Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (66 page)

In a memorandum dated September 8th 1957, the Hungarian writer István Bibo observed that ‘in crushing the Hungarian revolution, the USSR has struck a severe, maybe mortal blow at “fellow-traveler” movements (Peace, Women, Youth, Students, Intellectuals, etc) that contributed to Communism’s strength.’ His insight proved perceptive. Shorn of the curious magnetism of Stalinist terror, and revealed in Budapest in all its armored mediocrity, Soviet Communism lost its charm for most Western sympathizers and admirers. Seeking to escape the ‘stink of Stalinism’, ex-Communists like the French poet Claude Roy turned ‘our nostrils towards other horizons’. After 1956, the secrets of History were no longer to be found in the grim factories and dysfunctional kolkhozes of the People’s Democracies but in other, more exotic realms. A shrinking minority of unreconstructed apologists for Leninism clung to the past; but from Berlin to Paris a new generation of Western progressives sought solace and example outside of Europe altogether, in the aspirations and upheavals of what was not yet called the ‘Third World’.

Illusions were shattered in Eastern Europe too. As a British diplomat in Budapest reported on October 31st, at the height of the first round of fighting: ‘It is nothing short of a miracle that the Hungarian people should have withstood and turned back this diabolical onslaught. They will never forget nor forgive.’ But it was not only the Hungarians who would take to heart the message of the Soviet tanks. Romanian students demonstrated in support of their Hungarian neighbors; East German intellectuals were arrested and put on trial for criticizing Soviet actions; in the USSR it was the events of 1956 that tore the veil from the eyes of hitherto committed Communists like the young Leonid Pliushch. A new generation of intellectual dissidents, men like Paul Goma in Romania or Wolfgang Harich in the GDR, was born in the rubble of Budapest.

The difference in Eastern Europe, of course, was that the disillusioned subjects of a discredited regime could hardly turn their faces to distant lands, or rekindle their revolutionary faith in the glow of far-off peasant revolts. They were perforce obliged to live in and with the Communist regimes whose promises they no longer believed. East Europeans experienced the events of 1956 as a distillation of cumulative disappointments. Their expectations of Communism, briefly renewed with the promise of de-Stalinization, were extinguished; but so were their hopes of Western succor. Whereas Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, or the hesitant moves to rehabilitate show-trial victims, had suggested up until then that Communism might yet contain within itself the seeds of renewal and liberation, after Hungary the dominant sentiment was one of cynical resignation.

This was not without its benefits. Precisely because the populations of Communist Eastern Europe were now quiescent, and the order of things restored, the Khrushchev-era Soviet leadership came in time to allow a limited degree of local liberalization—ironically enough, in Hungary above all. There, in the wake of his punitive retaliation against the insurgents of 1956 and their sympathizers, Kádár established the model ‘post-political’ Communist state. In return for their unquestioning acceptance of the Party’s monopoly of power and authority, Hungarians were allowed a strictly limited but genuine degree of freedom to produce and consume. It was not asked of anyone that they believe in the Communist Party, much less its leaders; merely that they abstain from the least manifestation of opposition. Their silence would be read as tacit consent.

The resulting ‘goulash Communism’ secured the stability of Hungary; and the memory of Hungary ensured the stability of the rest of the Bloc, at least for the next decade. But this came at a cost. For most people living under Communism, the ‘Socialist’ system had lost whatever radical, forward-looking, utopian promise once attached to it, and which had been part of its appeal—especially to the young—as recently as the early fifties. It was now just a way of life to be endured. That did not mean it could not last a very long time—few after 1956 anticipated an early end to the Soviet system of rule. Indeed, there had been rather more optimism on that score
before
the events of that year. But after November 1956 the Communist states of Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union itself, began their descent into a decades-long twilight of stagnation, corruption and cynicism.

The Soviets too would pay a price for this—in many ways, 1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs. As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.
’
But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.’

X

The Age of Affluence

‘Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good’.
Harold Macmillan, July 20th 1957

‘Admass is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity,
plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high-pressure
advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural
democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man’.
J. B. Priestley

‘Look at these people! Primitives!’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘Lucania.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Down at the bottom!’
Rocco and His Brothers
, dir. Luchino Visconti (1960)

‘We’re going where the sun shines brightly,
We’re going where the sea is blue.
We’ve seen it in the movies—
Now let’s see if it’s true.’
Cliff Richard, from
Summer Holiday
(
1959
)

‘It’s pretty dreary living in the American age—
unless of course you’re American’.
Jimmy Porter, in
Look Back in Anger (1956)

In 1979, the French writer Jean Fourastié published a study of the social and economic transformation of France in the thirty years following World War Two. Its title—
Les trente glorieuses: ou, La Révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975
—was well chosen. In Western Europe the three decades following Hitler’s defeat were indeed ‘glorious’. The remarkable acceleration of economic growth was accompanied by the onset of an era of unprecedented prosperity. In the space of a single generation, the economies of continental Western Europe made good the ground lost in forty years of war and Depression, and European economic performance and patterns of consumption began to resemble those of the US. Less than a decade after staggering uncertainly out of the rubble, Europeans entered, to their amazement and with some consternation, upon the age of affluence.

