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From World War II to the Age of Prosperity, 1945–1973

Drink A Toast to the Great Russian Nation, 1947,

Mikhail Ivanovich Khmelko. This 1947 painting is an

example of Socialist realism, which sought to

glorify the socialist state and advance the goals

of Communism.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

Introduction

World War II exacted a brutal toll on Europe. The human carnage and material destruction were immense. The horrors of the Holocaust put an end to any lin-gering claim for Europe’s cultural superiority, and with it the right of Europeans to rule over others. Military, economic, and cultural power seemed to lay elsewhere. Yet, starting from this economic and moral wilderness, Europe, or at least the part of it that was not under Communist control, would stage an astonishing and rapid comeback.

5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

While Hitler’s Empire was at its height during World War II, Europe experienced an unsought near-unity imposed from above, like that of Napoleonic times. An equally imposed division followed this unity: During the Cold War, external powers effectively divided Europe into spheres of influence, with the United States domi- nating the West and the Soviet Union dominating the East. (See Figure 5.1.) Although the United States never treated the Western European nations as satellites, as the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe after 1947, the destruction of the war and the reliance of Western Europe upon the Americans for investment, trade, and military defense made it an effec- tive dependency of the United States.

The term cold war refers to the fact that, although the United States and the Soviet Union never engaged in direct military conflict—that is, their own armed forces never actually fought each other—the relationship between them was frozen into one of deep hostility. In the view of both of the main antagonists, the relationship threatened to turn into a fighting, or “hot,” war at any moment. After the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, and during the subsequent arms race that saw each side build some 25,000 nuclear weapons by 1990, such a war threatened the annihilation of humankind in what became known as “mutually assured destruction.”

In retrospect, fears of outright war probably were exaggerated, partly because neither party was willing to risk such utter devastation and partly because they each tended to hold paranoid views of the other. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union seriously contemplated an invasion of Western Europe, which was a fear repeatedly expressed by the United States. In turn, it is clear that no matter how unhappy the United States was that the Soviet Union turned Eastern Europe into a region of satellite states, an inva- sion for the purpose of challenging Soviet supremacy in the region was never seriously considered. Since Soviet troops who had been fighting the Nazis were in occupation of virtually all of the capitals of Eastern and Central Europe, only an enormous military action could have fundamentally challenged Soviet power there. By 1948 the domina- tion was complete, and Eastern Europe’s 90 million people (nearly half as many as in the Soviet Union itself) were firmly attached to Soviet economic, political, and military systems (Paxton, 2005).

WEST GERMANY

FRANCE

LUXEMBOURG

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

ITALY

NATO states Warsaw Pact states Other communist states Non-aligned states

SPAIN

PORTUGAL

MOROCCO ALGERIA TUNISIA

TURKEY

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

POLAND

ICELAND

NORWAY

IRELAND

SWEDEN

FINLAND UNITED

KINGDOM

DENMARK

EAST GERMANY

SWITZERLAND

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

AUSTRIA HUNGARY ROMANIA

YUGOSLAVIA BULGARIA

ALBANIA GREECE

CYPRUS

SYRIA

LEBANON

IRAQ

IRAN

500 miles

500 kilometres O

N N

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NaNa Na

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The Cold War polarized much of Europe, separating it into the largely U.S.-dominated West and the Soviet- dominated East.

Figure 5.1: Cold War Europe

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

The Deep Roots of the Cold War

The Cold War was deeply grounded in tensions that had long existed in the U.S.–Soviet relationship. While both countries had generally been rather minor players on the world political stage before World War II, the economic and physical devastation of much of Europe during the war left them standing as the only two true world superpowers. This new reality brought old tensions to the forefront. Early American fear and mistrust of Marxism had been demonstrated when the United States, along with many other Western powers, sent troops to the Soviet Union briefly in 1919–1920 during the civil war that fol- lowed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although this half-hearted attempt to overturn the new Communist regime was virtually forgotten in the United States by the time of World War II, it was well remembered in Russia. According to the Marxist ideology that com- prised the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, capitalism, represented after World War II in its highest form by the United States, was the primary enemy of communism and was doomed to collapse. Similarly, hostility to Marxism had deep roots in the United States,

Introduction

5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

WEST GERMANY

FRANCE

LUXEMBOURG

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

ITALY

NATO states Warsaw Pact states Other communist states Non-aligned states

SPAIN

PORTUGAL

MOROCCO ALGERIA TUNISIA

TURKEY

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

POLAND

ICELAND

NORWAY

IRELAND

SWEDEN

FINLAND UNITED

KINGDOM

DENMARK

EAST GERMANY

SWITZERLAND

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

AUSTRIA HUNGARY ROMANIA

YUGOSLAVIA BULGARIA

ALBANIA GREECE

CYPRUS

SYRIA

LEBANON

IRAQ

IRAN

500 miles

500 kilometres O

N N

N NN

NaNa Na

Na Na Na

The Cold War polarized much of Europe, separating it into the largely U.S.-dominated West and the Soviet- dominated East.

Figure 5.1: Cold War Europe

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

and Americans resented the constant anticapitalist propaganda pumped out of the Soviet Union as well as the Soviet spy rings uncovered in the United States during the late 1940s.

Another source of tension in the American-Soviet relationship was that the Soviet Union believed the United States and the Western allies had unnecessarily delayed the opening of a second front in Europe during World War II, thus leaving the Russians alone to face Germany for three years. The Soviets also felt, both at the time and afterward, that their absolutely critical contribution to the war effort—the Soviet Union lost more soldiers than all other countries combined—was downplayed in Western accounts.

The Immediate Causes of the Cold War

The most immediate cause of the Cold War was concern about Soviet intentions and actions in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union had been attacked through Poland and Eastern Europe during both world wars and, in each case, not only Germany but most of the other states bordering her western frontier had been hostile. Stalin was determined that in the future, Eastern Europe would be, at the least, politically “friendly,” and he repeatedly brought up this subject during the war. Finally, in 1944 and 1945 agreements were reached in an attempt to settle this question in way that Stalin interpreted as favorable. In 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill informally agreed that in return for predominant British influence in Greece, the Soviet Union would have dominance in Eastern Europe; and in the February 1945 Yalta conference it was agreed that there would be both free elections and states “friendly” to the Soviet Union in Europe in the wake of World War II. While the West stressed the “free elections” part of the agreement, Stalin focused on the “friendly” aspect.

In the end, putting troops in place underlined and reinforced Stalin’s interpretation, since by the time of Yalta, Soviet troops had pushed the Germans out of most of Poland, Hun- gary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania and were only 100 miles from Berlin. Soviet troops were also in Yugoslavia, though there it was local resistance that was responsible for liberating the country from the Nazis. Thus it was virtually a foregone conclusion that Stalin would dominate Eastern Europe after the war, and that the West could change that outcome only at the inconceivable cost of another war. As historian David Mason notes, just as the Western powers “swept the Germans out of the western part of Europe and initiated Western-style democratic governments in those countries, the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe and established ‘people’s democracies’ that were ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union” (Mason, 2005, p. 164). Stalin himself was quoted as privately saying, “This war is different from all earlier ones; the conqueror of a region imposes his own social system on it” (Stromberg, 1988, p. 301).

What followed was a spiral of action and counteraction in which each of the superpowers viewed the other as violating the wartime agreements and seeking to dominate Eastern Europe. The April 1945 death of President Franklin Roosevelt and his succession by Harry Truman, who was far more skeptical of Soviet intentions, was a major contributor to the general deterioration of U.S.–Soviet relations. Despite their dire economic situation, Truman cut off American aid to the Soviets immediately upon Germany’s surrender. And whereas Roosevelt had told Stalin to “make it look good” if he insisted upon imposing Soviet control in Eastern Europe, Truman declared in 1946 that he was “tired of babying the Soviets,” who understood only “an iron fist and strong language” (Stromberg, 1988, pp. 306–307).

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

In short, whenever the Soviet Union took an action interpreted in the West as seeking to impose domination on Eastern Europe, the United States responded with an action that the Soviets interpreted as part of a master plan to surround them with hostile states. The biggest source of conflict was the future of Poland and Germany. The United States also feared an expansion of Soviet influence into Western Europe, especially France and Italy, where Communist parties had won much popular appreciation through their leading role in the Resistance, and where terrible economic conditions threatened to weaken demo- cratic governments in the wake of the war.

The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1945–1947

Between 1945 and 1947, Soviet actions in Eastern Europe could be viewed as consistent with a desire to have “friendly” but not necessarily satellite regimes on her borders. Soviet leaders excluded the Western powers from any significant role in the govern- ment of these countries, and their troops remained in occupation—save in Czechoslo- vakia where they were withdrawn in 1945. Stalin allowed non-Communist parties to share power with dominant Communist parties in what became known as “national front” regimes, and there were reasonably free elections and other political freedoms. In general, the prewar regimes in Eastern Europe had been discredited by their authori- tarianism and their collaboration with the Nazis, and thus significant political changes were welcome.

Such change above all meant support for Soviet foreign policy, land redistribution, and nationalization of key sectors of the economy such as major banks and the steel and coal industries. A total of six million acres of land were expropriated from wealthy landown- ers and handed out to three million peasants across Eastern Europe (Paxton, 2005). In Czechoslovakia all large companies were nationalized, a policy supported more enthu- siastically by the socialists than by the Czech Communists, who like Communists else- where in Eastern Europe were eager to maintain a broad political coalition. Another major development of the 1945–1947 period was the expulsion, with the blessing of the Western allies, of almost 15 million ethnic Germans from their homes in Poland (includ- ing land formerly belonging to Germany) and Czechoslovakia (Stromberg, 1988). Many of these policies had broad popular support, especially in Czechoslovakia where the Communists received 38 percent of the vote in free elections in May 1946. In Hungary, the Communists won 17 percent of the vote in November 1945, in what were the freest elections in Hungarian history.

Soviet rule in its occupation zone of Germany was very different, though. With Western approval, German assets were systematically stripped to support Soviet reconstruction. This policy also reflected Stalin’s tremendous fear that Germany might quickly recover and pose a military threat once again. Until 1946 the Western powers also allowed the Soviets to take reparations from their occupation zones in western Germany. When this policy ceased, it aroused Soviet fears and suspicions that the West was determined to encircle Russia with hostile powers and was planning to supervise the rise of a powerful, re-united Germany. Altogether, the Soviets extracted an estimated $3 billion worth of Ger- man industrial plants between 1945 and 1950. They also exerted considerable pressure on Poland to ensure that a friendly government remained in power there, especially in con- nection with weakening socialist and peasant groups.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

The West and the Cold War, 1946–1950

If Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was relatively gentle in the years immediately following the war, it still amounted to dominance, especially in matters related to foreign policy. In a famous speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, former British Prime Minister Churchill, citing some historic European cities that were now part of the Soviet sphere, warned, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Virtually every development across the world that seemed to undercut Western influence was attributed to Soviet subversion. This included the civil war in Greece where, in fact, Stalin had kept his promise not to intervene; the Chi- nese Revolution where the Communists gained power in 1949 without significant Soviet help; and various anticolonial struggles around the world, including in French Indochina, which included Vietnam. Soviet efforts to exclude anti-Communist Poles from power especially resonated in the United States, which contained a significant Polish population, as did Soviet bullying in her German occupation zone to weaken the German socialists and strengthen the Communists.

The Truman Doctrine In retrospect, it is clear that developments in 1947–1948 were decisive in freezing the Cold War into place. Fearing the growth of Communist influence in Greece and pressure on Turkey to allow a Soviet military presence near the Bosporus Straits, as well as the power of Communist parties in Western Europe during the terrible winter of 1946–1947, when

hunger stalked the continent, the United States announced two major initiatives: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Both reflected the enormous influence of George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat based in Moscow, who, in a famous “Long Telegram” (1946) and subsequent article in Foreign Affairs (1947), recommended the “contain- ment” doctrine, in which every perceived act of Soviet aggression would be met by an active U.S. response. Kennan wrote,

Soviet power is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns. (Ken- nan, 1947)

The Truman Doctrine, announced in March 1947, described the world situation as

The civil war between royalists and Communists created many refugees. It also provided the newly created UNICEF an opportunity to assist. In the photo, children sing Greek folk songs as they sit around the barrel of UNICEF milk waiting for its distribution.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

[one in which] nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. . . . One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is dis- tinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and free- dom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the sup- pression of personal freedoms.

Although specifically pegged to Greece and Turkey, the doctrine announced an open- ended policy of providing American help to “free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (Mason, 2005, p. 166). Truman never mentioned the Soviet Union, but his speech was so clearly aimed at the Soviets that it has been widely viewed as the “opening gun of the Cold War” (Richards & Waibel, 2005).

The Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947 and enacted by Congress in the European Cooperation Act of April 1948, offered massive economic support to European countries to help ensure their return to prosperity. It also benefit- ted the United States: The U.S. economy needed export markets in Europe, and economic prosper- ity would reduce the appeal of Communist Par- ties in Western Europe. In theory, the Marshall Plan was open to all European countries, East and West, but its terms ensured that any country that accepted aid would become highly dependent upon the U.S. economy in terms of planning deci- sions, markets, and investment. Czechoslovakia at first agreed to take part, and Poland and Hun- gary also expressed interest, but the Soviet Union vetoed the participation of any eastern bloc coun- tries and walked out of an early conference to influence the plan, viewing it as simply a means by which the United States could extend its politi- cal and economic interests throughout Europe.

Under the Marshall Plan, or the European Recov- ery Program as it was formally known, the United States provided $17 billion to 16 western European countries between 1948 and 1953. This period witnessed an astonishing economic boom in that part of Europe, and economic coopera- tion among the 16 nations helped pave the way toward future experiments in European unity. For a long time, historians credited the Marshall Plan aid with playing a major role in the amazing

In 1950, the Marshall Plan ran a poster contest on the theme of cooperation and economic recovery. This poster, one of 10,000 submitted, shows a chef dressed in the flags of the European countries receiving aid stirring a pot with the initials ERP, for European Recovery Program. The text, in German, reads, “Intra-European Cooperation for Better Living Conditions.”

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

economic recovery in the region. More recently, however, the dominant view is that while the Marshall Plan did contribute, it played a smaller role than previously believed. Recov- ery was already underway before Marshall aid reached Europe, and while it gave Euro- peans resources to help transform their economies, the impact varied from country to country according to the nature of local economic policies.

The economic impact of the Marshall Plan was less important than its contribution to consolidating the division of Europe. The Soviets’ view of the world was embodied by the so-called “Two Camps” doctrine elaborated by Andrei Zhdanov in 1947, which stated that the world was divided into an imperialistic camp headed by the United States and a democratic one headed by the Soviet Union. In this context, the Marshall Plan—and the Truman Doctrine—were part of a general attempt to encircle them with hostile powers dominated by the United States.

The Berlin Airlift Western policies in Germany stoked Soviet suspicions. While the Soviets wanted to keep Germany weak and divided, the United States had decided that an economically strong Germany was necessary for the recovery of Europe as a whole. In 1948 the United States, France, and Britain announced their intentions to create a common German currency and a united economic area in their three Western occupation zones. The Soviets reacted by cutting off Western access to Berlin.

The West responded with the Ber- lin Airlift: Between June 1948 and May 1949, when the Soviets lifted the blockade, 270,000 flights deliv- ered 2.3 million tons of supplies, mostly coal, to the western zones of the city. (See Figure 5.2.) In May 1949, the Western Allies announced the formal creation of the Federal Republic of Germany from their three occupation zones, to which the Soviets responded by turn- ing their zone into another new country, the German Democratic Republic. By the early 1950s, the United States was, much to Stalin’s grave concern, actively supporting rearmament in West Germany.

Standing amid the wartime ruins, West Berliners watch a U.S. transport plane carrying supplies.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

United Kingdom USA

Soviet Union France

GERMANY

BerlinHamburg Air Corridor Bueckeburg Air Corridor

Fran kfur

t Ai r Co

rrid or

US UK

The United States, Great Britain, and France responded to the blockade of West Berlin by flying in millions of tons of supplies between June 1948 and May 1949.

Figure 5.2: The Berlin Airlift

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization In 1949 the United States and its allies—Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal—inaugurated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a formal military alliance committing each member to the defense of each of the others. One scholar has called this “empire by invitation,” as European leaders “were positively begging for an assertion of U.S. military power” in Europe (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010, p. 169). U.S. policy was fur- ther concretized by National Security Council Paper No. 68 (1950), which committed the United States to opposing the Soviet Union anywhere in the world where it was seen as acting aggressively, since the latter power was seen as “animated by a fanatical new faith” and seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world” (Richards & Waibel, 2005, p. 132). When West Germany joined NATO in 1955, the Soviet Union responded within five days by forming a similar military agreement with its satellites, the Warsaw Pact.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

The Soviet Crackdown in Eastern Europe, 1947–1956

If the Soviet-dominated regimes in Eastern Europe were quite tolerant from 1945 to 1947, this was no longer true by early 1948. There were signs of growing harassment of oppo- sition groups even before the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plans were announced, for example in the elections in Romania in late 1946 and Poland in early 1947. However, the two U.S. initiatives provoked a dramatic change in Soviet policy: Increasing crackdowns begin- ning in about mid-1947 ended with the creation of Soviet satellite regimes, known as “peo- ple’s democracies,” in every Eastern European country except Yugoslavia by early 1948.

New Governments Stalin feared the appeal of the West, as reflected by interest among some Eastern European countries in participating in the Marshall Plan, and he also felt a need for more direct rule to assure control of economic resources to aid in Soviet reconstruction. Thus, during a six- month period beginning in late summer 1947, the national front coalitions that had previ- ously governed the Eastern European states were all replaced with one-party Communist governments. (Shortly before, the Italian and French governments had forced Communist ministers to resign from coalition governments under U.S. pressure, so to some extent the Soviet action mirrored that in Western Europe.)

The so-called Communist “coup” in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 had an especially profound impact in the West, since that country alone in Eastern Europe had maintained a democratic system throughout the interwar years. Faced with the prospect of elections in which they were expected to lose significant support from the 38 percent level reached in 1946, the Czech Communists and trade unions occupied government buildings in the cap- ital of Prague and physically prevented the elections from being held. They then forced the creation of a single-party Communist regime. Partly because of Czechoslovakia’s democratic past and partly because the 1938 western surrender of Czech independence to Hitler at Munich had been a keystone in Hitler’s plotting of World War II, the Czech “coup,” perhaps more than any other single act, helped to convince Western leaders that Stalin was bent on the expansion of Soviet communism (Paxton, 2005).

In September 1947 the Soviets established the Communist Information Bureau (COMIN- FORM) as a means of coordinating control of other Communist parties; its predecessor organization, the Comintern, had been dissolved as a good will gesture during World War II. Two years later they created a parallel organization for economic coordination, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Partly due to the creation of the COMINFORM, the United States increasingly viewed any sign of Communist influ- ence anywhere in the world as part of a monolithic master plan directed from Moscow. Thus, when the Communists triumphed in the Chinese civil war in 1949 and when North Korea invaded the South in 1950, the role of the Soviet Union was vastly exaggerated in the United States, partly feeding the rapid emergence of the domestic “red scare” that is today known as “McCarthyism.” Largely due to this exaggerated and simplified view, the United States, which had been an opponent of imperialism, began to support military operations against Communist-Nationalist movements in many parts of the world.

The Soviet view of the United States was similarly simplified and paranoid. The Soviet Union saw itself as a weakened and battered power in the wake of World War II, and it

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

was desperate to protect its perceived vital national security interests in Eastern Europe in the face of U.S. hostility. Soviet fears of a reunited and re-emergent Germany were espe- cially intense, and its leaders viewed the United States as a wealthy and powerful nation that hypocritically denied security to the USSR while it defended its own right to act as it saw fit (Richards & Waibel, 2005). Each power believed that the other was engaged in a relentless quest to destroy its whole way of life (Paxton, 2005).

Stalinism at High Tide The Soviet crackdown in Eastern Europe was accompanied by an ever-increasing imposi- tion of the Stalinist model: Cults of personality were created around Communist Party leaders, and opposition and church leaders, and even Communist Party officials who were deemed insufficiently pliant, such as Imre Nagy in Hungary and Wladislaw Gomulka in Poland, were purged, sentenced, and jailed or executed in clearly faked trials. The secret police and censorship now became dominant in the satellite states. By the 1950s, these states were being run by leaders known as “little Stalins.”

The most notorious case of persecution was the so-called “Slansky trial” of 1952, in which Rudolf Slansky, the second most powerful person in Czechoslovakia, was convicted of working for the CIA and, along with ten others, was executed. (Slansky was Jewish, and his trial also revealed the growing anti-Semitism in Soviet and other Communist circles.)

The Eastern European economies were increasingly oriented toward Soviet needs. Thus, the Soviet share of Czech trade increased from 6 percent to almost 35 percent between 1947 and 1956, and in Poland trade with Russia increased from about 7 percent before the war to 58 percent in 1951. Russia paid below-market prices for raw materials from Eastern Europe while charging above-market prices for its industrial exports to the region. Alto- gether, it is estimated that such unfavorable trade terms amounted to a total extraction of $20 billion in favor of the Soviet Union, one of a number of measures that kept down liv- ing standards in Eastern Europe.

Small farms and businesses were collectivized and central economic planning was intro- duced, with heavy industry stressed, and always with an emphasis on quantity rather than quality. By 1962, only 3 percent of East German industrial production remained in private hands, while in Hungary the percentage of agriculture in private hands decreased from 85 percent to less than 5 percent between 1956 and 1961. All aspects of the Eastern European economy, including how much of each product would have to be produced and at what price, was determined by the government; and virtually all workers became state employees. Consumer goods were relatively neglected; there were constant shortages and complaints about their low quality. Only Communist elites were given ready access to high-quality consumer goods from the West via special stores.

On the other hand, Eastern Europe made tremendous gains in the fundamentals of health, literacy, and education; and a comprehensive welfare state was introduced in which unemployment was eliminated and basic goods were heavily subsidized. Considerable advances were also made in urbanization and industrialization nearly everywhere. Liv- ing standards remained well below those in the West, but the long-standing historical gap between the two halves of Europe was reduced. Industrial progress was often quite remarkable. By 1952 annual production in Poland and Czechoslovakia had reached double

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

their prewar levels (Gilbert & Large, 2002), while East Germany became the most indus- trialized country in the east via a policy focused on construction of large-scale chemical, electrical, coal, and steel enterprises.

The Soviet Union

The Soviet Union itself, with the considerable aid provided by its economic exploitation of Eastern Europe, reached prewar levels of industry and agriculture by 1950, a remarkable feat given that about 25 million Soviet citizens had been killed in World War II and much of Western Russia emerged from the fighting in ruins. It is estimated that the country lost 30 percent of its total national wealth (including 26 percent of its tractors), over 1,700 towns were obliterated, and over 30,000 factories were bombed or blown up (Williamson, 2007). During the 1950s, the Soviet rate of overall growth was about 7 percent, similar to that in Western Europe. Thereafter it fell increasingly behind the West with the result that by 1972 total Soviet production was no more than one third the U.S. figures and substan- tially less than those in Western Europe.

As in Eastern Europe, after World War II the production of consumer goods was neglected, and quality was often shoddy. Top-quality and imported goods were available only in special stores open to privileged party members. The Soviet Union also suffered from a terrible housing shortage, substantially due to the destruction of about five million homes during World War II, so that shared kitchens and one-room apartments were virtually the norm. In Belorussia and the Ukraine, people lived in caves, dugouts, or ruined buildings for years after the war. Domestic political freedoms were virtually nonexistent, and sus- pected dissidents were subjected to a steady stream of arrests and trials in a police state atmosphere. In early 1953, an estimated five million Soviets were confined to labor camps and prison colonies. Meanwhile, the cult of personality surrounding Stalin reached almost inconceivable new heights in the post–World War II period: Stalin was credited personally for all the country’s achievements and his birthday became a major national celebration.

Khrushchev and De-Stalinization In early 1953, the Soviet Union appeared to be on the verge of a vast new round of purges, but Stalin’s sudden death in March cut this short. In the power struggle that followed, Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, was executed, and Ukrainian Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev emerged as Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev was selected as an apparent compromise candidate, partly due to his own political skills and partly because he was underestimated by other possible candidates.

Khrushchev’s reign, which lasted until 1964, was marked by an easing of the police state— although by no means its elimination—and an increasing focus on consumer goods and the needs of ordinary citizens. In a secret speech at the February 1956 Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the first since Stalin’s death, Khrushchev shocked his audience with a denunciation of Stalin—”a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious”— and his way of ruling, which involved “a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality.” He even called Stalin a coward: “Not once during the whole war did he dare go to the front” (Khrushchev, 1956).

