by Tony Judt
It is against this background, and that of the additional demographic calamity of the Second World War itself, that the post-war baby boom has to be understood. Between 1950 and 1970 the population of the UK rose by 13 percent; that of Italy by 17 percent. In West Germany the population grew in these years by 28 percent; in Sweden by 29 percent; in the Netherlands by 35 percent. In some of these cases the indigenous increase was boosted by immigration (of returning colonials to the Netherlands, of East German and other refugees to the Federal Republic). But exogenous factors played only a small role in France: between the first post-war census of 1946 and the end of the sixties, the French population grew by almost 30 percent—the fastest rate of increase ever recorded there.
The striking feature of Europe in the nineteen fifties and sixties—it can immediately be gleaned from any contemporary street scene—was thus the number of children and youths. After a forty-year hiatus, Europe was becoming young again. The peak years for post-war births in most countries were 1947-1949—in 1949 869,000 babies were born in France, compared to just 612,000 in 1939. By 1960, in the Netherlands, Ireland and Finland, 30 percent of the population was under fifteen years old. By 1967, in France, one person in three was under twenty. It was not just that millions of children had been born after the war: an unprecedented number of them had survived.
Thanks to improved nutrition, housing and medical care, the infant mortality rate—the number of children per thousand live births who died before reaching their first birthday—fell sharply in Western Europe in these decades. In Belgium it dropped from 53.4 in 1950 to 21.1 in 1970, with most of the change coming in the first decade. In Italy it fell from 63.8 to 29.6, in France from 52.0 to 18.2. Old people lived longer too—at least in Western Europe, where the death rate fell steadily over the same period. The survival rate of infants in Eastern Europe also improved, admittedly from a far worse starting figure: in Yugoslavia, child mortality rates fell from 118.6 per thousand in 1950 to 55.2 twenty years later.120 In the Soviet Union itself, rates fell from 81 per thousand in 1950 to 25 in 1970, though with wide variations among the different republics. But fertility rates in Communist states tailed off rather sooner than in the West, and from the mid-sixties they were more than matched by steadily worsening death rates (especially among men).
There are many explanations for the recovery of European fertility after World War Two, but most of them reduce to a combination of optimism plus free milk. During the long demographic trough of 1913-1945, governments had sought in vain to foster procreation: compensating through patriotic urging, family ‘codes’ and other legislation for the chronic shortage of men, housing, jobs and security. Now—even before post-war growth had translated into secure employment and a consumer economy—the coincidence of peace, security and a measure of state encouragement sufficed to achieve what no amount of pro-natal propaganda before 1940 had been able to bring about.
Demobilized soldiers, returning prisoners of war and political deportees, encouraged by rationing and allocation schemes that favored married couples with children, as well as cash allowances for each child, took the first opportunity to marry and start a family. And there was something else. By the early nineteen-fifties, the countries of western Europe could offer their citizens more than just hope and a social safety net: they also provided an abundance of jobs. Through the course of the 1930s the average unemployment rate in western Europe had been 7.5 percent (11.5 percent in the UK). By the 1950s it had fallen below 3 percent everywhere except Italy. By the mid-1960s the European average was just 1.5 percent. For the first time since records were kept, western Europe was experiencing full employment. In many sectors there were now endemic labor shortages.
In spite of the leverage this afforded to organized labor, trade unions (with the distinctive exception of Britain) were either weak or else reluctant to exercise their power. This was a legacy of the inter-war decades: militant or political unions never fully recovered from the impact of the Depression and Fascist repression. In return for their newfound respectability as national negotiating partners, union representatives through the fifties and early sixties often preferred to collaborate with employers rather than exploit labour shortages to their immediate advantage. In 1955, when the first ever productivity agreement in France was struck between the car workers’ representatives and the nationalized car manufacturer Renault, it was symptomatic of the shift in perspective that the workers’ major gain came not in wages but in the innovatory concession of a third week of paid holiday.121
Another reason why the old blue-collar unions were no longer so significant in Western Europe is that their constituency—skilled male manual workers—was in decline. Employment in coal, steel, textiles and other nineteenth-century industries was shrinking, though this did not become obvious until the sixties. More and more jobs were opening up in the tertiary sector, and many of those taking them were women. Some occupations—textile manufacture, domestic labor—had been heavily feminized for many decades. But after the war employment opportunities in both of these diminished sharply. The female labor force no longer consisted of single women working as servants or mill girls. Instead it was increasingly composed of older women (often married) working in shops, offices, and certain lowpaidprofessions: nursing and teaching in particular. By 1961, one-third of the employed labour force in the UK was female; and two out of every three employed women worked in clerical or secretarial jobs. Even in Italy, where older women had traditionally not joined the ranks of the (officially) employed, 27 percent of the labour force was female by the end of the 1960s.
