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POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Yet he was not harmed and there was no Titoism trial in Warsaw. In Bulgaria, in the course of the first two Five-Year Plans beginning in , viable agricultural land had been completely removed from private hands. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way. And in an epilogue on modern European memory, Judt reminds us that the sickness that fueled Auschwitz is not fully cured. Thus East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would supply finished industrial products to the USSR at prices set by Moscow , while Poland and Romania were to specialize in producing and exporting food and primary industrial products. Seller Rating:. Subscribe Already registered? Accusations, details, confessions were all identical, which is not surprising since both trials were scripted in Moscow. Faced with an unprecedented raft of demands for job security and wage protection, European leaders initially resorted to proven past practice. Subscribe to Independent Premium. But whereas the Moscow Trials of the s, particularly the trial of Nikolai Bukharin, had been sui generis , theatrical innovations whose shock value lay in the grisly spectacle of the Revolution consuming not just its children but its very architects, the trials and purges of later decades were shameless copies, deliberately modeled on past Soviet practice, as though the satellite regimes hardly merited even an effort at verisimilitude. Write a customer review. This article about a non-fiction book on European history is a stub. Subscribe to Independent Premium to debate the big issues Want to discuss real-world problems, be involved in the most engaging discussions and hear from the journalists? Milan Kundera. Postwar tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here, demystifying Europe's recent history and identity, of what the continent is and has been. Hungary's inflation, to pick the worst example, was obscene. The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. But the posture could never have been sustained very long. You can find our Community Guidelines in full here. But none of those implicated and held in prison during and was senior enough to serve as figurehead and ringleader for the major public trial that Stalin was demanding. The West had grown accustomed to readily available and remarkably cheap fuel—a vital component in the long years of prosperity. A half-century later, Europeans no longer feel that they are living in an American age, and they -- and many Americans -- are realizing that life may not always be so wonderful even if you are American. By the s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed sine die. Seen in this light, the economic history of eastern Europe after bears a passing resemblance to the pattern of West European recovery in the same years. Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been. Some were modern, urban and industrial, with a sizeable working-class; others the majority were rural and impoverished. Politics and government became synonymous with corruption and arbitrary repression, practiced by and for the benefit of a venal clique, itself rent by suspicion and fear. Five Year Plans were everywhere adopted, with wildly ambitious targets. Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the American move of August and the subsequent fall in the value of the dollar European governments, hoping to head off the anticipated economic downturn, adopted deliberately reflationary policies: allowing credit to ease, domestic prices to rise, and their own currencies to fall. Far from saving him, however, this just exacerbated his crime—Stalin was not interested in agreement or even consent, only unswerving obedience. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. This was an amazing analysis. The End of the Old Order. The US dollar, the anchor of the international monetary system since Bretton Woods, would henceforth float against other currencies. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Writer

In western Europe, too, investment in productivity and growth was given priority over the provision of consumer goods and services, though the Marshall Plan softenedthe pain of this strategy. Hamish McRae. As in the past, the redistributive impact of inflation, made worse by the endemic high taxation of the modern service state, was felt most severely by citizens of the middling sort. The Italian writer Elio Vittorini once observed that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except that of German romantic philosophy: and what was true when he wrote that in was no less true two decades later. Unemployment rates started to rise, steadily but inexorably. In Warsaw 90 percent of homes were gone. The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. But whereas European universities of the previous decade were preoccupied with grand theories of various sorts—society, the state, language, history, revolution—what trickled down to the next generation was above all a preoccupation with Theory as such. World War II may have ended in , but according to historian Tony Judt, the conflict's epilogue lasted for nearly the rest of the century. There was little else to distinguish them. Eastward expansion reduced the EU's capacity to act as a coherent force in global affairs - a capacity that has never been notably strong - to practically nothing. In Czechoslovakia, in the years , Communists represented just one-tenth of 1 percent of those condemned to prison terms or work camps, one in twenty of those condemned to death. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Meanwhile the anti-Semitic tide was gathering strength in the satellite states. Follow comments Enter your email to follow new comments on this article. Tony Judt's remarkably detailed history of postwar Europe is a revelation. Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. Buy New Learn more about this copy. Thomas J. By , 80 percent of agricultural land was back in private hands, following a March 30th decree permitting peasants to withdraw themselves and their land from the collective. The West, then, was a threat that had to be exorcised, repeatedly. If anything, the risk now was of growing domestic pressure to re-impose protection against competition. It was desirable that Poland become socialist, but it was imperative that it remain stable and reliable. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Reviews