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

Khrushchev’s speech, which was soon leaked to the West, opened a period of so-called “de-Staliniza- tion” in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s preserved body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square to a small spot in the Kremlin Wall in 1961, and his name was erased from places all over the country, including Stal- ingrad, which was renamed Vol- gograd. The novelist and former labor camp detainee Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant exposé of Stalinist prison camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was allowed to be published. For the first time, Soviet citizens could read about a prisoner ’s horrific experiences in the gulags. Previ- ously, the most writers were allowed to do was mention the existence of these camps; they could not describe them in any way. The labor camps did not disappear, but their population declined sharply and the use of torture and summary execution ended.

Under Khrushchev, the Soviets invested heavily in high technology and made major advances. The most spectacular, and one that caused great consternation in the United States, was the launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Four years later, Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin pioneered manned space travel.

This period was also marked by a modest easing of the Cold War, as reflected by an end to the Korean War in 1953, by the signing of a treaty providing for the withdrawal of occupa- tion troops by all sides from Austria in 1955, and by the first post–World War II Soviet– U.S. summit conference in Vienna in 1961. On the other hand, it was under Khrushchev that the Berlin Wall was constructed and Soviet nuclear missiles were sent into Cuba, touching off the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev’s colleagues ousted him from power in 1964, partly due to his perceived failure in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in bring- ing out agricultural reforms. He was allowed to live out his retirement in peace, and even to write his memoirs.

Brezhnev The relative openness of the Khrushchev era was replaced by a new period of cultural and political repression under Leonid Brezhnev, who was in power from 1964 until 1982. Although dissenters did not face execution, as during the Stalin era, they did regularly risk arrest, forced exile in the provinces or outside of the country, and even detention in psychiatric hospitals. Thus, the leading physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakha- rov, father of Russia’s hydrogen bomb, was forced into a six-year internal exile, while novelist Solzhenitsyn, cellist Mistislav Rostropovich, and poet Josef Brodsky were forced to leave their homelands. Soviet citizens even were forbidden from owning copying

Khrushchev (right) worked his way up the Communist power structure under Stalin (left), but after succeeding him, he denounced Stalin’s crimes in a famous speech in 1956. Khrushchev oversaw a lessening of Stalinist repression but he was pushed from power in 1964.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

machines. When a movement for major political reform erupted in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (see “The Prague Spring” later in this chapter), Brezhnev sent Soviet troops to crush it and announced his intention (“the Brezhnev doctrine”) to similarly intervene whenever events threatened Communist rule in Eastern Europe. Despite such restrictions, Russians in ever-increasing numbers expressed their dissent clandestinely via the circulation of “underground” newspapers, books, and periodicals known as samizdat (“self-published”).

Yugoslavia

The one Communist-ruled country to escape the fate of Stalinization was Yugoslavia. There the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito led the only national resistance movement in the region that (with Soviet aid) defeated the Nazis, and he won a massive majority in elections held in November 1945. This gave the Yugoslavs a special status within the Communist world, and when Stalin tried to assert increased control over them in 1948, Tito resisted. Stalin punished him by expelling the Yugoslavia party from the COMINFORM, imposing an economic blockade and launching a propaganda war. There was also the threat of an invasion; from 1948 until 1953, there were almost 8,000 “border incidents” between the two countries, some of which were quite significant (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010).

Despite the pressure on his regime, Tito resisted and got assistance from the West. Yugo- slavia even cooperated with NATO, although Tito always refused to join, and it received $1.5 billion in economic and military assistance from the United States and other countries between 1949 and 1955 (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). Yugoslavia’s excommunication from the Communist bloc also allowed it to develop its own distinctive form of commu- nism, with an emphasis on self-management and workers’ councils. In addition, collective farms were abolished and market mechanisms were permitted to function.

Tito also played a leading role in building the Non-Aligned Movement, a large association of states that remained outside the two cold war camps. He participated in the Bandung Conference, the meeting of Asian and African states that took place in Indonesia in April

1955, and then worked with Jawa- harlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to develop what was called the “Third Way.” The Non-Aligned Movement was formally created at a meeting of 25 heads of state in Belgrade in Sep- tember 1961.

Relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were normalized only after Stalin’s death. Khrush- chev’s “Belgrade Declaration” on June 2, 1955, was a public state- ment that the Soviet Union would treat Yugoslav Communists as equals. Even so, Tito retained his independence: He refused to join

Although a Communist, Tito kept Yugoslavia independent of Soviet control. This picture shows Tito (right) and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (second from right) during the latter’s visit to Belgrade in 1955 to normalize relations between the two countries.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

COMECON or the Warsaw Pact, and in 1956 he encouraged Polish and Hungarian Com- munists who tried to overthrow the Stalinist system.

Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953–1968

The combination of widespread arrests and trials, secret police, intense censorship, the continued presence of Soviet troops and the general lack of strong democratic traditions made political protest difficult to organize in Eastern Europe. There was sporadic resis- tance to the nationalization of land and private businesses, but it was generally suppressed with little difficulty. For instance, in Bulgaria, where such resistance was widespread in the early 1950s, it was crushed by detaining thousands of peasants in labor camps (the number of detentions reached over 100,000 between 1946 and 1956) (Fowkes, 2000). The 1953 death of Stalin was followed by riots in Czechoslovakia and East Germany; in the lat- ter they were severe enough that they had to be suppressed by Soviet tanks. About 25 East Germans were killed in the disturbances of June 1953, and about 600 executions followed.

Despite the repression, one unexpected result of Khrushchev’s secret speech was to severely delegitimize Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Significant unrest followed in Poland, where, quite unusually, peasants had been allowed to keep small private plots and the Catholic Church had been allowed to function reasonably freely. The Polish unrest forced the authorities to replace the sitting Polish leader with the “reform” Communist Wlady- slaw Gomulka, who had been purged earlier. In Hungary, a full-scale revolution broke out in October 1956. Its leaders started out by calling for reforms but ended up demanding an end to Soviet domination. It was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. Reform Communist leader Imre Nagy, another victim of the purges of the late 1940s who had returned to power, was executed. Two hundred thousand Hungarians fled the country, 20,000 were jailed, and 2,000 were executed. How- ever, after 1960 there was a considerable relaxation of tension in Hungary, including a broad political amnesty, a general easing of censorship, and an increased stress on consumer goods production, which became known, in reference to the famous Hungarian stew, as “goulash communism.”

In Romania, dictators Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and his successor Nicolae Ceausescu ruled with iron hands but were able to express some inde- pendence from the Soviet Union, especially after Russian troops were withdrawn in 1962. Thus, at the 1963 COMECON meeting Ceausescu success- fully resisted Russian efforts to impose a com- prehensive economic plan throughout Eastern Europe, and Romania also retained relations with Yugoslavia and China after Soviet ties to those nations grew enormously strained.

Rebels in Budapest burn books and portraits of Stalin looted from the Soviet propaganda office during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The Soviet military brutally crushed the uprising.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.1 The Division of Europe and the Cold War

The Berlin Wall East German citizens could express their discontent in a way unavailable in other Soviet satellites: They could simply leave the country by crossing from East to West Berlin. By 1961, 3.5 million of them, including many highly educated young people, had done so, threaten-

ing the viability of the state itself. On August 13, 1961, the Soviets and East Germans “solved” this prob- lem by building a wall that encir- cled West Berlin and divided the two parts of the city. The wall had 302 watchtowers, permanently manned by soldiers with orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross. Between 150 and 200 people were killed during the wall’s existence, but some 5,000 managed to cross. The Berlin Wall became a literally concrete manifestation of the Cold War and the division of Europe.

The “Prague Spring” Unlike in Hungary and Poland, de-Stalinization had had relatively little impact in Czecho- slovakia. The country had been rigidly ruled by Antonin Novotny, whose policies of cen- tralization, stress on heavy industry, and brutal repression of dissent increasingly alienated Czech intellectuals, Slovak nationalists, and ordinary citizens. Novotny’s replacement by Alexander Dubcek (1921–1992) in January 1968 was an attempt to respond to pressures for change, which arose in the one country in Eastern Europe that had traditionally had the strongest democratic traditions and ties with the West.

Without seeking to abandon one-party rule or Czechoslovakia’s strong ties with the Soviet Union, Dubcek set about a comprehensive reform program: Political repression was con- siderably eased, and an attempt was made to incorporate more democratic procedures in the internal functioning of the Czech Communist Party. These developments quickly spawned an explosion of dissent reflected in wide-ranging discussions in the press and other cultural arenas and the emergence of a burgeoning civil society in which students played an especially important role.

As the “Prague Spring” deepened between April and August 1968, Soviet leaders grew increasingly alarmed at what they saw as a trend toward defiance and independence, despite Dubcek’s assurances that Czechoslovakia would remain a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact. When Dubcek resisted Soviet demands that he renounce his reforms and purge the Communist Party, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded. The inva- sion led to some 500 deaths and brought the brief Prague Spring to an end on August 20. Dubcek was allowed to remain in power until March 1969, when Czechs rioted en masse to celebrate the victory of their national team over the Soviet Union in the World Hockey championships. Full censorship was subsequently restored, and the police, army, admin- istration, and Communist Party were thoroughly purged.

Children in West Berlin play alongside the Wall, 1965.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

The developments of the Prague Spring were carefully followed throughout the world, especially in the United States and the rest of Europe. The “Brezhnev doc- trine” and the Soviet occupation of Prague severely disillusioned many Communists and leftists, for whom it marked the end of both de-Stalinization and any seri- ous hopes that the Soviet system could reform itself from within. Thus, French existentialist phi- losopher Jean-Paul Sartre resigned from the French Communist Party, denouncing Russia’s actions in Czechoslovakia as “pure aggres- sion” and a “war crime” (Gilbert & Large, 2002, p. 447).

5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

Economic recovery after World War I was stuttering, fragile, and cut short by the Depression that began in 1929. The experience after World War II could not have been more different, especially for the countries of Western Europe. These econo- mies not only recovered rapidly, they entered a period of nearly 30 years of uninterrupted growth at historically unprecedented rates—the Golden Age of European Capitalism. The French call this “the thirty glorious years.” One country after another—even Spain, which for twenty years after its Civil War had suffered under the incompetent policies of the Franco regime—experienced what were called “economic miracles” that left them and most of their citizens more prosperous than they had ever been.

Productivity and Economic Growth

As Figure 5.3 shows, between 1950 and 1973, the countries of continental Western Europe had annual growth rates ranging from 3 percent in Sweden to over 6 percent in Greece, with an average of 4 percent for Western Europe as a whole. This compares to annual growth rates between 1.5 percent and 2 percent per year during the period of industrial- ization in the 19th century.

One of the factors responsible for this growth was increased worker productivity. This was, in large part, the result of a major structural change in the Western European economy: the decline of agriculture. Workers moved from agriculture, where productivity and wages were low, to industry and the rapidly growing service sector where both were higher. Between 1950 and 1975, the number of Europeans working in agriculture decreased: from 23 percent to 10 percent of the labor force in France, from 22 percent to 9 percent in Norway,

The Soviet Union responded to the reforms taking place in Czechoslovakia by sending troops from Warsaw Pact nations to invade on August 21, 1968. The photograph shows Soviet tanks in Charles Square in the heart of the Czech capital.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

from 16 percent to 6 percent in Sweden, from 33 percent to 17 percent in Italy, and from 42 percent to 22 percent in Spain (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). At the same time, the pro- ductivity of those who remained in agriculture increased.

Migration and Economic Growth

A second major factor behind this sustained economic growth was the availability of plen- tiful, inexpensive labor for industry and services. This labor was provided by migration. By 1973, foreigners made up 11 percent of the workforce in France and 12 percent in West Germany. This compares to just over 1 percent of the West German population who were foreigners a decade earlier.

Overall, some 40 million people moved to or within Western Europe in these years. Migrants can be classified into three categories: (1) those who moved within their own country, usually, as in Italy and Spain, from poorer agricultural regions to more devel- oped industrial ones; (2) those who moved from poorer countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, or Yugoslavia to wealthier ones such as Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or West Germany—these people usually sent money to their relatives in their homeland where their remittances contributed to local economic growth; and (3) those who arrived from Europe’s colonies or former colonies. This last group was the smallest: The 600,000 Algerians in France in 1969 were outnumbered by both the Italians and Span- iards living there.

UK Un

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A decline in agriculture and an increase in worker productivity contributed to high rates of economic growth in many countries after World War II.

