Economic and Social History of Western Europe since 1945, An

Anthony Sutcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This is the ideal companion text to A Political History of Western Europe Since 1945. It is an introductory survey which explains how western Europe built up its postwar prosperity and is moving towards continental integration. Themes treated include: the origins of the EC; consumerism; youth culture and protest; immigration; the oil crisis and its aftermath; and the contrasting experience and expectations of the Nordic world and the Mediterranean south. The book ends with the consequences of Soviet collapse. Designed for general history students, it assumes no formal knowledge of economics, and is notably accessible and user-friendly in its approach.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Reconstruction Challenge: Western Europe, 1945–c.1952

The potential participants in reconstruction

In Germany they soon came to call the last day of the war in Europe, 8 May 1945, Stunde null (zero hour). In their gloomy sense of ‘zero hour’, everything had broken down, while the future offered nothing that they could discern (see Leiwig, 1988). Meanwhile, there were parts of Europe where life had been little touched by the war. Neutral Sweden and Switzerland had even prospered, mainly by supplying Germany on favourable terms of trade and welcoming rich or talented refugees. Spain’s acute problems were largely the result of its own Civil War (1936–39), and its wise refusal to join the Axis struggle spared it further military suffering. Britain’s total mobilisation for war production left it with serious economic problems but its role as the great European leader of the anti-Axis effort renewed its nineteenth-century stance as an example to the whole of the continent. Finally, the United States, by far the biggest contributor to the western war effort, had reinforced its economy and had made clear its determination to inspire European reconstruction after the war.

We now know that western Europe would recover surprisingly quickly from what Aldcroft has described as ‘a shambles’ (Aldcroft, 1993, 108). In 1945, however, no one could be confident that the recovery would be rapid, or even that there would be a recovery at all before some new disaster took place. Human and material losses had been much greater than in the First World War, and the growing attacks on civilian populations as the war dragged on had been demoralising and dislocating in their effect. Hitler’s desperate defence of the Reich had reduced Germany to a level of devastation and suffering which recalled the darker descriptions of the Thirty Years’ War (Beck, 1986, 172–97). The number of deaths caused by the war in Europe is estimated at about 40 million, and over 30 million Europeans had been transplanted or dispossessed. Most countries suffered a large fall in GNP between 1938 and 1946. In many countries, exports had dropped almost to nil by 1946. Meat production declined by one-third and bread output fell to 60 per cent of pre-war (Aldcroft, 1993, 112). Malnutrition was serious in the occupied countries. With the American contribution to reconstruction not yet clear, there was much talk of growing chaos and discontent, followed by another war.

For the victor countries, the end of the fighting was the prelude to a period of continuing effort in which a transition to peacetime conditions involved important decisions and new initiatives. Much more than the neutral and liberated countries, they could lead the way towards new international arrangements. The strongest leader by far was the USA. There were, however, two big problems. One was the role and objectives of the Soviet Union. The other was the future influence of National Socialism.

Annihilating National Socialism

National Socialist ideology and policies are now so fully discredited that their influential role in a great European Fascist revolution, beginning in Italy in 1923, is often not recognised. This movement had its intellectuals, its newspapers and journals, and its artists, as well as its soldiers, brawlers and politicians. The National Socialists sought nothing less than a revolution which would first of all transform Germany, then incorporate foreign territories where large German communities lived, and then absorb such parts of Europe, like the Netherlands, as the Nazis felt worthy of inclusion in their New Order. Ideas and policies were also developed to deal with other parts of Europe which would be either exploited or virtually exterminated, like eastern Poland.

Although the general concept of German superiority over other peoples had matured by the later 1930s, no detailed planning had been done for the development or exploitation of likely new territories. Certain areas with Germanic minority populations or traditions were earmarked for incorporation into the Reich, but little thought had been given to the planning implications. The collapse of Poland in September 1939 prompted urgent efforts to plan the germanisation of western Poland on the basis of new communications, a new urban structure, the eradication of the Polish agricultural system, and the expulsion of part of the Polish population (Ward, 1982, 93–103). Work on the planning of occupied areas continued, mainly under the direction of the Wehrmacht (armed forces), until 1942, when the Russian revival forced the Germans to concentrate on defence rather than continental planning and dreaming.

