Postwar Europe: 1989-2005

Postwar Europe: 1989-2005 

Western European Politics 

J. Robertson 

20 November 2012

Reconfiguring The European Identity

         In the fourth section of Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, we see Europe’s development from 1985 through 2005. Although in the postwar years European leaders made attempts to conjoin the continent together by forming a supranational trade entity, the effort did not really take off until the 1990s. The European Union that we see today is a much more complex and integrated system than any of its member states could have imagined; not only is it a massive trade institution, but it also heads a humanitarian aid program, a financial auditory administration, and rural development.

         While the European Union has been able to offer its member citizens a wide range of social and economic benefits, it has hugely disrupted conventional beliefs about the citizen, the nation, and their respective roles on a global scale. This essay will use examples from Judt to demonstrate the challenges that Europeans face today in adjusting to their new and continually changing identities. The three political changes that help to underscore these challenges include Germany’s collective amnesia of their recent history, the ambivalent independence of Soviet Russia’s satellite states, and the European Union’s expansion.

         The first point of discussion looks at how Germany has dealt with its ugly history of the past twentieth century. Until the fall of communism, the capitalist and militarily occupied West Germany dealt with their history by shifting their attention from its political past—although it was not altogether forgotten—to its economic future. After 1989, the issue of fortifying a clear and tarnish-free German national identity reemerged as the country underwent reunification.

“Rather than engage the GDR’s troubled history, in other words, its former subjects were encouraged to forget it—an ironic replay of West Germany’s own age of forgetting in the Fifties. And as in the early years of the Federal Republic, so after 1989: prosperity was to be the answer. Germany would buy its way out of history. To be sure, the GDR was a decidedly suitable case for treatment” (Judt, p.642-643).

         In order to compensate for the economic differences between the former East and West

Germanys and to prevent domestic political unrest, the German government chose to funnel capital into the former East. Although these redistribution programs were conducted successfully, “many ‘Ossies’ were actually put off by the patronizing triumphalism of their Western cousins” (Judt, p.643). This was in part due to the new economic challenges faced by the ‘Ossies,’ but much more of their apathy to join the West came from decades of Communist indoctrination: this “inculcated misperception [of the West]…was part of the GDR’s core identity and did nothing to ease its disoriented former citizens’ transition ‘back’ into Germany” (Judt, p.642). The challenge of once again unifying German nationalism became particularly problematic as “‘their’ Germany was systematically excised from the official record” (Judt, p.642).

In order to alleviate the political anxiety of Western Europe over the unanticipated fall of Communism and fears of a potential resurgence, German leaders implemented rushed assimilation programs. This could be seen in how “the names of towns, streets, buildings and counties were changed, often reverting to pre-1933 usage” and the restoration of rituals and memorials (Judt, p.642). But mere name changes could not overcome the long-term stigmas that came with the “ethnic-national categories” ascribed to them by the Soviet constitution (Judt, p.649). As seen in the resurgence of the Communist party in German politics during the 1980s, German re-assimilation “was not the recovery of history…but rather its erasure—it was though the GDR had never been” (Judt, p.642). While these processes served to mediate whatever potential political unrest that was seething among Soviet loyalists, it did little to resolve the problem of finding a national identity: the Eastern European history was plagued by demagogues and the imposition of the values of imperialist Russia. 

Another significant event that has a similar tone is the disintegration of another former satellite state, Yugoslavia. Like many other former Soviet states, Yugoslavia struggled with its transition to democracy. For many, independence from the Soviet Union “was not so much about self-determination as self-preservation—a sound basis for state-making, as it turned out, but a poor foundation for democracy” (Judt, p.659). This attitude is largely due to the widespread skepticism and suspicion of the Soviet bloc’s political culture, as evidenced in its black market operations and the nepotism among the underground and political elites. Indeed, after enduring so many years of perverted authoritarianism, Eastern Europeans were striped of any remote experiences as how to establish an “individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices” (Judt, p.692).

On more than one occasion, history has shown us the dangerous consequences of allowing national leaders exploit their minorities, and the fate of Yugoslavia was no different. Although Judt suggests that the “‘ethnic’ fault-lines within Yugoslavia were never very well defined,” he does recognize the negative role that imperial manipulators had in exacerbating these differences (Judt, p.666-668).

