Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (35 page)

In retrospect what is striking is the lack of debate on these issues in most of Europe. The two countries where economic liberalism was most in evidence after 1945 were West Germany and Italy; there, the idea that state planning was associated with totalitarianism had a plausibility borne of bitter experience. Yet not even in those countries could there be a return to Hayek’s “abandoned road.” Elsewhere the principle of state intervention—either for a mixed economy, as in western Europe, or for a planned and controlled economy, as in eastern Europe—was accepted with surprisingly little resistance. Behind this development lay the memory of capitalism’s inter-war crisis, the prestige which the Soviet system won in the war against Nazism as well as the sense produced by wartime state controls and rationing that state intervention could increase social
fairness
.

It was also questionable whether economic planning was compatible with the new internationalism. It was, after all, the Left and the social reformers who tended to be in favour of
both
abandoning laissez-faire at home, and creating new international institutions with enlarged powers. E. H. Carr, for example, proposed the creation of a European Planning Authority “whose mission will be nothing less than the reorganization of the economic life of ‘Europe’ as a whole.” With a characteristic blend of realism and idealism, Carr did not blanch at the idea of taking advantage of the “centralized European authority” that Hitler had established while abandoning the nationalist premises upon which it was based.
⁴⁴

But how could national planning, which Carr also advocated, coexist with planning at a continental level? What if national economic interests did not mesh with those of Europe as a whole? In general,
there was little awareness on the Left of such a potential conflict. But here the critique from economic liberals was penetrating. Hayek insisted that
international
planning was a nonsense:

One has only to visualize the problems raised by the economic planning of even such an area as western Europe to see that the moral bases for such an undertaking are completely lacking. Who imagines that there exist any common ideals of distributive justice such as will make the Norwegian fisherman consent to forgo the prospect of economic improvement in order to help his Portuguese fellow, or the Dutch worker to pay more for his bicycle to help the Coventry mechanic, or the French peasant to pay more taxes to assist the industrialization of Italy?
⁴⁵

Hayek insisted that Carr was wrong; such planning could not be democratic in scope, but must always rest on “a naked rule of force” like the Nazi
Grossraumwirtschaft
. Reviewing Carr’s book, C. A. Manning enquired: “If the Nazi way with small sovereign states is indeed to become the common form, what is the war about?” Hayek argued that the notion of European planning implied “complete disregard of the individuality and of the rights of small nations.”
⁴⁶

Other liberals agreed with Hayek that international federation was, in principle, desirable. But in their view, it could only remain democratic in so far as it eschewed the idea of supranational planning and based itself upon the creation of free-trading areas. “Federal government can only work under a free market economy,” stated von Mises, another Austrian neo-liberal. He suggested that, though it was unlikely to happen, the Western democracies should aim at removing barriers to trade as well as abandoning
étatisme
at home. Rather than pursuing utopian and unrealizable schemes for “world planning,” politicians should work towards the more modest goal of international economic agreements and regulations. The eminent Italian liberal economist, Luigi Einaudi, was thinking along similar lines. In
Per una federazione economica europea
(For an economic federation of Europe), issued in September 1943, the future President of the Italian Republic advocated free trade and economic federation as a realistic means of bringing harmony to Europe. States, he argued, would not surrender their
political independence at a stroke to some new international federation; but they might be prepared to relinquish certain economic powers for the sake of greater security.
⁴⁷

In this debate, the liberals were ultimately more successful than they were where domestic reform was concerned. This was partly because they had logic and, for once, political realism, on their side. But it was also because their message had powerful supporters. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull was committed to the cause of free trade; the post-war planners in his department followed his lead and stressed the importance of eliminating economic nationalism in Europe through tariff reduction and the introduction of convertibility. It did not hinder matters that the US also stood to benefit from such policies. Finally, the liberal argument won the day not least because the economic planners preferred to exercise power at a national level. As a result, the post-war economic “miracles” would be based on a delicate blend of
étatisme
at home and liberalization of trade.

UTOPIAS AND REALITIES: THE EXTENT OF THE ACHIEVEMENT

During the war, cautious commentators had warned against utopian expectations. “How
new
will the better world be?” asked historian Carl Becker. “Many people are saying that what we have to do to make a new and better world is to ‘abate nationalism, curb the sovereign state, abandon power politics and end imperialism,’ ” he noted, adding, “Maybe so. But if so, then I think we have an impossible job on our hands … Making a new and better world is a difficult business and will prove to be a slow one.”
⁴⁸

In England, Mass Observation reported that pessimism at the prospects of any far-reaching change after the war was growing. Following Beveridge, people hoped for full-scale reform but did not believe it would happen. They now believed that post-war unemployment was avoidable but would occur nonetheless. “I think it will be like after the last war, dreadful unemployment,” said an older man. Increasing cynicism and uncertainty led people to dream of emigrating
or living off the land. The return to civilian life provoked a sense of unease and anxiety among soldiers and their families.
⁴⁹

Inside occupied Europe, the
résistants’
expectations of a better future were tempered by the fear that just as their activities and values had emerged during the war, so too they would disappear when the war ended. This uncertainty was evident in Italy, where members of the Partito d’Azione worried that the demise of Fascism might lead in turn to the end of anti-fascism. As one put it, “ ‘Antifascist’ may one day become as useless and irritating a word as ‘fascist.’ ” What, then, would happen to the ideals and aspirations of the resistance? Would the world return to power politics and business as usual?
⁵⁰

From the resistance perspective, these fears were given added weight as it became clear that political power was slipping from their hands. Across Europe, former resistance leaders were being marginalized as the war came to an end. In Italy, Ferruccio Parri gave way to Alcide de Gasperi in December 1945; in Poland, the Red Army backed the Lublin Committee, who had been parachuted in from Moscow. In France, de Gaulle ordered the demobilization of the Maquis. Across Europe exiles and refugees returned to take power, and policies were imposed from above. The most striking case of all was Greece, where the British-backed royalist government actually fought with the left-wing EAM/ELAS in Athens in December 1944, crushing the main wartime resistance movement there.

