for policies that promoted investment and rapid growth, and that would raise the standard of living through social welfare programs and higher incomes in the long run. Countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Austria negotiated “social partnerships” or “social pacts” in which labor set aside immediate wage demands and promoted productivity alongside employers. Trade unions, collective bargaining, and labor representation in economic decision-making became an integral part of the capitalist landscape. The Dutch Publiek Rechtelijke Bedrijfsorganisatie, or Public Work Board, for example, brought together delegates from labor, management, and government to negotiate employment and investment policy. Governments became involved in settling labor disputes and heading off labor unrest. In countries where this settlement was not as successful and where wage pressures continued, such as France and Italy, the Cold War suppression of the most radical elements within the labor movement eventually opened the way for reform. In his 1942 report, Full Employment in a Free Society, Liberal Party member William Beveridge argued that the state should step in and close gaps in private investment in order to prevent unemployment, even if the budget did not balance. A policy of full employment and social benefits would “socialize demand” rather than production.7 Under the British welfare state, social services became a universal right with social security, family assistance, and free access to medical care. Even when the Conservatives regained power in October 1951, they accepted the postwar social pact as vital to economic stability and success. By 1957 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proclaimed “most of our people have never had it so good,” and in 1959 that “the class war was over.” Austria, Belgium, and the French Fourth Republic all pushed through schemes to enhance social security, pensions, and medical care during the late 1940s and 1950s. In West Germany, comprehensive social reform resulted in a reorganization of public pension plans in 1957 that increased payments from 50 to 70 percent. The gospel of “cooperative capitalism” was that high and growing wages and high and growing government expenditure would guarantee a balanced expansion of demand and productive capacity. Conventional European caution toward money and credit was replaced with an upbeat faith in prosperity and the capacity to spend. Capitalism had

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undergone a qualitative transformation. It operated in the context of the welfare state, of a trade union movement that was tame even where it was powerful, of the commitment to demand management, and of American international leadership. In assessing the golden postwar age, Stephen Marglin and Juliet Schor argue that this American leadership and Western political supremacy were essential to success.8 Americans helped change European capitalism just as they had begun to do before the war—transforming industrial relations, preaching scientific management and modernizing work practices and equipment. Marshall Planners tried to encourage European policy-makers to boost consumer spending and to break free of the economic defenses and rigid social hierarchies of the past in a kind of European New Deal. Despite the bitter oratory of the Cold War, the political situation in Europe was more stable than it had been at any other time during the twentieth century. In the West, the “Pax Americana” facilitated a stream of aid and an orderly flow of technology and goods to countries desperately in need. American investment in Western Europe swelled to over $21 billion by 1969. The institutions established to implement the Marshall Plan provided the foundation for postwar international cooperation and eventually achieved considerable success in promoting the liberalization of trade and payments and in ensuring a reasonable degree of stability in international monetary relationships. They provided the precedent for later cooperative efforts with the establishment of the European Payments Union (1950), the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), the European Economic Community (1957) and the European Free Trade Association (1959). The role of Bretton Woods (1944) in stabilizing the international monetary system and underpinning the credibility of growth policies was crucial. So long as Western Europe could legitimately peg the value of its currencies to a stable dollar, then workers could rely on the value of their wages and business could confidently expect high returns on their investments. From the negotiations at Bretton Woods in July 1944 two important institutions emerged: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). The fortyfour participating nations committed themselves to the most liberal trade possible and to fixed currency exchange rates. In 1947 the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) came into existence. Under this “Bretton Woods system,” American economic power and its privileged dollar were the material support for a free trade philosophy used to invigorate and globalize the world economy. It secured a greater measure of international economic cooperation among nations on a wider and more permanent scale than anything that had been tried in the past. These new arrangements were key to Western Europe’s rapid export growth. Beyond the influence of American leadership, however, lay institutional techniques that represented a specifically European version of modernization and managed capitalism. The great postwar economic success stories in Europe are stories of economic modernization backed, supervised, and planned by governments. This deployment of state powers was essential to full productivity, guaranteed growth and rising living standards that stimulated demand and for the first time provided a mass consumer market for luxury goods that became accepted as necessities. In the first postwar years, when the eagerness for social and economic reform was at its most intense, nationalization was the most direct method for capital investment in key industries and infrastructure. Closest to a nationalized economy was Italy, where much of the nationalized sector was inherited

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51

from the corporatist Fascist economy. The major state-holding company of the 1930s, the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, continued to own a large share of Italian metallurgy, chemicals, and transportation. In France and in Italy, about 40 percent of the banking sector was nationalized, but in both cases public banks had existed before the war. The coal mines in Britain and France were nationalized; the production of electricity was entirely in the hands of the state in Italy and Britain, and in France and Germany as well. So too were air transport and the railways, with sea transport also state-controlled in large measure. About 60 percent of the French aircraft and automobile industries were nationalized. As the fervor of the Liberation faded, outright nationalization gave way to indicative planning that provided state direction and guidance of economic development. This statemanaged capitalism scored some striking successes, France’s Monnet Plan (1946–53) being among the most famous examples. The new generation of technocrats who emerged in France in 1945–46 were determined to break with the past and to use the state to stimulate productivity and modernization. A national planning commission (Commissariat Général du Plan) launched a vigorous program that set goals, and provided investment incentives in modern industry and disincentives in declining sectors. A successful series of Five-Year Plans transformed France from a byword for economic Malthusianism into a modern industrial power. Between 1950 and 1979 France caught up more successfully than any other of the chief industrial countries with US productivity, more so even than Germany. The Dutch followed a similar path of government investment planning, but used a much more sophisticated econometric model for forecasting. It is interesting to note that France and the Netherlands were the most successful in the “catch up” process that set Europe on the path toward economic convergence.9 On the face of it, the contrast between this and the West German approach to planning could not be clearer. The extension of state power during the Nazi era was treated as evil. Ludwig Erhard and the neo-liberal architects of the Federal Republic’s economic miracle were firm believers in free market ideology. Yet while there was no overall plan, nonetheless the state consumed, transferred, and invested some 35 percent of the GDP during the 1950s. It retained control over transportation, utilities, the savings banks, and a number of industrial enterprises including the Volkswagenwerk. It has been estimated that between DM 35 and 40 billion were lent by West German public authorities to the private sector between 1949 and 1957. Public funds financed the development of agriculture, coal mining, housing, and shipbuilding. Doug McEachern estimates that the postwar divestiture of state-owned assets in West Germany made state intervention about equivalent to that in Britain and France.10 Under Erhard’s social market economy and its principle, “competition as far as possible, planning as far as necessary,” by 1958 Germany was already so prosperous that its currency could be made fully convertible. The Federal Republic had the highest growth rate of GNP in Western Europe and despite the spectacular increase in population, it maintained the highest average yearly GNP growth per capita. This entire framework of European institutional policy was held together by a quality and range of statistical reporting that was in itself a revolution in economic thinking. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, government and corporations alike built up a modern technocratic corps of planning experts. They employed a matrix of financial and

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economic statistics and planning strategies that became the emblematic tools of mixed economies and managed capitalism. They were used, as Charles Maier argues, “to ensure the primacy of economics over politics and to de-ideologize issues of political economy into questions of output and efficiency.”11 Economic decision-making became the domain of nonelected experts who led an assault against outdated business customs and preached modernization, productivity, and the embrace of modern economic life. The younger generation of Europe’s private business leaders trekked to Harvard Business School for the strategies of American-style capitalism. The planning techniques of fascist Germany and Italy and the Soviet Union alike were stripped of ideology and then adapted to public policy with missionary zeal. A revolution in West European economic culture had taken place. An elite technocratic corps filled with businessmen and bureaucrats from both the private and public sectors experimented with and orchestrated diverse formulas for practicing capitalism. Even socialism was redefined as “technocratic.” Although their ideological trajectories were poles apart, the economic objectives of both East and West were in reality quite similar: economic growth, modernization, and prosperity. The socialist state, with the political mediation of the Party, took upon itself the role of guaranteeing a high rate of investment with full employment in exchange for moderate wages and social discipline. Immediately after the war, the goals of orthodox Stalinist planning favored full-scale nationalization, reconstruction Five-Year Plans, and forced industrialization. The Soviet Union’s goals were to extract punitive reparations from any country that had sided with the enemy and to establish hegemony over its “outer empire.” But its policies were in part a pragmatic modernization model for peripheral agricultural countries. By the late 1960s all the countries of the East, except Albania, were industrialized. Heavily staffed planning offices worked out the details for investment in every area of the economy with huge injections of money into military defense industries. The creation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in 1949 signaled the growing reorientation of trade away from the West and the need for self-sufficiency. Coal, iron, and steel reigned supreme. The result was astonishing economic growth that halted the systemic stagnation and narrowed the gap with the West. Between 1950 and 1970, industrial production increased five times in Czechoslovakia, seven times in East Germany, six in Yugoslavia and eleven times in Bulgaria and Romania.12 Yet this took place side-by-side with widespread shortages. Consumer manufacturing, agriculture, and services were neglected, as was the environment. Production was independent of demand, marketability, quality, or price. The goals of socialist equality and a homogenous society required the redistribution of incomes as well as old age pensions and free social services. Lower paid and less skilled workers, and eventually the peasants, were the major beneficiaries. But the stifling atmosphere of political repression, scarcity, and suffering that shrouded Eastern Europe in the 1950s was all too visible. Under the “New Course” that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 and the 1956 revolts, the communist regime became less oppressive and more flexible, and achieved significant results in economic modernization (although growth rates slowed) by introducing elements of a market economy and consumer society. Under technical reformers such as György Peter and János Kornai in Hungary, by the early 1960s a consensus began to emerge that planning and the market were no longer irreconcilable. In Hungary, partial privatization and the profit motive gradually undermined central planning and replaced it

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with a “market socialism” codified as the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) in 1968. Detailed planning directives were replaced by broad indicative plans that partially privatized firms. Profits became the criterion for success. The shortage economy was exchanged for a greater quantity of basic foodstuffs and of consumer choice. In Poland, a Five-Year Plan (1956–60) emphasized consumer goods as a means to improve the standard of living. Eventually, after food riots swept aside Wladyslaw Gomulka in the late 1960s, Party Secretary Edward Gierek promoted Western-style consumerism that brought foreign loans, Italian Fiat cars, French buses, and Coca-Cola to Poland. In the mid-1960s, Czech authorities freed enterprises from binding Plan targets. Outside the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia loosened management of state enterprises, foreign trade and banking in a system that approached western practices more closely than any other East European experience.13 The new economic flexibility touched foreign trade as well. Czechoslovakia was already an original member of GATT. Poland joined in 1967 and Romania in 1971. More than 50 percent of foreign trade was realized outside Comecon during the 1980s. These reforms represented a radical departure from the centralized planning methods of the 1950s. Under capitalism state management tempered the whims of the market, while under socialism the market mechanism worked to correct the errors of the state. The doctrine of productivity The extraordinary growth of the golden age was built on Europe’s investments in capital formation. Private investment soared alongside public. Net investments in Europe were nearly twice as high in the 1950s and 1960s as they had been before the war. This was the essential accomplishment of the policy consensus that involved governments, private business, and trade unions in the West. In the East, where capital accumulation and investment rates were 50 percent higher, it was the result of militant state socialism. In the most basic sense, the rapid advance of Europe’s economy was connected with the availability of a labor supply created from a generally high rate of natural population growth, transfers from agriculture to industry and services, and from immigration. Although the availability of excess labor is not in itself a sufficient explanation for unprecedented growth, this perspective points to the enormous demographic and social shifts that characterized the golden age. “The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, “is the death of the peasant.”14 Indeed the scale of this shift of Europe’s rural population from the land into the cities, and into jobs in factories and services was unparalleled. Some 70 million Europeans worked in agriculture on the eve of the Second World War. Roughly one-third of western Europe’s working population was still employed in agriculture, and in countries such as France, Sweden, and Austria, it was as much as 35 and 45 percent. In agrarian countries such as Spain, Bulgaria and Rumania, the proportion was much higher with sometimes four out of five people working the land. Henri Cartier-Bresson captured this timeless rural world in his photographs of the late 1940s: peasant families dressed in unadorned black parading to the local village, the women in their ancestral coifs, their somber, withered faces staring into his camera.15

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It was a world about to disappear. By 1980, peasant numbers were slashed by more than half, with roughly 30 million people remaining in European agriculture. Even by 1965 only 17 percent of the Common Market population was engaged in agriculture. In France, for example, departures from rural to urban employment averaged 90,000 a year in the 1950s and 1960s with the result that by 1970 only 14 percent of the country’s working population was employed in farming. By the early 1980s, that figure was down to 8 percent while in Italy it had fallen to 13 percent. The rural hinterland had been left behind. The villages that had once been the focal point of traditional rustic life were left to those too old to move on or were re-imagined as bucolic vacation escapes. Many farmers lived in towns and cities farming parttime while their wives held down other jobs. In West Germany farm employment dropped by more than 1.2 million in the ten years between 1960 and 1970 and only 5 percent of the population was employed in agriculture by 1980.16 In the two decades after the war, 40 to 50 percent of the farming labor force left the countryside of Eastern Europe. By the early 1970s, the agricultural population had dropped to 18 percent in Czechoslovakia and 24 percent in Hungary. It was still as high as 50 percent in Romania and about 40 percent in Bulgaria and Poland. But there also, some portion of rural dwellers actually worked in urban industries. In most southern European countries agriculture was still the occupation of 40 percent or more of the population, but the trend toward industry and services was unmistakable. In Spain, for example, two out of three workers had been employed in agriculture in 1910. By the early 1950s the share of agriculture had fallen to less than 50 percent, and by 1966 it was less than 33 percent. In 1985 it was no more than 15 percent.17 The fall in rural labor took place within a radical restructuring of European agricultural land. The miniscule family farms that had traditionally dominated European agriculture were increasingly abandoned as economically unviable. In some Eastern European countries, cooperatively organized state farms were created through brutal collectivization. In Western Europe, the number of agricultural enterprises fell by over onethird after 1945 while the average size of farm holdings increased. Most western European governments introduced farm enlargement policies during the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the European Union’s efforts to support viable and profitable medium-sized farms. Tractors, chemical fertilizers and disease control, new plant and animal stocks, modern horticultural and animal husbandry techniques all reduced the amount of work and substantially increased output in both East and West. By the mid1960s, European farmland was among the most intensively cultivated in the world and labor productivity in Western Europe exceeded that in industry.18 The highest growth in agricultural labor productivity took place in West Germany.19 Only because agriculture achieved such substantial advances in productivity were so many workers able to leave the agricultural sector after the Second World War. These trends amounted to a second agricultural revolution that radically transformed the social and economic landscape. Meat, fruits, and vegetables that were considered luxuries before the war became available to everyone. Eastern Europe elevated its food consumption to the level of the West. The rural world of peasant farming had been replaced by highly productive agrobusinesses and factory farms relying on the mechanized cultivation of large acreage, skilled livestock rearing, and capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive operations. The capitalist penetration of agriculture produced the horn of plenty that forced the European Union into supporting vast subsidized “food mountains” and “wine rivers.” In the two

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decades after 1961, gains of more than 50 percent were recorded in wheat yields throughout the European Community.20 By 1991, the European Union had 300,000 tons of olive oil in storage, 600,000 tons of dairy produce, and 450,000 tons of beef. Agricultural policy was the Achilles’ heel of European integration. While European Union policies largely demanded further reductions in the farming sector to cut back over-employment and over-production, there was a counter-tendency to protect small farmers from competition through price controls and direct payments. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was fought out in the 1960s when the French farmers’ union staged violent demonstrations against a reduction in the price supports they saw as rightfully theirs. With the help of Charles de Gaulle, they paralyzed the Common Market in 1965 until it agreed to absorb French agricultural surpluses. The “long-wave hypothesis” based on the work of Kondratieff and Schumpeter21 is that national economies have developed in long growth cycles of fifty to sixty years’ duration linked with technological change. The 1930s and 1940s produced a backlog of consumer products and technologies (radar, the jet engine, and early devices in the telecommunications revolution such as the first digital computers in 1946 and the transistor in 1947) that provided a platform for postwar industrial expansion. The general destruction and scrapping of Europe’s old productive base during the war also ironically helped clear the way for new infrastructure and machinery. The Marshall Planners and propagandists for the “American way” launched an array of Productivity Councils and exchange programs for Europe’s emerging postwar leaders. The French, for example, sent a total of 450 missions to the United States. The AngloAmerican Council on Productivity from the United Kingdom recommended “more standardization, more research; the use of more effective managerial techniques, more mechanization and the better layout of existing factories.”22 It amounted to the extension of Fordism, a rationalized regime for mass production and mass consumption. It increased productivity through control over the labor force and over the intensity of work through standard procedures and large-scale mechanized production. Increased labor productivity accounted for 90 percent of the increase in total manufacturing output in industrial Western Europe.23 Mechanization and mass production were not new phenomena, nor for that matter were giant companies. But the unprecedented rate at which they grew between 1945 and 1973 justifies singling out the golden age as the maturation of Fordism into a full-fledged and distinctive system of accumulation.24 Because of relatively low-tech, uniform procedures, it was a system that could profit well from unskilled labor drawn from agriculture and immigration, for which demand remained high throughout the boom years. Hundreds of thousands of workers from southern and southeastern Europe migrated to Germany, France, and Switzerland to find better-paying jobs than those in their native countries. Some six million southern Italians moved to northern Italian industrial cities in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, foreign workers constituted between 5 to 7 percent of West European workforces including immigrants from the Maghreb and Turkey. Their willing acceptance of work conditions and reluctance to participate in strikes contributed to the general wage stability of the boom years. Germany was probably the major beneficiary with a large influx of refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe in the 1950s (numbering around 10 million) until the Berlin Wall went up, followed by guest workers from Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and Turkey in the 1960s. Industrial production in West Germany increased six-fold between

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1948 and 1964, while the level of unemployment fell from 8–9 percent in 1949–52 to less than 1 percent in 1961 and to an all-time low of 0.4 percent in 1965. By 1970, 1.8 million foreign workers were needed to keep the booming German economy going. The number of married women in the workforce also grew rapidly throughout Europe. Again using West Germany as an example, the proportion of married women in paid employment rose from 25 percent in 1950 to 42 percent in 1980. The proportion of those engaged in craft-based methods of production, who were often self-employed, and therefore not directly subject to Fordist methods of control in the workplace, fell from 34 percent of total employment in 1954 to 17 percent in 1973. Likewise, although an informal economy still existed in the building trades and other traditional industries, it was increasingly marginalized. There was a parallel tendency for average plant size to increase. Big business was an American managerial strategy. It exploited economies of scale, standardized products, and increased the proportion of modern equipment. It was also a response to market expansion and the investments necessary for research and development in science-based industries. These trends were reinforced at the beginning of the postwar period in France, Italy, and Britain by public ownership and nationalization, and later by extensive merger activity supported by the state. In Britain for example, the creation of the Industrial Reorganization Corporation as a “merger broker” in 1966 was meant to keep British manufacturing competitive. The formation of the European Economic Community and the challenge of American multinationals setting up factories in their home country made the French more responsive to international competitive pressures. During the 1960s, De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic supported large-scale “national champions” in the aeronautics, computer, and nuclear industries through state-ownership and subsidization, a policy that produced the Concorde aircraft (in collaboration with the British) as well as six nuclear reactors. The zeal for high-tech innovation caught the public’s imagination perhaps more than any other sector of economic life and quickly became associated with national prestige and glory. Volkswagen and Renault (now nationalized), the Italian Snia Viscosa firm that produced artificial fibers, and the Unilever conglomerate superseded the great giants of Europe’s traditional industrial economy, iron and steel enterprises like Krupp, Thyssen, and Skoda. This was partly a result of the postwar settlement that broke up large industrial concerns such as Krupp and Vereinigte Stahlwerke and left the way open for other industries. Among them, the automobile was most likely the emblematic symbol of Europe’s golden age. The age of the automobile had long arrived in North America, but European car ownership was still limited before the war. But by 1967 there was one car for every six people in Western Europe. Cars like the French Citroën DS and Renault 4C, the German Volkswagen Beetle, and the Italian Fiat, as well as the Vespa motor scooter, ruled supreme as the icons of affluence and consumerism. In 1970, West Germans owned nearly 14 million private cars; the French had nearly 13 million, and the British, 11.5 million. Italy made rapid progress in the 1960s and had over 10 million private cars by 1970.25 Even the main squares in Italy’s remote rural villages were dominated by parked Fiats. Germany emerged in the 1960s as the largest producer and the largest exporter of automobiles, with a yearly output of slightly less than 3 million cars by Volkswagenwerk and Daimler-Benz. Britain and France produced between 1.5 million and 2 million cars each. The European car industry also underwent a wave of mergers. Renault took over

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Peugeot, for example, while British Leyland merged with the British Motor Corporation. The years from the early 1950s through the early 1970s were also a period when energy and fuel were available and cheap. By 1966, oil supplied 51 percent of the Common Market countries’ energy demands. This spectacular rise became possible as the result of the discovery of vast oil resources, mainly in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s. Oil was also discovered in the North Sea. Western Europe’s share of world oil-refining capacity rose from 4 percent before the war to over 20 percent in 1960 with the erection of giant refineries in Rotterdam, Southampton, and Hamburg. Here again, large-scale companies dominated production: Shell and British Petroleum in the United Kingdom, the French Compagnie Française des Pétroles, and the Italian ENI. In 1967 the Royal Dutch-Shell oil company was the largest in Europe by sales with an annual income larger than Switzerland’s. The postwar growth of the European automobile industry was comparable only to the development of the chemical industry. Here the output tripled between 1950 and 1960 and led all other manufacturing sectors. Before the war, the industry had been centered in northeastern England with ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), founded in 1926 through the merger of the three largest British chemical firms, and in the Rhineland and the Ruhr with IG Farben. The latter was broken up after the war, but by the 1960s its successor firms—Farbenfabriken Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF—were each nearly as large as IG Farben had been in the 1930s. Hoechst had factories in thirty-five countries. Bayer produced no fewer than 12,000 different items, most of which had not been known before the war. Britain was being overtaken by Germany, while the French and Italian chemical industries developed at an even faster rate. In engineering, the fastest-developing branch all over Europe was the electrical industry, and more particularly electronics. Big American firms like IBM took an immediate lead in the European computer market, but European producers such as Italian Olivetti and the French Machines Bull and ThomsonBrandt experienced phenomenal growth. The biggest European electrical companies were, as before the war, German, British and Dutch (Siemens, English Electric, and Philips). However, their factories and subsidiaries were spread throughout Western Europe by the 1960s. The extraordinary demand for consumer durables such as washing machines and refrigerators, for radios, record players, and eventually television sets and advanced home electronics opened up production of a range and turnover of new products. Refrigerator ownership skyrocketed in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s allowing Italian firms such as Zanussi to compete against big multinationals like Hoover and Philips. The intertwining of economic and aesthetic strategies increasingly defined the sophisticated consumer market. Manufacturers such as Olivetti and Cassinini in Italy, Hille in Britain, Bang & Olufsen in Denmark, and Braun in Germany established their identities through innovative, well-designed products identified with modern lifestyles. Robin Day’s polypropylene stackingchair, manufactured by Hille in 1963, was the first of its kind to utilize this new material. In all these countries there was a tendency toward Fordist production and marketing techniques, partly as a result of stiff competition, partly to meet the need to devote a larger share of capital to product research, and always to increase productivity. With over five hundred separate companies in sixty countries and a cornucopia of everchanging product lines, the British-Dutch Unilever conglomerate was a dynamic case in point. Unilever’s fortunes were rooted in Europe’s burgeoning

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consumer market for everything from butter to soap and frozen food. In Anthony Sampson’s humorous depiction: A properly Unilever-minded English bachelor could begin his day shaving with an Erasmic shaving stick or Erasmic shaving cream, washing with Lux toilet soap, cleaning his teeth with Pepsodent, cooking with Wall’s sausages in Spry fat, buying Birds Eye Frozen food at a MacFisheries supermarket, opening a tin of Batchelor s peas, washing up with Squeezy, and washing his shirt with Omo.26 The dynamics of Fordism and state-managed capitalism were encoded in a new spatial mapping that altered the traditional core—periphery pattern of industrial geography. The old industrial heartland of Europe, the Paris-Rotterdam-Hamburg-Ruhr circle, became more differentiated with areas of economic distress and high unemployment as old industries and energy sources died away. A “Ruhr crisis” developed in the 1960s as ancient coal pits closed down. As manufacturing and services became more footloose, environmentally attractive regions that had once been Europe’s deprived periphery were in high demand. In the 1950s and 1960s new areas such as the Maas River, where Shell and ICI established enormous plants, southern France and north-central Italy signaled the economic convergence that was a unique feature of the boom years. Nuclear plants sprouted across the French and German countryside. The result was a new social and economic dialectic. Mass production and mass consumption created a more heterogeneous and uneven economic landscape across Europe, in which pockets of prosperity and poverty were interspersed everywhere. Places like Barcelona, Marseilles, Florence and Bologna became peripheral “cores” while core regions in Belgium and northern France became “peripheries.” At the same time modernization created a more homogenized landscape that obliterated differences. Economic development depended upon state planning and the location of large-scale capitalist enterprises. Privileged work in mass production and access to the joys of mass consumption became the keys to success and social mobility. Social scientists argued that the embourgeoisement of the worker was already an established fact. Quality of life became standardized. The sweet whiff of prosperity seeped from department store windows, sleek new supermarkets and car showrooms. The modern business and residential districts constructed across Europe created identical urban worlds. Eastern Europe experienced much the same kind of structural transformation, and the same kind of vocabulary is used to describe it. Derek Aldcroft concludes that “the socialist countries of this area have achieved little short of a miracle in the generation or so since 1945.”27 Backward agrarian economies were turned into relatively modern, industrial complexes. There was a significant increase in the standard of living, although it certainly remained below that of the West. Employment grew at almost double the rate of Western Europe. The labor shortages were such that women were recruited into industry and formed a greater proportion of the labor force than in most Western European countries. Real wages improved substantially. New engineering, automobile, and chemical industries emerged. In general, the consumer did not reap the full benefits of this economic development. However, per capita personal consumption increased by 40–50 percent in the 1960s and by another 20–50 percent in the 1970s.28 The rapid

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growth of personal consumption in countries such as Bulgaria and Romania evinced the catching-up and convergence of economic trends that marked the golden age. Yet despite the affinities between the mixed economies in both Eastern and Western Europe that worked these “miracles,” the East eventually fell behind in the process of modernization. Socialist economic policy remained wedded to its reconstruction strategy in which heavy industry loomed large. How much of this was due to the specificities of state socialism, to peripheral economies, or to the idiosyncratic nature of Eastern Europe is under debate. But by the 1970s, the rigid effort to fight economic backwardness and “catch up” eventually became backward itself. Without the replacement of antiquated plants and the addition of state-of-the-art equipment and know-how, it was bound to run out of steam. Most production was heavily subsidized and consumed domestically. There were few commodities from Eastern Europe that could withstand the test of quality and pricing on the world market. Nor did the region follow the technological leaps into electronics and automation made by the West in the 1970s. Although much of Europe worried over closing the technology gap with the Americans, the problem was relentless in the East. Importing technology and consumer goods helped saddle the region with extraordinary borrowing from Western banks that reached upwards of $70 billion by the late 1970s. It was a quick-fix solution that ended abruptly with the debt crisis of the early 1980s. Only East Germany and Czechoslovakia managed to keep pace with economic innovations— but not for long. The “catching-up process” was replaced by a growing gap between East and West. Industrial plants became obsolete. Natural resources and energy were wasted. Whole industrial regions teetered on environmental disaster. The deficiencies in consumer durables and services mushroomed into a glaring crisis. In Slavenka Drakulic’s recollections of Romania in Café Europa, the lack of everything from milk to toilet paper represented an acutely dysfunctional communist system.29 The black market held an ever firmer grip in the 1970s and 1980s as a shortage economy once again became the norm for millions. The scene was set for the collapse of state socialism. After the golden age The end of the golden age is conventionally dated as 1973, the year of the first oil shock. Eventually the rise in OPEC oil prices in 1973–74 and then again in 1979–80 would together take the price of oil from $2 dollars to over $35 dollars a barrel. The prices of all commodities soared. Production fell off. The slowdown affected market and socialist economies alike. Yet it was not so much that productivity or trade suddenly plummeted. What occurred, rather, was a breakdown in the unique combination of factors that had supported a period of unprecedented economic expansion. The early 1970s saw a major departure from the main trends of the two previous decades, heralded by the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the end of the consensus on American leadership. The influence of the American military—industrial complex (especially during the Vietnam War) and the almighty dollar were perceived increasingly as a threat to European independence and economic development. International capital flows put pressure on national exchange rates and the dollar lost international confidence. High inflation and slow economic growth combined in a new crisis of “stagflation.” Increasingly, the United States and Europe would face each other as economic competitors in trade, technology,

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and investments. By the 1980s it was possible to talk about the de-industrialization of Europe. Between 1973 and 1981 over one million industrial jobs were lost in Britain, and over 600,000 in both France and West Germany. The heyday of Fordism was over. In 1982 growth dropped to nothing in West Germany. The bountiful years of full employment suddenly came to a halt. Unemployment rates nearly tripled in the 1980s relative to the 1960s. Even during a relatively prosperous year such as 1989, a harrowing 16 percent of the working population of Italy and Spain was unemployed, while unemployment in France chronically hovered at between 10–12 percent, in West Germany 8 percent, and in Britain 8–9 percent (see Table 3.2). The unemployment crisis was most difficult for young people, and in economically declining regions such as the north of England, the Ruhr, and the old heavy industry locations in northern France and Belgium. That unemployment was a social and political as much as an economic evil was manifest, for example, in the growth of right-wing groups that attacked foreign workers perceived to be stealing jobs. The Keynesian interventionist policies that had been so successful during the golden age were abandoned as economically reactionary. The structural crisis was intensified by new technologies and the information revolution that inaugurated an entirely new stage in the world economy. Flexible networks of information, mobile capital, and migratory labor distinguished globalization. The comparative advantages of high-wage countries Table 3.2 Level of unemployment (percentage of labor force) in Western Europe 1930–73 Belgium

1974–83 3.0

1984–93 8.2

1994–98 8.8

9.7

Finland

1.7

4.7

6.9

14.2

France

2.0

5.7

10.0

12.1

Germany

2.5

4.1

6.2

9–0

Italy

5.5

7.2

9.3

11.9

Netherlands

2.2

7.3

7.3

5.9

Norway

1.9

2.1

4.1

4.6

Sweden

1.8

2.3

3.4

9.2

United Kingdom

2.8

7.0

9.7

8.0

Ireland

n.a.

8.8

15.6

11.2

Spain

2.9

9.1

19–4

21.8

Average

2.6

6.0

9.2

10.7

Source: Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris, OECD, 2001, p. 34.

under Fordism were lost as economic activity was transferred to low-cost peripheral regions of the globe. Many of Europe’s premier companies, such as Philips and Siemens, moved their production facilities to Asia and Latin America in search of cheap labor. The

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European invasion by American corporations and products from IBM computers to Colgate toothpaste intensified the fight for consumers and economic anxieties. “Eurosclerosis” was the diagnosis for low productivity and the lack of European competitiveness under conditions of globalization and the perceived superiority of the freewheeling American economy. While the French Minitel was an early version of electronic communication, it failed to ignite into the revolutionary Internet web systems launched instead by American dot.com start-ups. West Germany also was slow to discover microprocessors and telecommunications. In response, country after country switched to supply-side economics, deregulation and privatization to permit the operation of market forces. Innovation, flexibility, efficiency were the perceived strategies for transforming the economy. The election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979 committed Britain to a reinvigoration of free-market economics with a drastic scale-back in government intervention and a wave of privatizations. It began with British Airways and eventually encompassed British Telecom, British Gas, the electricity supply industry as well as British Steel and British Rail. Most other West European states refrained from the radical divestiture of the Thatcher Experiment, but the switch from a managed economy to an entrepreneurial economy meant deregulation, restructuring, and downsizing. Business executives were rewarded with extraordinary salaries and stock options for cutting labor forces and increasing productivity. The social contract with labor was essentially repudiated as unemployment became an accepted consequence of economic reform. Increasing numbers of informalized laborers were without access to the minimum wage and social benefits. At the same time the revolution in services led to the rise of a “post-industrial society.” By the early 1980s, services accounted for 50 percent or more of employment in all the major economies of Western Europe and more than 60 percent of GDP. Over 18 million new service jobs were created in the 1990s, many of them in the public sector. Labor was forced to adapt to a new global labor market, quick changes in supply and demand, and the necessity for a new kind of flexibility in the workplace. While initially Europe’s slow growth and high unemployment seemed to suggest infirmity, by the late 1990s the Western nations had successfully coped with restructuring and entered a period of new prosperity. Sales of personal computers rose by more than 20 percent in 1998 and grew even faster by 2000, making Europeans the population with the highest rates of computer purchases in the world. The number of European online companies exploded in 2000–01. Finland’s Nokia transformed itself from a toilet tissue and electric cable manufacturer to become a world leader in mobile telephones. Europe also led the world in the production of smart cards (credit cards with computer chips).30 The adoption of Anglo-Saxon business methods and the increased flow of financing from venture capitalists opened prospects for would-be entrepreneurs. The value of European mergers and acquisitions surpassed the United States for the first time in 2000. British Petroleum swooped down on two American oil companies to rival Exxon in size. The German media group Bertelsmann took control of American publisher Random House while, before it backtracked, French media titan Vivendi Universal gobbled up everything from Canal Plus and Britain’s BSkyB to the Canadian Seagram Company and Hollywood’s Universal Studios. The European Union nations created 1.7 million jobs in 1998 alone. Cities such as Dublin and Rotterdam flourished in the New Economy, with newly located multinational firms generating employment, income and new construction.

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But the heady optimism of the century’s end was just as quickly dashed by greater uncertainty about the future. At the end of 2000, the booming American economy skidded towards recession bringing the mania for dot.com companies and the latest electronic wizardry down with it. It was uncertain how the economic slowdown in the United States at the same time as the inauguration of a common Euro currency would impact upon Europe. Globalization and international competition have provoked a host of new challenges, not least of which was the changing balance of forces controlling Europe’s economic agenda. EU member states fought to control their future within the context of economic and monetary union and the appearance of the Euro. Technocratic leadership in Brussels came under increasing fire for offering rule by bureaucracy, the gospel of productivity and profit, and a crass materialism as the replacement for European democratic culture. Yet supranational institutions such as the European Union offered perhaps the most effective scale on which to confront the effects of globalization and the New Economy. GATT and the G-8 industrial leaders31 offered alternative supranational forums for power politics and economic strategizing. The G-8 in particular was increasingly perceived as a self-exclusive club of the rich and powerful offering free trade as a magic potion for all ills. Their meetings became a lightning rod for the oppositional forces lined up against the tyranny of global capitalism. After the July 2001 Genoa conference ended in a deadly confrontation with protesters, the G-8 resolved to protect themselves from the dangers of democratic participation by scheduling their gatherings in increasing isolation. The threats were made crystal clear by the terrorist attack of September 2001 on New York’s World Trade Center—long held as a nerve center of moneyed interests. The range of problems in the search for global federalism, in which markets and economic policy are truly international, remained formidable. Further reading Among the most important surveys of European economic development since 1945 are N.Crafts and G.Toniolo (eds), Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996;, G. Ambrosius and W.H. Hubbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989; S.A.Marglin and J.Schor (eds), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. To this should be added A.Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-Run Comparative Vision, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, as well as P.Armstrong, A.Glyn and J.Harrison, Capitalism Since World War II, Cambridge MA, Basil Blackwell, 1991, and A.Boltho (ed.), The European Economy: Growth and Crisis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. F.Crouzet, A History of the European Economy, 1000–2000, Charlottesville, VA., University of Virginia Press, 2001, D.H.Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914–2000, London, Routledge, 2000, and D.H.Aldcroft and A.Sutcliff (eds), Europe in the International Economy 1500 to 2000, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1999, explore economic development from a longer point of view, while A.Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris, OECD, 2001, provides a wealth of statistical evidence. Both B. J.Foley, European Economies Since the Second World War,

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New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, and S.Lieberman, The Growth of European Mixed Economies 1945–1970, New York, John Wiley, 1977, provide overviews of individual countries. The classic account of the boom is M.Postan, An Economic History of Western Europe, 1945–1964, London, Methuen, 1967. On the question of economic integration, see L.Tsoukalis, The New European Economy Revisited, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. On the dynamics of Fordism, D.Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989, remains the classic text. Y.Cassis, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, is also useful. The impact of globalization is taken up in C.F.Bergsten and C.R.Henning, Global Economic Leadership and the Group of Seven, Washington, DC, Institute for International Economics, 1996, while M. Castells looks at globalization and the technology revolution in The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, and The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997–1998. As to the role of nation-states and supranational institutions in globalization, see R. Boyer and D. Drache (eds), States Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, London, Routledge, 1996, as well as S. Sassen’s Losing Control?, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992. The evolution of state economic management is examined by D. McEachern, The Expanding State: Class and Economy in Europe Since 1945, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1990, and P.Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951, London, Jonathan Cape, 1992, surveys reconstruction and the welfare state. A.Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994, offers a useful analysis. The American influence in Europe is discussed in A.Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science, Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 1987, and in J.Harper, American Influence and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, as well as in I.Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. V.Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry, New York, Berg, 1986, takes up the impact of American business methods, while G.Sinn and H.-W.Sinn, Jumpstart: The Economic Unification of Germany, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992, is the classic study of German unification.. On Eastern Europe, D.H.Aldcroft and S.Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe Since 1918, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, and I.T.Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, are essential. See also A.Teichova (ed.), Central Europe in the Twentieth Century: An Economic History Perspective, Brookfield, VT, Ashgate, 1997, and M.C.Kaser and E.A.Radice (eds), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975, vol. 3, Institutional Change within a Planmd Economy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Steven Morewood, Anthony Sutcliffe, Derek Aldcroft, and the members of the New York Comparative Europe Seminar for their helpful reviews of this chapter. Notes 1 On measures of long-range economic performance, see G. Ambrosius and W.H.Hubbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989, as well as A.Maddison “Economic Policy and Performance in Europe 1913–1970,” in Carlo M.Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, London, Collins, 1976, and Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo, “Postwar Growth: An Overview,” in N.Crafts and G.Toniolo (eds), Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2 For annual rates of growth of Real National Product, see Ambrosius and Hubbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe, p. 144 and D.H.Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914–1970, London, Croom Helm, 1978, p. 208. 3 Crafts and Toniolo, Economic Growth in Europe, pp. 5–7. 4 Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914–1970, pp. 161–2. 5 W.Laqueur, Europe in Our Time: A History 1945–1992, New York, Viking, 1992, p. 168. 6 A. Warde, Consensus and Beyond, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982, p. 26. 7 W.H.Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, London, G.Allen, 1944, pp. 28–30. 8 S.A.Marglin and J.B.Schor (eds), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 8. 9 Crafts and Toniolo, Economic Growth in Europe, p. 28. 10 D.McEachern, The Expanding State. Class and Economy in Europe Since 1945, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1990, pp. 77–8. 11 C.Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 146–9. 12 D.Aldcroft and S.Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe Since 1918, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, p. 125. 13 Ibid. pp. 113–18 and I.T.Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 14 E.Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York, Pantheon, 1994, p. 289. 15 H.Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans, New York, Bullfinch Press, 1998. 16 D.Coates (ed.), Economic and Industrial Performance in Europe, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, pp. 141–3. 17 Laqueur, Europe in Our Time, p. 180. 18 M.Postan, An Economic History of Western Europe, 1945–1964, London, Methuen, 1967, p. 177. 19 United Nations, Economic Commission for Europe, Some Factors in Economic Growth in Europe during the 1950s, Geneva, United Nations, 1964, p. 28. 20 A.Williams, The Western European Economy: A Geography of Post-War Development, London, Hutchinson, 1987, pp. 117–18. 21 N.D.Kondratieff, “The Long Waves in Economic Life,” Review of Economic Statistics 17 (1935), pp. 105–15 and J.A.Schumpeter, Business Cycles, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1939.

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22 N.H.Leyland, “Productivity,” in G.D.N.Worswick and R H.Ady, The British Economy 1945–1950, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1952. 23 Secretariat of the Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe in 1971, Part I, New York, United Nations, 1972, p. 45. 24 D.Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 129. 25 B.Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970, New York, Macmillan, 1978. 26 A.Sampson, Anatomy of Europe, New York, Harper & Row, 1968, p. 105. 27 Aldcroft, The European Economy, p. 219. 28 On the East European growth record, see I.T.Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 217, and Aldcroft and Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe, pp. 125–7. 29 S.Drakulic, Café Europa: Life After Communism, New York, W.W.Norton, 1996, p. 35. 30 On European high technology, see B.Barnard, “Business and Technologies of the Future,” in R.Guttman (ed.), Europe in the New Century, London, Lynn Rienner, 2001, pp. 168–70. 31 Russia became an official participant in the annual Summit of leading industrial nations in 1997, bringing their number to eight: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Russia.

4 Social class and social change in postwar Europe Don Kalb Life in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was marked by what Göran Therborn has called the “high noon of industrial society.”1 This was so both in the East and in the West of the continent. More precisely, this zenith lasted in the West until the 1970s and in the East until 1989. The half-century between 1945 and 2000 thus comprised two distinct and at the same time connected era’s. The first was what is commonly referred to as the postwar period, featuring a continuous expansion of largescale industrialization and urbanization, an age in which wage-earner families became almost a form of fixed capital after having gained rights to education, housing, pensions, illness benefits, and social security.2 The second, beginning in the 1970s and as yet unfinished, saw the partial transformation of the West European welfare state into what Philip Cerny has called a “competition state,”3 anchored in a technocratic European Union and focused less on rights than on budgets and competitiveness. This transformation was paralleled in the East by the transition, after 1989, from paternalistic socialist to dependent capitalist states that seek economic growth by inserting themselves in the economic, political and cultural networks of the West. This shift led to an unevenly deindustrialized, service-intensive, socially segmented, and ethnically divided Europe with increasing disparities in income, rights, and power. This is especially the case in the East—far more dramatically so than in the West. This chapter will focus on a number of key issues to understanding these transformations. How do we explain the social make-up of the postwar period in Europe? How do we account for the shift to new relationships after the 1970s? And what are the precise characteristics of the postindustrial period in European societies? The very first May Day celebrations of the twenty-first century in Europe underlined the distance European citizens had traveled in crossing the threshold to the new millennium. The distance was about politics, political alliances, and political culture. In Berlin, large-scale clashes were reported between the xenophobic Right on one side and the multicultural Left on the other. In other places, such as Antwerp, Vienna, and Paris, the Far Right duplicated Hitler’s and Mussolini’s appropriation of a classic symbol of the Left, and staged May Day parades attracting thousands of people in each city in order to demonstrate support for native citizens.4 At the same time, in places such as Hamburg, Zürich and London, anti-capitalist demonstrators, in an act not very different from recent protests against the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund in Seattle (November 1999) and Washington (May 2000), clashed with the police and smashed symbols of globalism and Americanism such as McDonald’s outlets. Quite a few social democratic “First of May”

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celebrations certainly proceeded peacefully, in traditional strongholds such as Bologna and Vienna, for example. But they did not arouse any interest in the international press (except the one in Moscow, which was reported to be small). Nor could they divert attention away from the fact that for the first time since the 1930s the heritage of May Day in Europe was contested once again. May Day, as a celebration of the rights of labor, was one of the very few public events shared by all of Europe after 1945. The other public celebrations common to European Union countries were the traditional Christian holidays and the national commemorations of war, which both divided as much as united the continent. May Day events were to some extent a European peculiarity. They were never institutionalized over the longer term in the United States, Latin America, or East Asia (except for China). Indeed, they were closely associated with the centrality of the welfare state on the European continent in the postwar period. Even when they did not attract large crowds everywhere, certainly not after 1980, and obviously had a different meaning in the East compared to the West, their resilience over decades symbolized the continued vitality of the political coalitions undergirding the welfare state. Public surveys have consistently registered a strong and steady attachment to the welfare state everywhere in Europe, both in East and West.5 Thus, while globalized technocratic and corporate elites have sought to scale down the social rights of European citizens for two decades now, the efforts to capture May Day for the Far Right, on the one hand, and for anarcho-protest against globalization and Americanization, on the other, provide a sense of the contradictory forces contending for Europe’s social definition in the new millennium. Modernity in one country What strongly distinguished the postwar period in Europe from the first half of the twentieth century were two basic things. First, the Holocaust and then the retribution against the Germans after the war in Central Europe created an ethnically much more homogeneous space in the geographic heart of the continent. Together with the painful memory of the war, which persuaded people and parties in Europe to strive for cooperation and solidarity rather than for class and ethnic conflict, the experience of the Holocaust and retribution in themselves made ethnic or religious identity politics seem much less meaningful. Second, a stable international regime was created that divided Europe in two, encouraged the destruction of Western Europe’s colonial empires, and proceeded to sponsor national economic growth and modernization in both halves of the continent. Indeed, the rhetoric of the Cold War could not hide the fact that the socioeconomic objectives of the two blocs were ultimately not that dissimilar. Next to military prowess, their rivalry was explicitly about economic growth, modernization, and prosperity. Both blocs organized an international division of labor within which national economies could profitably insert themselves and acquire a piece of the bulging material pie. This post-imperial (as far as the West was concerned) and post-national framework for territorial development helped to transcend the enmity, economic stagnation and political stalemate of the pre-war period and produced two long decades of historically unique rates of economic growth. It strongly facilitated the ensuing “high noon of industrial

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society” in Europe by sponsoring the creation of fixed capital on an unprecedented scale. European governments made a concerted effort via public policy to translate expanding tax revenues and budget surpluses into large-scale urbanization and infrastructure programs, which, in their turn, secured the preconditions necessary for the next rounds of investment. Cars need roads, industries and households need electricity, and families need homes. And if corporations wanted to sell consumer products such as television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators, there needed to be domestic spaces for them to function in. Above all, consumer industries needed customers with adequate spending power. This was not just about economics. This was about creating a whole new material social and cultural world, a world that European capitalism had as yet failed to construct. Using an eclectic assortment of models drawn from municipal socialism in the 1920s on urban and housing reform as well as from fascism and Catholicism on industrial coordination policies, postwar Keynesian states felt strong enough to take on that Promethean task. Sons and daughters of peasants, who in many parts of Europe had been locked into a stagnating agricultural sector or in crisis-ridden provincial industries, were finally able to establish themselves as new urban households. Large corporations modeled on the American example (though with clear regional and national distinctions) poured industrial investments into newly developed urban spaces on the peripheries of Europe’s capitals or in the provinces. They tapped into remaining labor reserves and geared them to the products and technologies of the “second” industrial revolution, such as electronics, cars, and chemicals, as well as to engineering, the machine industry, and light manufacturing. It allowed European countries to climb the ladder of added value, creating and spreading a prosperity that humanity had, until then, only witnessed for a short while during the twenties in the United States. This, indeed, was the first time in European history that investments into productive infrastructure were so systematically paired and coordinated by national governments. The Netherlands and France, for example, created powerful central planning agencies that projected rounds of public investment for years to come. Other countries as well, especially those faced with the task of reconstructing a devastated national heritage, developed more robust central policy capabilities than had ever been known before. Except for its respect for private capital accumulation (but not particularly for private property rights) and markets (but not antithetical to state power), the ensuing system was not entirely unlike the one imposed on Eastern Europe. National regimes of growth and investment coordination were ideal for catch-up modernization, both in the backward East and the more advanced West. Private industrial corporations in the West were happy to cooperate with developmental welfare states that enjoyed high prestige, just as they had previously joined forces with colonial administrators or war planners. In the process, private business built up planning techniques and strategies in finance, technology, products and personnel that had been rare before the war. They operated in tandem with states that were persuaded of the necessity for Keynesian deficit spending when recession threatened. This created a unique situation in Europe in which the business cycle was actually reduced to a purely economic phenomenon. After the mid-1950s, the business cycle lost its stranglehold on worker households. This was a historic breakthrough that changed popular culture and expectations in crucial ways. Since the advent of industrial capitalism, wage-dependent households had learned to live with spells of insecurity, recurrent cycles of debt, and with periodic hunger. Postwar democratic capitalism put an

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end to that. It was only the first, though probably the most fundamental, of a series of “cultural” breakthroughs that were about to take place. Uniquely industrial Europe The outcome after two or three decades of investment rounds was nothing less than the wholesale transformation of European populations from peasants into urban workers, a period variously remembered in European nations as “the golden years,” les trente glorieuses or das Wirtschaftswunder. On the eve of the Second World War, Europe as a whole was still largely rural. Agriculture continued to be the single largest sector of employment on the continent. The 1950s and 1960s saw the final transformation of the continent’s rural classes into urban workers. Certainly there was an East—West divide, and a North—South one as well. Britain had already been urbanized and industrialized by 1900, as had Belgium. In the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden less than a third of employment by the 1930s was in agriculture. But the employment structures of all other countries were either still strongly agrarian (40 percent or more in Austria, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia) or predominantly agrarian, as in the countries in the south and east (Spain, Poland, Finland, and above all the Balkans and the Soviet Union where more than 80 percent of people worked the land).6 These figures do not account for seasonal work, nor workers tied to declining and peripheral industries or dying trades, nor youth unemployment. All countries in the interwar years had substantial populations assigned to these fates. Although this was truer for the periphery of Europe than for its developed centers, even advanced regions still featured notorious pockets of backwardness within their confines or close by. The city and the countryside were still very different worlds before the Second World War. And while some countries had their dynamic growth poles typically organized around a major expanding industry, such as Coventry, Eindhoven, Gothenburg, Stuttgart, Clermont Ferrand, Lodz, Brno, or Turin, for many people it remained all but impossible to get the education, the housing, and social connections necessary to move to such places and share in modern prosperity. It makes sense, therefore, to say that Europe as a world region only became fully urban and industrial under the favorable conditions of the international Cold War regime. In the 1990s only Albania was still largely rural, while Poland, Romania, and the countries of the former Yugoslavia continued to have around 25 percent of their working populations on the land (however, they were not neces-sarily engaged in agriculture as their primary source of income). The European peasantry had disappeared. Europe became not just industrial in these years—it became uniquely industrial.7 Outside Europe only Taiwan had an occupational structure in which industry and transport actually dominated the non-agrarian labor force. That was the case for a whole series of European countries. A majority of European nations also traveled the full road from an agrarian to an industrial, and then to a service-based economy. Only the coastal nations of Norway, the Netherlands, and Greece skipped a dominant industrial phase in their economic evolution. The weight of industrialism as an historical experience in Europe was therefore unique among the developed nations in the world. In the postwar period this experience spread into southern and eastern Europe as well. Industrial West

