XII

DIVISA ET INDIVISA

Europe Divided and Undivided, 1945–1991

THERE is a strong sense of futility about Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. The vast sacrifices of the Second World War did not generate security: the Continent was soon divided into rival political and military blocs whose energies were squandered for nearly fifty years. Immense resources were poured into unproductive tasks, especially in the East; there were few countries who could maintain a neutral stance; and the construction of European unity was repeatedly postponed.

The mood of futility was well caught in the post-war circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophers of existentialism. It faded soon enough in most Western countries, but surfaced again with the peace movement and the anti-nuclear protesters of later decades. In Eastern Europe it belied the optimism of official propaganda, and remained a dominant note in people’s inner lives until the ‘Refolution’ (revolution by reform) of 1989–91.

Fortunately, for those who wished to heal the wounds, the division of Europe helped to stimulate the strong European movement which had been planted before the war, and which now grew up in the West. First as a moral campaign for reforming international relations, and later in the realm of economic cooperation, it fostered a new sense of community. In the Council of Europe (from 1949) and in the EEC and its associated bodies (from 1956), it founded a complex of institutions, which were designed to expand as more and more European countries were welcomed into the fold. Even so, the alternative prospect of an all-European communist camp was not effaced for many decades.

In the event, the West proved itself to be immeasurably more dynamic than the East. With the assistance of the USA, Western Europe rapidly emerged from the post-war ruins and set a course for unrivalled prosperity. Inspired by the example of West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the original members of the European Economic Community had little difficulty in publicizing the benefits of their cause. Membership doubled from six in 1956 to twelve in 1983, with many applications pending. Whilst the Kremlin coped ever more ineptly with its muscle-bound empire, the rapid process of decolonization in Asia and Africa liberated West Europe’s imperial powers for a new future in an integrated Europe. Under the leadership of NATO, West Europe’s defences held firm against a Soviet threat that grew ever less credible. By the late 1980s the European movement seemed to be moving towards maturity at the very time that Soviet communism was climbing onto its death-bed.

Despite the divisions, however, the concept of Europe was no less alive in the East than in the West. Soviet tyranny was very effective in promoting the European ideal by default. Citizens of the former Soviet bloc were mightily impressed by Western Europe’s food mountains; but there is every reason to believe that their aspirations to rejoin ‘Europe’ had a spiritual as well as a material dimension. ‘Europe has two lungs,’ declared a Slavonic Pope; ‘it will never breathe easily until it uses both of them.’

Europe’s wasted years fall neatly into three periods. They began in the immediate post-war era (1945–8), when Allied unity was lost. They continued through four decades of the Cold War (1948–89); and they drew to a close with the astonishing reign in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91). Overall, they may be said to have begun on VE Day, 9 May 1945, and to have ended with the final disband-ment of the Soviet Union in December 1991. By that time, almost all of Europe’s peoples were free to determine their own destiny.

The End of the Grand Alliance, 1945–1948

The division of Europe was implicit in the state of affairs at war’s end. As Stalin correctly predicted, the social and political systems of East and West were destined to follow the positions of the occupying armies. Yet the division of Europe did not crystallize immediately. At first the victorious Allies were preoccupied with the immediate problems of refugees, resettlement, and reparations; and they were obliged to co-operate in the joint administration of Germany and Austria. Stalin acted cautiously, following different policies in different capitals. The Americans, too, were very slow to reveal their intentions.

Unlike 1918, there were no urgent demands for a general Peace Conference. There was no German government with whom a new Treaty might be signed; and Stalin in particular had no wish to renegotiate the massive gains which he had already secured. In consequence, the only Peace Conference to be held was the one which met at Paris in July-October 1946 to settle the affairs of five lesser defeated states—Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland. Proceedings were fixed by the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers, who virtually dictated the terms of the settlement. All the defeated states were obliged to cede territory. Italy lost the whole of her African empire, but not South Tyrol. All had to pay enormous indemnities, totalling $1,250 million, mainly to the USSR and to Yugoslavia. In the teeth of Soviet opposition, the Conference insisted on establishing the Danube as an international waterway, and Trieste as a free port under the United Nations.

Trieste, the sole European territory to be openly disputed after the Second World War, remained in a high state of tension for seven years. Zone A, including the port and city, was secured by British troops; Zone B, to the east, was held by the Yugoslavs. This partition was finally accepted by Italo-Yugoslav agreement in October 1954. (See Appendix III, p. 1313.)

Post-war Europe was faced with tidal waves of refugees. Both the Nazis and the Soviets had resorted to mass deportations and slave labour. Many survivors were now set free. There were 9 million such displaced persons (DPs) in Germany alone. They lived in primitive, overcrowded camps, often in barracks recently vacated by prisoners of war. The largest numbers came from countries recently occupied by the Red Army, to which, fearing retribution, they steadfastly refused to return. They were administered by UNRRA (the UN Refugee Relief Administration) and slowly dispersed, first as European Voluntary Workers to various industrial centres in Western Europe and later by emigration schemes to Canada, USA, Australia, and South America. The last emigrants did not leave until 1951–2.

Military personnel were also stranded in huge numbers. The Western Powers had difficulty making provision even for units that had fought on the Allied side. General Anders’s Polish army, for example, which had fought its way into northern Italy, contained several hundred thousands of men, and dependants, whose homes had been seized by the USSR. In 1946 they had all to be brought to Britain, where they were added to the Polish Resettlement Corps (PKRP) for retraining and assimilation.2 Ironically enough, they were joined in Britain by ex-members of the Waffen SSGalizien, who had also found their way to Italy and who, as citizens of pre-war Poland, were not handed over to the mercies of the Soviet authorities. Most ex-Wehrmacht personnel were not so lucky. German prisoners of war captured by the Soviets were transported to the Gulag, where they shared the fate of ex-Soviet prisoners of war from Germany. (The remnants were repatriated in 1956.)

The Western Allies were aware of communist barbarities towards people returning from abroad. But they generally held to a policy of forcible expulsion for all persons, both civilian and military, whose return was demanded by Stalin. The first transports of ex-slave labourers captured by the British Army in Normandy sailed in secret from Liverpool to Murmansk in October 1944. Serious resistance was provoked in Austria in the Spring of 1945 when many Soviet citizens chose mass suicide before repatriation. Hundreds of thousands, notably the Cossack Brigade and large numbers of Croats, were handed over to almost certain death before the practice was stopped.3 [KEELHAUL] Not that the Anglo-Americans could necessarily boast about the treatment of POWs in their own charge. One study of American policy in 1945–6 has claimed that German prisoners held in western Europe were administratively reclassified in order to bypass the Geneva Convention, and that a significant proportion may have died from neglect.4

The population exchanges envisaged at Potsdam took effect from the autumn of 1945. At least 9 million German expellees were driven from their homes in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Defenceless refugees became the prey of local revenge. The Communist security services used former Nazi camps as collection centres. Maltreatment was routine. The death toll was counted in tens of thousands. Miserably overcrowded transports were sent straight through to the British and American zones of Germany. The resultant Vertriebene verbände or provincial ‘associations of expellees’ were to become a potent anti-communist force in post-war politics. Their successful absorption was the first of West Germany’s many miracles.5

Compensatory population movements took place further East. The empty city of Königsberg, renamed Kaliningrad, was repopulated by the Soviet military as an enclave of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Some 2–3 million Poles were allowed to migrate westwards from provinces annexed by the USSR. The empty city of Breslau, for example, renamed Wroclaw, was largely taken over by Poles driven out of the city of Lwów, who arrived complete with their university, their mayor and corporation, and their national museum. Both in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the former German territories provided a ready source of housing and employment for the poorest internal migrants.

Given the fiasco after the First World War, the Western Powers decided not to press Germany for punitive reparations. The Soviets, in contrast, set out to extract the maximum. The official Soviet demand stood at $20 billion. But they did not wait for inter-Allied negotiations to fail: from the earliest days of occupation, Soviet reparation squads set about dismantling and removing industrial plant, railway lines, power stations, livestock, and rolling stock. The Soviet looters, private and collective, drew no distinction between Germany and lands designated for administration by Poland or Czechoslovakia.

Across Europe, people wanted to settle accounts with wartime collaborators. In some cases, it was undertaken by legal process. Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), and Father Tiso were among those sentenced and executed. The aged Marshal Pétain, though sentenced to death, lived out his remaining years on the Ile d’Yeu. Proceedings were most thorough in the Netherlands, where some 200,000 suspected collaborators were detained, and in Belgium, where, of 634,000 detained, 57,000 were sentenced. This compares with 9,000 trials and 35 death sentences in Austria. Often enough, though, the populace took matters into their own hands. In Italy, thousands of fascists were simply lynched or shot by partisans. In France, in a wild wave of retribution, at leaast 10,000 were killed, often on the flimsiest of accusations. In West Germany, once the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals were over (see pp. 1048–54), denazification proceeded slowly; criminal trials began in the late 1950s. Sporadic trials of SS officers, employers of slave labour, and concentration camp personnel continued through the 1960s. But most of the big fish had swum off: 9 million ex-Nazis were too many to deal with.

In Eastern Europe, the Communists used the purge of collaborators as a pretext for eliminating their own opponents. A few prominent Nazis and collaborators were made an example of: Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, was tried and hanged in Poland in 1946. On the other hand, many of the rank and file were able to survive if they agreed to change sides. Boleslaw Piasecki, head of the Polish fascist Falanga, for example, emerged from a Soviet jail in 1945 as head of the communist-sponsored pseudo-Catholic organization PAX. Meanwhile the vast majority of East European politicals who were consigned in droves to the Soviet Gulag or to other communist prisons under the label of ‘fascists’ or ‘collaborators’ were nothing of the sort. It was not uncommon for Nazi war criminals to share their cells with the flower of the anti-Nazi resistance.6 Nazi concentration camps, such as Buchenwald, were reopened by the KGB in order to repress a new generation of inmates.

Somehow, amidst the chaos, the ex-Reich had to be administered. Austria was immediately hived off. Germany, disarmed, diminished, and demilitarized, was divided into five parts—four occupation zones, plus Berlin, which was also split into four sectors (see Map 27, p. 1049). Since it was agreed at Potsdam that there should be no central German government, a clutch of ministries required to restart economic life had to be organized under the direct supervision of the Inter-Allied Control Commission (ICC). All aspects of local administration were subordinated to committees chaired by British, American, French, or Soviet officers. For the first two winters priority had to be given to mere survival. Germany’s cities had been reduced to rubble; roads, railways, and bridges had to be rebuilt. Fifty million people, one-fifth of them refugees, had somehow to be fed and housed.

German politics, however, did revive, in the first instance in the Soviet zone. A communist initiative group headed by Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) arrived from Moscow almost before the fighting had stopped. When local elections in December 1945 suggested that the socialists of the Soviet zone held an advantage, the communists openly assaulted them, arresting their leaders and withholding ration cards. The results of the only free election in the Soviet zone were ignored; a forced merger was pushed through between communists and socialists. Already in April 1946 the resultant Socialist Unity Party (SED) was under Ulbricht poised for the creation of a one-party state. In these circumstances, the three nascent all-German parties, which began to operate in 1945 under Allied proposals for Germany’s ‘democratic transformation’—the SPD of Dr Kurt Schumacher, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Dr Konrad Adenauer, and the Free Democratic Union—were only able to function freely in the three Western zones.

Communist machinations were particularly blatant in Poland. Ever since 1943 the Western powers had closed their eyes to the crucifixion of their Polish ally [KATYŃ]; and at Yalta they had handed Poland to Stalin on a plate. The results were disastrous. In the wake of the Moscow Trial of June 1945 (see p. 1050–1), members of the wartime Resistance were arrested en masse; non-communist parties were mercilessly harassed; a vicious civil war was fought with the remnants of the underground; and the ‘free, unfettered elections’ promised at Yalta were repeatedly postponed. The country was run by an NKVD officer, Boleslaw Bierut (1892–1956), who was masquerading as a ‘non-party’ leader. The one representative of the London Poles to participate was powerless. The results of a dubious referendum held in June 1946 were drowned amidst news of a dastardly pogrom perpetrated with official connivance at Kielce. The elections, when finally held in January 1947, were so manifestly fraudulent that the US Ambassador in Warsaw promptly resigned in protest.7

Yet Stalin’s overall intentions were far from clear at this stage. If the conduct of the communists was bad in Poland and Yugoslavia—where Tito had crushed his opponents in a bloodbath of revenge—it was not so bad in Czechoslovakia, the West’s favourite son. Beneš and his Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk (1886–1948), were still at the head of affairs. The Czech communists had a popular following; and they seemed to be responsible partners in the ruling coalition. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the political situation was confused. Republican constitutions were adopted in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania in 1946, and in Romania in 1947. But the disappearance of the last Balkan monarchies, who all had German connections, did not cause much grief. A general increase in communist influence, as in France and Italy, was taken as a natural reaction against the fascist era. There was no sign of a fixed Soviet blueprint.

Stalin’s caution is easily explained. The Soviet Union was still in surprisingly good odour with Western opinion, especially in the USA. It had suffered appalling devastation, and desperately needed an interval of respite. The Soviet Union had annexed 272,500 square miles of foreign territory, with an extra population of 25 millions, and needed time to purge and prepare them for the Soviet way of life. Most importantly, the Soviet Union did not yet possess the atomic bomb. On this score alone, any physical confrontation with the Americans would be premature. The most sensible approach was to wait and see whether the Americans would carry out their promise to withdraw their troops from Europe or not.

American counsels were long divided. There was a strong lobby in Congress which held that the Soviet threat was much exaggerated and that Europeans should be left to sort out Europe’s problems. The contrary view, held by President Truman, agreed with the closing words of Churchill’s Fulton speech: ‘our Russian friends… admire nothing so much as strength.’ For two years, therefore, US policy hung in the balance. The advocates of engagement had to fight every inch of the way. Their determination was gradually strengthened by the insulting nature of Soviet propaganda, by the subversive activities of Soviet sympathizers, by the obstructiveness of Soviet administrators in Germany, by the Soviets’ refusal to accept America’s economic proposals, and by British advice. They finally won the day after the strategic decision forced on President Truman by the crisis in Greece in the spring of 1947. In the background, American concern was heightened by news of communist advances in China.

The communist parties of Western Europe were greatly strengthened by the victory over fascism. They were particularly active in France, Belgium, and Italy, where their role in the Resistance was widely admired and where one-quarter of the electorate supported them. After the fiasco of a failed communist coup in Brussels in November 1944, their strategy was to participate in parliamentary and governmental coalitions. But then in 1947 a wave of orchestrated strikes in Italy, and in the French mines, destroyed the reigning harmony. Stalin’s Western cohorts were seen to be damaging the progress of democracy and economic recovery. Relations between Western and Soviet administrators in Germany went from moderate to bad, and from bad to worse. There was no common language; Berlin remained split into mutually hostile sectors. In mid-1946 the Western Powers sought to realize the united German economic space as envisaged at Potsdam. The Soviets refused to participate. Thereon the three Western zones went their own way, assisted by a German Economic Council formed under Anglo-American auspices in June 1947.

Until 1947, both Persia and Greece had been managed by the British. But suddenly, pressured by other major crises in India, Egypt, and Palestine, the bankrupt British decided that they could no longer cope. In Persia, the parliament had decided to reject an arrangement which would have seen Soviet forces retire from the northern region in return for huge deliveries of oil. In face of possible Soviet retaliation, American advisers were brought to Teheran. A new source of Soviet-American confrontation was in the making. In Greece, the civil war was reopened in May 1946. Communist rebels pressed southwards from bases in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Britain’s costs for defending the royal government in Athens soared; London appealed to Washington for financial aid. Instead of preparing its withdrawal from Europe, the USA was being asked to shoulder the burden of resistance against communist expansion. A decisive shift in global power was about to occur.

President Truman’s response was unequivocal. In applying to Congress for $400 million economic aid for Greece and Turkey, he spelled out the principles of a firm new policy. ‘It must be the policy of the United States’, he declared, ‘to help free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.’ This Truman Doctrine of 12 March 1947 marked America’s voluntary acceptance of the leadership of the free world. It put an end to prolonged indecision, and ensured that American troops would remain in Europe for the duration. Truman’s stance towards communism came to be known as ‘containment’—a fresh version of the pre-war cordon sanitaire. It coincided closely with an analysis entitled ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, anonymously published in July 1947 by the experienced diplomat George Kennan. It called for ‘adroit and vigilant application of counterforce … corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy’. It was purely defensive, and far from the Third World War which some hotheads had advocated.8

At this juncture the USA produced a generous economic scheme to complement its policy of increased political involvement in Europe. On 5 June 1947, at a Harvard Commencement speech, Truman’s Secretary of State, General George Marshall, unveiled plans for a European Recovery Program. ‘It is logical’, he declared, ‘that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.’ In contrast to the 1920s, the USA was offering to finance Europe’s recovery in the interests of the common good. The Marshall Plan ran for four years, from 1948 to the end of 1951. It dispensed a total of $12,500 million to 16 participating members. To manage the funds, it required the establishment of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which insisted that recipients increase production, expand trade, and make ‘counterpart contributions’ of their own. Although one-quarter of Marshall Aid was earmarked for Britain and one-fifth for France, it was made available to allies, neutrals, and ex-enemies alike. It has no peer in the history of enlightened self-interest.

