by Tony Judt
This distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism—for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims—was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe. In its positive form it facilitated national recovery by allowing men like Marshall Tito, Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer to offer their fellow countrymen a plausible and even prideful account of themselves. Even East Germany claimed a noble point of origin, an invented tradition: the fabled and largely fabricated Communist ‘uprising’ in Buchenwald in April 1945. Such accounts allowed countries that had suffered war passively, like the Netherlands, to set aside the record of their compromises, and those whose activism had proven misguided, like Croatia, to bury it in a blurred story of competing heroisms.
Without such collective amnesia, Europe’s astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible. To be sure, much was put out of mind that would subsequently return in discomforting ways. But only much later would it become clear just how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years. In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.
III
The Rehabilitation of Europe
‘All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire
order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by
preparing the road to a new type of planned order’.
Karl Mannheim
‘The all but general opinion seems to be that capitalist methods will be
unequal to the task of reconstruction’.
Joseph Schumpeter
‘A lot of us were disappointed in the Britain that we came back to . . .
nobody could make it change overnight into the Britain we wanted’.
Mrs Winnie Whitehouse (in Paul Addison, Now The War Is Over)
‘The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence
of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and
of Europe as a whole’.
George C. Marshall
The sheer scale of the European calamity opened new opportunities. The war changed everything. A return to the way things had been before 1939 was out of the question almost everywhere. This was naturally the view of the young and the radical, but it was just as evident to perspicacious observers of an older generation. Charles De Gaulle, 54 years old when France was liberated and born into the conservative Catholic bourgeoisie of northern France, put the matter with characteristic precision: ‘During the catastrophe, beneath the burden of defeat, a great change had occurred in men’s minds. To many, the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every realm.’
But the problems had not begun in 1940, either in France or elsewhere. Anti-Fascist resisters everywhere saw themselves in battle not just with the wartime occupiers and their local surrogates but with an entire political and social system which they held directly responsible for the disasters their countries had undergone. It was the politicians and bankers and businessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years who had brought their countries to catastrophe, who had betrayed the sacrifices of the First World War and laid the ground for the Second. These, in the words of a British pamphlet excoriating Conservative advocates of appeasement before 1940, were the ‘Guilty Men’. They, and their system, were the target of wartime plans for post-war change.
Resistance was thus everywhere implicitly revolutionary. This was inherent in its logic. To reject a society that had produced Fascism led one naturally ‘to a dream of revolution which would take off from a tabula rasa’ (Italo Calvino). In much of eastern Europe the slate was indeed wiped clean, as we have seen. But even in western Europe there was widespread expectation of dramatic and rapid social transformation: who, after all, would stand in its way?
Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place your self beyond the law.
For this new generation, politics was therefore about resistance—resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past. Claude Bourdet, an activist in the French resistance and a prominent left-wing magazine editor and writer in the post-war years, captured the mood in his memoirs, L’aventure incertaine: ‘The Resistance’, he wrote, ‘turned us all into contestataires in every sense of the word, towards men as much as towards the social system.’ From resisting Fascism to resisting a post-war retreat to the errors of the thirties seemed a natural step. Out of this came the oddly optimistic mood upon which many observers remarked in the immediate aftermath of Liberation. In spite of the destitution all around—indeed, because of it—something new and better was bound to emerge. ‘None of us’ wrote the editors of the Italian review Società in November 1945, ‘recognizes his own past. It seems incomprehensible to us . . . Our life today is dominated by a sense of stupor and by an instinctive search for a direction. We are simply disarmed by the facts.’
The chief impediment to radical change in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat was not the reactionaries or Fascists, who had thrown in their lot with the dictators and been swept away with them, but the legitimate governments-in-exile, most of which had sat out the war in London planning their return. They saw the local resistance organizations in their countries as a problem rather than as allies: careless youngsters who would need to be disarmed and returned to civilian life, leaving public affairs in the hands of a political class duly cleansed of collaborators and traitors. Anything less would mean anarchy—or else an indefinite occupation by Allied armies.
The wartime resistance groups, organized by 1944-45 into various political movements, were just as suspicious in return. For them, the politicians, functionaries and courtiers who had escaped the Occupation were doubly discredited: by their pre-war errors and by their subsequent absence. In France and Norway the legislators elected in 1936 were disqualified by their actions in 1940. In Belgium and the Netherlands their absence in the intervening five years had cut off the returning governments from any appreciation of local suffering and the change in public mood brought about under Nazi occupation. In central and eastern Europe, with the important exception of Czechoslovakia, the former governments were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Red Army (though they were sometimes slow to grasp this).
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 arm
ed 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 conv
ince 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.’