The economic history of post-war western Europe is best understood as an inversion of the story of the immediately preceding decades. The 1930s Malthusian emphasis on protection and retrenchment was abandoned in favor of liberalized trade. Instead of cutting their expenditure and budgets, governments increased them. Almost everywhere there was a sustained commitment to long-term public and private investment in infrastructure and machinery; older factories and equipment were updated or replaced, with attendant gains in efficiency and productivity; there was a marked increase in international trade; and an employed and youthful population demanded and could afford an expanding range of goods.

The post-war economic ‘boom’ differed slightly in its timing from place to place, coming first to Germany and Britain and only a little later to France and Italy; and it was experienced differently according to national variations in taxation, public expenditure or investment emphasis. The initial outlays of most post-war governments went above all on infrastructure modernization—the building or upgrading of roads, railways, houses and factories. Consumer spending in some countries was deliberately held back, with the result—as we have seen—that many people experienced the first post-war years as a time of continuing, if modified, penury. The degree of relative change also depended, of course, on the point of departure: the wealthier the country, the less immediate and dramatic it seemed.

Nevertheless, every European country saw steadily growing rates of
per capita
GDP and GNP—Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product—the newly sanctified measures of national strength and well-being. In the course of the 1950s, the average
annual
rate at which
per capita
national output grew in West Germany was 6.5 percent; in Italy 5.3 percent; in France 3.5 percent. The significance of such high and sustained growth rates is best appreciated when they are compared with the same countries’ performance in earlier decades: in the years 1913-1950 the German growth rate
per annum
was just 0.4 percent, the Italian 0.6 percent, the French 0.7 percent. Even in the prosperous decades of the Wilhelminian Empire after 1870, the German economy had only managed an annual average of 1.8 percent.

By the 1960s the rate of increase began to slow down, but the western European economies still grew at historically unusual levels. Overall, between 1950 and 1973, German GDP per head of the population more than tripled in real terms. GDP per head in France grew by 150 percent. The Italian economy, starting from a lower base, did even better. Historically poor countries saw their economic performance improve spectacularly: between 1950 and 1973
per capita
GDP in Austria rose from $3,731 to $11,308 (in 1990 dollars); in Spain from $2,397 to $8,739. The Dutch economy grew by 3.5 percent each year from 1950-1970—
seven
times the average annual growth rate for the preceding forty years.

A major contributory factor in this story was the sustained increase in overseas trade, which grew much faster than overall national output in most European countries. Merely by removing impediments to international commerce, the governments of the post-war West went a long way towards overcoming the stagnation of previous decades.
¹¹⁶
The chief beneficiary was West Germany, whose share of the world’s export of manufactured goods rose from 7.3 percent in 1950 to 19.3 percent just ten years later, bringing the German economy back to the place it had occupied in international exchange before the Crash of 1929.

In the forty-five years after 1950 worldwide exports by volume increased sixteen-fold. Even a country like France, whose share of world trade remained steady at around 10 percent throughout these years, benefited greatly from this huge overall increase in international commerce. Indeed,
all
industrialized countries gained in these years—the terms of trade moved markedly in their favor after World War Two, as the cost of raw materials and food imported from the non-Western world fell steadily, while the price of manufactured goods kept rising. In three decades of privileged, unequal exchange with the ‘Third World’, the West had something of a license to print money.
²

What distinguished the western European economic boom, however, was the degree of
de facto
European integration in which it resulted. Even before the Treaty of Rome, the future member states of the European Economic Community were trading primarily with one another: in 1958, 29 percent of Germany’s exports (by value) were going to France, Italy and the Benelux countries, and a further 30 percent to other European states. On the eve of the signing of the Rome Treaty, 44 percent of Belgian exports were already going to its future EEC partners. Even countries like Austria, or Denmark, or Spain, which would not officially join the European Community until many years later, were already integrated into its trading networks: in 1971, twenty years before it joined the future European Union, Austria was taking more than 50 percent of its imports from the original six EEC member states. The European Community (later Union) did not lay the basis for an economically integrated Europe; rather, it represented an institutional expression of a process already under way.
³

Another crucial element in the post-war economic revolution was the increased productivity of the European worker. Between 1950 and 1980 labor productivity in western Europe rose by three times the rate of the previous eighty years: GDP per hour worked grew even faster than GDP per head of the population. Considering how many more people were in work, this points to a marked increase in efficiency and, almost everywhere, much improved labour relations. This, too, was in some measure a consequence of catching-up: the political upheavals, mass unemployment,under-investment and physical destruction of the previous thirty years left most of Europe at a historically low starting point after 1945. Even without the contemporary interest in modernization and improved techniques, economic performance would probably have seen some improvement.

Behind the steady increase in productivity, however, lay a deeper, permanent shift in the nature of work. In 1945, most of Europe was still pre-industrial. The Mediterranean countries, Scandinavia, Ireland and Eastern Europe were still primarily rural and, by any measure, backward. In 1950, three out of four working adults in Yugoslavia and Romania were peasants. One working person in two was employed in agriculture in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and Poland; in Italy, two people in every five. One out of every three employed Austrians worked on farms; in France, nearly three out of every ten employed persons was a farmer of one kind or another. Even in West Germany, 23 percent of the working population was in agriculture. Only in the UK, where the figure was just 5 percent, and to a lesser extent in Belgium (13 percent), had the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century truly ushered in a post-agrarian society.
¹¹⁷