The USSR condemned Marshall Aid as a capitalist ruse. Moscow refused to participate, and ordered the countries which it controlled to do likewise. As a result, the hardening political divide was reinforced by a marked economic divide. The 16 countries of Western Europe who benefited from Marshall Aid were able to forge ahead; the USSR and its dependants were cast into self-imposed isolation.

The European movement could trace its roots right back to the seventeenth century (see Introduction, p. 10; Chapter XI, pp. 949–51). But the ambitions of the national states had ruined every practical enterprise in that direction. Europeans had to drink the bitter dregs of defeat and humiliation before the dreams of the early idealists could be realized. They had to lose their empires, and their hopes of empire, before governments would give priority to living with their neighbours.

The moral dimensions of the post-war European movement are not always remembered. One strand was centred on the survivors of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany, for whom international reconciliation assumed prime importance. For them, the Declaration of Guilt formulated by Pastor Martin Niemöller, at the Stuttgart Conference of the German Evangelical Church in October 1945, was an act of great moment. Another strand was centred in France on a number of radical Catholic organizations inspired by the doyen of pacifist protest, Marc Sangnier (1873–1950), whose Gratry Society looked back in direct line to the Abbé Lamennais. Sangnier had been fighting for 30 years for ‘un nouvel état d’âme international’, ‘a new international state of mind’. He was the guru of Robert Schuman, and exerted a strong influence on policy in the French zone of occupation in Germany. A European Union of Federalists held a founding conference for some 50 activist groups at Montreux in August 1947. Other, specifically Anglo-Saxon strands were to be found in the pre-war Oxford Group of Lionel Curtis, founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and in the actively anti-communist Movement for Moral Rearmament.

In 1945, however, the immediate problem lay with the intentions of the British and American Governments. London and Washington were politically supreme in Western Europe. They could easily have taken the lead in the formation of new European institutions, or indeed in opposing them. They did neither. In the field of international co-operation they looked principally to the United Nations; politically, they were preoccupied by the growing confrontation with Stalin. They had no special vision for Europe.

The lack of intent, however, was not immediately evident. Churchill’s personal involvement in the early post-war years boded well for official British support. Only later did it become apparent that the ruling British Labour Party did not share his views. The most that it did was to encourage the discussions which was to lead to the Council of Europe (see below). A Labour Party pamphlet entitled European Unity (1950) stressed that ‘no iota of British sovereignty’ was negotiable. The Americans, too, exuded goodwill. The OECD, which acted as the conduit for Marshall Aid, seemed to be a first step in the direction of European integration. Only in 1949–50, when Marshall Aid was running down, did the limits of American as well as of British interest become clear.

The first person of stature to identify the direction in which Europe was moving was Winston Churchill. Rejected by the British electorate in July 1945, Europe’s most admired war leader had leisure to reflect. ‘What is Europe?’ he wrote. ‘A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding-ground for pestilence and hate.’ In 1946, in two landmark speeches that were to prove prophetic, he expressed views that were not very popular at the time. On 5 March, at Westminster College in Fulton (Missouri), with President Truman at his side, he spoke of ‘the Iron Curtain’:

From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line, lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe—Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia… This is certainly not the liberated Europe which we fought to build up.9

Churchill rejected the likelihood of an early Soviet attack on the West, but he believed that Moscow was intent on ‘indefinite expansion’. He called for ‘timely action’ of the sort that had been lacking ten years earlier against Nazi Germany. US opinion was ‘almost universally hostile’.10 In London,The Times bristled with disapproval, announcing that ‘Western Democracy and Communism have much to learn from each other’.11

On 19 September, in Zurich, Churchill appealed for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. Time, he said, might be short; the spread of atomic weapons might soon reinforce existing divisions. The first step had to be a partnership between France and Germany. ‘If we are to form a United States of Europe …’, he declared, ‘we must begin now.’ The future of the ‘European family’ depended on ‘the resolve of millions to do right instead of wrong’. So the appeal was not economic or political, but moral. The Times sniffed at this ‘outrageous proposition’. ‘Even in Western Europe,’ it commented, ‘there is little to suggest that the unity so much spoken of… is on the way.’ The founder of the pre-war European movement, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, was one of the few to congratulate Churchill. ‘Now that you have raised the European question,’ he wrote, ‘the governments can no longer ignore it.’

In this period, Churchill’s strategic vision postulated a ‘fraternal association’ of three interlocking circles made up of the British Commonwealth, the ‘European Union’, and the United States. Britain was to act as ‘the vital link between them all’. He correctly identified the competing interests which were to cause tremendous strains in the ensuing decades by pulling British foreign policy in three different directions at once.

Churchill’s views made him the natural choice for chairing the Congress of Europe which was privately organized in The Hague on 7–10 May 1948. Some 800 eminent invitees were asked to ponder the problems of European disunity. A strong German delegation attended, with Konrad Adenauer at their head. The cultural commission was chaired by the exiled Spanish minister and writer Salvador de Madariaga. In their debates, they recognized the principle of ‘supra-nationality’: the need for states to surrender part of their sovereignty in the interests of common institutions. Churchill’s statement enshrined the loftiest ideals:

We must proclaim the mission and the design of a United Europe whose moral conception will win the respect and gratitude of mankind, and whose physical strength will be such that none will dare molest her tranquil sway … I hope to see a Europe where men and women of every country will think of being European as of belonging to their native land, and wherever they go in this wide domain will truly feel ‘Here I am at home’.

De Madariaga waxed equally eloquent:

This Europe must be born. And she will, when Spaniards say ‘our Chartres’, Englishmen ‘our Cracow’, Italians ‘our Copenhagen’, and Germans ‘our Bruges’… Then Europe will live. For then it will be that the Spirit which leads Europe will have uttered the creative words: FIAT EUROPA.14

The Congress was undoubtedly carried away by the force of its own enthusiasms. But the final communiqué called for practical steps such as the creation of a European Assembly and a European Court of Human Rights; and a liaison committee was formed to keep the Congress aims alive. This latter body was destined to adopt the name of ‘European Movement’, of which it was indeed the progenítor. Apart from Churchill, its honorary presidents were Schuman (France), De Gasperi (Italy), and Spaak (Belgium). They had now to see whether any of the ruling governments might adopt their ideas. Given the truculence of the USSR, it was obvious that they could only hope for support from the governments of the West (see below).

By the end of 1947, therefore, Churchill’s Iron Curtain was becoming a reality. Three events removed all lingering doubts: the creation of Cominform; the February coup in Prague; and the Berlin Blockade.

Meeting in the Polish mountain resort of Szklarska Poręba in October 1947, communist delegates from the USSR, Eastern Europe, France, and Italy founded the Communist Information Bureau. Its purpose was to co-ordinate the strategies of fraternal parties. To the outside world, it looked suspiciously like a revival of Comintern, an instrument of subversion, the harbinger of a new ideological offensive.

The Communist coup in Prague took place on 25 February 1948. The Czech communists had been sharing power with the socialists for two years; but their fears of a rising socialist vote meant that their own influence might soon decline. Their involvement in a genuine democratic system equally meant that they could not gain supremacy by manipulation, as in neighbouring Poland; so they resorted to force. Armed workers and militiamen appeared on the streets. Red Army garrisons were rumoured to be preparing for action. Non-communist politicians were arrested, and their parties dissolved. Jan Masaryk was thrown to his death from his ministry window. Klement Gottwald, the communist boss, said ‘it was like cutting butter with a sharp knife’. President BeneŠ, pliant as ever, did not resist. For the second time in ten years, Eastern Europe’s most promising democracy had been subverted without a shot fired in its defence. Western opinion took fright. Fearing a Soviet attack, five West European countries formed a 50-year alliance providing for economic and military co-operation. The Brussels Treaty of 17 March 1948, signed by Britain, France, and the Benelux group, was the precursor of the new security alignments now congealing.

The final blow fell in Germany. The German Economic Council was preparing its new plan. The key proposals envisaged a radical currency reform, involving the exchange of ten old Reichsmarks for one new Deutschmark, and a new central bank—the Bank Deutscher Länder (the ancestor of the Bundesbank). The Soviet commissioner, Marshal Sokolovsky, would have none of it. On 20 March 1948 he and his aides marched out of the Allied Control Commission, never to return. The Grand Alliance was finished.

Stalin had reached the point where restraint was no longer paying dividends. Soviet diplomacy had failed both to persuade the Americans to leave Europe and to prevent the growing integration of Germany’s Western zones. With active American assistance, Western Europe could only grow in strength. So the time had come for the Russian bear to growl. The Soviet Army could not risk a direct assault; but it could demonstrate its hold on the vulnerable, and highly symbolic, city of Berlin. On 1 April 1948 Soviet patrols began interfering with traffic in the corridor between Berlin and the Western zones, but to no effect. On 18 June the D-Mark and the BDL Bank were introduced. This, from the communist viewpoint, was an act of aggression; on the 24th Soviet troops sealed off Berlin completely, to save their zone from invasion by the Deutschmark. The German capital was under blockade, and would remain so for 15 months. The Cold War had begun.

Western Europe, 1945–1985

Post-war Western Europe is easily defined: it consisted of the countries which were not occupied by the Soviet Army, and which did not fall under communist control. These countries belonged, however, to two distinct groups. One was made up of neutrals, who stayed outside the various military and economic associations of the era; the other, larger group was made up of those who became members either of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or of the European Economic Community (EEC), or both (see Appendix III, p. 1335).

Western Europe was also distinguished by the fact that in 1945 it was still the home base of the world’s colonial empires. Indeed, with the exception of the USA and the Soviet Union, whose imperialisms did not conform to the traditional type, there were no imperial powers that were not West European. Germany had been stripped of its overseas colonies in 1919. Italy suffered the same fate in 1946. But the British, the Dutch, the French, the Belgian, and the Portuguese Empires were largely intact. The dissolution of these empires in the early post-war decades constituted a fundamental element in the changing European scene. Decolonization was a necessary precondition for the emergence of a new European Community of equal, democratic partners.

During and immediately after the Second World War, many European imperialists had hoped that they would be able to keep, or to reconstitute, their empires. ‘I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister’, said Churchill, ‘in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ But he did.

There were many reasons why, by 1945, the maintenance of Europe’s empires had become virtually impossible. First and foremost, the élites of the colonial peoples, many of them educated in Europe, had learned the nationalism and democracy of their masters and were now vociferously demanding independence. The links between the colonies and the home countries had weakened during the war. There were no longer the resources available to restore them by force; nor was there the will to perpetuate the rule of one race over another. The USA, on whom Western Europe now depended, was resolutely opposed to old-style colonialism; and so was the United Nations. Imperialism was no longer either viable or respectable. The main question was whether the imperialists would bend to the wind of change or try to stand against it. Nothing better reveals the gulf between Eastern and Western Europe at this stage. At the very time that the Soviet Union was extending and consolidating its empire over the peoples of Eastern Europe, the imperial governments of Western Europe were desperately seeking means to dismantle theirs. For some reason, these twin aspects of European imperialism are rarely discussed under the same heading.

The process of decolonization was immensely complex, and many of the complications derived from conditions beyond Europe. But each empire possessed its own ethos; each possessed a variety of territories ranging from self-governing dominions to colonies and trusteeships; and each wielded very different degrees of military force. Except for Britain and Portugal, all the imperial powers had been defeated and occupied during the war, and started from a position of weakness.

The British Empire, which occupied an area roughly 125 times larger than Great Britain, was already in an advanced state of transformation. All of the ‘white dominions’ had been fully independent since 1931; and many other crown possessions were being prepared for self-rule or native administration. Of 250,000 employees of the British Colonial Office in 1945, only 66,000 were from Britain. The test case was India, a subcontinent of 400 million people where Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent resistance had attracted world-wide attention. The postwar British Labour Government decided to grant India unconditional independence. On 15 August 1947 the last Viceroy took the salute in Delhi as the Raj saw the British flag lowered for the last time. India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon all arose as independent states. There was an orgy of intercommunal massacres between Muslims and Hindus, but nothing aimed directly at the British.

Several of the smaller dependencies caused much greater trouble. In May 1948 Britain returned the mandate of Palestine to the UN after years of violence both from Zionist terrorists and from Arab rebels. In Malaya, the communist insurgency lasted from 1948 to 1957; in Cyprus, the war against Eoka from 1950 to 1960; in Kenya, the Mau-Mau campaign from 1952 to 1957; in Egypt, the struggle culminating in the Suez Crisis from 1952 to 1956; in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the emergency over white UDI from 1959 to 1980. Elsewhere in Africa, a procession of peaceful acts of independence started with that of Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960. At the end of the process, almost all of Britain’s former colonies had joined the British Commonwealth, a voluntary association originally founded for the self-governing dominions. South Africa left in 1961, Pakistan in 1973. The residual administrative functions of the Commonwealth Office had been transferred in stages to the Foreign Office (FCO) by 1968. Preferential Commonwealth tariffs were terminated in 1973. The dissolution of the world’s largest empire was essentially complete within a quarter of a century.

The Dutch Empire, 55 times larger than the Netherlands, was closed down at one blow. The Dutch East Indies were never effectively resecured by the Dutch after the Japanese occupation of 1941–5. The Republic of Indonesia was confirmed in 1950.

The French Empire, 19 times larger than France, expired in agony. Many inhabitants of the colonies possessed full French citizenship; and several north African departments, with large French populations, formed an integral part of metropolitan France. Humiliated during the war, French governments felt obliged to assert their authority, and wielded enough military power to make their ultimate defeat very costly. Tunisia and Morocco were safely disentangled by 1951, as were the Levantine mandates in Syria and Lebanon. But in Indo-China an eight-year war was fought against the Viet-Cong, until the disaster of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 forced Paris to hand over to an incautious Washington. In Algeria, another vicious eight-year war against the FLN, which destroyed the Fourth Republic on the way, ended with General de Gaulle’s dramatic concession of Algerian independence in May 1962. Preoccupied by the Algerian war, France had already set its other African colonies free.

The Belgian Empire, 78 times the size of Belgium, collapsed in 1960, when the Congo sought to follow the example of its ex-French neighbours. The move was quite unprepared. The secession of Katanga caused a civil war which claimed the lives of thousands, including those of the Soviet sponsee, Patrice Lumumba, and the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

The Portuguese Empire survived longest. Angola, which itself was 23 times larger than Portugal, broke away in 1975, together with Mozambique and Goa.

All the ex-colonies in Europe but one were set free. The Dodecanese were returned to Greece by Italy in 1945. Malta was given independence from the British in 1964. Only a clutch of small colonial dependencies clung on, including Gibraltar, which faced threats of a Spanish takeover, the Falkland Islands (British), the source of the Anglo-Argentine war of 1983, and the Marquesas Islands (French), the site of France’s nuclear testing. Hong Kong (British) was due to revert to China in 1997, Macao (Portuguese) in 1999.

The effects of decolonization were almost as profound on the ex-imperialists as on the ex-colonies. The former imperial powers were reduced to the same standing as other sovereign states in Europe, thereby rendering eventual union less problematical. They lost many traditional economic benefits, especially cheap raw materials and captive colonial markets. Yet they also shed the burden of defending and administering their distant possessions. They each maintained strong cultural and personal links with the Asian and African peoples, who could now send floods of voluntary immigrants to join the ‘old country’s’ labour force. In the post-imperial decades, far more people from the Caribbean or the Indian subcontinent came to Britain, and Muslims to France, than ever came previously. Imperial race problems were imported with them.

The decolonization of the West was watched in Eastern Europe with a mixture of surprise and envy. Official propaganda found difficulty in celebrating the national liberation movements of distant continents without giving ideas to their own subjects. Ordinary citizens wondered why so much publicity was given to the Arabs, the Vietnamese, and the Congolese. The intelligent ones wondered why decolonization should not also apply to them. For this, they had to await the era of Mikhail Gorbachev (see below).

Once the Truman doctrine had been enunciated, it was necessary to create formal institutions for co-ordinating US involvement in Europe’s defence and security. The Berlin blockade only emphasized the urgency. The foreign ministers of nine West European countries joined the US and Canada in a treaty founding NATO on 4 April 1949.