            After the atrocious wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, the region is still struggling to mend its fragmented society. If World War II was ever was a lesson about the dangers of extreme nationalism, the point was not missed in Yugoslavia, but rather deliberately exploited for the benefit of the Soviet tyrant, Milo Milunovic. This relapse of an entire European region into civil war over ethno-nationalist lines dissolved any remaining confidence that Western Europeans may have had about being able to maintain continental peace under the

auspices of the traditional nation-state system. Clearly, the continent would have to extra precautions in reconfiguring their governing structures if there was to be any hope of ensuring long term political stability. While the European Union offered a nice outlet for resolving nation-state antagonisms, its expansion during these decades served to further obscure the national identities that were recovered since World War II.

In most Western European states, the challenges of recovering national identities was generally much easier than it had been in the Soviet bloc not only because of the less damage that was wrought on them during and after the war, but also because the region found common ground in its resolution to never allow themselves to enter into war with one another. Outside of this post-nationalist resolution, however, the future character of the region remained imprecise (Judt, p.733).

Uniting the continent through economic treaties helped to make the EU’s member nations “so intertwined and interdependent that armed conflict, while never impossible, had become somehow inconceivable” (Judt, p.734). This was a positive change in continental governance in that the EU’s policies now facilitated “education, research and investment,” but these changes have done little to aid in people’s understanding of their relationship with both their supranational and national governing structures (Judt, p.796). Today, the relevance of the EU’s member nations seems to rely only on their capacity to raise armies and to limitedly adjudicate laws within their own borders, albeit under the supervision of EU administrators. Under such regulations, a majority of member citizens have been hesitant to place ‘European’ ahead of their national identities, unsure of the precise meaning behind its tag.

Taken together, we can see that these three events aptly capture the unprecedented challenges Europeans are facing to elucidate the transcendental meaning behind their changing political institutions. With the continued steady expansion of the European Union’s political authority, the struggle to assert an identity that both honors the continent’s difficult past and its move away from the faults of their traditional ideologies will continue to be a challenge for generations to come. The best option for Europeans at this point in time is to forge ahead with developing their “‘European values,’” and continue to be a beacon of democracy and interstate cooperation to which the world can aspire (Judt, p.788). For all anybody knows, the solution to resolving Europe’s identity crisis may be as simple as the passage of time.

 Bibliography 

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin: New York. 2006. 

Postwar Europe: 1971-1989

 Postwar Europe: 1971-1989

Western European Politics 

J. Robertson 

25 October 2012

The Age of Despondency and Redress in Europe

In the third section of his book, Tony Judt underscores the continent’s transition from a dichotomy between Eastern and Western Europe into the multilateral political system we see today. To understand the changes of these years, it is necessary to discuss three conditions that provoked public disdain for the ‘eurosclerosis’ that ensued during the 1970s and 1980s. The first deals with Europe’s newfound economic independence from U.S. monetary policy. The second event refers to Europe’s realization of its increasing dependency on the international economic system. The final point addresses the general public’s growing displeasure in the management and administration of its political leaders.

The economic boom of the 1960s was the result of European investments three decades earlier and the U.S.-born Marshall Plan for economic recovery in the post-war years. But by the 1970s, two events provoked a major economic downturn. The first was the U.S. decision to abandon the fixed exchange rate system: the second, the oil crisis after the Yom Kippur War.

In 1971, U.S. president Richard Nixon unilaterally declared the nation’s switch from the fixed exchange rate system to a floating rate system. This change was motivated by increasing Vietnam War costs, a growing federal deficit, and an increasing fear that foreign holders of U.S. currency (including Europe’s central banks) would “seek to exchange their dollars for gold, draining American reserves” (p. 454, Judt).

In Europe, moving to a floating exchange rate “introduced an unprecedented element of uncertainty” away from “the social harmony in the age of rapid growth” during the preceding two decades and afforded by the U.S. funded Marshall Plan (p. 455, Judt). Leaving the 1944 Bretton Woods system caused inflation rates to soar. European governments responded by enacting “deliberately reflationary policies: allowing credit to ease, domestic policies to rise, and their own currencies to fall” (p. 454, Judt). But as prices fell, the costs of imports rose. This trumpeted Europe’s growth, as labor began demanding wage increases from governments that could not keep up with the price ratcheting. Thus, wages remained inert while national leaders scrambled to find another country to replace the U.S. dollar as their market’s standard currency.