Meanwhile, several ministries, culminating in the Ministry of Armaments and War Production developed by Albert Speer between 1942 and 1945, worked on the economic aspects of Germany’s New Order in Europe. This funnelled massive supplies of primary and secondary materials to Germany at artificially low prices. Most of these were war materials, and they included armaments produced by local firms in the occupied areas. Some progress was also made towards securing the production of consumer goods within the occupied territories, for export to Germany and even to other parts of the German system (Milward, 1970b, 276–80). Albert Speer hoped to set up a series of European cartels for coal, iron ore, electricity and so on, following proposals and initiatives of the large German banks and industrial firms which dated back to 1940 in some cases (Mommen, 1994, 62–3). These would be extensions of the German structure of war production, and would involve the lifting of all tariff barriers in the context of a continental production plan. Speer told his interrogators in 1945 that he expected Sweden and the other neutral countries to join this system (Milward, 1970b, 147).

This German approach to the reorganisation of Europe had something in common with the Allied one after 1945, even though its principles and the resulting policies were very different. Domestic programmes were mostly the work of national ministries, the SS, and the National Socialist party, while the planning and treatment of the occupied territories were largely the work of the Wehrmacht. Party members, SS members and industrialists could exercise some influence on the general formulation of policy but the process was not consultative in the formal sense. When it was the Allies’ turn to take on new territories, from 1945, the Army (American, British and French) was likewise the main agent on the ground, while a wide variety of participants shaped the policies at government level. German and American pluralistic decisionmaking ironically had more in common with each other than with British and French centralism.

When Germany surrendered in 1945, the Allies took the horrific power of National Socialist thinking very seriously. It had, for instance, sustained the German forces in a hopeless defence which lasted until most of them had been overrun. Interrogated prisoners had generally expressed support for, and confidence in, the regime. National Socialism had sustained millions of Germans in the execution or observation of brutal acts and had given them the ideology to justify them. A resistance movement in occupied Germany could not be ruled out, and popular support for underground Nazi activity seemed possible. The association of German nationalism and National Socialist ideology which was Hitler’s biggest political achievement could easily remain a potent force after the war, so that even if order were restored soon after the surrender, it could revive almost unaltered once circumstances favoured it again.

This spirit was present in Hitler’s New Year’s Day radio speech to the German people in 1945, when he looked forward to the reconstruction ‘in a few years’ of everything that the enemy had destroyed. This achievement would be the result of the ‘superhuman’ and ‘heroic’ efforts which only the German people could generate. The work would go on until, one day, the objectives of Germany’s enemies would be abandoned. This product of the German spirit and the German will would, Hitler concluded, go down in history as ‘the miracle of the twentieth century’ (Hohlbein, 1985, 6). The idea that Germany would be rebuilt ‘more beautiful than before’ dated back, in Hitler’s speeches, to 1942, but to suggest that the work would go on during the war, and that it would persuade Germany’s enemies to abandon their military efforts, implied a continuing National Socialist movement. The idea had something in common with Marshal Pétain’s assertion in June 1940 that a reinvigorated France could so impress the Germans that they would leave of their own accord. Unrealistic though Hitler’s ideas sounded, they could not be discounted as the Allied victory approached, particularly in view of the mysterious ‘miracle weapon’ promised by German propaganda.

The Allies had decided to remove this danger by rooting National Socialism out of Germany. This meant arresting and punishing the Nazi leaders, ‘denazifying’ German society by demoting large numbers of party members, officials, and politicians, banning all public expressions of Nazi views, destroying or sequestering Nazi literature, cleansing school and university programmes, and removing party insignia from such buildings as still stood. In the early stages of the Occupation, Allied personnel were banned from speaking to Germans so that they could be made to feel their pariah status. Films about concentration camps were shown in the surviving cinemas to the local population, who were forced to attend in order to secure their food rations.

At first, many German people were too dazed by the collapse of the Reich and the devastation in the cities to understand that the Allies were aiming at a national revolution in thought and attitudes, as ambitious as Hitler’s had been. With about 5 million party members, denazification was a slow process; it was still going on in 1948. However, one thing was clear. Germany would not be allowed to generate its own reconstruction ideology, however many liberals came to the surface and offered to take on the task. They would be allowed to share in government and economic revival, as did Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, but at first their role would be a subordinate and supervised one. Even as late as 1949, just before the German Federal Republic was set up, rather earlier than had been expected, the senior Germans of the day were still working under Allied tutelage. Germany did not direct its own reconstruction before 1949, and did not even have a major influence on it. The result was a large gap which was filled by the Allies, and principally by the USA. As Germany was still the biggest country, and potentially the largest economy, in Europe, the absence of a German contribution left the way clear for a huge American influence on the reconstruction of Europe as a whole.

