Europe: A History (222 page)

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. The
Economic 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:

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.