J. Robertson
20 September 2012
Political
Recourses in Post-World War Europe
The
first part of Tony Judt’s book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
discusses the sociopolitical environment in the immediate decades following the
Second World War. He examines the impact that WWII had on Europe’s political,
economic, and sociological composition within a chronological ordering of the
major political events that took place at that time. Judt examines the
developing juxtaposition of Eastern and Western Europe through interwoven anecdotes
of the countries most altered by the division. In doing so, he offers detailed
insight into the political motives and social attitudes guiding the postwar
policies of these countries. It appears that Judt’s main purpose in this
portion of the book is to offer a sociopolitical framework by which his
audience can better understand the logical sequence of motivation for the supranationalist
policies and practices that are to come later in his account of modern European
history.
While
much of what Judt introduces covers many of the issues that are often presented
in American institutions and media, it offers a more in-depth articulation of
the postwar issues faced by the major European powers. Among these discussions,
three subject matter standout as imperative to our understanding of how the
modern European state system developed. The aim of this essay is to make an
appeal to Judt’s American audience by explaining the cardinal role that these
three topics played in social and political reconstruction of postwar Europe.
The
first point Judt carefully articulates deals with the development of what we
recognize today as the European welfare state. As Judt presents it, the concept
of the welfare state was born out of the desperate economic and delicate
political situation in the aftermath of continental war. This explanation
starkly contrasts the popular American belief that socialism and welfare-oriented
governments are merely “unfulfilled attempts at creating Communist states.”
Instead, Judt suggests that Western Europe
nationalized many of its domestic industries between 1946-1950 simply because
it found no other means to provide economic relief and political stability for
the millions of newly disenchanted, embittered, and impoverished workers in the
aftermath of the war.
War-ridden
European leaders knew that in order to rebuild their economies and to
“forestall political upheaval-it would now be necessary to intervene in
economic affairs to regulate imbalances, eliminate inefficiencies and
compensate for the inequities and injustice of the market” (Judt 67). In fact,
far from inspiring divisiveness, the creation of these welfare states witnessed
the closing of earlier class-based political gaps by bringing them together to
serve a common interest in the state’s “preservation and defense” (Judt 76).
Judt
asserts that the birth of the “planning” state “reflected a well-founded
awareness, enhanced by the experience of war, that in the absence of any other
agency of regulation or distribution, only the state now stood between the
individual and destitution” (Judt 69). The distance between socialism and
communism widens further when Judt notes a rudimentary disjunction in their
dogma: “Communist regimes after 1948 on the whole did not usually favour universal welfare systems-they did not need to,
since they were at liberty to redistribute resources by force without spending
scares state funds on public services” (Judt 74).
Support
for this claim appears in Judt’s vignette on the postwar economic challenges
facing the pre-war continental powerhouses, especially of Great Britain.
Britain’s vignette discloses comparative pre- and postwar economic data and
reveals the full extent of its financial burdens after playing a pivotal role
in two world wars. By 1945, Britain completed its “transition from a position
of the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor nation” by having
lost “one quarter of its national wealth”
(161). With the money received from the
Marshall Plan, Britain allocated “97 percent of the counterpart funds (more
than anywhere else)” to “pay off the country’s massive debt” (161-162). The
scale of this national deficit was not uncommon among the western European
countries, although Great Britain far surpassed any other in the amount of debt
incurred during either world conflicts.
Another
point Judt introduces that often goes forgotten in American discourse is the
importance of Germany’s return as the backbone of the European economy. As Judt
explains, ““before the war Germany had been a major market for most of central
and eastern Europe, as well as the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Mediterranean
region” (87). Greece offers a prime example of how highly integrated the German
economy was with its neighbors. Before the war, Germany bought almost 40
percent of Greece’s exports and supplied almost 30 percent of its imports. And
in post-Industrial Revolution France, the steel industry found itself “utterly
dependent on coke and coal from Germany and would therefore need to find a
basis for long-term collaboration” (154). Whether the commercially broken
continent liked it or not, one of the Nazi’s greatest legacies was their
ability to expropriate property and integrate transportation networks,
effectively prepping Europe for heightened economic integration and
collaboration. Such priming served well in the latter postwar years to help
alleviate Europe’s economic dependency on a reluctant American underwriter.