The voluntary exclusion of the Soviet Union

As Allied soldiers marched through the ruined cities of western Germany in 1945, they probably concluded that the core of European destruction must be here. In fact, most of the fighting had taken place in eastern Europe, with widespread destruction in western Russia as far as Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad where the Soviet line had held firm in 1942. As the war ended, there were still hopes that the USSR would join the western Allies in a concerted programme for the rebuilding of Europe. This would presumably have included an alliance of American capital and Soviet labour to rebuild Russia, and would have rivalled the reconstruction of western Europe.

Stalin, however, chose a different course, incorporating eastern Europe, including part of Germany, into the Communist world. Insofar as this was a rational decision, it was probably designed to build up the economic strength of Communism rather than dilute it in a pan-European economy which would inevitably be dominated by American capital and expertise. The descent of the ‘Iron Curtain’, as Churchill called it in a big speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, was total by 1948, and it cut Stalin’s world adrift on the aimless voyage towards the collapse of European Communism in 1991. None of that sad Odyssey is the concern of this book, and the reconstruction story of this chapter is that of western Europe alone. Indeed, the term ‘western Europe’ came into general use in 1947/48 to signify ‘non-Communist Europe’ (De Jouvenel, 1948, 16).

The USA

The voluntary exclusion of the USSR from western European reconstruction allowed the USA to play the leading role. The origins of this role dated back to December 1940, when a Roosevelt press conference had used the metaphor of ‘the garden hose’ to explain that the United States intended to help put out Europe’s house fire, provided that it got its hose back later (Stettinius, 1944, 1). On 11 March 1941, Congress approved the Lend-Lease Act after a vigorous national debate in which the disturbing idea of indirect involvement in a second European war, and rearmament at home, had been justified on the grounds that hostilities could well reach America later on.

The Japanese attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbor, at Honolulu, on 7 December 1941, had then launched the USA into a naval war in the Pacific but it was Hitler’s rash decision to honour an Axis treaty pledge and declare war on the USA a few days later that drew the Americans into a world war. Already non-belligerent supporters of Britain, the last anti-Fascist outpost in Europe, they found themselves in alliance with the Soviet Union, under German attack since May 1941. The USA decided on strategic grounds to take a direct part in the war in Europe, which they and Britain came to regard as the crucial theatre of the Second World War. With China also drawing on Lend-Lease support, the Americans shaped the concept of 1,500 million people fighting together against aggression, and began to refer to them as the ‘United Nations’ (Stettinius, 1944, 5).

From the first the United States assumed that they and their allies would win the war. They also aimed to secure the utter defeat of their Axis enemies, rather than a negotiated peace which might leave the Fascist and Japanese-imperialist regimes still in existence, in however reduced a form. They wanted to avoid the survival of national and international conditions which might lead to a later conflict, much as they had after the First World War. The US government presented its European and Asian enemies to the American people and to its friends as a world conspiracy of evil which had to be destroyed, root and branch. This meant that something had to be put in its place after the war, with the USA again taking the lead. Participation by the Soviet Union in the ordering of the post-war world would have complicated the American task, but the compromise solution of a division into spheres of influence both simplified and limited it.

Planning for the post-war world could therefore begin very quickly, in early 1942. It built on a statement of broad principle, the Atlantic Charter, drawn up from August 1941 on the basis of early discussions between Roosevelt and Churchill. The Atlantic Charter set out the principles on which the post-war world would be based. Essentially these were freedom, democracy, and a prosperous economy based on free exchange. Britain pressed the USA to start work immediately on planning a post-war system of stable exchange rates and smoothly running international payments. US discussions took place at the highest levels, under the direct guidance of President Roosevelt, who was mindful of the strengths and the weaknesses of President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to create a better world after the First World War and wanted to follow his example, though with much greater success.

Washington committees, while uncertain about precise reforms, were prepared to envisage radical change. So were citizens’ advisory groups like the Council on Foreign Relations which clearly stated in 1942 that the USA should be prepared to create completely new institutions in all areas affe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Content
• Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. The Reconstruction Challenge: Western Europe, 1945–c. 1952
• 2. The Northern Industrial Core: Britain, France and Germany, 1945–c. 1960
• 3. Contrasts on the Fringe: the Nordic Countries and the Mediterranean South, 1945–c. 1960
• 4. Towards the European Union, 1945–1995
• 5. The Society of Success: Consumerism, Youth Culture and Protest, 1945–1970
• 6. The New Europeans: Immigration, Immigrants and their Descendants
• 7. The New Climate of External Events: (1) The Oil Crisis, 1973, and (2) The Collapse of European Communism, 1989–91
• 8. National Problems and Progress: Germany, France and Britain since the 1960s
• 9. The Benelux Countries: Modernisation through Association, 1945–1995
• 10. Progress and Problems on the Western European Fringe since the 1960s
• 11. Western European Society Since 1970
• 12. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index