Post War Europe

12 Key excerpts on "Post War Europe"

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  Sources of European History

  Since 1900

  • Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, James Krukones, , Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, James Krukones(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, a totally defeated, devastated, and demoralized German nation had relinquished the dream of forging a greater Germany. These tendencies were reinforced by massive deliveries of American aid in the late 1940s and early 1950s—an effort to nip fascist and especially communist extremism in the bud by removing the root of disaffection. Moreover, it had become apparent during the war in Britain, and shortly after the war ended on the Continent, that an effective social security net would help prevent the appeal of extremist political move-ments. Comprehensive welfare would require sound economies, how-ever. Partly toward this end, Western European states began to embrace economic cooperation, laying the basis for the European Community (later, the European Union); German recovery prompted less acrimony and jealousy than would have been expected, and more admiration. Two decades after the war ended the physical and emotional effects of the Second World War were still evident in European society and felt by many individuals, but the basis of recovery had been successfully established. The first postwar generation began to face the future with a sense of hope, although many intellectuals, scarred by war and geno-cide, continued to speak of the fragility of reason, the reality of human evil, and the precariousness of civilization. 1 The Aftermath: Devastation and Hope Unlike the mood following World War I, the two decades after 1945 wit-nessed no quibbling over territorial revisions, no glorification of the front-line experience—in short, no palpable desire for revenge that expressed itself in an Copyright 2009 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.

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  Contemporary Europe

  • Richard Sakwa, Anne Stevens(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Europe after 1945, although divided for the next 45 years owing to the bitter rivalry of two competing ideological systems, represented a peaceful and stable environment compared to the pre-war period. Post-war Europe: Cold War and bipolar division At the end of the war in 1945, with the defeat of fascism, one might have expected a return to the European state system which had arisen in the previous two centuries, that is, a system of inde-pendent states engaged in various levels of compe-tition and accommodation – militarily by way of alliances and occasional wars outside or else at the periphery of Europe, and economically through trade and investment among themselves and their colonial possessions. Yet this system was already being undermined by the events and trends of the inter-war period from 1918 to the outbreak of war in 1939 – the Russian Revolution and rise of the Soviet Union on a course of development isolated from the rest of Europe; the collapse of tentative attempts at liberal democracy in Italy and Germany and in the process the rise of fascist states and movements; the increasingly lethal nature of arma-ments and the breaching of the prohibition against targeting civilian populations, i.e. total war; and the growing challenges to Europe’s empires by inde-pendence movements in the colonies, for example in India. Instead, the ‘new order’ that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War was largely deter-mined by the new superpowers, the USA and USSR. Within a few years from the ending of the war in May 1945, the USA and USSR became more intimately involved in the affairs of Europe than at any previous time. During the inter-war period, both of these countries had been marginal to the events and dynamics convulsing Europe. In general, the USA and USSR were preoccupied with domes-tic priorities.

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  A History of Denmark from the Viking Age to the 21st Century

  • Mary Hilson, Bjørn Poulsen, Thorsten Borring Olesen, Mary Hilson, Bjørn Poulsen, Thorsten Borring Olesen(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Aarhus University Press

    (Publisher)

  Following the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, the world community faced the major task of re-establishing diplomatic and international co-operation, while avoiding the escalation of conflicts and aggressive nationalism. The depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, with its huge civilian and economic losses, were viewed as failures of international economic co-operation and political diplomacy. However, the post-war period soon became defined by new conflicts, and with the onset of the Cold War from 1946–1947 Denmark had to navigate a new context of bloc formations and international organisations. Denmark’s foreign and economic policy was to orient itself towards the West through membership of NATO and the European Community, and to establish tighter Nordic co-operation. Its foreign and security policy after 1945 was thus largely defined by its relations to these inter-governmental and supranational organisations.

  The Cold War and new alliances

  The period from 1914 to 1945 is sometimes seen as one continuous era of international conflict, culminating in the Second World War. ‘No more war’ was therefore the slogan for politicians and weary populations in the immediate post-war years. Hopes of peace were dashed, however, by ideological tensions and overlapping spheres of interest, particularly for the two countries that became major post-war powers: the USA and the USSR. These were ‘superpowers’, to use the new word coined to describe these global heavyweights, and thus even larger and more powerful than the traditional political and economic great powers like Britain, France and Germany, which had built up strong states, empires and alliances in the nineteenth century.

  The four allied great powers had met during the Second World War to discuss spheres of interest and possible solutions. At the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, Britain, France and the USA agreed on new international economic rules to try to avoid a return to the economic instability of the inter-war period, and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 they were joined by the USSR to agree on geopolitical spheres of interest. In the immediate post-war years, efforts were made to build bridges between the Allies of the Second World War. The hope was that an organisation for effective inter-governmental collaboration could be founded in order to reduce conflict and prevent a new war, unlike the failed League of Nations of the inter-war period.