Once
the political leaders of the day accepted the necessity of revitalizing Germany
in order to sustain the European economy, the next step was to formulate a
trade organization that would mediate and monitor the transactions to take
place. This led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
in the 1951 Paris Treaty. Initially, the ECSC comprised of France, Germany, Belgium,
Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Italy.
The participation of France should be the most noted here, since up
until the Paris Treaty, France had been the prominent harbinger in preventing
German rehabilitation in all three realms: economically, politically, and
especially, militarily. The ECSC’s most important legacy, however, lay in its
political achievement in resolving postwar antagonisms than as catalyzing economic
recovery. In regards to rebuilding Germany, by 1951 “German exports had grown
to over six times the level of 1948 and German coal, finished goods and trade
were fuelling a European economic renaissance” (158). Indeed, Germany’s
recovery, albeit unable to reach its potential due to its political division,
played the pivotal role in reuniting Western Europe economically, politically,
and psychologically.
The
third topic that many Americans overlook in their discussions of postwar Europe
is a full understanding of how Communism took hold of Eastern and Central
Europe. Given that 1945 marked the end of not one, but two of the world’s
biggest political conflicts, it is not surprising that the most defunct nations
easily succumbed to Stalin and Josep Tito’s takeovers.
What
made Communism most dangerous to
re-stabilization was its advocacy of violence as legitimate political tool to
gain control and its enthusiasm for swift, radical political revolution.
Combined with having many of their previous governments and elites in exile and
facing widespread destitution, Communist takeover proved all too easy in
Eastern and Central Europe. As Judt notes, “the opportunistic dimension of
Soviet policy towards ex-Nazis was a function of weakness...their only
political prospect, beyond brute force and electoral fraud, lay in appealing to
calculated self-interest” (59).
Another
factor that made these states even more susceptible to Communism is that for
much of the region’s citizens, “the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of
the ruling class and system in every realm” (63). This anti-hegemonic attitude offered
a segway for Communism to enter the European political arena as yet another branch
of Leftist ideology. As such, it attracted dissenters from other Leftist
parties, although Communism never gained legitimate majority support in any one
nation. But the most foretelling fact of the oncoming spread of Communism comes
from the region’s history, having had
“few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The
inter-war regimes in this part of Europe has been corrupt, authoritarian and in
some cases murderous. The old ruling castes were frequently venal. The real
governing class in inter-war Eastern Europe was the bureaucracy, recruited from
the same social groups who would furnish the administrative cadre of the
Communist states” (137).
Overall,
these points serve to underscore Judt’s point in asserting that in the early
postwar decades, European nations recoiled from divisive politics as much as
possible in the name of public security and for the sake of rebuilding the
damaged economies of its nations. We must examine the socioeconomic landscape
of Europe in 1945 in order to understand the motives behind Western Europe’s
development of the welfare state and its newfound willingness to cooperate on a
supranational scale. In order to avoid perpetually cycling between civil war
and totalitarian regimes, Western Europe devised the welfare state to maintain
domestic peace by alleviating the desperation of its citizens. To avoid
international conflict as well as to regain economic independence from the
United States, European leaders saw the need to revitalize Germany by building
a cooperative trade organization in the ECSC. In order to understand the
dichotomous fates of Eastern and Western Europe, it was necessary to examine
the unique political history and vulnerabilities existing in Eastern and
Central European countries. Once these are understood, it is apparent
why either region of a traumatized Europe took no action to challenge the
political course which the war had set upon them.
No comments:
Post a Comment