In a sense, NATO may be seen as a replacement for the former Grand Alliance; it was centred on the same Anglo-American partnership dating from 1941. In the first instance, it joined the Anglo-Americans to the signatories of the earlier Brussels Treaty, together with Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway. It was later expanded to include Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982). It was run by a political committee, the North Atlantic Council, based in Brussels, with its own Secretary-General. Its regional military commands, with air, land, and sea forces, covered the Atlantic routes between North America and Europe, and the full length of the Iron Curtain from the North Cape to the Black Sea. It was the prime instrument for the ‘containment’ of the USSR, which was now perceived as the principal threat to European peace. Its mission lasted for 40 years, and was carried out with indisputable success.

NATO’s first task was to break the Berlin blockade—which it did, quite literally, with flying colours. Relying on superior air power, relays of British and American transport planes undertook to supply a city of 2 million souls with all the fuel, food, and raw materials they needed. The airlift required 277,264 flights; at its height, one fully laden aircraft was touching down at Tempelhof Airport every minute. Every day 8,000 tons of supplies dropped out of the sky. By the end, dozens of east-facing air-strips had been constructed across Western Germany, where the popularity of the Western Powers soared. The Soviets could only watch in silent fury, until they lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949.

By that time, preparations for the creation of a separate West German Republic were well advanced. The previous July, in Frankfurt, the Allied commanders had presented recommendations to the premiers of the regional Länder, calling for the creation of a constituent council and the drafting of a federal constitution. Reluctant German leaders had been tempted to hold out for a united Germany; but the Berlin blockade removed their hesitations. The Grundgesetz or Basic Law was passed in the week that the blockade ended; elections were held in August. Konrad Adenauer took his place as the first federal Chancellor with a one-vote majority. The Bundesrepublik, with its capital at Bonn, took its place as Western Europe’s most populous sovereign state.

It was perhaps inevitable that the Soviets would respond in kind. The German Democratic Republic (DDR) provided a formal framework for the existing dictatorship of the SED, and was instituted in October 1949, with its capital in (East) Berlin. West Berlin, still occupied by the Western Allies, remained an enclave of disputed status, a loophole through which thousands of refugees continued to seek freedom in the West. The memory of a united Germany receded ever more rapidly into the past.

Political life in Western Europe was restarted on the basis of a universal commitment to liberal democracy and a widespread belief in the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state. Monarchies survived in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and in Britain, but only as national totems. There was much interest in Anglo-American democracy and, in the early post-war years, great admiration for the Soviet Union. Revulsion against fascism inhibited the nationalist wing of opinion, boosted parties seeking social reform, and made communism respectable. Proportional representation, and government by multi-party coalitions, were most common. Spain and Portugal had not been involved in the war, and were the only countries where pre-war fascism persisted. Three general trends can be observed: the rise of Christian Democracy, the tribulations of socialism, and the decline of communism.

Christian Democracy, which before the war had often possessed confessional and clerical overtones, now made a fresh start free of ecclesiastical patronage, often in the hands of former left-centre Catholics. It had a ‘left wing’ connected with Catholic trade unions, and a ‘right wing’ that was not; party brokers managed the middle ground. In Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), headed at first by De Gasperi, was deeply riven by factions, but gradually edged its way to forming a national establishment. In France, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) was created in 1944 under Georges Bidault and the Schuman brothers, but suffered from rivalry with the main-line Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF). In West Germany, the CDU of Dr Adenauer slowly emerged as the major political force. Adenauer was an old-time conservative, fond of the motto ‘No Experiments’. But his partnership with Ludwig Erhard, a proponent of the social-market economy, was a winning combination. Exceptionally, the Dutch ‘Catholic People’s Party’ remained a confessional grouping. Exceptionally, Great Britain possessed no Christian Democratic tradition at all.

European socialism was especially prone to fragmentation, and frequently suffered from communist competition. Post-war social democracy shed its prewar emphasis on the class struggle, pressing instead for human rights and social justice within the capitalist system. The Italian Socialists of Pietro Nenni manœuvred in the middle ground between the DC and the powerful communists. In France, the PSF of Guy Mollet moved away from its pre-war dogmatism, but did not enjoy much success until the era of François Mitterrand in the 1970s and 1980s. In West Germany too the SPD, whose Godesberg Programme of 1959 broke with its proletarian traditions, remained in opposition until the late 1960s. Once again the British Labour Party, a ‘broad church’ of very variegated tendencies, was something of an odd man out.

West European communist parties, initially prominent, declined rapidly after 1948. They normally took instructions and financial support from Moscow. They had a strong intellectual wing which ill matched the proletarian base, and which gradually disintegrated as the enormity of Stalin’s crimes was revealed. They only remained powerful in Italy and France, where they regularly polled 20–25 per cent, forming a solid bloc which rallied all other parties against them. In Italy, they played an effective role in local government, administering bourgeois cities like Bologna with success. In France, they eventually achieved a brief moment of ‘cohabitation’ with the socialists in 1980–1, before falling away for good.

Post-war French politics were marked by the fundamental divide between the Fourth Republic (1946–58), which emerged from the Liberation, and the subsequent Fifth Republic. They were strongly influenced by the towering figure of Charles de Gaulle, who returned in triumph as Premier in 1944–6, retired in disgust for twelve years, reigned as President 1958–69, and left an enduring legacy after his death. De Gaulle, though a democrat, was an advocate of a strong executive, and a jealous guardian of French sovereignty—anti-British, anti-American, and, initially, both anti-German and anti-EEC. The Fourth Republic was blighted by immobilisme, ‘political paralysis’, caused by the attacks of communists and extreme right—the Poujadistes—and by a succession of fleeting, unstable coalition governments. On average, it saw a new prime minister every six months. It was temporarily rescued after 1947 by the success of the Gaullist RPF, which acted as a patriotic force for unity, but was destroyed by the effects of Indo-China, the Suez Crisis, and the Algerian War. The Fifth Republic came into being in 1958, when de Gaulle was recalled from Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to quell the revolt of army officers in Algeria, which had all the makings of a military coup that could have spread to Paris. It introduced a powerful presidency, which was independent of the National Assembly and controlled the formation of governments. There was a major crisis in the summer of 1968, with sensational street-fighting between police and demonstrators in Paris; but it passed. Under de Gaulle’s successors, Georges Pompidou, 1969–74, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 1974–81, and the socialist Francois Mitterrand from 1981, it found both stability and rising prosperity. The failures of the Fourth Republic turned many French politicians into committed European federalists. The assertiveness of the Fifth Republic led to great friction with the European Commission (see below) and, in 1966, to France’s withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military command.

In 1962–3, however, General de Gaulle took a decision of lasting importance. He decided not only to make Franco-German reconciliation the corner-stone of French policy but also to give it institutional substance. Touring West Germany, he congratulated German youth for being ‘the children of a great people’, contrasted ‘Germany’s great crimes and great miseries’, and praised Germany’s ‘treasures of courage, discipline and organization’. He restored German self-respect. By the Élysée Treaty of January 1963, signed with Chancellor Adenauer, he established a ‘special relationship’ which no other European nations possess. Henceforth, a comprehensive programme of Franco-German co-operation in foreign affairs, defence, education, and youth, cemented by regular meetings of heads of state, provided the only consistent source of leadership in Western Europe.15[DOUAUMONT]

Post-war Italian politics have long displayed the same shortcomings as France’s Fourth Republic, without ever producing a de Gaulle to mount a rescue. After the abolition of the monarchy in 1946, continuity was built on a strong consensus against a return to fascism, on the entrenchment of the Christian Democrats, who shared in all post-war governments, and on the vitality of municipal and regional politics. The consistency of state policy contrasted remarkably with the instability of cabinets. The polarization between the anti-Catholic and anticlerical left, dominated by Communists, and the conservative right has generated considerable violence. The terrorism of the Red Brigades culminated in the murder of a Prime Minister in 1978, and in the counter-terror which killed many people in the Bologna bombing of 1980. There were important divergences between the prosperous north, especially Turin and Milan, and the backward, Mafia-ridden south, which seemed impervious to reform. The Italian economy was slow to recover from the war, but made rapid strides within the EEC. Economic success offset political weakness. Italy was an active member of NATO, providing the bulwark of the Southern Front in the Mediterranean and the base of the American Sixth Fleet in Naples. Domestic political weakness has strengthened Italian adherence to European federalism.

After 1949 West German politics were, frankly, unexciting—which was perhaps a sign of their efficacy. Seventeen years of the CDU’s supremacy under Adenauer and Erhard gave way in 1966 to three years of coalition government, to a long period of dominance by the SPD under Willy Brandt (1969–74) and Helmut Schmidt (1974–82), then again, after 1982, to the CDU, under the chancellorship of Dr Helmut Kohl. The Constitution created a Bundesbank independent of the federal government, whilst reserving wide powers to the regional governments of the Länder (some of which pre-dated the Bundesrepublik). The central authorities in Bonn enjoyed the freedom to concentrate on their internal co-ordinating role and on foreign affairs. In the federal parliament the proportional representation of the Weimar system was amended to minimize the disruptive influence of fringe parties. Trade unions, remodelled on British advice, turned out to be more effective than in Britain itself. Though Germany was to rearm after joining NATO, defence policy remained very dependent on American leadership. The Wirtschaftswunder or ‘Economic Miracle’ of the 1950s (see below) brought stability and prestige as well as prosperity, greatly assisting in the country’s rehabilitation. Adenauer moved step by step, trading German partnership for Allied concessions. West Germany gained sovereign status in 1952, full membership of NATO in 1955, membership of the EEC in 1956, membership of UNO in 1973. After that, the political scene was enlivened or disturbed by the well-publicized activities of the anti-nuclear peace movement, of the environmental ‘Greens’, and, for a time, of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. Decades of confrontation with East Germany were modified after 1970 by the Ostpolitik (see below), and crowned with success in 1990 through reunification. For years, West Germany was described as an economic giant and a political pygmy. This was not entirely just; but the burden of history undoubtedly inhibited an assertive stance, and it predisposed many Germans to the idea of European union. Critics worried about what could happen if Germany’s prosperity faded. ‘The German Dictatorship has failed,’ a historian wrote in 1969, ‘but German democracy has not yet been secured.’ Similar worries would recur again after reunification.

Post-war British politics had to cope with a country whose traditional identity was quietly disintegrating. They were governed by the swings of the two-party Westminster system, by the stop-go performance of the economy, and, above all, by Britain’s long search for a post-imperial role. In July 1945 the dramatic election victory of the Labour Party introduced an extensive welfare state and a mixed economy, where evenly matched private and nationalized sectors competed. In the next half-century, three Labour governments ruled for a total of 17 years, three Conservative governments (up to 1992) for over 30. Thanks to the near-dictatorial powers of the parliamentary majority, each government’s programme tended to be reversed by its successor. The over-mighty position of the trade unions, for example, which had been encouraged by the Labour governments, was overturned by the fierce anti-union policies of the Conservatives in the 1980s. Attempts by assorted ‘third parties’ to stop the sterile duel—by the Liberals, by the Social Democrats in the early 1980s, and by the Liberal Democrats—repeatedly failed. The unsteady performance of the economy created a climate of declining confidence. The long monetarist reign of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) chose an authoritarian book-keeping style to bring discipline to all spheres that the government could reach. The effect, perhaps unintended, was to create an unusual degree of centralized power, which all but eliminated the voice of local government and the regions. Many British institutions had remained undisturbed for longer than anyone could remember; and a succession of disgraceful or divisive episodes in the City of London, the police, the royal family, and the Church of England heightened the sense of authority in decline. British society was increasingly polarized: the relative prosperity of the new ‘enterprise culture’ was matched by the decay of the inner cities and their despairing underclass, by falling standards in education, and by juvenile crime. The cohesion of the state was also being shaken: an initial surge of national separatism in Wales and Scotland in the 1970s was checked by referenda, which upheld the status quo. But from 1969 a virtual civil war in Northern Ireland required a strong military presence and brought provincial self-government to an end. Scottish separatism revived in reaction to the Anglocentric stance of successive Conservative governments. By the time that the strong hand of Mrs Thatcher left the helm, there was a widespread awareness of British democracy in crisis.

As the Empire sank from view, however, Britain’s principal dilemma lay in the need to choose between her precarious ‘special relationship’ with the USA and the prospect of closer links with her European neighbours. The natural inclination was to get the best of both worlds: to give unstinting support to the USA and to NATO, and to join the European Community as well. With luck, the British could combine maximum economic benefits with a minimal loss of sovereignty and historic ties. General de Gaulle spotted this ploy, and blocked it. After his death, British entry to the EEC was successfully negotiated. But in the late 1980s the old dilemma returned; sooner or later, the British would be forced to make their choice. British diehards feared that the United Kingdom might lose its soul; their critics argued that internal problems could only be solved in the European context.17Amidst the confusion, some people wondered whether the United Kingdom would live to celebrate its tercentenary.

France, Italy, West Germany, and Great Britain—each with populations over 50 million—were by far the largest states of Western Europe. The smaller countries could best exert an influence by joining regional associations. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had co-ordinated their policies informally ever since the war; they completed the Benelux Economic Union in 1958. Riven by ethnic discord, Belgium turned itself in 1971 into a federalized union of three autonomous provinces—Flanders, Brussels, and Wallonia. In Scandinavia, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, all members of NATO, joined Sweden and Finland, both neutrals, in the Nordic Council, formed in 1953. In their internal politics, various brands of social democracy predominated. Generally speaking, the smaller the state the greater was its stake in eventual European union.

European fascism, though peripheral, was slow to disappear. The Salazar regime in Portugal was not overturned till 1974. Franco’s regime survived in Spain until the Caudillo’s death in 1975. In Greece, deeply divided by the conflict in Cyprus, a junta of colonels seized power between 1967 and 1974. Spain’s transition from fascism to democracy presented relatively few problems. A programme of economic reform dating from the early 1960s had steadily removed many discrepancies. The revival of the monarchy in the person of King Juan Carlos provided a crucial source of political leadership; and there was a strong public consensus in favour of Spain’s accession to West European institutions. American support was also a factor. As a result, though negotiations between Brussels and Madrid were long and at points precarious, 141 sessions were sufficient for Spain to gain entry to the EEC in 1983, one year after joining NATO. Contrary to the gloomier predictions, the integration of a supposedly backward economy proved virtually trouble-free.

The cultural life of Western Europe was conditioned by the climate of political liberalism, by great advances in technology and the mass media, especially television, and by a tidal wave of American imports. The overall effect was seen in the loosening of conventional restraints and, to some degree, in the reduction of national particularities. Freedom of the arts and sciences was taken for granted. Pluralism of views was the norm.

In philosophy, the existentialism of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) came into fashion after the war, whilst in the English-speaking world the followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), an Austrian on the Cam, thought that logical positivism had rendered all other philosophy redundant. In France, the devotees of Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) and his method of deconstruction imagined that all rationalist thought could be taken apart, and shown to be meaningless. Marxism was modish in intellectual circles for twenty or thirty years, leading to what has been called ‘the Great Confrontation’ between Marxist intellectuals, fed on Gramsci, Lukács, and Bloch, and their critics. The most devastating critique came from the Polish ex-Marxist, Leszek Kotakowski (b. 1927), whose Main Currents of Marxism (1978) served both as a handbook and as an obituary to the movement. European feminism received its modern manifesto in The Second Sex (1949) of Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre had written: ‘Hell is other people.’ His partner, de Beauvoir, wrote: ‘You are not born a woman; you have to become one.’ [LAUSSEL]

Growing respect for science, a very American trait, affected all branches of study. The social sciences—psychology, economics, sociology, political science— exerted a profound effect on all the older disciplines. Perhaps the most fruitful alternatives to the arid trends of the time, however, were supplied by the Austrian-born Karl Popper (1902–94). Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) overturned reigning assumptions about the scientific method. He argued, after Einstein’s example, that no knowledge was absolute or permanent, and that hypotheses were best established by searching for proof of their wrong-headedness. His Poverty of Historicism (1957) demolished the pretensions of social science to formulate laws governing historical development. His Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) served to justify the liberal democracy which he would live to see triumph all over Europe.

In the arts, the tide eventually turned against the disintegrating tendencies of modernism; and the ‘post-modernist’ blend of old and new gained ground. International festivals such as those at Salzburg, Bayreuth, or Edinburgh broke down national barriers.

The communications media proliferated. In an age of almost total literacy, a free press flourished. Quality papers such as The Times, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung were joined by popular news magazines, gutter-press tabloids, and from the 1960s by legalized pornography. Cinema, radio, and sound technology greatly extended the mass audience and created new art forms such as musique concrète. Nothing, however, could compare in the scale of its impact with television—whose general broadcasting began in France in December 1944, in Britain in 1946, in West Germany in 1952.