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Germany hit its peak year in 1970, with almost half its civilian employment in industrialized jobs. In the early 1970s, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had even slightly higher numbers. Industrial laggards like Poland, Portugal, Bulgaria, and Romania continued to expand their secondary sectors until the later 1970s and early 1980s, while earlier industrializers such as Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and Britain, as well as the Netherlands and Norway, were already shedding manufacturing jobs in absolute numbers and heading towards postindustrialism. Welfare states and public goods The peculiar twist in this moment of “high modernity” and industrialism in postwar Europe was that it took place within a previously established framework of contentious class relations and public policy. This was a particular pattern of both conflict and cooperation between parties and interests that had emerged during Europe’s long and revolutionary transition toward urban industrial capitalism. Under the conditions of postwar growth and industrialization the outcome was the modern European welfare state. It was produced by at least four forces: (1) earlier local experiences with welfare action and public policy; (2) the broad postwar support for solidarity and for a society less divided by class; (3) the continued economic growth and budget surpluses between the later 1940s and the early 1970s; and last but not least; (4) the gradual tipping of the balance between workers, employers, and the state in the postwar period in favor of labor. Charles Tilly has argued that the most urbanized region in Europe—that is the band stretching from the English midlands, through the low countries, the Ruhr and the Rhenish cities via the Alps to the Northern Italian city belt—was historically characterized by a strong, dense web of contract and bargaining relationships between workers, capitalists, and urban elites.8 Each interest learned to mobilize and articulate claims vis-à-vis the others, claims that often grew into enforceable rights a generation later. These socially and economically differentiated urban spaces, therefore, had given rise to a more consensual and civic form of rule, indeed to “public rule” and “civil society,” rather than to territories shaped by overwhelming state coercion or by the uncontested deployment of capital. It was a form of governance based on the logic of what the Anglo-German sociologist Norbert Elias had called “the process of civilization,”9 the “lengthening of chains of interdependency,” and the growing public awareness of such interdependencies. This classical sociological insight has recently gained popularity among political economists under the somewhat narrower label of the “Rhenish model of capitalism” (as against AngloSaxon “pure” capitalism).10 Europe’s history of modernization had recurrently spilled into virtual or actual civil war. Workers were often radicalized in times of emergency, above all when international crises destroyed the legitimacy of ruling elites as in the turmoil of 1848, 1871, and 1917– 21. State apparatuses regularly turned against mobilized citizens in a final effort to shift the balance of class forces in favor of established interests. The unsuccessful urban revolutions in Central Europe directly after the First World War (Munich, Budapest, and also in the Ruhr) were a good example of the former, while the disastrous rise of fascism in central and southern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was just one uniquely criminal

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case of the latter. However, the relevance of the idea of the Rhenish model lies in the fact that it shifts attention to another European history, a history that was not so much located in the centers of imperial power or machinery of state, but more in the socially differentiated, spatially compact, and economically complex arena of its urban economies and societies. European urban regions were often far more differentiated, and much more compact and complex than their counterparts in Asia or the Americas. This peculiarity of pre-fascist Europe was destined to regain salience during the long postwar boom. Tilly’s argument can well be extended to Europe at large as compared to the new postwar superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, which were continent-wide techno-military complexes rather than densely interwoven urban regions.11 The long internal history of forging compromises between the key groups involved in creating modernity in Europe had produced a more equal landscape of social mobilization, class cooperation for the public good, and a resultant plethora of public policy networks, than in any other part of the world. Europe featured more horizontal power relationships between parties and classes than either the United States, where big capital normally held sway over everything else, or the Soviet Union, where coercion by the Leninist communist state crushed all other interests. Postwar Eastern Europe was different, of course. But even here, historical legacies were too complex to be easily repressed and they regularly resurfaced in protest movements (Berlin 1953; Poznan 1956; Budapest 1956; Prague 1968; Gdansk 1970; Poland 1980–81; Poland 1988–89). These movements helped to produce different national paths of development within the Warsaw Pact countries, such as the failure to collectivize agriculture in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia in the 1950s. The Hungarian and Yugoslav “market socialisms” starting in the 1960s as well as the Yugoslav (1960s) and Polish (1980s) experiments with workers’ selfmanagement also make this clear. Welfare states in postwar Europe were not all of a kind, nor did they have fully identical juridical roots and organizational forms. All European societies before fascism had enjoyed an abundance of community-based arrangements to alleviate the plight of the orphaned, the elderly, the poor, the ill, the disabled, and the unemployed, as well as for advancing culture, sociability and leisure, and for pursuing local public interests such as education, housing, public utilities, public health, and public transport.12 Churches, local political parties, or elite philanthropies sponsored such arrangements. This was the case in Germany from the 1880s, for example, as part of the Bismarckian state’s struggle against socialism. After the First World War, newly democratic or more fully democratized national governments began to support some of these local provisions, most often vocational training, pensions, unemployment benefits, liability for work accidents, and social housing. Labour in Britain, fascism in central and southern Europe, as well as social democracy in Scandinavia and France turned parts of these social initiatives into national programs. But it was only in the postwar period that such schemes acquired systematic and stable funding from tax revenues and social insurance contributions and were gradually turned into legal entitlements connected to citizenship. These policies were variously sponsored by Social Democrats and social Christians, but were not in principle opposed by employers’ organizations or conservatives. As a result, by 1980 almost everyone in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe as well, was somehow protected by illness, disability, old age and unemployment insurance. Around the same time, the total monetary transfers involved in welfare expanded from only 1 or 2 percent

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in most countries in 1930 (with the exception of Germany with nearly 8 percent and Britain with 4 percent) to anywhere between 10 percent in Britain and over 20 percent in the Netherlands and Sweden. The public sector as a whole had grown to some 50 percent of GDP in most European countries, with education, welfare, and health being by far the biggest expenditures.13 European welfare states naturally reflected various social situations as well as different national histories and cultures. Some, those that were later called the corporatist states of continental Europe (such as Germany, Austria, France, Italy), were built on prior conservative social policies aimed at cementing occupational status and instilling loyalty to the state and its core employers. Corporatist social policy maintained the status of middle classes and professionals in relation to workers, discriminated against women in the labor market, tended to underwrite the patriarchal family, and was strongly inclined to subsidize high culture. Liberal welfare states gave more play to market forces and offered less comprehensive social protection. Britain, for example, did so in the form of nonoccupational universal citizenship rights as proposed by the influential Beveridge Report prepared during the Second World War. Social democratic states, such as Norway, Denmark or Sweden, in contrast, actively helped to organize family life and labor markets, drew large groups of women into education and the labor force, and provided inclusive services for everyone, as well as extensive protection against market fluctuations. Such varied “regimes” combined in complex ways with tax systems, inheritance and property laws, education, family structure, class, gender, and generational relationships to produce distinctive national civic cultures. The comparatively high participation of women in the paid labor force in some corporatist countries such as Belgium and Austria, for example, was closely tied to the importance of home ownership and family property in these nations. It was also a function of the proverbial attachment of Belgians and Austrians to their place of birth and to their continued family conservatism, which cherishes extended family bonds. On the other hand, the low participation of Dutch women in the workforce up to the 1990s was not only a product of Catholic corporatist policy, as is often implied, but perhaps even more of the large social housing sector in that country (at its peak over 50 percent of the entire housing stock). This guaranteed easy access (after 1970) and low prices combined with good standards for single-family units, thus reducing the need for a second income for households. It was also related to the tax structure, which allowed unlimited deduction of interest paid on housing mortgages, keeping home ownership open to the middle classes. This worked until the early 1990s, when rapid price increases (over 300 percent in a decade) began to heavily favor insiders in the housing market (those over fifty years of age) over newcomers. It in fact turned the tax advantages into a machine for luxury consumption by the elderly. But until that happened, housing in the Netherlands was good and cheap, and second incomes were conceived as just “an extra.” This of course meant that child daycare in a country like the Netherlands was far less developed than in Belgium or Austria, notwithstanding the much broader spread of feminism as a shared outlook among Dutch women. In Italy, Greece, and Portugal as well, low formal participation of women in the labor market was associated with widespread property ownership and a large informal work sector (in tourism, agriculture, and urban services). It combined with the involvement of whole families and multiple generations in childcare

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and with the lack of public childcare facilities. A related configuration is probably now emerging in some of the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. However, seen from a slightly higher level of abstraction, there was clearly also a unity among European societies. All European welfare states sheltered people, organizations, and places from strong market fluctuations. All saw social inclusion as both a right and a duty of citizenship. Public policy was universally accepted as a legitimate way to prevent or redress “market failures.” It provided those “public benefits,” such as housing, education, and public health on which the market necessarily depends, but which it cannot create or sustain for everyone on its own. Social justice and economic efficiency in Europe were not seen as diametrically opposed. The postwar period of welfare state formation left a durable mark on the values and expectations of European populations, both in the East and the West. Everywhere on the continent, people expected governments to act on behalf of the general welfare, for the public good, and, if necessary, against markets if their outcomes were not beneficial. Even now, after two decades of welfare state retrenchment in the West and a decade of transition to democratic capitalism in the East, political elites (often against their own inclinations) are still held responsible for keeping people out of poverty, preventing intolerable inequalities, and protecting or procuring jobs with decent wages, as well as for managing the public sector well. Such values are more widely shared among less privileged people with more dependent jobs and less education, however, they are not rejected by the higher social strata. Trust in government too, compared to the United States, remained high, even though in some less fortunate states such as Belgium, Italy, or Poland, people could not always identify with their government wholeheartedly. Trust in social and economic life was a more generalized public good for Europeans than for Americans. Europe operated with less than 50 percent of the lawyers that a country like the United States needed to guard daily social intercourse.14 Similarly, trust in people was more widespread in Europe. The number of incarcerated persons was on average less than 10 percent that of the United States (Britain has by far the highest percentages within Europe, although they remain 50 percent below the United States figure). These were cultural artifacts that have largely been produced by the particular “class-intensive” quality of Europe’s experience with modernity in the postwar period. It is likely that Europe’s strong and continuing secularization, which started in the late 1950s and has shown itself to be much deeper and more durable than in the United States or any other part of the modern world, was another outcome of this peculiar path of modernization. European modernity signified, as it were, that the parameters of social life were basically set by humanity itself. The rise of labor The three decades after the war in Western Europe saw first a strong rise in the power and prestige of labor, then a relative electoral weakening in the 1950s and early 1960s, followed by a marked upsurge in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. This chronology was not entirely dissimilar in Eastern Europe, even though it could not be expressed in elections. Labor’s power was enhanced by the rapid industrialization that Europe witnessed in these years, while labor policies, in their turn, helped foster the

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industrialization and urbanization on which continued worker power depended. Immediately after the war, the general public’s mood against capital (which had failed to bring prosperity on its own and had often willingly cooperated with fascism), the perception that the experiment with liberalism between the wars had failed, and the strong desire for fraternity as well as the prestige of the Soviet Union all helped to fundamentally alter the relationship between labor and capital. The immediate aftermath of war in 1945 saw something close to rebellion, with a communist threat in Brussels, a wave of armed left-wing action against fascist landlords and other traitors in Italy, numerous occupations of factories in Western Germany, and glorious victories for leftwing parties in a number of countries, above all by the communists in France and Italy. The start of the Cold War played a paradoxical role in the strengthening of labor. Its internal aim was the marginalization of the more radical and laborist elements of the European Left, including the large Communist Parties of France and Italy. But the competition with the Soviets also forced Social and Christian Democrats to collaborate in proposing reform programs. As a consequence, big capital was not at all sacrosanct in the first years after the war. Building on earlier corporatist ideas, German, French and Dutch Catholics came close to social democratic designs for the nationalization of large firms. They proposed public regulation of the private sector that was meant to subordinate capital to various juridical schemes. These would limit the autonomy of management and shareholders, and subject markets to negotiated public governance.15 These proposals ultimately failed but helped in various ways to limit the space of maneuver for capital for a long time to come. German workers in the British zone were supported by the British Labour government in demanding co-determination rights, the so-called Mitbestimmung, from management and the state in the crucial coal and steel industries. This movement led to an unprecedented democratization of decision-making in corporate boardrooms in Europe’s most important economy. Early twentieth-century experiments with workcouncils in Britain, Austria, and Germany before, during, and in the aftermath of the First World War were picked up again in several European countries in the postwar period. In 2000, this finally led to an EU-sanctioned system of worker participation in management decisions throughout the member states, although with various national modifications. Where linked with a strong labor movement, such as in Germany and Sweden, worker participation rights significantly helped to make capitalism more accountable to worker interests.16 The biggest gain for labor was witnessed in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and, somewhat later, Austria. In these countries the popular demand for full employment was effectively turned into law protecting workers and the bargaining power of labor as never before. Nevertheless, workers in such countries as Italy, Belgium, Denmark and Ireland were faced with unemployment reaching 8 percent and higher up to the mid1950s. From the early 1960s, however, unemployment disappeared practically everywhere in Europe for almost two long and unique decades. It only reappeared again as a mass phenomenon in some countries not protected by full employment policies during the early 1980s. This was a consequence of drastic and sudden shifts in the world economy, and the ensuing deindustrialization and shift to financial markets in some of the more vulnerable industrial nations. Belgium (especially Wallonia), the Netherlands, Britain, Denmark and Spain all developed unemployment rates well over 10 percent that would stay in place for a decade or more.17 Sweden finally gave up full employment in the early 1990s and

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immediately saw unemployment rise to over 7 percent. Germany after re-unification as well as France experienced dramatic unemployment of over 12 percent until the late 1990s. In the case of Germany, joblessness was most heavily concentrated in the former GDR. Countries such as the Netherlands, Britain, and Belgium that had become postindustrial early on, finally moved to strong but fragile economic recoveries from the late 1980s. This brought down the jobless rate to well below 7 percent by about 1995. The booming market in services, both consumer services such as tourism and the restaurant sector, as well as producer services such as accounting, real estate, banking, consultancy and automation, and also public services such as healthcare and education (which all profited from partial deregulation) created more employment opportunities and part-time work. In Western Europe, Spain remained the nation hardest hit by unemployment, around 20 percent for more than a decade and a half, an experience that will probably be repeated by some post-socialist countries such as Poland. All West European nations accepted and institutionalized collective agreements between organized labor and employer organizations. Most of them generalized the results of collective bargaining throughout their national economies, including even the non-organized parts, by legal regulation (the minimum wage for example). All European states also seriously limited capital’s right to hire and fire at will, making it subject to often complex and costly juridical procedures, which sometimes required strong evidence of threatened bankruptcy or an unambiguous case of individual misbehavior on the part of an employee; another important gain for which German workers had been at the forefront. This historic transformation in capitalism made postwar Europe a far less free place for capital to maneuver than was the case in the United States. Even so, some countries, in particular Britain after Thatcher’s anti-worker restoration, came closer to the American model over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. This is certainly the case with respect to the deregulation of employee dismissal policies and the minimum wage, which Blair’s Labour government only partially redressed at the end of the 1990s. Britain’s labor market remained well below the standards of protection obtained on the continent. Because Europe became uniquely industrial in the course of the postwar period, it should not come as a surprise that union membership was also higher there than in other parts of the developed world (with Australia a partial exception). However, it makes little sense to talk about averages. The percentage of people actually organized in labor unions diverged strongly between countries. Low union participation (between 10 and 20 percent of the labor force) continued to characterize France and Spain. A second group of, in other respects, quite disparate countries ranged between 25 percent and 40 percent (in ascending order, Greece, Switzerland, Portugal, West Germany, the Netherlands up to the early 1980s, and Italy). There follows a group consisting of Britain, Austria, Ireland, Belgium and Norway (between 40 percent and 60 percent), and finally a group comprising Finland, Denmark and Sweden with over 70 percent of workers organized (Sweden more than 80 percent).18 Eastern Europe up to the 1970s, for understandable reasons, also belonged in the highest category. The integration of unionism into labor law and into the institutions of national governance was quite uneven as well. In some countries, mainly those with high union membership or with strong social democratic or corporatist traditions such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Austria, unions became formal actors in regular tripartite negotiations with employers and the state. In such countries, collective contracts

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attained the status of law for a set period and both workers and employers were obliged to abide by signed agreements on pay and benefits. As a result, strikes largely disappeared from the scene during the 1950s and early 1960s, except for short periods of formal bargaining at the close of a contract. In other countries, such as France and Italy, but also Britain with its decentralized bargaining structure, the strike and other forms of labor protest remained prevalent as a way to put pressure on employers and to influence the government. Strikes in Eastern Europe were necessarily political and always of the wildcat type until Solidarity emerged in 1979 in Poland. The decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s was the heyday of the strike in Europe. May 1968 in Paris was the most symbolic moment. Workers at Renault and other big plants sympathized with students and took to the streets in a conscious re-enactment of the Paris Commune of 1871. The conservative De Gaulle government was forced to resign in order to save the Fifth Republic. Starting with the Hot Autumn of 1969, Italy also witnessed a wave of labor protest in its big cities. By the early 1970s, a wage redistribution system was introduced, while a workers’ charter fixed new labor rights in the workplace. The political disaster of the Red Brigades and the bombing by neo-fascists of the Bologna central railroad station in 1979 caused dozens of casualties and triggered a political stagnation that lasted at least until the mid-1990s. German workers as well used the strike frequently during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as did the Dutch. Both added the traditional revolutionary practice of occupying factory premises to their reformist repertoires, mostly as a defensive effort to block company relocation decisions. Such direct labor actions against private property, however, always remained under very close judicial scrutiny. Strikes and protest in the Alentejo were, then again, essential to the success of the Portuguese revolution in 1974. Britain also experienced an extensive wave of labor protest after 1975, starting with a major strike among coal miners threatened with lay-offs. The notorious lack of coordination in British industrial relations and the growing sectionalism within the Trade Unions Congress during these years contributed strongly to Margaret Thatcher’s electoral victory in 1979. Her anti-union policies were pushed through forcefully after the slow dissipation of the dramatic, never formally ended miners’ strike of 1984. The issues at stake in industrial conflict evolved too. While wage demands continued to predominate, the early 1970s saw a shift toward demands for participation in management decisions, for a less punitive hierarchy, and away from the minute subdivision of tasks that the big corporations with their Taylorist and Fordist production practices had brought. Volvo’s quality circles and job-rotation initiatives and Philips’ “work-enrichment” programs were some of the responses by big corporations. Equality and prosperity Social scientists have made the relatively unsurprising argument that countries with strong unions, centralized bargaining and high social benefits have much more equally distributed personal incomes than countries that lack these institutional features.19 Postwar Europe is a good illustration of this general rule—indeed it was the mother of the hypothesis. The strength of labor and the associated importance of the welfare state and the public or corporatist economy after the war made all European societies far more

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leveled social landscapes than the United States (but slightly less so than Japan). Real earnings and incomes rose at unprecedented rates. The bottom 10 percent of wage earners in countries like the Netherlands, France, Finland and Belgium in the mid-1980s enjoyed incomes of more than 50 percent of the average.20 Only Ireland resembled the United States in that the top 10 percent of earners brought home some six times the amount the bottom 10 percent could muster. In Britain this ratio was one to four. While the Mediterranean countries remained somewhat above this figure, the Nordic, Benelux and Germanic countries were significantly below it. Incomes continued to equalize in most of Europe until the mid-1980s, although the trend was slowed by the economic crisis of the 1970s.21 Prosperity was broadly shared as almost everyone became dependent on incomes from salaried jobs; incomes that were more easily taxed, regulated, bargained about and insured than incomes from capital shares or property. Rentier capital was destroyed by crisis and war, and declined in significance throughout the postwar period up to the mid-1980s. The old middle class, associated with private ownership in retailing and artisan enterprise, also slowly disappeared in the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Corporations integrated the more specialized production once associated with artisanal tradition, while retail chains and department stores competed successfully with the independent neighborhood merchants. High-tax countries did not allow small property owners the luxury of existence on the margin. European societies in the course of the 1950s and 1960s began to closely resemble the big capital/big government/big labor stereotype that French scientists of the “regulation school,” harkening back to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, later identified as Fordism.22 Fordism in the European context was highly successful and created an economic growth rate twice that experienced between 1900 and 1950. After the mid-1950s, the strength of labor enabled workers to reap unique income gains from productivity growth. Recurrent rounds of bargaining at the close of collective agreements in Germany and Sweden helped balance income with increasing output. In some countries such as Italy and the Netherlands, wages were linked not to labor productivity but to the cost of living. As a result, it was much harder for workers to translate economic growth into higher living standards. Here, sobriety and social harmony were turned into key goals of government policy and became the bottom line of public morality. Only in the 1960s, after unemployment in Italy and the Netherlands had subsided and labor markets became increasingly tight, would wildcat worker protest usher in substantial and spasmodic wage increases. In the Netherlands, for example, the early 1960s became known as the years of “the wage explosion.” It was a dramatic shift in the balance of social forces in favor of labor that allowed wage hikes of 10 percent in 1963 and 15 percent in 1965.23 Not surprisingly, it was exactly in 1963 that Dutch households, skilled workers in particular, embraced the television en masse. Expenditures on consumer durables, which were the consumer innovation of the postwar period, doubled between 1958 and 1965. The same was true for consumer credit. It continued to rise sharply until 1973.24 In 1966, four times more cars were sold in the Netherlands than in 1958. Britain, France, and Sweden enjoyed the fruits of consumerism early in the postwar period, while Spain, Portugal, and Greece eventually turned into mass-consumer societies in the course of the 1980s. Throughout Europe, the working classes took up their places in suburban housing

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estates, shopped in modern supermarkets, and purchased an eclectic mix of household goods and clothing in chain department stores. John Goldthorpe’s landmark study of the “affluent worker” in the British automobile industry, published in 1968, argued that prosperity among blue-collar households was leading to their cultural embourgoisement, that is their turning away from laborist politics and their imitation of the private property orientation of bourgeois lifestyles.25 The classic working class was surely disappearing. It had gained protection against arbitrary dismissals, been made secure from the vagaries of the business cycle, and enjoyed the broad safeguards of the welfare state. Workers were now also earning the wages that enabled them to spend approximately 30 percent of their income on discretionary merchandise such as cars and consumer durables, and they would soon be enjoying home ownership as well. The design and architecture of working-class housing in countries around the North Sea were changing in response, especially during the 1970s. The distinction between the dining room and sitting room was erased, as sociability was no longer centered on breaking bread around the table, but rather on a television set faced by a semi-circle of cushioned sofas or comfortable seats. Apartments in tenement blocks in big cities were increasingly abandoned in favor of suburban single-family homes, each with access to a garden and parking spaces. This was undoubtedly an amazing improvement compared to working-class life just a generation before, with its poverty, insecurity, and fear of losing respectability. The meanings of class had fundamentally changed. But even though the classic European working class was finally getting some of the purchasing power, and some of the commodities and playthings of its American counterpart, Goldthorpe’s claim was proven incorrect in various ways by subsequent events. Affluent European workers increasingly turned toward more radical politics in the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, the new bourgeoisie was transforming into a “service class” based on educational credentials rather than on property. It became increasingly intent on clearly distinguishing its tastes from mass consumption. This belied the idea of “working-class embourgoisement.” Above all, stepped-up competition, unemployment, deindustrialization, postindustrialization, immigration, and welfare state retrenchment would all soon change the basic social parameters around which class was understood and individual lives were carried out. Crises, postmodernity, and elite exit One of the most memorable episodes of my youth was in 1969 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono lay in bed for days on end in the Amsterdam Hilton, surrounded by cameras, to protest the war in Vietnam. I was 10 years old and my family was still living in one of the lower-middle class segments of the huge social housing districts owned by the Philips Corporation in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. All the houses in the neighborhood were identical small single-family homes with gardens. All the families had two children the same age as their neighbors’ children. Almost every father worked for Philips. Each left home by eight in the morning, mostly on bicycle, and returned at fivethirty in the evening. During these Lennon-days, my family would gather around the television for the evening news and my father, looking at Lennon, would become so intensely enthusiastic

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and exhilarated that all of us couldn’t help but be delighted. Doing nothing but lying in bed with your new wife in a luxury hotel, being world-famous just for making songs, and getting on the news each night to protest a war on the other side of the globe—all spoke enormously to his imagination. His joy bordered on sheer disbelief. My father was born in 1930 as the oldest son of a skilled metal worker. After long years of evening study, he had just left his modest job as an office clerk at Philips to become a marketing researcher at a design-oriented textile firm. Both my father’s biography and his disbelief (though not necessarily his extreme delight) were somehow representative of the accelerated pace of social and cultural change around 1970. The contradictions in the Western economic system and in European capitalism and culture were accumulating. There were the economic contradictions of the labor and product markets, and between material accumulation in Europe, the United States, and Japan.26 There were social incongruities between employers and workers, between men and women, and between generations. And there were the cultural contradictions between the sobriety and moral duty of an industrial producers’ society with a clear memory of crisis, war and poverty and the emergent postindustrial consumer society and its pleasures.27 What was happening was not just a shift in one or another aspect, but rather a wholesale transition from one mode of social organization and operation to another. The most visible manifestations during the 1960s and 1970s in Europe were the spectacular emergence of youth both as a social category and as a cultural experience, and with it the spread of urban protest. The rise of feminism also marked this transformation, as did the rapid succession of new consumer tastes and subcultures. New waves of migrant workers from the Mediterranean added further to change. The 1980s and early 1990s would be far less successful in finding solutions to deep-rooted problems such as deindustrialization, mass unemployment, growing inequality, growing racism, and the slow retrenchment of the welfare state. The boomand-bust cycles of the later 1990s, based on high technology and the stock market, turned into a postmodern belle époque of mass-mediated, deepening consumerism. Eastern Europe, slowly extricating itself from Sovietstyle socialism with its emphasis on heavy industry, sought Western prosperity. Instead it went through a massive deindustrialization of its economy. Except for Slovenia and the better-educated groups in the capital cities, it had to postpone “catching up” for another generation. In response, East European youth made every effort to gain entrance to the West. There is not enough space to explore all these complex elements here. Instead, in concluding this chapter, I will concentrate on some of the most important social and cultural cleavages. The guiding question is: to what extent was Europe, in the course of this transition, losing the public and civic solidarity that marked much of the postwar period? European societies have of necessity become spaces of immigration. This was first a consequence of decolonization and the recruitment of foreign labor for the great task of reconstruction. It continued as a way for employers to escape the tight labor markets of the late 1960s and 1970s. Then waves of family arrivals and the collapse of the states and economies of eastern and southeastern Europe subsequently drove migration into the European heartland. For example, as Eastern Europe crumbled, some one million foreigners and ethnic Germans immigrated to Germany in 1992, many of them seeking asylum. The estimate is that some two million Turks live in Germany, while more recently the number of refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan has

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grown. All told, the country is home to over seven million resident foreigners, or around 9 percent of the total population. Some five million Muslims, mainly of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian descent, live in France—the largest Islamic population in Western Europe. In Britain the number of ethnic minority citizens, mainly South Asian and black Caribbean, rose from a few tens of thousands in the 1950s to more than three million, or around 6 percent of the total population. Grinding poverty, persecution, and oppression in areas such as the wartorn Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa have also dramatically increased migration to southern European nations. Non-nationals now make up around 2 percent of the population in Italy and Spain. These vast movements of people ended the heyday of increasing ethnic and religious homogenization characteristic of the 1950s. They also immediately pointed to the limits of social solidarity, as native populations everywhere looked upon the increasing number of foreigners with suspicion, especially in the provinces. Initially, the key problem was not so much competition for jobs as that of the cultural threats often symbolized in the close relationships between young local women and young immigrant men. Questions of cultural superiority and pride played an important role in antiimmigrant feeling in East Germany (which was also undergoing difficult economic crises) and in agricultural southern Spain in the late 1990s. However, the problem was increasingly magnified by fears of an overcrowded labor market and, in the former GDR by the creeping awareness of dispossession and exclusion that resulted from reunification and its particular extrication from socialism. Local authorities have also found it difficult to develop a suitable strategy toward new immigrants (see Chapter 2 on this topic). Was their classification temporary or permanent? Should they be housed in compounds or should they be given citizenship rights and access to social housing? If so, on what conditions? Legal migrants and ethnic minorities currently amount to between 5 and 15 percent of the population in European countries. They have become ever more concentrated in the larger cities, where they comprise between 10 percent and 40 percent of the urban population. Brussels is probably the most multi-ethnic of all European capitals (with legal migrants representing 30 percent of its population), while international port cities such as Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Marseilles are also among those urban areas with the highest population of immigrants. It is not happenstance that Rotterdam, with migrants totaling 40 percent of its population, produced an antiimmigration candidate, Pim Fortuyn, who declared the Netherlands “full” and garnered one-third of the vote in municipal elections before he was tragically assassinated in 2002. In the subsequent national elections, the late Fortuyn’s party produced the largest single shift ever in the composition of parliament, and helped to reduce the Left to its lowest score since 1918. The Lijst Fortuyn ended second place, behind the Christian Democrats who were also lifted up by the Fortuyn effect. France, in its turn, experienced a political bombshell in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, when Jean-Marie Le Pen and his xenophobic Front National came in second place, overpowering Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and the Socialists. While Le Pen mobilized a traditional provincial middleclass electorate for his authoritarian xenophobic visions, Fortuyn’s political style was a clear innovation of Rightist repertoire. He allied young and poorly educated “white” or self-ascribed “white” marginalized workers from suburban commercial zones around the big cities with the equally suburban nouveaux riches winners of the economic boom years between 1996 and 2000. His imagery was not authoritarian, as with Le Pen, but on

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the contrary exceedingly hedonistic and libertarian. This was precisely the reason why he insisted that Islam was “backward.” Yet in the course of their adjustment to a new life in the 1980s and 1990s, immigrants introduced and spread their national and regional cultures as well as “world music” throughout Europe. Ethnic restaurants, shops, and entertainment have diversified the public scene both in the capital cities and in the provinces, broadening sensibilities and introducing new cuisines to the relatively deprived eaters of Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Scandinavia, while further enriching the culinary experience in already wellserved places like Belgium, France, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Although all social groups enjoy ethnic cuisine in Europe, it is most clearly preferred by the well-educated.28 Regardless of social circumstance, the European urban landscape has become a rich mosaic of peoples, cultures, and ethnic spaces. The relatively uniform and binding national cultures and traditional class distinctions of Europe were also destabilized by international mass consumption and its clothing, information technology, music and other cultural symbols.29 From the late 1950s, youth became an international and strongly Americanized “event” affiliated at its core with rock music and the subsequent varieties of pop. European television broadcasting was infused with American content and involved fierce competition between private media empires owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Leo Kirch, and Silvio Berlusconi. German and Italian cinema, strong even as late as the early 1980s, severely declined. Only the French film industry seemed viable on its own, but not without European support. Except for the French and Italian cases, European elites read English language newspapers and magazines to supplement what was offered in their native language. Consumer choice reigned supreme in an expanding number of spheres, propelling an engaging mix of Americanism, cosmopolitanism, and reinvented localism. Indeed, the sixties liberation of pleasure and the imagination became endless, inspiring a swirl of identity politics that helped the better-educated of all persuasions carve out their own particular lifestyles distinct from each other and from the influence of history, class, or the masses. “Niche” consumption and identity politics in private life, in public space, and in social movements, suggested passage into a postmodern age distinct from the modernism that had held sway since the war. By the mid-1970s, stepped up international economic competition, the oil crises, and the gyrations of the American dollar vis-à-vis European currencies put the welfare state and the broad civic coalitions underpinning it on the defensive. This occurred at the very same moment that the postwar cultural homogeneity and cohesive social consensus were breaking down from within. Although readied by the rebellions and conflicts of the 1970s, this fiscal and ideological crisis of the welfare state began in earnest with the rapid rise of unemployment and budget shortages in some European states in the early 1980s. These budget problems were generally solved quickly, with the important exceptions of Germany with its high unification costs, Belgium with its expensive federalization of the Flemish and Walloon regions, and Italy with its generous pension system and baroque public policies. However, European public spending was effectively kept under pressure by the neo-liberal critique of “Eurosclerosis” and the purported lack of competitiveness of the European model under conditions of globalization during the 1990s. Such Criticism was not only embraced by the likes of Margaret Thatcher, but gradually also by many “third-way” Social and Christian Democrats throughout the continent. It was based

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on the perceived superiority of the technology-oriented and stock market driven American economy with its deregulated labor markets, its social inequalities, and the associated advantages for elites. This notion also informed the policies of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as the international business press that was fed by them.30 This global pressure led to a curtailment of social rights everywhere in Europe, most drastically in East and Southeastern Europe. Health benefits were decreased, the replacement ratios of pensions were lowered, while full disability pensions became far less accessible. At the same time, education fees were raised, the minimum wage in various countries was frozen over the long term, and unemployment and social assistance benefits were scaled back in amount as well as duration. Supplementary private insurance was increasingly required to bolster the traditional public guarantees against risk. In the workplace, protective rights for labor (in hiring and firing practices, for example) were reduced, although this was more the case in some countries such as Britain and post-socialist Eastern Europe than in others, such as Austria, Italy, or Belgium. The cost-cutting regimes of the 1980s and 1990s, moreover, were firmly anchored in the very basics of the emergent European Union. They have, as it were, become more or less “constitutionalized.” The “ever closer union” into which European states were being integrated with accelerated speed from the late 1980s was primarily an alliance of top civil servants. They lifted their responsibilities out of the national democratic arenas and subjected their performance to mutual Europeer-review based on the criteria of costefficiency directly derived from neo-liberal or even plain actuarial modes of management. By demanding 3 percent deficits of member states for qualification in the European Monetary Union, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the 1997 Growth and Stability Pact put all national budgets in a rigid straitjacket that ignored the needs, established rights, or claims of their citizens. The neo-mercantilist “competition state” gradually erased the fundamental postwar insight that social problems left unattended in one domain recur in another. They will inevitably produce costly inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and legitimacy crises that stretch the limits of any state’s capabilities. Efficiency and social justice have reappeared as simple opposites. European capital in the 1980s and 1990s, moreover, quickly jumped on the bandwagon of emergent Anglo-Saxon stock market capitalism. It reinvented financial leverage as the key strategic response to economic crisis and declining returns on fixed investment.31 Like their American counterparts, European CEO’s have their eyes firmly fixed on shareholder values. They are keen on short-term results, spend much of their time on mergers and acquisitions, and are rewarded by stock options that connect their earnings directly to the grades they receive from the financial community. Accordingly, they neglect internal growth capacity and sell off units with insufficient profit. Internal labor pools are broken up with lay-offs the result for many employees—except for the lean and mean. Corporations now deal with their components, whether employees or subcontractors, in terms of buying and selling and ignore responsibility for long-term development. The ideology of market rationality has replaced the rhetoric of community and democracy that characterized European elites during the “golden years” of the 1950s and 1960s.

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Transition to what? What about the outcome? Has Europe really been shaped in the neoliberal image? Or to phrase the question in a slightly more theoretical way, are globalization and postindustrialism producing the same social polarizing effect everywhere, as both Saskia Sassen’s analysis of global cities and Manuel Castells’ study of “the network society” suggest?32 The answer is still unambiguously no. The situation in Western Europe was to a significant extent determined by previously established public institutions and traditional balances of power.33 Only where government had both the political will and the leverage to organize a frontal attack on the key democratic institutions of civil society did neo-liberal radicalism to some degree succeed, that is, only in Thatcher’s Britain. Elsewhere, notwithstanding the circumscription of rights and an impoverished conception of public responsibility, West European welfare states have held out. This was largely because the forces that were present at their making did not permit any radical overhaul. Continental governing systems are consensual coalitions firmly grounded in cooperation with civil and political groups that represent a mix of social interests. While clearly playing down the rights offered by the welfare state, neither Social Democrats nor Christian Democrats fully embraced neo-liberalism. The same was true for the various European Liberal parties, whether new or old. Voters, indeed, remained firmly in favor of protecting the welfare state—ironically this was more the case in Britain than elsewhere. The post-socialist societies of Eastern Europe also remained staunch supporters of social welfare. However, the institutionally weak and dependent states in the East could offer little resistance to the erosion of rights and the emergence of mass poverty. The result was a huge social gap between those living in the East and those in the West of the continent, one comparable to the rift between Northern and Southern Italy. Continued support for the welfare state was not just the conservatism of well-fed citizens. West European voters were correct. Once budgets came under control again, the “Eurosclerosis” argument did not resonate with popular experience. Several European states, such as Austria, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, actually enjoyed long-term economic growth rates similar to the United States, and far better than Britain, although they did not allow comparable levels of inequality and marginality to emerge.34 The same countries, including Italy, even produced more new jobs in the purportedly “sclerotic” 1980s than in the “golden years” of the 1960s. Britain’s job performance throughout these years has actually been far worse than any of the Nordic or Western continental countries. Moreover, in contrast to Britain and the United States, European welfare states did not develop the signs of what economists have recently called “low skill equilibrium.” Protecting some 25 percent of the population from slipping below the poverty line (the United States figure) apparently had the additional advantage of keeping the economy as a whole on “the high road” of more skill-intensive and durable jobs. This is confirmed by recent empirical research. The structure of the West European job market during the 1980s and 1990s has not been polarized along American lines. Instead, it has mainly been improved.35 On closer scrutiny even the hard-core evidence for Eurosclerosis breaks down. There turned out to be no strong general correlation between job growth and labor market flexibility.36 Even the basic assumption that strong welfare states feature rigid labor markets has been shown to be incorrect. Labor markets in all European welfare states

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were clearly more regulated than in the United States. However, some of the “strongest” welfare states, such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands, actually had far less restricted labor markets than those with less developed welfare policies, such as Spain and Italy. Most important for our discussion, is that those European welfare states most protective of their citizens were not necessarily most protective of jobs. Finally, it seems that European social models boasted a form of citizen-friendly flexibility that compared gloriously with the capital-friendly flexibility trumpeted by the neo-liberal consensus. The chance to exit from poverty was many times higher than in the United States or Britain. The permanent consequences of starting in a low-wage job were far lower. The risks of poverty associated with low skill remained much smaller. In comparison, the social structures, labor markets and welfare systems of post-socialist Eastern Europe have been far more thoroughly Americanized. Yet notwithstanding these apparently durable qualities of Europe’s social models, acute problems of efficiency and social justice became endemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Neither the Eurosclerosis critique nor neoliberalism add to our understanding of them, nor do either of these offer any viable solutions. These recent difficulties have more to do with questions of generation, gender, and ethnicity, and have usually been summarized under the rubrics of participation and exclusion. Perhaps the most important solution households everywhere in Europe found to the insecurities and turbulence associated with a global and increasingly service-based economy was the dual career. The capacity to pursue this option, however, was entirely dependent on the ability to bridge family and work, which in its turn rested on the availability and affordability of childcare. Some European welfare states, such as the Nordic countries, France and Belgium, scored decidedly better on this point than either the neo-liberal United States and Britain or the more family-friendly Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary. The free market simply did not produce childcare services at a price most families could afford, and paternalistic welfare states that favored male breadwinners did not provide them at all.37 Postwar industrialization was also the harbinger of the modern family centered around suburban domesticity, a housekeeping wife and mother, on the one hand, and a male breadwinner employed in modern industry on the other. During the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Europeans married at rates never before seen. Steady jobs in industry allowed nine out of ten men and women to marry, and at a significantly younger age than before the war. Housing remained scarce, but gradually became available from the late 1950s. This was a major revolution in the private lives of those dependent on wages. The industrial working class could now afford the erstwhile bourgeois luxury of having a fulltime housewife at home whose labor was reserved for bringing up children, whose numbers were rapidly reduced to two or three per family in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, much of what the West European industrial welfare state had to offer was meant to support precisely this pattern of social reproduction. The formula included low- to medium-skill employment for male breadwinners, family medicine and health services, primary and secondary schooling, and social housing. But the pattern was clearly repressive of higher aspirations, in particular for women who were increasingly secluded in private suburban life. Feminism and the rise of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s (which reflected an increasingly knowledge-intensive and service-based economy) provided an alternative.

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First came a steep drop in the number of children per family. It was associated both with the higher ages at which better-educated women had their first children and with an acceleration of divorce rates. Then came the sophisticated educational requirements of the competitive postindustrial labor markets of the 1980s and 1990s, and with it, the spread of youth unemployment everywhere (with Spain and Italy the worst examples). The combined result of these developments in the cultural economy of personal relationships and procreation was the postponement of marriage, cohabitation, and children. Two-earner households rapidly became a majority in most European Union countries. The new households were more democratic and equal between the sexes and the generations than the industrial family had been. However, childcare and housework remained largely the provenance of women while men’s careers still claimed priority. Two salaries also provided greater safety and flexibility against labor market risks and helped young couples accumulate the necessary savings and credit for increasingly expensive housing, childcare, and education. The rise of the new households posed a challenge to West European welfare states. Deindustrialization and economic restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s had essentially been arranged through early retirements and disability benefits. They allowed a particular form of flexibility to operate; productivity was enhanced through the substitution of lesseducated and less-productive older workers by better-educated younger ones. Ageing populations in Europe thus became inactive on the labor market. In countries such as Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, the majority of citizens over fiftyfive no longer worked. This was also the case in Central and Eastern Europe. As a consequence, public expenditures in most European welfare states were focused increasingly on the elderly and on men, a tendency reinforced by heavy public health spending, which largely went to the elderly as well. Seen from this vantage point, the main issue around the welfare state was not quite the one suggested by the neo-liberal Eurosclerosis critique that so heavily underlined across-the-board rigidity. Rather, it was whether European welfare states could prevent the monopolization of their public benefits by elderly, male insiders and instead channel part of these resources to the needs of young households and women, the most important of which were childcare and education. Britain and the United States clearly failed in this respect, with poverty rates among young families (including single mothers) peaking above an immense 25 percent. Only the Nordic welfare states have so far, more or less successfully, chosen this road.38 The deepest problem of social exclusion in Europe was associated with the intersection of class, citizenship, ethnicity, and immigration. At the turn of the twentyfirst century, almost 30 percent of Austrian and German-Swiss voters as well as those in Antwerp, some areas of eastern Germany, northern Italy, Alsace-Loraine, southern France and southern Spain, and increasingly those in Slovenia, Hungary and the Balkans were all turning toward xenophobic and authoritarian, chauvinist political parties. At the same time, the unemployed in Europe’s cities were overwhelmingly becoming those of non-European origin or their offspring. The city of Rotterdam, for instance, suffered from a 10 percent unemployment rate in the mid-1990s. Among the city’s legal ethnic minorities, unemployment reached 25 percent. Some 9 percent of Dutch unemployed had been out of work for more than a year. The same was true for 30 percent of the unemployed of non-Dutch origin. Unemployment and above all long-term unemployment were becoming ever more “colored” just as the Dutch economy was starting to create its

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widely admired “job miracle.”39 At the same time, in the city of Amsterdam, 64 percent of the unemployed from Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds had not enjoyed more than a primary education, as against only 29 percent among the jobless of Dutch background.40 By the turn of the twenty-first century, and after a string of years characterized by unique rates of economic growth everywhere in Europe, social exclusion had become first and foremost an ethnic affair (see Chapter 5). It was more precisely a problem of specific minority groups (such as Moroccans) rather than others, and more often a problem of men rather than women. Globalization and international economic competition created ever more serious social divides—especially in Eastern and Southeastern Europe—just as political breakdown in these regions made any public response to the growing crisis ineffectual. Families in these disaster zones were increasingly linked via personal networks to the imagined cornucopia in the West. The disparities were palpable. Given these social and regional schisms, the pressures to enter the European Union and establish European Union citizenship are unlikely to subside in the twenty-first century. The issues are an intractable composite of legal and illegal immigration, poverty, crime, legal and “informal” work as well as language and education, religion, gender, and generation. They crisscross established social and juridical policy and force on to the agenda questions of social and cultural rights, multiculturalism, and social justice. Added to them are the entwined problems of foreign policy and international security that are entirely without precedent to the European Union. Compared to other world regions, Europe still features a network of compact, complex, and highly differentiated urban landscapes. These characteristics have produced and reproduced propinquity between social classes and cultures. This unique urban system also sustains a heritage of public institutions committed to solving public problems and providing public services. This basic European framework has not changed dramatically since 1945, even in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. What has changed is the wider environment, and the shifting cultural complexion and social forces within it. Yet given its distinct social and urban structure, the outcome of the postindustrial transition and global competition for Europe is so far significantly different, and on the whole more socially benevolent, than in the United States or other parts of the advanced world. Whether this will continue to be the case will depend on the ability of European citizens to prevent the ongoing self-exclusion of the rich and powerful. The European Union can become helpful in this respect, but will need a concerted redesign in order to take on the challenge. Whether Europe’s citizens are still capable of nurturing an intellectual and political milieu equipped for reframing older social ideologies within the context of global conditions is entirely open to question. Further reading My suggestions cover both classics and important recent items. Given the range of interconnected topics, disciplines, scales, and dimensions of change discussed in this chapter, I can only refer to those key works that are suggestive of, and informative to, the perspective developed here and must neglect the debates that have been, or are being waged, in any separate sub-field.

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A must for any further reading is G.Therborn s European Modernity and Beyond. The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000, London, Sage, 1995, which gives a wealth of empirical material as well as stimulating theoretical considerations on most of the subjects elaborated here. G.E. Andersen’s work is central for contemporary research on the welfare state. See his classic The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, in which he presents the three types of welfare state: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic. His later work reflects the crisis of the welfare state debate: G.Esping-Andersen (ed.), Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, London, Sage, 1996. Esping-Andersen’s Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, is strong on welfare state dilemmas and the micro-economies of family, gender and generation, and is more fully comparative than the earlier studies. For a more historical and gendered perspective, see S.Pedersen, Family Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. A.de Swaan, In Care of the State, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988, is particularly good on the long-term logics of welfare state development in Europe, connecting them with Norbert Elias’ civilizing process and the dilemmas of collective action. The collection by P.Flora and A.Heidenheimer (eds), The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America, New Brunswick, Transaction Books, 1987, is still useful for its broad comparative historical covering. For the initial discussion on welfare state retrenchment, see P.Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. J.Elster, C.Offe and U.Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-communist Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, contains relevant chapters on the welfare state in the first years of post-communist Eastern Europe. D.Kalb and Janos Kovacs (eds), Europeanization or Americanization? (forthcoming) is an in-depth comparison of social policy formation and retrenchment in Eastern Europe with contributions on Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The literature on industrial relations, class and protest in Europe is huge. For a historical and comparative overview, D.Geary, European Labour Protest, 1848–1939, London, Methuen, 1981, is still helpful. I. Katznelson and A.Zolberg (eds), Working Class Formation, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986, goes much more into depth and is theoretically more acute. I found C.Crouch, Industrial Relations and European State Tradition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, extremely helpful. For the upsurge of class protest in the 1960s and 1970s, C. Crouch and A.Pizorro, The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968, 2 vols, London, Macmillan, 1978. See also Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997, and M. Regini (ed.), The Future of Labour Movements, London, Sage, 1992. There is again a wealth of country studies available in English, such as R.Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, as well as more anthropological and local studies in the cultural dynamics of class such as my own Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities: The Netherlands, 1850–1950, Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 1997. For the later period such studies are regrettably still rare. It is well known that European cities are mid-size and much more compact than the American metropolises-cum-urban sprawl, but (ecological as well as Marxist) traditions

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of urban research still tend to study the character of European urbanism somehow in isolation of the public heritage of the welfare state and of the particularities of class relationships in Europe, see the lucid book by I.Katznelson, Marxism and the City, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. The following items should therefore be read in connection with the literature above: L. Benevolo, The European City, London, Blackwell, 1993, gives a long historical overview of European urbanism with an emphasis on traditions of public management. A good classic text that is supportive of the general thrust of my interpretation of European urbanism is P.Hohenberg and L.Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1985. A.Bagnasco and P.Galès (eds), Cities in Contemporary Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, offers up-to-date materials that support the claim that European urbanism is a singular phenomenon. Recent volumes of Urban Affairs and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research contain many articles on current economic restructuring and the urban experience in Europe. A good sense of European particularity in the light of its combination of public policy heritage and urban compactness is shown in L.Wacquant, “Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium”, Urban Studies, 36 (10) (1999) 1639–47. A useful reader that exhibits an incipient awareness of European particularity is E.Mingione (ed.), Urban Poverty and the Underclass, London, Blackwell, 1996. Much of this work both embraces as well as criticizes S.Sassen’s global cities thesis in The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988 and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991 in which she argues that postindustrial cities will necessarily polarize between highly paid and educated employees of the producer services sectors and the ever more marginalized and largely immigrant workers in the lower tier of the consumer services. The more subtle argument stresses that, while abstract forces do exert pressure in that direction, actual outcomes are significantly shaped by local institutions of public governance. For the issue of Europe and American-led globalization, these four books together are very helpful: S.Leibfried and P.Pierson (eds), European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration, Washington, DC, The Brookings Institution, 1995; B.Deacon et al., Global Social Policy: International Organizations and the Future of Welfare, London, Sage, 1997; R.Dore, Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo Saxons, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; and A.Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, London, UCL Press, 1998. P.Hirst and G.Thompson, Globalisation in Question, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, makes a persuasive case for the continued space for public policies at the level of world regions such as Europe within a framework of globalizing economies. P.Gowan, The Global Gamble, London, Verso, 1999, analyses American policies for world dominance by economic statecraft. For a general sense of the direction of social change (social polarization) under the new regime of globalization, see M.Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997–98; S.Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York, The New Press, 1998; G.Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, London, Verso, 1994. These and other grand visions are discussed in a more empirical vein in D.Kalb et al., The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In,

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Boulder, CO and London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. D.Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, London, Blackwell, 1989, is still highly suggestive for the key forces and manifestations of post-Fordist culture. R.Brenner, “The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950–1998”, New Left Review, 229 (1998), 1– 265, and D.Coates, Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, both give a very good sense of the long-term dynamics and problems of the postwar world economy and the limitations of recent economic globalization as a response. On the 1960s, see A.Marwick, The Sixties, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. P.Bourdieu, Distinction, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984, is a key text about the cultural reconfiguration of the middle classes in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular in France. For a British study that incorporates structural changes of the 1980s and early 1990s see M.Savage et al., Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle-Class Formation in Contemporary Britain, London, Routledge, 1992. For recent comprehensive work on migration, among others in relation to Europe, see R.Cohen (ed.), The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; D.S.Massey et al, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999- There is a wealth of research on the rise of the new Right in Europe, including some in-depth ethnographies; see, for example, D.Holmes, Integral Europe, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001, F.Gaspard, A Small City in France, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995. On social and cultutal change in Eastern Europe, I would recommend K.Verdery, What was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996; M. Burawoy and K.Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition, Boulder, CO and London, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, C.Hann (ed.), Post-Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Local Practice, London, Routledge, forthcoming. Notes 1 G.Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond, London, Sage, 1995. 2 The association with fixed capital comes from M.Hanagan, “States and Capital: Globalizations Past and Present,” in D.Kalb et al. (eds), The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In, Boulder, CO and Oxford, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, pp. 67–87 3 P.Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics, London, Sage, 1990. 4 These are partly personal observations in situ (Antwerp) and via the evening news of various European television broadcasters, partly they are derived from the International Herald Tribune, May 2, 2000. 5 See Z.Ferge “Freiheit und Soziale Sicherheit”, Transit, 12 (1996), 62–81; G.Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. 6 These and the other figures in this section are from Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond, pp. 65–85. 7 Ibid., pp. 67–9. 8 See C.Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990. See also, on the importance of public policy in European urbanism, Leonardo Benevolo, The European City, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1993. 9 N.Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1939. 10 M.Albert, Capitalisme contre capitalisme, Paris, Seuil, 1991.

