by Tony Judt
Nevertheless, there was a certain distinctiveness about the British Social Democratic state, beyond the insular refusal of all parties concerned to describe it thus. What the British Left (and, at the time, much of the Centre and Centre-Right of the political spectrum) were taken up with above all was the goal of fairness. It was the manifest injustice, the unfairness of life before the war that drove both the Beveridge reforms and the overwhelming vote for Labour in 1945. It was their promise that they could liberalize the economy while maintaining a fair distribution of rewards and services that brought the Conservatives to power in 1951 and kept them there for so long. The British accepted progressive taxation and welcomed universal health provision not because these were presented as ‘socialist’, but because they were more intuitively just.
In the same way, the curiously regressive workings of the British flat-rate systems of benefits and services—which disproportionately favoured the better-heeled professional middle class—were broadly acceptable because they were egalitarian, if only in appearance. And the most important innovation of the Labour governments of the nineteen sixties—the introduction of un-streamed comprehensive secondary education and the abolition of entrance examinations to selective grammar schools, a longstanding Labour commitment judiciously ignored by Attlee after 1945—was welcomed less on its intrinsic merits than because it was deemed ‘anti-elitist’ and thus ‘fair’. That is why the educational reform was even pursued by Conservative governments after Wilson’s departure in 1970, despite warnings from all sides of the perverse consequences such changes might have.144
The Labour Party’s dependence on trade union backing led it to postpone the sorts of industrial reforms that many (including some of its own leaders) knew to be long overdue. British industrial relations remained mired in adversarial shop-floor confrontations and craft-based piece-rate and wage disputes of a kind virtually unknown in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria or the Netherlands. Labour ministers made half-hearted attempts to break clear of this encumbering inheritance, but without much success; and partly for this reason the achievements of continental social democracy were never quite emulated in Britain.
Moreover, the universal features of Britain’s system of welfare, introduced two or even three decades before those of France, or Italy, for example, hid from view the very limited practical achievements of the British state even in the field of material equality: as late as 1967, 10 percent of the UK population still possessed 80 percent of all personal wealth. The net effect of the re-distributive policies of the first three post-war decades was to shift income and assets from the top 10 percent to the next 40 percent; the bottom 50 percent gained very little, for all the general improvement in security and welfare.
Any overall audit of the era of the welfare state in Western Europe will inevitably be side-shadowed by our knowledge of the problems it would face in later decades. Thus today it is easy to see that initiatives like the West German Social Security Reform Act of 1957, which guaranteed workers a pension keyed to their wage at the point of retirement and linked to a cost-of-living index, would prove an intolerable budgetary burden in changed demographic and economic circumstances. And with hindsight it is clear that radical income-levelling in Social Democratic Sweden reduced private savings and thus inhibited future investment. Even at the time it was obvious that government transfers and flat-rate social payments benefited those who knew how to take full advantage of them: notably the educated middle class, who would fight to hold on to what amounted to a new set of privileges.
But the achievements of Europe’s ‘nanny states’ were real all the same, whether introduced by Social Democrats, paternalist Catholics, or prudentially disposed conservatives and liberals. Beginning with core programmes of social and economic protection, the welfare states moved on to systems of entitlement, benefits, social justice and income redistribution—and managed this substantial transformation at almost no political cost. Even the creation of a self-interested class of welfare bureaucrats and white-collar beneficiaries was not without its virtues: like the farmers, the much-maligned ‘lower middle class’ now had a vested interest in the institutions and values of the democratic state. This was good for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats alike, as such parties duly noted. But it was also bad for Fascists and Communists, which mattered rather more.
These changes reflected the demographic transformations already noted, but also unprecedented levels of personal security and a new intensity of educational and social mobility. As west Europeans were now less likely to remain in the place, the occupation, the income bracket and the social class into which they had been born, so they were less disposed to identify automatically with the political movements and social affiliations of their parents’ world. The generation of the 1930s was content to find economic security and turn its back on political mobilization and its attendant risks; their children, the much larger generation of the 1960s, had only ever known peace, political stability and the welfare state. They took these things for granted.
The rise in the influence of the state upon the employment and welfare of its citizens was accompanied by a steady reduction in its authority over their morals and opinions. At the time this was not seen as a paradox. Liberal and Social Democratic advocates for the European welfare state saw no reason in principle why government should not pay close attention to the economic or medical welfare of the population, guaranteeing citizens’ well-being from cradle to grave, while keeping its nose firmly out of their views and practices on strictly personal matters like religion and sex, or artistic taste and judgement. The Christian Democrats of Germany or Italy, for whom the state still had a legitimate interest in the manners and mores of its subjects, could not so readily make this distinction. But they too faced growing pressure to adapt.