The insatiable demand for labour in Europe’s prosperous northwest quadrant accounts for the remarkable mass migrations in the 1950s and early 1960s. These took three forms. In the first place, men (and to a lesser extent women and children) abandoned the countryside for the city and moved to more developed regions of their own country. In Spain over one million residents of Andalucia moved north to Catalonia in the two decades after 1950: by 1970, 1.6 million Andalucian-born Spaniards lived outside their native region, 712,000 of them in Barcelona alone. In Portugal a substantial percentage of the residents of the impoverished Alentejo region departed for Lisbon. In Italy, between 1955 and 1971, an estimated nine million people moved from one region of their country to another.
This pattern of population movement was not confined to the Mediterranean. The millions of young people who abandoned the German Democratic Republic for West Germany between 1950 and 1961 may have been opting for political freedom, but in heading west they were also seeking well-paid jobs and a better life. In this respect they differed little from their Spanish or Italian contemporaries—or the quarter of a million Swedes from the rural centre and north of their country who moved to the cities in the decade after 1945. Much of this movement was driven by income disparities; but the desire to escape hardship, isolation, the bleakness of village life and the hold of traditional rural hierarchies also played a part, especially for young people. One incidental benefit was that the wages of those who remained behind, and the amount of land available to them, increased as a consequence.
A second route taken by migrants involved moving from one European country to another. European emigration, of course, was nothing new. But the fifteen million Italians who left their country between 1870 and 1926 had typically departed across the ocean: for the United States or Argentina. The same was true of the millions of Greeks, Poles, Jews and others who emigrated in the same years, or the Scandinavians, Germans and Irish of an earlier generation. After World War One, to be sure, there had been a steady trickle of miners and farm workers from Italy and Poland into France, for example; and the 1930s saw political refugees fleeing west from Nazism and Fascism. But intra-European migration, especially in search of work, remained the exception.
By the end of the 1950s, all this changed. Cross-border labor movement had begun shortly after the end of the war—following an agreement of June 1946, tens of thousands of young Italian worke
rs traveled in organized convoys to work in the mines of Wallonia, in return for a Belgian undertaking to supply coal to Italy. But in the course of the 1950s the economic expansion of northwest Europe was outrunning local population growth: the ‘baby-boom’ generation had yet to enter the workforce but demand for labor was peaking. As the German economy in particular began to accelerate, the Bonn government was forced to seek out cheap labour from abroad.
By 1956 Chancellor Adenauer was in Rome, offering free transport to any Italian laborer who would make the journey to Germany and seeking official Italian cooperation to funnel unemployed southerners across the Alps. In the course of the next decade the Bonn authorities would sign a series of accords not just with Italy but also encompassing Greece and Spain (1960), Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1964) and Yugoslavia (1968). Foreign (‘guest’) workers were encouraged to take up employment in Germany—on the understanding that their stay was strictly temporary: they would eventually return to their country of origin. Like Finnish migrant workers in Sweden, or Irish laborers in Britain, these men—most of them under 25—came in almost every case from poor, rural or mountainous regions. The majority were unskilled (although some accepted ‘deskilling’ in order to get work). Their earnings in Germany and other northern countries played an important part in sustaining the economies of the regions they had left behind, even as their departure alleviated local competition for jobs and housing. In 1973, the remittances of workers abroad represented 90 percent of Turkish export earnings, 50 percent of export earnings in Greece, Portugal and Yugoslavia.
The demographic impact of these population transfers was significant. Although the migrants were officially ‘temporary’ they had in practice left their homes for good. If they returned, it would only be many years later, to retire. Seven million Italians left their country between 1945 and 1970. In the years 1950-1970 a quarter of the entire Greek labor force left to find work abroad: at the height of the emigration, in the mid-Sixties, 117,000 Greeks left their country every year.122 It is estimated that between 1961 and 1974, one and a half million Portugese workers found jobs abroad—the greatest population movement in Portugal’s history, leaving behind in Portugal itself a workforce of just 3.1 million. These were dramatic figures for a country whose total population in 1950 had been only eight and one third million. The emigration of young women in search of domestic employment in Paris and elsewhere had a particularly marked effect on the countryside, where the shortfall of young adults was only partly made good by the arrival of immigrants from Portugal’s colonies in the Cape Verde Islands and Africa. In one Portuguese municipality, Sabugal in the rural north, emigration reduced the local population from 43,513 in 1950 to just 19,174 thirty years later.
The economic benefit to the ‘importing’ country was considerable. By 1964, foreign (mostly Italian) workers were one quarter of the work force of Switzerland, whose tourist trade depended heavily upon cheap, seasonal labor: easily hired, readily fired. In West Germany, in the peak year of 1973, there were 2.8 million foreign workers, mostly in the building trades and in metalworking and car manufacture. They constituted one worker in eight of the national labour force. In France the 2.3 million foreign workers recorded that year were 11 percent of the total working population. Many of them were women in domestic work, employed as cooks, cleaners, concierges and babysitters—overwhelmingly of Portuguese origin.
Most of these men and women had no permanent rights of residence, and they were not included in the agreements signed by unions and employers providing for the security, welfare and retirement of local employees. They thus represented very little commitment or long-term cost to the employer and country to which they had come. Well into the 1980s, ‘guest-workers’ in Germany were held back at entry-level positions and wages. They lived as best they could, sending most of their earnings home: however little they were paid in marks or francs, it was worth many times their earning potential in their villages of origin. Their condition resembled that of the forlorn Italian waiter in Luzerne lightly caricatured in Franco Brusati’s 1973 film Pane e Cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate).
