Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (49 page)

Dancing, too, was popular, in large part thanks to the American GIs, who introduced swing and be-bop which were widely performed at dance halls and night-clubs and popularized by radio (few could afford record-players before the mid-1950s and the juke-box had not yet killed off live dance bands). The generation gap of the next decade was hardly yet in evidence. Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ of February 1947—an aggressively indulgent style meant to contrast with wartime shortages of cloth, with ankle-length skirts, stuffed ‘leg of mutton’ shoulders and a plethora of bows and pleats—was favored, where they could afford it, by women of all ages; external appearance was still a function of class (and income) rather than age.

There were, of course, inter-generational tensions. During the war, Americaninfluenced‘zoot suits’ were worn by London spivs and Parisian ‘zazous’ alike, much to the appalled disapproval of their elders; and in the later forties the enthusiasm among bohemians and intellectuals for the duffle-coat, an adaptation of what had until then been the traditional outerwear of Belgian fishermen, hinted at the coming fashion among the young for dressing
down
rather than up. In the ultra-fashionable Parisian nightclub
Le Tabou
, which opened in April 1947, sartorial permissiveness was treated with great seriousness, while a French film of 1949,
Rendezvous de Juillet
, makes much of the spoilt younger generation’s lack of
gravitas
: at lunch, the conventional father of a traditional bourgeois household is appalled at the behavior of his youngest son, above all by his insistence on eating without a tie.

But all this was the small change of adolescent revolt, hardly new. Most people of all ages in post-war Europe were chiefly concerned with making do. At the beginning of the 1950s, one Italian family in four lived in poverty and most of the rest were little better off. Less than one house in two had an indoor toilet, only one in eight boasted a bathroom. In the worst-off regions of the far south-east of Italy poverty was endemic: in the village of Cuto, in the Marchesato di Crotone, the fresh water supply to the town’s 9,000 inhabitants consisted of a single public fountain.

The Mezzogiorno was an extreme case. But in West Germany in 1950 17 million of the country’s 47 million residents were still classed as ‘needy’, chiefly because they had nowhere to live. Even in London a family whose name was on the waiting list for a house or flat could expect on average to wait seven years before being housed; in the meantime they were placed in post-war ‘prefabs’—metal boxes installed on empty lots around the city to shelter the homeless until the construction of new dwellings could catch up with need. In post-war polls, ‘housing’ always topped the list of popular concerns; in De Sica’s
Miracle in Milan
(1951) the homeless crowd chants, ‘We want a home to live in, so we and our children can believe in tomorrow’.

The consumption patterns of post-war Europe reflected the continuing penury of the continent and the enduring impact of the Depression and the war. Rationing continued longest in Britain, where bread rationing was introduced between July 1946 and July 1948, clothes coupons remained in force until 1949, the wartime utility clothing and furniture regime was not abandoned until 1952, and food rationing on meat and many other foods was not finally ended until the summer of 1954—though it was temporarily suspended for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, when everyone was allocated an extra pound of sugar and four ounces of margarine.
⁸⁰
But even in France, where rationing (and therefore the black market) disappeared rather sooner, the wartime obsession with food supply did not abate until 1949 at the earliest.

Almost everything was either in short supply or else small (the recommended size of the much-coveted new family dwellings being built by the Labour Government in Britain was just 900 square feet for a 3-bedroom house). Very few Europeans possessed a car or a fridge—working-class women in the UK, where the standard of living was higher than most countries on the continent, shopped twice a day for food, either on foot or by public transport, much as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. Goods from distant lands were exotic and expensive. The widespread sense of restriction and limits and containment was further reinforced by controls on international travel (to save valuable foreign currency) and legislation keeping out foreign workers and other migrants (the post-war Republic in France maintained in force all the legislation from the 1930s and the Occupation designed to bar foreign labor and other undesirable aliens, allowing exceptions, mostly for skilled manual laborers, only according to need).

In many ways, Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was less open, less mobile and more insular than it had been in 1913. It was certainly more dilapidated, and not just in Berlin, where only one quarter of the rubble of battle had been cleared by 1950. The English social historian Robert Hewison describes the British in these years as ‘a worn-out people working with worn-out machinery.’ Whereas in the US by the end of the 1940s most industrial equipment was under five years old, in post-war France the average age of machinery was twenty years. A typical French farmer produced food for five fellow Frenchmen; the American farmer was already producing at three times this rate. Forty years of war and economic depression had taken a heavy toll.

‘Post-war’, then, lasted a long time; longer, certainly, than historians have sometimes supposed, recounting the difficult post-war years in the flattering light of the prosperous decades to come. Few Europeans in that time, well-informed or otherwise, anticipated the scale of change that was about to break upon them. The experience of the past half-century had induced in many a skeptical pessimism. In the years preceding World War One Europe was an optimistic continent whose statesmen and commentators looked to a confident future. Thirty years on, after World War Two, people had their eyes firmly and nervously fixed upon the terrible past. Many observers anticipated more of the same: another post-war depression, a re-run of the politics of extremism, a third world war.

But the very scale of the collective misery that Europeans had brought upon themselves in the first half of the century had a profoundly de-politicizing effect: far from turning to extreme solutions, in the manner of the years following World War One, the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned
away
from politics. The implications of this could be discerned only vaguely at the time—in the failure of Fascist or Communist parties to cash in upon the difficulties of daily existence; in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action; in the emergence of domestic recreations and domestic consumption in place of participation in public affairs.