Figure 5.3: Percentage annual growth of GDP, 1950–1973

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

In West Germany, immigrant workers were known as gastarbeiter (guest workers). Between 1955 and 1968, the German government signed treaties with Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, and Yugoslavia to govern the recruiting of immigrants. (Switzerland had a simi- lar system.) The centrality of this immigrant labor was stressed by Labor Minister Theodor Blank when he welcomed the one millionth guest worker to the country in October 1964:

One million people from other coun- tries help keep our economy in gear and running at full throttle. From year to year, our economy has become more and more dependent on the help of guest workers. Today they are an essential prerequisite for the success of the German economy. These one million people in German workplaces contribute to the continued growth of our production, the maintenance of stable prices, and the preservation of our prestige on the world market. (Blank, 1964)

The idea was that these workers, who numbered four million by 1975, would be a temporary resource at a time of labor shortage and that they would eventually return home. The reality was that many soon brought their families and became permanent residents. By 1973, one of every six children born in the Federal Republic was the child of immigrants. Without intending it, West Germany had become a country with a multicultural population.

Mass Consumption

Rapid economic growth was accompanied by full employment: By the mid-1960s the unemployment rate in Western Europe was a miniscule 1.5 percent (Judt, 2005). It was also accompanied by a rapid increase in real wages, the amount that people could buy with what they earned. In 1950, Europeans spent more than 40 percent of their income on food; in some countries it was more than 50 percent, and in Italy it was 60 percent. By 1971, the average in the 10 most developed countries was only 27 percent (Berend, 2006).

Having to spend less on food meant that Europeans had much more disposable income, money they could spend on things that were not necessities. By the beginning of the 1970s, it had become normal for Western Europeans to own such former luxuries as refrigera- tors, washing machines, telephones, and cars. To take just one example, in 1953 in Italy— which had been one of the poorer countries in Western Europe before the war—almost no families owned a television, only 4 percent of families owned a washing machine, and only 14 percent owned a refrigerator. By 1971 the percentages were 82 percent, 63 percent, and 86 percent respectively. There were only 10 cars per thousand Italians in 1950; by 1970 the figure was around 170 (Ginsborg, 1990). Overall, 1.6 million cars were sold in Europe in 1950; in 1973, the number was 13.3 million, more than 8 times as many (Vinen, 2001).

“Guest workers” from Turkey arrive in Munich. Their first stop will be the dispatching center in a bunker beneath the train station where they will be told where they are going to work.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

Another manifestation of this new consumer society was the emergence of mass tourism. By 1960, most Europeans received at least four weeks paid vacation, and they began to spend their new leisure time away from home. The rapid expansion of the French resort chain, Club Med, which had begun in 1951, was one indicator. The emergence of Spain as a major tourist destination for Northern European sunseekers was another. The number of tour- ists who went to Spain jumped from 2.8 million in 1959 to 19 million a decade later. In fact, tourism quickly became Spain’s leading industry and one of the drivers behind its eco- nomic miracle in the 1960s and early 1970s. Many of these tourists went to Spain on package holidays that included airfare; travelling by plane was another formerly rare luxury that became normal in these years.

The Beginning of European Unification

Until 1945, any attempt to create a unified Europe had been made by force. The postwar years saw the first peaceful attempts to bring European nations together. For example, in May 1948 a Congress of Europe was convened. Its most important decision was to create the Council of Europe. The goal of the Council, which still exists today, was to “achieve a greater unity among its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realizing the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress” (Statute of the Council of Europe, 1949). Similarly, political leaders bandied about a plan for a united European Defense Community, but without much result.

The European Coal and Steel Community The first concrete accomplishment for advocates of unification was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The idea was developed by French bureaucrat Jean Mon- net. Faced with the U.S. decision to rebuild the German economy, something French leaders feared, Monnet decided that the best way to prevent renewed German aggres- sion was to create joint institutions to oversee crucial economic sectors. The idea was taken up by French foreign minister Robert Schuman and announced in the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, which is seen as the founding statement of the process of European unification:

The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany.

Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries.

With this aim in view, the French Government proposes that action be taken immediately on one limited but decisive point:

Mass tourism was one indicator of the new level of prosperity in Western Europe. In this photo, tourists at the Club Méditerranée in Corsica do exercises on the beach, 1969.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

“It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. . . . By pooling basic produc- tion and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preser- vation of peace.” (Schuman, 1950, p. 12)

This led, in 1952, to the creation of the ECSC, involving Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, as well as France and West Germany. The ECSC operated until 2002, when its functions were taken over by the European Union.

The Treaty of Rome and the European Economic Community The success of the ECSC led the six member states to broaden their economic cooperation. In March 1957, they signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community (EEC). (See Figure 5.4.) The six agreed to phase out and ultimately abolish internal tariffs on all goods and to create a common external tariff. Between 1962 and 1972 total production of goods and services in the EEC nearly tripled, with trade among the member states increasing 720 percent between 1957 and 1969, compared to 305 percent with nonmember states.

WEST GERMANY

FRANCE LUXEMBOURG

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

ITALY

The European Economic Community was created by the Treaty of Rome, 1957. The map shows the original six members.

Figure 5.4: The European Economic Community

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

Economic historians have debated the extent to which the creation of the EEC contrib- uted to economic growth. One recent analysis states that the upsurge of trade among the member states was already underway before 1957, and that unification did not cause economic growth. It did, however, further the process, helping make economic growth some 5 percent greater than it would have been in its absence (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010).

In Their Own Words: Charles de Gaulle Vetoes British Entry into the EEC

If the Six have been able to build this famous edifice it is because it concerned a group of continental countries, immediate neighbors to each other, doubtless offering differences of size, but complementary in their economic structure. Moreover, the Six form through their territory a compact geographic and strategic unit. It must be added that despite, perhaps because of their great battles of the past—I am naturally speaking of France and Germany— they now find themselves inclined to support one another mutually rather than to oppose one another. Finally, aware of the potential of their material resources and their human values, all desire either aloud or in whispers that their unit constitute one day an element that might provide a balance to any power in the world. . . .

Compared with the motives that led the Six to organize their unit, we understand for what reasons, why Britain—

who is not continental, who remains, because of the Commonwealth and because she is an island, committed far beyond the seas, who is tied to the United States by all kinds of special agreements—did not merge into a Community with set dimensions and strict rules. . . .

[B]efore changing what exists, [we should] wait until a certain internal and external evolution, of which Great Britain seems already to be showing signs, is eventually completed, that is to say, until that great people which is endowed with tremendous ability and courage has itself accomplished first and for its part the necessary profound economic and political transforma- tion so that it can join with the Six continental countries. (Hanhimaki, 2004, p.335)

The United Kingdom originally stood aloof from the EEC for fear of infringements upon its sovereignty and upon its special relationships with the British Commonwealth, the organization of former colonies, but it twice applied for membership in the 1960s. Each time French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed the British application. In this speech delivered on May 16, 1967, he sets out his reasons for doing so.

Charles de Gaulle during the speech in which he vetoed Britain’s application to join the EEC, May 16, 1967.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

The Welfare State

The rapid economic recovery and subsequent unprecedented prosperity that Western Europe achieved in the 30 years after the end of World War II was accompanied by the creation of the welfare state. Probably the definition of the welfare state cited most often is the one made by British historian Asa Briggs:

A state in which power is deliberately used (through politics and admin- istration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions—first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their property; second, by nar- rowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and families to meet certain ‘social contingencies’ (for example, sickness, old age and unemployment) which lead otherwise to individual and family crises; and third by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services. . . . The third objective brings in the idea of the ‘optimum’ rather than the older idea of the ‘minimum.’ . . . It is concerned not merely with the abatement of class differences . . . but with equality of treatment and the aspirations of citizens as voters with equal shares of electoral power. (Briggs, 2006)

Consensus Across Western Europe, democratic governments extended the social services and benefits provided by the state to its citizens far beyond anything that had previously existed. These included expanded secondary and post-secondary education, health care, housing, pen- sions, unemployment insurance, paid maternal or parental leave, family allowances, and paid vacations.

This could not have happened without a significant increase in government spending that, in turn, demanded high rates of taxation. (See Figure 5.5.) Overall government expenditures increased from an average of 10 percent to 12 percent of GDP before World War I to a range of 20 percent to 33 percent in 1935 and to between 38 percent and 45 per- cent in 1975 (Judt, 2005). As government spending increased overall, its makeup changed considerably: The place of social transfers that effected a redistribution of income became much more prominent. From an average of 6 percent to 10 percent of GDP in 1950, they jumped to an average of 15 percent to 20 percent in 1975, and considerably higher in coun- tries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden (Berend, 2006). Even the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco in Spain followed the trend, though at lower levels: Between 1950 and 1974 social expenditure jumped from 4 percent to 12 percent of GDP (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). Moreover, these changes took place at a time during which the GDP per capita of European states itself tripled in real terms.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

% G

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A general rise in GDP after World War II allowed many European countries to see a significant increase in government spending on social services and benefits.

Figure 5.5: The welfare state

There was broad political consensus across Europe that this was desirable. As historian Tony Judt put it, most Europeans agreed that “the state would always do a better job than the unrestricted market . . . in designing and applying strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality” (Judt, 2005, p. 361). On the one hand, Europeans decided that the rise of Nazism and the subsequent catastrophe were due in large part to the failure of the state to respond effectively to the crisis of the Depression. On the other, politicians felt the need to rebuild the legitimacy of the state after the experiences of the war as well as to attract voters. The Cold War also provided a stimulus: In the competition between social systems, the welfare state made capitalism much more appealing to Europeans.

Divergent Models All Western European democracies created a welfare state in the years after 1945, but despite many similarities among them, there was no single model (Broadberry & O’Rourke, 2010). Rather, the services provided, the levels at which they were provided, and how they were funded all varied from country to country. That said, the European welfare states can be separated into two broad categories. In one, consisting of Ireland, Great Britain, and Scandinavia, welfare rights are universal and each individual has a right to a form of social protection by the simple fact of being a citizen. In this system, known as the Beveridge welfare state, services are funded primarily through taxes. In the other, present in the rest of Europe, social protection rights are awarded to those who work and to their families. Social contributions paid by employees and employers fund this system, known as the Bismarck welfare state after the 19th century Chancellor of Germany who introduced the first welfare measures in Europe.

In many countries, such as Belgium, France, and Great Britain, governments created wel- fare states at the same time that they nationalized important industries, such as railroads,

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.2 The Golden Age of European Capitalism

electricity, utilities, automobiles, and banks. It is important to realize, however, that no connection was necessary between these two developments, and that nationalization and other significant interventions in the free market were not an essential part of the welfare state. The best evidence for this comes from Sweden. Governed by the Social Democratic Party from 1932 to 1976, Sweden was long seen as the poster child of the welfare state: With the most comprehensive set of services anywhere in the capitalist world, Swedes enjoyed one of the highest standards of living and life expectancy anywhere. All this was achieved without nationalizing any industries and without interfering in the market; instead, it was the work of a state that “ruthlessly and progressively tax[ed] and redistribute[d] private profits for public ends” (Judt, 2005, p. 367).

The welfare state succeeded in reducing economic inequalities within individual European countries by decreasing the importance of salary and income and replacing them with free or subsidized state services. The share of income held by the top 5 percent of the population in countries such as Denmark, Great Britain, and Sweden decreased significantly while the share held by the bottom 60 percent increased. Once again, the changes were most marked in Sweden: Between 1939 and 1964, the share of the bottom 60 percent went from 23 percent to 33 percent while that of the top 5 percent fell from 28 percent to 18 percent (Berend, 2006).

The combination of economic growth and the welfare state produced a significant increase in the quality of life enjoyed by Western Europeans. This can be seen in the evolution of the Human Development Index (Figure 5.6), a measure developed by the United Nations that includes income, life expectancy, and education. All nine countries shown on the graph improved their scores significantly over the 25 years between 1950 and 1975. At the same time, the degree of difference among them decreased, as the level of development of poorer countries such as Spain and Italy increasingly converged with that of wealthier countries.

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The Gini Index measures the degree of inequality in a society. A score of zero means that a society has no inequality; a score of one indicates maximum inequality.

Figure 5.6: Europe: Human Development Index, 1950–1975

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

In Their Own Words: Carolyn Steedman: Beneficiary of the Welfare State

The 1950s was a time when state intervention in children’s lives was highly visible, and experienced, by me, at least as entirely beneficent. . . . [W]e spent a lot of time . . . picking up medicine bottles of orange juice and jars of Vitriol from the baby clinic for my sister. I think I would be a very dif- ferent person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something. . . .