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11 G.Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, London, Verso, 1994. 12 P.Flora and A.Heidenheimer (eds), The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Books, 1981; A. de Swaan, In Care of the State, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. 13 These are the figures given in W.Fischer (ed.), Handbuch der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschtchte, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1987, p. 217. 14 G.Calvin Mackenzie, Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 2000, p. 13. 15 Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond, pp. 27–9; J.P.Windmuller, Cees de Galan, Labor Relations in the Netherlands, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1969, Chapter 3. 16 R.Dore, Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism, Japan and Germany versus the Anglo Saxons, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. 17 G.Therborn, Why Some Peoples Are More Unemployed Than Others, London, Verso, 1986. 18 J.Visser, “The Strength of Union Movements in Advanced Capitalist Democracies,” in M.Regini (ed.), The Future of Labour Movements, London, Sage, 1992. 19 D.Kalb, G.Engbersen, B.van Steenbergen, and N.Wilterdink, The Conundrum of Globalization: Inequality, Marginality, and Poltcy Imperatives in Advanced Welfare States, Amsterdam: Netherlands School for Social and Economic Policy Research, Paper 97 (1997), pp. 24–5. 20 A.Atkinson, A.B.L.Rainwater and T Smeeding, Income Distribution in OECD Countries: The Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Paris, OECD, 1995. 21 N.Wilterdink, “The Internationalization of Capital and Trends in Income Inequality in Western Societies,” in D.Kalb et al., The Ends of Globalization, pp. 187–201. 22 M.Aglietta and D.Fernbach, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, London, Verso, 2001. 23 H.Righart, De eindeloze jaren zestig, Amsterdam, De Arbeiderspers, 1995, pp. 55–6. 24 Ibid. 25 J.H.Goldthorpe and D.Lockwood, The Affluent Worker, 3 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968. 26 In particular see R.Brenner, “The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950–1998,” New Left Review, 229 (1998), 1–264, and D.Coates, Models of Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000. 27 D.Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, London, Heinemann, 1976. 28 A.Warde, “Eating Globally: Cultural Flows and the Spread of Ethnic Restaurants,” in D.Kalb, The Ends of Globalization, pp. 299–316. 29 M.Beisheim et al. have collected much data about international trade and show that it is in particular these items that have become internationalized, M.Beisheim et al., Im Zeitalter der Globalisierung?, Baden-Baden, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999. 30 See the discussion in G.Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, and B. Deacon, Global Social Policy, London, Sage, 1997, pp. 57–91. 31 Although the actual implementation is still far from complete. See R. Dore, Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism. 32 M.Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996–97, and S. Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991. 33 Among others: Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. 34 Ibid. See also G.Garret, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 35 C.Hamnett, “Social Polarisation in Global Cities: Theory and Evidence,” Urban Studies, 31 (1994), 401–25, and “Social Polarisation, Economic Restructuring and Welfare State Regimes,” Urban Studies, 33 (1996), 1407–30. 36 Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, p. 135.

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37 Ibid., pp. 170–85. 38 Ibid., pp. 145–70. 39 J.Visser and A.Hemerijck, A Dutch Miracle, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1997. 40 J.Burgers, “A World of Difference: Between the Local and the Global,” in D.Kalb, The Ends of Globalization, pp. 239–53.

5 Changing margins in postwar European politics Michael Hanagan Marginal social groups are those whose grievances are ignored or relegated to the sidelines by established political and social orders. They deserve the full attention of historians and social scientists because the impact of marginalization and the mobilization of hitherto marginal social categories can profoundly affect political life. This chapter looks at how political elites and popular struggles shifted the borders of marginality in post-1945 Europe. Social policy after the Second World War focused on improving the condition of organized workers, especially adult males and their families, groups particularly hurt during the interwar period. At the same time, political repression after the Second World War marginalized those ethnic minorities who had protested so stridently in the interwar years. For at least thirty years, this political consensus dominated European politics. Beginning in 1974 with the end of three decades of rapid European economic growth and accelerating after 1989 with the collapse of the Eastern European Peoples’ Democracies, this postwar European force—labor unions—that had been brought into the political order after 1945, was on the brink of exclusion from political power centers in 2001 and a newly emerging social group—non-white immigrants—arose on the margins. At the same time, nationalist minorities, an older social force that had been marginalized in 1945, returned to the foreground in 2001, while a whole series of single-issue movements, some new, some old, including feminists, ecologists, and gay rights movements, mobilized to demand greater political recognition. The landscape of marginality in the interwar years Social policy must be understood against the interwar backdrop of depression and rampant nationalism. Those brought to power by Allied victory in 1945 designed government policy to avoid the debacle of these years. The interwar economic crisis had marginalized both unions and industrial workers, and threatened their gains in the preceding fifty year social struggle. Even more than the split between socialists and communists, the most significant aspect of working-class politics during the Depression was the declining ability of trade unions and labor parties to mobilize their supporters in the face of rising unemployment. A landmark study of Marienthal, a small factory town in Austria, showed that as unemployment became prolonged, workers became resigned; “no plans, no relation to the future, no hopes.”1 Unemployed Marienthal workers allowed their socialist newspaper subscriptions to lapse. The conservative rule of Baldwin and

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Chamberlain in Britain, Brüning in Germany, and Daladier in France resulted from such working-class apathy. Persistent mass unemployment weakened socialist parties and trade unions, drying up support for liberal democracies and weakening them for attack by the far right. The Depression not only marginalized unions and socialist parties, but individual workers as well. For many Europeans, the image of disheveled unkempt men traveling the roads and roaming the cities incarnated the Depression. The crisis brought a great increase in the numbers of hobos, beggars, and tramps—men, young and old, who survived through charity, casual labor, and petty crime. Throughout, industrial Europe the Depression hit men hard. The sectors most strongly affected by unemployment— construction, metalworking, steel, coal mining, and shipbuilding—employed a disproportionately large number of males. Centers of heavy industry such as Northumberland and South Wales in Britain, the Nord and Pas-de-Calais and the Parisian suburbs in France, the Ruhr, Saxony and Silesian regions in Germany, all witnessed extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. From the political left to the right, critics of the interwar economic order pointed out that unemployment threatened not only individual men but also their families. In 1934, a London doctors’ committee asserted “that there exists in this country widespread undernourishment among the families of the unemployed…this must inevitably lead to a steady deterioration in the physical standards and health of the population.”2 In 1929, German Catholic aid workers lamented, “the family unit is gradually destroyed in both personal and economic terms.”3 The Depression’s impact on working women is harder to measure. Largely excluded from heavy industry in favor of returning veterans following the First World War, women labored disproportionately in temporary and part-time occupations, such as domestic service, where unemployment escaped the official records. Just as importantly, whitecollar jobs held by women were relatively unaffected by unemployment. Still, when they did lose their jobs, women workers almost always received lower benefits than males. Europe’s politicians sought to ban married women from work on the theory that the husband was the natural provider. Such efforts were most successful in civil service and a particular threat to women schoolteachers who frequently had to conceal their marital status. Marginalization took a different form in agricultural than in industrial Europe. By and large, social support policies did not reach agricultural workers. Unemployed urban workers often returned to their rural origins when times were tough, increasing the pressure on rural households where hunger was liable to be borne with greater silence than in the cities. Agricultural problems were particularly arduous in Eastern Europe. Leaving aside the Soviet Union (where famine killed millions in the Ukraine in 1932– 33), in some important respects the difference between the rural worlds of West and East was greater in the interwar period than it would be in the post-Second World War era. Even in 1940, in North, West and Central Europe, only 21.5 percent of the male working population was employed in agriculture and 44.3 percent in industry, while in Eastern Europe and Italy, a full 54.4 percent toiled in farming and 24.1 percent in industry.4 Among European peasants, the Depression accelerated the loss of their land and preserved redundant labor on already strained family farms.5 The intensification of the

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agricultural crisis foredoomed the efforts made from the early 1920s to mobilize peasants as an independent and progressive force in Eastern European politics. Social insurance was relatively well established in much of Western and Central Europe in the years before the Second World War with Britain and Germany strengthening welfare policies established even earlier, before the First World War. A few Western powers, such as France, provided meager national benefits. Still, Western welfare states were solidly established compared with Eastern Europe where compulsory social insurance was the exception and coverage was extremely limited. Here, only Poland took any initiatives and its welfare state was based on already existing systems in the German and Austrian territories integrated into the new Polish state. The major solution for dealing with large-scale unemployment, that is mass emigration, broke down entirely, during the interwar years. Emigration to the United States had been a long-standing solution to hard times in Italy and in the Austrian and Russian Empires, but it was largely closed off by American legislation between 1921 and 1924. France had accepted large numbers of migrant workers during the 1920s, but enjoyed the modern luxury of expelling substantial numbers of them. Employers anxious to keep experienced laborers, often fiercely combated these government efforts. Where unemployed workers and hungry peasants lapsed into quiescence, newly created ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe sprang into action. In contrast with the West, the political geography of the East had changed dramatically after 1919 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference. New nations appeared everywhere. There were areas in the Balkans, such as Dobruja, Macedonia, and Vojvodina where no ethnic group constituted a clear majority and self-determination provided no clear answer. But the most serious problems of the Versailles settlement stemmed from the Allies’ violation of their own principles. Alsace-Lorraine, the South Tyrol, and Istria were taken by the victorious powers without democratic consultation of their populations. The egregious violation of self-determination in the case of Ireland was not addressed at Versailles, and the treaty negotiated with Irish rebels in 1921 left nationalist and Catholic minorities in a Northern Ireland where they were subject to discrimination and murderous violence. Territories with predominantly German and Hungarian populations were ceded to Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in a vain effort to placate nationalist leaders’ insatiable hunger for territory. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the artificial federations constructed by diplomats to stabilize Central and Southern Europe against German and Hungarian nationalism, only resulted in incubating new nationalisms. Most aggrieved ethnic minorities entered into politics and sought compromise until the reshuffling of the map after the Munich crisis of 1938 awakened hopes of achieving their most extreme goals. Indeed, within a few years, their German occupier summoned many of them to political power albeit under circumstances in which their effective authority was severely limited. Where minorities remained almost from the first utterly unreconciled, such as the Sudeten Germans and the Macedonians, it was usually because they received support from existing neighbor states, in these cases, Germany and Bulgaria. The creation of new independent nations across Eastern Europe put new pressure on the Jewish communities that had spanned the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. Nationalist universities often imposed more restrictive Jewish quotas than their imperial predecessors. As Eastern European economies collapsed, middle-class

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nationalists accused their Jewish competitors of not being truly national. While Hitler’s use of the Jews as a scapegoat for German failure and the marginalization of all nonAryans was exceptional in its venom and in its ultimate consequences, many Eastern European nationalist leaders used anti-semitism to explain the poverty and political chaos resulting from a national independence of which so much had been expected. As a result, the interwar Depression led to the marginalization of some important groups—male industrial workers and their families as well as their trade unions and political parties. At the same time the Versailles settlement inflamed ethnic minorities stranded in new nations. The result was utter catastrophe. The remaking of marginality in post-1945 Europe The lasting strength of the hastily constructed post-1945 settlement came from its roots in a deeply felt political consensus shared by a generation of politicians who had witnessed the interwar crisis. The Second World War was as much a civil as an international war, and the Allied triumph represented a victory for those within each nation committed to state intervention and greater social equality Liberal democrats, social Catholics, socialists, and communists triumphed over laissez-faire liberals as well as traditional conservatives and fascists. Resistance groups recruited largely from the left emerged from the shadows to popular acclaim and almost all championed social reforms. In Western Europe, American financial and military power gave its policy-makers great influence, and they favored Keynesian economic policies and expanded markets. American experts were much less concerned about the immediate threat from Communist parties or invasion by the Red Army than with the possibility of a postwar European economic collapse, with the Communists then standing ready to fill the breach. In Eastern Europe the presence of Soviet armies strengthened Communist Parties composed of local resisters and leaders who had spent the war in Moscow. The decisive—and utterly unexpected—role of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler earned that country and its economic system respect everywhere and admiration among an anti-fascist public. The prominence of Catholic social reformers in Western Europe, in Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the western-occupied zones of Germany, made the bitter pill of social reform more palatable to employers and to middle-class voters. The years immediately after the Second World War witnessed a great increase in support for Catholic parties that took a sharp left turn; the far right was on the run and the collaboration of some Catholic hierarchies with the Nazis put traditionalists on the defensive.6 Even the British Conservative Party committed itself to maintaining full employment. With laissez-faire in full retreat, the only state interventionist group outside the consensus was the far right. It had sympathized or openly collaborated with Nazism and was implicated in its fall. In Eastern Europe, a significant silencing of women followed Soviet occupation. Enemy female populations, (Germans and Hungarians), may have been particular sexual targets for Russian troops, but allies such as Tito’s government in Yugoslavia also complained bitterly about outrages committed during the Red Army’s passage through their territory in pursuit of the Germans. The Russian conquest of Berlin was followed by generalized sexual assaults that most commanders did nothing to stop. Of course, the

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character of the war in Eastern Europe helps explain Soviet soldiers’ behavior. In Western Europe, save for a few well-known incidents, the Germans followed established rules of military conduct. In Eastern Europe, from the beginning, the Germans fought a war of slaughter and inhuman cruelty that disregarded all military conventions. As victory approached, many upper-level Russian spokesmen did not attempt to distinguish between the atrocities committed by the Axis military, secret police and SS, and the civilian population of the fascist states. Ilya Ehrenburg’s chants of hate for all things German reinforced Marshal Zhukov’s orders of January 1945 that proclaimed: “Woe to the land of the murders… We will get our terrible revenge for everything.”7 Soviet brutality doomed German Communists’ efforts to win the support of women, the majority of the adult civilian population, and contributed to their third-place showing in traditionally “Red Berlin” in key elections in October 1945. Although Soviet commanders finally reined in their troops, the outbreak of the Cold War ended the political restraint that had characterized Soviet and Communist politics up to mid-1947. In Eastern Europe, the new order was imposed by violence, most notoriously in the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Communist Parties backed by Soviet force overthrew left-wing coalitions and established party dictatorships that carried through programs of social reform, the nationalization of industry, and the collectivization of agriculture, creating what Churchill famously called an “Iron Curtain” separating the eastern and western halves of the continent. Despite Communist authoritarianism and more radical social policy, the shared consensus that laissez-faire economic policies had failed led governments in both East and West to pursue many similar policies. First and foremost, the postwar regimes allocated large portions of their budget to investment in order to promote economic growth. Governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain agreed that, above all, unemployment must be avoided. Western Europe’s commitment to investment was so heavy that bankruptcy threatened. Here lies the true importance of the American Marshall Plan; Western European governments were already committed to policies of economic growth, but Marshall aid sustained and facilitated their efforts to fiance it without further depressing living standards. The result was that the years between 1945 and 1970 witnessed a great period of accelerated industrial development in both the capitalist West and the communist East. In France and Italy as well as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the number of industrial workers expanded rapidly. While material prosperity and consumerism greatly enhanced the living standards of Western European workers, their Eastern European counterparts also shared in the new wealth. In the years between 1945 and 1974, the eastern regions were economically catching up with the west of Europe. In 1913, the per capita GNP of Eastern European nations was 57 percent of those in the West. By 1938, that figure had increased to only 61 percent, but by 1973, it had reached 82 percent.8 Even so, per capita GNP was a poor measure of consumer welfare, particularly in Eastern Europe where governments were better at constructing steel and chemical plants and producing tanks than at distributing consumer goods. A second key element of the postwar consensus concerned the need to incorporate working-class parties more fully into the political order and secure their support for centralized state intervention. The resurgent strength of these parties also made this a practical necessity After the Second World War, working-class parties, both socialists in Western Europe and communists in Eastern Europe, routinely became parties of

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government. Across the continent, trade unionists cooperated in promoting industrial growth. In Social Democratic Western Europe as in Communist Eastern Europe, the strike tended to die away.9 The newfound moderation of Western European socialist parties made incorporation feasible. Abandoning old divisions between reformists and revolutionaries, European socialist parties rallied to the idea of a “mixed economy” characterized by state planning alongside private enterprise. The Bad Godesberg meeting of 1959 is indicative; the German Social Democratic Party not only repudiated nationalization but also its traditional practices of referring to party members as “comrade” and automatically using the familiar form of address. Between 1944 and 1946, the moderation of Communist demands further helped consolidate the new order throughout the continent. Unlike after the First World War, militant workers did not dispute workplace decision-making with engineers or managers. In Western Europe, resistance movements nowhere posed a revolutionary threat. Forged in combat, often organized by Communists, these clandestine groups had been mobilized around themes of patriotism, social reform and national unity, and could not suddenly be converted to the class struggle. While Western European Communist parties increased their power in government and administration, they made no effort to rouse the masses to social revolution. In Eastern Europe, Stalin’s armies prevented workers’ committees from seizing control of industries as German troops and collaborating employers fled. Here revolution would be from the top down. A third result of the new political consensus established after the Second World War was the determination to address the problems of male workers and their dependents. Between 1945 and 1950, old age pensions and free medical care were extended to almost all industrial workers and their families, and this period witnessed the greatest expansion in the history of the European welfare state. In Britain the adoption of important features of the Beveridge Plan created vastly more egalitarian social assistance, and in France the rudiments of a modern social benefits system were created. In Eastern Europe, the 1950s witnessed a dramatic expansion of old age pensions to industrial workers, and in the 1960s most states adopted free medical care. The advances in welfare in Eastern Europe represented an impressive accomplishment; few if any Western European nations had enjoyed such comprehensive provisions at a comparable point in their industrial development. In many European countries, for the first time, workers no longer expected to work until they were physically unable. In fact, concerned to prevent the return of unemployment, some states made retirement mandatory (usually at age 65) if a worker was to receive full benefits. Although the amount and the terms of the plans differed in the 1950s throughout Western Europe, retirement benefits were extended to all long-term workers. During the 1960s, Eastern Europe finally extended benefits to agriculture. Although retirement plans were not notably generous, they did allow an increasingly large number of male workers to retire. In industrialized Western Europe somewhere around 50 to 60 percent of males aged sixty-five and over were economically active in 1930 while that number fell to roughly one-third by 1950.10 Worried about the interwar fertility decline and the wartime losses, welfare states were particularly concerned with stabilizing the male breadwinner and his working-class family. By and large, this focus was supported by the largely male trade unions as well as by social reformers determined to restore a nostalgic vision of the traditional

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working-class family. Benefits were tied to work and rewarded the perceived male attributes of high skill and continuous employment. Money came to wives and widows through their husbands and divorce threatened female entitlements. Subsidies for childbearing and the encouragement of large families in countries such as France and Romania reinforced the image of women’s social role as mothers whose natural sphere was the privacy of the home. West Germany’s subsidies to non-working wives made these assumptions explicit. Under the mad dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania went the furthest of any European country in the enforcement of family values: childless adults were forced to pay special taxes and adultery was made a crime punishable by imprisonment. A fourth aspect of the consensus was a partial but significant break with interwar protectionism. This was not solely due to changed conviction. The two new superpowers that emerged from the war imposed transnational economic unions in the European areas they controlled. In response, the Eastern and Western European nations formed attendant organizations to promote trade within their respective blocs. Western Europeans enjoyed considerable freedom of maneuver, resisted most American efforts to encourage free trade, and accepted only those expansionary measures deemed compatible with national sovereignty and national interests. The nucleus of European union—the European Coal and Steel Community—addressed a narrowed field of interest for each of the states involved and its responsiveness probably ensured its survival. Responding to American pressure, Western European states also joined the system of postwar international organizations and treaties, the World Bank and the GATT, which underwrote a new era of expanding trade. Eastern European states remained outside this new world order. Through Comecon the Soviet Union imposed a significant division of labor in Eastern Europe, but internal trade was relatively weakly developed when not subject to Soviet fiat. The consensus after the Second World War not only encouraged economic growth, incorporated working-class parties, expanded welfare states, and broke with protectionism, but also, as an intended result of these policies, promoted social equality. In Western Europe this equalizing trend can be seen both in Britain and in Sweden. In Britain the share of total household income of the top 1 percent of the population fell from 61 percent in 1923 to 23 percent in 1974, while in Sweden, it declined from 50 percent in 1920 to 21 percent in 1975.11 In Eastern Europe, the expropriation of industry and landholdings dramatically decreased social inequality, although a more modest social elite of managers, party leaders, and military men came into being whose income was higher than that of workers. In many cases, such as in housing, this disparity was increased by a state policy that allocated high-class housing and summer homes to these newly privileged. Still, the rapid industrialization policies pursued by every Eastern European state in the post-1945 period secured industrial workers’ high status along with an ideology stressing the “leading role of the industrial working classes.” Within Soviet factories, wage differentials narrowed significantly.12 Industrial expansion combined with the retirement of older workers created opportunities for underemployed peasants and for many agriculturalists who found urban life more rewarding and better paying. This exodus began the final stage in the millennial history of peasant Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, industrialization also introduced young peasants to factory life. Many East European governments undertook a more

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drastic solution to peasant poverty and attempted to collectivize agriculture. In some countries, such as Poland, reformists faced with the immensity of the task finally abandoned collectivization with the result that an impoverished peasant sector continued to survive. Growth also brought new problems; economic advance and European prejudices created a new marginal group: non-white workers and their families. Western European governments were so successful in stimulating employment that their economies soon suffered labor shortages and migrants were required to sustain economic expansion. This difficulty was in fact a transnational variation on the end of the peasantry. The great majority of industrial immigrants to European industries were peasants or landless laborers, first from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and later from the Maghreb and Turkey. Although largely unmentioned at the time, even in the 1940s and 1950s, European nations had pursued policies intended to discourage permanent migrants from different cultural or racial backgrounds. West Germany was explicit about its requirements. Only people of German background and culture could claim citizenship, including those fleeing East Germany and lands claimed by Poland as well as more distant relatives such as refugees from the old-established German minorities in Romania or the Soviet Union. All other migrants were labeled Gastarbeiter or “guest workers” and, while provision was made for protecting migrants from exploitation, their temporary status was insisted upon. The millions of Turks, for example, who underpinned Germany s postwar economic recovery by taking low-paid jobs shunned by German nationals, were essentially excluded from civic life despite the fact that many of them had lived in Germany for well over ten years. The most extreme case was 1980s’ Switzerland, which was rapidly becoming a state like Saudi Arabia or Qatar where immigrants performed the majority of wage labor. British and French impulses to limit migration along the lines of race and culture were not so different from those of the Germans, however, their continuing imperial ties complicated them. Attempting to restore empires shaken by world war, Britain and France emphasized the mutually beneficial character of imperial membership and the time-honored right of imperial citizens to enter the métropole. Here let us focus on the British Empire where in the case of nonwhite migrants the right to reside in the imperial homeland was only maintained so long as it was little used. As early as 1948 the voyage of the Empire Windrush, a ship containing Jamaican migrants, panicked the Labour government because it raised the prospect of non-white migrants establishing themselves permanently in Britain. Terror of non-white migration overcame the government’s fear of labor shortage. At a time when British officials were actively recruiting laborers from “first class people” who would be “of great benefit to our stock” in displaced person camps and among Italian coal miners, the government was using informal channels and a variety of pretexts to discourage migration from non-white colonies. Sir Harold Wiles, Deputy Permanent UnderSecretary at the Ministry of Labour, pronounced that the “early training and way of life” of “colored workers born abroad” “must make it more difficult for them to settle down with British born workers.”13 Britain’s efforts to develop de jure universalistic criteria that would de facto discriminate against non-white workers became even more confused when Ireland left the British Commonwealth in 1949 and declared itself a republic. Britain continued its policy of admitting migrants from the Irish Republic as full British citizens, with the right to vote and the right to welfare benefits, while the government was fashioning laws to exclude

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“Citizens of the UK and its Colonies”—generally non-whites—from setting foot in Britain. The Irish had finally become white—not that it increased British understanding of problems in Northern Ireland. French policy shared the same basic concerns as British but was further complicated by the status of Algeria, the great majority of whose inhabitants were disenfranchised second-class citizens, although the country was formally incorporated into France. In one of the worst cases of brutality, Parisian police killed some 150 Algerian demonstrators in 1961 and dumped their bodies in the Seine River. Just at the moment when mass migration of ethnic and religious minorities into European cities was first beginning, the exodus of Eastern Europe’s oldest ethnic and religious minority was nearly completed. Staggered by the enormity of the Holocaust, the remnants of Eastern European Jewry departed the continent. Many Jews who emerged from hiding or from camps did not wish to return to states that had provided inadequate protection or actively collaborated with the German occupiers. Just as disillusioning was the discovery that even the experience of the Holocaust had not extinguished anti-semitism. In 1946– 47, pogroms occurred as Jews returned to their Polish, Hungarian, and Slovakian homelands to reclaim homes and businesses. Between 1946 and 1951, clandestine emigration to Palestine, outwit ting British colonial authorities, offered the only hope for hundreds of thousands of traumatized survivors.

Tanks in Budapest, 5 November 1956 Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

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A man pulling a hand cart past tower blocks under construction in the Gorbals area of Glasgow Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

Workers from the Renault Car Company holding a meeting outside the Town Hall at Billancourt Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

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Harkis families at Marseilles awaiting departure to refugee camps, June 1962 Source: Photo: Pierre Domenech

Algerian repatriates await arrival in Marseilles, June 1962 Source: Photo: Pierre Domenech

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The Rolling Stones performing in West Berlin, 17 October 1965 Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

A Paris café, ca. 1967 Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

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On the Berlin Wall, 31 December 1989 Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images

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An Asian family outside their shop on the Camberwell Road, London Source: Hulton Archives by Getty Images For political leaders, both in the East and West, the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust had revealed the dangers of resurgent nationalism. Even in the best of circumstances, political leaders who believed in activist centralized states would have been disinclined to devote a lot of attention to ethnic minorities. But unlike after the First World War, the victorious allies had few obligations to national minorities and many

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grievances against them. The Nazi use of national minorities to undermine continental regimes had generally associated these minorities with fascism. Besides the notorious case of the Sudeten German nationalists, the Croatian nationalists in Yugoslavia, the Flemings in Belgium, the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, and the Hungarians in Romania had all forfeited Allied support by too close an association with the Third Reich. Even the generally left-wing Irish Republican Army had sought German guns and support. In a few extraordinary cases, techniques learned from the Nazis were used against these suspect nationalities. The Poles and the Czechs “solved” the German minority problem by driving hundred of thousands of Germans from reoccupied national territory and killing thousands more. Marginality since 1974: crisis of the postwar order Responding to the crisis of the interwar period, governments of state interventionist liberals, Catholic reformists, socialists and communists had concentrated on ending the marginalization of male industrial workers and their dependants. The full consequences of their policies only became clear in the post-1974 period. The reappearance of unemployment throughout Europe during the last quarter of the twentieth century was both symptom and cause of the erosion of support for state planning in East and West alike. Many contemporaries regarded the unusual severity of the recession that began in 1973 as a result of the sharp increase in oil prices imposed by Middle East oil states at the beginning of the Israeli—Egyptian War. In retrospect, the oil price increases coincided with the start of a new phase in the development of the European and world economies. In the decades after 1974, Western European industrial production increased more slowly than in the preceding thirty years; unemployment reached levels unprecedented in the post-1945 world and remained there. Worst affected were poorer nations that depended on exports to Western Europe or on Western European aid. Eastern Europe communist countries that had borrowed large sums of money in the expansive 1960s to fiance exports were particularly hard hit. Most were still struggling with that debt burden when they collapsed in 1989 The economic crisis that began in 1974 marked the grinding slowdown if not the halt of three decades of steadily increasing social equality. In Sweden the top 1 percent of the population held 17 percent of total household income in 1974, and 19.5 percent in 1983, while in Britain, the matching figure held steady at 23 percent in both periods. Pay disparities between unskilled and skilled workers increased almost everywhere in Western Europe, as did disparities among northern and southern European regions.14 Unemployment was heavily concentrated in the depressed rural areas along the Western European periphery and in the continent-wide rustbelt of declining steel mills and coal mines. In Eastern Europe, party bureaucrats, who had enjoyed comfortable privilege under communism so long as they held their jobs, expropriated public property and made themselves into a new proprietor class that was able to pass their vast wealth directly to their children. At the same time, Eastern European workers experienced mass unemployment. Although the collapse was sudden, the post-1945 settlement had been slowly undermined for years. Not long after the end of the Second World War, social Catholic

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parties abandoned their commitment to building welfare states and working with labor movements. Instead, internal conservative forces reasserted their control or prompted the disintegration of the Catholic political movement altogether. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution signaled the ongoing crisis within the Soviet Empire at precisely the same moment as the Suez Crisis completed the crumbling of British and French imperial influence in the Middle East. Reminiscent of the years after the First World War, the radical upsurge of the 1960s raised questions of workplace control in France and Italy and challenged the hierarchical character of state intervention. This in turn helped bring about the revival of neo-fascist groups in both countries. In Eastern Europe, bureaucratic centralized planning proved increasingly unable to raise living standards. However, efforts to introduce more flexible socialist planning were abandoned after Eastern European and Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. The retreat from market socialism in Czechoslovakia and soon after in Russia was the system’s last serious chance at reform. In Western Europe in the 1980s and in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the abandonment of commitment to full employment and its replacement by the free market commitment to price stability coincided with profound changes in both industry and the economy as a whole. Technological evolution no longer rewarded large plants and assembly lines. Traditional coal resources were exhausted or no longer loomed as significantly in industrial production. Between 1975 and 1996, the proportion of the working population employed in industry declined by almost 23 percent in Britain and Spain, and by around 30 percent in Sweden and France.15 In Western Europe, the persistence of unemployment despite increased government spending led resurgent free marketeers to argue that “stagflation” was due to prodigal spending by post-1945 welfare states and the political leverage of working-class parties. Their solution, adopted by parties as diverse as British conservatives and French socialists, was to trim welfare state costs, reduce trade barriers, and engage in global economic competition. But opening national markets to increased foreign trade on such an extensive scale cost European governments a significant amount of control over their own economies. In most European countries increased exposure to international markets resulted in higher unemployment in traditional heavy industries while it often benefited the more technologically advanced economic sectors. In 1963 unemployment rates in the European Union were 3 percent, while by 1994 joblessness had reached 11 percent.16 In good times, unemployment decreased, but in bad times, such as the deep recession of the 1980s, it soared. Even more troubling was that the unemployment level was higher at the end of each succeeding economic cycle. As in the interwar period, these developments undermined labor solidarity and tended to favor white-collar workers and some strata of skilled blue-collar workers at a time when the position of the mass of industrial workers was under attack. Although mass unemployment returned, the social consequences were not the same as in the interwar years. While union demands were restrained by international competition, male workers were not thrown into the streets. Despite cutbacks, welfare states protected adult males and families with male household heads. But the social policies that sheltered the native, white male members of the industrial working class from marginality exposed other groups to grim poverty and the social marginalization that inevitably results from sustained unemployment and growing despair. The resurgence of popular racism in the

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1980s and 1990s revealed new fault lines produced between white working-class citizenship and non-white working-class disenfranchisement. The 1990s equivalent of the 1930s male tramp was the unemployed adolescent of North African, Turkish or East Asian origin. During the 1970s economic recession, many European politicians responded to popular demand and imposed restrictions on new migration. Despite the repeatedly demonstrated fact that Europeans refused to accept many of the jobs in manual labor performed by migrants, a great wave of anti-migrant measures swept across Western Europe. This legislation produced unexpected results. Accelerating a trend already under way, migrant laborers who had established themselves in European countries began to send for their relatives in fear that family members would themselves soon be denied the right to migrate. Migrant children newly settled in Europe were at an educational disadvantage. They often found legal barriers to their employment and confronted ethnic prejudice. As a result, they swelled the ranks of the jobless and this spurred further anti-migration sentiments as politicians denounced their numbers in the welfare ranks. Within one lifetime, French migrants from the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa who in the 1960s had one of the highest labor force participation rates in Europe became in the 1990s a group with one of the lowest.17 The massive arrival of relatives joining migrant males in Europe also resulted in increased cultural conflict as these newly established families sought to rear children in their own religious and cultural traditions. For decades, Islam was invisible in France. Its believers occupied the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder, lived in marginalized public housing projects and practiced their faith in improvised prayer-halls. That situation began to change in the late 1980s, when it became obvious that the first-generation immigrants and their offspring would never return to their countries of origin. The growing presence of migrant children in public schools often resulted in lay-religious struggles that recalled prewar battles between Catholics and anti-clericals. The 1989 expulsion of three young women from a public high school in Créteil, in the suburbs of Paris, because they wished to wear veils, or chadors, is only one example. Years of deep-rooted racial segregation and grinding poverty in England’s Asian and black Caribbean communities have led to “parallel lives” of isolation, ignorance and fear. Cultural conflicts created a new climate of violence. Racial tensions and rioting periodically turned the cities of England into battlefields, from the 1958 riots in London between whites and West Indian blacks to the rampage by Asian youths in Bradford in 1995. A wave of fire bombings of Turkish mosques, travel agencies, and cultural centers hit Germany in March of 1995. The riot that attended the first soccer match between France and Algeria on October 16, 2001 surprised many by its ferocity. Booing the French anthem, a crowd composed of many French-born Muslims of Algerian descent showered bottles on two French ministers and finally occupied the field, forcing the cancellation of the match, when it became clear that Algeria would lose. Elsewhere in Europe, battles over food preparation, prayer breaks, and coeducational physical education courses have contributed to growing tension.18 The imperial legacy has further complicated the incorporation of many migrants into the political mainstream by creating a barrier of suspicion between migrants and political parties, both right and left, that supported imperial rule (see Chapter 2 on this issue).

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Anti-immigrant actions were not unique to the West and in the 1990s these sentiments were expressed openly throughout Eastern Europe. Turkish workers in Germany, gypsies in the Czech Republic, and North Africans in France were identified not only as foreigners but also as non-whites. Their exposed position as migrants was compounded by the spread of racist propaganda and the perpetration of racist attacks reminiscent of the interwar period. The position of migrant workers was particularly distressing because few possessed voting rights and could hope to redress their grievances through mainstream politics. The turn towards financial austerity, the expansion of international trade and the resulting increase in unemployment, the declining number of industrial workers and the weakening of labor movements all led European governing coalitions to attach less importance to the political incorporation of organized labor. In many Western European nations, by the turn of the century even socialist and labor parties were distancing themselves from the trade union movement. Tony Blair’s “New Labour” administration was proving more hostile to organized labor than any Labour government of the post1945 period, even refusing to revise Margaret Thatcher’s reactionary industrial relations legislation and limiting trade union influence within the party. At the same time, Western trade unions were shedding their communist affiliation. The formerly communistcontrolled French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), for example, no longer officially endorsed communist candidates at the national level. Trade unions retained more political influence in such bastions of organized labor strength as Sweden and Germany. But even in these cases, declining membership led to increased calls for socialist parties to reorient themselves towards the constituencies represented by singleinterest social movements such as those driven by feminists, ecologists or gay rights activists. In Eastern Europe, except for Poland, organized workers played a relatively minor role in the combination of reformist and revolutionary movements, so-called “refolutions,” that replaced the communist regimes. Increasingly, European leftist parties began to reorient their recruitment toward the single-issue movements that proved their success in demonstrations and mass actions. Ecology, feminist, and gay rights movements won victories in Western Europe because they represented new and growing constituencies. Let us look at feminism as an example of these new single-issue “identity” causes. The feminist movements that arose in the 1960s and 1970s combined a whole series of protests. Struggles to legalize abortion were almost everywhere important issues. The first victory of the Union of Italian Women was the successful campaign to introduce divorce, which was legalized in 1970. But as feminist movements expanded to include working-class women, demands increasingly centered on gender discrimination in the workplace and on social policy. Feminists protested not simply against employers but against trade unions’ policies and the welfare states that working-class parties had constructed. Across Europe, women were confined to specific sectors of the economy, often in occupations involving personal care and teaching. Their wages were generally inferior to men’s for similar work; and women were disproportionately confined to lower levels of paid unemployment and to insecure jobs. Feminist movements in Western Europe made progress in breaking down barriers and fighting for wage equality in the 1980s and 1990s, but results varied greatly from country to country. In part, this variation was due to the different position of women workers

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within national economies. Although women continued to have higher unemployment rates than men in every country of continental Europe, female activity rates were lowest in southern Europe where most women leave work once they have children.19 Outside southern Europe, German social policy rewarded women who stayed home to raise children and many areas of West Germany had relatively low labor participation by women in their childbearing years. At the close of the century, the variation among Western European countries was small compared to that between Eastern and Western Europe. In general, Eastern European communist regimes expected urban women to work for wages, but allowed little room for promotion and diverted female labor to relatively low-paying employment, particularly in the service and caring professions. Working women were still charged with maintaining primary responsibility for housework and childcare, responsibilities particularly onerous in economies with a relative scarcity of labor-saving appliances and a relatively undeveloped consumer sector. The contrast in labor force participation rates between a West German economy that encouraged women to stay at home to raise children and an East German economy that expected married women to work continued to be reflected in the employment patterns of united Germany. Feminist social movements have so far not taken deep root in Eastern Europe. While Eastern European women worked more continuously and in higher proportions than Western European women, they have shown less interest in workplace-centered grievances. Their experience under communism made many Eastern European women suspicious of feminist rhetoric while the continued weakness of independent trade unionism denied them an effective forum for their concerns. The break-up of established parties in both Western and Eastern Europe and the waning of trade unions created opportunities for previously marginalized groups to mobilize. Starting with the radical protests of the late 1960s and 1970s and then hitting full stride with the collapse of the Soviet Eastern European empire after 1989, national minorities that had been largely quiescent in the 1950s and 1960s made their presence felt. In Western Europe, the growth of the European Union with its promise of European entitlements and encouragement of internal mobility made membership in a particular state less valuable for many minority groups. The hasty compromises combined with repression that had quieted regional nationalists in the wake of the Second World War collapsed. Causes dormant since the interwar years, from Basque and Catalan separatism in Spain, Irish republicanism in Ulster, to demands for autonomy from Flemings in Belgium and Germans in Italy’s South Tyrol, all reappeared. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the rise of newly independent Eastern European states created fresh opportunities for ethnic nationalists to assert themselves amid the inevitable conflicts between old elites and new challengers. In 1989, new nations such as Moldavia, Estonia, and Latvia reported ethnic minority populations between 36 and 48 percent. In many of these former Soviet client territories, nationalist hostility towards Russian minorities posed potentially serious international problems. The abandonment of the commitment to full employment as well as the growing marginalization of organized labor in both Western and Eastern Europe marked the end of the post-Second World War period. The rise of new single-issue, identity and ethnic politics represented a distinctive feature of the late twentieth century. Both recent groups on the European political stage, such as refugees and migrants, and once significant

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political contenders, such as trade unionists, were being marginalized. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 seems to have been partly a response to the marginalization of migrants. Young Middle Eastern immigrants apparently planned the attack in Europe, and preliminary reports suggested that several of the planners had joined militant fundamentalist groups during their residence in Europe. While they targeted the United States, many of their grievances originated in their experiences of the European continent, which itself clearly remained another potential terrorist objective. At the same time that new groups were being marginalized, traditionally marginalized groups such as ethnic nationalists and new feminists opposed to the gendered character of the post-1945 welfare state were mobilizing to win political rights. Here it is important to remember that resistance to marginalization is not the only source of violence; the mobilization of ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia produced the largest outbreaks of mass killing in Europe since the Second World War. The identity and boundaries of Europe’s social margins have thus shifted significantly over the past fifty years, but the story is not one of progressive inclusion. Exclusion remains as central as inclusion to this story as the process of marginalization and mobilization continues. Further reading An important survey and reconsideration of the grand themes of Cold War historiography are provided by A.Hunter (ed.), Rethinking the Cold War, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1998. For an extremely well-chosen collection on the settling of accounts with collaborationists in the immediate postwar period, I.Deák, see J.T.Gross and T.Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000. European consciences are still tender on this subject: see H.Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1991. Excellent material can also be found in B.Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997. For Eastern Europe, the opening up of communist archives is transforming our knowledge of the post-Second World War period. On the installation of communist regimes in Eastern Europe: N.M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Qccupation, 1945–1949, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1995; N.M.Naimark and L.Gibianskii (eds), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997. A superb case study of class formation in Eastern Europe is P.Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1949–1950, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997. On the self-image of communist states, A.L.Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1999. The recently translated study by E.Zubkova summarizes recent Soviet scholarship on Stalin’s final years: Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, Armonk, NY, M.E.Sharpe, 1998. On the causes of communist decline and collapse D.Lane, The Rise and Fall of

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State Socialism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996: and K.Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996. For Western Europe, the post-Second World War period has only recently gained legitimacy as a field for historical investigation and the exploding work of historians needs to be supplemented by that of sociologists and political scientists. For Western European labor, H.Compston (ed.), The New Politics of Unemployment: Radical Policy Initiatives in Western Europe, London, Routledge, 1997; R.Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; H.Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994; S.Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, Protest and Politics in Italy 1965–1975, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989; and B. Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1997. Appraising the plight of contemporary labor, A.Martin and G.Ross (eds), The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium, New York, Berghahn, 1999, and F.Fox Piven, Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. On the development of the welfare state, see P.Flora and A.J.Heidenheimer, The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Books, 1987; G.Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990; and J.Klausen, War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1998. For social and gender politics in West Germany, see R.G.Moeller (ed.), West Germany Under Construction: Politics, Society and Culture in the Adenauer Era, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1997, and E.Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1997. For the French case, R.Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1993 is also good. On the issue of citizenship in the drive towards European Union, see A.Wiener, “European” Citizenship Practice: Building Institutions of a Non-State, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1998. On migrant labor in Western Europe, see D. Cesarani and M.Fulbrook, Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, London, Routledge, 1996; A.G.Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, London, Routledge, 1995; J.F.Hollifield, Immigrants, Markets, and States: The Political Economy of Postwar Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992; N. Harris, The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker, London, I.B. Tauris, 1995; G.Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; K.Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997; and Y. Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. On the revival of nationalist movements in Europe, East and West, see R.Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; B.Jenkins and S.A.Sofos (eds), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe, London, Routledge, 1996; and A.J.Motyl (ed.), Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study

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of the USSR, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992. For a provocative interpretation of the “new nationalism,” see M.Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999. For a variety of opinions on one nationalist movement, see B.Purdie, Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1990; J.Ruane and J.Todd, The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emacipation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; and R.Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1997. On recent social movements, see M.G.Giugni, D.McAdam and C.Tilly (eds), From Contention to Democracy, New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998; H.Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995; and A.Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Notes 1 M.Jahoda, P.Lazarsfeld and H.Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociology of an Ummployed Community, Chicago, Aldine, 1971 [1933], p. 53. 2 J.Macnicol, The Movement for Family Allowances, 1918–1945: A Study in Social Policy Development, London, Heinemann, 1980, p. 50. 3 L.Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945, Oxford, Berg, 1997, p. 9. 4 M. Hauner, “Human Resources,” in M.C.Kaser and E.A.Radice (eds), The Economic History of Eastern Europe: 1919–1975, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, vol. 1, p. 88. 5 I.T.Berend, “Agriculture,” in The Economic History of Eastern Europe, vol. 1, p. 185. 6 T.Buchanan and M.Conway (eds), Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996. 7 N.M.Neimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1995, p. 72. 8 I.T.Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 188. 9 E.M.Kassalow, Trade Unions and Industrial Relations: An International Comparison, New York, Random House, 1969. 10 S.L.Wolfbein and E.W.Burgess, “Employment and Retirement,” in Ernest W.Burgess (ed.), Aging in Western Societies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 54–75, 66. 11 E.N.Wolff, “The Distribution of Household Wealth: Methodological Issues, Time Trends and Cross-Sectional Comparisons,” in L.Osberg (ed.), Economic Inequality and Poverty: International Perspectives, Armonk, NY, M.E.Sharpe, 1991, pp. 92–134, 129. 12 Naimark, The Russians in Germany, pp. 200–2. 13 K.Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 125. 14 A. Wood, North—South Trade Employment and Inequality: Changing Fortunes in a SkillDriven World, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 462. 15 G.Ross and A.Martin, “European Unions Face the Millennium,” in A.Martin and G.Ross (eds), The Brave New World of European Labor: European Trade Unions at the Millennium, New York, Berghahn, 1999, pp. 1–25, 18–19.

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16 R.Martin, “Regional Dimensions of Europe’s Unemployment Crisis,” in P.Lawless, R.Martin and S.Hardy (eds), Unemployment and Social Exclusion: Landscapes of Labour Inequality, London, Regional Studies Association, 1988, pp. 10–48, 13–14. 17 A.D.Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 40–1. 18 “In Suburban Squalor, Echoes of Jihad,” The New York Times, October 16, 2001. 19 D.Perrons, “Gender as a Form of Social Exclusion: Gender Inequality in the Regions of Europe,” in Lawless et al. (eds), Unemployment and Social Exclusion, pp. 154–81, 169.

6 European mass culture in the media age Rosemary Wakeman When Europe celebrated its liberation from Nazi dictatorship and the war’s end in 1945, it was young people who spilled out into the city streets in an outpouring of emotion after the horrible years of war. In London and Paris, young men and women linked arms, sang and marched, snaked through the streets in rumba lines, be-bopped, jitterbugged, and greeted Allied soldiers in a spontaneous explosion of freedom. It is conventional to understand youth culture partly as a rebellion against the unbending atmosphere of the 1950s and partly as an invention of consumer capitalism. There is no doubt that those origins were significant. But the first appearance of European “youth” as a social category capable of creative action was during the war and Liberation. Even the wartime resistance, from Germany’s Edelweiss Pirates and the French maquis to Ukrainian partisans, was in part a youth movement. The older generation, its values and politics, were bankrupt. Traditional class distinctions were broken down. The war was an experience of anonymity, uniformity, mass production, mass migration, and mass death. The future belonged to the young, who learned rebellion, anti-conformity, and their capacity for substituting and appropriating “found objects” as their own amid the ravages of war. Living within this collective experience, yet avoiding its facelessness and boredom through the assertion of individuality became the hallmarks of postwar youth culture. In liberated France, the “J3s”, as they were often called after the name of the food ration category for 15- to 21-year-olds, sported crew cuts and khaki uniforms in emulation of American GIs. They zipped along the streets on roller-skates once the curfews were lifted. Young German jazz fans in roll-neck sweaters and striped socks founded “Hot Clubs” and consumed pulp gangster and western novels amid the chaos and occupation that followed the defeat. French beats, decked out in black, jammed in Paris. These were the roots of contemporary mass culture, the everyday practices heavily influenced by the war and Liberation, by Americanization, and staged by the young people of Europe as the formula for their own identity. Youth was a metaphor for social change. It was a public sign of the shifting categories of memory, community, and social category. If youth distinguished mass culture, so did commodification and the absorption with lifestyle. Mass culture was carried on radio and television waves, on celluloid film and vinyl records to audiences of millions who absorbed the same images, shared the same values, and collectively engaged with the same cultural icons and issues. European high culture struggled for survival. Older cultural ideals, passed on through identification with social class and family, were diffused. In their place, consumer capitalism produced and marketed collective desires that perpetually reinvented themselves and became a universalized set of signs, a language of value explicitly associated with the

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contemporary age. But if the promotional strategies came from corporate boardrooms, the creative core came from quotidian invention. Local culture was remade. The “street,” in this sense the populist culture of everyday urban life, became the vital laboratory for the spellbinding twists and turns of mass cultural imagery and practice. Beginning with this youth culture that emerged in the 1950s, this chapter focuses on the development of mass culture and its impact on Europe. The relationship between the new autonomous stratum of youth and working-class culture, or for that matter ethnic culture, is complex. The early postwar years saw the development of a confident, prosperous working class based on urban life, full employment, and the social partnership negotiated with postwar capitalism. There was more disposable wealth than ever before. Even though prices rose almost constantly after the war, average real wages rose ahead of them through the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe. Even in Britain, where economic performance fell behind that of the continent, average weekly earnings more than doubled between 1950 and 1961, while retail prices advanced by only about 50 percent. Increased social services such as free medical care and pensions, education, subsidized public housing and transportation helped create a degree of security and comfort for broad ranges of working people that had never been known before. With it came a new respectability. Beginning in the mid-1950s, young working-class families took up residence in the vast public housing estates built from the rubble in Europe’s cities and suburbs. Despite the jolting character of modernist architecture in block public housing projects such as Sarcelles outside Paris or Loughborough Estate in London, for many families they were initially a revelation compared to the wretched lodging houses and rundown flats of the old city districts. The new one- and two-bedroom apartments equipped with up-to-date kitchens and bathrooms, electricity and gas heating transformed everyday life. Equipment widely used in North America before the war now became available in Western Europe. The middle classes and a large part of the working classes acquired a variety of consumer durables such as televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators. Visits to such popular events as the Salon des Arts Ménagers in Paris revealed a cornucopia of consumer objects and domestic technologies. Newspapers and magazines such as Woman’s Own in Britain and France’s Elle featured sleek advertisements for the newest cleansers, appliances, furniture, and cosmetics. The Braun Company offered a range of domestic appliances as the signature of the modern West German lifestyle. Purchasing a first television set was planned around important family celebrations. The “art of living” well and comfortably became the shared aspiration of millions of working families who followed the dream of trouble-free consumption. Access to an automobile was a central feature in this vision of domestic bliss. Cars such as the VW Beetle, the Renault 4CV, British Leyland’s Mini, and the Fiat 500 became emblematic symbols of a new-found affluence and freedom. For war-weary Europeans tired of poverty and rations, these were the new measures of quality of life. Sociologists Richard Hoggart in England and Pierre-Henri Chombart de Lauwe in France argued that the rich pattern of everyday working-class life was being destroyed by exile in the concrete slabs of suburbia. In Britain, Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell quipped that the strength of Labour had been sapped by “a new way of life based on the telly, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazine.”1 But it was difficult to argue with material comfort and prosperity. The pattern of convergence around a broad new range of accepted cultural norms was

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accelerated by the prosperity of the golden age. The working classes had finally achieved some status. Rock music and the teen revolution Yet adult workers were not the pacesetters in new values and life-style choices. Young people stood out as the main agents of change. Full employment and high wages boosted opportunities for young workers in their late teens and early twenties even in unskilled jobs. More importantly, free public education was a powerful force for cultural convergence for the bumper crop of children who grew up in the 1950s. Education was a unique rite of passage, a collective experience shared by increasing numbers of Europe’s adolescents and young adults that would determine their values outside the traditional influences of family, church, and class. Educational opportunity had been expanding in Europe since the late nineteenth century, but the numbers enrolled beyond primary school were still small on the eve of the Second World War and education remained the domain of the privileged elites. The 1944 Education Act in England and the 1947 Langevin— Wallon Report in France opened the way to secondary education for everyone, although the schools were notoriously divided between classical and technical tracks. Although West Germany did not introduce any major postwar reforms, it maintained a school system close to those in England and France. Only Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark introduced comprehensive institutions for all students. Regardless of how they were organized, education became the fastest growing item in Western European budgets. Governments subsidized higher education because high skills were crucial to the great task of modernization and economic development. Looking primarily at secondary schools, Italy and France were the countries where the educational system expanded most rapidly, doubling to around 2.5 million students in each case from 1951 to 1961. Most East European countries underwent an educational revolution after the Second World War and offered schooling free of charge at all levels. Almost everywhere, between a third and a half of the 10–19 age-group attended a secondary school by the mid-1970s. The democratization of the university systems and the building of new vocational schools opened further avenues for cultural convergence and social mobility. University enrollment in France more than tripled in fifteen years after 1950, West German enrollment almost tripled, and Italian enrollment more than doubled. While in 1950, only 3–5 percent of the 20–24 age group were attending universities in Western Europe, by 1965 their numbers had increased to between 8 and 15 percent, and by 1978, some 24 percent were registered. In the most advanced countries of Eastern Europe, 50–60 percent of this generation was enrolled in some form of higher education. Many of these new students were young women who took their first strides toward independence and professional mobility. The average proportion of female students to male students in higher education nearly doubled in Western Europe to 39 percent by 1975, while in Eastern Europe women made up 48 percent of students.2 The experience of mass schooling showed that children of higher income families performed better than children of workers or peasants. This educational disparity was further accentuated by university admissions. Even if mass schooling opened new possibilities for women, social mobility was still limited. But acculturation around a shared set of youthful values was not.