Namespaces Article Talk. The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. Thus East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would supply finished industrial products to the USSR at prices set by Moscow , while Poland and Romania were to specialize in producing and exporting food and primary industrial products. Of the 7, collective farms, just 1, remained. Price and wage inflation at these levels was not historically unprecedented. With the exception of the Germans, the nation most directly affected by the division of Europe but also ill-placed to voice displeasure at it, western Europeans were largely indifferent to the disappearance of eastern Europe. Judt, a prolific British historian who has been teaching at New York University for almost two decades, suggests that "the 21st century might yet belong to Europe. The recession of the Seventies saw an acceleration of job losses in virtually every traditional industry. PostWar But their suspicion of the West and their fear of Western influence was not unprecedented; it had deep roots in self-consciously Slavophil writings and practices long before If the dollar was to float, then so must the European currencies, and in that case all of the carefully constructed certainties of the postwar monetary and trading systems were called into question. Even the products in which the country still had a competitive edge—notably small arms manufacture—no longer afforded Czechs any benefit, since they were constrained to direct their exports exclusively to their Soviet masters. In Romania, where a substantial part of the Jewish population had survived the war, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched in the autumn of and sustained with varying degrees of energy for the next six years. I almost stopped reading. But in the Seventies all Western European governments already spent heavily on welfare, social services, public utilities and infrastructure investment. It was not so much the idealism of the Sixties that seemed to have dated so very fast as the innocence of those days: the feeling that whatever could be imagined could be done; that whatever could be made could be possessed; and that transgression—moral, political, legal, aesthetic—was inherently attractive and productive. Tellingly, over 38 percent of the members of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra were Nazis, compared with just 7 percent of the Berlin Philharmonic. Theorists of liberation now surfaced, in Western Europe as in North America, whose goal was to release the human subject not from socially enforced bondage but from self-imposed illusions. Thus the arrests and purges and trials were a public reminder of the coming confrontation; a justification for Soviet war fears; and a strategy familiar from earlier decades for slimming down the Leninist party and preparing it for combat. Next page. Until they were firmly ensconced in power, the Communist parties of eastern Europe actively encouraged inefficient land redistribution.

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But there is also another, more benign way to rewrite history: using hindsight to reveal the past in the light of what it unexpectedly led to. The Impossible Settlement. Judt's subject is a continent that in looked like the site of a failed civilisation, but which during the 50 years that followed enjoyed unbroken peace and freedom in most of its western halff,at any rate. Floating exchange rates and oil price increases thus introduced an unprecedented element of uncertainty. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. In the city of Amsterdam, 40 percent of the workforce was employed in industry in the s; a quarter of a century later the figure was just one employee in seven. Views Read Edit View history. But Europe is a long-settled region of nations with distinct histories and cultures. Judt has no sacred cows and spares no one. The measurable losses in people and resources were immense, and would be felt for decades to come. It was not needed. But only Germans went the extra mile: when four gunmen two Germans, two Arabs hi-jacked an Air France plane in June and flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda, it was the Germans who undertook to identify and separate the Jewish passengers from the rest. It is hard for words to do justice to the magisterial, comprehensive, insightful, and penetratingly insightful narrative of European history from to contained in this work. No such inhibitions applied in Czechoslovakia, however, where the biggest show trial of them all was to be staged in Prague in November The Second World War left Europe divided. And in an epilogue on modern European memory, Judt reminds us that the sickness that fueled Auschwitz is not fully cured. Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union. Royal Family. In particular, he studies the success of the Marshall Plan and the way the West both appreciated and resented the help, for acceptance of it reminded them of their diminished place in the world. Polish universities were also left virtually intact, in contrast to the purges that stripped out the teaching staff of higher educational institutions in neighbouring Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Coronavirus Advice. Instead they sought to undermine the very concept of the human subject that had once underlain them. The Eurovision Song Contest—in which B-league crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged—was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. In external respects, contemporary Italian terrorism was not markedly different from the German kind. This was an amazing analysis. Show details.

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