American influences were felt in almost every sphere, especially in Hollywood films, dance music, and popular dress. Youth fashions and ‘pop culture’, where adolescents dressed in unisex jeans jived and minced in imitation of film idols or rock stars, became entirely transatlantic and cosmopolitan. In a world conditioned by unrestrained commercial advertising, fears began to be expressed that ‘the media was the message’, in other words, that people could be conditioned to believe anything. American English—the language of NATO, science, and ‘pop’ alike—could not be resisted as the main vehicle of international communication. ‘Frangiais’ was officially condemned in France; but the teaching and, increasingly, the use of English came to be accepted as an educational and cultural priority in all West European countries. Mindless materialism, however, came to be regarded as the most insidious of American imports. It may have been very unfair to blame the USA for reducing Europeans to the level of economic animals; but Willy Brandt was expressing widespread feelings in this regard when he asked, ‘Do we all want to be Americans?’

Post-war social life was much more relaxed and egalitarian than previously. The war had acted as a great leveller: the old hierarchies of class, profession, and family origins did not entirely disappear; but people became more mobile, and rising standards of living ensured, as in America, that wealth and income should be the main criterion of status. Motorization proceeded apace, as did the mass adoption of domestic appliances. By the 1970s an absolute majority of West European families, including the working class, possessed a motor car, a washing-machine, and a refrigerator, and could travel abroad for summer holidays on the Mediterranean beaches. East Europeans could only watch with envy. At the same time, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Community, which dispensed huge subsidies, served to redistribute wealth from the town to the countryside. Starting from the 1960s, several million peasants were transformed into relatively prosperous farmers. Primitive villages, especially in France, Germany, and northern Italy, were rapidly modernized and mechanized.

A number of structural changes made a deep impression on social attitudes. The ‘Welfare State’—which provided a wide range of services such as Britain’s National Health Service (1948), West Germany’s model pension scheme, or France’s massive HLM projects for cheap housing—removed many of the traditional anxieties about ill health, unemployment, homelessness, and old age. But it also served to create a form of psychological dependence where people could relapse into torpor, expecting to be coddled by the state from cradle to grave. It certainly did not eliminate the problems of poverty, which in a generally affluent society were particularly bitter. Rising wages turned the masses into ‘consumers’, pressured to become big spenders by aggressive advertising and by social emulation. Consumerism certainly fuelled the economy; but it turned material advancement into the goal, not the means; it threatened to reduce politics to a debate about the supply of goods; and it taught young people that possessions alone brought fulfilment. Since it put a dazzling supply of desirable goods before people’s eyes, it was a more effective form of materialism than that which communist propaganda was advocating in the East.

The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, facilitated by general access to the contraceptive pill, rapidly destroyed conventional mores. It eliminated the social shame of extramarital sex, bastardy, homosexuality, divorce, and unmarried cohabitation. In most countries it was accompanied by the de-closeting of homosexuals, by the decriminalization of consensual sodomy in private, by the relaxation of laws on pornography and obscenity, and by the widespread legalization of abortion. There were considerable variations in the tempo of change, with Denmark in the van and Ireland in the rear. And there was a strong reaction, especially in Catholic circles, where fundamental values of marriage, family, and human love were thought to be under threat.

Religious life experienced a serious decline. Wartime horrors and post-war materialism destroyed many people’s faith. Church-going ceased to be a social convention, and was left to the private inclination of families and individuals. Semi-deserted churches, lacking both congregations and regular clergy, could be encountered not only in city centres and industrial suburbs but also in rural areas. Protestant England and Catholic France were both badly hit. For the first time in 1,500 years Christianity was becoming a minority belief.

One response lay in ecumenism. From 1948 the World Council of Churches, with headquarters in Geneva, brought together the main Protestant and Orthodox Churches with the aim of voluntary co-operation. Its high ideals were not always immune from low politics.

At first the Roman Catholic Church stayed aloof. In the 1950s, a minor French experiment of ‘worker-priests’ working in industry was suppressed by the Vatican. But the elevation of Cardinal Roncalli, a man of radiant humanity, as Pope John XXIII (1958–63) marked the turning towards comprehensive reform. His Encyclical Pacem in Terris was addressed, exceptionally, to people of all faiths. Mater et Magistra showed concern for world social welfare. His convocation of the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Universal Church, known as ‘Vatican IIÙ launched the most radical change of direction since the Council of Trent.

Vatican II, whose four sessions lasted from October 1962 to December 1965, has been labelled ‘the end of the Counter-Reformation’. In the battle between conservatives and liberals, many of the proposed reforms were diluted or rejected: the declaration absolving Jewry from accusations of deicide was passed in modified form; the proposals favouring modern methods of birth control was scotched. But the powers of the Curia were clipped; the obligatory Tridentine Latin Mass was to be replaced in the Roman rite by vernacular liturgies; the laity were given greater responsibility; restrictions on intermarriage were relaxed; and the seal of approval was given to ecumenism. Most importantly, a new, open, flexible spirit took flight.

Among several new Catholic bodies, Opus Dei attracted growing attention. Founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest, Mgr José-María Escrivá de Balaguer (1902–75), it seized on the special role given by Vatican II to the laity. When its founder moved with record speed towards canonization, it was seen by its critics as a sinister and irrational force within the Church. To its adherents, it was a blameless movement for spiritual regeneration, especially of youth.

The momentum generated by John XXIII was maintained by his two principal successors. Paul VI (Cardinal Montini, 1963–78) was the first Pope to leave Italy since Napoleon had deported Pius VII. His Encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), which reaffirmed the ban on contraception, dismayed the liberals, but his pilgrimage to Constantinople and Jerusalem, where he embraced Orthodox leaders, was a milestone. Limited approaches were made to Anglicans and Lutherans. John Paul II (Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, elected 1978) added immense charm and energy to the agenda. Actor, linguist, and globetrotter extraordinary, he took the Papacy to the world. In May 1981, in St Peter’s Square, he survived an assassination attempt by a Turkish terrorist, possibly hired by the KGB. Implacably hostile to ‘liberation theology’, birth control, and clerical indiscipline, he was in some respects a fierce traditionalist. His suspension of the Swiss theologian Professor Hans Küng (b. 1928), who had questioned the dogma of papal infallibility, worried many Catholic intellectuals; and his assertion of the Church’s teaching on moral philosophy, as summarized in Veritatis Splendor(1993)Ú offended the ‘relativists’ in the field. Yet his horizons were broad and compassionate. In the West he entered the Anglican den at Canterbury; and he pleaded in person for peace in Ireland. In the East, he played a vital role in his native Poland, undermining communism by sheer force of personality and his support for human rights. He succoured persecuted Lithuanians and Uniate Ukrainians; he declared his respect for the Orthodox. For the captive peoples of the Soviet bloc, he proved to be the steadiest beacon of hope shining from the West. Notwithstanding the resistance of the Russian Orthodox, who boycotted his Synod of European Bishops (1991), he aimed to bring East and West together. He was deeply committed to the unity of Europe that was Christian.

Contrary to expectations, the population of Western Europe grew more rapidly after the war than before it (see Appendix III, p. 1332). Affluence did not inhibit population growth. Wartime losses were rapidly restored by the ten-year post-war baby boom. The population of the 16 OECD countries rose from 264 million in 1940 to 320 million by 1966, and to 355 million by 1985. The country with the highest per capita income, Switzerland, also achieved the highest birth rate: in 1950–85 the Swiss population almost doubled. France’s recovery was particularly striking: having remained stable at around 40 million for almost a century, the French population reached 55.2 million in 1985, thereby closing the gap on Britain and Italy. West Germany soon established itself as the largest single country (61.1 million in 1985) with the largest GDP. Birth rates generally fell again after the 1960s, causing characteristic ‘troughs’ and ‘bulges’ in subsequent generations. But death rates also fell steadily. This affected age structures. Refugees and immigrants accounted for a significant part of the increase in Germany, France, and Britain. Whereas pre-war Europeans were predominantly middle-aged, post-war Europeans included growing cohorts of elderly and retired. There was a dramatic decline in the size of the agrarian population, which had dropped to only 17 per cent overall in the EEC by 1965.

Western Europe’s greatest success story lay in the realm of economic performance. The speed and the scale of economic resurgence after 1948 was unprecedented in European history, and unmatched in any part of the world except Japan. It was so unexpected and spectacular that historians cannot easily agree on its causes. It is far more easily described than explained. It clearly owed much to the start provided by Marshall Aid, to continuing interplay with the USA, and to the climate of liberal democracy, which greatly favoured unfettered enterprise. It must also be examined in conjunction with advances in science and technology, radical changes in agriculture, power, transport, and industrial relations.

Marshall Aid was essentially a pump-priming exercise, which supplied the cash to sustain European trade and industry after the initial post-war upsurge faltered. But it was not interested in the design of the pump. To use another metaphor, it was a blood transfusion which gave the economies of the OECD the strength to manage their own recovery. Several of the largest American firms invested in Western Europe at an early stage. Dupont, General Motors, and later IBM all helped to create transatlantic competition. In due course many of the larger European multinationals—Royal Dutch Shell, BP, EMI, Unilever—were well able to repay the compliment.

Contemporary economic theory and practice is very much the product of Euro-American interaction. The Keynesian revolution in macroeconomics had already established that government intervention had a vital role to play in nourishing the business climate, maintaining full employment, and managing recurrent crises through adjustments of money supply, interest rates, currency, and taxation. In due course the monetarist reaction against Keynes set in under the inspiration of Milton Friedman. Western Europe participated from the start in the international monetary system created in July 1944 under Anglo-American auspices at the Bretton Woods conference, where Keynes had led the British delegation. The resultant institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both run by the United Nations, have strong European involvement, and to some extent compete with other purely European bodies. In Western Europe, as in the USA, it was taken for granted that democratic politics were a necessary adjunct to the effective management of a successful market economy.

Science and technology moved into an era when they were promoted by huge state and international funds. CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research (1953)Ú and ESRO, the European Space Research Organization (1964), were among the major projects. National budgets no longer sufficed for expensive operations such as aircraft production. Modern agricultural techniques only reached the greater part of Western Europe in the 1950s. In 1945 British farmers were exceptional in using tractors; by 1960 even the smallest Continental smallholders did so. All manner of mechanization, artificial fertilizers, and intensive methods followed. Britain and West Germany remained food importers, but Denmark, France, and Italy became massive exporters. From the 1960s, Western Europe was embarrassed by colossal surpluses—the notorious ‘butter mountains’, ‘wine lakes’, and gargantuan ‘grain hills’ of the CAP. Power generation moved steadily away from the traditional coal to oil, natural gas, hydroelectricity, and nuclear fuels. France, in particular, made vast investments in hydroelectricity and nuclear power stations. The discovery of North Sea oil and gas off Scotland and Norway in the 1970s reduced dependence on foreign imports.

The infrastructure of transport was expanded beyond all recognition. State railway networks were electrified and rationalized. In the case of the SNCF’s Train de Grande Vitesse (TGV), introduced in 1981, France moved into the era of supertrains equalled only in Japan. The German autobahns were systematically extended; they served as the model for magnificent autostrade, autoroutes, and motorways elsewhere. Tunnels under the Alps or under the Channel (1993) and stupendous bridges, such as the Europabrücke in Austria, closed the missing links in a unified network. International waterways with huge capacity linked the Rhine with the Rhône, Rotterdam with Marseilles. The Europoort near Rotterdam, the largest in the world, was the focus of the ambitious Rhine Delta Plan of reclamation and flood control completed in 1981. Air travel progressed to the point where no West European businessman needed to think twice about doing a day’s work in any European city of his choice, and returning the same evening.

Post-industrial economies ceased to rely on the quantitative production of heavy industry. The service sector proliferated, as did the new retail structures of supermarkets and department stores. European iron and steel, after a famous boom in the 1950s, gave way to electronics, plastics, and sophisticated machinery.

Here were the components for the mighty economic motor which began to accelerate as soon as Marshall Aid had primed it. With only two minor pauses, one in 1951–2 caused by the Korean War and another in 1957–8, every major index showed a relentless upwards trajectory. TheEconomic Survey for Europe, published in 1951, predicted a 40–60 per cent growth in industrial production by the end of the decade. The targets were surpassed in under five years. By 1964 industrial output was more than two-and-a-half times that of 1938. Over 1948–63, average yearly growth of GDP was 7.6 per cent in West Germany, 6 per cent in Italy, 4.6 per cent in France, 2.5 per cent in the UK. West European trade was still growing faster than world trade, of which it accounted for some 40 per cent.

West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder or ‘Economic Miracle’ lay at the heart of Western Europe’s resurgence. Contrary to popular misconceptions, West Germany did not exceed the performance of all its rivals. Italy’s miracolo was hardly less spectacular; and Germany did not generate the Continent’s highest standard of living. But thanks to the sheer size and central location of the West German economy, it was vital to everyone else’s success. Its psychological impact was enhanced because the starting-point had been so low. Its author, Dr Erhard, spurned government planning of the sort preferred in France and Italy, though certain key sectors were nationalized. The rest was left to efficient organization, heavy investment, sound training, and hard work. The figures spoke for themselves: in 1948–62 West Germany’s foreign trade grew by an annual average of 16 per cent; West German car ownership soared from 200,000 in 1948 to 9 million in 1965; in the same period, 8 million new housing units were constructed—enough to house a minor nation. Unemployment fell dramatically, bringing in a wave of Gastarbeiter or ‘guest workers’, especially from Turkey and Yugoslavia. Foreign investment in West Germany reached the point in 1961 when the government took active steps to discourage it. Industrial production (1958 = 100) showed how West Germany, having sustained the greatest damage from the war, travelled the furthest afterwards:

	1938	1948	1959	1967
West Germany	53	27	107	158
France	52	55	101	155
Italy	43	44	112	212
Great Britain	67	74	105	133
USA	33	73	113	168
Japan	58	22	120	347

As matter for comparison, the GNP of West Germany was larger at $115 billion than that of all East European members of the Soviet bloc combined.

Western Europe’s triumphant economic recovery inevitably set minds ticking. If each of the national economies had prospered so well on their own, how much more might they prosper in unison, if all the manifold barriers between national states were removed? Here was the germ of an idea which would give the faltering movement for European union a new source of vitality. It would appeal not only to those who saw economic unification as a limited end in itself but also to those who saw it as an instrument for advancing a more fundamental political process.

Not surprisingly, once the Anglo-Saxons had declined to take the lead, the European mantle fell primarily on the French. Unlike the Germans and Italians, the French had been restored to their place in the victorious coalition; at the same time they resented the secondary role allotted to them. In these circumstances, the less nationalist wing of the dominant Gaullist movement found itself facing a historic opportunity. On 20 July 1948 a strong statement in favour of European unification was made by the outgoing French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault. After that, Monnet, Schuman, and Pleven would all rise to the challenge.

Jean Monnet (1888–1979), an economist, had started his career as the head of his family’s brandy business in Cognac. From 1920 to 1923 he was Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations; and in 1940 he gave Churchill the idea of a Franco-British union. In 1947–9 he headed France’s National Economic Plan, which he pursued under a number of ministries. He believed fervently in full-scale European union—political and military as well as economic. His goal was to be achieved step by step by what was called ‘functionalism’, that is, by steadily transferring an ever-increasing number of functions, or ‘spheres of activity’, from national to supranational control. He was the heir to Aristide Briand, and has been called ‘the Father of Europe’. Robert Schuman (1886–1963), a Catholic Lorrainer, was a leading disciple both of Sangnier and of Monnet. Before the war he had been a long-serving Deputy. During the war he had fought in the Resistance, and was imprisoned. After the war he became a founding member of the Catholic MRP, of which Sangnier was honorary President. In the musical chairs of the Fourth Republic, he was twice Prime Minister. At the critical moment, in 1948–50, he stood at the head of the French Foreign Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay. René Pleven (1901-), a member of the wartime Forces Françaises Libres, was twice France’s Prime Minister. He was the leader of the ex-Gaullist faction which deviated from de Gaulle’s own path.

The French group found ready partners in Paul-Henri Spaak (1899–1972) and in Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954), Schuman’s partners from the original Liaison Committee (see above). The former was a socialist, who held office in Belgium as Foreign Minister, Finance Minister, or Prime Minister almost continuously from 1938 to 1966. In 1946 he had been President of the first UN General Assembly. The latter, a Christian Democrat, was a bilingual South Tyroler, who served as Premier in successive Italian coalitions from 1945 to 1953. Like Spaak, he was a strong supporter of NATO. Together they formed a formidable team, which set out to force the pace.