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  European Identity and the Second World War

  • Menno Spiering, Michael Wintle(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This situation changed after the Second World War. In the chaotic scene of dramatic change there was a need for stabilizing points of orientation, and Europe was one of them. European historians were called upon to give new meaning to Europe. The period after 1945 witnessed hectic activity, and major collective projects on European history were developed. Europe, including the concept of Europe, became a topic in historiography. 3 Prominent figures such as Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) and Franco Valsecchi (1903–92) responded, but so did a younger generation of historians such as Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–84), Max Beloff (1913–99) and Heinz Myth and History in European Post-War History Writing 83 Gollwitzer (1917–99). Three examples of this post-war outpouring will be examined more closely here: Lucien Febvre, the grand figure of the French Annales School, Oscar Halecki (1891–1973), renowned Polish medievalist, and the British historian Max Beloff. In 1944–5, Lucien Febvre entitled his lecture series at the Collège de France ‘L’Europe: Genèse d’une civilisation’ (Febvre 1999). The reason he gave for choosing this topic was to give meaning again to the word ‘Europe’, which had been so misused (49). He began his first lecture by stating that he viewed Europe as ‘a historical entity’ (37) that expressed itself through ‘tensions transcending different spaces’ (38). Europe was, in fact, the term for this ‘long march towards unity’ (291). Febvre directly linked this teleological perspective to a demand for European unity: ‘Créons la république européenne. Constituons la nation européenne dont les nations d’aujourd’hui seraient les prov- inces, rien de plus’ (291). There is, however, an inbuilt ambivalence in Febvre’s concept of Europe, which questions this teleology. Europe in 1945 was very different from earlier manifestations. It did not exist as a full civilization, but rather as ideals and practices transmitted to the rest of the world.

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  Western Civilization

  Ideas, Politics, and Society

  • Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  A most striking fact of recent history in the West has been the unprecedented economic ad-vance. Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, production in Western Europe and the United States surpassed all previous records. The rapid postwar economic boom suffered a setback in the 1970s due in part to the drastic increase in oil prices imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Economic growth returned throughout the 1980s, though unem-ployment remained high, even in West Germany, the strongest country economically. Stimulated by the expansion of U.S. multina-tional corporations into Western Europe and by the opportunities offered by the European Com-munity, many European companies came to be dominated by gigantic private and public enter-prises tied to other parts of the world. Boosted by rising standards of living and by U.S. power, the overall trend of political life in the West since World War II has been toward consti-tutional democracy. Although Spain and Portugal retained their prewar dictatorships until the mid-1970s and Greece for a time wavered between de-mocracy and dictatorship, by the late 1970s even these countries had conformed to the common pattern. Great Britain and France Impoverished by the war and forced to give up nearly all its overseas colonies, Great Britain lost its leading role in world politics after World War II. British sea power was replaced by the American navy and air force. The postwar Labor B UILDING A N EW E UROPE : U NITY AND R ECOVERY Historically, a rough balance of power among au-tonomous states and extraordinary political and technological dynamism had cursed Europe with incessant warfare. Now, however, two ruinous world wars and the clear Soviet threat made some form of Western European unity attractive, if not imperative.

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  Modern Europe, 1789-Present

  • Asa Briggs, Patricia Clavin(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 10

  FREEZING AND THAWING POSTWAR EUROPE, 1945–1969

  ___________    

  F or the people of Moscow peace officially began at 2 a.m. on the morning of 8 May 1945 when a salvo of a 1,000 guns was sounded. Some citizens cheered while others sobbed, recalling the loved ones who would never return. In London’s Trafalgar Square crowds lit fireworks, sang songs and embraced, and beneath the Arc de Triumph General de Gaulle solemnly saluted the tomb of the unknown soldier before euphoric men and women swept away the barriers surrounding the tomb in enthusiastic celebration. In Germany, by contrast, news of the defeat was met in dumb, apathetic silence, despite Allied fears that zealous young soldiers would be reluctant to surrender arms.

  For all of Europe, however, it did not take long for the pleasure of victory to be replaced by sobering recognition of the price to be paid for victors and vanquished alike. ‘This noble continent’, Winston Churchill proclaimed in neutral Switzerland in 1946, contained ‘a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care-worn and bewildered human beings’ gaping at the ruins of their cities and scanning ‘the dark horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror’. Definitions of Europe now took on an institutional dimension as organizations appeared on a European and global level, dedicated to fostering understanding and co-operation between nations on economic, social and political issues.