The oil crisis of 1973 brought with it even further economic slow down. In the days after the Yom Kippur War began, Egypt and Syria retaliated against the U.S. and Europe for supporting Israel. Major Arab oil-exporting states then imposed oil embargos on Israel’s Western allies. This “increased the price of petroleum by 70 percent” (p. 455, Judt).

This crippled Europeans, whom had grown “accustomed to readily available and remarkably cheap fuel” in the 1960s (p. 455, Judt). The imbalance of low economic growth, coupled with artificially induced price increases caused Europe to enter a decade of unprecedented “‘stagflation’” (p.456, Judt).

Both economic shocks forced Europe to try to resolve these issues as quasi-independent countries. Governments tried to maintain “full employment…compensating in its absence with wage increases for those in work, social transfers for those out of work and cash subsidies” for businesses (p. 460, Judt). But the states soon realized that to remain globally competitive, they needed to establish a transnational “‘snake in a tunnel’: an accord to maintain semi-fixed ratios between their currencies” (p. 461, Judt). This lead to the Economic Monetary System, (EMS), which was to act as a “grid of fixed bilateral exchange rates” underwritten by the “anti-inflationary priorities of the German economy” (p. 461, Judt). This effectively deprived “governments of their initiative in domestic policy” by obliging conformity to multilateral economic practices, but brought economic stability via setting the Deutschmark as the new “currency of reference” (p. 461, Judt).

The third and most salient motivational cause for the revival among EU leaders to form a supranational institution through which European states could coordinate and stabilize their economies relative to each other came from the public backlash of dissatisfaction with current pseudo-independent policies.

The backlash from the hard-hit middle classes came from all over Europe. People began to resent and doubt about the perceived omnipotence of the social welfare state in the wake of stagflation. The abasement of that generation’s sense of social security and political livelihood is best summarized in the following quote:

“It was an age depressingly aware of having come after the big hopes and ambitious

ideas of the recent past, and having nothing to offer but breathless and implausible re-runs and extensions of old thoughts. It was, quite self-consciously, a ‘post-everything’ era, whose future prospects appeared cloudy” (p. 478, Judt).

Yet again in European history, the public felt betrayed by their leaders and the ideologies they espoused. But the 1970s and 1980s were not only strained financial times for the West—in these years the Soviet bloc experienced a dichotomous fall yet further into disparity. By the mid 1980s, “the economy, which had hardly grown through the course of the 1970s, was now actually shrinking: always qualitatively lagging, Soviet output was now quantitatively inadequate as well” (p. 595, Judt).

This continental recession caused Europeans to solidly abandon the tenants of its old canons and replace it with “a new political vernacular-or, rather, a very old one, freshly rediscovered” (p. 564, Judt). That old vernacular was the language of rights and liberties, ideals which were already “inscribed in every European constitution, not least those of the Peoples’ Democracies” (p. 564, Judt).

In the West, this ideological revanchism came via the reappearance of Conservatism and nationalism, as its supporters feared the further secessions of state power to supranational bodies. But while countries such as Northern Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland abruptly experienced neo-nationalist violence, Western Europe was fortunate to avoid revolution. Most of these campaigns were quelled by negotiating with politicians to achieve their policy goals and soon became marginal national issues.

Overall, “the net effect…was not to polarize society…but rather to deprive politicians of all sides [of the ability] to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground” (p. 477, Judt). No longer could Europe’s citizens so blindly trust their national leaders to protect them from suffering the pitfalls of a rapidly globalizing world economy. 

In the East, however, the rejuvenation of democratic ideals gained momentum for the oncoming demands for Soviet reform. Fed up with the social injustices of the Soviet Union, Czech protestors wrote a petition in 1979. The draft, called “The Charter of Workers’ Rights, ” requested that Moscow correct its mistakes failing to “implement the human rights provisions” of its national constitution, the Helsinki Accords, and the UN’s “covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights, all of which Prague had signed” (p. 569, Judt).

This was an unprecedented effort at Party opposition. Rather than “engaging the Communist authorities, the new opposition was deliberately talking past them” (p. 567, Judt). By presenting their demands as a legal issue, rather than blame their injustices on the incorrigible faults of the Communist system, Party leaders saw no way to circumvent answering their demands without appearing to deliberately ignore fundamental portions of Communist doctrine. Before Communist leaders could stop it, the seeds of resistance were sown anew, and not long afterwards, a series of political debacles forced the reformist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev to abandon, once and for all, all endeavors to resuscitate his dying state.