In August 1949 the Council of Europe started business in Strasburg. Its minimalist mandate, which was to promote European unity by debate, publicity, and research, was determined by British reservations. It had no executive powers. Its 11 original members, including Great Britain, soon swelled to 18. It was run by a Committee of Ministers meeting in private, and by a public Consultative Assembly. Its commissions on crime, human rights, cultural and legal co-operation did useful work, as did the European Court of Human Rights over which it presided. But its vision was geared to a vague and distant future. Within a year of Strasbourg welcoming the Council, the far more ambitious Schuman Plan was unveiled in Paris.

The strategy of the activists was to press for maximum proposals in the hope that a modicum of the programme would be accepted. They had to operate within a Western alliance still dominated by Washington and London, and had to be seen to complement existing arrangements in NATO, the OEEC (later OECD), and the Council of Europe. None the less, the Schuman Plan of May 1950 proposed a far-reaching package of economic, military, and political institutions. It called for an economic organization co-ordinating the iron and steel industry and for a European army, which together would form the foundation for a United States of Europe. And it was prepared in secret, without advance consultation with London. In the event, the economic element took flight whilst the military and the political elements were shelved. Henceforth, the three strands of European unification were destined to progress along separate tracks and at different speeds.

The main strength of the Schuman Plan lay in its appeal to Franco-German reconciliation. It appeared at a juncture when the Bundesrepublik stood on the brink of spectacular economic expansion, but when it was still politically isolated. Chancellor Adenauer, a Rhinelander, had lived all his life in the shadow of Franco-German wars; and he shared Schuman’s liberal and democratic Catholicism. The prospect of harmony between France and Germany provided the fund of agreement which no one could reasonably oppose. Once rolling, it gathered momentum.

The European Coal and Steel Community (1951–) was the first-born child of the Schuman Plan. It was designed to prevent the reappearance of a separate military-industrial base in each member country; and its first president was Jean Monnet. Its founding treaty, signed in May 1951, brought together ‘the Six’— France, Germany, Italy, and Benelux. They agreed to operate free trade in coal and steel, to abide by common regulations governing manufacture and competition, and, in the event of‘manifest crisis’, to control prices and production. It was a manifest success. Britain did not participate.

The military strand encountered severe obstacles. The Pleven Plan (1950) floated a modified version of the military clauses of the Schuman Plan; but it still encountered the forthright denunciation of de Gaulle. Complicated negotiations dragged on for four years. The British were in no mood to weaken NATO; the French came out against a compromise organization, the European Defence Community (EDC). An eventual outcome was found in the Western European Union (1955), a deliberative body with few independent powers, which came into being just in time to experience the chaos of the Suez Crisis.

The Messina Conference of 1955 marks the moment when the European movement turned to economic integration as the leading element in its strategy. The political strand was not making progress; members decided that a strong and successful economic community would open up the surest path for pursuing their long-term political goals. They were to hold to this course for more than 30 years. The two treaties signed in Rome (25 March 1957) embodied the determination of the Six to extend the success of the ECSC into all sectors of their commercial and economic life. They gave rise to the European Economic Community (EEC), otherwise known as the Common Market, which came into official effect on 1 January 1958 and also to Euratom. The main aims were to remove all internal tariffs, to formulate a common external trade policy, to harmonize transportation, agriculture, and taxation, to eliminate barriers to free competition, and to encourage the mobility of capital, labour, and enterprises.

In order to pursue these aims, four new bodies were created: the Council of Ministers, which was to control and authorize all policy decisions; a subordinate Executive Commission in Brussels, with a Permanent Secretariat and numerous directorates for proposing policy; the European Court of Justice; and a European Parliament sitting alternately in Strasbourg and Luxemburg. Once again, the venture prospered. Internal tariffs were abolished by 1968. The Common Agricultural Policy (1962), thanks to vast subsidies and despite the protests of manufacturers, brought a new lease of sturdy life to millions of farmers. The introduction of Value Added Tax (VAT) in 1967 raised important revenues which could be used to spread the Community’s growing wealth into deprived social sectors and backward regions. The first President of the European Commission, Professor Walter Hallstein (West Germany), guided its fortunes from 1958 to 1967. Among his successors were Roy Jenkins (UK) and, from 1985, Jacques Delors (France). Whatever the criticisms of the EEC—and there were many—it was demonstrably true that its members were waxing more prosperous than the countries which stayed out. ‘Anyone who does not believe in miracles in European affairs’, remarked Professor Hallstein, ‘is not a realist.’

The European Free Trade Area (EFTA, 1958- ) was created in response to the EEC by the so-called ‘Outer Seven’, led by Britain, who had not been parties to the Treaty of Rome. Its interests were confined to the commercial sector; and its long-term future was constantly clouded by the likelihood of defection to the EEC. It played a valuable role until 1973, when Britain and Denmark left EFTA to join the EEC.

Britain’s membership of the European movement proved a bone of contention that rankled for more than 40 years. The UK Government did not participate in the ECSC in 1951, and dropped out of negotiations preceding the Treaty of Rome. The inhibitions were both psychological and practical. Not having suffered the sobering humiliation of national defeat, many Britons still harboured illusions of sovereignty and self-sufficiency. They also possessed very real commitments to the Commonwealth—including the thorny matter of Commonwealth commercial preference. In the political sphere, they gave priority to relations with the USA and to membership of NATO. In 1961 and 1967 under Macmillan and Wilson, they twice applied to join the EEC, only to meet the shocking rebuff of de Gaulle’s veto. Throughout the decade before the Treaty of Rome, de Gaulle was in retirement and France’s European policy had rested with milder men. But de Gaulle’s return to power coincided with the launching of the EEC. Conflict was unavoidable. The General was still nursing resentments about the alleged betrayal of French interests first by the British in wartime and then by the leaders of the Fourth Republic. He held strong views about ‘l’Europe des Patries’, a ‘community of nation-states’; and he insisted on reinstating what he saw as France’s sovereign rights. The results were seen in his vetoes against Britain’s entry, and then in a long-running battle against the European Commission—‘the Emperor versus the Pope’. French representatives boycotted proceedings in Brussels until they forced through the Luxemburg Compromise (1966)—an arrangement whereby members were permitted to disregard the rules of the Treaty of Rome on majority voting in matters of supreme national concern.

The first two decades of the EEC were crowned by a number of important financial developments. The European Monetary System (EMS), which began in 1979, tied the currencies of member states into the framework of an exchange rate mechanism (ERM) which was designed to dampen previous fluctuations. It was conceived by its authors as the initial stage on the long road to European monetary union (EMU). The appearance of the European Currency Unit (ECU) promised later moves towards a single currency. The European Social Fund and the European Development Fund were both designed to redistribute wealth into areas of social or regional deprivation.

The Community’s economic success ensured a steady stream of new applicants. In 1973, under Edward Heath, the UK was admitted at the third attempt, together with Denmark and Ireland. A British referendum (1975) confirmed the permanence of UK membership. The Six became the Nine. In 1981, the admission of Greece turned the Nine into the Ten. In 1986, after lengthy negotiations, Spain and Portugal were admitted: the Ten became the Twelve. For the first time, the Community embraced three ‘developing economies’, and, in the case of Greece, an East European country with no contiguous frontier.

Yet the military and political strands of European union remained stalled. In the early 1980s the Atlantic alliance was reactivated by the assertive Reagan-Thatcher duet; and the value of NATO was emphasized by the controversy over Soviet and American missiles. The political and international role of the EEC was peripheral. Its institutions, which were designed to fit a small Community of Six, were increasingly strained by the expanding business of the Twelve. In due course, one of the leading Europeans would call the Community ‘a growing man still walking around in babyclothes’.19 There seemed little chance that the EEC could soon break out of its narrowly economic concerns.

One would like to think, however, that the creation of the Twelve had given birth to something qualitatively new. Europe had seen any number of alliances between the rich and powerful, any number of visions based on selective membership of the privileged ‘West’. But now the point appeared to have been reached at which the European Community was changing itself into a voluntary association of equal nations—rich and poor, East and West, great and small. The main criteria for entry, apart from being European was that applicants should have shed the nationalistic, imperialist, and totalitarian traditions of the past. Only time would tell whether the change was permanent.

The Neutral States

Neutrality has been a feature of the European scene throughout the twentieth century. Eleven neutral states existed in 1945; four countries which had avoided involvement in one or both World Wars also declined to be drawn into the postwar military blocs; two countries achieved neutral status in the early post-war years. There was a high correlation between neutrality and affluence; and most neutrals did not make haste to join the European Economic Community.

Switzerland, for whom neutrality was a way of life, thrived mightily. It had steeled itself to resist German invasion during the war, and saw a marked rise in population afterwards. It benefited greatly from the proximity of northern Italy and southern Germany, both regions of massive post-war economic growth, whilst continuing to play a special role in banking and in tourism. It welcomed numerous multinational companies and international agencies, from Bayer chemicals to UNESCO. Rhaeto-Romanic was raised to the status of a national language, alongside Swiss German, French, and Italian, and the French-speaking Jura was made a special canton. The defence budget was high, and universal male conscription remained in force to support the national militia. Swiss women had no vote until after the (all-male) referendum of 1980. Switzerland shunned the Council of Europe till 1963; its association with the EEC was limited to a free-trade agreement signed in 1972.

Thanks to Switzerland, several adjoining territories have claimed the status of free customs zones. These include the German enclave of Büsingen, the Italian districts of Campione d’ltalia, Livigno, and Val d’Aosta, and, since 1815, the French département of Haute-Savoie.

Sweden had prospered from neutrality in wartime, and continued to do so in peacetime. It was the centre-piece of the regional Baltic Council, but remained aloof from both NATO and the EEC even when its Scandinavian partners joined. The long rule of Social Democracy carried on to the elections of 1989. Especially under its premier, Olaf Palme, who was murdered in 1986, Sweden took the lead in a number of initiatives involving Third World, refugee, and environmental issues.

Franco’s Spain remained a political pariah so long as the Caudillo lived. Indeed, the extraordinary longevity of both Franco and Salazar held Iberian politics in a time-warp until the mid-1970s. The anachronistic survival of fascism served to offset anti-communist opinion in Western Europe, especially in France. With Portugal a member of NATO, Spain agreed to receive American bases, but rejected any greater involvement. Mass tourism, however, militated against total isolation. The re-establishment of the constitutional monarchy in 1975 opened the way for EEC membership, and for the remarkable economic resurgence of the 1980s. Basque terrorism in the north-west, Catalan separatism in Barcelona, and the intractable dispute with Great Britain over Gibraltar all complicated the Spanish revival.

The Republic of Ireland had survived the threat of British occupation during the war, and left the Commonwealth at the end of it. But economic dependence on the United Kingdom remained a reality: Ireland had little alternative to following in Britain’s contorted wake in negotiations with the EEC. Political life centred on the privileged position of the Catholic Church, on the endless conflict with Northern Ireland, and on the rivalry of the two main parties, Fianna Fail (‘Soldiers of Destiny’) and Fine Gael (‘Race of Gaels’). The Irish Constitution treated the counties of British Ulster as an integral part of the Republic. But the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was regarded as an illegal organization on both sides of the border; and relations between London and Dublin were not a major obstacle to a settlement.

Finland, which had joined the German attack on the USSR (see p. 1013), escaped Soviet occupation, though further territory, notably Viipuri (Vyborg) and Petsamo, had to be ceded at the armistice of 1944. In 1947, however, a peace treaty confirmed the country’s limited sovereignty in return for the lease of the Porkkala naval base. Henceforth, Finland was obliged to observe strict neutrality, to reduce its armed forces, and to pursue a foreign policy concordant with Soviet interests. After that, the economy boomed, and Helsinki became one of Europe’s most elegant and expensive cities—a western showpiece on the doorstep of Leningrad. ‘Finlandization’ was a status which many Soviet-occupied countries coveted, but none, except Austria, ever obtained.

Austria benefited from the Allied fiction that it had been the Nazis’ first victim. Divided, like Germany, into four occupation zones, the Republic succeeded in regaining full sovereignty on the basis of a Staatsvertrag or ‘state treaty’ (1955) signed by all four occupying powers. The conditions included strict neutrality, plus the maintenance in perpetuity of Vienna’s vast Soviet war memorial. The restoration of independence was followed by a period of unprecedented prosperity, similar to that in neighbouring Switzerland, and of relative détente. Politics was dominated by the nicely balanced rivalry of the Socialist Party, which held the chancellorship under Bruno Kreisky (1970–83), and the conservative People’s Party. In 1986 an international campaign to discredit the Austrian President, Kurt Waldheim, formerly Secretary-General of UNO, did not harm him; but it served as a reminder of Austria’s past. Austria’s frontiers contained several aberrations. Thanks to a treaty of 1868, the two districts of Jungholz and Mittelberg form part of the Bavarian customs area. The provinces of Vorarlberg and Tyrol enjoyed free trade with the Alto Adige and Trentino in Italy.

Seven European principalities, the last survivors of numerous historic mini-states, were too small to exercise an active role in international relations; but each has been well able to exploit its eccentric position.

San Marino (founded in the fifth century AD, territory 62 km2, population 23,000) claimed to be Europe’s oldest state. Recognized as independent in 1631, it hugs the slopes of Monte Titano, near Rimini, and is entirely surrounded by Italian territory. It functioned after the war as a tax haven for rich Italians, ruled by a local government dominated alternately by communists and Christian Democrats.

The Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein (founded 1719, territory 157 km2, population 27,000) had ceded its foreign policy to Switzerland. In 1980, at $16,440 it had the highest per capita GNP in Europe. It is the last surviving constituent of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Principality of Monaco (territory 150 ha, population c.30,000) was a self-governing protectorate of France occupying a tiny enclave on the Riviera, east of Nice. Its modern status emerged in 1861; it had previously been a possession of Spain (from 1542), France (from 1641), and Sardinia (from 1815). Its constitution put government into the hands of the Grimaldi family. Its income depended heavily on the casino at Monte Carlo.

Andorra (territory 495 km2, population c.43,000), high in the eastern Pyrenees, has preserved its autonomy since 1278, when it was placed under the joint protection of the Bishop of Urgel and the Comte de Foix. In recent times the powers of the latter were exercised by the Prefect of the Ariège on behalf of the President of the French Republic. It lived from tourism, especially skiing, and from duty-free trade.

The Isle of Man (territory 518 km2, population 65,000 in 1986) and the Channel Islands (of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and Sark—territory 194 km2, population c.134,000 in 1981) were both British dependencies with English connections dating from the Norman Conquest. They were never formally joined to the United Kingdom. Both were wealthy tax havens. The Dame of Sark was still contesting her prerogatives with Westminster in the 1960s. In the 1990s the ‘parliament’ of the Isle of Man was courting a showdown by failing to follow England’s example in legalizing private homosexual acts between consenting adults.

Gibraltar was the only British dependency outside the British Isles to join the EC. In this it followed the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion, and Guiana. All other British and French colonies, like the autonomous Danish regions of [FAROE] and Greenland, remained outside the EC.

The Vatican City (territory 44 ha, estimated population 1,000 in 1981) was Europe’s last autocracy. Its ruler, the Pope, exercised the same unlimited governance over this latter-day papal state as over the Roman Catholic Church, of which it was the headquarters. Its nearest counterpart was the ‘theocratic republic’ of [ATHOS], which has enjoyed autonomy within Greece since 1926.

These survivals serve as a reminder that variety and tradition play a prominent part in European life. Europe has not been entirely submerged by power politics.

Eastern Europe, 1945–1985

‘Eastern Europe’ in the post-war era had two distinct meanings. It could reasonably be taken to refer to any part of the Continent which lay on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. In this sense, it included the European countries which had been incorporated into the Soviet Union and others which had not. More usually, however, it was used as a synonym for the satellites of the USSR in ‘East Central’ and ‘South-Eastern’ Europe, as distinct from the USSR itself.

In the last analysis, these distinctions carry only limited weight. None of the states organized on Leninist lines, whether as so-called ‘people’s democracies’ or as republics of the Soviet Union, were supposed to enjoy any significant measure of independence. All were designed as facades for the exercise of the dictatorial prerogatives of the Soviet-led communist movement. By any definition, therefore, the post-war history of Eastern Europe can only take the policies of the CPSU as its starting-point, before moving to examine the ever more dyslectic translation of Moscow’s wishes by Moscow’s ever more wayward dependants.