We will examine in the next chapter the extent to which pro-Nazi and collaborationist elements in society and the state bureaucracy were purged after the war. In general, however, these purges left intact the same structures of power through which the Germans had ruled Europe: local civil servants, police, business organizations and the press. There may have been good reasons for this, but many former partisans and members of the underground were left with the feeling that they and their cause had been betrayed.

A later generation of historians has echoed their complaint. A recent collection of studies of the experience of women during the war describes what happened as a retreat in peacetime from the gains made during the war itself. We should compare this critique with a very different school of thought which sees the war as a forcing-house
for social change. On the surface they appear incompatible; but are they really?
⁵¹

Looking back at the way visions of the post-war world emerged during the struggle against Germany, what must surely strike us is the extent to which a genuine consensus of ideas concerning domestic reform—political, economic and social—was attained and lasted well into the post-war era. Consensus, in other words, was a reality not merely a wartime propaganda myth, as some recent scholars have argued. The Labour government’s creation of a National Health Service, together with its commitment to educational reform, nationalization and full employment rested upon the studies carried out during the war and survived the changeover of power in 1951. Elsewhere in western Europe too the mixed economy and welfare state became the norm, despite stops and starts as liberals tried to halt the growth of public spending or swam briefly against the
dirigiste
current. There was, to some extent, an “emulation effect” as, for example, France followed the British and Belgian lead in reforming social security. Under Soviet rule, eastern Europe moved towards economic planning and the development of a social security system; given the acceptance of such measures by exile governments during the war, it seems likely that not dissimilar developments would have taken place even without Soviet pressure. Across Europe, in other words, the repudiation of laissez-faire was complete. As a result, the idea of democracy was resuscitated, fitfully and abortively in eastern Europe, but with much greater success in the West.

However, in other areas of reform, advances were less durable. Women’s rights had been promoted by resistance movements during the war; this was part of what many regarded as their “dual war of liberation”—against the Germans and against the “reactionaries” at home who opposed social reform. Moreover, the war itself had profoundly altered traditional gender roles, disrupting family ties and providing women with new tasks and challenges outside as well as inside the home. Liberation did bring some enduring changes, notably the extension of the suffrage in France, Yugoslavia, Greece and other countries where women had formerly been excluded. But just as after 1918, the ending of the war revived more traditional relations between the sexes. Governments tried to get women to withdraw
from the workforce and return to the home, both in order to give employment priority to returning servicemen and to encourage the production of babies. In countries like Greece and Italy, this trend was blamed by the Left on capitalism, but as it was also occurring in such uncapitalist environments as Tito’s Yugoslavia, other explanations for “the reassertion of patriarchy” must be sought.

Part of the answer lies in the new post-war pro-natalism, based on the old concerns about the birth rate, and population decline—natural enough in the aftermath of the greatest bloodletting in Europe’s history. But the answer may also be found in ordinary people’s reactions to the war; the feeling of sheer exhaustion after years of fighting, and the desire to retreat from the world of ideological strife contributed to an idealization of domesticity. With this nostalgia for the home, many men and many women looked forward to settling down and starting a family. “After the war I shall get married and stay at home for ever and ever,” said a twenty-year-old working on the day shift. “I’ll get right out of it when the war is over,” said another, older married woman. “Straight out of it. I’ve been here about fifteen years now. I was married six years ago. I suppose I’ll go on for a time till my hubby gets settled, and then I’ll go home and increase the population.” “For better or worse,” concluded the Mass Observation team, “the larger number of opinionated women
want
to return to, or start on, domestic life when the war is over.”
⁵²

In the case of attitudes to race, one can scarcely talk of a retreat from wartime radicalism. European attitudes to race were slowly changing anyway before the war; the war itself appears hardly to have accelerated the process. Anti-Semitism did not disappear from Europe after 1945: to the contrary, it intensified across the continent immediately after the war ended as Jewish survivors returned home to find their property inhabited by others and their goods plundered.

There were also few signs in 1945 that the European powers intended to do anything other than cling to their colonies. Being subjected to Nazi violence appears to have made them more rather than less inclined to inflict imperial violence of their own: French forces killed up to 40,000 Algerians in the aftermath of the Setif uprising in May 1945, and left perhaps as many as 100,000 dead in Madagascar in 1947. Decolonization, for all the efforts of the 1945
Pan-African Congress in Manchester, remained off the European political agenda until forced back as nationalists raised the costs of hanging on to the colonies. In so far as the European imperial powers had been humiliated by the war and were now overshadowed by the anti-imperialist superpowers, they felt more rather than less inclined to reassert their authority overseas. It was hardly a coincidence that it was the one imperial power which could have been said to have “won” the war—Great Britain—which first accepted the need for decolonization.

The vision of a united Europe flickered on fitfully as the nation-state reasserted itself and adjusted to the exigencies of the Cold War. Early efforts to force the pace led to the creation of such bureaucratic drones as the Council of Europe, a far cry from the idealistic visions of 1943. At the start of the 1950s, the failure of the EDC (European Defence Community) marked the end of the federalist dream for three decades, making NATO rather than any purely European organization the watchdog over the newly sovereign German Federal Republic. Thereafter, the Europeanists were a chastened but more realistic cohort, following Einaudi’s advice and adopting a gradualist programme which, beginning with the ECSC in 1951, led in turn to the Common Market and the European Union.