Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (15 page)

The returning authorities were quite willing to compromise in matters of policy—in particular on social and economic reforms, as we shall see. What they insisted upon, however, was what De Gaulle and others perceived as an ‘orderly transition’. Since this was also the preference of the Allied occupying forces, West and East, the illusions of the Resistance were soon shattered. In eastern Europe (with the exception of Yugoslavia) it was the Soviets who determined the shape of post-war governments and who directed their actions. In western Europe, provisional authorities took office pending new elections. And in every case the resistance movements were encouraged and eventually forced to hand in their weapons and disband their organizations.

It is striking, in retrospect, how little resistance there was to this restoration of the institutional
status quo
. In Poland and parts of the western Soviet Union armed partisan groups survived for a few more years, but theirs was a specifically national and anti-Communist struggle. In Norway, Belgium, France and Italy the organized resistance merged peacefully into post-war political parties and unions with only muted protests. In Belgium in November 1944 armed members of the wartime resistance were given two weeks to hand over their weapons. This led to a large protest rally in Brussels on November 25th at which the police opened fire, injuring 45 people. But such incidents were uncommon.
¹⁷
More typically, 200,000 French resistance fighters were successfully integrated into the regular army when their organization, the
Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur
, was disbanded without protest.

The demobilization of the resistance was greatly facilitated by Soviet strategy, which favoured the restoration of parliamentary regimes in western Europe (as, nominally, in eastern Europe too). Communist leaders like Maurice Thorez in France and Palmiro Togliatti in Italy played a major role in ensuring the peaceful cooperation of their (sometimes bemused) followers. But many were willing to believe that the energies and ambitions of the resistance would now be channeled into political projects for national renewal.

Contacts made in the Resistance
did
sometimes survive—the post-war ‘depillarization’ of Dutch society, for example, the breaking down of the centuries-long denominational divide between communities of Catholics and Protestants, began with personal links forged in wartime. But plans for a post-war ‘Resistance Party’ failed everywhere. They came closest to fruition in Italy, where Ferrucio Parri became Prime Minister in June 1945 and promised that his Action Party would pursue the spirit and goals of the Resistance. But Parri was no politician and when he fell, six months later, political power shifted definitively into the hands of the traditional parties. De Gaulle, in France, was a far better political strategist but he, too, abandoned office (one month after Parri) rather than accommodate his wartime ambitions to parliamentary routine—thus paying unintended tribute to his own success in re-establishing the continuity of the Republic.

Rather than being governed by a new, fraternal community of resisters, then, most Europeans in the immediate post-war years instead found themselves ruled by coalitions of left and left-centre politicians rather similar to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. This made sense. The only pre-war political parties able to operate normally in these years were those with anti-Fascist credentials—or, in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, those to whom it suited the new authorities to ascribe such credentials at least for the time being. In practice this meant Communists, Socialists and a handful of liberal or radical groups. These, together with the newly-prominent Christian Democratic parties, thus constituted the parties of government in the first post-war years and they brought with them many of the policies and men of the Popular Front era.

The existing parties of the Left had gained immensely by their engagement in the wartime resistance: especially in France, where the Communists’ succeeded in converting their (sometimes exaggerated) wartime exploits into political capital and convinced even dispassionate observers of their unique moral standing—‘the great heroes of the Resistance’ as Janet Flanner described them in December 1944. It is thus not especially odd that the reform programs of post-war European governments echoed and recapitulated the unfinished business of the 1930s.

If experienced party politicians had so little difficulty displacing wartime activists after 1945 this was because, although they shared a common anti-Fascist ethos and a widespread desire for change, the Resistance and its heirs were rather vague on specifics. The Action Party in Italy sought to abolish the monarchy, nationalize large capital and industry and reform agriculture. The Action Programme of the French National Resistance Council had no king to depose, but its ambitions were otherwise similarly imprecise. Resistance units had been too preoccupied fighting, or just surviving, to busy themselves with detailed plans for post-war legislation.

But above all the resisters were handicapped by a lack of experience. Among clandestine organizations only the Communists had practical knowledge of politics, and except in the French case not much of that. But Communists in particular were reluctant to tie their hands with detailed programmatic statements that might alienate future tactical allies. The Resistance thus bequeathed little in the way of post-war projects beyond high-minded statements of intent and broad generalities—and even these, as the otherwise sympathetic François Mauriac noted in August 1944, were ‘hastily typed fantasy programs’.

On one thing, however, all were agreed—resisters and politicians alike: ‘planning’. The disasters of the inter-war decades—the missed opportunities after 1918, the great depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929, the waste of unemployment, the inequalities, injustices and inefficiencies of laissez-faire capitalism that had led so many into authoritarian temptation, the brazen indifference of an arrogant ruling elite and the incompetence of an inadequate political class—all seemed to be connected by the utter failure to organize society better. If democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be
planned
.

It is sometimes suggested that this faith in planning, the political religion of post-war Europe, derived from the example of the Soviet Union: a planned economy that had ostensibly escaped the traumas of capitalist Europe, withstood the Nazi assault and won the Second World War thanks to a series of detailed Five Year Plans. This is entirely mistaken. In post-war western and central Europe only Communists put their faith in Soviet-style Plans (about which they knew very little), and even they had no notion of how such Plans might be applied to their local circumstances. The Soviet obsession with numerical targets, production quotas and centralized direction was alien to all but a few of the contemporary western advocates of planning. The latter—and they came in many varieties—were drawing on a very different set of sources.