It was a considerable achievement for a society to pour so much milk and so much orange juice, so many vitamins down the throats of so many children, and for the height and weight of those children to outstrip the measurements of only a decade before. . . . Within that period of time more children were provided with the goods of the earth than had

any generation before. What my mother lacked, I was given . . . the sense that a benevolent state bestowed on me, that of my own existence and the worth of that existence . . . demon- strates in some degree what a fully material culture might offer in terms of physical comfort and the structures of care and affection that it symbolizes, to all its children. (Steedman, 1986)

Carolyn Steedman is one of the most prominent historians of Great Britain writing today. Born in 1947, the daughter of a working-class mother, Steedman was also part of the first generation of British chil- dren to benefit from the welfare state that had been created by the Labour Party after it won a massive majority in the elections of July 1945. It was the educational component of the welfare state that made it possible for Steedman to attend university, get a PhD at Cambridge, and eventually become a university professor. Before the existence of the welfare state, such a trajectory would have been almost impossible for someone from her background. In this excerpt from her book about her mother’s and her lives, Steed- man describes the benefits, both material and psychological, of the new system for a young child.

A mother brings her baby to a clinic to be checked by a doctor, 1958.

5.3 Culture

World War I had provoked a strong cultural response in Europe, one focused on the novel horrors of the battlefield. It focused on the experience of ordinary soldiers, and in many ways it could be shared by Europeans from all combatant countries. World War II was a very different matter. There had been some highly lethal military innovations, such as strategic bombing and the atomic bomb, but these were experienced more by civilians than by soldiers. Beyond this, for many nations, the war brought quick military defeat, occupation by a foreign power, and the choice of collabo- rating, resisting, or simply trying to get by. Most shockingly of all, of course, it brought the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The experiences of 1939–1945 were much more fragmented—and in many cases more embarrassing—than they had been in 1914–1918 and as a result would be much harder to integrate into post- war European culture. That said, the difficulty would be much greater in Western Europe than in Communist-ruled Eastern Europe, where cultural responses to the war were dic- tated by regimes that often rewrote history for their own purposes.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

Existentialism

The philosophical position that came to be known as existentialism had existed since the 19th century, starting with the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1850). Despite its long history, existentialism achieved broad prominence only in the aftermath of World War II. This was due primarily to the influence of two French thinkers: Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). This popularity derived in part from the fact that both wrote novels, plays, and stories as well as works of philosophy. Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 for a body of work that included novels such as The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). In 1964 Sartre also won the Nobel Prize but he rejected it; he felt that writers should not accept official awards and should exert their influence through their names and their work alone, without the help of the power of a prize. The prominence of existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s was also due to its relevance, as the French—and Europeans more broadly—struggled to come to terms with the experiences and choices presented by the war and the occupation.

Simply put, existentialism proposes that reason, natural science, and morality cannot provide the meaning of human existence. This requires the concept of authenticity: that individuals act in certain ways and not others because that is what they want to do and not because it is what is expected of them. Men and women confront a world in which universal norms do not exist; how they act determines who and what they are. Recogniz- ing what Camus called “the benign indifference of the universe” gives individuals the freedom—and the often-painful responsibility—to make decisions and take responsibility for one’s actions. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism,” claimed Sartre.

Although she was overshadowed by her two male countrymen in her time, Simone de Beau- voir (1908–1986) may well have been the existentialist thinker with the greatest long-term influence. Her book The Second Sex (1949) combined existentialism with feminism in a way that would provide the intellectual basis for second-wave feminism of the 1960s and after.

De Beauvoir’s book brought the question of the gendered body into philosophy. It also introduced two concepts that are now common- place. The first was the concept of the “Other,” the categories of peo- ple who are measured against what is taken as the norm. The second, set out in the famous sentence “One is not born but becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir, 1973, p. 267), was the distinction between sex and gender. De Beauvoir argued that women did not have to accept their social- ization passively and that they could become independent beings without becoming like men. This liberation required that women act to claim their freedom.

Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone de Beauvoir (right) were married as well as being intellectual allies. They were also activists. Here they are selling the newspaper La Cause Du People, which the government had banned. Paris, October 16, 1970.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

The Theatre of the Absurd

The existentialist theme of human beings confronting a meaningless universe was taken up by several playwrights whose work was given the name the Theatre of the Absurd. The concept of the absurd came from Camus’s 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: “The absurd is born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” In plays such as Waiting for Godot (1949) and The Bald Soprano (1950), drama- tists such as Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and Eugene Ionesco (1909–1984) used unconven- tional techniques—nonlinear plots, illogical language, and unrecognizable settings—to convey the bewilderment and anxiety felt by people facing a universe without meaning and the new threat of nuclear holocaust. As critic Martin Esslin, who invented the term Theatre of the Absurd, described it, previous playwrights, including Camus himself, had addressed the same themes but they did so

[. . .] in the form of highly lucid and constructed reasoning, while the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought . . . trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. (Esslin, 1968, p. 24)

The Holocaust in Culture and Memory

There was one major aspect of the war that European culture was unable, or unwilling, to integrate in the three decades after 1945: the Holocaust. This situation is well captured in the history of a now-classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. Written immedi- ately after the war, the book, whose original title was If This is a Man, was rejected by the major left-wing Italian publisher; Levi had to settle for a minor publisher, a small print run, and very few sales. It was first published in English in 1959, but it was only at the end of the 1970s that it began to sell well. Giuliana Tedeschi, another Italian who had sur- vived Auschwitz, described the indifference that was so common in Europe at the time: “I encountered people who didn’t want to know anything, because the Italians too had suf- fered, even those who didn’t go to the camps. . . . They used to say ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s all over,’ and so I remained quiet for a long time” (Judt, 2005, p. 807). The unwillingness to come to terms with the Holocaust was particularly strong in Germany. Children born after 1945 usually found that their parents were unwilling to answer their questions about what had happened during the war.

Reasons for Silence Saving the Jews had never been a major Allied war aim, so in some respects it was not surprising that the Nazi attempt to exterminate them should not loom large in postwar culture. Even more important was the fact that as Europeans struggled to come to terms with the war, they did so in ways that emphasized their experience as members of specific nations. Across the continent, governments created official “collective memories” of the war. In many cases, such as in Austria, which portrayed itself as the “first victim” of the Nazis, these collective memories centered on local claims to suffering. This was particularly

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

true in Eastern Europe, even in Poland where many of the extermination camps had been located. The Polish Communist regime established a museum at Auschwitz, where more than 90 percent of the 1.5 million people killed were Jews, but it “listed the victims only by nationality: Polish, Hungarian, German, etc.” (Judt, 2005, p. 822). Jews were not men- tioned. In this context, the suffering of Europe’s Jews, which crossed all national borders, was not part of the story.

Changing Consciousness In Western Europe, this “universal . . . neglect” of the Holocaust would not begin to change until the end of the 1960s, and especially in the second half of the 1970s (Judt, 2005). Only after that would the Holocaust find its place at the center of European cultural conscious- ness. (In Eastern Europe, the process of rethinking the Holocaust would not begin until after the fall of Communism in 1989.) One of the major contributors to this change was the maturing of a new generation that had not experienced the war. Another was the showing of the U.S. television miniseries, Holocaust, which aired in the United States in April 1978 and in much of Europe the following year. European film directors denounced it as trivial- izing or distorting the Holocaust, as did the famous survivor and writer Elie Wiesel, but the miniseries brought the Holocaust unprecedented public attention. In West Germany, half the population watched at least one of the four episodes (DW-World.DE. Deutsche Welle).

These collective memories also sought to portray each country in the best possible light, which often meant ignoring the actual experiences of many of their citizens, especially when these were not especially edifying. This process was particularly marked in France, which had been humiliated on the battlefield in May 1940 and then lived with the collaboration- ist Vichy regime until British, Canadian, and U.S. troops liberated it in 1944. Rather than come to terms with the unflattering reality that collaboration was not limited to only a handful of zealots or that Vichy took the initiative in deporting French Jews, the French lived with what historian Henry Rousso has called the “Vichy Syndrome.” After an ini- tial period of “mourning,” the government, supported by the Communists, promoted the myth that Vichy was unimportant and that France had been united in resistance to the Germans (Rousso, 1994).

The importance of this myth was made clear by the experience of The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 documentary about daily life in the French town of Clermont-Ferrand during the years of the Vichy regime. This four-and-a-half-hour film showed a range of people, col- laborators as well as resisters. It also showed Vichy as a French phenomenon; Germans have only a very small role. Although it had been commissioned by state television, the French government did not allow The Sorrow and the Pity to be broadcast until 1981. Until then, it was shown only in cinemas and provoked a wide range of reactions: “hostility, self-flagellation, shame, indignation, surprise, disbelief” (Rousso, 1994, p. 100).

Youth Culture

In this period, and especially after the mid-1950s, an unprecedented combination of demo- graphics and economics produced something new: the emergence of a fully fledged youth culture.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

Demographics and Economics After the war, Europe experienced a baby boom. Combined with a significant decline in infant mortality due to better medical care, housing, and nutrition, this produced a major increase in overall population. It also produced a population in which, by 1960, young people had a large place. In countries such as the Netherlands and Finland, 30 percent of the population was under 15 years old; in France, one third of the population in 1967 was under 30 (Judt, 2005). At the same time, Europeans started to stay in school longer. High school, and even university, which had been limited to small numbers of elites before 1939, became available to more young people than ever before. Students, and especially university students, were still a minority—between 7 percent and 15 percent of 18 to 24 year olds—but there were more of them than ever before.

The increasing prosperity of postwar Europe provided the economic basis for a youth cul- ture. Previously, most Europeans had lived in what historians Louise Tilly and Joan Scott call the “family wage economy”: When children went to work, they turned over all their wages to their parents because everything earned by all family members was required for subsistence. As real wages rose after the war, this was no longer true, and young people who still lived at home were able to keep more of their money for themselves. In 1965, 62 percent of French 16 to 24 year olds who lived at home kept all the money they earned. Adolescents had become what marketers now call a “demographic,” and advertisers took aim at them: Spending on magazine advertisements aimed at French adolescents, for instance, rose by nearly 400 percent between 1959 and 1962 (Judt, 2005).

Style and Music Youth culture manifested itself in numerous ways but the most important were personal appearance and music. The first youth styles in Europe were the leather outfits of the gangs of the 1950s, but these were soon surpassed by what would become the universal style of young people around the world, jeans and T-shirts. When Levis jeans first went on sale in Paris in 1963, they flew off the shelves. There were also distinctive youth hairstyles, especially for young men. These too changed rapidly between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, from quiffs and pompadours to long hair.

By far the most important component of youth culture was music. New technologies such as the 33 rpm record (1948) for albums, the 45 rpm (1949) for singles, the home stereo and the transistor radio (1954)—the iPod of its day—made music much more accessible, and young people had the money to buy it. Soon there were magazines, radio programs, and even television shows devoted to young people and their music. The first open-air rock concert in Europe, the Concert des Nations, was sponsored by a popular radio program, Salut les copains; it took place in Paris on June 22, 1963, and was attended by 150,000 people.

Youth culture was international, with young people in Western Europe dressing the same and listening to the same music as their counterparts in North America and other parts of the world. (Young people in Communist countries had a much harder time, as the authori- ties there tried to shield them from such Western “capitalist” influences.) Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the musical icons of youth almost everywhere; that few young Europeans knew enough English to understand the lyrics was no obstacle. But there were also local stars in each country, like Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

Vartan in France and Adriano Celentano in Italy. They sang their in own languages, but their music was influenced by international, usually American, fashions. Hallyday even changed his name to sound more American; his real name was Jean-Philippe Smet. (There were also singer songwriters whose music came out of older local traditions, like Jacques Brel in Belgium and Joan Manuel Serrat in Spain, but their songs were usually more politi- cal than rock and roll.) A few rockers from non-English speaking countries sang in English, trying to enter the international market. The Spanish group Los Bravos had an interna- tional hit in 1966 with “Black is Black,” but the only one of these groups to become a major international sensation was Abba from Sweden, which had its first hit, “Waterloo,” in 1974.

Youth culture led to the creation of a new concept, the teenager. Invented in the United States, it arrived in Europe in the mid-1950s. In West Germany, the term, in English, was first used to describe female fans of Elvis Presley, but was soon applied to all young women. Youth culture also provoked con- cerned, often hysterical, responses from older Europeans. The Paris newspaper Le Figaro responded to the Concert des Nations with, “What difference is there between the twist . . . and Hitler’s speeches in the Reichstag, apart from the leaning toward music?” And when Elvis Presley toured Europe, com- mentators described the audiences as “wild barbarians in ecstasy” and “haunted medicine men of a jungle tribe governed only by music” (Poiger, 1996).