Together, these three events symbolize the anticlimactic experience of this period in Europe. The economic slowdown confirmed latent fears that Europeans held about their future during the unprecedented affluence of the 1950s and 1960s. Just as many suspected, the economic growth of those decades was unsustainable, given the infancy of the consumer market, the poorly administered trade practices of the European Economic Community, and the rapidly increasing interdependencies of the European states.

Both the abandonment of the 1944 Bretton Woods system and the Arab oil embargos taught Europeans a valuable lesson about just how sensitive they have become to global economic fluctuations. Such sensitivity seems to be the price for capitalist expansion, and up until these years, Western leaders had romanticized capitalism to the point where it was widely accepted as the ‘guiding savior’ for the ravaged economies in the postwar years. Yet, as with all other doctrines that entered into European colloquium and gained the faith of its citizens, Western Europeans were once again fiscally admonished for over-crediting their nation-based political system as having the ability to bypass any economic contingency. Overall, the peaceful disintegration of Soviet Russia and these economic challenges revived incentives to find a new, more practical approach to solving the increasingly complex problems of a continent headed towards increasing globalization. By 1989, the colloquial stage had indeed been set for fulfilling the post-nationalist goals that had been long sought after by so many leaders in the last century. 

Bibliography

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin: New York. 2006. 

Postwar Europe: 1953-1971

Postwar Europe: 195-1971

Western European Politics 

J. Robertson 

4 October 2012

Political Attitudes in the Apogee of Post-War Europe

The second part of Tony Judt’s book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 discusses the sociopolitical revitalization of Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s. With the successful resurrection of the Western European economy, Judt tries to capture the continent as it finally heals its war wounds. Three events during this period are particularly indicative of Europe’s ideological rehabilitation from the radicalism that plagued it the past century. The first event- and perhaps the one with the most longstanding ideological impact- is the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The second set of events includes the disintegration of Britain as a major global power: no longer would the island nation hold much influence the future of continental Europe. Rather, during these decades Germany solidified itself as the continent’s economic leader. The third point discusses the rise of the Social Democrats and the marginalization of Marxist ideologies that had spearheaded revolutionary sentiments across Europe for over fifty years. Together, these events ended longstanding pretenses about the fungibility of far Leftist philosophies. After these events, Europeans accepted the unromantic disjunct between the demands of political philosophy and of political practice.

With Stalin’s death in 1953 and the appointment of Nikita Khrushchev as the First Secretary of the Communist Party, the USSR began to loosen the grip of the governmental hand on its satellite states.  This process required the reappointment of a number of satellite councilmen. Moscow appointed Imre Nagy (a ‘questionable’ reformist politician in Stalin’s view) as the new Chairman of the Hungarian Council of Ministers.  By 1955, Nagy’s politics inspired many national “informal ‘reform’ opposition” groups (Judt, p. 313-314). 

In 1956, increased public support led to the ‘League of Hungarian Students’ to draft a “’Sixteen Point’ manifesto detailing their economic and civil liberty demands to Moscow” (Judt, p. 315). They demanded Nagy become prime minister and that Hungary withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. In October, the League demonstrated in Budapest’s Parliament Square, tearing down Stalin’s statue and installing Nagy as the Prime Minister of Hungary. Soviet troops quickly arrived to suppress the movement. To avoid the media catastrophe that would surely follow in the wake of a violent military suppression, Soviet leaders chose to stand by and observe quietly. But when Nagy announced that he “was forming a multi-party government” and basing his authority on the public’s support, Moscow became agitated (Judt, p. 316).

When Nagy announced plans “to secure Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact,” Khrushchev realized that Hungary was “beginning to sound like the start of the contamination effect that the Soviet leaders had long feared” (Judt, p. 316).  The next day, troops were deployed towards Hungary and Soviet leaders convinced Nagy’s Minister of State, Janos Kadar, to head a counter-revolution against Nagy’s government.

 Nagy then declared Hungarian neutrality. But Soviet forces arrested Nagy and his administration before he could act upon it. The Red Army immediately reinstated Kadar’s government “within the next seventy-two hours” (Judt, p. 317). The Soviets gave Nagy a secret trial, ultimately sentencing him and his government leaders to death.