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The term “teenager” was invented in America, imported into Britain by the late 1950s and applied by sociological studies and the popular press to the “submerged tenth” of working-class youth whose image and music seemed eccentric and unwholesome, that is to say Americanized. The term reified adolescence as a cultural and social category. Teenagers heralded the arrival of a commodity culture and a classless consumer society. They poured surplus cash into clothes, cosmetics, music, and inspired a cornucopia of commercial leisure products, boutiques, record shops, discotheques, television programs, and magazines. Teenagers and young married couples were the main agents in establishing new standards of taste and patterns of consumption in Europe. They signified both an affluent avant-garde and a slavish consumerism: the best and worst aspects of the high living standards enjoyed during the “golden age.” They exuded effortless economic power and yet embodied a “delinquent” social element. The distinction between traditionally “respectable” and “criminal” social classes was transmuted into a distinction between “conformist” and “nonconformist” youth.3 A subculture of young people emerged in skiffle and beat clubs, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll basements hidden away in working-class districts and towns. The English teddy boys, dressed as Edwardian desperados and captivated by American films and music, became synonymous with hooliganism. They terrorized South London in 1956 after the film opening of Bill Haley and the Comets’ Rock Around the Clock when hundreds gathered to dance and chant “Mambo Rock” on Tower Bridge, blocking all traffic. During the “rubble years” in divided Germany an underground alternative music scene led by jazz fans devoured swinging, evocative melodies such as “Don’t Fence Me In.” Young German workers appropriated the Wild West outlaw image of American films and were disparaged for their excesses and blatant Ameri-Kultur. France s blousons noirs and Italy’s vitelloni, sporting long hair, black leather jackets and cowboy boots, broke up theaters after rock concerts. By the mid-1950s, American movie icons such as James Dean and Marlon Brando epitomized the sultry young rebel without a cause, drifting outside the margins of consensus and respectability. With slicked-back bouffant hairstyles, sunglasses and jeans, the “male rebels” were the new standard of cool and a barometer of social unease. They were the symbolic expression of dissent. Disturbances and riots by young gangs of bikers became standard fare after concerts and films in West Germany from 1955 to 1958. The countless versions of Marlon Brando’s wild image became a public menace.4 The anxieties and condemnation of this anti-conformist behavior settled around a single source: Americanization. The first direct contact with American popular culture for most Europeans occurred during the war through American GIs. The American serviceman with his dollars and chewing gum, listening to jazz, buying favors with candy and cigarettes became a familiar stereotype. The image of the GI or kak was converted into a “folk devil,” an internal enemy and the focus of popular resentment. After the war, Europe’s decline as a world power, coupled with the growing reliance on American wealth and international prestige, exacerbated the hostility. West Germany, for example, experienced an unprecedented influx of American goods after 1945, from nylon stockings to popular music. Until the construction of the Wall in August 1961, a constant stream of teenagers flowed back and forth between East and West Berlin. The western sector of the city was a mecca of jazz and Big Beat clubs, movie houses featuring American films such as Marlon Brando’s The Wild One and Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender, and shops with

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“boogie-woogie shoes,” jeans, leather jackets, and records. American popular culture provided models of dress and behavior for young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Young people in Budapest and Warsaw came together to listen and dance to rock ‘n’ roll, smoke American cigarettes, and paid small fortunes for Western rock albums and American blue jeans. Initially authorities in both East and West Germany, and in the Communist bloc in general, condemned American culture for its uncontrolled sexuality, African-American imagery, and blatant consumerism, and linked it to fascism. But by the second half of the 1950s, West Germany increasingly accommodated the consumption of American popular culture as a vision of democratic capitalism transmittable to its own citizens, while communist state authorities continued to attack and repress it. The lines of the Cold War had been drawn. The American military presence in West Germany, which reached over 400,000 personnel by 1960, attempted to make one half of the former Third Reich into a replica of the United States. Germans were employed on US military bases and were introduced to English there and in school. Alongside the Marshall Plan, a huge cultural program was developed that included educational and journalism consultants, theater performances as well as vast quotas of American films and consumer products. In 1958, American film classics Gone With the Wind and Rear Window were part of an “All Berlin Cultural Program” that offered Western tastes as the best antidote to communism.5 American culture was largely accepted in West Germany as a replacement for a discredited Nazi culture and in Italy as a part of modernization. In France, the campaign for the American way of life and the sale of such icons as Coca-Cola and the Hollywood film ran into stiff resistance. By law, French radio was required to play a minimum of 40 percent French music. In general, however, American consumer culture and high living standards were immensely seductive on both sides of the Iron Curtain, especially for young Europeans in their teens and twenties searching to distinguish their identity from the war and their parents’ uneasy past. Beyond official policy, it was virtually impossible to repress the gyrating rhythms of American rock ‘n’ roll, especially when performed by a hip-swinging Elvis Presley. What was new about rock ‘n’ roll was not its black rhythm and blues origins nor its rebellious style—that was already present in the jazz of the 1920s—but its role in the mass media and the new worlds of personal leisure and consumption. The development of long-play and 45 rpm records as well as the transistor radio during the 1950s made popular music a personal as well as a group experience shared by millions of adolescents across class and national boundaries. Despite its condemnation by official policy, parents and taste experts, rock was a sophisticated commercial product. Big American stars such as Elvis Presley reached their audiences through radio and records, magazines, films, and carefully arranged television and stage performances. Bill Haley and his Comets were met by thousands of hysterical fans during their European concert tour in 1958. Their Leipzig concert was the official invasion of rock music into East Germany. Presley’s West German record company Teldec marketed no fewer than thirteen Presley singles under the RCA label in late 1956. If rock began as defiant, it quickly transfigured into the twentieth-century’s most influential formula for commodification and mass communication. Rock was the anthem of mass culture and mass movements. The music, the wild dancing and unruly behavior were all associated with the disreputable culture of the

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urban working classes and the shocking influence of America on European youth. But it was exactly its revolutionary, subversive quality that made it alluring—to say nothing of the fact that the feverish beat could be appropriated in untold ways and copied on to cheap recording tape for distribution. Transistor radios were tuned to pirate stations such as Radio Caroline that filled London’s airwaves with the new music by the early sixties. In places like Gdansk, where trade and tourism kept young people attuned to the latest Western fads, in West Berlin and Budapest, imitation Elvis Presleys and Little Richards flourished in the local clubs. The best of them, like Hungary’s Big Four bands, became local stars distributed and sold on record labels like Hungaroton. Despite every effort to suppress the twist craze, the Czech state recording company Suprahon relented with a smash hit album of domestic twist songs.6 British record companies such as Decca and EMI scoured Liverpool for vocal talent and competed feverishly with the big American labels for the British market. By the early 1960s, the “British invasion” had reached the continent as well as the United States. It established the hegemony of both youth-inspired British pop culture and the English language. The Beatles played for peanuts in clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg before going on the radio and achieving their first national hit, “Love Me Do,” in 1962. EMI’s commercial blitz of the Beatles in 1963, followed by their US tour in 1964 and then the two films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) established Beatlemania on a world scale. The Fab Four became an international phenomenon. For millions of people, their music was the backdrop of everyday life. They were a symbol of youthful struggle against a moribund older generation and led a string of British pop groups, from the Rolling Stones to Dusty Springfield and the Kinks, as the heroes of the age. Hundreds of amateur Beatles bands laid waste on their guitars and sound systems, wailing indecipherable English lyrics into their microphones to the delight of screaming fans. The British invasion re-exported pop culture back to the United States and introduced a new American generation to their own blues heritage. Live performances as well as radio and television were essential mass media for spreading the pop youth subculture of the sixties. The immensely popular British television show Ready, Steady, Go!, which began broad-casting in 1963, featured young Mod couples dancing to the latest music and appearances by such bands as the Rolling Stones. Daniel Filipacchi introduced Salut les Copains in France, first as a radio program on Europe 1 in 1959, and then as a teen magazine. The print run reached one million within a year. The official start of French rock was the mass concert at the Place de la Nation in Paris in 1963. Organized by Filipacchi as a media bash for Salut les Copains, Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan belted out the Gallic variation on rock. In Italy, magazines such as Ciao Amici promoted rock to Italian teenagers who, despite Italian urlatori (or “yellers”) such as Domenico Modugno and Adriano Celentano, remained slower to accept the new music. In Eastern Europe, rock music programs on Radio Free Europe and Radio Luxembourg, and radio programs such as For Youth Only in Hungary, broadcast Western rock ‘n’ roll. The swinging sixties Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of the 1960s was the triumph of cultural forms that no longer originated from European educated elites, but instead reverberated

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outward from this youth culture and overrode all class and national barriers. It was a cultural revolution without parallel and without frontiers. By the time the postwar baby boomers came of age in the early 1960s, their morals, styles, and ways of living dominated the media and mass communication. Teenagers and young married couples set the standards for affluent society. From the motorbikes, transistor radios and 45 rpm record players of the early youth subcultures to the trendy fashions, graphics, furniture and lifestyle accessories of the pop sixties, they demanded artifacts that provided them with generational “identity.” Although the hedonism and permissiveness appeared threatening, as a cultural revolution the 1960s were a radical adaptation to affluence and consumer society. The reaction to the new cultural standards varied across Europe, but the general trend was a democratization of culture and a liberation of ordinary lives from the strict confines of tradition. Bourgeois frugality and delayed gratification were upended. Family values became more democratic. There was an indirect working classness embedded in this liberation. Yet class boundaries seemed to dissolve in a new set of gender and generational categories and in the absorption with individuality. The social consensus achieved immediately after the Second World War was rooted in a nostalgic, paternalistic vision of traditional family values. The war had actually strengthened the position of women. In France (1944), Belgium (1948), Italy (1946), and Greece (1952), women finally gained the right to vote on the same terms as men. Nonetheless, anxieties about jobs for returning soldiers, the wartime losses and low fertility rates reinforced women’s place in the home and as mothers. This vision rapidly crumbled in the face of the media and mass culture. It was not just the male pop stars who symbolized rebellion, but the adoring, screaming young female fans who mobbed them in fits of uncontrolled “orgiastic hysteria” as Der Spiegel described the effect Elvis had on teenage girls.7 Magazines marketed directly at teenage girls stressed clothes, make-up, and boys. The West German teen magazine Bravo, for example, heightened the desires of consumer capitalism by offering adolescent femininity to the lucrative market of “Bravo girls” between the ages of twelve and twenty-four.8 Fashion, films, pop music and dance provided the springboard for a veritable cultural revolution among women. They were a subversive escape from traditional roles and a very public assertion of new ones. Beginning in Britain during the 1960s and then moving slowly through the continent in the 1970s and 1980s, the women’s movement and feminism created entirely new, modern gender identities. Simone de Beauvoir’s early The Second Sex (published in 1949, the first English edition appeared in 1953) argued that women’s roles are not determined by biology but are imposed on them by society. The arrival of modern contraception with the “pill,” which was invented in 1952 and became widely available in Europe by the mid-1960s despite its ban by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, launched a new era of sexual freedom, as did new attitudes toward abortion. Britain’s “civilized society” legislation of 1967–70 provided for legal abortion and freely available contraception, and laid down reformed principles of legal divorce as well as new provisions for equal pay. Even in Catholic countries where these were fraught issues, the women’s movement helped establish the right to divorce in Italy and the right to abortion in both Italy and France in the 1970s. In 1971, over 300 of France’s most prominent women signed a manifesto published in Le Nouvel Observateur admitting that they had had abortions and advocating free abortions on demand.9

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Women functioned in new public roles as the symbols, creators, and consumers of mass culture. The raw material of Pop Art was drawn from openly sexual themes that focused on the body, especially the female body, as an object of desire. Sex was a lever of subversion against the old order. Whether it was teenagers screaming for the Beatles, the dream figures of stars such as Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, wafer-thin Twiggy, or Christine Keeler photographed nude, sex was spectacle. By 1974, the soft-porn Emmanuelle was one of the biggest film box-office attractions. The “liberated woman” was caught in an impossible dilemma. The daily narrative of female existence proposed by the mass media was shopping, housekeeping, and fashion. Sexual liberation had broken down the tyranny of constraint, but left women as stars in a “phallocratic sexual culture,” in the words of Italian feminist Carla Lonzi. As participant in the carnival, each woman enjoyed the very masquerade that signified her own subjection and became what Germaine Greer called The Female Eunuch in her ground-breaking book first published in 1970. A sharpening of feminist consciousness was stimulated by the student activitism of the 1960s and the radical women’s movement in America. Women’s marches and rallies were held. A fluoride bomb exploded at the Miss World competition in 1970 in London. Millions of television viewers watched as radical feminists threw flour, smoke bombs and stink bombs at the stage while comedian Bob Hope attempted to salvage the situation.10 In France, féminisme was a moderate movement riddled with cerebral Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations, while in Italy radical feminists confronted Catholic prudery. Beauty itself became a mass phenomenon with the spread of the miniskirt, T-shirt, and jeans. Although Paris had occupied a position of unrivalled authority over the elite fashion industry, by the mid-1960s the beautiful people of Swinging London were the trend-setting vanguard, best captured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up. Their source of inspiration was the everyday life of the “street,” along Carnaby Street, among the Mods, the art student scene, and the gay clothing boutiques. Designer versions of working-class male street style became chic. The street look expressed a playful détournement and the joy of consumerism as the old, rigid hierarchies of deference and the stifling sexual puritanism of the postwar years began to dissolve. Simple shift dresses and pant suits, waif-like bodies and the straight hairdo replaced the over-sculpted female image of the 1950s. Mary Quant described her fashions as “mod” and classless, pop fashions in an age of pop music and Pop Art. It was a youthful rebellion associated with a “permissive society” and the breakdown of social constraint and traditional family values. The disjuncture and shock value of the London scene functioned both to revolutionize the avant-garde and as a vehicle for mass consumption. The staging of “happenings” and “spontaneous actions,” many of them based on a display of nudity and sexuality, became a widespread phenomenon in the capitals of Europe. A hedonistic hippy culture spread to Amsterdam, which became the European San Francisco. There, and in Copenhagen, youth culture was less pop and more utopian, branching into sex and drugs on the one hand and green—urban politics on the other. Fashion, music, language, the body itself became sites for personal exploration and inventiveness. The psychedelic designs of the rebel rock and drug counter-culture became mass-produced glamour. As mass audiences became increasingly exposed to the collective impact of the commercial media, the image-makers themselves emerged as key players. Models such as Twiggy, fashion designers Mary Quant and Yves Saint Laurent, and artist Andy Warhol were integral to

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the mythologies they were creating in the fluid network of mass marketing and artistic communication. They plugged into a commercial coding of hip and cool in which television, advertising, magazines and popular music constructed, according to semiologist Jean Baudrillard, a seamless hyper-reality of consumerism. Shopping became a performance. By the mid-1960s, the concept of design as a commodity that added value to consumer objects produced vividly colored bold, modern forms that asserted alternative values and taste in domestic products. In 1964, British retailer Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store, its furnishings and household goods appealing to young, educated, fashionconscious consumers. Modern Scandinavian design, Italian furniture by Giò Ponti, Fila sportswear, Fellini films became the emblem of the super-cool. The image of the 1960s went beyond youth and consumerism to become an icon in itself, reproduced mechanically as a signifier of freedom and the unrestrained imagination let loose in an explosion of high voltage energy and creativity. It was an ideology of affirmation and an art of commercial packaging. The Beatles’ 1967 albums Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour merged poetry and song, graphic art, instrumentation and music engineering into masterpieces of pop. The 1960s were both a product of and a reaction to the mesmerizing spectacle of mass culture and consumerism. The rebellion of youth and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s were inexhaustible in content and by 1967–68 they were politically subversive. The Parisian enragés were perhaps the most politically idealistic and influential of the 1968 movements. Protests in Italian universities and factories, in West Germany, England, Northern Ireland, and Eastern Europe exposed the geographic extent of the shared generational ethos. Its cultural and even its consumer power were uncontestable. Brandishing the leftist swords of everyone from Lenin and Mao to Herbert Marcuse and Che Guevara, protesting against police brutality, the military-industrial complex, and the Vietnam War, students marched out into the streets to test their political strength. The widespread movement of student activism struck a diagonal across the Cold War. It harassed the capitalist West and the Communist East alike. The Vietnam conflict was the first televised war, coinciding with the first color transmissions and the first satellite links with Asia. “The whole world is watching” became a well-known war protest slogan. Particularly in Eastern Europe, where young people lacked high-quality capitalist consumerism, rock culture was a political medium and an obsession that outrivaled its impact on Western Europe. Consumerism came later to the East. The standard of living rose more slowly. Refrigerators, washing machines, and televisions were just being introduced in the early 1960s. Buyers waited years for an East German Trabant car. “Rough music,” as it was known, was the oppositional voice against the dreary malaise of deficiencies and communist repression. Despite censorship and restrictive state cultural policies, thousands of rock groups and rock clubs were the breeding grounds for political dissent. Music festivals, western-style “happenings,” drugs and free love were anti-party, anti-state, and anti-police. The Rolling Stones’ Warsaw concert in 1967, for example, turned explosive when security forces were sent in against the rioting, semi-hysterical crowds. By the spring of 1968, the frenetic rock scene in Prague was emblematic of the brief public freedom found during Alexander Dubcek’s liberalization. When the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, it was the long-haired hippies and rock hooligans who took to the streets in massive protest. Despite the immediate

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crackdown, young people in Eastern Europe were entranced with the expression of freedom they found in Western music. Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, and the Sex Pistols were mythic figures. John Lennon in particular served as inspiration to an entire generation, who adopted his “Give Peace a Chance” as well as Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” as their political anthems. The emergence of this deeply politicized rock counterculture was directly connected with the growing decay of communism. At semiillegal concerts in Hungary, musicians lashed out at the state and official media while their fans rampaged. One of the best-known rock groups in Eastern Europe, the Czech psychedelic Plastic People of the Universe, were put on trial and suppressed in 1976 for their outspoken lyrics. The “Battle of the Rock Groups” waged in Berlin in 1988, with Michael Jackson in a media-saturated performance on the westernside of the Berlin Wall and an array of Western and GDR rock groups on the easternside, graphically illustrated the politicization of the music scene. Rock artists in East Germany were among the first to take up the challenge against the Honecker government in 1989 through public declarations at their concerts, street demonstrations, and adherence to New Forum.11 Media Europe As the 1968 protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 made clear, the mightiest medium for mass culture was television. It was still a novelty in European countries in the early 1950s. The BBC’s service had been inaugurated between 1936 and 1938 as part of early experiments in television broadcasting. The station was shut down on September 1, 1939 with the start of the Second World War and only reopened at the war’s end. In 1949, the BBC constructed the most powerful television transmitter in the world as part of an ambitious expansion plan. A rival commercial television service was set up by the Conservative government in 1955 and financed by advertisers. Until the 1960s these two services, the BBC and ITV, broadcast for a growing number of hours each day and gave Britain the fullest television service in Europe. Television spread across the continent, with the basic national programs launched in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Development of the media was controlled by government and financed through licenses and advertising. In France, full weekday television under the government-controlled Radiodiffusion Television Française, or RTF, began in 1947, but its spread was extremely slow. There were only 24,000 television sets in France in 1952. Italian RAI (Radio Audizione Italiana) state-controlled television began in 1939. A 1976 court ruling eventually ended its monopoly and private stations avidly entered the field, including Silvio Berlusconi’s popular Italo Uno, Canale 5, and Retequattro networks. Germany was also a pioneering country in the new medium, setting up the world’s first television service in the mid-1930s under Nazi leadership and continuing to broadcast until 1944. After the war, the Western Allies slowly harmonized broadcasting around the Land governments that shared “magazine programs” on the first channel (ARD), while a second channel (ZDF) was added in 1961. In the early years, television was a much more communal activity set up in public places: Italians and Frenchmen would sit in rows in village bars and cafés, watching television like a cinema audience, or stand outside store windows where television sets had been installed. Germans organized TV Clubs. As the cost of television sets fell, the

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radios that had dominated living rooms for several decades were shuffled away to make way for television as a domestic pastime. For many Europeans, the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 was their first major television experience. Massive events such as this, the funeral of Winston Churchill, the selection of Miss World, or the 1966 World Cup between England and Germany brought television viewers together through the engineering of Eurovision in Geneva. The first live transmissions from the United States via Telstar were made in 1962. Television created a visual collage of images that represented reality and were absorbed collectively as contemporary values. Key moments in history were shared by viewers in the countless millions whose memories were punctuated with riveting television spectacles: the assassination of John F.Kennedy in November 1963, for example, when all regular programming was stopped, or the royal marriage of Diana and Charles in 1981 and then Diana’s funeral in 1997. On July 20, 1969, 600 million viewers world-wide watched Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon. In 1972, the Munich Olympics were broadcast live to an audience of 450 million. When Palestinian terrorists broke into Olympic Village and kidnapped several Israeli athletes, coverage of the games cut back and forth between shots of the terrorists and footage of ongoing Olympic events. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center, beamed all over the world, tragically reinforced the sense of shared spectacle and experience. Television coverage of news events such as these merged politics and mass culture in unprecedented ways and tested the limits of tolerance and censorship. Control over television and media coverage varied across Europe. In Western Europe, the classic example of political tutelage over television broadcasting was France. RTF was under the daily control of the government, which limited coverage of political disasters such as the Algerian War. Once in power, Charles de Gaulle quickly adopted television as an extension of his theatrical personality and the perfect tool for diffusing French culture and his policies. De Gaulle was one of the first European political leaders to learn the power and meaning of media stardom. He appeared on television frequently, seated and speaking directly into the camera or moving through cheering crowds on his world visits. Finally the government’s one-sided coverage of the 1962 elections forced some measure of change. Television broadcasting was reorganized as the semi-autonomous Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), which offered such news interview programs as Face to Face. But to average viewers there was little difference. In May 1968 the restrictions burst into the open. When ORTF attempted to fully cover the events, the Information Ministry forced a censored version. The ORTF staff responded with a strike followed by a broader walkout of journalists that went on for months. The sympathetic news coverage and images of students beaten by CRS riot police on the streets of Paris in 1968 resulted in a wave of criticism against De Gaulle’s government and produced media stars such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who emerged as the most recognizable leader of the student revolt. In the March 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the leading Christian Democrat politician in Italy, the bloodstained images of Moro’s five murdered bodyguards on television opened a complicated game of communication between the Red Brigade terrorists and the media. Daily news coverage canonized Moro in the dispute over whether to negotiate for his release. The celebrated image of his body found curled in the trunk of a car and his state funeral became iconographic symbols of the media’s power to transform political events into mass spectacle.

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As it matured and programming evolved, European television became a more independent vehicle for political criticism. The general mood of critical rebellion in the 1960s found expression in a scathing satire of politics and current affairs. In Britain, That Was the Week That Was and Monty Python’s Flying Circus lampooned British society on an unprecedented scale and helped to open up political culture. That Was the Week That Was had an audience of over 12 million viewers at its peak in 1963. Each broadcast, David Frost took irreverent quick-fire aim at the most venerable of British institutions and politicians. By the 1980s, the use of latex puppets as a medium for scorning politicians and well-known figures propelled the programs Spitting Image in Britain and La Bebete Show in France into the forefront of political satire. French television became a more independent medium with multiple channels, although it remained a state monopoly. Under the socialist government of François Mitterrand, commercial television stations were introduced with the privatization of the TF1 channel, the licensing of TV Cinq and the pay-TV service Canal Plus. Canal Plus continued the tradition of political commentary with its flagship program, Les Guignols de I’lnfo as did Italy’s Saluti e Baci with its open discussion of political corruption, and Germany’s Motzki with its critique of unification. In Eastern Europe, nearly every home had a television set by the early 1970s. But the opportunities to deviate from the state-imposed uniformity of the mass media were very limited. Even dramas and game shows in the communist bloc were politicized and largely propagandist. The Romanian Second World War series The Search, for example, extolled anti-fascist movements. The broadcasts of Radio Free Europe provided a Cold War Western source of information not under the iron monopoly of state policy. The Voice of America, the BBC, and other foreign radio stations provided international news and music while foreign television broadcasting, and in later years, satellite broadcasts, showed foreign films and offered a window on the West. After the collapse of communism, the privatization of radio and television broadcasting began to open access to information. In 1993, the first private television station with a complete program structure and news service in any post-communist European state, Nova, began operations in Czechoslovakia.12 In Hungary, the state-owned MTV and DunaTV were both teetering on the brink of financial ruin when the 1995 Media Law opened the way to commercialization. Privatization attracted local millionaires like the Czech rock star Michael Kocáb as well as Western media tycoons, all of whom appeared to menace freedom of information and the public sphere yet again, just as the new democracy was testing its wings. In terms of popular programming, the biggest traffic across the frontiers was the British serials. The most successful of all, action series like The Avengers or The Saint were aired across the continent. The single most successful and popular British program of the 1960s was Coronation Street, which reached audiences in excess of 20 million. The characters and daily life of this stereotypical district of the northern industrial cities nostalgically explored how the traditional working class was faring in the age of affluence. Britain also led the way with innovative series from the science fiction The Quatermass Experiment to The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs Downstairs. The most successful in Germany were programs such as the 1950s Familie Schölermann. Television sparked a new chapter in the European debate about Americanization and the decadence of mass culture. Beginning in the 1950s, American television was dumping

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entertainment shows in Europe at rock-bottom prices. The BBC could buy American dramas at less than one-tenth the cost of producing such material themselves. As Europeans from Budapest to Dublin tuned into episodes of Charlie’s Angels and Dallas, the influence of the Hollywood image-making and American media machines became unprecedented. European news coverage was also increasingly dependent on signal feeds and news-program formats from Ted Turner s satellite CNN International, which began operation in 1985. By 1988, some 22 percent of French, 13 percent of British, and 6 percent of Italian broadcasting consisted of American programs. Debates about the cultural and political consequences of American media domination were eventually transformed into quota systems and more support for domestic production. However, the increasing competition for transmission rights to Hollywood films and sports programming as well as the success of American-owned stations such as music video titan MTV Europe undermined these efforts. Yet by the 1980s and 1990s, the venerable argument over pernicious American influences paled in the shadow of post-Fordist multimedia empires that dominated the revolution in telecommunications. They called the very nature of citizenship and democratic community into question for everyone. Cable and satellite television broadcasting, video and film, computers and the Internet involved conglomerates such as Hachette-Filipacchi or Fininvest in a ruthless battle over the flow of information. Mass culture and communication were entwined in a spreading net of corporate mergers and takeovers. Even state companies were weak compared with multimedia multinationals like those of Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann AG, for example, only a medium-sized German publishing house at the end of the war, catapulted itself into an international multimedia conglomerate with two German television stations, 58,000 people in more than 300 companies, and profit centers spread across forty countries in 1995. Once released from government control, French television broadcasting fell into the hands of Europe’s new media barons, among them Silvio Berlusconi, Robert Maxwell, and Leo Kirch. Berlusconi introduced American-style television programming to his European networks in the 1970s and 1980s. His Fininvest media empire became a primary instrument in producing the Italian collective imagination. The televised advertising, showgirl and sports spectacle was instrumental to the victory of his right-wing Forza Italia alliance in the 1994 and 2001 elections, and in creating a new tele-visual politics. Citizenship became tele-viewing. Democracy became tele-populism. Giuliano Ferrara, a popular television personality on Berlusconi’s stations, became Prime Minister Berlusconi’s spokesperson and Minister for Parliamentary Relations, while Fininvest’s chief attorney became Minister of Defense.13 Government and corporation merged. Berlusconi’s Mondadori, Italy’s biggest publishing house, and Standa department stores offered a complete range of products and services to their consumer-citizens. Leisure and pleasure, the gratifications of consumer choice, became synonymous with good government. The Berlusconi phenomenon was only one aspect in the tortuous and increasingly incestuous relationship between politics and the mass media. In 1962, Jürgen Habermas emphasized the critical role of the media in democratic functions and the public sphere.14 The opportunities for the telecommunications revolution to expand participatory democracy were extraordinary, but the exploitation and promotion that went with multinational corporate control threatened a new form of postmodern tyranny.

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Mass culture, national identity, ethnicity and class In the brief span of three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the content and power of mass culture changed dramatically. The postwar democratization of vacation travel sent 30 million tourists crossing European frontiers every year by the mid-1950s, and in 1966 their number exceeded a hundred million. Europe’s highways, railroads and airports were besieged each July and August by the grand départ, a mass migration unprecedented in history. A landscape of homogenized tourist destinations was constructed across local and national boundaries. The highly successful Center Parcs and Club Méditerranée operations offered a cornucopia of recreational pleasures in carefully regulated compounds. By the 1960s television had become a dominating presence in the lives and leisure of ordinary people throughout Europe. The images and expectations of consumerism filtered down into the remotest of places. The ties of neighborhood and village, the particularities of local culture were subsumed by an omnipresent, universalized cultural structure. By the 1990s, urban space and the everyday shifted to a postmodern landscape of McDonald’s and fastfood eateries, sexy H & M and Palmers billboards, American television reruns, images of Madonna and Nike logos, Internet cafés and the ever present cell phones. These were the sights and sounds of a shared cultural universe that provided a group identity while it increasingly embodied individuality and the self. The “society of the spectacle” had become banal. So much so that television turned back to so-called “reality shows,” of which the most successful to date, Britain’s Big Brother and France’s Loft Story, took the public by storm in 2000–1. For critics, these were the instruments of surveillance and control. Yet it is one of the great ironies that mass culture and the era of globalization have produced a formidable response in class, ethnic, and national culture. The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu has argued persuasively that, while mass culture works ideologically as a common standard of values and behavior, it is deeply implicated in the production of various forms of social distinction. Taste and consumption functioned as markers of class. Bourgeois and working-class lifestyles were two separate universes revealed in their preferences for food, clothing, sports, and cultural activities.15 Working-class culture was less submerged by mass culture than it was a continuous source for its inspiration. The space and culture of everyday urban life remained the zone for experimentation and the production of populist culture. The visual and musical hyperboles of punk, for example, particularly the Sex Pistols, were in part a reaction to the end of affluence and the recession wasteland of the 1970s. It was a strategy for survival against the empty tedium of mainstream rock culture. Nonetheless, the discovery and commercialization of the inflammatory punk image helped to revitalize the music and fashion industries. Although punk was already passé in the West by the 1980s, in the East it remained a political vehicle for expressing marginality and despair with the communist system. The politics of “identity” carved out idiosyncratic niches for a growing array of groups claiming cultural diversity. From the 1980s, gay pride became a new form of cosmopolitanism in Europe’s capital cities. Despite the scourge of AIDS, a stream of annual gay pride parades flaunted the rebellious sexuality and eccentricity that were habitual to street spectacle. For migrant populations and ethnic minorities facing racism and marginalization in public housing ghettos, consumerism was both mockery and desire. It epitomized the hypocrisy in the myth of a classless society. The subcultures

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of reggae, rap and hip-hop, the mix of World—African—European sounds provided a voice as the street riot provided a media spectacle. British cities were rocked in the 1980s by race riots staged by black and white youth. For black Britons and French Algerians, for Islamic youth living in the politically charged atmosphere of Europe’s multicultural neighborhoods and suburbs, street music provided a solidarity and authenticity that propelled rap singers like MC Solaar into international stardom. Hundreds of pirate radio stations across Europe functioned as a medium for the avant-garde. The pool of raw talent and underground labels hidden away in the “Bronx” of every major European city, far beneath global markets and multinational conglomerates, functioned as the wellspring for mass culture and for reconceptualizing the boundaries of race and nation. Mass spectator sports, especially football, also worked to fashion an imaginary shared identity from the fabric of difference and division. Michael Real and Robert Mechikoff argue, “the largest number of people ever in human history to engage in one activity at the same time are the television viewers watching the Olympic games and the World Cup.”16 Association football became a trans-cultural spectacle and a symbol of national, regional, even local, loyalties. It was the sport of millions, a medium for redefining cultural parameters, and a performance overflowing with patriotic meaning. The 1966 World Cup victory of the English team at London’s Wembley Stadium unleashed a swell of mass enthusiasm and catapulted what had been a working-class spectator sport since the 1880s into a symbol of a new classless society. During the 1990–91 season some 19 million fans filled stadiums in the United Kingdom. The Glasgow clubs regularly attracted rival crowds of 30,000–40,000 people, the majority men, as did those in the northern industrial cities of Merseyside, Manchester, Newcastle, and Leeds. Although attendance reached a peak in the late 1940s and then declined, the television audiences skyrocketed. By the mid-1950s, both the BBC and ITV were offering sports magazines and Saturday afternoon sports coverage on Grandstand and World of Sport, while European Cup matches were broadcast continent-wide through Eurovision. In 1990 a reported television audience of 26 million people in Britain watched coverage of England’s World Cup match against Germany. The English Premier League became the world’s richest by selling exclusive television rights to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB satellite television channel. ITV countered in 2000 by negotiating digital TV rights to the Nationwide League and Worthington Cup matches—albeit through a deal that soon proved financially disastrous for all parties. The global struggle for multimillion-dollar TV and merchandising rights reached a new frenzy when bids for live coverage of matches through cellular phone and high-speed Internet access opened in 2001. The limits of devotion to mass spectator sports was tested with football hooliganism. Although “Roughs” had been causing problems at British matches since the late nineteenth century, hooliganism was first identified as a serious social problem during the 1960s alongside the teddy boys and other youth gangs. Rival bands staked out territory at the goal-ends of the playing field and shifted the spectacle to the terraces. Hooligans then transferred their ritual performances in defense of national honor and manliness outside the stadiums before and after matches. The televised violence was sharpened in the 1970s and 1980s by xenophobic racism incited by extreme right-wing groups. Although disturbances plagued all European countries, in 1985 English fans were banned from European competitions when fighting by Liverpool enthusiasts before the European Cup

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Final at Heysel Stadium in Brussels ended in the death of thirty-nine fans. Ninety-five spectators were killed at a Sheffield match in April 1989. Yet the mythic identification with sport could be a metaphor for inclusion as well. The French World Cup victory at the new Stade de France in 1998 with Zinedine Zidane, a Marseillais of Algerian descent at the helm, let loose a torrent of patriotic unity as hundreds of thousands of supporters of every ethnicity descended into the streets of Paris. Football celebrities like Zidane and Luis Figo, who learned football in the streets of Lisbon, carried the mythic belief that sport offered stardom to any young man of ability. It was a route outside the restrictive boundaries of class and institutionalized inequality. As citizen-supporters, sports fans were turned into fans of the nation or region itself. Football franchises and the media promoted “Scotland” or “France” as consumer product. In Italy, the industrial cities of the North were the main centers of support. Italians staged ritual bonfires at San Siro Stadium before their matches. AC Milan club owner Silvio Berlusconi set off a political row when he demanded the resignation of Italy’s coach after their defeat by France in the Euro2000 Cup. On the Feast of Saint George (the patron saint of Catalonia) in 2002, which coincided with the semi-finals of the European Club Champions’ Cup, 98,000 whistling enthusiasts turned out in Barcelona to see Barca, the “people’s passion,” face Real Madrid in a game “drenched in a hundred years of political and footballing passion.” The categories of youth, identity, nation and social class interacted with mass culture in serendipitous ways. The convergence of lifestyles around a common set of signs, language, and desires was offset by the very distinctions that culture produced. This cultural geography of difference, the new forms of distinction in taste and values across social and ethnic categories are among the most important challenges for understanding contemporary Europe. The cultivation of difference is hardly new, but what distinguishes it in the postmodern era is the extraordinary scale on which it takes place. Given the power of consumer capitalism and the mass media to appropriate and construct a cavalcade of symbolic references, the possibilities are endless for both a disintegration and multiplication of identities. War lords immersed in the recent ethnic struggles of the Balkans took their cues from American action films as much as from local tradition. European gay skinheads maintained their own web site. The elasticity of cultural novelty and identity formation continuously stretched beyond known boundaries and tested the meaning of old loyalties. The effort to invent a sense of European identity associated with unification is in part a response to the “decentering” that has taken place in the midst of a culture that superficially appears to homogenize everyone. Whether the discovery of all these differentiating identities or even the common European-ness they share are momentarily provocative or whether they can be nourished with lasting power remains open to skepticism. But the frictions mass culture has created have become indelible to the complicated assumptions and expectations surrounding European culture and its values. Further reading On youth culture in post-1945 Europe, D.Hebdige s Hiding in the Light, London, Routledge, 1988, and G.Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentienth

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Century, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989, are both masterpieces in the field. Also good starting places are the following three studies: N.Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1993; I. Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, London, Meuthuen, 1986; and finally Stuart Hall, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, London, Routledge, 1995. On Italy, see Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow. The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2000. P.Yonnet, Jeux, Modes et masses, 1945–1985, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, and more recently S. Weiner, Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945–1968, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University Press, 2001; explore French youth culture. The social history of rock ‘n’ roll in Europe is now receiving the attention by scholars that it is has long deserved. Among the most innovative studies are T.Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990; U.G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture ‘in a Divided Germany, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2000; S.Petra Ramet (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1994; and R.Garofalo (ed.), Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, Boston, South End Press, 1992. Greil Marcus takes on the Punk movement in In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999. R.Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, New York, Transaction Press, 1991, is the classic text on the reaction to mass communications and journalism. J.Brown, A History of Western Education, 3 vols, London, Methuen, 1981, is a formidable study. On transatlantic cultural relations and Americanization, see R.Pells, Not Like Us, New York, Basic Books, 1997, and C.W.E.Bigsby (ed.), Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, London, Paul Elek, 1975. R.Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1993, looks at the French reaction to American influence, while R.Wagnleiter, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, takes on the Central European response. More recent is H.Fehrenbach and U.G.Poiger, Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan, New York, Berghahn, 2000. The most important work on the cultural revolution of the 1960s is A. Marwick’s magisterial The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–1974, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. D.A. Mellor and L. Gervereau’s The Sixties: Britain and France 1962–1973, The Utopian Years, London, Philip Wilson, 1997, is also useful. J.Savage and H.Kureishi produced an important anthology on pop culture in The Faber Book of Pop, London, Faber and Faber, 1995. The Italian influences on pop culture are explored in G.Malossi (ed.), The Icon of Italy in Global Pop Culture, New York, Monacelli Press, 1999. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, and E.Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1997, offer an analysis of the modern domestic realm. On the women’s movement, B.Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East

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Central Europe, London, Verso, 1993, offers a social and political analysis of gender since the 1989 revolutions. Similarly, S.Petra Ramet s Social Currents in Eastern Europe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995, offers an interesting discussion of the new generation and gender issues. B.J.Nelson and N.Chowdhury (eds), Women and Politics Worldwide, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1994, surveys women’s experience in forty-four countries around the world while R.Henig and S.Henig, Women and Political Power: Europe Since 1945, London: Routledge, 2001, and G.Kaplan, Contemporary Western European Feminism, New York, New York University Press, 1992, look at the feminist movements. W.Kaltefleiter and R.Pfaltzgraff discuss peace movements on both sides of the Atlantic in The Peace Movements in Europe and the United States, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1985. On the events of 1968 in Europe and elsewhere, see C.Fink and Philipp Gassert (eds), 1968: The World Transformed, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, as well as the oral histories presented in R.Fraser, 1968; A Student Generation in Revolt, London, Chatto & Windus, 1988. The history of European media is also a new field of study. A.Smith, Television: An International History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, is the standard text. Excellent material can be found in A.Silj et al., East of Dallas: The European Challenge to American Television, London, British Film Institute, 1988, J.Corner (ed.), Popular Television in Britain, London, British Film Institute, 1991, Pierre Musso and Guy Pineau, L’Italie et sa télévision, Paris: INA-Champ Vallon, 1990, and P.Miquel, Histoire de la radio et de la télévision, Paris, Richelieu, 1973. More recent is K.Richardson and U.H.Meinhof, Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe, London, Routledge, 1999- The media revolution in Eastern Europe is surveyed in S.Kovats (ed.), Ost-West Internet Media Revolution, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2001. On the history of European football and sports in general, see D.Rowe, Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure, London, Sage, 1995, C.Philo and J.Bale, Body Cultures: Sports, Space and the City, London and New York, Routledge, 1993, R.Holt, Sport and the British, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, as well as N. Blain, R.Boyle, and H.O’Donnell, Sport and National Identity in the European Media, Leicester, University of Leicester Press, 1993. Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Don Kalb, Simon Sadler, and Anthony Sutcliffe for their comments on this chapter. Notes 1 As quoted in S.Lang, Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–64, London, Macmillan, 1986, p. 29– 2 I.T.Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 206. G.Ambrosius and W.H.Hubbard, A Social and Economic History of Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 110–11. 3 D.Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, London and New York, Comedia, 1988, p. 30.

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4 See in particular U.G.Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2000, Chapter 2. 5 Ibid., p. 134. 6 T.Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 51. 7 Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels, p. 170. 8 E.Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 234. 9 A.Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 702. 10 Ibid., p. 691. 11 On the role of rock music in East Germany, see P.Wicke, “The Times They Are A-Changin’: Rock Music and Political Change in East Germany,” in Reebee Garofalo (ed.), Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, Boston, South End Press, 1992, pp. 81–92; and on Hungary, L.Kürti, “‘How Can I Be a Human Being?’ Culture, Youth, and Musical Opposition in Hungary,” in S.Petra Ramet, Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1994, pp. 73–102. 12 H.Jerávek and F.Zich, “The Czech Republic: Internationalization and Dependency,’ in P.J.Katzenstein, Mitteleuropa: between Europe and Germany, Providence, RI, Berghahn, 1997, p. 161. 13 On the Berlusconi phenomenon, see the excellent article by P.Musso and G.Pineau, ‘L’Italie, laboratoire de M. Berlusconi,” Online. Available at http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/, 3 (July 1995). 14 J.Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998, Part VI. 15 P.Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984. 16 M.R.Real and R.A.Mechifkoff, “Deep Fan: Mythic Identification, Technology, and Advertising in Spectator Sports,” Sociology of Sport Journal, 9 (1992), 324.

7 The boundaries of the avant-garde Simon Sadler By the 1970s, a consensus was emerging that the avant-garde was extinct. Such was the conclusion reached by the Theory of the Avant-Garde proposed in 1974 by a German critic, Peter Bürger: the “advanced guard” that used to challenge the entire institution of culture had now dispersed.1 Of all the experiments with art that stretched back at least as far as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the unique contribution of the fully “avantgarde” work that peaked in an extraordinary concentration in the early twentieth century (with Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and the early Soviet experiments in revolutionary culture) was that it turned against art itself. In other words, the true avant-garde spurned the ‘autonomy’ that separated art from the rest of life, thereby challenging bourgeois society. Notorious avant-garde “works of art” had really been the bombs to wreck bourgeois consciousness. By contrast, the art still trading as “avant-garde” after the Second World War was failing to revolutionize everyday life, and had itself become an artistic institution (that is, treated as a product of individual genius, housed in bourgeois galleries and museums, serenely set apart from collective political struggle). The shock value of avant-garde art, once a weapon against bourgeois sensibilities, was now an expectation of the audience, the museum and the dealer. A distinction would have to be drawn, it seemed, between art that was truly avant-garde, created with the intention of revolutionizing the world at large, and that which was simply “Modernist,” created to revolutionize art. The “historical” avant-gardes of the early twentieth century had been politically “engaged”; by contrast, the “neo-avantgarde”2 of the late twentieth century, like the Pop Art movement, seemed politically disengaged, and ironic in its rapprochement with bourgeois capitalism. Today’s visitor to London’s Tate Modern gallery, faced with German Dada of the 1920s on the one hand, and the “Young British Artists” of the 1990s, on the other, would surely find the distinction between the “historical” and the “neo-” avant-gardes helpful; the work of the 1920s seethes with anger, that of the 1990s with playfulness. One problem though with this persuasive explanation is that it mythologizes our understanding of the avant-garde, even risking nostalgia for the extreme single-issue political conditions that induced it, and then freezes it, making it difficult to account for the subsequent decades of change in the cultural mood and political landscape of Europe. Critics and artists alike have become jaded with the idea of the avant-garde, yet it has remained current in the popular imagination and among those who are shocked by new culture, and it is an aim of this chapter to understand this survival. Has the idea of what it is to be avant-garde changed? Has the challenge to cultural structures continued beyond the narrowly defined institutions of art, through the “underground,” through philosophy,

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and through new technologies? It may then be necessary to look for an “expanded,” somewhat shapeless avant-garde. Perhaps it is the very shapelessness of late “avantgarde” activity in Europe—in particular its all-pervading aura of uncertainty—that is most significant about it, and relates it most closely to the age and place in which it was created. The survey which follows is necessarily schematic, outlining four key themes: the politics, popularity, uncertainty, and “decentering” of vanguard European culture. The epigrams for these sections have been copied from the journal kept by a German painter, Gerhard Richter. Richter, born in the East in 1932, leaving for the West in 1961, crisscrossing different artistic tendencies, happens to have lived and worked close to the hub of European culture and its anxieties, into which his diary offers insight. Cultural politics in Europe since 1945 …the masses don’t have a class enemy any more. (Gerhard Richter, 1990)3 Was the larger, utopian project of the avant-garde lost, and if so, when and why did this occur? In the belief that Marxism still held the key to complete revolution, immediately after the Second World War many artists signed up to the Communist Party, Pablo Picasso among the most famous recruits.4 But the official Soviet VOKS Bulletin attacked the avant-garde in 1947 as decadent, individualist and anti-humanist, and rigid party political alignment soon lost its appeal for the freethinkers of the European intelligentsia.5 Freedom of artistic and intellectual expression in the Soviet sphere was circumscribed with the imposition in 1949 of Socialist Realism (a doctrine which demanded that art and literature deploy traditional and naturalistic techniques to convey the achievement and ambition of communism) and the attempted nationalization of artistic production. Suppressions of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and of the Prague Spring in 1968 further discredited the Soviet project, as dissident intellectuals sought asylum in the West. Socialist Realism in the East stifled artistic innovation, while the sponsorship of modern art and abstraction by business and government in the West—apparent in countless new civic centers, corporate headquarters and artistic festivals—was in part a counter-demonstration of liberal credentials. Modernism, a style that was considered a vehicle of radical anti-bourgeois values before the Second World War, had now been transformed into one associated with bourgeois liberalism. Many artists, however, resisted co-option into one or the other sides of the Cold War. From 1948 to 1951, for example, the COBRA6 group of artists and writers rejected economic liberalism, on the one hand, and Stalinism, on the other, developing a direct, expressionist style which was felt to bridge creativity and life. Western European cultural policy elicited little more overt political support from artists and intellectuals than did its Eastern opposition. For example, shortly after arriving in West Germany as a refugee from the GDR, Gerhard Richter could be found participating in a show held in a Düsseldorf department store that lampooned the values of Capitalist Realism (1963) as an echo of the Socialist Realism he

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had left behind in East Germany. The most telling rejection of Eastern and Western systems alike were the revolutionary May 1968 events in Paris. Led by students and intellectuals in an uneasy alliance with workers, Paris in 1968 was the Western equivalent of the Prague uprising the same year. Protests were exerted equally against capitalist and communist hegemonies and attempted to reclaim Marxism from the Communist Party. 1968 in Paris and the smaller insurrections it prompted elsewhere in Europe confirmed the formation of a New Left aspiring to free people from their alienation (their sense of distance from other people, culture and things) as well as their exploitation by capitalism. New Left thought had some ancestry in pre-war Central and Eastern Europe, amidst the creative revisions of Marxism to be found in the early work of the Hungarian literary philosopher György Lukács (who retracted it under pressure from the Stalinists) and the Marxist intellectuals of the “Frankfurt School” (associated with the Institute for Social Research, which returned to Frankfurt in 1949 following its New York exile from Nazism). But for dissident “inner émigré” intellectuals now trapped behind the Iron Curtain in the East, their existence barely known to the West, it was not possible to partake in calls for total cultural “liberation.” Their precarious survival depended on the sporadic liberalization of the Soviet imperium, until its disbandment in 1989. In the 1950s, for example, Yugoslavian artists found themselves generally excused from Socialist Realism to explore Modernist styles of primitivism, abstraction, and magical realism.7 Intermittent sanction of artistic Modernism on both sides of the Iron Curtain deprived it of its inherent avant-garde quality. For example, (the Swiss-French) Le Corbusier, still the foremost Modern architect until his death in 1965, provided startlingly innovative buildings for that most conservative of patrons, the Catholic Church (the Pilgrimage Church of Ronchamp, 1954, and the Monastery of La Tourette, 1956). Even so, avowedly Modern artists did not believe themselves to be in the pockets of politicians and commerce. Their “autonomy” was a state of grace from the need to convey messages, narrative and illusion, a refuge from the contaminations of the agonized body politic of Europe. It was a stance validated on the one hand by the highly influential former Marxist critic, the American Clement Greenberg, and on the other hand by certain thinkers of the Frankfurt School like Theodor Adorno, who returned from exile in the United States in 1960. For them, the autonomy of high abstract art gave it automatic political authority because it could never be fully assimilated by the mass market or the machinations of propaganda. Though the idea of a pure, deterministic class struggle became obsolete in the minds of many intellectuals and artists, a more general political consriousness did not. In the 1950s the Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that his philosophy qualified as “humanism,”8 compatible with the common good, even though it assigned precedence to the individual’s “being” in an otherwise meaningless and unknowable world. It was, if anything, more politically engaged than traditional class politics because it offered no formulae or dogma. Instead it required the conscious political engagement of the subject moment-by-moment, circumstance-by-circumstance. Significantly this new ethic of personal political responsibility emerged at the time when many heroes of the “historical” avant-garde had themselves either disengaged from party politics altogether (such as the Surrealist leader André Breton), or subscribed to communist orthodoxy (former Surrealist writer Louis Aragon), or had emigrated to the ‘new world’ of America (as did Dadaist

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and satirist George Grosz).9 An avant-garde politics was emerging after the Second World War as more flexible and contingent upon particular, local circumstances rather than class destiny. The radicalism of a fragmented politics that emphasized “molecular” and “nomadic” rather than broad-based struggle (to draw upon the terminology developed in the 1970s by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) was symptomatic as well of the “decentering” of European culture, discussed in the final section of this chapter. Thus the relegation of class struggle to a component of political awareness, rather than its substance, by no means created a political vacuum. Quite the opposite, one suspects, for those subject to the belief that struggle begins in the “everyday life” of the ordinary person. This was the approach presented by the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (Critique of Everyday Life, 1946) in an intellectual maneuver that would require his departure from the Communist Party. From this it would be a relatively short step to the common mantra in the United States and Europe in the 1960s that “the personal is political.” This was particularly powerful among feminists who noted that the struggle against patriarchy was not a simple corollary of the struggle against capitalism. Consequently the political agenda of the intelligentsia broadened, even as it focused on the microscale of “everyday life,” the individual, and the body. While a thinker like the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based Julia Kristeva would not normally be considered “political,” there was a political importance in her bid to understand the ideological formation of the individual under society’s repressive social and intellectual structure. The same could be said of the philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, who played down the directly liberating implications of his wide-ranging investigation into society, discipline and the body. Yet he provided theory to political struggles from anarchism to gay activism, diffusing (not defusing) the “utopian” project once associated with the avant-garde.10 The dispersal of the Events of 1968 was a turn in the tide for the political mood of the intelligentsia. 1968 attempted a pan-political assault upon “totality,” upon the very conditions of everyday life and the mind. But it failed to terminate bourgeois capitalism and its institutions, achieving at best their partial reform (for example, the dismemberment of the French school that had internationally led artistic conservatism, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Thereafter “postmodern” intellectuals, like the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, argued that the purposeful role of an avant-garde culture in the ascendancy of the masses was self-righteous, elitist wishful thinking, as history painfully demonstrated. Ironically, the avant-garde, or neo-avant-garde, thrived amid the bourgeois liberalism of Western Europe both before and after 1968. The story was very different in Eastern Europe. Illegal Soviet samizdat literature, which first appeared after Stalin’s death in 1953, represented another sort of cultural challenge mounted against the dominant order. Being clandestine and homemade, artistic quality was less important to samizdat than its mere production and the breaking of censorship. The fact that Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 samizdat-based dissident movement would ultimately propel a playwright, Václav Havel, to the presidency (1989), indicated an authority invested in culture that was waning further west. Cultural radicalism in the East was a liberal attack upon a purportedly Marxist regime, reversing the criteria traditionally associated with the avantgarde. American rock music provocateur Frank Zappa arrived in Czechoslovakia shortly