Until the early 1960s, public authorities throughout Western Europe (with the partial exception of Scandinavia) had exercised firm and mostly repressive control over the private affairs and opinions of the citizenry. Homosexual intercourse was illegal almost everywhere, and punishable by long prison terms. In many countries it could not even be depicted in art. Abortion was illegal in most countries. Even contraception was technically against the law in some Catholic states, albeit often condoned in practice. Divorce was everywhere difficult, in some places impossible. In many parts of Western Europe (Scandinavia once again being a partial exception) government agencies still enforced censorship of theatre, cinema and literature, and radio and television were public monopolies almost everywhere, operating as we have seen under strict rules as to content and with very little tolerance for dissent or ‘disrespect’. Even in the UK, where commercial television was introduced in 1955, it too was strictly regulated and carried a publicly mandated obligation to provide ‘enlightenment and information’ as well as entertainment and advertisements.
Censorship, like taxation, was driven forward by war. In Britain and France some of the most stringent constraints on behaviour and the expression of opinion had been introduced during the First or Second World Wars and never repealed. Elsewhere—in Italy, West Germany and some of the countries they had occupied—post-war regulations were a legacy of Fascist laws that democratic legislators had preferred to maintain in place. Relatively few of the most repressive ‘moral’ powers still in force by 1960 dated back beyond the nineteenth century (the most obviously anachronistic being perhaps the Office of the Lord Chamberlain in Britain, responsible for pre-censorship of the theatre, where the posts of Examiner and Deputy Examiner of Plays were created early in 1738). The outstanding exception to this rule, of course, was the Catholic Church.
Ever since the First Vatican Council of 1870, held under the influence and auspices of the avowedly reactionary Pope Pius IX, the Catholic Church had taken an all-embracing and decidedly dogmatic view of its responsibilities as moral guardian of its flock. Precisely because it was being steadily squeezed out of the realm of political power by the modern state, the Vatican made uncompromising
demands upon its followers in other ways. Indeed, the long and—in retrospect—controversial papacy of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) not only maintained its spiritual claims, but actually brought the official Church back into politics.
Avowedly on the side of political reaction, from the Vatican’s close ties to Mussolini and ambivalent response to Nazism to its enthusiasm for Catholic dictators in Spain and Portugal, Pacelli’s papacy also took an uncompromising line in the domestic politics of the democracies. Catholics in Italy especially were left in no doubt as to the spiritual impropriety, and worse, of voting against the Christian Democrats; but even in relatively liberal Belgium or Holland the local Catholic hierarchy was under strict instructions to turn out the Catholic vote for the Catholic parties and only them. Not until 1967, nine years after the death of Pius XII, did a Dutch bishop dare suggest in public that Dutch Catholics might vote for a non-Catholic party without risking excommunication.
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the post-war Catholic hierarchy also took an uncompromising line in questions having to do with the family, or moral behavior or inappropriate books and films. But younger Catholic laymen, and a new generation of priests, were uncomfortably aware that by the end of the 1950s the Vatican’s authoritarian rigidity in public and private matters alike was both anachronistic and imprudent. Back in 1900, most marriages in Italy had lasted around twenty years, before being dissolved by the death of a spouse. By the end of the third quarter of the century marriages lasted in excess of thirty-five years, and demand for the right to divorce was steadily growing.
Meanwhile, the post-war baby boom had undercut the demographic case against contraception, isolating the ecclesiastical authorities in their uncompromising opposition. Attendance at mass was down everywhere in western Europe. Whatever the reasons—the geographical and social mobility of hitherto acquiescent villagers, the political emancipation of women, the declining importance of Catholic charities and parochial schools in the age of the welfare state—the problem was real and, as it seemed to the more perceptive Catholic leaders, could not be addressed by appeals to tradition and authority, or suppressed by invoking anti-Communism in the style of the late 1940s.
Upon Pacelli’s death, his successor Pope John XXIII called a new Vatican Council, to attend to these difficulties and bring up to date the attitudes and practices of the Church. Vatican II, as it became known, convened on October 11th 1962. In the course of its work over the next few years it transformed not only the liturgy and language of Catholic Christianity (quite literally—Latin was no longer to be used in daily Church practice, to the uncomprehending fury of a traditionalist minority) but also, and more significantly, the response of the Church to the dilemmas of modern life. The pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council made it clear that the Church was no longer frightened by change and challenge, was not an opponent of liberal democracy, mixed economies, modern science, rational thought and even secular politics. The first—very tentative—steps were taken towards reconciliation with other Christian denominations and there was some (not much) acknowledgement of the Church’s responsibility to discourage anti-Semitism by re-casting its longstanding account of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. Above all, the Catholic Church could no longer be counted upon to support authoritarian regimes—quite the contrary: in Asia, Africa and especially Latin America, it was at least as likely to be on the side of their opponents.
These changes were not universally welcomed even among the Catholic Church’s own reformers—one delegate to Vatican II, a young priest from Crakow, would later rise to the papacy and see it as his task to restore the full weight of moral authority and influence of an uncompromising Catholic hierarchy. Nor did Vatican II achieve a reversal of the steady fall in religious practice among European Catholics: even in Italy, attendance at mass fell from 69 percent of all Catholics in 1956 to 48 percent twelve years later. But since the decline of religion in Europe has by no means been confined to the Catholic faith, this was probably beyond their powers. What Vatican II did achieve—or at least facilitate and authorize—was the final divorce between politics and religion in continental Europe.