The vogue for plans and planning began long before 1945. Throughout the interwar depression, from Hungary to Great Britain, voices were raised in support of a planned economy of one kind or another. Some of the ideas propounded, notably in Austria and among the British Fabians, derived from an older Socialist tradition, but many more had their origins in pre-1914 liberal reformism. The nineteenth-century ‘caretaker’ state, its attention confined to security and policing, was outmoded, so the argument ran. If only on prudential grounds—to forestall political upheavel—it would now be necessary to intervene in economic affairs to regulate imbalances, eliminate inefficiencies and compensate for the inequities and injustice of the market.

Before 1914 the main emphasis in such reformist projects was confined to calls for progressive taxation, protection of labour and, occasionally, state ownership of a restricted number of natural monopolies. But with the collapse of the international economy and the ensuing war, planning took on a greater urgency and ambition. Competing proposals for a national Plan, in which the state would intervene actively to support, discourage, facilitate and if necessary direct key economic sectors, circulated widely among young engineers, economists and civil servants in France and Germany.

For most of the inter-war years, would-be planners and their supporters languished in frustration at the political margins. The older generation of politicians was deaf to their appeals: to many on the conservative Right and Center state intervention in the economy was still abhorrent, while on the socialist Left it was generally believed that only a post-revolutionary society could plan its economic affairs rationally. Until then, capitalism was condemned to suffer and eventually collapse of its own contradictions. The idea that one might ‘plan’ a capitalist economy seemed to both sides a non-sense. The frustrated advocates of economic planning thus frequently found themselves attracted to authoritarian parties of the radical Right, distinctly more hospitable to their approach.

It was not by chance, therefore, that Oswald Mosley and some other British Labourites turned to Fascism out of frustration at their Party’s inadequate response to the Great Depression. In Belgium Hendrik de Man likewise failed to convince his fellow Socialists of the viability of his ‘Plan’ and began propounding more authoritarian solutions. In France a number of the brightest young leaders of the Socialist Party broke away to form new movements, frustrated at their party’s failure to respond imaginatively to the economic crisis. Many of these and others like them ended up as Fascists.

Mussolini’s cheerleaders in France and Britain, before 1940, envied what they saw as his success in overcoming Italy’s economic disadvantages through state-led planning and the establishment of umbrella agencies for whole economic sectors. Albert Speer, the administrator of Hitler’s New Order, was much admired abroad for his programme of economic direction and regulation. In September 1943, Speer and Jean Bichelonne, Vichy’s Minister of Industrial Production, worked out a system of tariff reductions based on inter-war ‘plan-ist’ ideas that closely anticipated European trading relations and Franco-German economic coordination in later years. In ‘Jeune Europe’, a club founded in 1933 for young thinkers and politicians keen to set a new direction in policy making, the future Belgian statesman and Europhile Paul-Henri Spaak exchanged ideas about an enhanced role for the state with similarly-minded contemporaries from across the continent, including Otto Abetz, the future Nazi administrator of wartime Paris.

‘Planning’, in short, had a complicated history. Many of its advocates got their first experience, as civil servants and business administrators, in wartime occupation regimes—in France, Italy, Belgium and Czechoslovakia, not to speak of Germany and Italy. Britain was not occupied but there, too, it was the war that introduced and domesticated the hitherto rather abstract notion of governmental ‘planning’. Indeed in Britain it was the war above all that placed the government at the heart of economic life. The Emergency Powers Bill of May 1940 authorised the government to direct anyone to do anything in the national interest, to control any property and assign any industrial plant to any national end it chose. In the words of Kenneth Harris, the biographer of Clement Attlee, Britain’s post-war Labour leader: ‘National planning and national ownership, which in the period 1945-51 seemed the result of a Labour government putting socialist principles into effect, were to a great degree the legacy of a state which had been organized to fight a total war.’

Fascism and war were thus the bridge linking heterodox, marginal and often controversial notions of economic planning with mainstream post-war economic policy. Yet this compromised heritage had little impact on planning’s appeal—whatever its associations with far Right, far Left, occupation or war, planning was quite distinctly
not
associated with the discredited politics of the inter-war years, a point widely held in its favour. What planning was really about was faith in the state. In many countries this reflected a well-founded awareness, enhanced by the experience of war, that in the absence of any other agency of regulation or distribution, only the state now stood between the individual and destitution. But contemporary enthusiasm for an interventionist state went beyond desperation or self-interest. The vision of Clement Attlee, the British Labour leader whose party defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in the dramatic election upset of 1945, nicely captured the contemporary mood: what was needed now were ‘well-planned, well-built cities and parks and playing fields, homes and schools, factories and shops.’

There was a great faith in the ability (and not just the duty) of government to solve large-scale problems by mobilizing and directing people and resources to collectively useful ends. Obviously this way of seeing things was particularly attractive to socialists; but the idea that a well-planned economy meant a richer, fairer and better-regulated society was taken up by a very broad constituency, including the Christian Democratic parties then rising to prominence all over Western Europe. The English historian A. J. P. Taylor told BBC listeners in November 1945 that ‘[n]obody in Europe believes in the American way of life—that is, private enterprise; or, rather, those who believe in it are a defeated party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688’. Taylor exaggerated as always, he was wrong in the long run (but who isn’t?) and he might have been surprised to learn about the planist enthusiasms of many New Dealers prominent in the contemporary US administration of Germany. But at the time he was broadly correct.

What
was
‘Planning’? The term is misleading. What all planners had in common was belief in an enhanced role for the state in social and economic affairs. Beyond this there was great variation, usually a consequence of distinctive national political traditions. In Britain, where very little actual
planning
ever took place, the real issue was
control
—of industries and social and economic services—through state ownership as an end in itself. Thus nationalization—notably of mines, railways, goods transportation and utilities—and the provision of medical services lay at the heart of the Labour Party programme after 1945. The ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, in short, were taken over. But that was all.