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after Havel’s election to work as an emissary linking the former Soviet bloc with business entrepreneurship. Samizdat epitomized the format of an “underground” culture—ephemeral and subcultural—and as such was inspired by and was inspirational for work in the West as well. There, “fringe” cultural producers were attempting to circumvent “museumification” and the domination of the arts by older, better-established practitioners. One of the most thorough attempts to eradicate leader—follower differences, and the discrimination between the work of art and ordinary life, was the Fluxus movement, officially founded in 1962. Distributing works and performances via informal samizdat-style networks, it linked participants (such as the Lithuanian-born George Macuinas) as far afield as the United States and Eastern Europe, crossing the Iron Curtain when an international Fluxus festival was held in Prague in 1966.11 Prior to the glasnost of the later 1980s, Russian avant-garde artists courageously, often wittily, produced work in the face of sustained repression, including an exhibition in Moscow’s Beljaevo Park in 1974 bulldozed by the KGB, and the Apt-art (“apartment art”) shows of the early 1980s.12 Eastern European dissidence has usually fallen outside an avantgarde “canon” assembled by Western dealers, art fairs, museums, and media, and until recently a great deal of “dissidence” from Western Europe went almost unmentioned as well. Punk music and fashion of the late 1970s revived in certain respects the spirit of the historical avantgarde, straying into anarchy and free cultural participation,13 yet it rarely attracted the scholarly attention accorded its Dadaist ancestor. Punk had antecedence in the Situationist International, probably the best instance of the survival of pure avant-garde ideals. Yet so successfully did the Situationist International elude categorization and “museumification” that it remained, at least until the late 1980s, a virtual blind spot in cultural history. It insisted, from its foundation in 1957 to its official disbandment in 1972, on the disintegration of the state, capitalism and the boundary between art and life, and claimed to be an inspiration for the direct action of 1968. Three decades later, a taste for Situationist-inspired anarchic/artistic/theatrical action, barely apparent in the avantgarde canon, is practiced internationally by anti-globalization protesters. This is typical of a capacity found among fringe postwar avant-gardes for being popular, wry and subversive. The comic agit-props of Italian dramatists Dario Fo and Franca Rame (performed in venues ranging from television studios to gymnasiums), and the projections by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (superimposing a swastika onto the London South African Embassy, and a Cruise missile onto Nelson’s Column in 1985) are all examples. That potential for a greater popularity is explored next. The avant-garde and popularity The much despised “artistic scene of today”…is only a variation on a perpetual social game that fulfils needs for communication, in the same way as sport, stamp collecting or breeding cats. (Gerhard Richter, 1990)14

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How is it possible simultaneously to go beyond that which is generally accepted—an inherent condition of the avant-garde—and to be nested within the heart of European culture? This is the implication of Richter’s diary entry of 1990; that advanced art has become part of everyday life, disposing of cultural hierarchy. In effect, concerted innovation became an expectation of European culture. From about the 1950s, as the Academic artistic paradigms associated with the Parisian Beaux-Arts school were overturned, Modernist strategies of shock, disjuncture and novelty were steadily integrated into mainstream arts education. The logic of innovation became inescapable. Even the return of certain traditional techniques and motifs to the arts in the 1970s and 1980s (especially visible in architecture) was heralded as “postmodernism,” with all the implications of advance that the word implied. It was not a “pre-modernism.” The clock could not be turned back to a time when culture was governed by rules and precedent. Instead, postmodernists were using history as a resource for further innovation. Where postwar art re-admitted religion, it did so as if to discover it anew, exploring its mystical source and personal meaning rather than its ecclesiastical management. Examples might include Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp church, the music of Olivier Messiaen, or the tortured depictions of faith found in the paintings by Francis Bacon in the 1950s. Here is Richter again noting, in 1966, the burden taken on by those who cut away established belief: “Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.”15 Despite the elitist implications of such a statement, Richter, in line with the tenor of the postwar avant-garde, likely felt that artists divined the reserves of spirituality and aesthetic sensibility believed to lie within every viewer, reader, and listener. Modern art’s reputation for obscurity is due partly to the absences and ambiguities that tempt the audience into completing works for themselves. Again, the idea of an avant-garde becomes problematic, since as a matter of principle, European artists since the 1940s have consistently refused a definitive leadership role. As the Situationist International insisted, “the S.I. can only be a Conspiracy of Equals, a general staff that does not want troops… We will only organize the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.”16 The preferred avant-garde role, then, is as an agitant working within broad cultural democracy. From the 1970s there would be a vast proliferation of artists, writers, composers, and performers working in local communities, schools, workplaces, and prisons. Shows would regularly be programmed to take place outside the traditional art spaces of galleries and theaters, in a gesture towards popularization. Just as striking, however, has been the appetite for the blockbuster show and spectacular arts center (the turn of the century saw crowds pouring into the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Tate Modern in London). Indeed, the role of consumption within contemporary European culture—both the consumption of culture (through publishing, tourism, admissions charges, sponsorship), and consumption itself as a motif in art—has been pronounced. Pop Art was a style that blurred the distinction between gallery art and the commercial arts of packaging and advertising, spreading through the continent from Britain in the 1950s to reach the Soviet Union in the early 1970s (with the Sots Art movement). Furthermore, the Pop sensibility pervaded other areas of intellectual production. In Roland Barthes’ seminal collection of essays, Mythologies (1957), one of Europe’s pre-eminent intellectuals could be found meditating upon car design, detergent commercials, and televised wrestling. Barthes was still

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confident of retaining an intellectual surveillance over such phenomena as he tested the decoding procedures of semiology, the “science of signs” that he helped develop. His intellectual successor in the 1970s and 1980s, Jean Baudrillard, was not so convinced, arguing that capitalism’s dense commercial coding of reality had become a seamless hyper-reality, ensnaring consumer and intellectual alike. Cultural distinctions of “high” and “low” thus become meaningless, and have been joyfully abandoned by some. The Name of the Rose, a best-selling novel published in 1980 by Italian semiologist Umberto Eco, combined an epistemological excursion with a detective story—in turn providing the basis for a hit film. The avant-garde has flirted with popular culture since the late nineteenth century, and has long seen the city street, that leveler of class and scene of change, as its greatest locale (see Chapter 6 on mass culture). But the avant-garde spirit was reciprocally absorbed into mainstream commercial culture in the later twentieth century. After Dior’s New Look (launched in 1947), fashion design balanced its leanings toward revivalism with a taste for an acute contemporaneity. 1964 found women clothed in André Courrèges trouser suits and Mary Quant mini-skirts, a double disruption of gender and decency in female clothing. From the mid-1970s, Vivienne Westwood’s punk chic further played with expectations of decorum, and the 1990s saw the futuristic sheen of sportswear tailored for the street. European popular music acquired an avant-garde flair, the Beatles going so far as to recruit leading figures in Pop Art as album cover designers. Shops and nightclubs have become laboratories for experimental interior design. Abrupt editing, collage, inventive form and anti-naturalism became routine in advertising, graphic design, music videos and new media. 1990s techno dance music carried overtones of the avant-garde German electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In this meeting of “high” and “low” culture, it is tempting to recall a classic essay by Frankfurt school philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), which forecasted the mass consumption of the products of modernity. But Benjamin hoped that this would negate the monetary value of art, whereas a well-organized and enterprising “culture industry” of dealers, museums and media has managed to sustain it (incidentally, Europe’s foremost private collector of contemporary art in the 1980s and 1990s was an advertising executive, Charles Saatchi). Cultural initiatives intended to circumvent capitalism, like pirate radio and open-air music festivals, have developed into big business. The Centre Pompidou (designed in the 1970s by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers under the inspiration of Pop Art and the 1968 events) became a pivotal image of the European culture industry. It was celebrated by its advocates as a “cultural supermarket” and attacked by radicals as the executioner of the very spontaneous culture it attempted to embody. Art fairs and festivals spawned across Europe in the wake of the Venice Biennale (which dates back to 1895), with contemporary music at Darmstadt and Donaueschingen in the 1950s, film at Cannes (from 1946), art and sculpture at the Biennale des Jeunes de Paris (from 1959) and at the Kassel Documenta in West Germany (from 1955) to give just a few major examples. The cultural economy has taken its place alongside the economic and political economies. Meeting on average every four years, Documenta, the international art showcase (initially accompanying the German Federal Horticultural Show) was markedly political in its first meetings in the way that it heavily promoted Modern art and abstraction as a counter to the Nazi legacy and to the Realist art of the GDR.17 The

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re-building of Berlin with its two city centers, East and West, during the 1950s was similarly politicized. Making government and business appear progressive and open through sponsorship of the arts has created some unholy alliances. The Conceptual art exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form, toured Switzerland, Germany and Britain in 1969 in an attempt to radically unseat the institution of art, yet it was paid for by the tobacco multinational Philip Morris Europe, avowedly drawn to the innovatory values of the avant-garde.18 Artists have been on the horns of a dilemma in their relationship to the economy. Basic market forces could not sustain a great deal of the cultural work produced, so the arts were often dependent upon corporate and state subsidy. Street theater in London, for example, was never more buoyant than under the auspices of the Greater London Council in the 1980s.19 The scale of cultural investment under the presidency of François Mitterrand in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s was breath-taking. The apparent contradiction of an officially sponsored avant-garde has proven remarkably resilient. In France, the avant-garde received lavish state funding (for instance, through the Parisian Institute of Research and Coordination in Acoustics— Music (IRCAM), founded in 1977).20 The arts and state joined forces to reform the tastes of the tax-paying public with its appetite for mainstream, market-produced culture. Such subsidy was provided, moreover, despite anthropological research proving the clear class orientation of arts consumption, notably in Pierre Bourdieu’s classic study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (originally published in 1979). Arguably, a subsidized avant-garde represents radicalism made safe, a mere fantasy of opposition to the bourgeois state. Consequently the recycling of avant-garde techniques seen in some postmodern art demonstrates a pithy honesty about the impossibility of being truly vanguard and “outside” the establishment. At the same time, organized culture is adopted by the state as a buttress of civilization and political stability. As the 1945 constitution of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, based in Paris) poetically explained, with an unnervingly masculine rationale, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” The rise of uncertainty I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. (Gerhard Richter, after John Cage, 1977/85)21 Uncertainty about the artist’s ideological, creative and social status might be considered symptomatic of the defeat of the avant-garde. However, uncertainty has been a benchmark of European aesthetics and thinking since the Second World War, as if it were one of the triumphs, one of the great liberties, of recent intellectual and artistic life. The unburdening of vanguard culture from the duty to make sense of the world, while arguably lacking ambition, is also evidence of a certain freedom that we might want to think of as being “avantgarde” after all.

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It is possible to sketch in how this uncertainty came about. The capacity of art and literature to communicate a coherent reality had been made problematic by the avantgarde since the early part of the twentieth century. Cubism substituted a multidimensional rendering with an illusionistic naturalism, while in literature James Joyce and others conveyed events through a filter of consciousness, putting serious demands upon the reader struggling to close the meaning of the text. After the Second World War, the philosophy of Existentialism indicated that consciousness itself was as much a source of uncertainty and anxiety as of cognizance. Living, it was contended, is not a predestined or rule-based pursuit. Accordingly, value was something independently created, and meaning might be as arbitrary as the paths chosen through life. The mood was instantly detectable in the brooding paintings from the “School of Paris,” in the Theater of the Absurd, and in the literature of Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. “There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, together with the obligation to express,” pondered Beckett in an interview of 1949.22 By the late 1950s and 1960s, successors to the immediate postwar generation were responding to the “crisis” not by stabilizing meaning but by further destabilizing it, or by imposing arbitrary rules upon creativity. It was a route notoriously championed by French author Alain RobbeGrillet with the nouveau roman, then in the cinematic nouvelle vague of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and in the impersonal musical serialism led by Pierre Boulez in the 1950s. This work demonstrated revulsion against the complacency of European culture. Theodor Adorno famously asked how it was possible to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz, just as many cultural producers wondered how it was possible to be optimistic in the age of the Bomb. The avant-garde response was to begin again, as far as possible, at a “degree zero.” Boulez’s grim determination in music was evoked again in Roland Barthes’s call for a “writing degree zero,” destroying narrative by exposing the “structural” mechanisms and “myths” of language and culture. Similarly the Structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss aimed to strip away the surfeit of human customs and reveal their base organization of society and belief. Even these critiques of language and culture proved incomplete. Barthes eventually concluded that the construction of meaning was unpredictable, completed by readers and so beyond the control even of authors. Deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose influence was pronounced from the late 1960s, further claimed that the pursuit of meaning as it slipped along and through texts was doomed to remain unresolved. What is remarkable, however, is that these critiques caused not so much the downfall of art as its reinvigoration. Postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard welcomed an art that recognized the unattainability of “wholeness” and “presence,” positing incompleteness and absence in their place. Jacques Derrida lent his support to the school of architects that emerged in the United States and Europe during the 1980s wishing to express the implications of Deconstruction. Deconstructivist architect Daniel Libeskind, for example, deployed a fragmented design technique for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (1989–96), thus conveying those misgivings with humanism, authority, and moral purpose that had first been voiced by the immediate postwar avant-garde. It was apt, since the Museum also served as a Holocaust memorial. The desire, inherited from historical avant-gardism, to destroy the “bourgeois” pleasures of naturalism and order has remained somewhere in the background of the

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postwar unraveling of art. The tonal, note-bynote serialism of the 1950s stripped music of harmony, while the Lettrist movement (forerunners of the Situationists) attempted to deprive literature not only of narrative, but also of sentences and even words. The Lettrists provoked cinema audiences with anti-entertainments like Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), in which the screen flicked from black to white, prompting disorderly scenes among cinema audi-ences. The critique of the cinematic pleasures of the gaze, focusing attention instead on the exploitation of the female body, the role of the male voyeur, and the minutiae of daily interaction and work, was a major field opened by feminist commentators and producers in the 1970s. At about the same time Conceptual art threatened to obliterate the purchasable object of art, uncomfortably foregrounding instead its institutional and economic housing—the dealer and museum. They were effectively lampooned by Daniel Buren’s refusal to supply anything but stripes for exhibition, and Hans Haacke’s insistence upon incorporating into his art sensitive information about the museum’s collections and sponsors. In the 1960s and 1970s, experimental theater similarly stripped away theatrical illusion, forcing audiences and performers into an uncertain encounter. Technology became another generator of uncertainty. For avantgardes before the Second World War, machine forms defined aesthetic perfection (as at the Bauhaus); after the war’s horrific abuse of technology, the avant-garde deployed it to create less determinate forms. For example, Boulez (with IRCAM) investigated the potential of electronics to provide automatic musical composition. It was a sensibility passed on to works of the 1980s and 1990s that took advantage of new video- and digital-based media. These were significant not least for their routine use of non-linear narrative—a happy progeny of Deconstruction described above, as readers navigated their own paths through hypertext. The increasing accessibility and falling costs of audio-visual technology have granted artists, directors and performers greater autonomy from studio backers. The prestige of traditional media and exhibition spaces has wavered: some years of Britain’s Turner Prize, instituted in 1984 in homage to the nineteenth-century painter, saw no painting.23 Over the long term, however, neither technological nor conceptual maneuvers have killed the traditional art forms of novel, feature film, symphony or painting, the last of these triumphantly re-grouping in Europe during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a so-called “new spirit.” In the resulting cacophony of voices and media, uncertainty remained a chief characteristic of high culture. It found little reassurance in its neighbor, science, which was working through the consequences of chaos theory, environmental depletion, and the ethical implications of genetics. The mood was captured in the title of a 1994 show, Institute of Cultural Anxiety, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. This may however reflect the temperament of the traditional social core of cultural production rather than its more assertive margins. At the same venue the following year, a show of postcolonial art was entitled Talking Loudly, Saying Something, a startling contrast to the sentiment expressed by Richter in the epigram for this section, and leading us to the final theme of the chapter.

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The “decentering” of European culture “The centre cannot hold”: accept this willingly, along with the loss of consensus and attitude and individuality. (Gerhard Richter, 1973)24 Given the uncertainties of contemporary European culture, it is not surprising that its “center” has become ever harder to locate as well. In fact the recognition and representation of “difference” and “otherness” have, somewhat anomalously, offered an approximate cultural agenda. This cultural “decentering” has been one aspect of the postmodern experiment, designed to supplant the once-hoped-for universal consciousness of Modernism. Decentering has been a corollary of sociopolitical change. As is evident throughout this chapter, European cultural production has traditionally been dominated by white patriarchy, based in the metropolis (very often Paris), and preoccupied by “abstract” procedures of the mind. This hegemony has been challenged by a combination of feminism, sexuality, ethnicity, class mobility, migration, capitalist globalization, and new technology. The result is that cultural production has become a little more socially diverse. It has accorded as much importance to the body as to the mind; “transgressivity” has drawn more interest than “discipline.” That artists have increasingly chosen their personal identities as subject matter seems symptomatic of a collapse in social and cultural certainties. The spur to “decenter” and undermine centralized moral authority stretches back at least to the Second World War. One motive was deNazification. Fascism and Nazism have cast a long and terrible shadow over European culture, still instantly visible in the portraits of victims assembled by French artist Christian Boltanski and in the troubling absences depicted in paintings by the German Anselm Kiefer. This has occurred despite earlier attempts launched by the German avant-garde to face the facts of history (as in Günther Grass’s 1961 novel The Tin Drum, and more allusively in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, staged in Germany in 1964). Hesitant cultural authority was also linked to Europe’s continued susceptibility to authoritarianism on the one hand, terrorism on the other; to the conformism of class and church; and to xenophobia and racism. Decolonization was a traumatic experience not only for those suppressed by colonialism, many of whom came to Europe as economic migrants, but for the colonizers as well. The French struggled to come to terms with their “dirty war” in Algeria, and persisted, like the British, with the dream of imperial outreach. Young European radicals felt a sense of guilt by association with American-led intervention in Southeast Asia. And if before the Second World War it was possible for the avantgarde to portray Europe as being in the throes of a polarized struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, the situation after the war was far less clear. Communism and liberal democracy alike proved themselves flawed in action. A continent once proud of its civilization, now bathed in blood a second time, threatened itself with instantaneous atomic annihilation. Moreover, one half imported money and ideology from outside Europe, through the

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American Marshall Aid program and a subsequent embrace of consumerism. “America has invaded our subconscious,” contemplates a character in German director Wim Wenders’ 1974 film Alice in the Cities, the very format of which was borrowed from the American road movie genre. Strung through shopping centers and on television, Europe now experienced a candy-coated variant of the colonialism it had once imposed more ruthlessly upon others. In the 1950s, French left-wing intellectuals talked of resistance to “Coca-Colonization.” But the epicenter of Western cultural activity had already migrated from Paris to New York, with European artists astonished at the confidence of the American Pop and Abstract Expressionist paintings that were regularly sent on tour as Cold War cultural initiatives. It was perhaps not until the importation of French theory by American academic circles in the 1970s that Europe regained an area of unrivalled intellectual leadership. However intimate their relationship, North American and Western European cultures have not been synonymous because their social and economic backgrounds have been far from interchangeable—the one based on the ascendancy of an imperium, the other on a relative decline. The experience of a diminished cultural prestige was especially acute for intellectuals in Eastern Europe. They had been excluded even from the revisions of Marxism that were a characteristic of Western European and American academies. Consequently, they struggled after 1989 to assemble a post-Communist identity and cultural infrastructure.25 The new humility of European culture in the latter half of the twentieth century was not an entirely bad thing. One of the most stimulating aspects of European Pop Art was the public, critical, humorous manner in which it came to terms with Europe’s “CocaColonization.” For some of those involved, the re-distribution of wealth and images through consumerism and mass media promised to complete the utopian vision promise of the avant-garde.26 There was also a palpable sense in the postwar period that an anarchic, childlike playfulness was the only possible response to the collapse in European cultural patrimony. Herbert Read wrote upon the foundation in London of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1948: Such is our ideal—not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-center, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilization perished without a creative protest.27 The extreme instability that characterized European history in the twentieth century culminated in something of a crisis for its sense of national and international identity. In 1993, the Venice Biennale art show, once the preserve of the select band of countries with pavilions at the Giardini exhibition grounds, took as its theme the “three closely related principles of cultural and political transnationality, multiculturalism and nomadism.”28 Commissioners were asked to share their national pavilions with artists from countries of former imperial affiliation, in a “return of the repressed.” Within Europe, nationalism has come to occupy an ambiguous place in intellectual life. It has been tempered on the one hand by the transplant of celebrity architects to build other people’s national landmarks— Norman Foster’s Reichstag in Berlin (1999), and Enric Miralles’ Scottish Parliament in

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Edinburgh (1998). On the other hand, European countries subsidize their indigenous film industries as a matter of policy, and the French language is patrolled by the Académie Française against American/English incursion. Although political devolution and the free movement of capital have been encouraged in Europe since the 1980s, the free movement of people and their cultures has been treated with suspicion, and the principle of asylum scrutinized.29 Ethnic, national and regional voices have simultaneously acquired liberatory and pariah tones. Despite attempts to build a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual “Mitteleuropa,”30 the “people’s revolutions” of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s were offset by the disaster of the Bosnian War. Artists brought together through an informally affiliated “trans-avantgarde” have debated how to build the “cathedral” of a common European culture while respecting demands for political autonomy.31 The ambassadorial role of the trans-avant-garde, personified by artist and former Luftwaffe pilot Joseph Beuys, was never quite accepted by entrenched European conservatism. At one point Germany was openly uncomfortable that its culture was being represented by an unaccountable provocateur like Beuys.32 That Beuys did not appear to embody values of “German-ness” was, however, probably the very thing that made it possible for him to bridge cultural boundaries. A consistent role for the postwar European artist has been that of the “Outsider”—a “primitive,” “childlike,” “abject,” “homeless” subject in touch with the desires of the body and the collective, transcending national and rational boundaries, negotiating a “decentered” culture. The artist might not even feel at home in her or his own body. In keeping with the postmodern mood, the “natural,” “whole,” “real,” “centered” body and mind have been destabilized in orgiastic performances, depictions of abjection, madness and altered identity. The French artist Orlan ultimately altered her body through surgery. Questioning the body, sexuality, identity and gender became the most likely way to provoke the outrage traditionally associated with the avant-garde. One instance of this was COUM Transmission’s Prostitution show, an exhibition of sexual transgressivity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1976, which was closed after four days in the wake of media attacks and hate mail.33 If the scandal was unsurprising, that surrounding the showing of Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document at the same venue just a month earlier gives more pause for thought. Kelly had dared to document and psychoanalyze the relationship between an artist and her infant son. Critics were appalled that motherhood and gender, the central organizing myths of the organic and natural, could be so deconstructed. Use of the label “avant-garde” for a project so determinedly pushing back taboo seems at once inadequate, yet apt. And from the late 1970s such experiments took place against a background of pronounced social and political conservatism in which the art market overwhelmingly favored the return of large-scale painting by men.34 The interrogation of white patriarchy, and the culture it defined, had steadily gathered pace in the latter part of the twentieth century. Woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her,” explained Simone de Beauvoir in 1949, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”35 Writing for readers of French three years later, Martiniquan cultural theorist Frantz Fanon further exposed the fallacies of ‘universal consciousness’ as just another attempt at domination: “I do not have to look for the universal… My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is.”36 Jacques Derrida’s exposure of the binary systems of Western thought, in which things are only “like” or “not like” the dominant category, and psychoanalyst

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Jacques Lacan s interest in the development of consciousness through images and language, provided means by which to deconstruct the widely held belief that culture and personal identity are unitary and homogeneous. The results could be seen in critical studies of gender, race and for that matter the myth of genius upon which much Western culture had been founded. The maneuvers of the avant-garde itself could now be shown to be analogous to any other patriarchal, imperialist expeditionary venture.37 Street-level multiculturalism in Europe has exploded through hiphop music, alternative fashion and food, underground clubs, the alterity of the annual Berlin Love Parade street party, and so on. Such bold indifference to the salons of the culture industry contrasted with the ennui that beset the neo-avant-garde as it labored toward heroic expression in an age of the inexpressible, burdened by its knowledge of history and theory. Yet cultural deconstruction has been just as often promoted by elite French theory as by those actually on the “margins.” As the idea of multiculturalism has gained acceptance, there is the risk of crafting “a comfortable ‘other’ for transnational postmodernity,” as the literary critic Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak puts it.38 In other words, the intelligentsia has risked sentimentalizing “difference,” such as ethnicity, as the counterpoint to the “inauthentic” homogeneity of a rationalized Europe, exactly when European and American capitalism and communications were actively erasing the differences between cultures. The culture industry has been quick to capitalize. One literary review sounded a note of skepticism at “the publishing industry s desire to unearth writers from the ‘margins,’ rude-talkin’ yout’ who can furnish provocative dispatches from behind the frontline of transgressive ethnic subculture.”39 In reality, difference is harsh: the complications of a multicultural postmodernity were shockingly visible in the fatwa imposed upon Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie in 1989Rushdie’s work, like much made by artists who feel culturally “in-between,” could not be competently read from purely Western or non-Western viewpoints. It had to be comprehended from both directions simultaneously. Enlightenment rationality was meant to be the lodestone of modern European culture, and some cultural commentators have warned that it has been undermined by the events this chapter has outlined.40 Broadly speaking, European culture has shifted from grand narratives and the promise of redemption—common to Marxism, Modernism, Rationalism, Existentialism and Structuralism—to the disparate activity casually accounted for by the postmodern label. Nevertheless the agents of “decentering” have been exercising a paradigm of Enlightenment rationality: questioning how European culture is structured, who and what it serves and excludes, in a relentless interrogation of assumptions and authority. While it is true that the avant-garde retreated from its all-out assault upon bourgeois culture (as described by Peter Bürger at the beginning of this chapter), it is not enough to write off subsequent activity as entirely formalist, commercial, and without critical social implications. It would be fairer to say that at its best it matured into recognition of the complex contexts in which it operated. Discontented with standing “outside” existing mainstream culture, certain strains of radicalism attempted to reach an accommodation with it, risking compromise in the process. The avant-garde mission since 1945, if that is what it was, became less programmatic and more manifold, more enquiring, and often more joyful. Paradoxically the idea of the avantgarde survived in its broadest definition, if not its strictest, because dissent and invention became institutional to European cultures.

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Further reading The literature for this area is vast, dispersed and hotly debated. Much of the most insightful commentary on the avant-garde has concentrated on examples from the United States rather than Europe, and there is very little literature that gives equal attention to the East and West, or to different media, or to the interaction with wider fields of intellectual and cultural endeavor. Martin Jay, “From Modernism to Post-Modernism,” in T.C.W.Blanning (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, has offered a concise narrative history of the art of the century as a whole, and B.Taylor, Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, New York, Harry N.Abrams, 1995, provides a very readable introduction to recent developments. C.Harrison and P.Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, is a highly recommended compendium of original texts and introductory essays. Readers of French will find a good value visual survey in B.Blistène, Une Histoire de l’art du XXe siècle, Paris, Beaux Arts/Centre Pompidou, 2000. A reference source is R.Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 1993. Key theoretical texts on the avant-garde include P.Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974, trans. Michael Shaw, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, which largely supplanted an earlier book: R.Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1968, trans. G.Fitzgerald, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981. Devastating critiques of the avant-garde include R.Krauss, The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985, and D.Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. The sense that the avant-garde had at least gone past a turning point was confirmed in the titles of C.Butler, After the Wake, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, and A.Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986. The latter is memorable for its contribution to an understanding of postmodernism; that story is updated in H.Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996. B.H.D.Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001, gathers together the essays of a long-serving observer. More specialist reading is needed for specific areas of the arts. S.Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, London, Aporia/Unpopular Books, 1988, uncovers the “hidden” vanguard. For art in Central Europe, an excellent essay is H.Meyric Hughes, “Were We Looking Away? The Reception in the West of Art from Central and East Central Europe at the Time of the Cold War,” at the website of The Heartland Project, 1999, which can be accessed (among other interesting contributions) at http://www.aspectspositions.org/essays.html. G.White (ed.), Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 1999, offers an introduction to developments further east. R.J.Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, London, Thames and Hudson, 1997, and M.Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1999, though slanted towards the USA, are useful resources. Music is delightfully surveyed by M.Hall, Leaving Home: A Conducted Tour

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of Twentieth-Century Music with Simon Rattle, London, Faber & Faber, 1996. Architecture has been provocatively surveyed by C.Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985. A fascinating guide to the history and theory of film is provided by P.Cook and M.Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book, 2nd edn, London: BFI, 1999. Discussion of avant-garde performance is to be found in J.Roose-Evans, Experimental Theatre: From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook, London, Routledge, 1989, and R.L.Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998. Beyond these general introductions, one turns to more advanced case studies, such as G.Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1995. A model for a “joined-up” study of culture is K.Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995. Additional research depends on detailed studies in academic journals, and in the key magazines for the various arts. However, the Internet is becoming an increasingly essential resource to keep abreast of current and fringe activity. Acknowledgements Thanks are owing to Jon Simons, Marcus Verhagen, Steven Gartside, Jan Wagstaff and Rosemary Wakeman. Notes 1 See P.Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974, trans. Michael Shaw, Theory of the AvantGarde, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, with a Foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. See also A.Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986. 2 See Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde; for a reply, see H.Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996. 3 Gerhard Richter, ‘Notes, 4.9.90’, in C. Harrison and P.Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, p. 1048. 4 For information on the recruitment of intellectuals to the French Communist Party, see Editions du Parti Communiste Français, Pourquoi je suis communiste, Paris, Editions du Parti Communiste Français, n.d. 5 See V.Kemenov, “Aspects of Two Cultures” (1947), reprinted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp. 647–9. 6 COBRA’s name was an abbreviation of “Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam.” 7 See H.M.Hughes, “Were We Looking Away? The Reception in the West of Art from Central and East Central Europe at the Time of the Cold War,” Online. Available at the website of The Heartland Project, 1999, http://www.aspectspositions.org/essays.html. 8 See J.-P.Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, London, Methuen, 1948. 9 Grosz returned to West Berlin shortly before his death in 1959. 10 See for instance D.Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995. 11 See H.M.Hughes, “Were We Looking Away?”

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12 See B.Taylor, Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, New York, Harry N.Abrams, 1995, pp. 35–7. 13 Although it was recuperated by the cultural industry that it temporarily destabilised. 14 Gerhard Richter, ‘Notes, 24.10.90’, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, p. 1047. 15 Gerhard Richter, ‘Notes, 1966’, in G.Richter and H.-U.Obrist, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, London, Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 58. 16 Anon., “L’opération contre-situationniste dans divers pays,” Internationale situationniste, no. 8, Paris, January 1963, pp. 23–6, trans. “The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries,” in K.Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA, Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p. 113. 17 See H.M.Hughes, “Were We Looking Away?”. See also the History section of the Documenta website, 2002, http://www.documenta.de/data/english/index.html. 18 See J.A.Murphy, “Sponsor’s Statement for ‘When Attitudes Become Form’”, 1969, reprinted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp. 885–6. 19 See D.Mellor, “The Eighties,” in Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fifty Years of the Future: A Chronicle of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1998, p. 33. 20 See G.Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1995. 21 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 13 November 1985,” and “Letter to Benjamin Buchloh, 1977,” in Richter and Obrist, The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 87. 22 Samuel Beckett in conversation with Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit,” Transition Forty-Nine, no. 5, December 1949, pp. 97–103, quoted in C.Butler, After the Wake, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 79–80. 23 See E.J.Hobsbawm, Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-century Avantgardes, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 36. 24 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1973,” in Richter and Obrist, The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 78. 25 See, for instance, Jiří Ševčík, Thinking about Identity at the Threshold of Europe’, Online. Available at the website of The Heartland Project, 1999, http://www.aspectspositions.org/essays.html. 26 See, for instance, Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. 142. 27 Herbert Read, Introduction to “40 Years of Modern Art: A Selection from British Collections,” 1948, reprinted in Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fifty Years of the Future, p. 4. 28 H.M.Hughes, “Were We Looking Away?,” quoting the Italian Director of the 1993 Venice Biennale, Achille Bonito Oliva, Cardinal Points of Art. Theoretical Essays, Venice, XLV International Art Exhibition, 1994, pp. 9–27. 29 My thanks to Dr. Benjamin Franks for this observation. 30 See H.M.Hughes, “Were We Looking Away?” 31 See J.Beuys, J. Kounellis, A.Kiefer and E.Cucchi, “The Cultural-Historical Tragedy of the European Continent,” Flash Art, no. 128, Milan, May-June 1986, pp. 36–9, reprinted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp. 1032–6. 32 See Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fifty Years of the Future, p. 23. 33 Ibid., p. 24. 34 See B.Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, p. 67. 35 Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex,” 1949, reprinted in J.Rendell, B. Penner and I.Borden (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, London, E & FN Spon, 2000, pp. 29–31. 36 Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, masques blancs, 1952, quoted in R.J.Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, London, Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 7. 37 For a psychoanalytic critique of the avant-garde, see D.Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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38 G.Chakravorti Spivak, “Who Claims Alterity?,” in B.Kruger and P.Mariani (eds), Remaking History: DIA Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 4, Seattle, 1989, pp. 269–92, reprinted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp. 1119–1124. 39 S.Sandhu, “The Thin Black Line,” The Observer Review, July 16, 2000, p. 11. 40 See, for instance, the consternation of Jürgen Habermas (a second-generation Frankfurt School thinker) with the work of Foucault and Lyotard.

8 The Central and Eastern European Revolution, 1989–2000 Ivan T.Berend “Yugoslav Communism, separating itself from Moscow,” stated the legendary Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, “initiated the crisis of Soviet imperialism.” However, he added, “The wound which the Hungarian Revolution inflicted on Communism can never be completely healed… Hungary means the beginning of the end of Communism…”1 “The October Revolution in Poland,” declared an enthusiastic contemporary reporter, “was more lasting…[and] more deadly to Communism. Where the Hungarian revolt failed, the Polish half-succeeded.”2 The Polish Communist Party, maintained Norman Davies, “never gained the strength or the confidence to advance beyond the compromises.”3 These three perspectives provide some impression of the complexity involved in assessing the struggle that engulfed Eastern Europe in the years after the Second World War. This chapter will discuss the evolution of communism in Eastern Europe, the revolts that provoked its collapse, and the efforts to “return to Europe” as a framework for modernization and reform after the upheavals of 1989. Roots: revolutions, liberalization, crisis, and erosion, 1956–88 The Stalinist regime and Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe introduced after the Second World War, in most cases, had no popular support and indeed generated a genuine, fundamental resistance. The first lethal blow was Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948. Tito alone openly rejected Soviet leadership and began organizing a socialist Balkan confederation—a potential rival to the Soviet Union. Stalin reacted furiously and attempted to remove Tito, but failed. The result was that Yugoslavia followed its own independent road. The “October Revolutions” in Poland and Hungary, in 1956 represented two further setbacks. A spontaneous worker’s uprising in Poznaæ and then its military suppression generated a deep political and moral dilemma among the Polish communist elite. They reacted by removing the Stalinist leadership and re-elected Wł adisł aw Gomuł ka, the purged and imprisoned “nationalist deviator,” as Secretary General of the party. It was an open and successful revolt against Soviet political intervention. The Hungarian revolution at the same moment turned into the only national, armed uprising and, albeit briefly, the only successful military struggle for independence against the Soviet Union. Under the momentary leadership of Imre Nagy, it led to the collapse of communism, a declaration of neutrality, and the reintroduction of a multiparty democracy.

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All three of these revolts were launched against Stalinism and, in the short run, led to a corrected post-Stalinist state socialism. The regime thus became more flexible, much less oppressive, and achieved significant results in the economic and social modernization of these relatively backward countries. Essentially what followed was a quarter-century of rapid economic growth and socio-cultural success that seemingly stabilized communist governments. “Prolonged effectiveness,” argues Seymour Martin Lipset, “may give legitimacy to a political system,”4 especially in the absence of any existing alternatives. Max Weber, the classic authority on legitimacy theory, rightly noted: The distinction between an order derived from voluntary agreement and one which has been imposed is only relative… It is very common…to impose an order which in the course of time comes to be regarded as legitimate by those who originally resisted it.5 Yet in spite of all the momentary triumphs, the iron consistency and stability of state socialism were indeed undermined by these early insurrections, which set off an inevitable series of ruptures and generated further rebellion. Tito’s “national communism,” independent from the Soviet Union, produced a strong echo and a number of imitators. When the post-Stalinist Soviet leadership of Georgi Malenkov, and then Nikita Khrushchev, introduced the “New Course” and pushed de-Stalinization, some of the local Stalinist leaders, especially Georghe Gheorgiu-Dej, and his successor, Nicolai Ceauşescu, in Romania and Enver Hoxha in Albania, sought to preserve their own versions of “national Stalinism.” Although unlike Tito’s reform-oriented system, these regimes remained rigid and the most Stalinist of the post-Stalin era, their revolt against domination by Moscow weakened Soviet control and increased doctrinaire orthodoxy throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The homogeneity within the Soviet Bloc disappeared; a number of countries withdrew from or rejected military alliance in the Warsaw Pact and economic alliance in Comecon. Thus, despite the fact that the dramatic Hungarian Uprising was militarily defeated and ruthlessly repudiated, the 1956 Hungarian and Polish revolutions resulted in a permanent reform process. The regimes could not continue their previous policies. Yugoslavia itself became a model country of reform. There, as well as in Hungary, and Poland, the party gave up efforts to control private lives and thought. Instead of brainwashing the population, they contented themselves with depoliticizing their citizenry. Instead of the absolute ideological and political loyalty previously demanded, passive acceptance of the regime became enough. Various “small freedoms” were tolerated: the freedom to travel and, at least partially, freedom of information, of religion and—if certain basic taboos were avoided—even a certain freedom of scholarly analysis and “politically correct” criticism. The straitjacket of “Socialist Realism” was denounced and legal authority strengthened. Police terror was substantially curbed. Liberalization of the regimes in these three countries destroyed some of the basic pillars of Soviet-style state socialism. In post-1948 Yugoslavia (mainly from 1953 on) and post-1956 Poland, the collectivization of agriculture was given up and unrestricted peasant farming was re-introduced. A large part of the population was freed from direct party—state control and directives. The monolithic political structure was significantly weakened by the introduction of the Yugoslav self-management system, which became a

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model for other East European countries and was even, at least in a revised version, introduced in Hungary and Poland in later decades. Poland partially pluralized its political system by guaranteeing freedom and some political representation for journals, newspapers, and Catholic Church publications. From the mid-1960s on, Hungary became the leader of ongoing economic reforms by introducing important elements of a market economy and consumerism. Market prices, profit orientation by firms, and a partial and partly hidden privatization gradually destroyed central planning and replaced it with “market socialism.”6 Ties with the Western free market economy became significant (in some countries 50 to 60 percent of foreign trade was realized outside the Comecon framework during the 1980s) and economic dependence on the Soviet Union was significantly loosened. Various types of political opposition also emerged. The peaceful post-1956 changes in Hungary led to a gradual “social democratization” of the reform-minded intellectual elite, a part of whom were within the party and establishment. An “opposition from within” propelled further economic reform and, gradually recognizing their severe political limitations, turned towards direct political change and pluralization. A similar “social democratization” affected an influential part of the Czechoslovak party elite led by Alexander Dubcek in its struggle against the Stalinist leadership of Antonin Novotný in the mid-1960s. This led to the appealing, peaceful “Prague Spring” of 1968 with its Action Program of radical liberalization, freedom of expression, and guaranteed human rights. Although a Soviet-led military intervention killed this early attempt at glasnost, its impact on intellectuals throughout Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary was, in the long run, unstoppable. An opposition movement was newly born after 1968. Former young, idealistic communists turned into willing dissidents: Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuroæ, and Karol Modzelewski in Poland, János Kis, as well as György Bencze in Hungary. They, together with Catholic intellectuals such as the Polish Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Czechoslovak Václav Benda, and genuine, noncompromising democrats such as the Czech Václav Havel and the Hungarian György Konrád sought to unmask the “big lie” and live the “truth” by organizing their “second society” independently from “official society.”7 In the less oppressive regimes, the intellectual opposition became a kind of “moral virus” that influenced the elite and, in some cases, even broader sectors of society, regardless of their small number and the strength or weakness of their dissident organizations. Tocqueville’s perception that the stability of dictatorship requires conviction in an ideology, and that once a dictatorship gives up this premise it becomes fragile, was repeatedly proven in Poland. The spontaneous labor uprising in Poznaæ in the summer of 1956 was followed by a series of similar revolts: student riots in Warsaw and other Polish cities in 1968; the spontaneous revolt of the dock workers in the ports of Gdansk, Gdynia, Elblag, and Szczecin in December 1970; and worker rioting in Ursus and Radom in June 1976. The latter event was a turning point in Polish resistance. Jacek Kuroæ and other dissidents founded the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR), and their struggle merged with the intellectual opposition. This alliance became manifest during the next labor uprising in August 1980 in Gdansk and other nearby worker fortresses: Solidarnosé (Solidarity), an independent trade union organization, was established and quickly became a virtual political party with some three million members. By coincidence, the rise of Solidarity benefited from the election of Polish Cardinal Karol

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Wojtyla to the Papacy in 1978. Forced by November to formally recognize the independent Solidarity movement and its alliance with the Church, the Communist Party’s monopoly of power was broken and the political system was further pluralized. Poland was the only country in the region where an organized, militant opposition mass movement emerged and consistently challenged the regime. However, in December 1981, under strong Soviet pressure, martial law was introduced. General Jaruzelski’s Polish army, perhaps better described as “the Party in uniform,”8 suppressed and banned Solidarity and arrested Lech Wałęsa and its other leaders. Despite a bankrupt communist administration, no one in Central and Eastern Europe believed in the possibility of changing a system guarded and guaranteed by one of the superpowers. While a thriving combination of a social-democratic, reform-oriented opposition from within, an organized and militant mass movement from below, and an intellectual dissident resistance emerged in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, none of the other state socialist countries of Eastern Europe experienced anything similar. Neither open demonstrations nor strong reform movements took place, nor were opposition groups formed in the Balkan countries. Most of their elites were satisfied with their at least relative independence from the Soviet Union and accepted the achievements of their “modernization dictatorships.” Two historical developments, however, changed the situation. One of them was the economic jolt caused by the first oil crisis of 1973. The prosperity and economic expansion that marked the “golden years” after the Second World War came to a sudden halt. Instead, a frightening price increase, double-digit inflation combined with economic stagnation (stagflation), and rapidly rising, double-digit unemployment became the new reality. Rather than being a brief cyclical recession, the crisis settled into a long-term “Great Depression” with global consequences. Moreover, it became clear that the world economy itself was in a state of transformation: scientific and technological breakthroughs comparable only to those of the British Industrial Revolution had generated a deep structural crisis. The traditional leading economic sectors, including export branches, began to decline and their infrastructure became obsolete. A “whole set of technological changes” based on revolutionary computer technology and electronics altered the economic landscape. “The technical advances in microelectronics,” noted Everett Rogers, “that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s have spurred the Communication Revolution…[connected with the emergence of a new} high-technology industry…one in which the basic technology underlying the industry changes very rapidly.”9 The process led to a “service revolution” and the rise of what Daniel Bell called a “post-industrial society.” The transformation was dramatic all over the world. Even the most developed countries were hit hard by the economic turbulence. However, with almost unlimited financial, intellectual, and scientific resources, they were rich enough to withstand change and adjust to the new economic requirements. A relatively rapid process of restructuring both industrial output and exports followed. As a result, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Western world successfully managed the crisis and entered into a period of new prosperity. Central and Eastern Europe, similar to other peripheral regions such as Latin America, Africa, and some parts of Asia, was unable to cope with the structural crisis. The rapid economic growth of previous years (3.9 percent annually between 1950 and 1973) slowed significantly to a rate of between 1 and 2 percent. All the previous

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achievements, including rising consumption and living standards, and even full employment, were endangered. The moderate catching-up process of the 1950s and 1960s was replaced by a growing gap between East and West.10 Along with promising growth and a sense of security, transitory legitimacy eroded and a deepening political and moral crisis took hold among the regime’s elite. The second development was the collapse of Soviet power. The economic crisis also hit the Soviet Union, cementing a prolonged stagnation of nearly two decades. It undermined the military position of the country in a tightening arms race with the West. Soviet military power eventually met its Waterloo (or Vietnam) in Afghanistan during the ten-year-long war that ended in defeat and exposed the vulnerability of the Soviet Empire. A further series of events accelerated unavoidable changes: Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and the party hierarchy consecutively elected two ailing men who both also died within a year. After this tragicomic interlude, a dynamic new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected party boss and head of state in 1985. In a surprisingly short period, he initiated glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and signed a series of agreements with the United States that ended the decades-long Cold War (see Chapter 1 for further analysis). The socalled Brezhnev Doctrine of “brotherly assistance,” which had called for military intervention if socialism was endangered anywhere in the Soviet camp, was suspended. For the first time in postwar history, the Soviet Union initiated reforms instead of hindering them. Central and Eastern Europe was able to determine its own destiny. Undermined by severe economic and political crisis and uncertain how to extricate themselves from it, but nevertheless freed from Soviet pressure, the reform-minded Polish and Hungarian elites decided to radically transform and rescue their regimes and solve what had been thought of as impenetrable problems. Collapse: Poland, Hungary, and the “domino effect,” 1989–91 Behind the shield of military rule, General Jaruzelski’s regime sought to gain some breathing space by introducing major reforms to consolidate Poland’s economy and satisfy a desperate population. This was clearly evidenced by the appointment of Mieczysław Rakowski, the leading Party liberal, as Prime Minister. Rakowski advocated copying the Hungarian path of market reform. The first measures in this direction were taken in January and July 1982, and then again in 1983, as a whole series of radical changes were introduced in a nervous rush. However, they could not and would not work. The Jaruzelski regime was opposed by the entire population and isolated by a Western boycott. The lack of self-confidence within the Communist Party forced it to make unending compromises: price reform, an essential element of marketization, was immediately compensated for by wage increases, with a resulting wage—price spiral that led to 100 percent inflation in 1982. The only legitimation for the 1981 party—military coup d’état had been the Soviet danger. Yet because of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the end of the Cold War, even this factor was eliminated. A total demoralization of the regime’s elite led to a final experiment and desperate compromise: preserving power by sharing it with Solidarity. After a partial and, then, full amnesty in 1984 and 1986, a continuation of Solidarity’s

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“self-limiting revolution” became an option once again. Adam Michnik noted a kind of “political draw” at that time.11 In the summer of 1988, Minister of Interior General Kiszczak suggested a dialogue between the government and Solidarity. It actually began on February 6 1989 when the “Roundtable” discussions were opened with Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa and the Catholic Church. As Kiszczak, (the head of the government delegation), expressed in his opening address, the talks were a “consistent continuation of the policy of ‘socialist renewal’ instituted in December 1981.” He also announced that “socialism would remain the system of government,” but declared the introduction of a new “political design,” the end of a “bad system and a lack of freedom…”. “The time of political and social monopoly of one party over the people,” declared the Communist Party representative, “was coming to an end.”12 The compromise, accepted by both parties on April 5, called for pre-arranged elections in June 1989. It allowed the opposition to contest 35 percent of the members of the Sejm (Parliament), and 100 percent of the members of the newly introduced second chamber, the Senate. The agreement, nevertheless, guaranteed a communist majority in the Sejm and strong presidential power for General Jaruzelski. The posts of Prime Minister, Ministers of Defense and Interior, thus all the armed forces, were granted to the communist government. The bargain, however, was swept away in the elections themselves: not a single government candidate was chosen. In a landslide victory, Solidarity claimed virtually all the freely elected Senate and Sejm seats. After the humiliating defeat, the designated Prime Minister, General Kiszczak, failed in his effort to form a mixed, communist— Solidarity government. President Jaruzelski, “who was completely loyal to the democratic process,” as Adam Michnik stated,13 had no other choice but, on August 24, to appoint the region’s first anti-communist Prime Minister, the Solidarity candidate Tadeusz Mazowiecki. A complete Solidarity takeover followed within two years. Entirely free parliamentary elections crowned the transformation in 1991 and Lech Wałęsa, the legendary Solidarity leader, became President of Poland. The Hungarian reform/revolution, what Timothy Garton Ash called a”refolution,” reached breakneck speed during the second half of the 1980s. A major reform abolished the monopoly of the National Bank and introduced commercial banking. The tax reform of 1987 established Western-style value-added taxation and a progressive personal income tax. The hard core of Party reformists, led by Imre Pozsgay, demanded a Rechtsstaat and the pluralization of the political system. The party and intellectual elite rebelled against the conservative-reform leadership of János Kádár. His cautious reforms combined with absolute loyalty to the Soviet Union were rather successful until the late 1970s, but became an obstacle during the second half of the 1980s. The socialdemocratized party elite prepared a coup by forcing an extraordinary National Party Conference in May 1988, two years earlier than the regular congress was planned. At this meeting almost the entire old leadership, Kádár and most of his Politburo, were dismissed and replaced mainly by reformers. Although conservative-reformer Károly Grósz briefly replaced Kádár as First Secretary of the Party and Prime Minister, Rezsö Nyers (the “father of the Hungarian reform”) and Imre Pozsgay became the leaders of the Politburo. One-third of the Central Committee was also replaced and the reformers took power. The peaceful revolution became inevitable: the radical reformer Miklós Németh and a “quadriga” of the Party leadership replaced Grósz. In February 1989, exactly at the same

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time as the Polish Roundtable discussions began, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Party decided to introduce a multi-party system and hold free elections within a year. Political parties were allowed to form, the constitution was amended and the “leading role of the party” was eliminated. Human rights were guaranteed. Free, unrestricted private enterprise and foreign investments were legalized. Moreover, in another extraordinary congress in October 1989, the Communist Party dissolved itself. In its place, two new parties emerged; one was actually a continuation of the old party (keeping both its name and program), but the former reform-wing established a Western-style socialist party and was soon accepted by the Social-Democratic International. As a symbolic end of an era, Imre Nagy, the executed leader of the 1956 revolution, was reburied and János Kádár, who ruled the country for a third of a century, died in the summer of 1998. In March 1990, free elections led to the overwhelming victory of the opposition: 60 percent of the vote was cast in favor of a right-of-center coalition led by the Hungarian Democratic Forum. The reform-socialists, who led the peaceful transformation and had hoped for victory, actually gained only 10 percent of the vote. President George Bush noted that 1989 would be remembered as a year “when the human spirit was lifted and spurred on by the bold and courageous actions of two great peoples, the people of Poland and Hungary.”14 The Polish and Hungarian collapse had fatal consequences for communist regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union accepted the political changes, thereby confirming the disappearance of any threat of Soviet military intervention. Communist elites were totally demoralized after recognizing that neither military force (martial law in Poland), nor radical and successful reforms (as in Hungary) were able to shore up a decaying and corrupted system. In this political environment, only a small spark was necessary to ignite and destroy state socialism in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania within a few weeks. The opening of the Hungarian—Austrian border in September 1989 lit that spark. This act was part of the peaceful Hungarian revolution. It was mostly symbolic, since all Hungarians had passports and were able to travel freely. The Németh government, however, sought to acknowledge this freedom by destroying the marks of a closed society: the barbed wire fences and watchtowers along the Austrian border. Yet this symbolic act eliminated a very real obstacle to escape for East Germans who were forbidden to travel to the West and instead spent their vacations in Eastern Europe. Hungary was a popular destination for families from both Germanies. Once the border was opened, tens of thousands of East Germans streamed across from Hungary into Austria in the early weeks of summer. The Hungarian government rejected the 1969 agreement preventing East German citizens from leaving to a third country and instead negotiated with the Kohl administration in West Germany to organize the mass migration. An exodus, a “vote by foot,” swept away Eric Honecker s hard-line government in East Germany. Mass demonstrations by millions followed in Dresden, Berlin and other cities. Personal changes in the top leadership became meaningless in this situation. To stop the exodus, the demoralized communist leadership opened the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The symbol of German division and the Cold War separation of Europe was destroyed. Deutschland, einig Vaterland, the slogan of the masses in revolt, was soon realized.