After the death of Pius XII, no pope and almost no bishop again presumed to threaten Catholics with serious consequences should they fail to vote the correct way; and the once-close link between Church hierarchy and Catholic or Christian Democratic parties in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Austria and Italy was prised open.145 Even in Franco’s Spain, where the local Catholic hierarchy had enjoyed unusual privileges and powers, Vatican II wrought dramatic changes. Until the mid-sixties the Spanish leader forbade all outward manifestations of non-Catholic religious belief or practice. But in 1966 he felt constrained to pass a law allowing other Christian churches to subsist, though still privileging Catholicism, and within four years full freedom of (Christian) worship was authorized. By lobbying successfully for this belated ‘disestablishment’ of the Catholic Church in Spain and thus putting daylight between the Church and the regime during Franco’s lifetime, the Vatican was to spare the Spanish Church at least some of the consequences of its long and troubling association with the ‘ancien régime’.
This rupture culturelle, as it became known in Belgium and elsewhere, between religion and politics and between the Catholic Church and its recent past, played a crucial role in the making of ‘the sixties’. There were, of course, limits to the Vatican’sreforming mood—for many of its participants the strategic impulse behind Vatican II was not to embrace radical change, but to head it off. When the rights to abortion and the liberalization of divorce were put to the vote a few years later, in predominantly Catholic countries like Italy, France or West Germany, the ecclesiastical authorities vigorously if unsuccessfully opposed them. But even on these sensitive issues the Church did not go to the wall, and its opposition no longer risked fragmenting the community. In a society well on the way to being ‘postreligious’, the Church accepted its reduced place and made the best of it.146
In non-Catholic societies—which meant Scandinavia, the UK, parts of the Netherlands and a minority of German-speaking western Europe—the liberation of the citizen from traditional moral authority was necessarily more diffuse, but even more dramatic when it came. The transition was most striking in Britain. Until the end of the 1950s, British citizens were still forbidden to gamble; to read or to see anything that their betters judged ‘obscene’ or politically sensitive; to advocate (much less engage in) homosexual acts; to practice abortions on themselves or others; or to get divorced without great difficulty and public humiliation. And if they committed murder or certain other major offences, they could be hanged.
Then, beginning in 1959, the skein of convention began to unravel. Following the Obscene Publications Act of that year, an uncensored work of adult literature could be shielded from charges of ‘obscenity’ if it was deemed to be ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’. Henceforward, publishers and authors could defend themselves in court by invoking the worth of the work as a whole, and could invoke ‘expert’ opinion in their defense. In October 1960 came the notorious test case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Penguin Books were prosecuted for publishing in Britain the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s otherwise unremarkable novel. The Chatterley case was of particular interest to the British not just because of the hitherto illicit passages to which they were now exposed, but also thanks to the inter-class eroticism on which its notoriety rested. Upon being asked by the prosecuting counsel whether this was a novel he would let his ‘wife or maidservant’ ( sic) read, one witness replied that this would not trouble him in the least: but he would never let it into the hands of his gamekeeper.
Penguin Books were acquitted of obscenity, having called thirty-five expert witnesses in their defense, and the decline of the moral authority of the British Establishment can be dated from that acquittal. In the same year gambling was legalized in the United Kingdom.
Four years later the death penalty was abolished by the incoming Labour Government, and under the leadership of Roy Jenkins, a remarkable reforming Home Secretary, Labour oversaw the introduction of state-financed family planning clinics, reform of the law on homosexuality and the legalization of abortion in 1967, and the abolition of theatre censorship in the following year. In 1969 there followed the Divorce Act, which did not so much precipitate a dramatic transformation in the institution of marriage as reveal its extent: whereas in the last year before World War Two there had been just one divorce for every fifty-eight marriages in England and Wales, forty years later the ratio would approach one in three.
The liberal and liberalizing reforms of 1960s Britain were emulated across northwest Europe, albeit with varying delays. The Social Democratic-led coalition governments of West Germany, under Willy Brandt, introduced similar changes there in the course of the later Sixties and Seventies, constrained in their case less by law or precedent than by the reluctance of their coalition partners—notably the economically liberal but socially conservative Free Democrats. In France, abolition of the death penalty had to await the arrival in power of François Mitterrand’s Socialists in 1981, but there—as in Italy—the laws on abortion and divorce were rewritten in the course of the early Seventies. In general, with the exception of Britain and Scandinavia, the liberated ‘Sixties’ did not actually arrive in Europe until the Seventies. Once the legal changes were in place, however, the social consequences flowed rapidly enough: the crude divorce rate in Belgium, France and the Netherlands tripled between 1970 and 1985.