Prior to the terminal decline after 1985, the post-war history of the Soviet Union fell into three periods. The first (1945–53) was taken up by the last years of the Great Stalin. The second (1953–64) was dominated by so-called de-stalinization, during the rise and fall of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. The third (1964–85), later labelled ‘the Age of Stagnation’, was initiated and inspired by Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev. Taken together, those four decades witnessed one of the grand illusions of modern history. The Soviet Union had emerged from the Second World War as the greatest military power in Europe; and it proceeded to turn itself into one of two global superpowers. To all outward appearances it was unimaginably strong, an impregnable fortress armed with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. At the same time, its internal processes were decomposing at an unprecedented rate; its body was riddled with the political equivalent of cancer. History is full of giants with feet of clay—the old Russian Empire was a prime example—but here was an armoured dinosaur which was dying on its feet. And no one saw its distress—neither Western sovietologists nor, until much too late, the Soviet leaders themselves. With a number of honourable exceptions, both groups spent most of those 40 years admiring the Soviet Union as a paragon of health and progress.

Stalin’s last years brought no relief to the long night of fear and suffering. Speculation that age and victory would mellow him proved unfounded. The same old gang of Stalin’s pre-war cronies clung to power. The same mixture of terror, propaganda, and collective routine kept the Soviet peoples down. The gulag kept up the same regular motions of mass arrests and slave labour. There is strong evidence to suppose that Stalin, having discovered the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’, was preparing yet another great Purge when he died.

In those years the Soviet Empire expanded to its greatest extent. It did so through military conquest and through political surrogates who created political, economic, and social clones of the Soviet model. Shortly after the occupation of Eastern Europe, the major advance came with the victory of the communists in China. Mao Zedong had written that ‘Power grows from the barrel of a gun’; and he triumphed in 1949 without the direct intervention of Moscow. He held somewhat different ideological views from the Soviets, and was well aware that Stalin had originally backed his arch-enemy, Chiang Kai-shek. But for the time being he was content to be a loyal member of the Soviet camp. For a dozen years, Moscow stood at the head of a movement which controlled the world’s most populous nation as well as the world’s largest state. The so-called ‘Socialist Camp’ contained half of humanity.

Great store was placed on growing Soviet influence with the ex-colonial peoples. In the era of decolonization, Moscow saw itself as the natural patron and beneficiary of all national liberation movements. Its strongest links were forged with Vietnam, the Arab world, and Cuba.

All available resources were thrown into the military aspects of nuclear science. At Mayak in the Urals, and elsewhere, teams of cosseted slave scientists laboured to produce the Soviet ‘bomb’. An atomic device was successfully tested on arctic Novaya Zemlya in 1949, a hydrogen device in 1953. After that, the period of America’s nuclear monopoly had passed. By the time that Stalin died, the Soviet Union had confirmed its status as a superpower.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953 after suffering a stroke at his dacha in Kuntsevo. In his death-throes he was left lying on the floor for 24 hours. No Kremlin doctor who valued his own life was going to save Stalin’s. The Politburo members kept vigil at his bedside in turns:

As soon as Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria threw himself on his knees, and started kissing Stalin’s hand. When Stalin lost consciousness again, Beria stood up and spat … spewing hatred.20

News of Stalin’s death caused tens of millions to weep.

De-stalinization meant exactly what the term implies. It removed those features of the Soviet regime which were directly connected with Stalin himself—the cult of personality, the edinonachalie or ‘one-man rule’, and the practice of random mass terror. It initiated an interval known, after Ehrenburg’s novel, as ‘the Thaw’. When Beria was gunned down at the very first Politburo meeting, the collective leadership of his colleague-assassins was able to trim the power of the NKVD—now reorganized as the KGB. But they kept the dictatorial machine intact. They lightened the climate of fear, but introduced no significant measure of democratization or liberalization. The Soviet system retained its totalitarian character. Over three years, the collective leadership gave way to the personal supremacy of Khrushchev.

The ebullient Khrushchev was perhaps the least obnoxious of Stalin’s creatures. He was typical of the proletarian opportunists who had made their way up the Party apparatus in the worst years of the Terror. He had a black record as Stalin’s boss in Ukraine; a late recruit to literacy, he was a cultural philistine of the crudest sort. Yet he had a rough peasant charm—especially when beating the table with his shoe at the United Nations. And he was surrounded by high hopes. Khrushchev’s sensational ‘Secret Speech’ to the XXth Party Congress in March 1956 must be seen in context. It set the precedent where every Soviet leader would ritually denounce his predecessor as a criminal; and its highly selective revelations of Stalin’s crimes were carefully matched to the needs of the Party. It concealed much more than it revealed, and by minimizing Soviet criminality earned him an exaggerated reputation for honesty. It belongs to the evolving Soviet genre of ‘openness’ that ran from Stalin’s own revelatory speeches to Gorbachev’s feats 30 years later.

Khrushchev’s reign was notable for three signal developments. Misunderstandings over the policy of ‘Different Roads to Socialism’ led to great tensions throughout Eastern Europe, to open conflict in Hungary, and to the fateful split with China. Developments in military science and the launching of Sputnik, the first earth satellite, led to intense rivalry with the USA and to the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. The quantitative achievements of the Soviet economy led Khrushchev to boast that the Soviet Union would overtake the West within 20 years: ‘We will bury you.’ Khrushchev’s adventurism thoroughly scared the comrades; in October 1964 he was removed in a Kremlin coup and sent into live retirement.

Leonid Brezhnev, another Russian from Ukraine, dominated the Soviet bloc for two long decades. He has been blamed as the man who allowed the USSR to revert to ‘neo-Stalinism’, and to ‘stagnate’. In time, he may come to be seen as the leader who understood the system best, who prolonged its life for as long as was possible. He was, above all, a cautious and canny apparatchik, who realized the consequences of tampering with a faulty machine. His brief experience of liberalization during the Prague Spring convinced him, quite rightly, of the unreliability of his closest allies and the need for the Brezhnev Doctrine (see below). His brief dalliance with economic reform at home, associated with his chief partner, Alexei Kosygin, convinced him that the risks were greater than the gains. His personal knowledge of Ukraine must have convinced him that the slightest relaxation of the nationality issue could only spell trouble. His pursuit of détente with the West, which combined an aggressive military stance with the careful delimitation of spheres, produced a stable arrangement that seemed to guarantee the international position of the USSR in perpetuity.

Brezhnev could not fail to notice how the USSR had been built. But he also understood—as his successors did not—that eliminating the lies and the coercion must inevitably dissolve the fabric of the building. So Brezhnev sat tight. What his detractors were to denounce as ‘stagnation’ could be seen as the peace and stability for which he and his generation had longed. The most one could do was to calibrate the force and the fraud to tolerable proportions. Unlike Stalin, he did not kill people in millions; unlike Khrushchev, he did not go in for ‘hare-brained schemes’; unlike Gorbachev, he did not destroy the system with which he was entrusted.

One of the great ironies of the era became apparent when successive General Secretaries showed signs of a variety of wasting diseases that perfectly symbolized the Soviet condition. By the late 1970s stability was slipping into inertia. Brezhnev’s speech slurred and his movements slowed to the point where jokers claimed that he was a corpse maintained on a life-support machine. His death turned inertia into paralysis, as ailing successors argued the contrary merits of reform and inaction. Yuri Andropov (1982–3), an exponent of reform, died of cancer before reforms could be started. Konstantin Chernyenko (1983–5), a victim of emphysema, had no intention of starting anything.

The Soviet political dictatorship, which reached maturity after Stalin’s death, did not conform to its popular image abroad. It was supported by the largest ‘secret police’ in the world, by the Gulag, by an aggressive brand of pre-emptive censorship, by a vast arsenal of tanks and security forces. But these were not the primary instruments of oppression: the dictatorship relied above all on the dual structures of the party-state, that is, on the civilian organs of the Communist Party and their control over the parallel institutions of the state (see Appendix III, p. 1321). There was no branch of human activity which was not subordinated to the relevant department of the state. There was no branch of the state which was not governed by orders from the relevant ‘committee’ of the Party. Whatever was going on, be it in the most august of ministries or in the lowliest of local farms, factories, or football clubs, it could only be legal if organized by the state; and it could only be organized if approved by the Party.

The plight of the individual citizen was dire. Since state law and state judges were subject to the universal principle of Party control, anything which the Party disliked could be promptly and legally suppressed, without effective right of appeal. Since all human needs were supplied by state monopolies, any person who chose to defy the Party’s wishes stood to be rendered destitute on the spot, or, as the jargon had it, to be given their ‘wolfs ticket’. Recalcitrant individuals and their families could be routinely deprived of their residence permits, their ration cards, their identity papers, and hence their access to employment, housing, education, and health care. Once the Party’s bureaucratic dictatorship was in place, the more violent instruments of oppression did not need to be invoked except against exceptionally courageous and resourceful dissidents. In theory at least, there simply was no place for private initiative, individual judgement, or spontaneous social action. In normal circumstances, it was virtually impossible to organize a strike, to form a private society, or to publish unauthorized information. News of popular uprisings, such as that at Novocherkassk in 1962, which led to huge massacres, could be concealed for decades.

Party control over state institutions was exercised by an elaborate array of laws, levers, structures, and psychological taboos. Party control was enshrined in law. The only important clause of the Soviet Constitution was the one which proclaimed ‘the leading role’ of the Party. This simple device ensured that all other clauses of the Constitution, and all other Soviet laws, were subject to the interpretation of the Party and its officials. By outside standards, they were not laws at all. The Party rule-book was a much more efficacious document than the Soviet Constitution. Thenomenklaturasystem ensured that every appointment, from the State Presidency to the chair of the village council, was exclusively filled by the Party’s nominees. Each Party committee reserved the right to draw up lists of posts at its level in the state and Party hierarchy, and of suitable candidates to fill them (including lists of Party-approved ‘non-Party’ persons). As a result, Party members would generally hold one position in the Party apparatus and a second one in some state institution. The nomenklatura of the Party’s Central Committee secured all appointments in the ministries, and in the supreme commands of the armed forces and the KGB.

The management of all state institutions was further restricted by Party control exercised ‘from without and from within’. The nominal heads of all state institutions—ministers, generals, ambassadors, leaders of delegations, all directors of factories, schools, or institutes—were formally obliged to accept instructions from a parallel Party committee. They were the servants of more powerful Party secretaries operating behind the scenes. At the same time, they had to bow to the day-to-day supervision of the primary Party organization, or ‘Party cell’, made up of all Party members within the ranks of their own personnel. As a result, ministers qua ministers did not really run their ministries; army commanders did not command their units; managers did not manage their firms.

Everything depended on the efficient transmission of the Party’s orders. Party discipline ensured that the decisions of the ‘higher organs’ were enforced right down the line. Party members were sworn both to obedience and to secrecy (not least about the contents of the rule-book). They were trained to anticipate and to execute the wishes of their superiors without question. Open debate was discouraged; discussion was limited to the means whereby higher decisions could be implemented.

These realities were so alien to the experience of democracies that it is easy to understand why political scientists could be so easily misled. All explanations to outsiders have to begin with the warning that Western concepts and Western terminology simply did not apply. The ruling Communist Party, for instance, was not a political party; it was a political army which had been transformed into the executive branch of government. The Soviet state was no more than the administrative agency of the Party. The so-called Soviet Government, i.e. the Council of Ministers, was not the government, since it was subordinate both to the Party’s Politburo and to the Party’s Secretariat. The chief executive of the system was not the President of the USSR or his Prime Minister, but the Party’s General Secretary (who was free to appoint himself President or Prime Minister if he so wished). The Supreme Soviet or state legislative assembly was not supreme, since it could only register statutes prepared in advance by the Party’s Central Committee. State elections, above all, were not elections, since there was no element of choice. Citizens were compelled by law to endorse the lists of Party nominees.

In a very real sense, therefore, the Soviet Union never really existed, except as a facade for Party power. It was the grandest communist front organization in history. That is why, when the CPSU eventually collapsed, the USSR could not possibly exist without it.

An important shift of political power took place in the Brezhnev era, largely unnoticed. In return for absolute loyalty to the policies of the centre, Brezhnev was ready to let the Party bosses of the 14 non-Russian republics of the USSR run their affairs without interference. The Soviet republics were turning almost imperceptibly into national fiefdoms, where Moscow’s writ ran ever more uncertainly. Brezhnev’s regional baronies did not enjoy the same latitude as the East European satellites: they were prominently represented in the Politburo, and were an important pillar of the conservative order. But their emergence helps to explain why their centrifugal trajectory could accelerate so surprisingly and so rapidly when the signals from Moscow grew confused.

The Soviet armed forces, though enormous and very prestigious, were deprived of all capacity for independent action: the Party left nothing to chance. It was not sufficient that all military officers were trained in Party-run academies, that they could only obtain promotion by joining the CPSU, or that they could issue no orders without the counter-signature of a politruk or ‘political director’ working alongside them. The entire fabric of the military hierarchy was run by agents of Glavpolity the Main Political-Military Department, whose senior members included the most important marshals of the General Staff and whose juniors filled key positions throughout the lower echelons. As a matter of routine, rocket forces were not given control over their own warheads, parachute forces did not control their transports, tank forces did not possess their own ammunition or fuel.

The Soviet armed forces comprised four main components—the strategic nuclear forces, the air forces, the army, and the navy. At their height they contained perhaps 10 million men. According to the wishes of their masters, they were designed to be the most formidable, or the most impotent, force imaginable. From 1955, when the Warsaw Pact was formed in belated response to NATO, the Soviet military became enmeshed in yet another layer of bureaucracy. They retained absolute control over the running of the Pact, whose HQ was in Moscow, not Warsaw.

The scale and organization of the Soviet security forces bore little resemblance to counterparts elsewhere. To call them ‘the secret police’ was a travesty. The KGB was the equivalent of the CIA, the FBI, and the US Coast Guard rolled into one, with many other functions to boot. Apart from foreign intelligence, its various directorates ran the Gulag, the Glavpolit, the civilian militia, and the system of censorship. Its principal mission, however, was to keep itself informed of everything and everyone, and to root out ‘unreliable elements’ by all means available. Its uniformed officers, with their sky-blue epaulettes, could be encountered in every Soviet town. They commanded a vast horde of informers, thugs, and secret agents hidden within the population, and a duplicate army of up to a million crack internal troops trained to police the army, to watch the borders, to man the camps, to quell disorder, and to protect the Party élite. As their most public and sacred duty, they mounted guard on Lenin’s mausoleum. Their headquarters in the Lyubianka in central Moscow looked out on a statue of Feliks Dzierzyński, their founder. It contained the most feared dungeons in all Russia.

Soviet society, officially classless, was dominated by a growing gulf between the Party élite and the rest of the population. Once the Purges stopped, the members of the nomenklatura were able to entrench their position, to purloin state property for their own use, and to grow rich and powerful from patronage. The higher echelons were allocated luxury flats and dachas, expensive limousines, exclusive access to closed stores, Western currency, and foreign travel. They were, as Milovan Djilas declared as early as 1957, the ‘New Class’—the proprietorial caste. The collectivized peasants, in contrast, suffered deprivations worse than those of the serfs. Until the 1970s they possessed neither social security benefits nor personal identity papers. The industrial workers were told that they had inherited the earth; they toiled in expectation of the improved housing, wages, and safety which never materialized. The intelligentsia—which in the official definition represented a professional stratum of ‘brain workers’—enjoyed high prestige but low incomes. Despite the fact that several professions, such as medical doctors, were predominantly female, Soviet women received little relief from conditions that their sisters in the West would not have tolerated. As in Nazi Germany, the official ethos encouraged heroic child-bearing; abortion was the only form of family planning to be widely available. ‘Developed socialism’ was, by European standards, very underdeveloped.

Not surprisingly, earlier Soviet demographic trends started to falter, especially in European Russia. In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet population recovered from the traumatic losses of the Stalin years, rising from 178.5 million (1950) to 262.4 million (1974); and there was a spectacular rise in the size and number of large cities. But the hardships of Soviet urban living were not conducive to carefree reproduction. By the 1980s both the birth rate and life expectancy were falling. Thanks to sustained growth in the central Asian republics, the dominant Russian nationality was declining. Even if the official figure of 52 per cent in 1979 was accurate, the Russians were poised to fall into an absolute minority.

The Soviet economic system held to the basic methods and priorities laid down by Stalin—central command planning, militarization, heavy industry. Its fundamental failures were long concealed behind the screen of falsified statistics. Five-Year Plans continued to give the illusion of continuing quantitative success even when growth rates inevitably slowed and targets failed to be met. Global results still looked impressive right up to 1980:

USSR: Selected indices of production

	1945	1950	1960	1970	1980
Steel (million tonnes)	12.3	27.3	65.3	116	148
Coal (million tonnes)	149	261	510	624	716
Oil (million tonnes)	19	40	148	353	603
Electricity (million kw hrs.)	43	91	292	741	1,294
Automobiles (000)	75	363	524	916	2,199
Industrial Group A (Capital goods 1913 = 1)	15	27.5	89.4	213.8	391.4
Industrial Group B (Consumer goods 1913 = 1)	2.7	5.7	15	30	49.8
Grain (million tonnes)	47	81	126	187	189
Cows (million head)	30	25	34	39	4321

Not till the early 1980s did the truth begin to dawn that global production figures were next to irrelevant, and that the Soviet Union’s rivals were forging far ahead in almost every sector.