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After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the cautious Czechs—about 50,000 young people—marched through the streets of Prague on November 17 demanding “freedom and truth.” The riot police attacked, wounding 500 and arresting 100 people. It was but fuel for the fire. The next day, even more protesters flooded into the streets. On November 20, a crowd of roughly 200,000 demonstrated against the regime and Václav Havel, the spiritual leader of the intellectual “non-political” opposition and Charter 77, freshly released from prison, addressed the people from a balcony in Wenceslas Square. A week later, Alexander Dubcek, the hero of the Prague Spring, spoke to 300,000 people in the packed square. A new opposition party, the Civic Forum, was founded. A general strike with the participation of four-fifths of the population demanded the resignation of the government. An attempted party reorganization, rapid personnel changes, and the formation of a coalition could no longer save state socialism. On New Year’s Day 1990, Václav Havel, the newly elected President of Czechoslovakia, addressed the nation: “People, your government has returned to you!”15 Three weeks after the Czechoslovak general strike, the most oppressive Romanian regime of Nicolai Ceauşescu also imploded. It began in Timisoara with a minor incident: a mixed Hungarian and Romanian crowd defended a Hungarian pastor, a critic of the regime, who was ordered to leave but refused to move. The secret police’s armed forces, the Securitate, opened fire and killed more than 100 people. The self-confident dictator called a mass meeting in Republic Square in Bucharest, on December 21 to denounce the “imperialist and Hungarian conspirators.” He addressed the crowd, which, for the first time, turned against him and demanded his resignation. The square was cleared by riot police, tanks, and tear gas.16 On that very night, agitated young people, intellectuals, students, and workers gathered in the center of the city. The army refused to take action against the people, but the 75,000 strong Securitate elite troops clashed with the antigovernment throng. A pitched battle resulted in which more than one thousand people were killed, but the revolution succeeded. The hated dictator and his wife, in a scene reminiscent of a Hollywood film chase, attempted to escape from the roof of his headquarters by helicopter and then by car. They were captured, summarily tried and immediately executed. In Bulgaria, a palace coup prevented a bloody confrontation. The 78-year-old dictator, Todor Zhivkov, who had been in power since 1954, was forced to resign at the Central Committee session on November 10, 1989- The next month, the leading role of the party was eliminated and free elections were held in June 1990. The regime collapsed without any real resistance. During the same weeks in December 1989, the fire of revolution engulfed Albania. Revolutionary students demanded the pluralization of the political system. On February 20, 1990, some 100,000 people gathered in the main square of Tirana to tear down the gigantic statue of Enver Hoxha. Ramiz Alia, the party chief and hand-picked successor of Hoxha, accepted the demands to hold free elections. In crisis-ridden federal Yugoslavia, the various republics, fighting against Serb domination, turned towards parliamentarianism and multi-party free elections. They were held between April and December 1990 in the various republics. The central question, however, was not democratic transformation, but separation. State socialism collapsed together with Yugoslavia. That year the cradle and bastion of state socialism, the Soviet Union itself collapsed: both the regime and the federal, multinational state. The collapse

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of Polish and Hungarian state socialism had thus generated a “domino effect,” destroying the regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe, one by one. Building a parliamentary and market system, 1990–2000 Central and Eastern Europe, as the main slogan of the peaceful revolution of 1989 expressed it, sought to “return to Europe.” No one questioned the urgent need to introduce Western political and economic institutions. The first free elections—in a number of these countries the very first truly free elections in their entire history—served as a prelude to political democracy. In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the opposition defeated all the former communist parties turned social democratic parties. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, however, a united monolithic opposition, Solidarity and Civic Forum respectively, incorporated various opposing left-of-center and right-ofcenter groups and parties. Only Hungary immediately developed a more structured multiparty system. Subsequent elections, in the Polish case nearly every year, led to a split in the united opposition and, gradually, a pluralistic political landscape developed. The Balkan countries followed a different pattern. In Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia, the reorganized former communist parties and their mostly new leaders gained, in most cases, an absolute majority, often in the first free elections. Their stronghold was in the countryside, while in the cities opposition forces gained ground. Later elections, however, saw the collapse of the former communist governments and then the formation of anti-communist governments. Thus during the 1990s, multi-party elections and democratic legislatures introduced stable, legitimate states (Rechtsstaaten), and a pluralistic system that gradually became well structured and able to express the interests of the various social strata. Deconstruction of state-ownership and the entire centrally planned economic system began immediately, although at different speeds and in different ways depending on the country—with Poland the most rapid and Bulgaria and Romania the slowest. State-owned shops, restaurants, and service companies were sold off (“small privatization”) and literally millions of small private, sometimes family, firms were established. Transformation, however, was not an easy road. The big and partly bankrupt state-owned industrial companies such as the iron, steel, and engineering works were not easily sold. The best firms were quickly privatized, while others remained state-owned much longer. In the mid-1990s, communications, electricity, water and other utilities were also privatized in some countries. However this “big privatization” turned out to be a longer process that lasted until the end of the 1990s. By then, roughly three-quarters of the economy was privatized in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. About half of the previously state-owned assets were sold in Slovenia and Romania. Marketization, despite the lack of any strong tradition in some of these countries, was virtually completed during the first half of the decade. State subsidies were withdrawn, prices deregulated, trade liberalized, and a free market for goods, capital, and labor was established. However, the transformation was not an idyllic process. Disorganization, corruption, and decline were unavoidable, especially since liberalization led to the opening up of previously closed, self-contained economic systems. The collapse of state socialism automatically led to the dissolution of the economic alliance (Comecon) and trade

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connections between the Soviet bloc countries. Virtually overnight, each country had to restructure its foreign trade and find new markets for its goods. The old production profile, however, was unsuitable for this kind of adjustment. Market dynamics had new requirements: innovative products, high quality content, and competitive prices were essential to profit making. Without tariff protection and trade restrictions, the former state socialist countries were forced to compete with the most advanced Western economies in their own domestic markets. The effect was devastating. The “transformational crisis,” as János Kornai called this phenomenon,17 was at least partly unavoidable. However, mistakes that were in principle avoidable, deepened it. The opening of the domestic market too rapidly, the immediate liberalization of trade through “shock treatment,” and an often mistaken and extremely corrupt privatization process led to free fall in certain industrial sectors. Domenico Nuti maintained that drastic deterioration of economic conditions “is not [a] necessary concomitant of transition…but the unnecessary consequence of policy failures.”18 Thus, because of both unavoidable breakdown and unnecessary errors, the early years were, indeed, shocking. Between 1990 and 1994, most of the countries of Eastern Europe hit bottom: industrial and agricultural output declined by 20 to 50 percent and GDP by 20 to 30 percent. Polish and Hungarian agriculture nearly collapsed. A soaring 14 to 16 percent unemployment rate and galloping inflation led to the pauperization of huge segments of society during the very first years of transformation.19 Inflation—a sign of inequity and a source of social pain—skyrocketed in some countries and remained high everywhere for a long time. In 1989, Poland and Yugoslavia experienced an inflation rate of between 1,000 and 2,600 percent. In 1992 and 1993, Russia and the Ukraine buckled under 2,500 and 2,700 percent hyperinflation. Ukrainian inflation culminated in 1993 at a rate of more than 10,000 percent. The collapse of the postwar state socialist regimes and the emerging economic chaos and insecurity also promoted a resurgence of nationalism and xenophobic violence. Old conflicts re-emerged and separatism engulfed the region as all the multinational states dissolved. Yugoslavia was first. The Slovene, Croat, and then Bosnian declarations of independence in 1991–92 generated a violent Serb reaction: in a bloody civil war about a quarter of a million people were killed and millions uprooted.20 This strife, occurring in several waves, characterized the entire decade. Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, BosniaHercegovina, then (virtually) Kosovo all became little independent states, some of them with only 2 to 4 million inhabitants. The Soviet Union followed in 1991 by breaking up into a series of independent states created from the former republics. Some ethnic minorities still continued their struggle for self-determination within the Russian Federation at the end of the 1990s. In January 1993, a peaceful separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia ended the existence of Czechoslovakia. In total, in place of eight independent Central and Eastern European countries in 1989, twenty-six sovereign states came into existence, including all the successor states of the Soviet Union, by the mid-1990s. Aside from separatism, a new wave of ethnic cleansing by Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians, as well as atrocities against Gypsies and various national minorities, led to further migration. Millions of Germans and Jews left the former Soviet Union. Roughly 100,000 Hungarians moved to Hungary from Transylvania and the former Yugoslavia. About 1 million Kosovar Albanians were forced to flee their homes. Nearly

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700,000 Serb refugees escaped to Serbia from neighboring newly independent Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. A permanent intellectual emigration towards the West and the departure of young people to find better jobs and living conditions took place in virtually all of the countries of the region. Slowly, however, the upheaval of the first years of post-communism settled down. Fresh opportunities opened up and entrepreneurs found new prospects. Hyperinflation was soon curbed. Some of the countries successfully stabilized their economies and currencies: Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia reduced inflation rates to single-digit levels from 1994–95 on. The average inflation rate in the region remained between 20 and 30 percent in the mid-1990s. High inflation returned to Bulgaria (311 and 579 percent in 1996 and 1997 respectively) and Romania (151 percent in 1997). Nevertheless, the 1998 and 1999 figures reflect an average 8 percent inflation in Central and Eastern Europe, although for the successor states of the Soviet Union it was still at 42 percent.21 Thus after the troubled early years, economic recovery was impressive. Between 1992 and 1994, the region began to recuperate. Although some countries, mostly in Central Europe, became rather successful, others in the Balkans and the successor states of the former Soviet Union remained in perpetual chaos and continued to decline. For example, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all nearly reached or slightly surpassed 95 to 120 percent of their 1989 per capita GDP level. In contrast, the Balkan countries and the successor states of the Soviet Union attained only 33 percent (Ukraine), 53 percent (Russia), 66 percent (Bulgaria), and 75 percent (Romania) of their 1989 economic levels.22 If the 1990s were a “lost decade” for all of the countries of Eastern Europe in terms of economic growth, it may continue to be the case for some of them during the first decade of the new millennium as well. Recovering from the “transformational crisis,” where it has been accomplished, is an important success. It reflects a basic shift to the new economic environment and also creates the fundamental prerequisites for a “return to Europe.” However, it does not yet mean a successful adjustment to the end-of-century globalizing processes. The revolutionary technological and structural transformation of the late twentieth century requires a dramatic adjustment. Market dynamics, privatization, and institution building create only the prerequisites for it. The elimination of central planning and the self-contained, noncompetitive Soviet bloc economy may not automatically guarantee successful modernization. Despite repeated attempts over the last century or more, Central and Eastern Europe have not succeeded in changing their relative economic position in the world nor in joining the advanced West (see Table 8.1).23 Thus returning to free market capitalism cannot alone change the historical trend of the region’s mediocre economic performance and its repeated inability to respond positively to major structural change. Central and Eastern Europe was unable to respond to the challenge of modernization in the 1970s and 1980s. As in most backward peripheral regions, and similar to Latin America and Africa, the replacement of the old with the new—that is, with what Joseph Schumpeter called a “whole set of technological changes”—undermined their economic performance. It destroyed Eastern European prices and export potential and caused a 30 percent decline in the terms of trade in the first five years of the structural transformation. It is reminiscent of the two previous structural crises—in the 1870s and 1880s and during the interwar decades—when Central

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and Eastern Europe tried to find an exit “backward.” In 1934–35, for instance, the countries of the area joined a German-led regional economic bloc based on barter trade and a strict quota system, independent from world market prices, in order to safeguard traditional sectors and agricultural exports. This practice was repeated after 1973. At that Table 8.1 Central and Eastern Europe’s per capita GDP as percentage of the West and the world average Region

1870

1913

1938

1973

1989

Western Europe

44

44

44

47

40

Overseas West

32

30

35

38

32

World average

112

98

108

133

121

time, Soviet-led Comecon sought to keep international economic influence at bay and the “capitalist crisis” outside the borders of state socialism. They postponed responding to the international challenge and avoided any significant change in structural policy or in exports. Trade relations within the protected, complacent Comecon zone helped to delay global market challenges, but undermined the opportunity to adjust to changing conditions in time: the old economy and backwardness were preserved. That was the main economic cause of the collapse of state socialism.24 The postponed and unresolved economic tasks of the 1970s and 1980s—the vital adjustment to the technological revolution by building up modern, competitive economic sectors—are, in spite of the achievements of the 1990s, still mostly waiting to be realized. The “transformational crisis” concealed deeper layers of difficulty. Transformation from a state-owned and planned economy to a private and free market one is mostly complete. The response to the structural crisis, however, is still on the agenda. And as recent, spectacular examples of the catching-up process (such as EU members Ireland and Spain) demonstrate, the cardinal question for Central and Eastern Europe is also “Europeanization” and transnationalization. Without a massive inflow of direct foreign investment, technology, and knowhow, without radically modernized communication and infrastructure systems, competitive new economic sectors cannot be built. Capital inflow, needless to say, began immediately after the collapse of state socialism. Between 1989 and 1991, $2.3 billion was invested in Central and Eastern Europe, but the bulk of it, nearly 2 billion, went to Hungary. That country’s position as the main capital recipient continued during the first half of the 1990s: out of the $13.5 billion total investment in the region, including the Baltic countries, more than half, $6.9 billion, went to Hungary. During the second half of the decade, Poland and the Czech Republic also became important beneficiaries. Thus, capital inflow played an important role in privatization and economic modernization in these three leading transformative countries.25 Foreign investments increased: estimated foreign investments in Central and Eastern Europe remained under $2 billion until 1991, but for 1998 and 1999 reached $15 to $16 billion. They contributed to infrastructural modernization, including the creation of a modern communication system, and also to founding or developing modern industrial sectors. General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, and other global

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companies participated in those transactions. Foreign direct investments in Central and Eastern Europe, however, were circumscribed (see Table 8.2): only 1 percent of the Table 8.2 Cumulative Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) to Central and Eastern Europe, 1989–2000 FDI Inflow in $ Billions Hungary

19.7

FDI Inflow in $/Capita

FDI Inflow as % of GDP, 1999

1,964

3.6

Poland

29.1

751

4.1

Czech Republic

21.7

2,102

11.7

Russia

10.0

69

0.4

Romania

6.7

301

3.0

Ukraine

3.3

68

1.5

Croatia

4.3

938

7.2

Bulgaria

3.3

404

6.7

Slovakia

4.2

772

3.6

Slovenia

1.5

756

0.7

Albania

0.6

174

1.4

Central & Eastern Europe*

83.0

1, 154

5.0

Successor States of Soviet Union

30.8

167

4.1

Notes: *Together with the Baltic States. Source: Transition Report 2001. Energy in Transition, London, European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, 2001, p. 68.

roughly $14 trillion in foreign investments was channeled to the area in the first half of the 1990s, representing an average of 3 percent of the GDP of Central and Eastern Europe, and hardly more than half of that in the successor states of the Soviet Union. Singapore alone gained 50 percent more investments than six Central and Eastern European countries put together. By the end of the twentieth century, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had already been accepted into NATO. As to the European Union, it agreed in the autumn of 2002 that, by 2004, its roster of members would include Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. Romanian and Bulgarian participation was also in prospect at a date around 2007–10. Membership in the EU offers all these countries an opportunity to redirect their economies and begin the historic process of catching up. Looking to the examples of the Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries, and Iceland this process will probably take thirty to fifty years. Becoming integrated into the European Union and profiting from Europeanization and

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transnationalization must crown the Central and Eastern European revolution of 1989 and the ongoing transformation of the 1990s. There is, however, no identical destiny for the area. Further reading For an overview of Eastern and Central Europe since 1945, see I.T.Berend (ed.), LongTerm Structural Changes in Transforming Central and Eastern Europe, Munich, Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1997, and Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. See also N.Naimark and L.Gibianskii (eds), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997, and B. Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, as well as Z.A.B.Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe, Oxford, Blackwell Press, 1991, and the more general G.Swain and N.Swain, Eastern Europe Since 1945, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Both P.G.Lewis (ed.), Eastern Europe: Political Crisis and Legitimation, London, Croom Helm, 1984, and M. Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy, New York, Penguin, 1993, are wide-ranging and informative. The individual countries of Eastern Europe have also received full attention from scholars. On the Polish transition from communism, see N.Davis, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; K.Z.Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition: Institutional Change and Economic Growth, 1970–1994, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997; as well as M.H.Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976– 1980, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993. The older F.Gibney, The Frozen Revolution. Poland: A Study in Communist Decay, New York, Farra, Straus and Cudahy, 1959, is also useful. On Hungary, see B.Király et al. (eds), The First War Between Socialist States: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Its Impact, New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1984; A.Felkay, Hungary and the USSR, 1956–1988: Kádár’s Political Leadership, New York, Greenwood Press, 1989; and R.L.Tökés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change and Political Succession, 1957–1990, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Political repression in East Germany is examined by M.Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995. The break-up of Czechoslovakia is examined in C. Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation versus State, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997. On the crisis and disintegration of Yugoslavia, see S.L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War, Washington, DC, Brookings Institute, 1995; B.Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980–92, London, Verso, 1993; and M.Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, New York, Penguin, 1996, as well as the very readable R.D.Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1993. For the Romanian case, see T.Gilberg, Nationalism and Communism in Romania: The Rise and Fall of Ceauşescu’s Personal Dictatorship, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1990.

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For a more detailed examination of the revolutions that ended state socialism, see J.F.Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991. V.Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central and Eastern Europe, London, Hutchinson, 1985, and A.Michnik, Takie czasy—rzecz o kompromisie, London, Aneks, 1985, are the best firsthand reports. On economic reform and the transition to capitalism, see J.Adam, Planning and Market in Soviet and East European Thought, 1960s—1992, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992, as well as I.T.Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, and D.H.Aldcroft and S.Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe Since 1918, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995. See also K.Z.Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition: Institutional Change and Economic Growth, 1970–1994, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, and N. Swain, Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism, London, Verso, 1992. Tina Rosenberg’s The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, New York, Vintage, 1995, examines the social and political implications of the transition from communism, as does M.Burawoy and K.Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition, Boulder, CO and London, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. For a more wide-ranging assessment of contemporary European socialism, see D.Sassoon (ed.), Looking Left: European Socialism after the Cold War, London, Tauris, 1997. Two excellent studies of women and gender are B.Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe, London, Verso, 1993, and S.Ramet (ed.), Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Notes 1 M.Djilas, “Hungary and Yugoslavia,” in B.Király et al. (eds), The First War Between Socialist States: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its Impact, New York, Brooklyn College Press, 1984, pp. 92–3. 2 F.Gibney, The Frozen Revolution. Poland: A Study in Communist Decay, New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959, p. XII. 3 N.Davis, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 11. 4 S.M.Lipset, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1960, p. 82. 5 M.Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. I, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1978, p. 37. 6 I.T.Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms 1953–1988, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 7 V.Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Cittzens Against the State in Central and Eastern Europe, London, Hutchinson, 1985. 8 J.Rupnik, “The Military and ‘Normalization’ in Poland,” in P.G.Lewis (ed.), Eastern Europe: Political Crisis and Legitimation, London, Croom Helm, 1984. 9 E.M.Rogers, Communication Technology: The New Media Society, New York, Free Press, 1986, pp. 14–15. 10 A.Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992, Paris, OECD, 1995.

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11 A.Michnik, Takie czasy—rzecz o kompromisie, London, Aneks, 1985. 12 Radio Free Europe Research, vol. 14, no. 9, March 3, 1989, pp. 3–5. 13 “Ja jestem polskim inteligentem,” an interview with A.Michnik in Polityka, 6, 1993, p. 9. 14 Radio Free Europe Research, vol. 14, no. 50, December 15, 1989, p. 20. 15 V.Havel, Open Letter: Selected Writings 1964–1990, New York, Knopf, 1991, p. 396. 16 J.F.Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991. 17 J.Kornai, “Anti-Depression Cure for Ailing Postcommunist Economies,” Transition: The Newsletter About Reforming Economies, The World Bank, vol. 4, no. 1, February 1993, p. 2. 18 D.Nuti, “How to Contain Economic Inertia in the Transitional Economies,” Transition: The Newsletter About Reforming Economies, The World Bank, vol. 3, no.11, December-January 1992–3, p. 2. 19 R.Andorka, “The Development of Poverty During the Transformation in Hungary,” and J.Kochanowicz, “New Solidarities? Market Changes and Social Cohesion in a Historical Perspective,” both in I.T.Berend (ed.), Long-Term Structural Changes in Transforming Central 6- Eastern Europe, Munich, Stidosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1997. 20 B.Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980–92, London, Verso, 1993. 21 Transition Report Update, London, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, April 1999, p. 9. 22 Transition Report, p. 11 23 Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, p. 212. 24 I.T.Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 25 Transition Report, p. 12.

9 The politics of European unification Robert H.Lieshout The politics of European unification has led to the establishment of international organizations that are unique in the history of cooperation between states in times of peace. First, these organizations are unique because they have executive organs—such as the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC), and the European Central Bank (ECB) of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)—with independent powers vis-àvis the member states, in which decisions are taken by majority vote. Second, they are unique because, in the Council of Ministers of the EEC and the European Union (EU), in certain domains decisions are taken by qualified majority vote (QMV) that are binding upon all the member states, even those that actually voted against them. These supranational organizations are distinctive in another respect as well. When, in the summer of 1952, the High Authority began its activities, it was the very first executive organ of an international organization with independent powers. Moreover, their evident success in “rescuing the European nation-state” notwithstanding,1 supranational organizations have remained very rare in the international system. Even in Europe itself there have only been two ‘qualitative leaps’ in this respect: the ECSC and EMU. The overwhelming majority of organizations facilitating cooperation between states are still intergovernmental in nature. In this chapter I shall argue that the Western European states resorted to such unique and innovative institutional constructions because these promised a peaceful solution to the violent FrancoGerman conflict that had resulted in two disastrous world wars and ravaged the European continent. Accordingly, the European integration process should primarily be seen as a political process, the dynamics of which are to be found in the attempts by French and West German—and American—politicians and officials to bring about reconciliation between France and the Federal Republic of Germany. The new supranational institutions provided the context in which the continuous struggle for power between France and Germany could at last be fought using peaceful means. If war, as Clausewitz maintains, is “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means,”2 then “Europe” is also a true political instrument—a continuation of political intercourse between France and Germany, carried on in this case by institutional means. This point of view also implies that, if one wishes to understand the dynamics of the European unification process, one should have a keen eye for the centrality of the Franco-German relationship. Of course, this relationship cannot explain the totality of European unification: for instance, why countries like Sweden, Finland and Austria wanted to join the European Union, or why at the present

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time the new democracies of Eastern and Central Europe are similarly eager. This perspective does make clear, however, that enlarged membership becomes possible only when France and Germany are in agreement on such important issues. The issue of sovereignty Before commencing my overview of the politics of European unification, it is perhaps wise to discuss briefly the concept of sovereignty, as this plays a central role in the debates on the relationship between the European Union (EU) and the participating states. Many authors see sovereignty as identical with autonomy, i.e. “the capacity to insulate oneself from outside influences and forces.”3 In my view, this is not correct. A state is not more sovereign to the extent that its power is greater. There are no “degrees of sovereignty.” In my interpretation, sovereignty refers to a situation as well as a claim to that situation. It is impossible to reduce it either to a “brute” empirical fact or to a purely juridical concept. Sovereignty forms the translation into international law of an actual state of affairs with respect to the effective exercise of authority over a certain territory and the people living there. Most of the time, the translation and the actual state of affairs will coincide, but this need not always be the case. The possession of sovereignty constitutes the certificate of membership in the states system, with all the accompanying rights and obligations. Perhaps Huber (the arbiter in the Island of Palmas case brought in 1928 by the Netherlands against the United States) has put this point most succinctly: “territorial sovereignty…involves the exclusive right to display the activities of a State.” However, it is possible that under certain circumstances this certificate of membership will be denied to a state by other states. This denial has very adverse consequences for the effective exercise of authority. This is the reason why sovereignty is more than just a juridical term. Sovereignty has two aspects. The first is that, with regard to its territory and the population living within it, a state recognizes no authority other than its own. This is called “territorial integrity” or “internal” sovereignty. A state can delegate part of its internal authority to an international organization—as did the member states of the ECSC, when they delegated to the High Authority their power to determine the price of coal and steel. The second aspect is that a state recognizes no authority above it in its international relations. This is called “independence” or “external” sovereignty. Independence refers to a state’s ability to conduct relations with other states. A state can also delegate part of its external authority to an international organization—as did the member states of the EEC, when they delegated to the Commission their authority to conduct negotiations in the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). That states can delegate part of their internal or external authority to international organizations does not mean that states “surrender” their sovereignty, or parts of it, or that they “delegate” or “pool” it. They also do not “fuse” their sovereignties, as Jean Monnet believed they were doing.4 Nor can we say that the growth of “multilateral governance arrangements” like the EU formally puts into question the sovereignty of the participating nation-states, which indeed are, directly or indirectly, collectively responsible for these arrangements. It may be the case that the member states of the EU

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have lost a significant part of their power for autonomous policy-making and that “in some matters, it seems even to have gone nowhere, just evaporated,”5 but this does not mean that their sovereignty—their claim to supreme authority over a certain territory and its inhabitants within clearly defined borders—has been affected. I can only agree with Robert Jackson, who has recently emphasized that “the EU does not involve a transfer of sovereignty. There is nothing to prevent Britain from legally withdrawing from the EU. There are of course policy considerations that might make that unwise.”6 Accordingly, although the emergence of “Europe” may have had major consequences for the policy autonomy of the member states, it has not diminished their sovereignty in any way. Laying the foundations: 1950–57 The German Federal Republic was founded in September 1949-However, it remained an occupied country. Supreme authority was retained by the occupying powers—the United States, Britain and France. The last of these was entrusted by the others with the task of developing a common policy for the new state. The United States and Britain believed that French leadership was needed to integrate the Federal Republic promptly and decisively into Western Europe. French foreign minister Robert Schuman fully agreed with this point of view, but in the months that followed he did nothing. Any proposal that so much as hinted at the rehabilitation of West Germany was certain to provoke a storm of criticism in France. By the spring of 1950, there were signs that the Americans were beginning to lose patience, and Schuman had to come up with something. Luckily, Jean Monnet helped him out at the last moment. As head of the National Planning Commission (Commissariat Général du Plan) since 1946, Monnet had been responsible for implementing the modernization of the French economy, and that of heavy industry in particular. The Monnet Plan’s aim was to restore France to its rightful position as the dominant power in Western Europe. While trying to accomplish his task, Monnet was confronted with two considerable problems that were intimately connected. The first was that because it might take so much time to overcome the stagnation and lethargy that had characterized the economy under the Third Republic, France would not succeed in staying ahead of the reviving West German economy The second problem was that in view of the conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States was very anxious for the West German economy to recover as soon as possible. Another complicating factor was that the French steel industry in Lorraine depended heavily on West German coke. However, what worried Monnet most was the general sense of resignation he encountered among his compatriots. Whomever he talked to seemed to have already resigned themselves to a German recovery, another period of FrancoGerman conflict, and French inability to counter such gloomy prospects.7 At the beginning of April 1950, Monnet thought up a means of escaping from this ominous vicious circle: France and the Federal Republic would pool their coal and steel production. A supranational body, in which France and West Germany would be represented on equal terms, would run this pool. Throughout April, Monnet and his staff worked on a memorandum incorporating his solution. The text was finally submitted to Schuman at the beginning of May. Schuman approved it, and the French cabinet accepted the plan on May 9. That very same

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afternoon, Schuman made the plan public at a press conference. The French government proposed “to place all of French and German coal and steel production under a joint High Authority, in an organization open to participation by other European countries.” Schuman also declared, “This proposal will lay the first concrete foundations of a European federation which is essential for the preservation of peace.” The Schuman Plan could initially be interpreted as a new method of giving France control over West German recovery. Nonetheless, when Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was informed about its contents on the morning of May 9, he immediately notified Schuman that he approved “wholeheartedly” of the latter s initiative. Adenauer did so because the plan was in keeping with the three key features of his European policy: (1) to bring about a reconciliation between Germany and France; (2) to achieve this reconciliation through the incorporation of the Federal Republic into Western European organizations (Westbindung); and (3) to participate in these organizations on the basis of equality (Gleichberechtigung). The plan would foster reconciliation, just as it satisfied the French desire for security. Schuman highlighted this point in a private letter to Adenauer, which he sent along with the text of the plan. He emphasized that “the purpose of his proposal was not economic, but eminently political.” In France “there was a fear that once Germany had recovered, she would attack France. He could imagine that corresponding fears might be present in Germany.”8 In other words, the Westbindung that the plan pursued by placing all French and West German coal and steel production under the High Authority, also had to ensure that France and the Federal Republic would gain so much control over each other’s war industries that future wars between them would not only be unthinkable but also impossible. Another attractive aspect of the plan from the point of view of Gleichberechtigung, was that the Federal Republic would participate in the proposed High Authority on an equal basis with the other participating powers rather than from the subordinate position of an occupied state. The working document prepared by Monnet and his staff for the conference on the Schuman Plan was developed not only by France and West Germany, but also by the other countries that were soon to be thought of as their partners in the “Six”: Italy and the Benelux countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.9 It proposed that the negotiators limit themselves to achieving agreement on a general framework treaty for the establishment of the High Authority. This intention was almost immediately thwarted by the attitude of the Dutch and Belgian delegations. They were particularly disturbed by the fact that the High Authority would operate in a political vacuum. They found it unacceptable that neither the responsibilities nor the accountability of the High Authority were clearly outlined. The governments must have some control over the High Authority’s activities. The Dutch proposed that a special Council of Ministers be established in addition to the High Authority. This council would have the power to coordinate the policies of the High Authority and those of the member states. They also suggested that the council should have a certain controlling power over the High Authority’s performance. This second component of “the Dutch formula” was completely unacceptable to France. It would undermine the whole raison d’être of the Schuman Plan, as its ultimate consequence would be to degrade the High Authority to little more than an international executive secretariat of the Council of Ministers. A compromise proposal was eventually accepted. It provided for a Council of Ministers with

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coordinating powers, but also for a High Authority with its own supranational powers, which, on certain well-defined issues, would therefore not need the approval of the member states. In early August, the delegations reached agreement on the basic institutional design of the Coal and Steel Community. In addition to a High Authority with supranational powers and a Council of Ministers with coordinating powers (in both bodies the member states would be represented on an equal footing), the delegations agreed to establish a parliament, known as the Common Assembly, to which the High Authority would report on its activities, as well as a Court of Justice, which would settle disputes concerning the functioning of the common coal and steel market. After the conference was re-opened in September 1950, the negotiations made very little progress. By the end of the year the participants were deadlocked over two draft articles drawn up by the French delegation in consultation with the American Embassy in Paris, which were to form the basis for the Community’s anti-cartel policy. The German Federal Republic strongly objected to these articles. Its refusal had to do not so much with their specific content as with the program of decartelization and deconcentration of the West German coal and steel industries that was being implemented by the occupation authorities at that time. Taken together, the articles and program were seen as an unacceptable attempt by France to weaken its rival’s competitive position in these industries as much as possible. It was only thanks to the intervention of the United States, which put considerable pressure on the Federal Republic, that a solution emerged in early March 1951. Knowing that the occupying powers could, in any case, unilaterally carry through the complete program of decartelization and deconcentra-tion against its wishes, the West German government decided to accept the compromise formulated by the American High Commissioner, even though it believed this to be detrimental to its own coal and steel industry. This concession cleared the way for the signing of the ECSC Treaty in April by the “Six.” The most vital point to grasp about the beginnings of the European unification process is that it was actually only for a very brief period that France saw the creation of supranational European institutions as a means of securing its position vis-à-vis West Germany. With the launching of the Schuman Plan in the spring of 1950, supranationality leaped to the forefront in quite a spectacular way. But by the early autumn of the same year, during the planning for a fully integrated European army in which German units would also take part, traditional thinking in intergovernmental terms prevailed once again. This Pleven Plan, named after then-French Prime Minister René Pleven, subordinated the supranational aspect to the intergovernmental one. It lacked a supranational authority with powers of its own and operating independently of national governments. A European Minister of Defense could only implement general guidelines from the Council of Ministers. Moreover, it contained many aspects that discriminated against the German Federal Republic. When one year later negotiations concerning the European Defense Community (EDC) took an unfavorable turn for France—in the sense that the supranational aspect was enhanced and the discrimination against the Federal Republic diminished—supranational solutions fell completely into disfavor, even though France did sign the EDC Treaty in May 1952. French aversion to the draft treaty for a European Political Community (EPC), in which ECSC and EDC were to be integrated, is illustrative on this point. According to the legal advisor to the Quai d’Orsay, the draft treaty, which was completed in March 1953, was outrageous. “If this notion of the

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extension of powers were adopted,” he wrote, “we will have to ask ourselves if future historians would not ask with incredulity how France herself opened up the question of her own succession.”10 When the draft treaty was discussed by the foreign ministers of the Six at the beginning of August 1953, France made it very clear that it would resist anything that as much hinted at supranationality. The rejection of the EDC Treaty by the French National Assembly one year later, in August 1954, after more than two years of political struggle and delaying tactics, also sealed the fate of the EPC. Barely two months later, in October 1954, the question of West German rearmament was finally settled in the “Paris Agreements.” The Federal Republic would participate as an equal partner in the common defense of Western Europe by first joining the intergovernmental Western European Union (WEU), and, subsequently, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During these negotiations, Adenauer promised that the Federal Republic would not produce any atomic, bacteriological or chemical weapons. This promise was one of the main reasons why France, in December 1954, decided to set up a secret study program for the development of nuclear weapons. Building up a nuclear force would give France an excellent opportunity to strengthen its position vis-à-vis West Germany. Many people in Western Europe believed that the failure of the EDC had damaged the European integration process beyond repair. As in the spring of 1950, Monnet acknowledged this sense of dejection, but refused to resign himself to it. A new initiative was required. Just four days after the French National Assembly rejected the EDC Treaty, Monnet had the first of many conversations with Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister, on how they might rescue the European integration process. Their solution was a further step in sectoral integration, mainly through the establishment of a new supranational community for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In April 1955, Spaak sent a letter to his French, German, and Italian counterparts, explaining this proposal. Their reactions varied from noncommittal, in the case of West Germany and Italy, to downright hostility, in the case of France. Dutch Foreign Minister Jan-Willem Beyen was in favor of a new initiative. However, rather than further sector-by-sector integration, Beyen advocated general economic integration instead. Since their desire to launch a successful initiative eventually outweighed any differences of opinion, Spaak and Beyen managed to reach a compromise. With a view to the coming Messina Conference, a joint memorandum from the Benelux countries was sent to the French, German, and Italian governments in the middle of May. It supported further sectoral integration, as in the field of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but noted “such an expansion would have no chance of success unless general economic integration was undertaken.” Both the economic and the nuclear communities necessitated the establishment of a common authority with the appropriate powers (the term supranational was avoided in order not to frighten the French). At the Messina Conference, France was persuaded to agree to the formation of a committee, representing but not binding governments, to prepare a conference on the proposals for further integration.11 This committee, headed by Spaak, presented a report in the spring of 1956 that subordinated as far as possible the supranational element to the intergovernmental one, although the executive organs retained independent powers. The designation “High Authority” was also dropped as being too pretentious, and was replaced with the more modest-sounding “European Commission.” The report was

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accepted as the basis for government negotiations on the treaties for the economic community and Euratom (as the nuclear community was now called). At the end of September 1956, the negotiations on Euratom reached a deadlock over the question of the military use of nuclear energy. West Germany insisted that the member states should follow its example by stating unilaterally that they would refrain from using nuclear energy for military purposes. France refused even to discuss this demand. Not much later, the negotiations on the economic community also came to a standstill. These were focused entirely on the “endless list” of demands and guarantees that France wished to see satisfied.12 The French vehemently insisted that their welfare state be protected in any future exposure to economic competition from other member states. The latter would therefore have to adapt their social policy to that of France. West Germany, however, refused to commit itself to a timetable for the harmonization of such things as the 40-hour working week and overtime pay. At the end of October, a conference of foreign ministers failed to find a way out of the impasse. The West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted by indicating that no matter how important the harmonization of social legislation was, it was only one area of concern. Failure of the whole European integration project as a result of this single problem could not be justified. The Ministry also urged Adenauer to place the issue of harmonization on the agenda of his meeting with French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, which was scheduled for November 6. After consulting all those involved on the West German side, Adenauer agreed to do so, particularly in view of the very tense situations developing on the wider international scene. On the night of October 23, 1956, the Hungarian people rose in revolt against the Communist regime (see Chapter 8 on the East European Revolution). On November 4, the Red Army attacked Budapest, and by the night of November 5, when Adenauer left for Paris, it was already clear that the Soviet Union would prevail. However, what caused far greater tension in Paris and Bonn was the Suez Crisis. In July, Egypt had nationalized the company granted the concession to run the Suez Canal. Both Britain and France strongly protested. The United States offered its good offices, but negotiations remained without result. On October 31, British and French ships and airplanes bombarded Egyptian targets. Five days later, despite an American demand to cease hostilities, French and British paratroops were dropped into Egypt. Then just as quickly, on the following night, Britain and France decided to declare a cease-fire. The British opted to end military operations because the consequences of the American refusal of help in any way had become crystal clear. It was very likely to cause a run on the pound sterling and an acute oil shortage. Adenauer’s French hosts were highly pleased with his November visit to Prime Minister Guy Mollet. In such a crisis situation, overtime pay was clearly a less important issue. Two small delegations were instructed to find a solution to the outstanding problems surrounding the economic community, while Mollet and Adenauer discussed the real problems. Without further ado, the two leaders accepted the compromise the delegations had reached, based on a French concession for the sake of good relations. Both countries were now determined to bring the negotiations concerning the economic community and Euratom to a successful completion, no matter how great the outstanding problems. As far as Euratom was concerned, the Federal Republic eventually dropped its demand that the member states refrain from using nuclear energy for military

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purposes. This concession can only be understood in light of the great political value that the Federal Republic attached to progress in the European integration process. With respect to the economic community, France, together with Belgium, introduced the Eurafrique concept for the association of their overseas territories into the negotiations, which also provided for an investment fund to be financed by the other four member states. This proposal had practically everybody in the Federal Republic up in arms. It took another three months before the government leaders, in mid-February 1957, reached a compromise. They agreed that the investment fund would initially be set up for five years and that France and Belgium would also contribute to it. The West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano defended his government’s involvement in the investment fund by explaining that politics had to take precedence over economics. The treaties on the European Economic Community and Euratom were then solemnly signed in Rome on March 25, 1957.13 France and the German Federal Republic had managed to solve the problems on their own. What was decisive was that by the autumn of 1956, both countries began to realize how disastrous it would be for Western Europe’s position in the world—and consequently for the positions of France and the Federal Republic—if these two European initiatives were to fail. The Federal Republic was more aware of this than France and therefore made the most concessions in the final stage of the negotiations. The Chancellor and the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in particular were determined to take “a fundamentally political stand, which would set the course for further developments.”14 The Europe of the states: 1958–85 With General de Gaulle’s coming to power in France at the end of May 1958, the European integration process lost its momentum. In his “Europe of the States” there was no need for supranational arrangements. In the autumn of 1960, De Gaulle launched a plan for political cooperation on the basis of regular consultations in the domains of foreign policy, economic and cultural affairs, and that of defense. A committee headed by the French diplomat Christian Fouchet was assigned the task of investigating this proposal. In October 1961, France submitted to this committee a draft treaty for a “Union of States” that was strictly intergovernmental in character. The Union’s Council of Ministers was to take decisions by unanimity, while a Political Commission would merely be the executive organ of this Council. Moreover, the report envisaged the future integration of the existing European communities into this new Union. The Federal Republic reacted favorably to these ideas, but the Netherlands and Belgium were very much opposed. They found the proposed subordination of the supranational communities to the intergovernmental union unacceptable. Moreover they were of the opinion that in view of Britain’s application for membership in the EEC in July 1961, that country should also take part in the negotiations on the Union. When in April 1962 the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Six failed to reach agreement on these issues, the negotiations on the project were adjourned indefinitely.15 The negotiations on British entry lingered on until January 1963 when, at a press conference, De Gaulle announced that, for the moment, France was against British membership in the Common Market. Only eight days

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later, the Franco-German Treaty of Friendship was signed, which established a system of regular consultations between the two countries in the areas of foreign policy, defense, and education. The EEC Treaty contained several articles providing for qualified majority vote (QMV) in the Council of Ministers once the last phase of the implementation of the Common Market began in January 1966. In a speech to the European Parliament in October 1962, Walter Hallstein, the President of the European Commission, had already predicted that the coming introduction of QMV meant that the development of the EEC could no longer be blocked by veto. The so-called “Empty Chair” crisis of 1965–66 proved him wrong. The crisis had its origins in the Commission’s proposed package linking the financing of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with a strengthening of the powers of the Commission and the Parliament. The Commission gambled that France, as the member state that stood to profit most from the CAP, would swallow the proposed strengthening of the two EEC institutions. The gamble failed. France flatly rejected the package deal. It also refused to consider compromise solutions. France withdrew its permanent representative from Brussels, and announced that it would no longer take part in the Council’s deliberations. Indeed, the French sought to profit from the crisis by stripping the Commission of its right to initiate legislation completing the Common Market and by blocking the introduction of QMV. The solution to the crisis was found in the Luxembourg Declaration of January 1966. The member states agreed that, in situations where very important interests were at stake, the Council would endeavour to reach unanimity, even if the Treaty provided for making decisions by a qualified majority. Furthermore, the member states recorded that France considered that discussions “must be continued until unanimous agreement is reached,” and that, although the other states did not share this view, they were nevertheless of the opinion that this divergence of views did not prevent “the Community’s work being resumed in accordance with the normal procedure.” The member states also declared that it was desirable, in case of initiatives “with a special meaning,” that the Commission should first contact the member states through their permanent representatives. By the end of the 1960s, France rediscovered the value of the European communities as a means to check the threat of West German dominance. This rediscovery did not lead to a new supranational initiative, but rather to an attempt to introduce the traditional policy of “balance of power” thin the European framework. In 1969, following De Gaulle’s resignation, France finally agreed to British membership in the EEC. However, France’s hope that together they might form a counter-weight to the Federal Republic evaporated almost immediately after Britain (together with Denmark and Ireland) entered the Community in 1973. It soon became clear that the British had no interest whatsoever in the political dimension of “Europe.” The Paris Summit of December 1974 created another institution, although it formally remained outside the European organizational framework for another twelve years. This was the European Council of heads of state and government, which was to meet at least twice annually. It was established at the instigation of France in an attempt “to improve decision-making and to assert the intergovernmental nature of integration.” The European Council would eventually overshadow the older institutions created during the integration process. It was also decided at the Paris Summit that in 1978 direct elections to the European Parliament would be held for the first time.16

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Under the rules of the CAP, prices of agricultural products were fixed at the community level and subsequently translated into national currencies. This arrangement presupposed a regime of stable exchange rates. The Bretton Woods system, based on the American dollar, provided such a regime. The collapse of that system in 1971 therefore posed a serious threat to the proper functioning of the common market for agricultural products. In order to combat the effects of exchange rate volatility, time and again the member states resorted to unilateral compensatory measures to maintain price stability and to protect farmers’ incomes at the national level. A first attempt in 1972 to coordinate exchange rates, the so-called “snake,” turned into a failure (see Chapter 10). Within a few months, Italy had to leave the arrangement. France was forced to do so as well in 1974, and although it returned in 1975, was again forced to leave in 1976. The snake worked as a D-mark zone, in which West Germany could independently set its monetary policy while the weak currency countries had to bear the costs of adjustment. To correct the flaws of the snake, the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing devised the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1978, in “a classic Franco-German political fix.”17 By introducing a divergence indicator based on a European Currency Unit (Ecu), which indicated which country would bear the brunt of exchange rate adjustments, the ERM was intended to work more symmetrically. However, it quickly became apparent that the new mechanism operated in exactly the same way as the snake. Essentially, the Bundesbank (the independent West German central bank) refused to subordinate its constitutional task of maintaining price stability in the Federal Republic to the EMS’s objective of stable exchange rates. According to the rules of the EMS, in situations where a weaker currency was entitled to support, the Bundesbank should have increased the West German money supply, but it generally refused to do so. Rising to the occasion: 1985–91 Two structural developments that became apparent in the early 1980s triggered the process leading to the Single European Act (SEA). The first related to fundamental shifts in the international economic environment of the EEC countries, particularly in the electronics sector (information technology), monetary matters, and trade affairs. These shifts came down to, “crudely put, relative American decline and Japanese ascent.”18 They pointed to a future in which a technologically backward Europe would face, on its own, competition from Japan as well as from the United States, since the latter could no longer afford to play its traditional role as Europe’s benevolent protector. A powerful lobby of some of the largest European multinationals, the “Round Table of European Industrialists,” advocated meeting this challenge by developing industrial and technological policies on a European scale, and adopting protectionist measures to shield the European market from foreign competition. The second structural development concerned the inability of the Western European welfare states to deal with the problems that had plagued them since the first oil crisis of 1973–74: high unemployment, low growth rates, high inflation and ever-growing government debt. As a result, one by one the West European states abandoned the Keynesian model that had been so successful in the 1950s and 1960s in favor of one based on supply-side economics and deregulation. A

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French attempt to go against the flow by establishing “Keynesianism in one country,” after François Mitterrand had been elected president in 1981, failed dramatically and was abruptly aborted in the spring of 1983. This tournant de la rigueur heralded the end of the years of “Eurosclerosis.” From then on, France again became the self-appointed champion of European causes. In the summer of 1984, Jacques Delors, the French president-designate of the European Commission, sounded the governments of the member states on possible initiatives to end the period of stagnation. It soon became clear that the creation of a genuinely functioning internal market was the only initiative that could count on support from all the member states, as it was the only one that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would approve of. The new Commission immediately set to work on this project. In June 1985, it presented the White Paper entitled “Completing the Internal Market.” It contained nearly 400 measures that were needed to complete the internal market by December 31, 1992. It also introduced a new approach to non-tariff barriers. The White Paper proposed that the EEC “should rely as much as possible on the principle of mutual recognition: all goods lawfully manufactured and marketed in one member country should be accepted also by the other member countries.”19 At the European Council in Milan of June 1985, the White Paper was accepted without much ado. Subsequently, everything turned on QMV. Britain accepted that majority voting in the Council of Ministers had to be strengthened as far as decisions for the completion of the single market were concerned, but it was strongly opposed to either amending the EEC Treaty in this sense or explicitly reformulating the Luxembourg Declaration. It lobbied for an informal return to QMV where the Rome Treaty provided for it, and a gentlemen’s agreement between the member states to exercise their veto sparingly. Greece, which had joined the European Community in 1981, and Denmark both supported the British position. The original Six, however, insisted on a treaty change. Deadlock threatened, but then the Italian President of the Council of Ministers unexpectedly called for a vote to convene a conference of government representatives “for the purpose of determining by common accord the amendments to be made” to the EEC Treaty. Its claim that this procedure was in agreement with Article 236 of the Rome Treaty was accepted by seven of the member states, notwithstanding vigorous protests by the other three—Britain, Denmark and Greece.20 Within a few months the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) had prepared a draft treaty. The final text was signed in February 1986, the same year thar post-Franco Spain and post-Salazar Portugal entered the European Union. It was laid down in the Single European Act that the Community would take the necessary measures to establish the internal market—“an area without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured”—by December 31, 1992, and that the Council would decide on these measures by a qualified majority. As far as these decisions were concerned, moreover, the powers of the Parliament were somewhat strengthened through a new “cooperation procedure” that applied to a limited number of articles of the Rome Treaty and the greater majority of the measures proposed in the White Paper. Thanks to the capital controls maintained particularly by France and Italy, the EMS did not entirely function as a D-mark zone. However, the completion of the single market involved abolishing the existing restrictions on capital transactions. This meant that the last defense line against West German monetary dominance would disappear. In light of

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this threat, supranational solutions exerted a new attraction. France had had enough of sitting on “the folding chair next to the command post in the European economy,” as Le Monde Diplomatique once put it.21 It wanted a seat in that command post itself. In January 1988, Edouard Balladur, the French Finance Minister, distributed a memorandum among his European colleagues in which he proposed that they should together investigate the possibility of replacing the EMS by a central European bank. Giuliano Amato, Italy s Minister of Finance applauded Balladur’s plan. As far as Amato was concerned, a self-imposed loss of autonomy in favor of a European bank in which all participants would have a say was preferable to the unilateral loss of autonomy that Germany imposed on its partners in the EMS.22 The Commission and the majority of the member states received Balladur and Amato s ideas favorably. There was a divergence of views in the Federal Republic. The West German Ministry of Finance and the Bundesbank rejected the proposal on economic grounds, whereas the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarded it positively, given the political importance of further integration. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher expressed his willingness to investigate whether a European bank could be realized, provided of course that it was modelled on the Bundesbank. At the European summit meeting in Hanover in June 1988, the member states decided to set up a committee to study the concrete steps involved and make proposals for the establishment of an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Most of the study committee consisted of the presidents of the national banks, while the Commission President, Delors, was entrusted with the chairmanship. The Delors Committee’s report, issued in the spring of 1989, recognized the desirability of an EMU, but also stated that the creation of such a union was going to be a long-term affair given the considerable differences between the economic policies of the member states. Only if a sufficient degree of economic convergence could be achieved would EMU have any chance of success. The committee therefore proposed the establishment of EMU in three stages. Furthermore, it advised against fixing the date of transition from Stage I (which was to commence on July 1, 1990 when the capital markets of the community would be liberalized) to Stage II, or that from Stage II to Stage III. For the Delors Committee, political urgency made way for monetary prudence. Although in the summer of 1989 France and the Federal Republic reached agreement in principle on an Intergovernmental Conference,23 everything seemed to indicate that the implementation of EMU would be postponed indefinitely for a lack of economic convergence. However, the events after the opening of the Berlin Wall in the beginning of November 1989 lent new weight to the political urgency of EMU—especially once German Chancellor Helmut Kohl presented his ten-point plan for German unity at the end of that month. The United States immediately welcomed Kohl’s plan, on the condition that “unification should occur in the context of Germany’s continued commitment to NATO and an increasingly integrated European Community.”24 After a few weeks spent in futile attempts to turn the tide, France accepted what seemed to be the inevitable. It found comfort in the thought that, at the European Council in Strasbourg in December 1989, West Germany made good its promise to support an Intergovernmental Conference on EMU. German unity would at least be matched by deeper European integration. The British government was opposed both to German unity and deeper European unity, but given American support and French acceptance, there was nothing it could do to block

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both projects. At the preparatory talks for the IGC in September 1990, Spain proposed implementing the second stage of EMU as of January 1994. The Bundesbank and the German Finance Ministry were against this proposal. They clung to the view that fixing a start date for the second stage made little sense if the required convergence had not been achieved. A few days after official German unification on October 3, 1990, Kohl brushed aside the objections of the Bundesbank and the fiance ministry. On French television (!) he announced his agreement to implement the second stage in January 1994. He also restated the German standpoint that like the Bundesbank, a European Central Bank (ECB) should be independent and that it should be given the exclusive task of maintaining price stability.25 Once the ICG was convened, it turned out that the delegations could not reach agreement on the institutional set-up of EMU. France was in favor of an EEC-type of organization: although the European Central Bank should have extensive powers, it must be subordinate to the Council of Ministers. This proposal was completely unacceptable to West Germany. The Germans clung to the independence of the European Central Bank, whose position in EMU they felt should be much like that of the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, as originally envisaged in the French working document for the conference on the Schuman Plan. The negotiators also disagreed on the way in which the transition to the third stage of EMU would take place. There was a consensus that the participants in EMU would have to meet strict convergence criteria, but the delegations failed to reach agreement on exactly how these criteria should be formulated, how to determine whether a member state had met the criteria, and how many countries should meet the criteria before EMU could become operational.26 These problems would have to be solved at the IGC in Maastricht in December 1991. The compromise that Kohl and Mitterrand eventually managed to reach in a private conversation at the Maastricht Conference ensured that the Federal Republic would get what it wanted with regard to the complete independence of the European Central Bank, the policy it would pursue (price stability), and the convergence criteria. In return, France obtained the crucial concession that the third stage of EMU would be irrevocably implemented on January 1, 1999 for all the member states that met the convergence criteria. This meant that the Bundesbank would no longer be able to prevent the implementation of the third stage of EMU using the failing monetary policies of Greece and Italy as an argument. It was now up to France itself whether or not it would get its seat in the command post of the European economy on the first day of 1999. In the spring of 1990, at West German instigation, France and the German Federal Republic requested a parallel IGC on political union. The European Council granted the request. However, this particular IGC remained a sideshow. France only paid lip service to the idea, while Britain was dead set against any supranational initiative in this area. As a result, in the end the Maastricht Treaty contained only one article on a “Common Foreign and Security Policy” and another on “Cooperation in the Field of Justice and Home Affairs.” Both articles were full of mutual information and consultation. However they contained no supranational clauses, although it was left up to the European Council to determine whether certain decisions would be taken by QMV. The Treaty also provided for an extension of the cooperation procedure, and introduced a new co-decision procedure in which the Parliament for the first time acted in common with the Council as legislator in certain policy areas.