By 1973 in West Germany alone there were nearly half a million Italians, 535,000 Yugoslavs and 605,000 Turks.123 The Germans—like the Swiss, French, Belgians or British—did not especially welcome the sudden eruption of so many foreigners on their soil. The experience of living among so many people from unknown foreign lands was unfamiliar to most Europeans. If it was tolerated reasonably well, with only occasional outbreaks of prejudice and violence against communities of foreign workers, this was in some measure because the latter lived apart from the local population, in the drearier outer suburbs of the larger cities; because they posed no economic threat in an era of full employment; because at least in the case of Christians from Portugal, Italy and Yugoslavia they were physically and culturally ‘assimilable’—i.e. not dark or Muslim; and because it was widely understood that they would one day be gone.
Such considerations did not apply, however, to a third source of imported labour: immigrants from past and present European colonies. The number of people in this category was not initially significant. Many of the people who had returned to the Netherlands, Belgium and France from former imperial holdings in Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific were white professionals, or else retired farmers. Even the Algerian nationals living in France by 1969 numbered just 600,000, less than the local population of Italians or Spaniards.
Even in Britain, where the governments of the 1950s had actively encouraged immigration from the Caribbean to staff the country’s trains, buses and municipal services, the figures were not especially striking. In the 1951 census there were 15,000 people from the West Indies (mostly Barbados) resident in the UK: 4,000 of them in London. By 1959 West Indian immigration to the UK was running at around 16,000 people per year. Immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth was even smaller—in 1959 there were just 3,000 immigrant arrivals from India and Pakistan. The numbers would increase in later years—notably when the British government reluctantly agreed to admit the East African Asians expelled by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin—but as late as 1976 there were still only 1.85 million ‘non-whites’ in the UK population, 3 percent of the total. And 40 percent of these had been born there.
What made the difference, of course, was that these people were brown or black—and, being Commonwealth citizens, had a presumptive right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the imperial metropole. Already in 1958, race riots in west London alerted the government to the perceived risk of permitting ‘too many’ immigrants to enter a historically white society. And so, even though the economic case for unskilled immigrants remained strong and the overall totals insignificant, the UK brought in the first of many controls on non-European immigration. The Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 introduced ‘employment vouchers’ for the first time, and placed rigorous controls on non-white immigration to the UK. A successor Act of 1968 tightened these still further, restricting UK citizenship to persons with at least one British parent; and in 1971 a further Act, overtly directed at non-whites, severely restricted the admission of the dependents of immigrants already in Britain.124
The net effect of these laws was to end non-European immigration into Britain less than twenty years after it had begun. Henceforth, the growing share of non-whites in the UK population would be a function of high African, Caribbean and South Asian birth rates within the UK. On the other hand, these drastic restrictions on the right of blacks and Asians to enter the UK were accompanied, in due course, by a considerable improvement in their life chances once there. A Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public places, introduced remedies for job discrimination, and set out penalties for incitement to race hatred. A successor Act eleven years later finally outlawed all discrimination based on race and established a Commission for Racial Equality. In certain respects, the new, non-European populations of the UK (and, later, France) were more for
tunate than the second-class Europeans who found work north of the Alps. English landladies could no longer display signs announcing ‘No Blacks, Irish or Dogs’; but notices forbidding entry to ‘dogs and Italians’ were not unknown in Swiss parks for some years to come.
In northern Europe the situation of foreign labourers and other residents was kept deliberately precarious. The Dutch government encouraged workers from Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy (and later Turkey, Morocco and Surinam), to come and take up jobs in textiles, mines and shipbuilding. But when the old industries shut down, it was these workers who lost their jobs, often without any insurance or social safety net to cushion the impact on them and their families. In West Germany a Foreigners’ Law of 1965 incorporated within its text ‘Police Regulations for Foreigners’ first promulgated by the Nazis in 1938. Foreign workers were described and treated as a temporary presence, at the mercy of the authorities. By 1974, however, when the European economy had slowed to a crawl and many of the immigrant workers were no longer required, they had become permanent residents. In that year, 17.3 percent of all children born in West Germany were the children of ‘foreigners’.
The net impact of these movements of people is hard to overestimate. Taken all in all, they amounted to some forty million people in transit, moving within countries, between countries and into Europe from overseas. Without cheap and abundant labour in this vulnerable and mostly unorganized form, the European boom would not have been possible. The post-war European states—and private employers—benefited greatly from a steady flow of docile, low-paid workers for whom they frequently avoided paying the full social cost. When the boom ended and it came time to lay off excess labour, the immigrant and migrant workforce was the first to suffer.
Like everyone else, the new workers not only made things; they bought them. This was something quite new. Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe—as elsewhere in the world—had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew. Industrialization in the course of the nineteenth century had transformed the world of town- and city-dwellers; but in many parts of rural Europe the traditional economy operated largely unchanged up to and even beyond the Second World War.