Postwar

XXIII. The Varieties of Europe

‘We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing wildly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand’.

Thomas Carlyle

‘The Creator of Europe made her small and even split her up into little parts, so that our hearts could find joy not in size but in plurality’.

Karel Capek

‘In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans’.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

When Communism fell and the Soviet Union imploded, they took with them not just an ideological system but the political and geographical coordinates of an entire continent. For forty-five years—beyond the living memory of most Europeans—the uneasy outcome of World War Two had been frozen in place. The accidental division of Europe, with all that it entailed, had come to seem inevitable. And now it had been utterly swept away. In retrospect the post-war decades took on a radically altered significance. Once understood as the onset of a new era of permanent ideological polarization they now appeared for what they were: an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution of the unfinished business left behind by his war.

With the disappearance of the world of 1945-1989, its illusions came into better focus. The much-heralded ‘economic miracle’ of post-war Western Europe had returned the region to the standing in world trade and output that it had lost in the course of the years 1914-45, with rates of economic growth subsequently settling back into levels broadly comparable to those of the late nineteenth century. This was no small achievement, but it was not quite the breakthrough into infinitely incremental prosperity that contemporaries had once fondly supposed.

Moreover, the recovery had been achieved not in spite of the Cold War but because of it. Like the Ottoman threat in an earlier time, the shadow of the Soviet empire shrank Europe but imposed upon the surviving rump the benefits of unity. In the absence of the imprisoned Europeans to their east the citizens of western Europe had flourished: free of any obligation to address the poverty and backwardness of the successor states to the old continental empires and secured by the American military umbrella against the political backwash of the recent past. Viewed from the East this was always tunnel vision. After the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet empire, it could no longer be sustained.

On the contrary. The happy cocoon of post-war Western Europe—with its economic communities and free- trade zones, its reassuring external alliances and redundant internal frontiers—seemed suddenly vulnerable, called upon to respond to the frustrated expectations of would-be ‘Euro-citizens’ to its East and no longer anchored to a self-evident relationship with the great power across its western ocean. Constrained once again to acknowledge their continent’s broad eastern marches when sketching a common European future, Western Europeans were perforce drawn back into the common European past.

As a consequence, the years 1945-1989 took on a parenthetical quality. Open warfare between states, a constituent feature of the European way of life for three hundred years, had reached apocalyptic levels between 1913 and 1945: some sixty million Europeans died in wars or state-sponsored killing in the first half of the twentieth century. But from 1945 to 1989 inter-state war disappeared from the continent of Europe.[385] Two generations of Europeans grew up under the hitherto inconceivable impression that peace was the natural order of things. As an extension of politics, war (and ideological confrontation) was outsourced to the so-called Third World.

That said, it is worth recalling that while remaining at peace with their neighbors the Communist states practiced a distinctive form of permanent warfare upon their own societies: mostly in the form of rigorous censorship, enforced shortages and repressive policing but occasionally breaking into open conflict—notably in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968 and in Poland sporadically from 1968 to 1981 and under martial law thereafter. In Eastern Europe the post-war decades thus appear rather different in collective memory (though no less parenthetical). But compared with what had gone before, Eastern Europe too had lived through an age of unusual, albeit involuntary, calm.

Whether the post-World War Two era, now fast retreating into memory with the onset of new world (dis-) orders, would become an object of nostalgic longing and regret depended very much on where and when you were born. From both sides of the Iron Curtain the children of the Sixties—i.e. the core cohort of the baby-boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1951—certainly looked back with affection upon ‘their’ decade and continued to harbour fond memories and an exaggerated sense of its significance. And in the West, at least, their parents remained grateful for the political stability and material security of the era, contrasted with the horrors that had gone before.

But those too young to recall the Sixties were often resentful of the solipsistic self-aggrandizement of its ageing memorialists; while many older people who had lived out their lives under Communism recalled not just secure jobs, cheap rents and safe streets but also and above all a grey landscape of wasted talents and blighted hopes. And on both sides of the divide there were limits to what could be recovered from the rubble of twentieth- century history. Peace, prosperity and security, to be sure; but the optimistic convictions of an earlier age were gone for good.

Before he committed suicide in 1942 the Viennese novelist and critic Stefan Zweig wrote longingly of the lost world of pre-1914 Europe, expressing ‘pity for those who were not young during those last years of confidence’. Sixty years later, at the end of the twentieth century, almost everything else had been recovered or rebuilt. But the confidence with which Zweig’s generation of Europeans entered the century could never be entirely recaptured: too much had happened. Inter-war Europeans recalling the Belle Epoque might murmur ‘if only’; but in the aftermath of World War Two the overwhelming sentiment among anyone reflecting on the continent’s thirty-year catastrophe had been ‘never again’.[386]

In short, there was no way back. Communism in Eastern Europe had been the wrong answer to a real question. That same question in Western Europe—how to overcome the catastrophe of the first half of the twentieth century—had been addressed by setting recent history aside altogether, recapitulating some of the successes of the second half of the nineteenth century—domestic political stability, increased economic productivity and a steady expansion in foreign trade—and labeling them ‘Europe’. After 1989, however, prosperous, post-political Western Europe was faced once again with its eastern twin and ‘Europe’ had to be rethought.

The prospect of abandoning the cocoon was not universally welcomed, as we have seen, and writing in March 1993 for the Polish journal Polityka Jacek Kuron did not exaggerate when he surmised that ‘certain Western political figures are nostalgic for the old world order and the USSR’. But that ‘old world order’—the familiar stasis of the past four decades—was gone forever. Europeans were now confronted not just with an uncertain future but also with a rapidly changing past. What had recently been very straightforward was now, once again, becoming rather complicated. The end of the twentieth century saw half a billion people on the western promontory of the Eurasian land mass increasingly taken up with the interrogation of their own identity. Who are Europeans? What does it mean to be European? What is Europe—and what kind of a place do Europeans want it to be?

There is little to be gained by seeking to distill the essence of ‘Europe’. The ‘Idea of Europe’—itself a much debated topic—has a long history, some of it quite reputable. But although a certain ‘idea’ of Europe—reiterated in assorted conventions and treaties—informs the Union to which most Europeans now belong, it offers only a very partial insight into the life they lead there. In an age of demographic transition and resettlement, today’s