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The return of the states: 1992–2000 At Maastricht neither Mitterrand nor Kohl had reckoned with the possibility that by the spring of 1998, when it was to be decided which member states of the European Union qualified for the third phase of EMU, the German Federal Republic itself might not be able to meet the convergence criteria—specifically, the criterion that the government’s budget deficit should not exceed 3 percent of GDR By that time, with the entrance of Sweden, Finland and Austria in 1995, the European Union had expanded to fifteen member states.27 If Germany did not qualify, the whole point of their agreement would be lost. However, in the course of 1997, the financial situation of the Federal Republic had deteriorated to such an extent that, if it insisted on a strict application of the convergence criteria to its own finances, it could still prevent the other member states from taking up their seats in that enviable command center. Kohl and Mitterrand also failed to foresee that France, notwithstanding the enormous benefits participation in EMU would bring, might at the last moment spurn its seat by deliberately exceeding the 3 percent norm in pursuance of its own socio-economic policies. Throughout 1997 speculation abounded that Germany and France might reconsider their position and decide not to go ahead with the third phase of EMU. When Mitterrand came to the conclusion, in the winter of 1989–90, that German unification could no longer be prevented, he also realized that it spelled the end of French claims to be the leading power of “Europe.” From then on, this role would be reserved for Germany. Because Kohl took care that at least outwardly France and Germany remained equal in European affairs, Mitterrand was able to accept the new role as the Federal Republic’s junior partner with good grace. Clearly, Mitterrand’s Gaullist successor as French President, Jacques Chirac, had more difficulty in accepting the new power realities. Chirac’s open defiance of German wishes, in nominating a French candidate for the first presidency of the European Central Bank, was a good example of this. Chirac’s socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who came to power in June 1997, was more prepared to accept the German ascendancy. Notwithstanding some initial professions of socialist sentiment, Jospin convinced himself that meeting the Maastricht criteria was a necessity. At the decisive Brussels conference in early May 1998, he ostentatiously let Chirac fight the battle for the European Central Bank presidency alone. Mitterrand and Kohl succeeded in reaching agreement in Maastricht because it was the Chancellor’s firm conviction that the Westbindung had been so beneficial to the Federal Republic that he was prepared to pay a high price for the continued successful functioning of “Europe.” With the approach of the third phase of EMU, many in Germany began to wonder whether the Chancellor was not suffering from Machtvergessenheit at Maastricht—that is, whether he had not forgotten the realities of power politics, and thus had paid an excessive price in terms of German self-interest. However, like Adenauer, Kohl never lost sight of the fact that, first and foremost, his country’s participation in “Europe” removed its neighbours’ suspicions of Germany and German initiatives. As such, European initiatives had brought the Federal Republic countless advantages. The Kohl government therefore refrained from insisting on a strict interpretation of the convergence criteria. Thus, France was at last allowed to take up its place in the command center of the European economy. The fact that France was unable to do so graciously (with Chirac turning the Brussels conference into a public relations

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disaster in the dispute over the presidency of the European Central Bank), must surely be attributed to France’s full understanding that although it is better off with EMU than without it, that maxim is even truer for Germany. Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder, has made it abundantly clear that he believed the time has come for France to openly accept the new European realities. His initial efforts were remarkably unsuccessful. A first attempt to reduce Germany’s role as the paymaster of Europe, during the European Summit in Berlin of March 1999, failed spectacularly, with his country ending up contributing even more than before. A second attempt, aimed at a redistribution of the voting power of the member states in the European Council that would do more justice to Germany’s leading position in the Union, also went wrong. At the Nice Conference of December 2000, France simply refused to give way on this point. France insisted on having the same number of votes as Germany. The latter was only able to secure a slight increase in its veto power. This nationalist bickering was characteristic of the Nice Conference. Nice was supposed to establish the supranational institutional framework by which the European Union would be able to meet possibly its greatest challenge yet—the enlargement of the Union with the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe—but it turned into “a shameless display of national interest.”28 Farsighted “European” statesmanship, in the tradition of Monnet and Adenauer, was definitely called for, but Schröder and Chirac only managed to look over their shoulder at their respective national constituencies. Further reading An embarrassing number of books and articles have been written on the European integration process. I will limit myself here to a few monographs that have been published in English. It should be clear, however, that one cannot hope to gain a sound understanding of “Europe” if one does not consult the relevant French and German texts. A nice introduction to the history of European integration is provided by D.W.Urwin’s The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since 1945, London, Longman, 1991, and later editions. A far more substantial introductory text is J.K.de Vree and M.Jansen’s The Ordeal of Unity: Integration and Disintegration in Modern Europe, Amsterdam, Instituut voor Internationaal Juridisch Onderzoek, 1998. G.Lundestad presents a concise overview of Europe’s American connection in “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. L.Tsoukalis, in The New European Economy Revisited, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, analyzes the growth of the European regional economic system without losing sight of the long-term political objectives of the European project. As far as the founding years of “Europe” are concerned, F.R.Willis, France, Germany, and the New Europe, 1945–1967, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1968, remains a very relevant book, if only because it documents the objections of important economic actors in both France and the Federal Republic against the ECSC and EEC. In my own The Struggle for the Organization of Europe: The Foundations of the European Union, Cheltenham and Northampton, Edward Elgar, 1999, attention is also paid to the crucial role the United States played in the first years of the integration process. A must read for this period is A. S.Milward’s The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51, London,

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Methuen, 1984. Milward discusses the economic background against which the Schuman Plan was launched. Adenauer’s Memoirs 1945–53, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966, and Monnet’s Memoirs, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1978, as well as F.Duchêne’s Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence, New York and London, Norton, 1994, are also essential reading with respect to the foundations of “Europe.” Moravcsik’s monumental The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, London, UCL Press, 1998, presents a “commercial” interpretation of the European integration process. This interpretation is most convincing where Moravcsik discusses the politics of De Gaulle. For the history of the EMS, one should read P.Ludlow’s The Making of the European Monetary System: A Case Study of the Politics of the European Community, London, Butterworth Scientific, 1982. Reading H.Simonian’s The Privileged Partnership: Franco-German Relations in the European Community 1969–1984, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, will also be helpful. N.Colchester and D.Buchan’s Europe Relaunched: Truths and Illusions on the Way to 1992, London, Hutchinson, 1990, very succinctly deals with the history of the SEA and the Delors Committee. Finally, D.Marsh’s The Bundesbank: The Bank that Rules Europe, London, Heinemann, 1993, is very insightful with respect to the politics surrounding the Maastricht conference, both in regard to the maneuvering inside the Federal Republic and that between France and Germany. A.Szász’s The Road to European Monetary Union, Houndmills, Macmillan, 1999, provides a good overview of the negotiation process leading to the establishment of EMU from a central banker’s point of view. Notes 1 Cf. A.S.Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London, Routledge, 1992. 2 C.von Clausewitz, On War, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 87. 3 R.Jackson, “Sovereignty in World Politics: A Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape,” Political Studies, 47 (1999), 453. 4 See, respectively, Milward, European Rescue of the Nation-State, A. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, London, UCL Press, 1998, and A.Wilkens (ed.), Interessen verbinden: Jean Monnet und die europäische Integration der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Bouvier Verlag, 1999– 5 S.Strange, ‘The Defective State,” Daedalus, 124 (1995), 56. 6 Jackson, “Sovereignty in World Politics,” p. 453. 7 See J.Monnet, Memoirs, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1978, pp. 289–90. 8 K.Adenauer, Memoirs 1945–53, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966, p. 257. 9 The Benelux economic treaty signed between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg arose out of a customs convention signed in 1944, but was not fully established until 1958. The union was established to promote free movement of workers, capital, goods, and services in the Benelux region. 10 G.Bossuat, “The French Administrative Elite and the Unification of Western Europe, 1947– 58,” in A.Deighton (ed.), Building Postwar Europe: National Decision-makers and European Institutions 1948–63, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1995, p. 27. 11 The French decision to agree to discussions on a common market should be seen as a major concession. After all, “in 1955–56 the vast majority of the French, that is the thinking French, were fundamentally opposed to any freedom of trade, even if geographically confined to Europe… France at that time was essentially protectionist” (R.Marjolin,

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Architect of European Union: Memoirs 1911–1986, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989, p. 281; emphasis in original). 12 See Marjolin, Architect of European Union, p. 288; see also V.Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard: Ein Politikerleben, Berlin, Ullstein, 1998, pp. 384–5. 13 Compared to the Treaty of Paris, the supranational element in the Treaties of Rome is far more circumscribed. The ECSC Treaty first deals with the High Authority, which is charged with the task to ensure that the Treaty’s objectives are attained, and subsequently discusses the Special Council of Ministers, which exercises its powers in particular to harmonize the actions of the High Authority and the member states. In the EEC Treaty, to which I restrict myself, it is not the Commission but the Council that is charged with ensuring the attainment of the Treaty’s objectives. This time the Council also is treated before the Commission. The latter’s task is confined to ensuring the proper functioning and development of the common market. 14 R.H.Lieshout, The Struggle for the Organization of Europe: The Foundations of the European Union, Cheltenham and Northampton, Edward Elgar, 1999, p. 171. 15 See W.Loth, “Jean Monnet, Charles de Gaulle und das Projekt der politischen Union (1958– 1963),” in Wilkens, Interessen verbinden, pp. 259–64, G.-H.Soutou, L’alliance incertaine: Les rapports politico-stratégiques francoallemands, 1954–1996, Paris, Fayard, 1996, pp. 168–201, and J.K.De Vree and M.Jansen, The Ordeal of Unity: Integration and Disintegration in Modern Europe, Amsterdam, Instituut voor Internationaal Juridisch Onderzoek, 1998, pp. 255–9. 16 The European Council was initially mentioned in the Single European Act. See H.Simonian, The Privileged Partnership. Franco-German Relations in the European Community 1969– 1984, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 260. 17 N.Colchester and D.Buchan, Europe Relaunched: Truths and Illusions on the Way to 1992, London, Hutchinson, 1990, p. 161. 18 W.Sandholtz and J.Zysman, “1992: Recasting the European Bargain,” World Politics, 42 (1989), p. 95. 19 L.Tsoukalis, The New European Economy Revisited, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 43. This implies, by the way, that the part played by the Round Table of European Industrialists should not be overestimated. The measures proposed in the White Paper reflected the new consensus on supply-side economics and deregulation, whereas the Round Table had been lobbying for an old-style program of government intervention and protection. The European multinationals only embraced internal market liberalization after it had been accepted by the member states. See Colchester and Buchan, Europe Relaunched, p. 27, and Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, pp. 355–6. 20 Ireland sided with the original Six. The claim is, however, of doubtful validity. The best one can say is that Article 236 does not specifically preclude the Council of Ministers—as far as the Treaty of Rome is concerned, the European Council does not exist—taking a majority vote on the decision to convene an intergovernmental conference, or IGC. 21 See P.Ludlow, The Making of the European Monetary System: A Case Study of the Politics of the European Community, London, Butterworth, 1982, p. 199– 22 See Colchester and Buchan, Europe Relaunched, p. 167. 23 See Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, p. 400. 24 P.Zelikow and C.Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 133. See also R.Kiessler and F.Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken: Der diplomatische Weg zur deutschen Einheit, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1993, pp. 52–9. 25 See J.Story and M.de Cecco, “The Politics and Diplomacy of Monetary Union: 1985–1991,” in J.Story (ed.), The New Europe: Politics, Government and Economy since 1945, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1993, p. 349.

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26 See Story, The New Europe, p. 350. 27 Voters in Norway, however, have rejected membership in the European Union twice: first in the referendum of 1972 and then again in 1994. 28 E.Holm, The European Anarchy: Europe’s Hard Road into High Politics, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School Press, 2001, p. 285.

10 European economic integration From business cycle to business cycle Wim Meeusen Although it is difficult if not impossible to isolate the economic history of a nation or continent from its political and cultural history, or for that matter from the personalities who contribute to it, this chapter concentrates on European economic integration and leaves a detailed discussion of the political and cultural aspects to other contributors to this volume (see in particular Chapter 9). In order to structure the history of European economic integration since 1945, the discussion that follows links it to the course of the European business cycle. This is an obvious and useful way to “translate” the chronological dimension. Another reason for this linkage is that the successive steps in the process of integration have, if not triggered, then most probably contributed to the recovery in many of the observed cycles. By linking the business cycle to European economic integration, we do not, on the other hand, mean to imply that the reverse would automatically be true as well, namely that business cycle conditions have influenced the process of integration, although—as we shall see—it certainly cannot be excluded in some particular cases. Taking the growth rate of real income in the fifteen European Union countries as criterion, we can—inevitably with some degree of arbitrariness- identify a sequence of cycles delimited in this way (see Table 10.1). To spice up the story, we shall at times make sidestep references to concurrent events and circumstances in Belgium (the home country of the author). By its geographical location and its particular history—and therefore in the opinion of many, by vocation—Belgium can be considered the most “European” of countries. First steps toward integration: 1945–52 At the end of the Second World War most European economies were in shambles, their infrastructure largely destroyed and their populations impoverished by German occupation.1 But even well before the end of the war, albeit at a time when its end was clearly in sight, an important step in the reconstruction of the European postwar economy was taken during a meeting held in July 1944 at Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) by a group of experts from forty-four Allied countries and co-chaired by John Maynard Keynes. The meeting attempted to lay the foundations for expanding international trade through a regime of fixed exchange rates by the creation of two international

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Table 10.1 Postwar business cycles in the EU-15, defined from trough to trough, based on the rate of real growth Cycle

Upswing

Downswing

1945–52

1945–51

1951–52

1952–58

1952–55

1955–58

1958–67

1958–64

1964–67

1967–71

1967–69

1970–71

1971–75

1971–73

1973–75

1975–81

1975–80

1980–81

1981–93 1993–2001

1981–88

1988–93

1993–2000

2000–2002

Source: European Economy, 72 (2001), Table 10 of the Statistical Annex.

organizations in the monetary and financial field, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The underlying economic and political rationale was straightforward: fixed exchange rates would create a shelter under whichentrepreneurs active on international markets could run normal commercial risks without facing the perils associated with volatile exchange rates. International trade would flourish as a consequence, economies would open up, economic growth would be fostered and, last but not least, good trading would make good neighbors. Peace would be given a firm economic foundation. It is important to realize that in taking this viewpoint, under the influence of Keynes, the Bretton Woods Conference went counter to the opinion of a majority of academic economists. According to the accepted orthodoxy of the day, the exchange markets, like any other market, should not be tampered with. The equilibrium-seeking forces of supply and demand were to play themselves out. Only in this way could distorting effects on the economy as a whole be avoided. As a consequence of the agreement reached at Bretton Woods, exchange rates could only be changed with the consent of the IMF and only in cases of “fundamental payments disequilibrium.” Moreover, the signatories agreed to make their currencies convertible as quickly as possible in order to allow for a rapid return to a system of multilateral trade. In the first years of the postwar era, reconstruction in Europe was severely hampered by a dollar shortage. Europe was in need of an enormous amount of capital goods that could only be supplied by the United States. American industry was not only undamaged by the war, but boomed as a result of the continuous, vital demand for war-related goods. It was further strengthened by the related burst of technological innovations. Exports by the European countries generated only a fraction of what was necessary to pay for this. Although Belgium was in a relatively better position than other countries, since it enjoyed a surplus in its trade balance with the United States, it could not pass its dollar balances on to its neighbors. It would only receive weak, unconvertible currencies in exchange. This lack of convertibility meant that the bulk of international trade was conducted through some 200 bilateral trade agreements.

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From the middle of 1947 onwards, the Marshall Plan brought relief to this “dollargap” problem under the form of a large-scale aid program by the United States. Shortly afterwards, in April 1948, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, the forerunner of the present OECD) was set up through a joint European initiative to coordinate the distribution and use of funds supplied under the Marshall Plan. Marshall Plan aid to OEEC members2 was extended until 1952 and can be considered to be one of the main generators of economic growth in Western Europe in this first postwar cycle. Actually Bretton Woods only became fully effective at the end of 1958 when the IMF member countries restored full convertibility. In the meantime, the creation of the European Payments Union (EPU) in the mid-1950s had put an end to intra-European bilateralism. From then on, all bilateral deficits and surpluses were netted out on a monthly basis into one balanced, overall position within the Union. Member countries could accumulate modest overall deficits for a short period of time through the use of an EPU credit mechanism. The European Payments Union can be considered the first European effort at economic integration (the OEEC, although fully European in composition, was too much an indirect policy instrument of the American government). It can be seen as the forerunner of the European Monetary System, and still later of the European Monetary Union. One other early institutional initiative should be mentioned in the history of European economic integration, although it is of a more modest scale. The year 1948 saw the creation of the Benelux, a customs union between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. These three countries would form the historic core of what would later become the European Economic Community. All the international institutional arrangements mentioned above created an atmosphere of optimism that led to an intense phase of reconstruction and recovery from 1946–47 onwards in most Western European countries. Germany, however, was a special case, since its recovery was severely checked by the Western Allied and Soviet occupations. Yet by 1947 the hard-line attitude of the Western Allies began to change, which eventually culminated in the 1949 formation of the Federal Republic of Germany. From mid-1948, the political conditions were created for a strong recovery, which indeed was not long in coming. There was, however, a brief spell of uncertainty in West German growth prospects during the so-called German crisis of 1950–51, during which, as a result of having exhausted its EPU credit, a severe dollar shortage developed. The crisis was overcome rapidly in concert with EPU authorities by a tighter monetary policy and a temporary suspension of import liberalization. After this experience, West Germany ran a continuous current account surplus (creating problems of its own) that remained virtually unchecked until 1981. Although far from the European scene, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 fostered industrial activity through a high demand for arms. This gave additional impetus to an already well-recovered, strong and prosperous metallurgical and metalworking industry in Belgium, France, and also later in Germany. At the same time, however, inflation rose, not only because the economy approached full capacity, but also because of war-related speculative hoarding of consumer goods by an anxious population. The overheated economy produced the usual recession, which worsened from 1951 on, when the allies in the Korean War applied import restrictions to fight continuing deficits on the current account of their balance of payments.

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The appearance of the ECSC: 1952–58 Economic recovery in a number of Western European countries was the result of a deliberate Keynesian policy of fiscal expansion. The main factor of renewed optimism, however, was the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952, a decision taken at the Paris Summit (1951), under the direct influence of the Schuman Plan. In reaction to an offer made in 1950 by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to internationalize the Thyssen-Hamborn steel empire, Robert Schuman (the French Minister of Foreign Affairs) suggested liberalizing the European markets for coal and steel. In return, the French would relinquish their demands for the dismantling of all properties owned by existing German conglomerates in that sector. Within the six member countries of the ECSC (the Benelux countries, France, the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy), all import and export duties, all quantitative restrictions, and all subsidies or other discriminatory measures related to coal and steel were abolished. The ECSC is generally considered to be the direct predecessor of the European Economic Community. However, the 1956 Suez Crisis and the uprising in Budapest deepened the recession already underway and once again caused speculative hoarding of consumer goods (mainly food). Inflation swelled well beyond the peak of the cycle in 1955. In general, 1958 was a year of worldwide depression. However, it was, incidentally, less severe in Belgium than elsewhere in Europe as a result of the very successful World Exhibition in Brussels. The EEC and the twin cycles of the “golden sixties”: 1958–67 and 1967–71: The so-called “twin cycles” of the “golden sixties” actually covered a period of fourteen years of practically uninterrupted economic growth at a rate that was far above the longterm average. The year 1967 could in this context (in a perhaps unnecessary effort to delimit cycles of a more conventional length) be singled out as the year during which the real growth rate made a dip: from, on average, 4.6 percent in the European Community nations in the years 1965–66, to 3.6 percent in 1967, and then back up to 6.3 percent for the average during 1968–69. But for practical purposes we can look at the twin cycles as a whole. The official start of the European Economic Community (EEC), which was negotiated in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, was January 1, 1958. In its first phase the EEC was a generalized customs union of the “Six” of the ECSC and a locus of control for the implementation of the so-called Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In 1967 the ECSC and the European Atomic Agency (Euratom) merged into the Rome Treaty and their official name became the European Communities, or EC (later changed to the European Community). In the meantime, on January 1, 1959, the IMF members3 switched to the full convertibility of their currencies after a transition period that had lasted thirteen years, during which partial convertibility was restored with respect to non-residents. This was to have a major impact in the years that followed on the ease with which capital flowed across the frontiers. One can safely say that only from this point did the Bretton Woods

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Agreement become fully operational. The core of its system was that: (1) the currency exchange rates of the Agreement’s member countries were tied to the US dollar as a central currency and the dollar in turn was linked to gold; and (2) the IMF would act as a kind of central bank of nations, giving members conditional credits (that were financed by member deposits) to help them overcome possible temporary deficits in their balance of payments. At the same moment that the IMF became fully operational, the European Payments Union was dissolved and its functions passed on to the IMF, with the so-called European Monetary Agreement (EMA) acting as an intermediary agent. The EMA had no real decision-making power. In actual practice, its role was purely formal. From the point of view of European economic integration, the replacement of the European Payments Union by the combination EMA—IMF was therefore a clear loss. Monetary authority essentially passed to American control.4 At around the same time, a number of Western European countries inaugurated special policy measures to encourage direct foreign investment. For example, in Belgium, the internationalization of the economy was enhanced by the so-called “Expansion Laws” (1959) that made it possible for the government to grant important subsidies to foreign investors. From 1960–61 onwards this gave rise to massive investment by American companies and American-dominated multinationals in Belgium, with a corresponding boost in growth and employment. Most of these firms produced for the world market. The ensuing boom continued practically uninterrupted for more than a decade. However, the inflow of American-based direct investments should probably be considered a mixed blessing. While, together with the creation of the EEC itself, it lay at the root of the European “golden sixties,” it also created dependencies in technology that would prove to be a serious handicap for further development in the long run. The bulk of the research and development, “or R&D” activity, by multinational corporations remained based in their American homeland. The 1985 White Paper of the European Commission, which put “Completing the Internal Market” on the political agenda, can be seen as a reaction to this situation, a topic taken up later in this chapter. The monetary issues that surfaced during the “twin cycles” laid the foundation for troubles to come. The first of these concerned the already mentioned structural surplus on the current account of the Federal Republic of Germany. After its creation (June 1948), the Deutschmark quickly became the strongest currency in Europe. Its current account and its balance of payments accumulated a surplus from 1951 onwards. This and its logical counterpart—the deficits in many of West Germany’s European trade partners— inevitably led to monetary crises and exchange rate realignments within the context of Bretton Woods. The first in a long string of realignments took place in 1961.5 To begin with, in addition to the speculative turmoil that of course preceded them, the realignments also involved a policy asymmetry: first, the EPU and later the IMF had no way to put pressure on surplus countries to change their monetary and fiscal stance. However, the same was not true for deficit countries. The latter therefore often felt that they had to bear the brunt of a German monetary policy that was considered by many to be excessively strict. France especially complained bitterly about the Bundesbank’s maintenance of price stability at the expense of stable exchange rates and continued to do so in the decade to follow,6 until the advent of the European Monetary Union. Second, since in the context of the CAP the prices of many agricultural products were fixed at the community level in terms of the “European Unit of Account,” or EUA (the forerunner of what later

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would become the Ecu and still later the Euro), which was in turn tied to the dollar, every realignment shook the delicate political balance on which the CAP rested. The CAP had supposed a regime of stable exchange rates. But on the contrary, these realignments represented a direct source of imported inflationary/deflationary jolts in the countries whose currency was either depreciating or appreciating in response. Since the CAP was one of the cornerstones of the EEC (the other one being the customs union), every appreciation of the Deutschmark therefore constituted a threat to the process of European economic integration. The second and even more important monetary issue that surfaced during the “golden sixties” was the “dollar overhang” created by the structural current account deficits and net capital outflows of the United States. Unlike deficits in other member countries of the Bretton Woods Agreement, this did not give rise to distrust in the dollar by investors, speculators, and central banks. The dollar continued to be accepted by everyone, everywhere, without question. The United States was indeed still by far the strongest country in the world, economically, militarily and politically. Wasn’t its currency, after all, the only one that remained backed by gold? There were, in short, no reasons for the American-dominated IMF to exhort this country to adjust its fiscal and monetary policy. The result of all this, however, was the phenomenon of “creeping inflation” that began to infect Western Europe. The inflation rate in what are now (2002) the members of the EMU amounted to an average of 3.5 to 4 percent on a yearly basis in the period 1961–68, but it rose to 5 percent in 1969, 6.4 percent in 1970 and 7 percent in 1971. The continuous feeding of the so-called “Eurodollar” market by persistent, increasing deficits in the American balance of payments gradually increased the money stock in Europe beyond what was necessary to support the increasing volume of economic activities. The Vietnam War, and the escalating burden that it placed on the US Federal budget, was an important factor in this evolution. This chain of adverse consequences caused by the structural American external deficit would prove to be very long. Given these monetary uncertainties, by the end of the 1960s it had become clear to a number of Europe’s top politicians7 that having accomplished the targets set out in the Treaty of Rome, the European integration process needed new impetus. At the European Summit Meeting at The Hague in December 1969, a set of ambitious new goals was formulated that amounted to the enlargement of membership as well as to a deepening of its content. More specifically, the latter aspect led in October 1970 to the so-called Werner Plan (Pierre Werner was the Prime Minister of Luxembourg) that placed the creation of real economic and monetary union squarely on the political agenda. However the time for economic and monetary union was not ripe. The discussion around the proposals incorporated in the Werner Plan quickly reached a deadlock largely due to rising, mainly French, nationalist reflexes. The end of the “twin cycles” of the 1960s was brought about by the recession in the United States (at the end of 1969) and by growing monetary unrest on the world markets: the devaluation of the Pound sterling in November 1967, the devaluation of the French franc and revaluation of the Deutschmark in the fall of 1969, and then the floating of the Deutschmark and the Dutch guilder from May 1971 onwards. As a result of severe attacks on the position of the dollar (there were rumors of large conversions of official dollars into gold by Western European central banks) that were also fed by the public realization (including the financial public) that the United States was on the point of

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losing the Vietnam War, on August 15, 1971 the American President Richard Nixon proclaimed the gold-convertibility of the dollar. The story of the American recession of 1969 and its effect on Western Europe is actually quite a complicated one, and worth telling.8 With demand on its markets continuing to expand sharply in 1968 and with some loss in price competitiveness, the United States trade deficit increased dramatically. This was countered by a tightening of monetary policy that increased short-term interest rates, which caused in its turn a massive inflow of short-term capital. These inflows were responsible for converting a long succession of overall deficits into an important, albeit temporary, balance of payment surplus. In many European countries, the authorities were obliged to tighten their monetary policy as well, and this at a time when domestic conditions, which were only moderately expansive, did not justify increases in local interest rates of such size (6 percent in August 1968 to a peak of more than 11 percent a year later). By the end of 1969 the American economy had slid into recession, and in response a year later, government authorities again relaxed their monetary policy. Interest rates tumbled and the balance of payments reversed to a huge deficit. The counterpart of these American outflows was, of course, inflows to the rest of the world. Particularly in Europe, the increase in the money supply was such that the rate of inflation accelerated seriously. The continued high activity into 1970 of this phase in the European business cycle should have necessitated tighter monetary conditions in order to prevent overheating. Instead, in response to the international monetary situation, the European countries allowed their interest rates to drop. In other words, again, as was the case the year before, European authorities decided on a policy opposite to what domestic conditions called for. It was precisely this type of confusion on the financial markets that created decisive difficulties for the Bretton Woods Agreement and brought an end to the “golden sixties.” The first oil shock and the years of the “snake”: 1971–75 The so-called “Smithsonian Agreement” of December 1971 (a kind of less ambitious rewriting of the Bretton Woods Agreement with the dollar still as the central currency but no longer linked to gold) temporarily calmed the unrest on the world financial markets. It can therefore, in a certain sense, be seen as the starting point of this cycle. It should be said, however, that, because of the continued worsening of the US current and capital accounts, doubts about the new arrangement began to quickly surface again in the early months of 1972. Uncertainty continued until the beginning of 1973 when the dollar, the British pound and the Japanese yen began to float and the worldwide regime of fixed exchange rates effectively came to an end. On March 7, 1972, in an effort to save at least something of the spirit of the Werner Plan, the six members of the European Community decided to limit the fluctuation band of their mutual exchange rates to one-half of that which had been decided in the Smithsonian Agreement (i.e. 1.125 percent above and below par instead of 2.25 percent). Thus the mutual exchange rates of the Six “wriggled” within a second band that was narrower than the original. In this way the famous “snake in the tunnel” was created that expressed a growing intra-European Community monetary solidarity. After the

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breakdown of the Smithsonian Agreement, the snake survived, but without the tunnel, and with a more or less continuous stream of countries opting out and others opting in. The “snake” can be seen as the immediate forerunner of what in 1979 would become the European Monetary System (EMS). However, despite the vicissitudes of the Werner Plan, one chapter of the 1969 Hague conference was carried out according to the original intentions: 1973 marked the entry of Britain, Ireland and Denmark into the European Community, which now numbered nine members. Although on the world markets, the downturn in the business cycle became clearly apparent as early as the fall of 1973, that is, before the first oil shock, it was the latter event that decisively brought an end to the “golden sixties.” The quadrupling of the dollar price of crude oil between late 1973 and early 1974 by the newly created OPEC oil cartel was a direct consequence of the collapse of the dollar that had wiped away the best part of the income of oil-producing countries (although Arab frustration after the victory of Israel in the Yom Kippur War at the end of 1973 probably played a detonating role). It more than compensated OPEC for the loss of income and had a devastating effect on the economy of Western industrialized nations. The result in most Western European countries in 1975 was a serious drop in real income (the first negative growth result since 1958) and a dramatic increase in the level of inflation.9 Worldwide, the inflation rate reached postwar record levels. Beyond the oil shock and the creeping inflation caused by a continuously swelling Euro-dollar market, came the combined effects of: (1) the synchronous character of this business cycle in most OECD countries;10 (2) failing harvests in many countries due to bad weather conditions, leading in its turn to scarcity on food markets; (3) an increased awareness of the effects of inflation, which in turn led to anticipatory buying behavior. Most serious of all, many Western European governments, among them Belgium, tried from the middle of 1975 on to combat the recession and ensuing unemployment by an expansionary budgetary policy along traditional Keynesian lines, combined with a rather restrictive monetary policy, and an absence of any serious incomes policy. The implied nse in aggregate demand only accelerated the spiral initiated by the oil-supply shock, with no gain on the side of employment. The Belgian experience in this context was a particularly unhappy one. As a consequence of its heavy overall dependence on oil imports and the relatively important emphasis in the Belgian economy on the production of semi-finished (i.e. energyintensive) goods with a high price-elasticity, the country lost out competitively to its main European trading partners. Belgium is the typical case of a country in which economic policy at this crucial moment can be seen as at least partly responsible for what would become one of the main policy concerns in the following two, if not three, business cycles: the problem of excessive government debt. Because of the strong position of the Deutschmark, this currency was the favorite refuge for speculators when the dollar was under speculative pressure. The indirect, but nonetheless serious result was that the other European currencies weakened in comparison to the Deutschmark. The history of the European “snake” was therefore one of continual withdrawals and re-entries of various countries, revaluations of the mark, and devaluations of other currencies.11 By the beginning of 1975, uncertainty on international financial markets had become so widespread because of these developments, that it no doubt added to the general atmosphere of pessimism.

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Laborious recovery: 1975–81 Economic recovery was perceptible from the second half of 1975 onwards in the United States and Japan and, shortly afterwards, in most European countries. It is safe to say however that growth during the later 1970s remained weak in comparison with the previous decade and was characterized by continuously growing (mainly structural) unemployment, and low productivity gains (the so-called “productivity slowdown”). Part of this unemployment was certainly due to the emergence of a “real wage gap” (the OECD terminology for the growing, positive difference between the growth rate of real wages and of labor productivity). This “real wage gap” induced European firms on the domestic scene to engage at a quicker pace in new technologies with a higher capital— labor ratio. They also transplanted an important part of their labor-intensive activities to the newly industrialized countries, known as NICs, of the Far East and Maghreb, and to a certain extent to Central Europe (mainly Hungary and Poland), because of the low wages in these regions. Another reason for the unemployment crisis was that when the recovery set in at the end of 1975, workers who in the meantime had lost their jobs, and who were mainly low-skilled, could not respond to the new job offerings that were largely targeted at highly skilled white-collar professionals. This development of what one might call “technological unemployment” paralleled the increasing number of unfilled vacancies and was characteristic of a structural maladjustment between supply and demand on the West European labor market in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rising unemployment, and the payment of state financed unemployment benefits that go with it, placed an extra heavy burden on the budgets of many West European countries. In France, West Germany, and Belgium, this period was also marked by industrial restructuring as a whole (particularly the steel and textile industries), often with the help of massive state financing, which further added to the burden on government treasuries. The recovery in most Western European countries was fostered by the revaluation (in the context of the European “snake”) of the German Deutschmark in October 1976. This revaluation was of course a good thing for the competitiveness of, particularly, Belgian exporters. But nevertheless, the position of the Belgian franc continued to raise problems for several years to come: only after another revaluation of the Deutschmark in March 1979 and again (along with the Dutch guilder) in October 1981, and a devaluation in February 1982 of the Belgian franc and the Italian lire would international competitiveness be restored and the current account come out of the red. At the end of 1978 new oil price increases were announced by the OPEC cartel. The fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran precipitated events, and by mid-1979, crude oil prices doubled. Although the effects on Western economies were again adverse, the shock was not as severe as in 1973–74. The surprise was gone. Governments reacted properly and, above all, having switched to nuclear power generation and to less energy-consuming production technologies, the influence of oil on average cost was reduced. Nonetheless, the harsh winter of 1978–79 made the continued dependency on heating oil clear. On the psychological level, the effects of the second oil shock were further neutralized in Western Europe by the transformation of the “snake” into a genuine European Monetary System on March 13, 1979, following a joint German—French political initiative in 1978 by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At the same time the Deutschmark was again revalued. The EMS, with its own

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accounting unit, the European Currency Unit (Ecu), was seen as an important step on the way to a monetary union with one central European bank, and one currency. The end of this cycle in Belgium and in the world economy was marked by disagreement on the policy response to high inflation rates and high levels of unemployment. The dividing line was not only between the left and the right of the political spectrum, but increasingly between countries whose exchange regime was more or less managed as floating (the United States, Britain, and Japan), and countries within the EMS system of fixed exchange rates. This political battle over the economy was won by the conservative right, when at more or less the same moment in the United States, Britain, and Germany, right-wing governments or coalitions came to power. The election of Ronald Reagan in the United States (1980) brought about changes in the business climate that (through the “Keynesian” side of his administration’s economic policy) turned out to be beneficial in the short run, but (through the more “monetarist” aspects of his policy) had close to disastrous effects in Western European countries such as Belgium and Italy. By their debt position, they were highly vulnerable to interest rate increases. This needs some clarification. Reagan won the presidential election with a three-point program: (1) tax rates would again come down; (2) the United States would again become the primary military power on the planet (especially after the trauma of Vietnam); and (3) inflation had to be brought under control through a tight monetary policy. The first two points meant that the budgetary policy of the government would be expansionist, leading to large budget deficits through lower revenues and higher outlays. This is the “Keynesian” aspect. This part of “Reaganomics” would on its own already account for large increases in interest rates. The third point, which was the responsibility of the monetarist president of the Federal Reserve System, Paul Volcker, meant that the inevitable budget deficit would have to be financed exclusively by new loans, which of course meant that interest rates would rise still further. The outcome of this was that American nominal and real interest rates soared to exceptionally high levels and, by the sheer weight of the United States in the world economy, European interest rates soared as well. As an example, the effect of soaring interest rates on the internal debt position of Belgium was dramatic. In 1981, as a result mainly of the economic recession that lasted longer and was deeper in Belgium than elsewhere, and the so-called “crisis outlays” that went with it (such as unemployment benefits and aid to firms in distress), the budget deficit reached a record level of 13 percent of GDP, and the interest burden amassed like a snowball rolling downhill. Countries like Italy and Ireland followed the same gloomy scenario. The White Paper and the Delors Report: 1981–93 The year 1981 was so disastrous that, by the sheer periodicity of economic activity, things could only get better. The first (modestly) positive note in the beginning of this cycle was the entry of Greece into the European Community, which now increased to ten members. The early 1980s elections in many Western European countries brought centerright coalitions to power that tried to restore profits, and through this, create a more favorable climate for investors. Although most observers think, rightly, of Thatcherism as a case in point, the Belgian situation is perhaps more typical of what happened on the

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European continent because of the absence of the open social “warfare” that was so characteristic of the British political climate. The list of the policy measures taken in Belgium that illustrate this, and that came on top of the devaluation of the Belgian franc in 1981 (together with the temporary suspension of automatic wage indexation), is indeed long. The so-called Maribel Operation (after the name of the econometric model that was used by the Ministry of Economic Affairs to simulate probable results) put a brake on real wage increases and lowered the contribution of firms to the financing of the social security system. This last measure contributed to the increasing structural deficit of the social security system at the end of the 1980s, which in turn continued to jeopardize the future equilibrium of government finance. An impressive series of tax actions for capital income followed, including a virtual end to the fight against fiscal fraud, “amnesty” for past fiscal offenders, as well as discontinuing several important forms of capital income as part of total taxable income (causing average tax rates to drop), and a Belgian version of the French Monory Law that made it possible, up to a certain limit, to buy shares on the stock market and deduct them from taxable income. There was a similar deduction mechanism for dipping into private pension plans (a government signal, by the way, implying that public pension schemes had an uncertain future). Special “tax havens” were also created within Belgium, as were the so-called “coordination centers” for firms to which they could transfer their administrative activities under a very favorable fiscal regime. It is probably safe to say that in Belgium, as in most other countries of the West, the change in income distribution from labor to capital income—although it certainly went hand in hand with increasing social injustice in those countries—was the main cause of the forceful and long-lasting economic recovery on world markets at the beginning of the 1980s. At the same time, a process of economic convergence, in terms of national inflation, interest rates, and budgetary policies, began in Western Europe. Even in France, which was the only country that in 1981 shifted politically to the left with the election of François Mitterrand as President, the same policy of budgetary and monetary restraint was eventually applied by 1983. At the same time, however, the fear of a “hard landing” by the dollar, which had soared to absurd levels, began to create uneasiness at the end of 1985 and in 1986. Although the dollar had begun to show signs of weakness in February 1985, economists felt that it was still heavily overrated. The fear was that a drastic plunge would have traumatic consequences for world trade and cause even more harm than the monetary unrest set off by uncertainty about the dollar’s future. This was the background of the socalled “Louvre Agreement” at the beginning of 1987. It was agreed that the central banks of the most important OECD countries would support the exchange rate of the dollar, and in return the United States would begin to reduce its double deficit (both its budget deficit and the current account deficit). West Germany and Japan would stimulate their economies in order to eliminate their trade surpluses. The general idea was that the stabilization of the dollar would create a breathing space, enabling the past exchange rate decreases to have positive effects on the American current account (cf. the socalled Jcurve effects that in succession had obfuscated the picture),12 and by that means restore the much shaken confidence of investors. However, the Louvre Agreement stood no chance of success. On October 6, 1987, the German Bundesbank raised the discount rate in order to counter what it thought was the start of a new inflationary price spiral. As a

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consequence, James Baker, then the American Secretary of the Treasury, threatened to let the value of the dollar run its natural course on the exchange markets. Shortly afterwards came the news of another unexpectedly large deficit on the US trade balance. All this together started a panic on the New York Stock Exchange (a fall of 22.6 percent in the Dow Jones index on Monday, October 19, 1987; 26.4 percent, if one also counts the fall on the previous Friday). The above events were the circumstantial reasons for the crash. The deeper reasons were that, in the first place, share prices had begun to climb steeply shortly after the coming to power of Ronald Reagan, and had reached levels that were far beyond the equilibrium level. At the same time, as a result of the continuing deficits on the American budget and current account and the low rate of inflation, real interest rates had risen sharply, and far above the returns on shares (which were of course very low because of the abnormally high share prices). In the second place, as a result of numerous financial “innovations” on financial markets (for example, options trading and computerized dealing) and the popularization of the idea of “capitalism for the people” (the entry on the stock market of many inexperienced investors), stock markets had become extremely volatile and thus unstable.13 The destruction of financial wealth that goes along with a serious stock market crash, and the reduced public propensity to spend that follows, were the main reasons why the business cycle in the United States showed some signs of reversing. In most countries of Europe, however, the effect on economic activity was hardly felt because of the relatively small slice of wealth (in comparison to their American counterparts) that typical Western European households invested in stocks. The chief effect of the crash was probably the increased uncertainty on financial markets that followed. The higher risk premiums that were the result prevented the interest rates from falling more than they actually did. Moreover, the negative effects of the crash were to a large extent neutralized in Europe by the beneficial effects on the general business climate of the 1985 European Commission publication (with later approval by the EC Council of Ministers) of the socalled White Paper on “Completing the Internal Market.” It defined the policy measures to be applied by the member countries in order to create a single “economic space” in the EC by the end of 1992. The White Paper contained action proposals falling under five headings, pertaining to the removal of: (1) all remaining tariffs; (2) all quantitative restrictions or quotas; (3) all costincreasing barriers, such as delays at customs relating to VAT or excise tax assessment, the verification of technical regulations, and costs related to differences in technical norms between member countries; (4) all marketentry restrictions, including government procurement restrictions, and establishment rights for various service industries and professions; and finally (5) all market-distorting subsidies and practices.14 The immediate objective was the complete liberalization of trade in goods and services and the complete freedom of movement for persons and capital by 1992. The openly stated ultimate purpose, as already mentioned, was the creation of a market space of the largest possible European dimension in order to exploit expected economies of scale and favor the creation of large European multinational firms. These large European firms, it was hoped, would then be able to compete head-on with American and Japanese corporations in newly emerging technological fields. The idea of “Europe 1992” provided much-needed fresh momentum to European economic integration. Together with the European-wide convergence in inflation rates,

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interest rates, and budgetary policy (that resulted from the presence of center-right coalitions in the governments of most European countries), it appears, with hindsight, to have prepared the launch pad for monetary union. The European Community received further stimulus with the entry in 1986 of Spain and Portugal, recently freed from totalitarian yoke. The number of members rose to twelve. The collapse of the communist regimes in Europe in 1989, and especially the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing reunification of Germany that followed in October 1990, favorably influenced demand in Western Europe. The possible future entry into the European Union of countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states was rapidly placed on the political agenda. In addition, in April 1989, Europe was confronted with the “Delors Report”—the result of a resolution taken at the 1988 Summit Meeting of Hanover (prepared to a large extent by the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher)—that put the creation of a European monetary union squarely on the agenda. In the opinion of many, Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, was probably the European administrator (his adversaries would say “bureaucrat”) with the strongest personality to date, and has had the strongest positive influence on the speed of European economic integration. With the explicit backing of French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Delors wanted to profit from the momentum created by the completion of the “internal market.” Following the nearly twenty-year-old lead of the Werner Plan, the Delors Report started by defining the monetary union in terms of: (1) the establishment of a total and irreversible convertibility between the different currencies; (2) the complete liberalization of capital flows as well as the complete integration of the banking system; and (3) the disappearance of the fluctuation margins in the EMS and the irreversible freezing of the exchange parities. It continued by describing the economic preconditions that were necessary for monetary union in both the short and long run. These included a large integrated market, the implementation of a European-wide competition policy that reinforced the market mechanism, a common policy of structural change and regional development; and, lastly, the co-ordination of macroeconomic policy and binding rules for fiscal policy. Delors and his ad hoc commission made more or less detailed recommendations on the creation of the monetary union in three phases. First, the EC Treaty was to be changed to allow the creation of a European System of Central banks (ESCB). Then the ESCB would actually be established. In the last phase, the monetary responsibilities of the member countries would be transferred to the ESCB. However, due to disagreements in the Commission between the French and the German delegation, the actual timing was not very precise. The Delors Commission therefore recommended that the European Council accept their report as a basis for further discussion and to convene, not later than July 1, 1990, an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) to revise the Treaty. The European Council in Madrid in June 1989 then accepted the proposals of the Delors Commission. The IGC rounded off its discussions at the Summit Meeting of Maastricht in December 1991. The Maastricht Treaty that was concluded, although not yet ratified, set out the transformation of the European Community (EC) into the European Union (EU). It would be based on three pillars: (1) the economic and monetary competencies of the old Community; (2) the common aspects, agreed upon on an intergovernmental basis, of foreign and defense policy; and (3) cooperation, also agreed upon on an

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intergovernmental basis, in the field of immigration, asylum and police matters. Maastricht also set out a concrete time schedule for the two remaining phases of the Delors Report. The first of these required the establishment of the European Monetary Institute (EMI), the forerunner of the European Central Bank, and the abolition of monetary financing of the budget deficit by the EMU member countries on January 1, 1994. Then, in the second step, the establishment of the monetary union itself would take place on January 1, 1999. A set of four conditions had to be fulfilled by every member country of the EU that wished to participate in the EMU. First, each country had to guarantee price stability. Before entry, the inflation rate in each candidate member state of the EMU could not be more than 1.5 percent over the average of the three countries with the lowest rate. Second, sustainability of government finance had to be secured. Before entry, the national budget deficit had to be less than 3 percent of GDP, and the gross debt could not be higher than 60 percent of GDP, or at least member countries should clearly and in a sustained way be moving towards that latter proportion.15 Third, each candidate state was required to guarantee exchange rate stability. The currency could not have undergone a change in parity during at least the two years prior to entry. And, finally, interest rate stability was also required. The long-run level of nominal national interest rates could not be higher than 2 percent above the average of the three countries with the lowest rates. In the meantime, in October 1990, the entry of Britain into the European Monetary System, albeit under less severe conditions than for the original partners (this involved a broader bandwidth for fluctuations of the pound sterling around parity), was generally seen as a serious step forward in European economic integration and a good omen for the success of the discussions around monetary union. Although the Gulf War in 1990–91 may have troubled some investors, the general slowdown of the American and world economies in 1991 did not seem to be the consequence of a particular adverse event, but rather the result of a “classical” overheating of the economy after a long period—the longest since the “golden sixties”—of reasonably high and sustained economic growth. In the course of 1992, however, the economic recession became a much more important concern in the European Union (some economists used the word “depression”), and as a result of the events that went with it, the EMU horizon defined by the Maastricht Treaty seemed to recede into the background, adding to the general pessimism. The story is essentially a simple one. By the beginning of 1992, the recession in the United States was the longest since the end of the Second World War. The oncoming presidential election prompted the sitting administration to keep interest rates low. In Germany, massive government financing to re-float the East German economy created rising inflationary pressure. The monetary authorities in West Germany—obsessed as they traditionally are by the dangers of inflation—felt obliged to keep interest rates high. In Britain too the recession was severe. The active anti-European lobby in the reigning Tory Party urged the Prime Minister to give priority to domestic matters rather than to keeping the pound within the boundaries prescribed by the EMS, thereby undermining, of course, the credibility of British membership. The outcome of all this was that speculators shifted from American dollars to German Deutschmarks. The resulting increase in the exchange value of the Deutschmark put the weaker partners of the EMS under severe pressure to support their currency by intervening on the exchange markets. The pound did not

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withstand the speculation for long. In the middle of September 1992, rather than concede to a devaluation, Britain withdrew from the EMS, together with Italy. The French franc, the Spanish peseta, the Portuguese escudo and ultimately also the Belgian franc and the Danish crown remained under speculative pressure, with new realignments expected by the public. This corrosion of the EMS, together with a mounting anti-Brussels feeling in public opinion in many EU member states (for example, the Danish “No” to “Maastricht” in June 1992, the pyrrhic victory of the proEuropeans in the French referendum, the massive “No” in the public opinion polls in Britain) made it, for many, highly unlikely that the various stages of European monetary unification would become operational according to the time schedule put forward in the Treaty of Maastricht. The German Bundesbank intervened massively to support the currencies under threat, and finally (in August 1993) the European monetary authorities, trying to save the projected move towards monetary union, reacted by widening the fluctuation margins within the EMS from 2.25 percent to 15 percent, thereby saving the EMS from collapse. The road to the EMU: 1993–2001 At the end of 1993, the unrest on the European currency markets subsided. Investors and speculators began to realize that the underlying “fundamentals” of the EMS countries were sound and in accordance with the parity values. This induced a correcting movement in exchange rates, coinciding as well with the announcement (in agreement with the Maastricht conditions) by the countries whose currencies had been under threat, of policy measures aimed at enhancing their international competitiveness and reducing their budget deficits. In November 1993 the Maastricht Treaty was finally ratified, ten months later than originally planned. In the meantime, the recovery that had begun in the United States in the second half of 1992 was in full swing. The driving force behind the American recovery and the ensuing boom during the better part of the 1990s was the so-called ICT or telecommunications revolution, especially the Internet, which produced an average real growth rate of nearly 3.5 percent in the period from 1992 to 2000. The strength of the recovery and its spillover effects in Europe made it somewhat easier for countries like Belgium and Italy to begin compliance with the Maastricht criteria. Ireland was a special case. By virtue of both a very stringent budgetary policy and a massive inflow of foreign direct investment in the ICT field from the United States, the Irish economy managed during the 1990s to dramatically reduce its government debt and to sustain a real growth rate that can only be compared to the Japanese average growth rate during the 1960s.16 Once the sky had cleared, the European Union once again set its course for monetary union. The start of the second phase began on January 1, 1994 with the creation, as planned, of the European Monetary Institute. The European Commission was asked to prepare a decision on a concrete scenario for the actual transition to a single currency. The Commission published its “Green Paper on the Practical Arrangements for the Single Currency” in May 1995. The EMI did something equivalent in the field of its competence in November the same year. Both documents formed the basis for the official transition scenario that was finally accepted by the European Council of Madrid in December 1995.