May 1968 The emerging youth culture also contained a significant element of alienation from older generations. This was nicely captured by one young Dutchman when he described his parents’ Saturday evenings when he was off at “happenings” in Central Amsterdam:

[They] were watching the TV with their left eyes and the cars in front of the houses with their right, seated on refrigerators and washing machines, with mixers in the one hand and copies of [the conservative newspaper] De Telegraaf in the other, and the children went to the Spui.” (Collin, B., 2009, p. 1)

There were also more specific complaints. In the mid-1960s, university students began to emerge as a political group. Access to higher education had increased significantly, but this had been done without making major investments in universities. As a result, facili- ties were poor and overcrowded. In addition, universities remained extremely hierarchi- cal and intellectually old fashioned. Starting in 1965, groups of student radicals, adopting tactics from the Civil Rights movement in the United States, began to stage strikes and sit-ins demanding changes. Many students, led by activists such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945– ) and Rudi Dutschke (1940–1979), from France and West Germany respectively,

French rock idols Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan, 1963.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

saw their demands as part of a broader democratization of society. A sit-in at Berlin’s Free University in June 1966 passed the following resolution:

We are fighting not only for the right to study for a longer period of time and to have a greater voice in expressing our opinions. That is only half of it. We are more concerned that decisions affecting students be made demo- cratically and with student participation. What is going on right now in Berlin is a conflict, like that in society at large . . . it is about dismantling oli- garchic rule and implementing democratic freedom in all areas of society. (Brown, A., p. 1)

The most important—and famous—episode of student radicalism came in May 1968 in Paris. Incidents at the new University of Nanterre, including a threat to discipline Cohn- Bendit for insulting a government minister who was visiting the campus, had led to the organization of a formal Movement. On May 10, students from the Movement occupied the Sorbonne, the city’s historic university, and soon clashed with police. The students were divided politically and their demands were vague; after the initial clash, the govern- ment felt it was safe to withdraw the police and left the students in control of the univer- sity district. However, the events in Paris prompted French workers to engage in a sponta- neous general strike that involved 10 million people and virtually shut down the country. All this took place beyond the control of the political Left, including the Communist Party, which disdained the students as pampered “daddy’s boys.” In the end, the movement

dissipated after a second round of street fighting on May 24–25 and the government won: President de Gaulle called an election that gave him a massive majority.

Although they were the high-water mark of protest in Western Europe and have achieved epic status in the memory of the European left, the events of May 1968 actu- ally accomplished nothing. Other movements such as feminism and environmentalism would have a much greater impact on European society and politics.

Americanization and Anti-Americanism

The most important elements of youth culture, such as jeans and rock and roll, came from the United States. European youth eagerly adopted all things American—movies were also extremely popular—and showed few signs of anti-Americanism until the emergence of opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Older Europeans were another matter, especially if they belonged to the cultural elites, and especially if they were French.

The atmosphere of the student revolt of 1968 was best expressed in the graffiti that appeared in the center of Paris. This one says, “It is forbidden to forbid.”

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.3 Culture

World War II had established the military dominance of the United States; the immediate postwar years established its economic dominance. They would also pres- ent Europeans with another facet of U.S. power, its culture. This was not a matter exclusively, or even primarily, of high culture, although these were the years in which New York supplanted Paris as the international capi- tal of art. “Americanization,” or “Coca-Colaization” as it was also called, referred to the appeal of U.S. popular culture, and even more broadly to an imagined “American way of life” embodied in mass consumption generally as well as in specific products such as Coca Cola. In the view of European elites—and it was a view that was held on both the left and the right—this was an insidious threat to European culture and traditions.

They responded with denunciations of the dan- ger. The United States was a “civilization of bath- tubs and frigidaires,” wrote French poet Louis Aragon in 1951. In 1960, critic Jean-Marie Domen- ach made the following reflection:

Ten years ago we could still look down on the snack bars, the super- markets, the strip-tease houses and the entire acquisitive society. . . . Now all that has more or less taken hold in Europe. . . . The United States is a laboratory exhibiting life forms into which we have entered whether we like it or not. (Kuisel, p. 109)

Three years later, Le Monde, the leading news- paper in France, was much more agitated about the appearance of Coca-Colaization, and in this it had the support of the Communist Party. The following year, only three years after Cuban Mis- sile Crisis and the erection of the Berlin Wall, Maurice Duverger could write that “There is only one imminent danger for Europe”; it was not Communism but “American civilization” (Judt, 2005, p. 353).

The U.S. involvement in Vietnam generated significant anti- American feelings among European youth. This image shows a demonstration in Stockholm in 1971.

Europeans often took and reworked aspects of American culture. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which gave Clint Eastwood his first starring role, was the first of a series of westerns made in Spain by Italian director Sergio Leone.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

Although overshadowed by cultural concerns, there were also worries that Europe risked being colonized economically by the United States. These coincided with a dramatic upsurge in U.S. investment in Europe; from just over $4 billion in 1956 to $24.5 billion in 1970 (Judt, 2005, p. 351). The most notable expression of these fears was Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber ’s bestselling book, The American Challenge (1967). There was a fun- damental difference, however, between Servan-Schreiber ’s attitude toward the United States and that of the critics of U.S. cultural dominance. Where the latter looked down on the U.S. culture, Servan-Schreiber admired the economic developments that made the “American challenge” possible. He also believed that Europeans could fight back. To the question, “What shall we do?” he replied, “In a nutshell, achieve a real economic union and build giant industrial units capable of carrying out a global economic strategy” (Servan-Schreiber, 1967, p. 116). As it turned out, the economic challenge was a transient one. European investment in the United States soon came to equal U.S. investment in Europe, and only four years after publishing his book, Servan-Schreiber would write that “the problem is not any more the American challenge because the Americans have the same problem” (Wallace, 2002, p. 24).

5.4 The Death of European Empire

In 1942, Winston Churchill declared that he had not become the Prime Minister of Great Britain “in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire” (Parker, 1997, p. 300). Political leaders in the other major imperial nations would have echoed that sentiment. Yet, the war had seriously undermined the basis of European imperial rule; the contrast between democratic values in Europe and the maintenance of empire was too great to ignore. By 1965, most of the territories that had been colonies in 1945 were inde- pendent states, and by 1975 only scraps of formal empire remained. (See Figure 5.7.) The once-imposing empires of the European states had disappeared within only thirty years.

Decolonization meant more than the end to formal imperial rule, as important as that was. It also meant “the demolition of a Europe-centered imperial order in which territo- rial empire was interlocked with extra-territorial ‘rights.’ The bases, enclaves, garrisons, gunboats, treaty ports and unequal treaties . . . that littered the Afro-Asian world were as much the expression of this European imperialism as were the colonies” (Darwin, 2007, pp. 441–442). So too was the belief in the racial and cultural superiority of the Europeans; and this also was a casualty of the decolonization process.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

MADAGASCAR 1960

ZANZIBAR 1963

MALAWI 1964

SWAZILAND 1968

LESOTHO 1966

BOTSWANA 1966

ZAMBIA 1964

(United as TANZANIA,

1964)

ATLANTIC OCEAN

INDIAN OCEAN

PACIFIC OCEAN

Independent before 1945

Dependent states, 1968

French

Colonial Affiliations Before 1945

British

Dutch

Belgian

Spanish

Japanese

American

Italian

TANGANYIKA 1961

UGANDA 1962

RWANDA 1962

BURUNDI 1962

CONGO (Kinshasa)

1960

KENYA 1963

Equator

ERITREA (To Ethiopia

1952)

CEYLON 1948

SINGAPORE (From Malaysia, 1965)

INDIA 1947

BRUNEI

PAKISTAN 1947

KUWAIT 1961

LEBANON 1946

CYPRUS 1956

ISRAEL 1946

SYRIA 1946

JORDAN 1946

LIBYA 1951

SUDAN 1956

CHAD 1960

NIGER 1960

NIGERIA 1960

CAMEROON 1960

SIERRA LEONE

1961

GUINEA 1958

GAMBIA 1965

SENEGAL 1960

IVORY COAST

1960

GHANA 1957

TOGO 1960

DAHOMEY 1960

EQ. GUINEA

1960

CONGO (Brazzaville)

1960

GABON 1960

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

1960

UPPER VOLTA

1960

MALI 1960

MAURITANIA 1960

ALGERIA 1962

TUNISIA 1956

MOROCCO 1956

LAOS 1954

CAMBODIA 1954

INDONESIA 1949

PHILIPPINES 1946

ASIA

EUROPE

AFRICA BURMA

1948

KOREA (Divided,

1945)

TAIWAN (To China,

1945)

VIETNAM (Divided,

1954)

1000

1000 2000 Kilometers

2000 Miles

Du Du

D D

BrBr Br

F F

I I

MALAYSIA 1963

SOMALIA 1960

SOUTH YEMEN

1967

This map shows the empires that existed before 1945 and the dates in which the various territories became independent.

Figure 5.7: Empire and decolonization

The Causes of Decolonization

A number of factors combined to end the European empires so rapidly. The first was the impact of the war. In Asia, the initial Japanese military victories over the European impe- rial powers undermined the myth of white superiority and provided new opportunities for local nationalists. In Africa, many colonial subjects fought in the French military; in fact, Africans constituted 9 percent of French military manpower during the war (Ship- way, 2008). In addition to witnessing the barbarism with which Europeans treated each other, many became literate and learned new skills. Wartime demands for food and other commodities from Africa also generated increased exploitation and discontent.

The war also left the imperial powers—Britain, France, and the Netherlands—so depleted that they found it difficult to reassert their control over their empires. In some cases, as with the French in Indochina, they found themselves turning to the United States for assistance.

This points to a third factor: the increased prominence of the United States. The Americans came out of the war as economically and militarily strengthened as the Europeans were depleted, and the U.S. position on colonial questions was crucial. Initially, this position was not sympathetic to empire; President Roosevelt in particular was hostile to European imperial pretensions. In the case of the Netherlands East Indies, U.S. pressure played a major role in forcing the Dutch to allow the colony to become independent.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

With the emergence of the Cold War, however, the anti-imperial position of the United States eroded. After the Communists’ victory in the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the Cold War moved beyond Europe to Asia and then to the rest of the world. As a result, Cold War considerations influenced U.S. attitudes toward movements for national liberation in colonial territories. As historian John Darwin put it, the Cold War turned the United States into “the patron and protector of European empires” (Darwin, 2007, p. 437). At the same time, anticolonial movements, many of which were led by Communists, found supporters in the Soviet Union and China. Many struggles for national liberation were turned into proxy battles of the Cold War.

A fourth factor, one caused by the depredations of the Nazis and the wartime rhetoric of the Allies, was a new, widespread sense that empire and the racial inequality on which it was based were wrong. This new attitude was embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, which proclaimed “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determina- tion of peoples” and “the realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion,” although the Charter also pro- tected domestic racist practices, such as those in the United States, from UN intervention (Charter of the United Nations, June 26, 1945 ). This statement of principles was further strengthened by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1960 Declara- tion on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. This last docu- ment proclaimed that,

The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploita- tion constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights. All peoples have the right to self-determination. . . . Inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying inde- pendence . . . All armed action or repressive measures of all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence. (Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 1960)

Plans for Postwar Empire

Whatever damage the war might have done, the European imperial powers certainly had no intention of surrendering their empires. Even before the war was over, some of them were developing plans to run them on a new basis. The British government made a number of key statements on the future of the Empire during the war, in part driven by recognition of the anti-imperial sentiments of the United States. In July 1943, the Colonial Secretary announced that Britain’s policy was to bring its colonies to “self-government within the framework of the British Empire,” that is, to allow the creation of local govern- ments but not allow colonies to become independent. Britain also undertook to promote the economic and social development of its colonies so they could serve as a market for British goods (Thomas, 2008).

In January 1944, Free French leader Charles de Gaulle summoned a conference of high- ranking officials from the African colonies to discuss the future structure of the French empire—and to make it clear that France fully intended to remain an imperial power. The main conclusion of these discussions was to create a new imperial citizenship that would

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

allow Africans to elect representatives to the future Constituent Assembly. This led to the inclusion in the Constitution of the new Fourth Republic (1946) of a new structure called the French Union. In theory this gave the overseas territories and associated states—as the colonies were renamed—a higher status, but in practice it meant very little. Imperial citi- zenship brought fewer rights than French citizenship, and the amount of power wielded by the local and national assemblies was limited. The French had expected these changes would bind the European-educated elites in the colonies to the reformed empire. They did not: Few accepted a subordinate role in colonial society and most felt frustrated by a lack of economic, professional, or political opportunities.

The Dutch were the least prepared of the colonial powers to deal with the postwar world. On December 6, 1942, Queen Wilhelmina broadcast a statement on imperial policy, but it was intended to appeal to anti-imperial sentiment in the United States. There would, she said, be Commonwealth composed of the Netherlands, Indonesia, Surinam, and Curaçao, although just what this meant in terms of self-government was unclear.