  Definitions of European geography changed too. Until the Cold War became the dominating feature of European life within three years of the Second World War, Europe was divided, as it was before 1939, into four distinct geographic regions: Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland); Western Europe (including Ireland, Great Britain and France); Central Europe (including Germany, Italy, Greece, Austria, Hungary and Poland); and Eastern Europe (including Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states). Superpower rivalry and the political division of Europe in the Cold War changed all that. Central Europe effectively disappeared. Political alignment, not geography, determined that Northern Europe and, more particularly, large sections of Central Europe, notably Greece, Germany, Austria and Italy now all found themselves located in the West.

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  Western Civilization, A Brief History

  • Marvin Perry(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Although Spain and Portugal retained their prewar dictatorships until the mid-1970s and Greece for a time wavered between democracy and dictatorship, by the late 1970s even these countries had conformed to the com-mon pattern. Great Britain and France Impoverished by the war and forced to dismantle its colonial empire, Great Britain lost its lead-ing role in world politics after World War II. It peacefully dismantled its colonial empire, and British seapower was replaced by the American navy and air force. The postwar Labour govern-ment, allied with powerful trade unions, provided Britons with a measure of economic security through social programs and extensive govern-ment control over important branches of the economy. However, these policies undermined economic efficiency and output. In 1979, at a low point in the economy, the voters elected a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” and Britain’s first female prime minister. She dominated English politics for the next decade, fighting in-flation and rigorously encouraging individual initiative and free enterprise. During the Thatcher Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 508 ❖ 21 Europe After World War II: Recovery and Realignment, 1945–1989 Map 21.2 Western Europe After 1945 To counter the Communist threat from the Soviet Union, Western European countries, formerly enemies, cooperated for their mutual protection.

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  A History of Europe

  From Pre-History to the 21st Century

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9

  Post-War Europe

  1945 to the present

  The threat of a nuclear conflict combined with a realignment of international politics, ideological division and the fear of repeating the events of the first half of the century led to a tense atmosphere during this period. Europe changed greatly as population growth, technological development, urbanization and a range of new cultural mores and environmental concerns made the continent a very different place.

  Changing Europe: The New Settlement

  The peace settlement saw major territorial, demographic and political changes. The first two have substantially lasted to the present. With its forces in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Prague, the Soviet Union was a major winner. It retained all of the gains it had obtained in 1939–40 (from Poland, Romania and Finland, as well as the Baltic Republics in their entirety). The Soviet Union also added part of Czechoslovakia that had been annexed by Hungary in 1939, as well as the northern part of the German province of East Prussia.

  The (southern) remainder of East Prussia went to Poland, which also gained extensive German territories on its western frontier, namely Silesia and Eastern Pomerania. However, Poland lost more extensive territories (about 48 per cent of pre-war Poland) on its eastern frontier to the Soviet Union. This outcome reversed the Polish gains of 1920–1 and was rejected by the exiled Polish government. Today, as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, these territories are parts of Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. Poland, in the meantime, had moved westwards as a country.

  Territories and cities were renamed accordingly. The German city of Breslau, where a long resistance to attacking Soviet forces had been mounted in 1945, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, became Kaliningrad, honouring a Soviet politician. Other names that entered the dustbin of history included Silesia, Pomerania and Stettin.

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  Rethinking Europe's Future

  • David P. Calleo(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  85 P A R T T W O Legacies of the Cold War To what extent did the postwar era bring fundamental and durable improvements to Europe’s state system? To answer requires exploring the basic character and dynamics of Cold War Europe. How was it structured, internally and in its global relations? How did its once highly conflictual parts settle into peaceful and stable cohabitation? And what elements and dynamic forces have survived from that post- war experience? To get a handle on such questions, theorists of international rela- tions regularly use the concept of a “system.” To speak of a system among a group of countries implies a distinct pattern of persistent and coherent relationships, with rules of the game, different roles, and a rough pecking order. 1 Alongside governments, numerous other actors may participate significantly: international organizations, nongovern- mental organizations, business firms, labor unions, churches, founda- tions, universities, the media, political parties, national and interna- tional bureaucracies, professional associations, pressure groups of all sorts, networks of friends, and families. Rendering these relationships into a system is a work of the imagination—a paradigm framed by the analyst’s eye and constructed in the analyst’s mind. The aim is to select, and thus to simplify, in order to find some broad pattern to international relationships, often to facilitate practical policymaking. To simplify is often to falsify. Any single paradigm is likely to be incomplete and therefore to provide a misleading picture of any real historical situation. 2 Europe’s military arrangements during the Cold War, for example, can certainly be described as a “bipolar system.” 1 For a careful theoretical definition of a “system,” see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 38–59. 2 Robert K. Jervis makes this point with considerable force.

