Europe: A History (220 page)

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.
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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.’
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Similar worries would recur again after reunification.