Patterns of Decolonization

The liquidation of European empires after 1945 was far from a monolithic or uniform process. It cannot even be broken down into a series of national patterns, in which, for example, the French acted one way and the Dutch acted another. This is because the impe- rial powers were not the only actors. In each case, they had to engage with local forces that had their own objectives. Once the Cold War went global after 1949, other players—China, the Soviet Union, and the United States—were also often deeply involved. What can be said is that the colonial powers always faced some level of demand for self-determination from the colonized, and that while the level of violence involved in decolonization var- ied greatly, Europeans were frequently prepared to sustain a struggle that was long and costly, in both economic and political terms.

From the Raj to India and Pakistan The outstanding case of an imperial power accepting the independence of one of its colo- nies without a fight was India. The British had begun to introduce some self-government with the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, although they did so in a way that preserved the economic benefits of colonial rule. During this period, the India National Congress led by Gandhi and Nehru emerged as the dominant political voice among Indi- ans, although the Muslim League led by Jinnah won the support of increasing numbers of Muslims.

Indian nationalists were angered when Britain unilaterally declared war against Germany on behalf of India in 1939, and by the failure of the colonial administration to take mea- sures against the devastating Bengal famine of 1943. Congress launched the “Quit India” campaign, calling for civil disobedience as the means of achieving immediate indepen- dence. Gandhi, Nehru, and the rest of the Congress leadership were immediately arrested and not released until World War II ended. By then, the British faced an increasingly intransigent Congress, growing tensions between Muslims and Hindus, and demands for a separate Muslim state. In this context, in February 1947 the British government decided it could not control the situation and announced that it would leave India by the end of

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June 1948. Later, it decided that the colony would be partitioned into two countries: India and Pakistan. In fact, independence came even earlier, on August 15, 1947.

The British abandoned the “jewel in the crown” without using violence, but the way in which they left all but guaranteed that the aftermath would not be peaceful. As many as 14 million people fled to the country of their co-religionists, and anywhere between 200,000 and one million people died in religiously motivated rioting. India would not be the only place to suffer serious conflict between religious or ethnic groups following the end of British imperial rule; the situation in Palestine and Cyprus was similar.

The Middle East World War I had laid the bases for the modern Middle East (see chapter 2). The complex situation created by Britain’s contradictory promises to the Arabs and Jews and its control of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate exploded in the aftermath of World War II.

The British had planned to create a state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority, but this proved impossible to realize. First, it required limiting Jewish immigration. But their attempts to impose controls were not entirely successful, especially when faced with large numbers of illegal immigrants after World War II. Second, the activities of Jewish terror- ist groups such as the Irgun Zvai, including bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British administration had its headquarters, made the British position increas- ingly untenable. The British eventually gave up and, in February 1947, passed the prob- lem to the United Nations. When the UN recommended a partition, the British announced they were leaving Palestine by August 1948. The state of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, and this produced an attack by the Arab states. The Arab-Israeli War ended with a series of armistices in the spring of 1949, but only after Israel had seized some of the territory that the UN had designated for a Palestinian state and some 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled.

One of the by-products of these events was to strengthen Pan-Arab nationalism and produce a new nationalist hero, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970). For Nasser, who came to power following a revolution against King Farouk in 1952, the British base at Suez and for- eign ownership of the Suez Canal, which links the Mediterranean and Red Seas, were major humiliations. In July 1956, he announced that he was nationalizing the Canal. Although the United States made it clear that it opposed a military response, Britain conspired with France and Israel to do just that. On October 29, Israel attacked Egypt, which was the cue for Britain and France to intervene, officially to “separate the combat- ants” but in fact to take back the Canal and get

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s defiance of France and Great Britain made him a hero of the Arab world. Here he gives a press conference after nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

rid of Nasser. Before they could do this, though, the British withdrew in the face of U.S. threats, leaving Nasser the hero of the Arab world. The Suez Crisis also led to the creation of the first ever United Nations peacekeeping force, which arrived on November 15 and acted as a buffer between the Egyptians and Israelis.

From the Netherlands East Indies to Indonesia Before World War II began, the Governor General of the Netherlands East Indies had dis- missed blithely nationalist pretensions: “We, the Dutch have been here for three hundred years; it will be another three hundred before we are gone” (Poddar, 2008, p. 342). The war changed everything. The Japanese rapidly defeated the Dutch and took control of the colony in March 1942. They received an enthusiastic welcome. The great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was seventeen when the Japanese arrived in his hometown, later recalled that “with the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone in the town was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch” (Vickers, 2005, p. 85).

In some respects, the enthusiasm was well placed. The Japanese had posed as the cham- pions of all Asians against European and American dominance and racial prejudice. They delivered. The Dutch military forces were put in detention camps, and they were soon joined by up to 100,000 Dutch civilians. Government administration was purged, with Japanese and Indonesians replacing the Dutch. The use of the Dutch language was banned; in the schools it was replaced with Japanese and on the radio with Malay. Racial discrimination, which had been an integral part of the colonial system, was ended so that facilities such as hotels and cinemas were now open to the locals. Perhaps most signifi- cant—and symbolic—of all, Europeans were made to perform menial tasks in public.

In other respects, Japanese rule was simply another form of colonialism. The success of their war effort was the overriding goal of the occupation, and this meant that many Indo- nesians suffered. Hundreds of thousands of men were drafted to forced labor; some were sent to other countries. Indonesian women wound up as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. The economy was also subordinated to Japanese needs, and parts of Indonesia suffered mass hunger: In Java more than 2 million people died of starvation. No wonder Ananta Toer also wrote, “There was a bad smell about the whole thing, a stench that rose from the bodies of the Japanese soldiers” (Vickers, 2005, p. 85).

But Indonesian nationalists benefitted from the occupation, taking full advantage of Japa- nese permission to travel and give speeches, so long as they emphasized that they were contributing to the Japanese war effort. Japanese rule also provided new opportunities for military training, as they promoted the creation of militias and, after October 1943, the 37,000-man Indonesian Auxiliary Army. Starting in September 1944, the Indonesian flag and national anthem were allowed and the Barisan Pelopor, a new paramilitary youth organization—this one openly nationalist rather than simply pro-Japanese—was created.

Across the region, Japanese policy was to create nominally independent states that would remain under their control, but they moved more slowly in Indonesia than elsewhere. In fact, it was only in the spring of 1945 that they began to act seriously, authorizing an Inde- pendence Preparatory Committee to discuss a constitution for the new state. The slow- ness with which the Japanese acted ultimately proved beneficial to Indonesian nationalists.

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Independence from the hand of Japan would have given them very little legitimacy in the eyes of the Allies. When Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender on August 15, the Allies were still far away; the first landing did not take place until September 30. Under the terms of surrender, the Japanese were supposed to maintain order, but for six weeks there was effectively a power vacuum. Indonesian nationalists moved quickly to fill it: On August 17, only two days after Japan’s surrender, Achmed Sukarno, the leading nationalist figure, read the Proclamasi, the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Indonesia, over the radio.

What followed demonstrated how much the world had changed since 1939. The Dutch fought back and by mid-1947 had retaken control of much of their former colony. The United Nations organized negotiations between the Dutch and Indonesian governments under the leadership of the United States, but these failed to produce a lasting agree- ment. The Dutch fought on but were unable to defeat the guerrilla forces of the Indone- sian government. As the conflict dragged on, the United States, whose anti-imperialism was now supplemented by its Cold War fear of communism, put increasing pressure on the Dutch, both directly—including threatening to cut off Marshall Plan money—and through the United Nations. The Dutch finally agreed to negotiations under UN aus- pices. This Round Table Conference led to Dutch recognition of Indonesian indepen- dence in December 1949.

From French Indochina to Vietnam The situation in French Indochina was similar in many ways to that in the Netherlands East Indies: Japanese occupation and creation of a puppet regime; the declaration of inde- pendence by a nationalist movement after the defeat of Japan, and the attempt by the imperial power to retain its colony by force. There was one major difference, however, one which would cause the conflict in Vietnam to go on for thirty years instead of only four: The Vietnamese struggle for national liberation would quickly become connected to the Cold War in Asia. This meant that when the Vietnamese defeated the French militarily, the United States stepped in to continue the conflict.

The Japanese occupied French Indochina in June 1941 but allowed a French administra- tion loyal to Vichy to remain in place. Then, in March 1945, they created a nominally inde- pendent Vietnam and put its historic ruler, Emperor Bao Dai, in charge. (The Japanese did the same in Cambodia and Laos.) When the Japanese were forced to withdraw, Vietnam was occupied, as decided at the Potsdam conference, by the Chinese in the north and the British in the south, with the 16th parallel as the dividing line.

A strong Vietnamese resistance movement had developed during the Japanese occupa- tion. The Vietminh, as it was known, was created in May 1941 at the impetus of the Indo- china Communist Party as a broad front organization to fight for national independence. In the power vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, the Vietminh leader, Ho Chi Minh, proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) based in Hanoi on August 29, 1945.

For its part, France was determined to maintain its rule over Indochina. In September 1945 a small French military force arrived to undertake what historian A. J. Stockwell has called “the second colonial occupation” of Southeast Asia (Thomas, 2008). The DRV government

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negotiated with France, but it was not prepared to accept any arrangement that under- mined real independence or the unity of Vietnam. The French, on the other hand, were not prepared to abandon the southern region they called Cochin-China, with its capital in Saigon. Skirmishes between French and DRV forces went on throughout most of 1946 and then, on December 19, the Franco-Vietnamese War formally began.

At first, the United States remained neutral, but once Communist China started assisting the DRV in 1950, it provided military assistance to France. The French proved unable deal with the “three stage process of anticolonial warfare” the DRV adapted from the Chinese: The Vietnamese Communists “first adopted a defensive military posture, while at the same time consolidating their political grip on Vietnam’s rural population. Second, they built up their military and economic strength in readiness for decisive combat.” In the third phase, guerrilla war gave way to “more conventional military encounter-battles” (Thomas, 2008, p. 184).

The war cost France 10 percent of its government budget between 1945 and 1954, and as it dragged on, the French public became increasingly disenchanted (Thomas, 2008, p. 418). On March 30, 1954, DRV forces attacked the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu and forced its surrender on May 7. This was a huge defeat for France. While the siege was taking place, an international conference on the Vietnamese situation opened in Geneva. The key players were the foreign ministers of China, Great Britain, and the United States, and they produced an agreement that recognized DRV’s control of the country above the 17th parallel but also the existence of a South Vietnam below it.

The Geneva Accords ended the war between the DRV and France, but it did not end the conflict in Vietnam. They provided for a temporary division of the country into North and South with elections to reunite the country to be held soon. The United States refused to sign the accords and refused to cooperate in the elections, fearing that the Commu- nists would win. The Americans soon found themselves directly involved in the conflict between North and South Vietnam, first by sending military advisors to the government of the South and then increasing numbers of troops. This phase of the Vietnam War, what the Vietnamese call the Resistance War against America, lasted until the North Vietnam- ese captured Saigon on April 30, 1975, and finally achieved the united Vietnam for which they had fought since 1941.

Algeria In 1945, France’s empire included the three North African territories of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. By 1956, the first two had become independent states following a “stop-start story of negotiation, protest and eventual compromise” that included relatively little violence (Thomas, 2008, p. 225). The story in Algeria was very different. Algeria was made part of metropolitan France and not a colony. Unique within its empire, Algeria attracted large numbers of French settlers, more than one million by 1957. This influx was accompanied by the widespread dispossession of the native population of its land. Independence would come only after a war that lasted almost eight years, claimed per- haps a million lives, was marked by extreme brutality on both sides, and ended France’s Fourth Republic and brought the country to the verge of civil war. The Algerians call the conflict that lasted from 1954 to 1962 the Algerian Revolution; the French have called it many things but did not call it a war until 1995. It was, in the words of historian Alistair

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Horne, “a prototype of the modern war of national liberation,” one in which “a hand- ful of Algerian guerrillas, primitively armed but masterfully deploying the weapon of terror, outwitted and outfought over eight years the best armies France could provide” (Horne, 2006, p. 13).

The War The war began on November 1, 1954, with terrorist attacks carried out by a new national- ist organization called the National Liberation Front (FLN). At the same time as it fought the French, the FLN also carried on a savage war against other Algerian groups and employed brutal methods, what has been called “compliance terrorism,” to command the obedience of Muslim communities. Women came to play important roles for the FLN, including planting bombs and carrying supplies in the cities. The French responded with vicious reprisals. The government soon authorized the sending of conscript soldiers to Algeria, and by the end of 1956 there were almost 500,000 French troops on the ground. French security forces adopted practices such as the execution of civilians without trial and widespread torture. These activities, which some compared to what the Germans had done during their occupation of France, only added to the disillusion and war weariness of the French public.