Unknown to the public or the outside world, the privileged military and nuclear sector was consuming over 30 per cent of Soviet GNP—at least five times more than was officially admitted. At the same time, the overblown communist shibboleth of heavy industry continued to pour out unwanted iron, steel, and crude chemicals. The result was an economy which produced tanks, rockets, and aircraft in huge quantities but which could not support the basic needs of the population. All the most important elements of the civilian economy were woefully neglected. Soviet agriculture produced low-grade food in huge amounts; but was incapable of delivering it to the family table. The USSR became a net importer of grain, whilst domestic supplies relied increasingly on the collective farmers’ back gardens (50 per cent of food derived from 3 per cent of arable land). Science and technology remained far behind the state of the art in the civilian sphere. Soviet conditions proved specially inimical to computerization and to the free flow of information outside the central bureaucracy. Motorization, which began in a big way in the 1960s with the purchase of a licence from Fiat to build Lada cars, was hampered by the absence of supporting services, especially modern roads. The service sector in general was no more than nascent. The consumer sector remained starved of goods. Subsidized prices in food and housing guaranteed a subsistence standard of living whilst nourishing a vigorous black market. The infrastructure remained woefully inadequate. After 70 years of progress, the Soviet Union had not built a single all-weather road link from west to east. The single-track trans-Siberian railway remained a solitary lifeline to the Far East. Aeroflot, the world’s largest airline, was also the most overworked. The riches of Siberia could not be properly exploited. The more commands emitted by Moscow, the feebler the response. Notwithstanding Comecon, the East European satellites moved from being net contributors to being a net burden. Soviet export earnings were unhealthily dependent on gold and oil. By the early 1980s the combination of uncontrolled military spending and the diminishing returns of domestic performance spelled the onset of a systemic crisis requiring urgent treatment.

Environmental protection was not a serious possibility. Primitive industrial methods and the pressures of quantitative planning left no room for ecological considerations. Even where environmental laws were passed, there was little chance that lowly elements of the bureaucracy could enforce them against the interests of the Party’s main productive drive. In the totalitarian party-state, there was place neither for an independent environmental agency nor for grass-roots activism. As a result, the Soviet Union systematically created Europe’s most scandalous examples of neglect and of persistent pollution. Blighted cityscapes, dead rivers, toxic air, dying forests, unmonitored radiation hazards, and declining health indices were all suppressed in the fog of habitual secrecy. Only the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine in April 1986, which bathed half of Europe in fall-out, alerted the world to the dangers at a very late stage.

Soviet culture was rendered schizophrenic by state censorship, which unwittingly divided all activities into official and unofficial spheres. Artists could only perform or publish if they belonged to one of the party-run associations. Their work could be categorized as the blatantly conformist, the trimmed, and the courageously defiant. Official culture centred on the principles of so-called Socialist Realism, which were laid down in 1934 and reformulated in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, [MOLDOVA] This style presented Soviet life in an idealized, com-pulsorily joyful, and essentially mendacious fashion. Some important deviations were permitted in the decade after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev on the one hand permitted the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)—a grim picture of the Gulag. On the other, he excoriated Moscow’s first exhibition of modern art, calling it ‘the lashings of a donkey’s tail’. Thaw soon passed into refreeze. A handful of talented artists preserved a margin -of independence on the fringe of toleration; but most of the great works of the era, from Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago(1957) or Alexander Zinoviev’s and Solzhenitsyn’s major novels, had to be published illegally abroad. Many masterpieces did not see the light of day for 20 or 30 years.

Paradoxically, Soviet repressions generated a genuine thirst for independent high culture, a hunger for spiritual and aesthetic values which most free countries do not know. The immorality of official policy generated its own moral antibodies. With time, the most determined opposition hardened in the most educated circles of an increasingly educated society. (By 1979,10 Per cent of Soviet citizens possessed higher education.) ‘Whether he wants it or not,’ Vladimir Bukovsky once said, ‘a Soviet citizen is in a state of permanent inner dialogue with the official propaganda.’ One of the earliest rebels was Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet H-bomb; one of the most eloquent was the Christian poet and prisoner Irina Ratushinskaya (b. 1954): 

And the sad tale of Russia
(Maybe we are only dreaming?)
Makes room for Mashka Mouse, and us and the radio set,
On the clean page, not yet begun,
Opening this long winter
On tomorrow.23

Religious life in the USSR was kept to a minimum by systematic persecution. The Soviet state was officially atheistic; Khrushchev in particular launched militantly anti-religious campaigns; the religious education of children constituted a criminal offence. The Muslims of Tatarstan and Central Asia were the least active, and the least troubled. But the Russian Orthodox Church was shackled hand and foot. Its clergy were state pensioners, its hierarchy supervised by the KGB. The Uniate Church in Ukraine, banned in 1946, survived only in the catacombs. The Roman Catholic Church survived only in Lithuania, its clergy decimated by assaults and deportations. With time, numerous Protestant and fundamentalist sects, especially Baptists and Adventists, came to be well represented. Judaism attracted harassment as soon as it showed signs of revival in the 1970s. In the decay of the Soviet ethos, the religious factor cannot be overrated.24

There have been many attempts to characterize the essential qualities of Soviet communism. Many outsiders have stressed the gulf between theory and practice—as if the theory were genuine and the practice faulty. Yet there is a rich literature to show how intelligent communists came to realize that the theory itself was fraudulent. Leninist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist communism always paid tribute to Marx and Engels. But they bore the same relation to intellectual Marxism that South Sea ‘cargo cults’, which worshipped American presidents as gods, bore to American democracy. From a very early stage, communism had no more serious goal than keeping itself in existence. Its heart was mendacity.25

In most essential respects, the eight East European countries that were incorporated into the Soviet bloc (but not into the Soviet Union) followed a similar pattern of development to the USSR itself. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania all passed through phases characterized by stalinization (after 1948), and de-stalinization (at various points after 1953). Most of them were subsequently subjected to ‘normalization’, that is, the reimposition of Brezhnevian norms after an episode of open defiance. Most of them belonged to the Soviet Union’s military ‘alliance’, the Warsaw Pact, or to the Soviet Union’s parallel economic organization, CMEA or Comecon. All of them were ruled by communist dictatorships which had learned their trade under Soviet tutelage, which justified their existence by reference to the same Leninist ideology, and which, with two exceptions, continued to owe allegiance to Moscow.

Of course, there were important variations and important synchronie dissonances. In the mid-1960s, for example, there were some countries like Czechoslovakia which had not yet reached de-stalinization, whilst others, like Hungary, had already passed through both de-stalinization and normalization. Generally speaking, since their exposure to Soviet methods was shorter—40 years in Eastern Europe as opposed to 70 years within the Soviet Union—the degree of ‘sovietization’ was much lower. Historians disagree over whether to emphasize the differences or the similarities. The fact remains, however, that the historical experience of those eight countries in the four post-war decades was tied to that of the Soviet Union and was fundamentally different from that of Western Europe. They were all subsumed in the category of‘People’s Democracies’, which by no stretch of the imagination could be described either as popular or as democratic.

In the first, Stalinist phase (1945–53), all the countries of Eastern Europe were forced to accept the type of system then prevalent in the USSR. In the immediate post-war years Stalin had insisted on close control only in the Soviet zone of Germany, in Poland, and in Romania. Elsewhere, whilst building communist influence, he had not insisted on rigid conformity. But from 1948 discipline was tightened: all chinks in the Iron Curtain were to be sealed in response to the Truman Doctrine. All the main features of late Stalinism were to be ruthlessly enforced wherever they did not already exist. Cohorts of Soviet ‘advisers’ and specialists were integrated into the local apparatus to ensure standardization and obedience.

In this new galaxy, Stalin remained ‘the sun of unsurpassed radiance’. But in each of the countries a string of lesser suns, of little local Stalins, was put into orbit. Bierut, Gottwald, Rákosi, Ulbricht, Georghiu Dej, Zhivkov, Tito, and Enver Hoxha were all Moscow-trained Stalinist clones. To call them ‘puppets’ was to flatter.

Yugoslavia was the only country where obedience to Moscow was rejected at an early stage. Josip Broz, or Tito (1892–1980), a Croat, was in the unique position of having spent the war in his own country, of possessing ties with the Western Powers, and of setting up his regime without Soviet assistance. He was a Stalinist, with a nasty record of repressions. His multinational federation, dominated by Serbia, was closely modelled on the Soviet Union dominated by Russia, with all nationality problems effectively suppressed. The Federated People’s Republic of Yugoslavia had come into being in 1945. Its Constitution, defining the powers of the ruling League of Yugoslav Communists and of the six constituent republics, had been functioning since January 1946. But Tito had built an independent base, and was not inclined to take orders. He did not favour collectivized agriculture, and he was interested in workers’ self-management. So, when criticized by Cominform, he made no effort to mend his ways. In June 1948 he and his party were expelled; for several years they lived under the threat of Soviet punishment. They remained what many believed impossible, both communist and independent—proof that there was life after defying Stalin. Belgrade made its peace with Moscow during Khrushchev’s visit in 1955. But it never joined either the CMEA or the Warsaw Pact. Having left the Soviet bloc, it was free to take a prominent lead in the movement of non-aligned states.

East Germany joined the Soviet bloc as Yugoslavia was leaving it. Political affairs in the Soviet zone had been conducted on the hopeful assumption that foundations were being laid for a united communist Germany. The failure of the Berlin blockade and the declaration of the Federal Republic showed that such hopes were false. The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was formally constituted on 7 October 1949, five months after the FRG. As in Poland, the DDR’s constitution arranged for the ruling communist party (SED) to work in conjunction with a number of satellite parties operating within the communists’ Front of National Unity. The first elections gave the Front a vote of 99 per cent. The Soviet occupation forces reserved important powers for themselves. The collectivization of agriculture was delayed until 1953, since the SED had only just implemented a massive land reform in favour of peasant ownership. The principal problem lay in the constant haemorrhage of escapees: for a dozen years, anyone could reach West Berlin by taking the U-bahn train from Friedrichstrasse to the Tiergarten. Over those dozen years, 1949–61, thousands of people availed themselves of the opportunity. The DDR was the only state in Europe with a declining population.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), better known as Comecon, was founded on 8 January 1949 in Moscow, where its Secretariat remained. The founding members were joined by Albania (1949), the DDR (1950), Mongolia (1962), and Cuba (1972). At this stage, its main function was to assist in the theory and practice of ‘building socialism’ by Soviet methods.

It is an open question how far the People’s Democracies were formally integrated into Soviet structures. But it would have been uncharacteristic if their dependence had been left to chance. The main clues must be found in the inimitable mechanisms of inter-party controls. If ‘socialist internationalism’ meant anything, it meant that the CPSU could control the affairs of the fraternal parties, who in turn controlled the republics for which they were responsible. The International Department of the CPSU’s central Secretariat was specially entrusted with this vital task; and each of its ‘bureaux’ were charged with overseeing the internal affairs of a particular country. Through its channels, all the leading posts in the fraternal parties could be subordinated to the nomenklatura system of the ‘higher organs’ in Moscow; and Soviet agents could be placed at will into key positions throughout the bloc. In effect, the Soviet Politburo could appoint all the other politburos. The KGB could run all the other communist security services, and Glavpolit all the General Staffs of the emerging People’s Armies. For several years after 1945 Stalin did not wish his clients to have large military forces of their own; and expansion did not begin until after 1948. Soviet military advisers exercised such direct control that the need for a formal military alliance to match NATO did not yet arise.

The most obvious sign of Stalinism taking hold was seen in the series of purges and show trials that smote the leadership of the fraternal parties after June 1948. Stalin put the East European comrades through the same ‘meat-grinder’ that he had once used on the CPSU. In Warsaw, the founding congress of the PZPR in December 1948 saw the grovelling self-criticism of Władysław Gomułka, before charges of ‘national deviation’. In Sofia, Traichov Kostov, the Deputy Prime Minister, was tried and executed on charges of Titoism. In Tirana, Koci Dzodze was sentenced to death for allegedly plotting to give Albania to Yugoslavia. In Budapest, the Foreign Minister, László Rajk, was tried and executed. In Prague, after years of slurs and test trials, the finger was pointed directly at General Secretary Rudolf Slánský. At Slánský’s trial in November 1952, in which 11 of 14 defendants were Jewish, charges of Zionism were added to the more usual ones of Titoism, Trotskyism, anti-Sovietism and foreign espionage.

In the second, post-Stalinist phase (1953–68), the Soviet satellites worked their way towards a stage that has been variously labelled as ‘national communism’ or ‘polycentrism’. Each of the fraternal parties was to claim the right to fix its own separate ‘road to socialism’. The CPSU reserved the right to intervene by force if the gains of socialism were in danger. ‘Gains of socialism’ was a codeword for communist monopoly power and for loyalty to the Kremlin.

In the climate of uncertainty fostered by the in-fighting of Moscow’s collective leadership, the more courageous elements took matters into their own hands. On 17 June 1953 workers in East Berlin staged demonstrations that threatened open rebellion. They were mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks. A similar outburst occurred in Plsen in Czechoslovakia. Popular protest still lay beyond the pale of the tolerable. In Poland, the Party quietly dropped several keystone policies. Forcible collectivization was halted; the hated Soviet-run Ministry of Security was replaced; jailed Party leaders, and the jailed Primate, were released. A communist poet was allowed to publish a Poem for Adults which daringly stated that life was less than perfect:

 

They ran to us shouting
‘Under Socialism
A cut finger doesn’t hurt.’
But they felt pain.
They lost faith.

…
There are overworked people …
There are Polish apples unavailable for children …
There are girls forced to tell lies…
There are people slandered and spat on,
assaulted on the streets
by common hoodlums undefined by the law …

The Warsaw Pact came into being on 14 May 1955. The armies of the People’s Democracies had been growing for seven years; and the point had been reached where the native officer corps had to assume greater responsibility. Thanks to the integrated political structures, the Warsaw Pact was not a genuine alliance of free and equal partners; none of the members’ armies had the capacity for independent action. But there were obvious military advantages in standardized weaponry and joint training; and a strong gesture was made to national pride. A strong signal was sent to NATO against the admission of West Germany.

The critical year proved to be 1956. Khrushchev’s Speech at the XXth Congress inevitably propelled a shock-wave right across Eastern Europe. The fraternal parties had to come to terms with Stalin’s crimes against them. The Polish delegation, for example, which leaked the proceedings to the Western press, learned that the entire leadership of the pre-war Polish communist movement had been murdered on imaginary charges. Bierut died of a heart attack on the spot. By the summer, developments were reaching boiling point. Popular unrest welled up, as the old guard of the ruling parties was rocked by demands of would-be reformers. In Poznań, in June, 53 workers were killed when the Polish army fired on demonstrators carrying banners demanding ‘Bread and Freedom’ and ‘Russians Go Home’. In October, first in Warsaw and then in Budapest, two fraternal parties took the momentous step of changing the composition of their politburos without first clearing their choice in Moscow.

Khrushchev’s management of the East European crisis was facilitated by its coincidence with the presidential election in the USA and with the Suez Crisis. The Western Powers were distracted by their differences over the Middle East; the USSR was left with a free hand in Warsaw and Budapest.

On Sunday 21 October an apoplectic Khrushchev flew into Warsaw unannounced. He found the city ringed with Polish commandos in full battle gear and ., the Polish leadership steadfast in its support for Władysław Gomułka. (Later rumour held that the Polish army had planned to break through East Germany into NATO lines.) Two days of talks showed thatGomułka’s ‘Polish Road to socialism’ was not inimical to basic Soviet interests, and that open warfare with his largest, and reputedly most courageous, ally was not exactly desirable. So Khrushchev backed down—agreeing thatGomułka’s election as General Secretary should stand, and that Marshal Rokossowski and his advisers should be withdrawn. For a spell,Gomułka basked in the glow of being Poland’s one and only popular communist leader.

