Tony Judt, Postwar ****

Postwar is "A History of Europe Since 1945". Judt says that it makes sense to consider Europe as a whole during this period because the issues of postwar reconstruction were transnational, as were the challenges of navigating the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. And of course there's the European Union, which tries to define what it means to be European.

The best thing about Postwar is that Judt presents the history in terms of broad currents, showing how specific events in far-flung parts of the continent flow from larger themes. At the same time, he doesn't try to shoehorn events into a grand narrative ("I have no big theory of contemporary European history to propose in these pages; no one overarching theme to expound; no single, all-embracing story to tell" [p 7]).

Occasionally I would reach a section where my eyes glazed over among the names and dates––the worst offenders were the chapters dealing with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, because so much was happening so quickly. But those sections rarely lasted long before Judt offered an intriguing insight or well-turned phrase of dry humor ("Portugal's ageing dictator Antonio Salazar was a genuine enthusiast for ecological objectives––attained in his case by the simple expedient of maintaining his fellow countrymen in a condition of unparalleled economic torpor" [p 491]). 

A handful of insights:

• Following WWI the victors redrew national boundaries based on where the people were; following WWII the victors kept the national boundaries and moved people to fit
• Only during the 20th century did people believe that the state is supposed to serve its people rather than vice versa
• People's day-to-day lives at the end of WWII were largely the same as they had been for a century before that
• The key to the "economic miracle" of post-war recovery was the Marshall Plan; alas there was no comparable plan for countries emerging from post-Soviet domination
• The cohort of students who participated in university demonstrations in the 1960s were mostly the first generation after the expansion of university admissions
• One of the reasons that 1970s "stagflation" was so pernicious was that it followed close upon the abandonment of fixed currency exchange rates; those years also saw a complete reassessment of the proper "balance of social rights, civic solidarity and collective responsibility that was appropriate and possible for the modern state" (p 793); a shift from Keynesian social democracy to neo-liberal free markets
• "The net effect of years of would-be revolutionary subversion at the heart of Western Europe was not to polarize society, as the terrorists planned and expected, but rather to drive politicians of all sides to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground." (p 477)
• The rise of "single issue" political parties affected the Left more than the Right

I found the pre-1989 chapters more compelling than the later chapters, probably due to the historical distance. The book has an optimistic ending, however: Judt feels that the European project of balancing responsibility for its citizens' welfare with economic efficiency is a better choice for "universal emulation" than any of the superpowers.