A revolt by settlers and some generals against French government in Algiers in May 1958 trig- gered a political crisis that led to Charles de Gaulle being made Prime Minister and, in September, a referendum that approved the constitution of the new Fifth Republic. The next month, de Gaulle offered to negotiate with the FLN, although actual negotiations would not start until June 1960. A referendum held in January 1961 showed that 75 percent of voters supported granting inde- pendence to Algeria. Negotiations concluded in March 1962, and on July 3 Algeria became inde- pendent. In the meantime, de Gaulle had to deal with an attempted coup by generals in Algiers in April 1961 and the campaign of random mur- ders carried out by the Secret Army Organization (OAS). The OAS would also try a number of times to assassinate de Gaulle. Another consequence of

Algerian independence was that some 650,000 white settlers fled from Algeria to France, as did 130,000 harkis (Algerian soldiers who had fought for France) and their families.

Frantz Fanon The Algerian conflict produced one of the most original and influential analysis of the costs of imperialism. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a French-trained psychiatrist who had been born on the colony of Martinique. During World War II he volunteered for de Gaulle’s Free French forces; afterwards, he studied psychiatry and eventually came to be head of psychiatry at a hospital in Algeria. This gave him a particular place from which to observe the cruelties of the Algerian war and the damage it inflicted.

An Algerian soldier in the French military guards a group of captured FLN soldiers.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

As a French-educated colonial, a so-called évolué, Fanon should have been an imperial success story. Instead, he became a committed enemy of imperialism. He had experienced racism in France itself, which led him to write his first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952). The shock of that experience was only exacerbated by the tales of torture he heard from his patients in Algeria. This led him to resign his position and join the FLN, which sent him to Ghana as its ambassador. While there, he was diagnosed with leukemia. It was during his unsuccessful fight with the disease that he wrote The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon recognized the economic exploitation that colonialism brought, but his original- ity lay in bringing his psychiatric training to bear on the issue. In his view, colonial rule caused immense psychological damage; it produced “a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny to the other person all attributes of humanity. [C]olonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly ‘In reality, who am I?’ ” The result was what he called a “colonized personality . . . a regular and important mental pathology” (Fanon, 1963, pp. 250–251). The only cure for such dam- age was violence. This was “a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority com- plex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (Fanon, 1963, p. 94). The anticolonial struggle, like the one being carried on in Algeria, would be, he believed, the source of this necessary healing violence.

The Belgian Congo During the “Scramble for Africa,” the Belgian Congo became notorious for its especially brutal exploitation of the African population (see chapter 1). During the era of decoloniza- tion, it was the site of an unusual form of transfer of power, what Jan Steggers has called “precipitous decolonization,” as well as of the first proxy battle of the Cold War (Thomas, 2008, p. 385).

Belgium made the decision to grant independence to the Congo almost from one day to the next. Riots in the capital of Leopoldville in January 1959 led the Belgian government to act very quickly. By the beginning of 1960, a constitution had been drafted and indepen- dence came six months later.

The Congo was particularly unprepared for independence. The Belgians had done almost nothing to develop the kind of indigenous elite that existed in French Africa. There were two universities in the colony, but by June 1960 only 16 Congolese had graduated from them (Thomas, 2008, p. 386). In addition, the Belgians had ruled the vast territory and diverse peoples of the Congo by manipulating ethnic differences, a strategy they also employed in their other African colonies, Rwanda and Burundi. In this context, the Belgians expected that they would retain an important role in government administration and the police.

Independent Congo quickly descended into civil war. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba wanted to create a unified country with socialistic policies. In July 1960, Moise Tshombe, with the support of international mining concerns, declared the resource-rich province of Katanga independent. The United States, which saw Lumumba as a potential Soviet ally, also provided support to Tshombe and, with Belgium, was involved in the assassination of Lumumba. The Congolese crisis would end only in 1965, when Joseph Mobutu staged a military coup. A strong Cold War ally of the United States, Mobutu would rule the coun- try, which he renamed Zaire, until his death in 1997.

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CHAPTER 5Section 5.4 The Death of European Empire

Portugal: The Last Empire Portugal was the exception among imperial powers, as it chose to fight to the death to defend all its colonies. Not only did it lose, but the strain of waging three colonial wars brought revolution to Portugal itself.

The Salazar regime, which governed Portugal from 1933 until 1974, tied the country’s economy and its national identity to the maintenance of its three African colonies: Angola, Guiné-Bissau, and Mozambique. It even declared them to be “overseas provinces” of Por- tugal. While other European nations changed their imperial policies after 1945 to promote economic development and political integration of colonial peoples, Portuguese policy continued practices of racial discrimination and forced labor.

When revolts broke out in Angola (1961), Guiné-Bissau (1963), and Mozambique (1964), the Portuguese government responded with military force. Portugal was strong enough to prevent the guerrillas from winning but not strong enough to defeat them. This stand- off came at a very high price: By the 1970s, the wars were eating up about half the govern- ment’s budget, and conscription for service in Africa was leading many young Portuguese men to flee the country. Even so, Salazar refused to consider any significant concessions, even when pressured by the United States.

Eventually, these never-ending conflicts gener- ated opposition within the Portuguese officer corps. This led to the creation of a loose organiza- tion called the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). On April 25, 1974, the MFA staged a coup against Salazar’s successor, Marcelo Caetano, who handed power to General Antonio Spinola, the former commander in Guiné-Bissau who had published a book critical of the government’s policy. This “rev- olution of the Carnations” as it became known for the way in which people in Lisbon gave flowers to the soldiers carrying it out, eventually led to nego- tiated independence for the three colonies.

The conflict in Portuguese Africa could not escape the tentacles of the global Cold War. In both Angola and Mozambique, there were rival nationalist movements, one backed by the United States, the other backed by the Soviet Union. Angola was the stage for a bloody proxy war between one side whose army had a large number of Cuban troops and the other equipped by the United States and South Africa. The pro-Communist MPLA won the first round, but Angola would experience almost 20 more years of civil war and foreign intervention.

Union members in the southern Portuguese village of Serpa demonstrate in favor of the government’s decision to end the colonial war. July 31, 1974.

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CHAPTER 5Chapter Summary

Conclusion

Europe had come out of World War II divided between U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence. It had also endured economic devastation and saw global economic—and cultural—leadership pass to the United States. Its claims to continual colonial rule came under immediate attack, and within thirty years, Europe’s empires were but a memory. Despite this unpromising beginning and this major decline in its place in the world, Europe, or at least the western part, not only recovered economically, it entered into a period of unprecedented prosperity and, through the welfare state, provided its citizens with greater well-being and security than they had ever known. Six Western Euro- pean states also began a trailblazing experiment in cooperation with the creation of the European Economic Community.

Chapter Summary

The Division of Europe and the Cold War • After World War II, Europe was divided into spheres of influence with the

United States dominating the West and the Soviet Union dominating the East. • The two superpowers engaged in a cold war as each believed the other was out

to achieve global dominance. • The Soviet Union imposed its Stalinist system of government on its satellite

countries. Soviet rule generated opposition and even occasional revolt, as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

• The United States resisted Communist expansion outside Eastern Europe. Through the Marshall Plan, it helped rebuild the economies of Western Europe and reduce the appeal of communism there.

• The Soviet Union and its satellites experienced economic growth and major improvements in health, literacy, and education; but they remained poorer than Western Europe.

The Golden Age of European Capitalism • Western European economies recovered rapidly after 1945 and experienced

nearly 30 years of unprecedented prosperity. • The availability of plentiful, inexpensive labor provided by immigration was an

important factor in this prosperity. • Full employment and rising real wages led to the emergence of mass consump-

tion, including mass tourism. • All European countries created welfare states that contributed to the increased

quality of life of their citizens and decreasing inequality within their societies.

Culture • Existentialism and the Theatre of the Absurd were two of the main cultural

responses to World War II. • Until the late 1960s, the Holocaust did not have a significant place in European

cultural consciousness.

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CHAPTER 5End-of-Chapter Review

• A fully fledged youth culture emerged in Europe in the late 1950s. Its main fea- tures were personal appearance, music, and alienation from older generations.

• American popular culture became increasingly influential, and many elite Euro- peans responded with anti-American attitudes.

The Death of European Empire • European empires collapsed very quickly after World War II. • There was no single pattern to decolonization. In some cases, the imperial power

abandoned a colony without significant resistance; in others, it fought long and costly wars to retain colonies.

• During World War II and immediately after, the United States had opposed the maintenance of European empires. With the emergence of the Cold War it changed its policy and even provided military support to fight against liberation movements.

End-of-Chapter Review

1. Which political leader is associated with the “Iron Curtain” speech?

a. Franklin Roosevelt b. Harry Truman c. Joseph Stalin d. Winston Churchill

2. The Truman Doctrine was especially associated with the situation in

a. Yugoslavia b. Poland c. Greece and Turkey d. Germany

3. NATO is the acronym for a military alliance between the

a. United States and China, directed against Russia b. United States and Israel, directed against the Arab countries c. United States and a number of European countries, directed against Russia d. United States and a number of Latin American countries, directed against Cuba

4. De-Stalinization is most closely associated with what Russian leader?

a. Brezhnev b. Khrushchev c. Beria d. Trotsky

5. Which country witnessed an anti-Soviet revolt in 1956?

a. Yugoslavia b. Czechoslovakia c. Poland d. Hungary

Answers: 1) d, 2) c, 3) c, 4) b, 5) d

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CHAPTER 5Web Links

Thought Questions

• Why was there a cold war after the end of World War II? • What were the major actions of the United States during the Cold War? • What factors contributed to Western Europe’s economic prosperity? • Why did the process of European unification begin? • What were the main features of European culture after 1945? • How important was the Holocaust in this period? • Why did the European powers lose their empires so quickly after 1945? • Did decolonization take place the same way everywhere?

Web Links

The Long Telegram Moscow-based U.S. diplomat George Kennan sent this telegram in February 1946. It was the most influential document of the early days of the Cold War. It was published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” www.historyguide.org/europe/kennan.html

The Schuman Plan This speech delivered by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman on May 9, 1950, marked the beginning of the process of European unification. http://aei.pitt.edu/14363/1/S3.pdf

The Secret Speech Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev shocked delegates to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the USSR when he denounced Joseph Stalin and his crimes on February 25, 1956. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/krushchev-secret.asp (excerpts) www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/26/greatspeeches2 (complete)

The Berlin Wall A correspondent for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung published this descrip- tion of the building of the Berlin Wall on August 14, 1961. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=822

The Welfare State This report prepared by Sir William Beveridge in 1942 became the basis of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain. www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1942beveridge.asp

The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist-based book on relations between men and women became a major influence on second-wave feminists. www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

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www.historyguide.org/europe/kennan.html

http://aei.pitt.edu/14363/1/S3.pdf

www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/krushchev-secret.asp

www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/26/greatspeeches2

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=822

www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1942beveridge.asp

www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

CHAPTER 5Key Terms

Ho Chi Minh Declares Independence for Vietnam In a radio broadcast on September 2, 1945, Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of his country from French imperial rule. http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/declar.html www.youtube.com/watch?v=bziqub19h-E (audio in Vietnamese)

Key Terms

Berlin Airlift Airlift of supplies organized by Western powers in 1948 to counter Soviet attempts to cut off West Berlin.

Brezhnev Doctrine Policy announced by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev after Rus- sian suppression of Czech unrest in 1968 that Russia would intervene in the Eastern Bloc to prevent developments that threat- ened Russian control there.

De-Stalinization Post-1956 developments in the Soviet Union exposing the crimes of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and eas- ing of such political controls and abuses.

Cold War The intense hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II, which fell short of actual fighting.

Golden Age of European Capital- ism Period of great prosperity and eco- nomic growth between 1945 and 1973.

Iron Curtain Term used by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a famous 1946 speech that suggested that Soviet- dominated Eastern Europe was being cut off culturally and politically from the rest of the world.

Marshall Plan U.S. policy first announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 to provide massive economic assis- tance to help Europe rebuild after World War II.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military alliance signed by the United States and many European countries in 1948 to provide a united anti-Soviet front.

Treaty of Rome 1957 agreement that provided key basis for formation of today’s European Union by eliminating tariff barriers between six Western Euro- pean countries.

Truman Doctrine Policy announced by President Truman in 1947 that the United States would provide military and other assistance to countries coming under inter- nal or external pressure from subversive (i.e., Communist) sources, first applied to Greece and Turkey.

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http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/declar.html