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  Conquering Peace

  From the Enlightenment to the European Union

  • Stella Ghervas(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  As Robert Schuman wrote in 1963, The major problem threatening peace is that of East-West rela-tions, between the West and the Soviet Bloc. This is today’s problem in the highest sense of the word, not only because of its intrinsic difficulties, but because it is closely related to all the other outstanding problems concerning Germany, Austria, the Balkans, the Middle and the Far East. Moreover, it dominates the whole The Postwar European Spirit · 279 issue of military spending and consequently of our financial and economic position. 159 In three visionary sentences, Schuman captured the essence of Europe’s peace problem and its relation to the issues of the Cold War. As the likeli-hood of a new conflict between France and Germany diminished, Western European leaders became increasingly aware that the Soviet Union was their gravest threat. In the early 1960s, daily life under Soviet domination had become less brutal than under Stalin or the Nazis, yet the USSR sought all the same to impose an imperial (or hegemonic) peace order over much of Europe: it was exactly what all European states had collectively resisted since the Treaty of Utrecht and against which they had been allied ever since. At a time when the former European great powers of France, Britain, and Germany had dwindled into political insignificance, the European con-struction was a key response to the Soviet presence in Central Europe. The two facets of foreign and economic policy were so closely intertwined in po-litical discourse as to be inseparable. The Cold War and the threat of a “new tyranny” (to use Churchill’s phrase) were thus more than just the in-ternational context for the postwar unification of Europe: they provided a large part of its motivation and internal impetus.

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  Three Postwar Eras in Comparison

  Western Europe 1918–1945–1989

  • C. Levy, M. Roseman, C. Levy, M. Roseman(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  That fact, together with the exhaustion of the population, was to help secure the postwar settlement when it emerged. 17 Moreover, just as in France and Italy in 1944–5, the right was in disar- ray. And as in those countries the left was committed to a broad popular front strategy, concentrating on reconstruction with the hope of future structural reform, rather than revolution now. Germany’s Social Demo- cratic leadership had in reality long advocated a cautious pragmatic approach, but unlike Weimar they were not now being outflanked by the Communists. In line with the Soviet popular front strategy adopted 266 Three Postwar Eras in Comparison in the 1920s, the Communists were keen to work within the framework of a broad anti-Fascist alliance, embracing bourgeois elements without precipitately pushing forward to revolution. As in other countries, the notion that some sort of front might be created, or at least that different groups might cooperate in pursuit of certain shared aims, was rein- forced by the fact that among many bourgeois political leaders, too, there existed a strong sense in 1945 of the need to create a more socially minded and caring society. The collapse of the economy and the level of destruction inclined many Christian Democrat politicians, for ex- ample, to call for the nationalization of basic industries and the introduc- tion of other forms of public control into the economy. The CDU’s 1947 Ahlen programme is the most famous expression of this line. Of course, there were many factors in the immediate postwar period less propitious for the creation of stability. The biggest problem of the opening years was the fact that the struggle between the Allies to find a common line undermined attempts to restore democracy and prosper- ity in Germany.

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  Britain and the World in the Twentieth Century

  Ever Decreasing Circles

  • Michael J Turner(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  2 Post-war Adjustments On 19 February 1947, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin instructed Lord Inverchapel, Britain’s ambassador in Washington DC, to inform the US state department that, owing to financial constraints, Britain could no longer sup-port Greece and Turkey against communist insurgency and external pressure. The Americans would have to step in and take over. This was a turning point in post-war history. Bevin’s success in persuading the United States to commit itself to security arrangements in Europe was regarded at the time and afterwards as a notable accomplishment, but was it a sign of British influence and ingenuity, or of failure and weakness? The desire to obtain American support did not mean that Britain was no longer a great power. London was able to provide for the security of Britain, the empire and a range of global interests, and to promote a European settlement after the Second World War, pursuing these ends both independently and in league with others. In Europe and beyond Britain played a leading role in post-war international relations, but economic problems imposed limitations, as did the need to work with allies. The British had to reassess aims and methods because they could not afford not to, but in the circumstances they did well. Prestige and influence were sustained. This was a period in which the international order was rapidly changing. The disruption wrought by the Second World War necessitated adjustments on the part of all the great powers. The desire for peace and co-operation had led to the establishment of the United Nations on 24 October 1945, but the existence of the UN did not mean that the post-war years were free of tension. In the historiography of the Cold War, most attention is paid to the United States and the USSR, though the focus is often on Europe, where the distinc-tion between rival political and economic systems became most pronounced.

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