Despite the failure of the 1956 revolution, Hungary represented a fundamental turning point for Eastern European communism. Because of its media coverage in the West, many democratic nations intensified their efforts in fostering resistance movements within the USSR, hoping that they may one day incite the disassembly of the federation without resorting to war. As summarized by Judt: “it was not the Hungarians’ revolt but rather the Soviet repression which made the greater impression on foreign observers. Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution” (Judt, p. 322). The events in Hungary ultimately served to extinguish any support for Communism that had managed to survive up to this point not only in Western Europe, but in the entire eastern bloc as well. Any enduring ideological support “was now just a way of life to be endured; after November 1956 the Communist states…began their descent into a decades-long twilight of stagnation, corruption, and cynicism” (Judt, p. 323). The threat of Communist ideology taking over Europe was effectively terminated. The only thing for the West to do at that point was to wait and the Soviet bloc unravel its own seams.

The second most striking development of this era was the solidification of Germany as an economic powerhouse juxtaposed to the dwindling relevance of the once-great British Empire. This reversal of economic fortune came directly from the antithetic roles each played in both world wars and their subsequent recovery plans.

The wars caused Britain to accrue an ostentatious debt and developed a firmly rooted cultural “stagnation and a deep fear of change” (Judt, p. 358). Rather than utilize the opportunity to revamp its capitalist economy under the Marshall Plan, Britain “never boasted any overall national strategic ambition” (Judt, p. 359). Parliament allocated raw materials to producers based on their respective pre-war market shares: a tactic that galvanized inefficiency and suppressed competition.

While other nations recognized the need for concessions in the post war economy, Britain believed that maintaining consistent output levels would guarantee financial re-stabilization. Soon enough, however, the market for British goods evaporated, as its reputation for producing low quality goods grew.

By the mid-1960s, British products “could not compete with the US, and later Germany, in any unprotected overseas market” in neither “quality nor quantity” (Judt, p. 357). These practices, alongside the dissolution of their colonial empire, and their inefficient expansion of higher education institutions, crushed any hope of Britain reclaiming its position as the dominant continental power.

The German boom of the 1960s, however, was the harvest of the economic seeds the Nazis had sown in the 1930s. The Nazis made profound investments in infrastructure, and in those industries where it could sustain an advantage. Having already been installed, Germany was ready to exploit these advantages with the capital supplied by the Marshall Plan. The government invested in and granted subsidies to the most promising industries. This fostered efficient production methods and weeded-out unprofitable businesses. An “inexhaustible supply of cheap labor” brought by lax immigration laws helped accelerate Germany’s economic recovery far past any other western state (Judt, p. 355).

Ideologically, the lesson from postwar Britain needs some disassembling. The haphazard funding by the government resonates with the grossly inefficient production plans of the USSR. By not incentivizing competition among private industry nor investing greatly in its upcoming labor market (as the Germans had done), British officials sabotaged its nations economic future role in the globalized economy. This pseudo-communist approach to the economy served as a prime example to its neighbors that at least the competitive element inherent in capitalism, for all practical purposes, should not be thrown out for the sake of promoting socialist ideology.

The third event that proves the most telling of the cultural and political changes taking place during this time comes through the continental rise of Social Democratic philosophy. Unlike the ultra radical movements of the past, this ideology emphasized social improvement for

all classes through peaceful and incremental changes. They advocated using “the resources of the state to eliminate…social pathologies…to build not economic utopias but good societies” (Judt, p. 363).

After decades of political turmoil, Europeans were more than ready to support an ideology that promoted social moderation and universal fairness. This proof was striking in the voting booth; “the remarkable thing about these voting figures…was their consistency” (Judt, p. 363).

 In addition, the 1960s demographic transformation of highly accessible education and “social mobility” led Europeans to grow “less disposed to identify automatically with the political movements and social affiliations of their parents’ world” (Judt, p. 372). Thus the widespread Social Democratic movement that made the 1960s a “vital” decade in which “both halves of the continent began their definitive turn away from ideological politics” (Judt, p. 448). Even the resurgence of early Marxism among intellectuals could not escape “its tragic denouncement…of the last illusions of Marxism as a practice” (Judt, p. 449).

            Overall, these points best summarize the sociopolitical climate of Europe between 1953 and 1971. With the Hungarian revolution terminating all enthusiasm for Communism as a practice, the relative failure of Britain’s anti-capitalist economic recovery, and rising popularity of the Social Democratic party, Europe during these decades can appropriately be seen as period of major departure from the experimental mood of the early twentieth century. Far from ideology, pragmatism now rooted itself as the guiding principle for all future government action. 

Bibliography 

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin: New York. 2006.