Postwar

the stability of the rest of the Bloc, at least for the next decade. But this came at a cost. For most people living under Communism, the ‘Socialist’ system had lost whatever radical, forward-looking, utopian promise once attached to it, and which had been part of its appeal—especially to the young—as recently as the early fifties. It was now just a way of life to be endured. That did not mean it could not last a very long time—few after 1956 anticipated an early end to the Soviet system of rule. Indeed, there had been rather more optimism on that score before the events of that year. But after November 1956 the Communist states of Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union itself, began their descent into a decades-long twilight of stagnation, corruption and cynicism.

The Soviets too would pay a price for this—in many ways, 1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs. As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956… will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orban, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.’

X. The Age of Affluence

‘Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good’.

Harold Macmillan, July 20th 1957

‘Admass is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man’.

J. B. Priestley

‘Look at these people! Primitives!’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Lucania.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Down at the bottom!’

Rocco and His Brothers, dir. Luchino Visconti (1960)

‘We’re going where the sun shines brightly,
We’re going where the sea is blue.
We’ve seen it in the movies—
Now let’s see if it’s true.’

Cliff Richard, from Summer Holiday (1959)

‘It’s pretty dreary living in the American age—unless of course you’re American’.

Jimmy Porter, in Look Back in Anger (1956)

In 1979, the French writer Jean Fourastie published a study of the social and economic transformation of France in the thirty years following World War Two. Its title—Les trente glorieuses: ou, La Revolution invisible de 1946 a 1975—was well chosen. In Western Europe the three decades following Hitler’s defeat were indeed ‘glorious’. The remarkable acceleration of economic growth was accompanied by the onset of an era of unprecedented prosperity. In the space of a single generation, the economies of continental Western Europe made good the ground lost in forty years of war and Depression, and European economic performance and patterns of consumption began to resemble those of the US. Less than a decade after staggering uncertainly out of the rubble, Europeans entered, to their amazement and with some consternation, upon the age of affluence.

The economic history of post-war western Europe is best understood as an inversion of the story of the immediately preceding decades. The 1930s Malthusian emphasis on protection and retrenchment was abandoned in favor of liberalized trade. Instead of cutting their expenditure and budgets, governments increased them. Almost everywhere there was a sustained commitment to long-term public and private investment in infrastructure and machinery; older factories and equipment were updated or replaced, with attendant gains in efficiency and productivity; there was a marked increase in international trade; and an employed and youthful population demanded and could afford an expanding range of goods.

The post-war economic ‘boom’ differed slightly in its timing from place to place, coming first to Germany and Britain and only a little later to France and Italy; and it was experienced differently according to national variations in taxation, public expenditure or investment emphasis. The initial outlays of most post-war governments went above all on infrastructure modernization—the building or upgrading of roads, railways, houses and factories. Consumer spending in some countries was deliberately held back, with the result—as we have seen—that many people experienced the first post-war years as a time of continuing, if modified, penury. The degree of relative change also depended, of course, on the point of departure: the wealthier the country, the less immediate and dramatic it seemed.

Nevertheless, every European country saw steadily growing rates of per capita GDP and GNP—Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product—the newly sanctified measures of national strength and well-being. In the course of the 1950s, the average annual rate at which per capita national output grew in West Germany was 6.5 percent; in Italy 5.3 percent; in France 3.5 percent. The significance of such high and sustained growth rates is best appreciated when they are compared with the same countries’ performance in earlier decades: in the years 1913-1950 the German growth rate per annum was just 0.4 percent, the Italian 0.6 percent, the French 0.7 percent. Even in the prosperous decades of the Wilhelminian Empire after 1870, the German economy had only managed an annual average of 1.8 percent.

By the 1960s the rate of increase began to slow down, but the western European economies still grew at historically unusual levels. Overall, between 1950 and 1973, German GDP per head of the population more than tripled in real terms. GDP per head in France grew by 150 percent. The Italian economy, starting from a lower base, did even better. Historically poor countries saw their economic performance improve spectacularly: between 1950 and 1973 per capita GDP in Austria rose from $3,731 to $11,308 (in 1990 dollars); in Spain from $2,397 to $8,739. The Dutch economy grew by 3.5 percent each year from 1950-1970— seven times the average annual growth rate for the preceding forty years.

A major contributory factor in this story was the sustained increase in overseas trade, which grew much faster than overall national output in most European countries. Merely by removing impediments to international commerce, the governments of the post-war West went a long way towards overcoming the stagnation of