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A decision by the European Council on the identity of the member countries that would participate in the EMU, and the European Central Bank (as successor of the EMI) and the European System of Central Banks were scheduled for the beginning of 1998. The third phase of the EMU would begin on January 1, 1999. It included the final definition and “freezing” of the conversion parities of the participating countries, the introduction of the new “Euro” (the successor of the Ecu) as a deposit, or non-cash, currency, and the issuance of new government bonds in Euros rather than in the national currency. The member states would also move toward a common monetary policy. On January 1, 2002 the Euro was to appear in the form of banknotes and coins as legal tender, while national currencies would begin a phased withdrawal lasting until July 1, 2002. 1995 was also the year in which three new members entered the European Union: Austria, Finland and Sweden, which brought membership to a total of fifteen countries. An important discussion that arose in European political circles was related to the socalled “Stability and Growth Pact” (SGP). Particularly in Germany, there was growing worry that the Maastricht conditions, although sufficiently stringent, would be difficult to enforce due to the absence of any legal context. The mechanism of the Stability and Growth Pact was therefore accepted at the Dublin Summit in December 1996. The legal framework necessary for its implementation was approved at the Amsterdam Summit in June 1997. The SGP implied that the budgetary policies of the EMU member states were bound by tight rules, and that sanctions (in terms of fines) would be applied automatically when they were violated. Each year the member states would submit for approval by the European Commission a “stability program” documenting their compliance to the SGP. The Amsterdam Summit was also the occasion for the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam, which contained stipulations on common foreign and defense policies, and on cooperation in the fields of justice and home affairs within the European Union. The speculative attack on the Thai baht in the late spring of 1997, and the ensuing panic throughout Southeast Asia (mainly in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia), South Korea and Japan rapidly developed into a sweeping economic and financial crisis in that region.17 Although the adverse effects on economic activity in Europe remained limited, there is little doubt that it had an important positive influence on the psychology of economic integration. It increased the determination of political elites in the candidate EMU countries to stay firmly on course in the planned monetary integration process, the rationale being that larger monetary entities with good economic fundamentals were much less vulnerable to the kind of speculative attacks that had brought down Asia. Thus, 1998 and 1999 were crucial years in the process of economic and monetary integration. In March 1998, the EMI and the European Commission published the planned “Convergence Reports” on the European Union member countries and their possible compliance with the Maastricht criteria. It appeared that the economies of the EU members had converged in an impressive way to common and acceptable levels of inflation rates, interest rates, and the government deficit/GDP proportion. They had significantly reduced the variability of their exchange rates and had secured the independence of their central banks. In May of the same year, during the special meeting of the European Council in Brussels, and on the recommendation of the European Commission, the following eleven countries were listed as future members of the EMU: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Denmark and Britain announced that they would not

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participate in the third phase. Sweden had not made enough progress with respect to legal compliance and did not satisfy the exchange rate criterion of the Maastricht Treaty, while Greece did not comply with several of the Maastricht criteria. In June 1998, the EMI was liquidated as planned and replaced by the European Central Bank and its supporting European System of Central Banks. Six months later, on January 1, 1999, the EMU officially took off: the conversion rates between the Euro and the currencies of the eleven EMU members were irrevocably fixed, the responsibility of the monetary policy of the eleven was transmitted to the ECB, and the Euro was officially introduced as common currency, for the time being only as a deposit currency. It was eventually decided at the Summit Meeting in Feira, Portugal in June 2000 that Greece had taken sufficient steps forward in adhering to the Masstricht conditions to be admitted to the EMU on January 1, 2001. From that point, the EMU would number twelve members From the moment of its introduction, a recurrent theme in the West European press, especially in Britain, and also in the United States, was the weak performance of the Euro on the exchange markets. Launched in the beginning of 1999 at an exchange rate equal to approximately $1.18, the Euro quickly began to slide, ending in January 2002 at a value of around $0.90. The economic consequences of this apparent lack of enthusiasm were limited, and, if anything, more positive than negative, because of the gains in international competitiveness that it meant. The danger, however, was rising inflationary pressure that resulted from rising net demand on international markets as well as the increased cost of imported natural resources and semi-finished products. The escalating inflationary expectations that often go with the latter was something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The interest rate policy of the ECB must be seen in this light: first “letting go” when international competitiveness seemed to be at stake, and then keeping interest rates relatively high when the weak performance of the Euro seemed mainly to be a credibility problem rather than the sign of unsound “fundamentals.”18 The fundamentals of the EMU-12 relative to the United States were indeed sound. The current account deficit in 2001 was only 0.1 percent of GDP, compared to 4.2 percent in the United States. Inflation was moderate (1.8 percent in 2001, compared to 2 percent in the United States). Real unit labor costs were favorable (92.7 points in 2001, against 96.8 in the United States; 1991=100) and a moderate government deficit (0.7 percent of GDP in 2001 compared to a surplus of 1.9 percent in the United States). The relative budgetary situation of the EMU-12 compared to the United States may seem adverse, but this should be qualified. If we look at the gross savings of the private sector, then it appears that the EMU-12 did much better than their American counterpart (20.1 percent in 2001 against only 12.2 percent).19 The above interpretation of the apparent weakness of the Euro was supported by the evolution of the so-called purchasing power parities (PPPs), i.e. the long-run equilibrium values for the exchange rate. In purchasing power terms the Euro was worth $1.091 in 1999, rising to $1.098 in 2000.20 At the December 2000 meeting of the European Council in Nice, the heads of state reached an agreement on what became known as the Treaty of Nice. Its main purpose was to declare the firm commitment of the European Union to enlargement and to make it possible from a juridical point of view. The Summit explicitly expressed its appreciation for the efforts made by candidate-countries to establish the conditions for adoption, implementation, and the practical application of what is generally known as the “acquis communautaire” (the accumulated heritage of agreements already registered by

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existing member states). It was felt that the time was ripe to lend fresh impetus to the process. A roadmap for the next eighteen months was traced out. By the Summit Meeting of Laeken (Belgium) in December 2001, the heads of state were determined to bring the entry negotiations for a number of candidate countries to a successful conclusion as soon as possible, so that these countries could take part in the elections for the European Parliament in 2004 as full European Union members. A list of possible entry countries “that could be ready” was made public that consisted of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia. A special emphasis was placed on the need for these candidate-countries to continue their efforts to bring their administrative and judicial capabilities up to the required level. In October 2002, Brussels announced that, barring any reaction against enlargement, they were indeed set to become members by the 2004 target with Bulgaria and Romania possibly joining in 2007. In view of the future accession of a relatively large number of new members, it becomes urgent for the present European Union members to reconsider a number of important principles that up to now have governed the functioning of the Union. A first issue is the way in which decisions will have to be taken in the future European Council. This has been by consensus, but it is evident that with a much larger number of members, this will have to change to a system of (weighted) majority voting. A number of veteren member countries have openly opposed this idea, with Britain foremost. A second issue concerns the possible danger that the European Union will consist of components that are moving at different speeds. In many ways, the existence of the EMU as fait accompli was, from the moment of its creation, the expression of a two-speed Europe. A third major question concerns the frequently mentioned “democratic deficit.” The practically exclusive focus of the European Commission on market issues, the highly specialized nature of many of the decisions taken, plus the “technocratic” nature of the decisionmaking itself, have increased the distance from the citizen. This remoteness has been increasingly translated into anti-European reflexes and, at worst, into the growing popularity of political parties with a populist or even extreme-right program. A number of other questions that urgently require a fresh response relate to a possible reorientation of the so-called “subsidiarity” principle. Among the most important are the creation of a coherent European foreign and defense policy, as well as responding to the growing clamor for a “social” Europe in a way that adequately addresses social protection, the problem of social exclusion, and democracy in the workplace. Is a European Constitution needed? The 2001 Laeken Summit convened a Convention composed of the main European parties to pave the way for a next Intergovernmental Conference that would seek answers to these basic challenges. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President, was asked to preside. Giuliano Amato, the former Italian Prime Minister, and Jean-Luc Dehaene, the former Belgian Prime Minister, were appointed as vicepresidents. As was the case during many of the previous business cycles, the first signs of an approaching downturn appeared on the stock market. The American Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked in early January 2000 and from then on slowly began to erode. More spectacular was the evolution of the Nasdaq Index, which peaked in the beginning of March 2000, and then started on a steep decline, losing more than half its value in the process. What in the beginning of the cycle clearly had been its driving force—the

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telecommunications revolution—had gradually taken on the characteristics of hype. Over-investment in many important Internet ventures had turned out to be unprofitable, and a growing pessimism rapidly spread. The second “bull market of a lifetime” (after that in the 1980s) was over. The malaise on the stock markets was followed with some delay by a decline in economic activity. In the third and fourth quarters of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001, American economic growth slowed down noticeably, coming practically to a standstill in the second quarter. GDP declined during the third quarter— that is before the dramatic events of September 11, 2001, which evidently only made things worse. Europe’s business cycle followed suit. Conclusion In each of the postwar cycles, important new steps were taken in the process of European integration. In the course of the past fifty years something has grown that can safely be called a European identity in the economic field. Current professional economic literature (in line with the early contributions on “optimum currency areas” by R.A. Mundell21) abounds in studies that examine the conditions under which “asymmetric shocks” experienced by a group of countries are compatible with a monetary union that exists between them. The conclusions drawn by most experts is that economic integration should be pushed forward, especially in terms of the working of the labor markets,22 but also in terms of the necessity to coordinate the fiscal policies of the member states.23 But many indeed also expected—this was certainly one of the motivations of its founding fathers—that monetary union and a single European currency would not only speed up the integration process, but also foster the development of a European and cultural and political identity. The latter development is probably an essential precondition for the European Union to succeed in the long term. Is there after all any historical precedent for a country, or set of countries, that engaged in monetary union, not to form at the same time or shortly after, at least in some particular sense, a political union? The question, although intrinsically of a long-term nature, is an urgent one. Further reading For a review of the economic dimension of the European Union, see W.Meeusen (ed.), Economic Policy in the European Union: Current Perspectives, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 1999. Analyses of economic integration can also be found in D.W.Unwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration Since 1945, New York and London, Longman, 1995, and A.Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998. A broader view is taken by L.Tsoukalis (ed.), Europe, America and the World Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, and The New European Economy Revisited, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. P.Lynch, N. Neuwahl, and W.Rees (eds), Reforming the European Union from Maastricht to Amsterdam, London, Scott Foresman, 2000, is also useful.

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Monetary policy and exchange rates are studied in H. James, International Monetary Co-operation since Bretton Woods, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, and F.Giavazzi and A.Giovannini, Limiting Exchange Rate Flexibility: The European Monetary System, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1989- On monetary union, good discussions can be found in P.Ludlow’s The Making of the European Monetary System: A Case Study of the Politics of the European Community, London, Butterworth Scientific, 1982; D.Gross and N.Thygesen, European Monetary Integration, 2nd edn, New York, Longman, 1998; M.Emerson, M. Aujean, M.Catinat, P.Goybet and A.Jacquemin, The Economics of 1992, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988. Also useful are A. Szász’s The Road to European Monetary Union, Houndmills, Macmillan, 1999; as well as M.Emerson, D.Gros, A.Italianer, J.Pisani-Ferry and H.Reichenbach, One Market, One Money, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, and finally W.Meeusen and J.Villaverde (eds), Convergence Issues in the European Union, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 2002. See also J.J.Kaplan and G.Schleiminger, The European Payments Union: Financial Diplomacy in the 1950s, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989. On the impact of the financial crisis, see V.Argy, The Postwar International Money Crisis: An Analysis, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Notes 1 See D.H.Aldcroft, The European Economy, 1914–1990, London and New York, Routledge, 1993, for a vivid description of the “war and reconstruction” period in Europe. 2 The OEEC originally comprised eighteen members: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Western Germany (originally represented by both the combined American and British occupation zones (The Bizone) and the French occupation zone). The Anglo-American zone of the Free Territory of Trieste was also a participant in the OEEC until it returned to Italian sovereignty. 3 A total of twenty-nine countries signed the original IMF agreement on December 27, 1945. 4 See D. Gros and N.Thygesen, European Monetary Integration, London, Longman, 1992, p. 8 on this particular aspect. 5 Also the Dutch guilder appreciated on that occasion by the same 5 percent compared to the dollar. 6 The last instance was the realignment of January 1987 when, in the context of the EMS, the German mark was revalued and the French franc devalued. Although there was quick agreement within the EMS on the direction of the realignment, the discussion on the percentage changes was acrimonious and long lasting. 7 Especially Georges Pompidou, who had succeeded Charles de Gaulle as French President and had a much more European profile, and Willy Brandt, the new German Chancellor. 8 See V.Argy, The Postwar International Monetary Crisis: An Analysis, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981, from whom we borrow, for a more detailed account. 9 In the non-oil-producing developing countries the oil shock had even more serious consequences. On the one hand, their income from the export of raw materials decreased sharply as the joint result of the declining value of the dollar (the currency in which all raw material prices were expressed), and of the fall in demand for raw materials. This fall in demand was very dramatic and occurred at the end of 1974. In other words: prices expressed in dollars dropped, the dollar dropped, and the quantities sold dropped as well. On the other hand, their expenditures on oil imports increased. The resulting structural deficit on their

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current accounts had in some important countries (Mexico and Brazil in particular) an asphyxiating effect on the ability to service their considerable external debt. They had accumulated this debt in the years before and particularly in the wake of the commodity price boom of 1972–73 in an attempt, in the form of ambitious investment projects in industry, to close in one huge leap forward an important part of the gap that separated them from the industrialized world. The scene was set for what in the beginning of the 1980s would amount to a world financial crisis focused on the external debt of developing countries. The burden of refinancing the external debt of the developing countries became so heavy that many of them could not service their debt any longer. From August 1982 onwards the financial world in the West was shaken by one moratorium after another in Latin America, threatening to disrupt the delicate financial structure in that part of the world. 10 In September 1961 the OEEC was superseded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a worldwide body. At the time, the OECD consisted of the European founder countries of the OEEC plus the United States and Canada. 11 Gros and Thygesen, European Monetary Integration, Table 1.1. 12 The so-called “J-curve effect” refers to a situation in which, after a devaluation of the domestic currency, the deficit on the current account worsens in a first phase (as a result of higher import prices for goods with a low price-elasticity—mainly oil and natural resources), before—in the somewhat longer run—it comes out of the red as a result of improving international competitiveness. 13 In the last place—but this is an issue of a more general nature—stock markets are markets where on top of a normal return (dividends on shares), capital profits can be earned. This means that the current price of a share depends heavily on the expectation with respect to future prices. If expectations on future prices are formed in circumstances of high uncertainty, then “rumors” can play a dominant role in investor decisions, and self-fulfilling prophesies will then often cause “speculative bubbles” to develop. 14 See M.M.Emerson, M.Aujean, M.Catinat, P.Goybet, and A.Jacquemin, The Economics of 1992, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988. 15 A thorough discussion of the logical consistency of these two criteria can be found in W.Buiter, G.Corsetti and N.Roubini, “Excessive Deficits: Sense and Nonsense in the Treaty of Maastricht,” Economic Policy, 16 (1993), 57–100. 16 F.Barry, “The EMU and the Cohesion Process,” in W.Meeusen (ed.), Economic Policy in the European Union: Current Perspectives, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 1999, pp. 49–65. 17 See the collection edited by P.-R.Agénor, M.Miller, D.Vines and A.Weber, The Asian Financial Crisis: Causes, Contagion and Consequences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, for a comprehensive economic analysis of the Asian financial crisis. 18 See S.Gerlach and F.Smets, “Output Gaps and Monetary Policy in the EMU,” European Economic Review’, 43 (1999), 801–12. 19 European Economy, 72, 2001, statistical annex. 20 http://www.oecd.org/pdf/M00009000/M00009294.pdf 21 The concept of “optimum currency areas” refers to the conditions that must be fulfilled for a monetary union to be sustainable. In the original contributions by Mundell it was stated that at least one of the following conditions should hold: (1) the set of countries should have a sufficiently congruent economic structure, so that an external shock produces symmetric effects in each of the countries; (2) in the case of asymmetric shocks, there should be sufficient factor-mobility, especially labormobility, across the borders of the member countries in order to absorb this shock without creating lasting disequilibrium.

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22 See A.Borghijs and A.Van Poeck, “European Labor Markets under Convergence Pressure,” in W.Meeusen and J.Villaverde (eds), Convergence Issues in the European Union, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 2002, pp. 171–94. 23 See C.Costa and P.De Grauwe, “EMU and the Need for Further Economic Integration,” in Meeusen, Economic Policy in the European Union, pp. 27–48, and also F.Van der Ploeg, “Macroeconomic Policy Coordination during the Various Phases of Economic and Monetary Integration in Europe,” European Economy, Special Edition, 1 (1991), 136–64.

Index Accra conference (1958), 42 Adenauer, Konrad, viii, 12, 215, 218–20, 229–30, 237 advertising, 144, 152, 154, 158, 174–75; see commercial cultureagriculture, 62, 67–73, 77, 89–91, 93, 95, 122, 125, 129, 192, 202, 222– 23, 243 Albania, xi, 68, 90, 191, 200–01 Algeria, vii, 41, 44–45, 47–49, 52–53, 130, 134; War (1954–1962), ix, 4, 42–44, 48, 155, 181 American competition, 5, 11, 24, 45, 74, 77–78, 80, 107 Americanization, 4, 7, 18, 87, 72–73, 106, 142, 146–48, 157–58, 181 Angola, xv, 21, 43–44 anti-communism, 15, 197, 201 anti-globalization, 87, 173 anti-immigrant violence, xx, 87, 130, 134–35, 161 anti-nuclear movement, 23 Antonioni, Michelangelo, xiii, 151 architecture, xiii, xvii, xxi, 102, 143, 170, 173, 175, 178, 182 art, viii, xi, xiv-xv, xxi, 10, 152–53, Chapter 7 Atlantic Charter, 21, 29, 42 atrocities, 125, 130–31, 138, 203 Austria, vii, x, xvii, xxi, 30, 70, 99, 198; economy, 70, 90, 109, 121–22; European integration, 212, 228, 254–55; social policy, 64–65, 94–95, 97, 107 automobile culture, 74, 101, 144, 174; see industry; consumer society avant-garde, 10, Chapter 7, 146, 152, 160 balance of payments, 237, 239, 241; see monetary policy Balkans, 8, 17, 90, 104, 112, 123, 162, 190, 194, 201, 203 Balladur, Edouard, 225 Baltic states, 205, 250 Bandung Conference (1955), x, 42 banking, 8, 67, 69, 78, 98, 197, 225, 227, 239–40, 245, 248, 250, 255; see European Central Bank; monetary policy Barthes, Roland, 174, 178 Baudrillard, Jean, 152, 171, 174 Beatles, xii-xiii, 148, 151, 153, 175 Beckett, Samuel, 177 Belgian Congo, 44 Belgium, viii, 4, 95, 99, 106, 112, 131, 137, 234, 237;

Index

209

Cold War, 23; decolonization, 42–44, 54; economy, 76, 90, 98, 100, 107, 236–9, 243–45, 247; employment, 40, 91, 94, 97; European integration, 215, 220–21, 253, 255; monetary policy, 245–47; politics, 64, 124, 150; social policy, 65, 94–95, 107, 111 Benelux, viii, 100, 215, 218, 238; customs union, viii, 237 Berlin blockade, viii, 17 Berlin Wall, xi, xviii, 9, 30, 73, 113, 146, 154, 199, 226, 250 Berlusconi, Silvio, xx, 106, 154, 158–59, 162 Beveridge Report, 65, 94, 127 black market, 32, 78 Blair, Tony, xx, 98, 135 Bosnia, xx, 182, 202–03 Brandt, Willy, xiii–xiv, 4, 20 Bretton Woods system, vii, xiv, 20, 66, 78, 223, 235–6, 239–40, 242 Brezhnev, Leonid, xii, 19–21, 25, 195 Brezhnev Doctrine, 19, 27, 29, 31, 195 British Nationality Act, 48 Bulgaria, viii, xxi, 4, 31, 106, 123; economy, 27, 68, 70–71, 77, 91, 201, 203; European integration, 207, 257; politics, 29, 201; revolution, 198, 200 Bundesbank, 223, 225–27, 240, 248, 252; see banking; monetary policy Burma, 42, 46 business, 6, 66, 70, 73, 80–81, 89, 97, 107, 172, 176, 224, 249; cycles, 59, 89, 102, Chapter 10 Cambodia, ix, 42 Camus, Albert, 177 capitalism, 2, 8–9, 15, 25, 32, 60–61, 63–68, 70, 72, 76, 81, 86, 88–89, 92, 95, 98, 102, 107, 142– 43, 147, 150, 162, 169, 171, 175, 184, 204–05 Catalonia, 137, 162 Catholic Church, xv–xvii, 27, 41, 124, 134, 151, 192–93, 196; see religion Ceauşescu, Nicolai, xii, xviii, 7, 19, 26, 29, 32, 128, 191, 199 Ceylon, 42 China, 20–22, 45 Chirac, Jacques, xx, 229–30 Churchill, Winston, vii, xii, 14, 125, 155 citizenship, 8, 10–11, 48, 87, 93–95, 105, 112–13, 129–30, 158 civil society, 26, 92, 94, 104, 106, 109, 129 civil war, 92, 124, 202 class, 6, 11, 96, 106, 112, 142–43, 145, 148–50, 159–62; mobility, 102, 162, 180;

Index

210

struggle, 10, 64, 88, 91–92, 126, 70–71; see also identity Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 156 Cold War, 2–5, 9, Chapter 1, 41, 60, 65, 88, 90, 96, 125, 147, 153, 157, 169, 181, 195–96, 199; interpretations, 14–18 collective bargaining, 64, 97–101, 126; see labor politics; trade unions colonialism, 41–45, 53, 181 commerce, see trade commercial culture, 148, 152–53, 175–76, 179–81; see advertising; mass culture Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), xii, 11, 72, 221–22, 238, 240; see agriculture; Empty Chair crisis Common Market, xii, 45, 70, 72, 75, 221–22 Commonwealth Immigrants Acts, 48 communism, 2, 8–10, 15, 23, 25–26, 28–30, 32, 51, 60–61, 64, 121, 124–26, 132, 135–36, 154, 157, 169–70, 181, 191, 196, 198, 201 consumer society, 6–7, 54, 66, 69, 74, 77, 88, 98, 102–04, 106, 126, 136, 142–43, 146–47, 150–53, 158–60, 174, 181–82, 192 consumption patterns, 54, 65, 72, 75–77, 80, 101, 106, 144, 146, 148, 152, 160, 174, 176, 195 corruption, 201–02 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), viii, 18, 27, 68, 70, 128, 192, 201, 205 Croatia, 202–03 cultural policy, 147–48, 153, 169, 181 culture, 7, 89, 93–94, 102–03, 105–06, 129, 134, 150, 152, Chapters 6–7; see commercial culture; mass culture currency policy, see monetary policy Cyprus, 19, 43, 256 Czech Republic, 135, 201–03, 205–07, 250, 256 Czechoslovakia, viii, xiii, xv, 24, 31, 123, 125, 131, 157, 172; Charter 77, xv, 4, 26–27, 172, 199; Cold War, 19–20, 22; break-up of, xix, 202–03; collapse of communism, 198–99; democratic opposition, 194, 199–200; economy, 68–71, 78, 90–91, 126; liberalization, 193; politics, xix, 29; Prague Spring, xiii, 4, 19, 25, 28, 153, 168, 193, 199; Soviet invasion, 26, 132, 153; velvet revolution, xviii 27 De Beauvoir, Simone, ix, 150, 183 De Gaulle, Charles, vii, xi–xiii, 2, 74, 99, 155; Cold War, 19–21; decolonization, 45, 51; European integration, 20, 72, 221–22

Index

211

decolonization, vii-xiii, xv–xvi, xx, xxiii, 2, 4–5, Chapter 2, 88, 104, 134–35, 180 Delors, Jacques, 224, 250 Delors Report, xviii, 247, 250–51 democratization, 7, 18, 25–26, 30, 97, 111, 145, 150, 159, 174, 191–93, 196–201; see also glasnost de-Nazifiation, 180 Denmark, xix, xxi, 76, 90, 94, 97, 99, 109–10, 145; European integration, 17, 222, 225, 243, 252, 255 depression, 120–21, 124, 194 de-Stalinization, 191; see Stalinism détente, 4, 15, 22, 27, 31–32 dissident movement, 172, 194; see democratization; democratic opposition Dubcek, Alexander, 19, 28, 153, 193, 199 economic collapse (Eastern Europe), 131–32, 202–03 economic development, 8, 18, Chapter 3, 88–91, 96, 104, 109, 126, 145, 194–95, 201, 203, 205, 238; competition, 202, 205; decolonization, 45, 51, 53–54; deindustrialization, 78, 86, 91, 97, 102–04, 111; infrastructure, 88, 194, 205; integration, Chapter 10; mixed-market, 6, 60, 64, 68–69, 77, 93, 126, 192, 196; economic policy, 62, 65–66, 68, 71–72, 77, 80, 132, 196, 224, 244–247, 249; state management of, 5–6, 64, 66, 76, 126, 201 economic miracle, 60, 62 economic planning, 6, 64, 67–70, 89, 131–32, 192, 204–05; education, 6, 50, 52, 86, 90, 93–95, 98, 107, 111–12, 134, 143–45 emigration, 122, 130, 203 employment, 6, 40–41, 50, 54, 63–65, 68, 70–73, 76, 78–81, 97–98, 109–11, 113, 124, 127, 129, 132, 137, 143–44, 195, 239, 244; see unemployment Empty Chair crisis (1965–66), 221 energy resources, 24–25, 27, 67, 74–76, 78, 218–19, 245; see also economic development; trade environmental issues, xv, xvii, 24, 68, 76, 78, 120, 179 Erhard, Ludwig, 64, 67 Estonia, 137, 206, 256 Ethiopia, 21, 53 ethnic cleansing, 130, 203 ethnic minorities, 47, 51–52, 54, 86, 104, 112–13, 120, 123–24, 129–31, 133–35, 137–38, 160, 202–03; see refugees ethnic tension, 8, 88, 105–06, 130, 134–35, 137–38, 162, 203 ethnicity, 6, 10–11, 88, 106, 110, 112, 159, 162, 180, 182, 184; see identity Euro currency, xxi, 11, 81, 240, 254–56

Index

212

Euro-communism, xv, 4, 23 Euromissile crisis, xv, 4, 23 European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), x, xiii, 219–20, 238 European Central Bank, xxi, 211, 227, 229, 251, 254–56 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), ix, xiii, 66, 128, 211, 213–217, 227, 237–8 European Commission, 219, 221–22, 224, 249–50, 253–55 European Community (EC), xiii, xiv, 17, 225, 238, 251; see European Economic Community (EEC); Common Market European Currency Unit (Ecu), 223, 240, 245, 254 European Defense Community (EDC), ix, 217–18 European Economic Community (EEC), x, xiii, 17, 66, 73, 211, 213, 220–21, 224, 237–9; see European Community (EC); Common Market European Free Trade Association (EFTA), xi, 66 European Monetary Agreement, 239 European Monetary Institute (EMI), 251, 253–55 European Monetary System (EMS), xvi, 223, 225, 236, 243, 245–46, 250–53 European Monetary Union (EMU), xviii, xx, 108, 211, 226–29, 236, 240–1, 251–57 European Parliament, xvi, 221–22, 225, 228, 256 European Payments Union (EPU), ix, 66, 236–7, 239–240 European System of Central Banks (ESCB), 250 European Union (EU), xix–xx, 12, 71–72, 81, 86, 97, 107, 111, 113, 137, 206–07, Chapters 9–10 Eurosclerosis, 8, 80, 107, 109–10, 112, 224 exchange rates, 223, 235–6, 239, 240–1, 243, 246, 248, 250–51, 253, 255; snake, 11, 223, 243–45; see monetary policy existentialism, 170, 177, 184 family, 6, 65, 94–95, 103–04, 110–11, 120–121, 124, 127–28, 133–34, 136, 143–44, 150, 152 fashion, 150–52, 175; see industry Fanon, Frantz, xi, 183 film, xi–xiv, 7, 106, 143, 146–47, 149–52, 157, 162, 175–76, 178, 182 Finland, xx, 21, 81, 90, 99–100, 110, 145, 212, 228, 254–55 Fluxus movement, 172 football, x, xiii, xviii–xix, 134, 155, 161–62; see hooliganism; sports Fordism, 5, 8, 72–73, 76, 78, 80, 100–01, 158; see modernization foreign investment, 69, 198, 205–06, 239 Foucault, Michel, xvii, 171 France, vii, x, xvii, 4, 41, 99, 112, 142, 214; Cold War, 19–21, 24, 32; culture, 106, 149, 151, 154–56, 158, 162, 176; decolonization, 42–44, 46–47, 49–52, 54, 130, 134–35; economy, 24, 60, 63, 64–65, 67, 72, 74–76, 80, 89, 100–01, 214, 237; employment, 40, 70, 73, 78, 90, 98, 121, 126, 133, 245; European integration, 212, 217–22, 224–229, 238, 240, 252, 255;

Index

213

foreign policy, 219; monetary policy, 223, 225, 247–48; politics, xii–xiii, xv–xvi, xx, 23, 43, 51, 72, 93, 96–97, 105, 112, 121, 124, 133, 150, 153; social policy, 65, 111, 122, 127, 129, 145, 150; standard of living, 59 Franco-German treaty of cooperation, 20, 221 Frankfurt School, 169–70 G-7(8), 24, 81 gay politics and culture, 120, 135, 152, 160, 162, 171 gender, 7, 11, 94, 121–22, 110, 127, 135, 138, 150–52, 175, 179–80, 183–84; see also women; identity General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), viii, 66, 70, 81, 128, 212 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 226, 250 Germany, reunified a1990 (Federal Republic of Germany), 104–05, 112, 134–35, 250; economy, 81, 98, 107, 109, 136; European integration, 227–29, 255; monetary policy, 227; politics, 112; reunification, 198–99, 226, 250; social policy, 110 Germany, East (German Democratic Republic), viii, xviii, 4, 105, 129, 176; Cold War, 16, 20, 22, 32; culture, 147–48; collapse, 30, 154, 198–99; economy, 27, 68, 78, 91, 136, 153; politics, xiv, 26, 29, 154; uprising (1953), 19 Germany, West (German Federal Republic), viii, x, 30, 99, 142, 176, 183, 214; Cold War, 16, 20, 22–24, 32, 147; culture, 146–48, 150, 154–57, 161; economy, 24, 63–64, 67–68, 71, 73–76, 80, 214, 237; employment, 40, 71, 73, 78–79, 90–91, 121; European integration, 18, 212, 215–22, 226, 228, 238; monetary policy, 223, 225, 240, 245–46, 252; politics, xiii, xiv, xviii, xx, 18, 96, 100, 121, 124, 153; social policy, 65, 97, 122, 127, 129, 136, 145; standard of living, 59, 128, 144 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, xv, 21, 223, 245, 257 Ghana, x, 41, 43, 53 Gheorgiu-Dej, Georghe, 191 glasnost, xv, 4, 25, 172, 193, 195 globalization, 8, 10–11, 66, 79–81, 87, 107–08, 113, 155, 159–60, 180, 204 Gomułka, Władysław, 69, 190 Gorbachev, Mikhail, xvii–xix, 4, 25–32, 195–96, 198 Grass, Günter, xi, 180 Great Britain, vii, x, xvii, xx, 99, 104, 214, 219; Cold War, 15, 19, 23–24; culture, 106, 148–49, 151–52, 154, 156–58, 161, 174, 176; decolonization, 4, 41–43, 46–48, 50, 54, 129–30, 134;

Index

214

economy, 24, 63, 67, 74–76, 80–81, 90, 98, 100–01, 109–110; employment, 40, 78–79, 91, 97, 121, 133; European integration, 17, 213, 221–22, 224, 26, 228, 243, 251–52, 255, 257; monetary policy, 246, 252; politics, xii, xiv, xx, 23, 80, 93, 100, 109, 121, 124, 130, 133, 153, 161; social policy, viii, 65, 94, 96–97, 107, 111–12, 122, 127, 129, 145; standard of living, 59, 132, 102, 143–44 Greece, xiii, xvi, 17–18, 73, 99, 150; economy, 91, 95, 101; European integration, 17, 224–25, 227, 247, 255; standard of living, 60 guest workers, 6, 8, 40, 73, 129; see also refugees Guinea, xi, 43–44 Hague Conference (1969), 241, 243 Hallstein Doctrine, 20 Harkis, xxiii, 48, 52 Havel, Václav, xviii–xix, 27, 172, 193, 199 health, 93–95, 98, 107, 111, 121 Helsinki Accords (1975), xv, 26 Holocaust, 130–31, 88, 178 Honecker, Erich, xiv, 29–30, 154, 199 Hong Kong, 42, 45 hooliganism, 161; see football housing, x, 6–8, 27, 40–41, 50, 67, 86, 90, 93–95, 102, 105, 111, 128, 134, 143–44, 160 Hoxha, Enver, 191, 200 Hungary, viii, 4, 29–31, 106, 203, 206; Cold War, 22; culture, 148–149, 157; democratic opposition, 26, 123, 193–94, 197, 200; economy, 69, 71, 93, 198, 201–03, 205, 244; European integration, 207, 250, 256; liberalization, 192–93, 197–98; politics, 112, 197–98, 200; revolt (1956), x, 4, 19, 25, 132, 169, 190–92, 219; social policy, 110 identity, 106, 134, 137–38, 159–60, 162, 180, 183–84, 143; ethnic, 7, 51–52, 88, 143, 160, 162, 184; European, 7, 9–11, 162, 182, 258; gender, 7, 135, 150, 183; generational, 7, 143, 148–50, 160, 162; national, 123, 137, 160–62, 183; religious, 88, 134; social, 7, 143, 162 immigration, xiii, 8, 10, 46–52, 70, 73, 102–05, 112–13, 130, 133, 137, 180–81, 251; see repatriation income, 60, 64, 69, 81, 86, 100–01, 128, 243, 247; see wages

Index

215

incomes policy, 243–44 India, viii, 41–43, 47–48, 53 Indochina, 42, 44; see Vietnam Indochinese War (1945–1954), vii, 42–43 Indonesia, viii, 4, 41–42, 44–45, 49 industry, 60, 62–63, 66–68, 70–73, 77–78, 121–22, 126, 131, 195, 202; aircraft, xi, xiii, xxi, 67, 74; automobile, x, 63, 67, 74–75, 77, 89, 102, 153; chemical, 67, 75–77, 89; computer and electronics, ix, xi, 74–75, 77, 80–81, 89, 194; consumer, x, 69, 72, 75–76, 78, 88, 144, 150, 152–53; construction, 121; electrical, 75, 81; engineering, 89; fashion, viii, 151; media, 81, 106, 148–49, 154, 157–58, 161, 179; metallurgy, 63, 67–68, 74, 97, 121, 126, 132, 201, 214, 216, 237, 245; nuclear, 74, 76, 245; oil, 24–25, 63, 75, 78, 81; telecommunications, ix, xv, xviii, xxi, 79 10–11, 72, 80–81, 106, 158, 161, 223, 253, 258; textile, 245; transportation, xvi, xx, 67, 93, 121; utilities, 93, 201 industrial geography, 6, 76, 78–79, 90, 121, 132; see regional development inflation, 62, 78, 194, 202–03, 237–8, 224, 241–243, 246–48, 252, 255–56 inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 19, 23 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 23 International Monetary Fund (IMF), vii, 12, 66, 87, 107, 235–6, 238–40 Ireland, viii, xiii, xiv, xxi, 99, 123, 130, 137, 153; economy, 97, 100, 205, 207, 246, 253; European integration, xix, 17, 222, 243, 255; Irish Republican Army, xx, 131 Islam, 44, 52, 104, 106, 134, 160 Italy, viii, xi, xiii, xv, 73, 95, 104, 106, 112, 137; Cold War, 23, 32; communism, 23; culture, 149, 154, 156, 158; decolonization, 43, 49–50, 54; economy, 64–68, 74–75, 107, 109–11; employment, 71, 73, 79, 90, 95, 97, 122, 126, 129; European integration, 215, 218, 238, 252–53, 255; monetary policy, 223, 225, 227, 246; politics, xvii, 51, 96–97, 99, 112, 124, 150, 162; social policy, 101, 107, 110, 135, 145, 151; standard of living, 59 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, xvi, 194, 196–97 Jospin, Lionel, 105, 229 journalism, xix, 87, 106, 143, 148, 150, 152, 192

Index

216

Kádár, Janos, 197–98 Kenya, xii, 43, 48, 53 Keynesianism, 5, 63–65, 79, 88–89, 124, 224, 235, 237, 243, 246 Khrushchev, Nikita, ix–xii, 19, 191 Kohl, Helmut, xviii, xxi, 25, 198, 226–29, 250 Korean War, ix, 237 Kosovo, xxi, 202–03 Kristeva, Julia, 171 Labor, 73, 77, 80, 88–90, 94, 97, 100–02, 106–08, 112, 122, 124, 126–28, 132–36; conflict, 6, 62, 64, 92–93, 193; foreign, 40, 51, 73, 79, 104, 121, 129–30; market, 51, 70–71, 94–95, 101, 103–05, 110–11, 201, 244–45; politics, 64, 69, 91, 96–102, 120–21, 124, 126, 128, 133, 135–36; organization, 93, 97, 120, 133, 137; productivity, 60, 71, 73, 101; women, 73, 77, 121–22 Laos, 42 Labour Party (Great Britain), vii, 23, 63, 93, 97–98, 130, 135 Latvia, xxi, 137, 206, 256 Le Corbusier, 170, 173 Lefebvre, Henri, 171 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xii, 178 Liberation, 67, 142–43 Libya, ix, 43, 49 life expectancy, 27 literature, ix–xii, xiv, xvi–xviii, 142, 175, 177–78, 180; samizdat, 172 Lithuania, xxi, 256 Luxembourg, 215, 237, 255 Maastricht Treaty (1992), xix–xx, 108, 228–29, 251–55 Macedonia, 123, 202 Madagascar, 44 Maghreb, 73, 129, 134 Malaysia, 43 Malenkov, Georgi, 191 Malta, 256 manufacturing, see industry marginalization, see social exclusion market socialism, see economic development Marshall Plan, viii, 18, 62–63, 65–66, 72, 125, 147, 181, 236 marxism, 168–70, 181, 184 Masowiecki, Tadeusz, 193, 197 mass (popular) culture, 7, 9–10, 106, Chapter 6, 174–76, 181, 184; see culture media, 106, 148–51, 154–62, 172, 175, 179, 182; see commercial culture; industry; television

Index

217

Messina Conference (1955), 218 Michnik, Adam, 193, 196–97 middle class, 94, 100, 105, 123–24, 144 minorities, 8, 123, 129, 131, 137, 202–03; see ethnic minorities Mitterrand, François, xii, xvi, xxi, 23, 25, 156, 176, 224, 227–29, 248, 250 Modernism (in art), 169–70, 173–76, 180, 184 modernization, 5–7, 9, 60–64, 66, 68–69, 76–77, 88–89, 92, 96, 145, 147, 194, 204–05, 214 Moluccas Islands, 48–59 monetary policy, xiv, 11, 27, 66, 225, 237–8, 240–46, 252; see exchange rates monetary union, 11, Chapter 9–10 Monnet, Jean, viii, ix, 12, 213–15, 218, 230 Monnet Plan, 67, 214 Moro, Aldo, xv, 156 Morocco, x, 42–43, 46–47, 53 Mozambique, xv, 43–45 multiculturalism, 11, 87, 106, 113, 160, 180, 182, 184 Murdoch, Rupert, 106, 158, 161 museums, 172, 174–75, 178–79, 182 music, xii, xv–xvi, xix, xxi, 7, 26–27, 106, 146–50, 152–54, 160, 175–76, 178–79, 184; rock ‘n’ roll, 106, 146–49, 153–54, 160 Muslims, see Islam Nagy, Imre, xi, 191, 198 Namibia, 45 nationalism, 8, 27, 31, 42, 49, 66, 120, 123, 131, 182, 202 nationalization, vii, 48–49, 68, 73, 97, 125–26 Netherlands, 4, 41, 99, 103, 106, 112, 237; Cold War, 23; decolonization, 42–45, 48–52, 54; economy, 60, 67, 75, 89–91, 97–98, 100–01, 109–10; European integration, 215, 221, 255; politics, 64, 105–06, 124; social policy, 94–95, 101, 110 North Africa, 42, 45, 49, 104, 133, 135 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), viii, x, xiii, xvi, xxi, 16, 18, 20, 22–23, 206, 218, 226 North Sea, oil reserves, xii, 75 Norway, 24, 64, 90–91, 94, 97, 99, 110, 145 oil crisis, xiv, xvi, 9, 24, 27, 78, 131, 194, 224, 243–45 Organization for European Cooperation and Development (OECD), 107, 243, 248 Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), viii, 17, 63, 236 Organization of Petroleum and Exporting Countries (OPEC), 24, 243, 245; see oil crisis Ostpolitik, xiv, 4, 20–21, Pakistan, viii, 42, 53 Paris Summit (1951), 237 pension plans, 86, 93, 107, 143, 127, 247 perestroika, xvii, 4, 26, 29, 195–96

Index

218

pieds noirs, xxiii, 49–50, 52; see refugees; repatriation philosophy, x, 169–71, 174, 178 Picasso, Pablo, 168 Plastic People of the Universe, xv, 26–27, 154 Poland, viii, x, 24, 29, 31, 95, 106, 123, 129, 206; Cold War, 20, 22; democratic opposition, 193–194, 200; economy, 69–71, 90–91, 93, 98, 126, 196, 201–03, 205, 244; European integration, 206, 250, 256; liberalization, 192–93, 196; politics, xvi, 196–97, 200; relations with Soviet Union, 28; revolts, 4, 25, 93, 190–93; social policy, 110, 122 politics: conservative, 93, 121, 124, 133, 183; cultural, 170, 175–76, 180, 183; ethnic, 51–52, 133, 137–38; extreme right, 87, 105, 121, 124, 161, 257; green, 135, 152; left, 87, 93, 96–97, 105, 107, 109, 121, 124, 133, 135, 153, 169, 171, 173, 181, 200; social Catholic, 64, 93–94, 97, 124, 132 political repression, 69, 104, 120, 125, 153, 191–192 Pompidou, Georges, xiii, 21 Pop art, 151–52, 167, 174–75, 181 population growth, 70, 127, 150 Portugal, xi, xvii, 99, 129; Angolan War (1961–1975), xi, 43–45; decolonization, 43, 47, 49–52, 54; economy, 91, 95, 101; European integration, 17, 250, 255; politics, xiv, 52; Revolution (1974–1976), xiv, 43, 50, 100; standard of living, 60 postmodernism, 106, 159, 162, 173, 176, 180, 183–84 poverty, 10, 76, 95, 102–04, 109–110, 112–13, 121–22, 129, 133, 144, 202 prices, 94–95, 132, 143, 192, 194, 196, 201, 204, 223, 240, 243–44, 248, 251 privatization, 69, 80, 157, 192, 198, 201–02, 204–05 productivity, 18, 60, 66, 68, 70–73, 76, 78, 80–81, 100, 112, 202, 244 protests, 9, 30, 69, 87, 93, 103, 135, 137; 1968 revolts, 9, 93, 99, 153–54, 156, 169, 171, 173, 193; anti-communism, 199–200; anti-globalization, xxii, 82, 87; ethnic, 52; German reunification, 199; student, xiii, 9, 153–54, 169, 193, 199; women’s, 151; worker, 86–87, 93, 96, 99–101, 193 Punk movement, 160, 172, 175

Index

219

Quant, Mary, xiii, 151–52, 175; see fashion race, xx, 5, 43, 106, 129, 134, 160, 184; riots, xx, 134, 160 racism, 5, 48, 51, 104, 130, 133, 135, 160–61, 180 recession, 24, 81, 131, 194, 237–8, 241, 243, 246, 252 reconstruction, 2, 5, 7, 16, 40, 44, 62–63, 68, 77, 89, 104, 236–7; see also Marshall Plan radio, 75, 143, 148–50, 155, 160, 175 refugees, 4–6, 8, 40, 46, 48, 52, 73, 104, 129, 134–35, 137; see repatriation; immigration regional development, 62, 76, 90–93, 113, 126, 204–05, 250; see industrial geography; underdevelopment religion, xvii, xix, 8, 93, 105, 130, 134, 137, 145, 173, 180; see Catholic Church repatriation, 5, 41, 45, 47–53; see immigration research and development (R&D), 31, 73, 76 Resistance, 63, 124, 126, 142 retornados, 50–52; see refugees; repatriation Rhodesia, 43 Richter, Gerhard, xiv, 168–69, 173–74, 180 Rolling Stones, xii, 149, 153 Romania, viii, xviii, xxi, 4, 123, 129, 131, 157, 191; Cold War, 19–20, 32 economy, 60, 68, 70–71, 77–78, 90–91, 201, 203; European integration, 207, 257; politics, 201; revolution, 30–31, 198–99; social policy, 127–28 rural society, 6, 70–72, 122, 132 rural exodus, 70–71, 89–90, 129 Russia, 202–03 Russian Federation, 202 Sartre, Jean-Paul, viii, xii, 170; see existentialism Schmidt, Helmut, xiv, 23–25, 223, 245 Schröder, Gerhard, xxi, 229–30 Schuman, Robert, 214–15 Schuman Plan, ix, 215–17, 227, 237–8 Senegal, 44, 53 separatism, 123, 137, 202–03 Serbia, xxi, 200–203 service sector, 69–71, 76, 78, 80, 86, 91, 95, 98, 110, 122, 136 Single European Act (1986), 223, 225

Index

220

Situationist International, 172–74, 178 sixties, 7, 149–50; see also youth culture Slovakia, xxi, 202–03, 206, 250, 256 Slovenia, 104, 112, 201–03, 206, 256 Smithsonian Agreement (1971), 242–3 social benefits, 6, 54, 65, 80, 86, 93–95, 100, 107, 112, 122, 127, 247; see also welfare; welfare state social conflict, 107, 123, 193, 247 social contract, 6, 8, 64, 80, 92–93, 95, 107, 124, 126–28, 143 social exclusion, 8, 10, 105, 110, 112–13, Chapter 5, 160, 257 social mobility, 10, 76, 102–03, 145 social reform, 64–65, 97, 124–26, 150 social rights, 86–87, 95, 97, 107, 113 socialism, xv, 19, 28, 32, 68–70, 77–78, 86, 93, 104–05, 121, 126, 191, 195–96, 198–201, 205 Socialist Realism, 169–70 socio-professional categories, 51, 102, 107, 121, 128, 132–33, 244–45 Solidarity, xvi–xix, 4, 26–27, 99, 193–94, 196–97, 200; see Poland; trade unions Somalia, xi, 43, 53 sovereignty, 128, 212–13 Soviet Union, ix–x, xvii–xviii, 2, 41–42, 92–93, 96, 129, 170, 203; Afghanistan War, 195; Cold War, Chapter 1, 195; collapse, xix, 14–15, 25–28, 31, 137, 170, 195, 202; economy, 23–24, 27, 68, 90, 122; relations with Eastern Europe, 124–25, 128, 190–92, 195, 198 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 218 Spain, xiii, xv, xvii, 99, 105, 112, 129, 137, 162; decolonization, xiii, 43, 47, 54, 133; economy, 70–71, 79, 90, 97–98, 110–11, 205; European integration, 17, 226, 250, 255; social policy, 110; standard of living, 60 sports, 155, 160–62; see football Stability and Growth Pact (1996–97), 254 stagflation, 8, 78, 133, 194 Stalin, Joseph, ix, 4, 17, 32, 69, 127, 190 Stalinism, 169, 191; see de-stalinization standard of living, 18, 27, 31, 46, 69, 77, 89, 94, 101, 126, 132, 143, 146, 148, 153, 195 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), xiv, xvi, 22–23 strikes, xiii, xviii, 73, 155, 99–100, 199 Structuralism, 178, 184 successor states of Soviet Union, 203, 206; see Russian Federation Suez Crisis, x, 46, 132, 219, 238 Surinam (Dutch Guyana), 48–50 Sweden, xvii, xx, 99, 128, 135, 212;

Index

221

economy, 70, 90–91, 97–98, 109–10, 133; European integration, 228, 245–55; politics, 100; social policy, 94, 97, 101, 145 Switzerland, xx, 73, 90–91, 97, 99, 129, 176 taxation, 88, 93–95, 101, 128, 197, 246–47, 249 technological development, 24, 27, 51, 60, 65, 72, 74, 77–79, 132, 179–80, 194, 204–05, 236, 239, 244; see research and development technocracy, 11, 67–68, 81, 86 television, ix–xii, xiii, xv, xvii, 7, 32, 54, 81, 101, 106, 142, 144, 146, 148–49, 151, 153–59, 161, 181; culture, 102–03, 152, 155, 158–59, 174; state control of, xv, 154–56, 158; news coverage, 155–58; Telstar satellite, xii, 155 terrorism, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii, xx, 82, 99, 137, 155–56, 180 Thatcher, Margaret, xvi, xix, 23, 25–26, 27, 80, 98, 100, 107, 135, 224 Thatcherism, 109, 247 theater, xvi, 173, 179 Timisoara, 199 Tito, viii, 4, 125, 190–91 tourism, xvii, 95, 98, 148, 159, 174 trade, 17–18, 60, 128, 148, 223; European integration, 224–25, 238, 249, 255; foreign, 27, 66, 69–70, 78, 133, 135, 192, 204, 235–36, 242, 244, 248; liberalization of, 201–02 trade (labor) unions, 40, 63–65, 70, 98–100, 120–1, 124, 126–27, 133, 135–37, 193 Transylvania, 203 Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), 254 Treaty of Nice (2000), xxii, 256 Treaty of Rome (1957), x, 220, 224–25, 238, 241 Tunisia, x, 41–43, 46–47 Turkey, 17, 73, 129 Uganda, 46, 48 Ukraine, 24, 122, 142, 202–03 underdevelopment, 10, 60, 77, 90, 204–05; see regional development unemployment, 8, 11, 40, 63, 73, 76, 79–80, 90, 93, 97–98, 101–03, 107, 111–12, 121–23, 125, 127, 131–33, 135–36, 194, 202, 224, 244–46; see employment United Kingdom, 46–48, 72 United Nations, vii, 42–43, 62 United States, xviii, 2, 15–16, 42, 67, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 100, 103, 109–13, 137, 122, 214, 216, 226; Cold War, Chapter 1, 147, 195; economic relations with, 18, 23–25, 27, 65–66, 78, 81, 107, 223, 236, 239–42, 246, 248, 252, 257–58 urban society, 7, 10, 51, 76, 92, 102–03, 105–06, 112–13, 134, 143, 152, 160 urbanization, 6–7, 50, 53, 70–71, 86, 88–92, 96, 143, 176

Index

222

Venice Biennale, xiv, 175, 182 Vietnam, vii, 20, 32, 41–42, 78; War, 153, 181, 241 wages, 59, 64–66, 68, 73, 77, 80, 95, 98, 100–01, 107, 111, 128, 132, 136, 143–44, 196, 244, 247 Wałęsa, Lech, xix, 194, 196–97 Warsaw Pact, x, xix, 18–19, 21–22, 29, 93, 192 welfare, 6, 64, 93, 122, 130, 134, 143 welfare state, 7, 54, 65, 86–87, 89, 91, 93–95, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109–12, 122, 127–28, 132–33, 136, 138, 219, 224 Werner Plan (1970), 241, 243, 250 White Paper (1985), 224–25, 239, 247, 249 Wojtyla, Karol (Pope John XVIII), xv, 193 women, vii–viii, 6, 10, 73, 94–95, 105, 111–13, 121–22, 125, 127, 134, 145, 150–51, 175, 183; feminist movement, 111, 120, 135–38, 150–51, 180; see also gender work, see employment; labor working class, 63, 102, 111, 121, 127, 133, 136, 143–44, 146, 148, 150–51, 157, 159–61; see labor World Bank, vii, 66, 107, 128, 235 World Trade Organization, 87 xenophobia, 87, 105, 112, 161, 180, 202 Yeltsin, Boris, xix–xxi, 26 youth culture, 7, 103–04, 106, 142–43, 145, 148–50, 152–53, 160; delinquency, 146, 161 Yugoslavia, viii, xix, xxi, 73, 123, 131, 138, 203; Cold War, 20; collapse, 200, 202; economy, 68–69, 93, 202; liberalization, 192; relations with Soviet Union, 125, 190–91 Zhivkov, Todor, 29, 200 Zimbabwe, xvi, 45