The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973 Author(S): Martin Conway Source: Contemporary European History, Vol
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The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973 Author(s): Martin Conway Source: Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 67-88 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081192 . Accessed: 08/12/2014 10:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary European History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 163.1.208.155 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 10:43:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Rise and Fall ofWestern Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973 MARTIN CONWAY Postwar western Europe has long been le plat pays of the historiography of Europe in the twentieth century. Survey histories of Europe's evolution during the twentieth century tend to pass over almost in embarrassed silence the history of this least remarkable period of Europe's twentieth century, preferring to dwell instead on periods both more murderous and more interesting.1 There was indeed something almost unnaturally calm about the history of much of western Europe from the terminus of the conflicts produced within and around the Second World War in 1948-9 to the re-emergence of socioeconomic conflict and political contestation in were course to the late 1960s and the early 1970s. There of many exceptions this rule: the demise of the French Fourth Republic amidst the disintegration of state authority in Algeria, the artificially glacial character of politics in the Iberian peninsula and the persistent undercurrents of sociopolitical violence in Italy.Nevertheless, they do not, I believe, detract significantly from what should be the primary focus of historians of western must be to of postwar Europe. This explain the particular muted character western Europe in the roughly twenty-five year period from the end of the 1940s to the early 1970s. This essay is therefore intended to explore in a highly schematic form some of the ways in which historians might choose to approach this period. My own approach arises from the archival work that I have been undertaking for a forthcoming study of in It Belgian politics the immediate postwar era.2 also reflects, however, my evolving interest in the broader nature of western which I in postwar Europe, have explored am to on as I grateful Tom Buchanan for his comments this paper, well as to all those who responded at to it the workshop organised by Gy?rgy P?teri and Contemporary European History at the Collegium Budapest inMarch 2003. 1 See, for example, Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998); Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments. Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown and Company, 2000). Others, notably William Hitchcock's recent book, seem to eschew any interpretation a in favour of predominantly diplomatic history of the age, enlivened by occasional vignettes of social and cultural change in European daily life:William Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: the Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-2002 (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 2 To be published as The Death of Belgium. The Normalization of Politics in aWest European State 1944-47 (2004). Contemporary European History, 13, 1 (2004), pp. 67-88 ? 2004 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0960777303001474 Printed in the United Kingdom This content downloaded from 163.1.208.155 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 10:43:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 Contemporary European History a number of recent articles. This work arises at least in part from my dissatisfaction with the way in which the history of this period has been conceptualised in much recent historiography, which seems to me to be characterised by two somewhat contradictory trends. On one to or even the hand, historians have sought explain, excuse, what they regard as the 'strange' stability of postwar western Europe in terms of the absence of the forces that otherwise serve to make the history of twentieth-century Europe In is an on interesting. particular, there inevitable tendency the part of those many at era from a historians who arrive their study of the postwar much greater familiarity with the preceding era to emphasise the absence of the social and ideological dialectics that had generated extremist movements of left and right inmuch of Europe between 1900 and 1945. Fascism and the other forms of authoritarianism which had become caught up in its tentacles had imploded in the war years, leaving only vague and often traces in was subterranean the history of postwar Europe, while communism forced into a as a of the War and as a pro-Soviet ghetto, partly consequence Cold partly consequence of the success with which the Soviet leadership recaptured control of the disparate European communist parties in the late 1940s.With the marginalisation of these forces, Europe collapsed, partly from exhaustion and partly even from a lack of ideological imagination, into a conformist politics of the centre ground.4 On the other hand, historians have also emphasised the hegemonic power of certain other forces, which it is suggested forced west European politics into a new was and by implication somewhat artificial mould. Foremost among these the sudden and unexpected impact of the Cold War, which resulted in the imposition on non-communist Europe of a US overlordship and a concomitant politics of liberal was democracy and anti-communism.5 The straitjacket of the Cold War reinforced by the no less unpredictable force of postwar economic prosperity. The sudden and on western new sustained impact the populations of Europe of the conquering forces to in of consumerism and welfare capitalism served create, the dismissive phrase of the 3 'Legacies of Exile: The Exile Governments in London and the Politics of Post-War Europe', in Martin Conway and Jos? Gotovitch, eds., Europe in Exile: Refugee Communities in Great Britain, 1940 1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 255?74; 'Democracy in Postwar Western Europe. The a Triumph of Political Model', European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), 59-84; 'The Age of Christian Democracy. The Frontiers of Success and Failure', in Tom Kselman and Joseph Buttigieg, eds., Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 43-67; 'The Greek Civil War: Greek Exceptionalism or Mirror of a European Civil War?', in Philip Carabott and Thanasis Sfikas, eds., Domestic and International Aspects of the Greek Civil War (forthcoming, 2004). 4 This shadow effect of the conflicts of the preceding era is, I think, particularly evident in the approach adopted by Mazower, Dark Continent, and Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994) to post-1945 Europe. 5 This is particularly prominent in the 'failed revolution' approach adopted in much work on southern a Europe during the 1940s, whereby presumed victory of the left was prevented in, for example, Greece and Italy by external intervention and the internal mobilisation of the post-fascist forces of counter revolution. See, for example, Tony Judt, ed., Resistance and Revolution inMediterranean Europe 1939?1948 on (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Emphasis the repressive weight of the Francoist regime in Spain mirrors this approach: Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936-1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). This content downloaded from 163.1.208.155 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 10:43:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Rise and Fall ofWestern Europe's Democratic Age, 1945-1973 69 French communist poet Louis Aragon, 'une civilisation de frigidaires'.6 Enthralled (in both senses of the term) by the new consumer wonderland (which formed such a contrast to east startling the situation of the Iron Curtain and south of the Pyrenees), west to conceive a return to Europeans found themselves unable of radical politics, until their children woke themselves from thisMarcusian slumber through the street demonstrations and cultural conflicts of the late 1960s. To explore here the shortcomings of these interpretations is probably unnecessary. As narrative of the oscillate encapsulations of the broader postwar era, they between a scorn statements of the obvious and rather too visible for the temper of postwar west European politics. Nobody would, for example, seek to deny the impact of Cold War diplomacy on postwar western Europe, but it is similarly obvious that to regard it as an external phenomenon visited upon Europe by the global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is an inadequate framework long rejected by historians of international relations. Indeed, the causality could be reversed, to the extent that the Cold War (or at least its initial genesis) can be seen equally well as a in on no more semi-conscious process 'made Europe' and imposed the than superpowers.7 These problems suggest that much work remains to be done. Europe - - 'after 1945' to employ the revealing phrase used in many books has for too long a western remained part of continuous present. After the changes of 1989?90, the Europe of the post-1945 period passed in some sense into history.