And something else was happening. As
The New Yorker
’s Janet Flanner had noticed back in May 1946, the second highest priority (after underclothes) in France’s post-war agenda for ‘utility’ products was baby-carriages. For the first time in many years, Europeans were starting to have babies again. In the UK the birthrate in 1949 was up by 11 percent on 1937; in France it had risen by an unprecedented 33 percent. The implications of this remarkable burst of fertility, in a continent whose leading demographic marker since 1913 had been premature death, were momentous. In more ways than most contemporaries could possibly have foreseen, a new Europe was being born.

PART TWO

Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971

VIII

The Politics of Stability

‘To most people it must have been apparent, even before the Second World
War made it obvious, that the time when European nations could quarrel
among themselves for world dominion is dead and gone. Europe has
nothing more to look for in this direction, and any European who still
hankers after world power must fall victim either to despair or to ridicule,
like the many Napoleons in lunatic asylums’.
Max Frisch (July, 1948)

‘Because we have had our troops there, the Europeans had not
done their share. They won’t make the sacrifices to provide the soldiers
for their own defense’.
Dwight Eisenhower

‘The chief argument against the French having nuclear information
has been the effect it would have on the Germans, encouraging them
to do the same’.
John F. Kennedy

‘Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last’.
Charles de Gaulle

‘Political institutions alone are capable of forming the character
of a nation’.
Madame de Stael

In his classic study of the growth of political stability in early-eighteenth-century England, the English historian J. H. Plumb wrote: ‘There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the result of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, farther from the truth (. . . ) Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice.’
⁸¹

Something of the sort occurred in Europe, quite unexpectedly, in the first half of the 1950s.

From 1945 until early 1953, Europeans lived, as we have seen, in the shadow of the Second World War and in anxious anticipation of a third. The failed settlement of 1919 was still fresh in the minds of statesmen and public alike. The imposition of Communism in Eastern Europe was a pointed reminder of the revolutionary instability that had followed World War One. The Prague coup, the tensions in Berlin and the Korean War in the Far East seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the serial international crises of the thirties. In July 1951 the Western Allies had declared their ‘state of war’ with Germany to be over, but in the circumstances of a rapidly intensifying Cold War there was still no Peace Treaty, and little prospect of one to come. Nor could anyone be confident that Fascism would not once again find fertile soil in the unresolved problem of Germany, or indeed anywhere else.

The expanding web of international alliances, agencies and accords offered little guarantee of international harmony. With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that between them the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Payments Union and above all the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were the germ of a new and stable system of inter-state relations. Documents like the Council of Europe’s 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights would acquire lasting significance in the decades to come. But at the time such documents, like the agencies that published them, rather closely resembled the well-meaning but doomed pacts and leagues of the 1920s. Skeptical contemporaries could be forgiven for paying them little attention.

Nevertheless, with the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, Western Europe stumbled half unawares into a remarkable era of political stability. For the first time in four decades the states of the continent’s western half were neither at war nor under the threat of imminent war, at least among themselves. Domestic political strife subsided. Communist parties everywhere except Italy began their slow retreat to the political margins. And the threat of a Fascist revival no longer carried conviction, except perhaps at Communist political rallies.

Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts. Political issues that in an earlier age would almost certainly have led to violence and war—the unresolved problem of Germany, territorial conflicts between Yugoslavia and Italy, the future of occupied Austria—were all contained, and would in due course be addressed, within the context of Great Power confrontations and negotiations over which Europeans had very little say.

The German Question remained unanswered. Even after the panic of 1950 had subsided, and Western leaders recognized that Stalin had no immediate plans to ‘do a Korea’ in central Europe, the two sides were no closer to agreement. The official Western position was that the two Germanies that had emerged in 1949 should be reunited in a single democratic state. But until all Germans were free to choose for themselves the political regime under which they would live, such reunification was not possible. In the meantime the Federal Republic of (West) Germany would be treated as the representative of all German citizens.
Unofficially
, the Americans, like the West Europeans, were not at all unhappy to see Germany divided indefinitely. As John Foster Dulles would put it to President Eisenhower in February 1959, there was ‘a great deal to be said for the status quo’, but this wasn’t ‘a position we could take publicly’.

The Soviet position was ironically quite similar. In his last years Stalin continued to maintain the official Soviet stance, that Moscow sought a united Germany and would even be willing to accept that such a Germany be neutral, so long as it was unarmed. In a series of Notes in the spring of 1952 Stalin proposed that the four occupying powers draw up a Peace Treaty aimed at establishing such a united Germany, neutral and demilitarized, with all occupying forces removed and its government chosen by free, all-German elections. Historians have criticized Washington for its failure to take Stalin up on these proposals—a ‘missed opportunity’ to end the Cold War or at least to draw the sting from its most dangerous point of confrontation.

It is certainly true that Western leaders did not take Stalin’s Notes very seriously and refused to take the Soviet Union up on its offer. As it turns out, though, they were right. The Soviet leaders themselves attached little importance to their own proposals and didn’t seriously expect the Americans, British and French to withdraw their occupying troops and allow a neutral, unarmed Germany to float loose in the middle of a divided continent. If anything, Stalin and his successors were not unhappy to see a continuing American military presence on German soil; from the point of view of the Soviet leaders of this generation, the presence of US troops in West Germany was one of the more reliable guarantees against German revanchism. It was worth risking that guarantee in exchange for a demilitarized Germany in the Soviet shadow (an objective for which Moscow would happily have abandoned its East German clients and their Democratic Republic), but not for anything short of that.