In Budapest, events took the fatal turn which might so easily have afflicted Warsaw. Khrushchev was anxious that his generosity to the Yugoslavs, and now to the Poles, should not be construed as a sign of general weakness. The suppression of Hungary posed fewer military problems than action in Poland. And the Hungarian comrades, unlike the Poles, were deeply divided. On the night of 23–4 October, at the exact moment that the Polish crisis was defused, the Hungarian Party’s Stalinist Secretary and security chief, Ernő Gerő, Rákòsi’s successor, called for Soviet military intervention to save him from dismissal. Hungary was battered into submission in less than a month. At first it seemed that an accommodation would be reached. The Soviet Army retreated from the capital; the Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Andropov, abandoned Gerő and approved his replacement by János Kádár—a loyal communist who, like Gomułka, had suffered Stalinist persecution. This seemed to check the progress of Imre Nagy, the leader of the Party’s reformist faction, who had emerged as Prime Minister. The Soviet Army’s final departure was said to be under negotiation. Khrushchev was making a second visit to Tito at Brioni. But then Nagy admitted several non-communists into his government, breaking the communist monopoly. The release of the Primate, Cardinal Mindszenty, sparked enthusiastic demonstrations, followed by ugly attacks on the hated security police. On 2 November popular pressure pushed the Government into appealing for assistance from the United Nations, and announcing Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn on the 4th, Soviet armoured divisions poured back into Budapest without warning. For ten days, heroic youths fought the tanks with their bare hands. Blood flowed copiously. Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, which he left on a Soviet safe-conduct, only to be promptly arrested. In due course, after incarceration in Romania, he and 2,000 followers were shot. Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded into Austria. The final toll of casualties reached similar proportions. Hungary was left in the hands of Andropov’s client, Kádár, and a ‘revolutionary government of workers and peasants’.

Hungary’s national rising left an indelible stain on the Soviet record. It showed the world that communism was impervious to popular demands. It destroyed the lingering sympathies of many leftists, ruined the future for communist parties in the West, and greatly increased the tensions of the Cold War. In the Soviet bloc itself, it offended Mao Zedong, who favoured national variants of communism, and who had tried to intercede on behalf ofGomułka and Nagy. It also provided the impetus for a new general economic strategy, of which the victors of Budapest, Andropov and Kádár, were among the chief proponents. But its lessons were not learned by everyone. Czechoslovakia had to go through a similar ordeal before the rules of the post-Stalinist game were fully understood.

The Sino-Soviet split, when it came in 1960, had direct repercussions in only one European country, Albania. Like the Chinese, the Albanian comrades had important reservations about de-stalinization. What is more, since they had been cut off by Tito’s break with Stalin and did not possess a frontier with the rest of the bloc, they were shielded from Soviet intervention. So they took the ‘Chinese Road’: Tirana shifted its loyalties from Moscow to Peking. It remained fully Stalinist, totally collectivized and atheized, utterly isolated, and at odds with all its neighbours. Nothing was to change until 1990. The only religion in Albania’, declared Enver Hoxha, ‘is being an Albanian.’ [SHQIPERIA]

The new Soviet economic strategy of the 1960s was adopted partly in imitation of the EEC and partly in recognition of the shortcomings of existing Stalinist methods. One development was to raise the profile of the CMEA as the coordinator of joint planning. The CMEA allocated specialized tasks to each member country, and put great store on the dissemination of modern science and technology. This satisfied everyone, except Romania. But the main pilot scheme was launched in Hungary. Andropov, now head of the CPSU’s International Department, and Kádár both realized that the reign of terror which followed the Hungarian rising had created an opening for intelligent economic experimentation. Economic reform could proceed without the threat of political turbulence. ‘Goulash communism’ would cure well-fed citizens of their dreams of liberty. The main idea was to introduce limited market mechanisms into a system still controlled by the state, and to encourage enterprise, especially in agriculture, by relaxing controls on compulsory deliveries and land ownership. Results came swiftly: by the mid-1960s Hungary’s prosperity was leading people to forget its political misery. Budapest was a city of thriving restaurants, groaning shelves, and no politics. ‘Kadarization’ seemed to offer an attractive compromise between communism and capitalism, especially to Western economists with no political sense.

Three countries failed to react to the developing trends—each for different reasons.

The German Democratic Republic was the most unnatural of all the People’s Democracies. Its rigid ideological conformism and excessive pro-Sovietism were fostered by the Stasi, a security apparatus of fearful reputation. It was blighted by the continuing division of Berlin, by the presence of nearly 40 divisions of Soviet occupation troops, above all by the steady exodus of its citizens. On 13 August 1961 all the crossings between East and West Berlin were sealed. For the next 28 years the Berlin Wall turned the DDR into a cage, the most visible symbol of communist oppression in Europe. All thoughts of a united Germany were dropped in favour of a theory that East Germany was inhabited by a separate nation with separate traditions. Great efforts were made to force the pace of heavy industrialization, and to win international recognition through massive state sponsorship of Olympic sport. By the time that Ulbricht gave way as General Secretary to Erich Honecker in 1971, a modus vivendi was about to be reached with West Germany. Yet the spirit of the 1950s lingered on in the DDR for 30 years. ‘We so love Germany,’ said one French minister with no little irony, ‘we prefer there to be two of them.’

Romania jibbed against all the changes, but never forced an open breach. Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–89), who became General Secretary of the Romanian League of Communists in 1965, pursued a line that was as eccentric as it was disreputable. As Conducâtor he created a neo-Stalinist cult of personality and a brand of nepotistic despotism that was well described as ‘socialism in one family’. He invented a constitution announcing Romania’s arrival in the highest ‘socialist’ stage of development, whilst keeping his people in fear and beggary. His dreaded Securitate made the KGB of the epoch look like real gentlemen. He gained a minimum of diplomatic leverage by balancing between Moscow and Peking; and he gained a measure of (undeserved) Western admiration by recognizing Israel and by staying on the margins of the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact. He stayed at Buckingham Palace, with his own taster, and, on the advice of the Foreign Office, was knighted by the Queen of England. Romania has been aptly called the North Korea of Eastern Europe—a closed country acutely aware of its inferiority, excessively proud of its dubious record, and instinctively given to acting as mediator between other Mafia gangs.

Bulgaria competed with East Germany for the laurels of grim immobility. Industrialization started late, as did the state’s exploitation of tourism and the wine trade. The Party leader, Todor Zhivkov, held the country on its slavishly pro-Soviet course from 1954 to 1990.

Czechoslovakia resisted de-stalinization until January 1968. The rule of Antonin Novotny, General Secretary since Gottwald’s death in 1953, paid no attention to political relaxation in Poland on one side or to the economic reforms in Hungary on the other. He was finally overturned by a coalition in the Politburo of Slovaks disgruntled with Czech dominance and Czechs eager for systemic reform. The new leader, Alexander Dubček (1927–93), was a mild-mannered Slovak communist, the only General Secretary in the history of the bloc to be endowed with smiling eyes. True to character, he declared for ‘socialism with a human face’.

The Prague Spring burst into bud with intoxicating vigour. Dubček and his team were planning the imposition of reforms from above. But they suspended censorship at an early stage, and the populace was brought into the frenzy of joyful debate. They were the first communist planners to realize that psychological incentives had to be mobilized if reforms were to really prosper. In their April programme they foresaw a stronger role for the State National Assembly. Nineteen years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s spokesman was asked what was the difference between the Prague Spring and Gorbachev’s programme of pere-stroika, he answered ‘nineteen years’. The Czechoslovak experiment struggled against the odds for barely seven months. At first, it seemed that an accommodation could be reached. The Soviet comrades expressed concern over alleged excesses, such as the freedom of the media. The Czechoslovak Government affirmed its commitment to socialism, its friendship for the USSR, and its determination to stay in the Warsaw Pact. Yet in July threatening Warsaw Pact manoeuvres were held throughout the country, and a personal meeting between Brezhnev and Dubček and their politburo members was held at the frontier village of Černá-nad-Tisou. After that, the manoeuvres were halted and the troops withdrawn.

At dawn on 21 August 1968, half a million soldiers drawn from all the Warsaw Pact countries except Romania poured back into Czechoslovakia without warning—Poles alongside grey-uniformed East Germans from the north, Hungarians and Bulgarians from the south, Soviet divisions via Poland and Ukraine in the east. The surprise and the saturation were overwhelming; resistance was minimal. Dubček was flown to Russia in chains; the reforms were halted. Czechoslovakia’s frontiers were to be permanently guarded by the Warsaw Pact. In due course Dubéek was replaced by Gustáv Husák, an old-timer who, likeGomułka and Kádár, had kept the faith despite bitter personal memories of Stalinism. When it was all over, Brezhnev spelled out the Soviet position at a summit meeting of bloc leaders in Warsaw in November 1968. The Brezhnev Doctrine stated in the clearest terms that Moscow was obliged by its socialist duty to intervene by force to defend the ‘socialist gains’ of its allies. East Berlin (1953), Budapest (1956), and Prague (1968) were all of a piece. There had been no fundamental progress. The members of the Soviet bloc were not sovereign states.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was far less brutal than the suppression of the Hungarian Rising. But it unfolded on the world’s television screens; and its impact on world opinion was enormous. It was condemned by several communist Parties. China called it ‘barefaced fascist power politics’, Yugoslavia called it ‘illegal occupation’, Romania ‘a flagrant violation of national sovereignty’. It promised an unending ice age in Europe. Few people who heard it would forget the crackling voice from the last free broadcast from Radio Prague: ‘Please remember Czechoslovakia when we are no longer in the news.’

In the third, Brezhnevian phase (1968–85), the Soviet bloc saw the norms laid down by the Brezhnev Doctrine progressively challenged by a growing tide of intellectual, social, and eventually political protest. All the levers of power were in the hands of the communist authorities; so opposition had to find new, nonviolent channels. The principal exemplar of ‘normalization’ was Czechoslovakia. The principal challenger was Poland.

Czechoslovak normalization was a sorry spectacle indeed. Husák used all the petty tyranny of the Party’s social controls to destroy the soul of the Prague Spring. There were no shootings or show trials, but the despair of the young student Jan Palách, who burned himself to death in public, caught the national mood.

Ex-ministers and academics were sent to work in the most menial jobs— Dubček worked as a forestry inspector. Police harassment was universal. Prague, Europe’s most beautiful city, was also the most depressed. A decade passed before a lonely band of dissidents around the playwright Václav Havel put their names to ‘Charter 77’—a declaration of human rights.

Compartmentalization was a central feature of the Soviet bloc in its later stages. Despite continuing lip-service to ‘socialist internationalism’, the bloc was divided up into a series of watertight compartments. National communism encouraged conditions where each country, whilst closely connected to Moscow, was effectively insulated from the others. The cordon separating Poland from Lithuania or Ukraine or, after 1968, from Czechoslovakia was every bit as severe as the Iron Curtain itself. The arrest of the Taternicy—a group of athletic dissidents backpacking with banned literature over the snowy ridges of the Tatra mountains— well illustrated the state of affairs. East Europeans were often more familiar with life in Western Europe or the USA than with their immediate neighbours.

The Polish People’s Republic (PRL) displayed an unusual number of idiosyncrasies. It was the largest of the Soviet satellites, with an army larger than that of Great Britain. Both structurally and psychologically it was the least sovietized. The Polish peasantry had successfully resisted collectivization; the Polish Bar had resisted the communist monopoly; the Polish intelligentsia had largely avoided Marxism. The pseudo-pluralism of the Front of National Unity permitted a margin of non-Party politics. Most importantly, the Roman Catholic Church under its formidable Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński (1901–81), never submitted, as elsewhere, to political control. By an agreement of December 1956 the Church hierarchy was granted full autonomy, so long as Party rule was not openly subverted. The calculation of the Party’s sociologists had presumably been that the rapid modernization which was turning Poland into an industrial power would rapidly undermine religion. In fact it was the Church which kept the loyalty of the new proletariat, which in turn undermined the Party.

Poland’s cycle of opposition and normalization occupied a quarter of a century.Gomułka passed rapidly from national hero to crabbed old boss. In the mid-1960s he repressed the Marxist intellectuals, in March 1968 the students, in 1970 bloody workers’ protests in the Baltic ports. In 1968 the challenge of an ultra-nationalist faction within the Party, whose bid for power had targeted the Jewish element in the Party apparatus, grew into a generalized and shameful ‘anti-Zionist campaign’, provoking the exodus of almost all of Poland’s remaining Jews. In the 1970s the ten-year reign of Edward Gierek adopted a strategy ofbigos communism’ funded by excessive Western loans. A brief interval of prosperity preceded renewed austerity, mass protests, and, in the Workers Defence Committee (KOR), the formation of a consolidated intellectual and workers’ opposition, the precursor of ‘Solidarity’. In June 1979 the visit of a Polish Pope created a moral climate pregnant for change.

The Solidarity trade union grew from a group of determined strikers in the Gdansk shipyards in August 1980. It was led by an unknown, unemployed electrician on his ‘wolf ’s ticket’, Lech Walesa. It swelled into a nation-wide social protest, millions strong. Dedicated to non-violence, it did not fight the communists; it simply organized itself without them. The only independent organization in the Soviet bloc, it won the formal right to strike and to recruit members. Party members defected in droves. Within a year, Solidarity threatened to topple the existing order without even trying. From Moscow’s viewpoint, it had to be suppressed. A non-communist workers’ movement was anathema. The ailing Brezhnev put the Soviet Army on alert, then left the job to the Polish army. On the night of 13 December 1981, aided by deep snow, General Wojciech Jaruzelski executed the most perfect military coup in modern European history. In a few hours, 40–50,000 Solidarity activists were arrested; all communications were cut and military commissars took over all major institutions. Martial law paralysed the country. In 1982, having imposed stability, Jaruzelski introduced the first stage of economic reform. The victory of communist ‘normalization’ appeared complete. In reality, it was the hollowest of victories. Within seven years, Jaruzelski would be at the end of his tether. History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.

Despite appearances, Jaruzelski’s emergence in Poland could later be seen as the first emanation of a reforming trend that was about to break surface in Moscow itself. This trend, which in due course would acquire the Russian name of perestroika or ‘restructuring’, was founded on the realization that the system was profoundly sick. Significantly, it came out of the KGB, the only body which had the means to know what was really happening. Jaruzelski had served for 25 years as head of the Polish army’s military-political department. He was necessarily a client of the man who ran the KGB throughout the 1970s. He was ‘playing John the Baptist’ to Andropov’s other protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev. With Gorbachev’s collusion, he was destined to turn Poland into ‘the laboratory of perestroika.

By the early 1980s the internal operations of the Soviet bloc were no longer achieving their goals. Forty years of corrosion had sapped their strength. On the surface, everything was in place; underneath, little was working well. In the age of the inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), the territory of the Warsaw Pact could no longer serve as an effective security buffer. In the age of high oil prices, the CMEA was draining more from the USSR than it was putting in. In the age of television, the gulf in living conditions between East and West was evident in every home. As Solidarity showed, the workers had no respect for the ‘workers’ state’. Important sectors of the Communist élite were losing the will to rule. One of Jaruzelski’s closest aides had chosen the patriotic course of feeding the CIA over a decade with the biggest flood of operational documents from the Warsaw Pact in the history of espionage.27

It is the career of Yuri Andropov, however, which provides the key to the extraordinary change of direction which preceded and then precipitated the collapse of the Soviet system. As ambassador in Budapest, Andropov had been co-author of the strategy of substituting economic for political reform. As head of the international department of the CPSU he must have known that the costly revolts which had beset Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and now Poland could spread to the Soviet Union. As head of the KGB during the era of détente (see p. 1115), he was the person best placed to see the glaring contrast between external strength and internal decay. In the 1970s Andropov had waged a cunning and flexible campaign of persecution against Soviet dissenters. He had no need to use mass terror; instead, he curtailed their access to the population at large, whilst consigning the obdurate to psychiatric hospitals or to foreign exile. He countered the growing disaffection of Soviet Jewry by giving them preferential access to emigration. As the files passed over his desk, he could only have wondered why the finest talents in the land had no love for communism. The list was a long one: Solzhenitsyn the political novelist, Nureyev the dancer, Rostropovich the cellist, Sakharov the physicist, the indomitable Bukovsky, a biologist, Andrei Amalrik, the mathematician who had written, after Orwell, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?These people must necessarily have figured prominently in Andropov’s long talks with the bright young Party Secretary from Stavropol who attended him at the nearby spa where he stayed to treat his kidneys.

Andropov’s penchant for reform, however, was repeatedly baulked. The Soviet Politburo was packed with guardians of the status quo. Gorbachev was brought in from Stavropol in 1979 only to be given the thankless task of running Soviet agriculture. Andropov did not reach the top until his own terminal illness was upon him. His death gave the Brezhnevites a final lease of inaction. Despite Amalrik’s prediction, 1984 came and went; the Soviet Empire survived unreformed.