Comparing Europe's Post-war Reconstructions: First Balzan Workshop

Following decades of widespread scholarly neglect, the last years have seen a growth of interest in the 'the lost decade' that followed the end of the Second World War, especially in the question of how a continent that emerged from the war as a physical and moral wasteland could rebuild itself so dramatically.¹ On 28 October 2005 a group of around forty historians, most of whom have been grappling with problems of the post-war period for some time, took part in a one-day workshop at Birkbeck College on 'Comparing Europe's Post-War Reconstructions'. The workshop formally launched a series of meetings and research projects held under the auspices of the Balzan Project at Birkbeck College. This project, which was established by Professor Eric Hobsbawm with a prize grant from the Balzan Foundation, is entitled Reconstruction in the Immediate Aftermath of War: a comparative study of Europe, 1945–1950 and is directed by David Feldman (Birkbeck) and Mark Mazower (Columbia). This first workshop set out to lay foundations for future work by pinning down some of the most central historiographical and methodological issues which are integral to research on the post-war period. The day was divided into two sessions, each of which embodied a comparative element. The first session compared reconstruction in the aftermath of the two world wars, while the second session contrasted approaches to reconstruction after 1945 in Eastern and Western Europe.

Comparing Reconstruction in 1918 and 1945

Jay Winter (Florence/Yale) looked at the role of lawyers in the reconstruction efforts following the two world wars. Through the lens of legal paradigms, he argued, the approaches to social reconstruction in 1945 differed radically from those in 1918. After 1945, complexities of a new order arose not simply from the fact that new legislation had to be drawn up, but because the previous detritus of occupation, collaboration and war had to be unravelled at the same time. Moreover, by 1945 a new legally-inspired language of human rights began to shape reconstruction agendas in ways that were completely novel. The situation in 1945, he conceded, did resemble that of 1918 in a number of ways, not least because both reconstruction periods blurred national boundaries and contained vital trans-national dimensions. Nonetheless by 1945 the language of social reconstruction, especially with regard to ideas about the rights of the individual and the sovereignty of states, had changed radically. Whereas the first half of the century had been marked predominantly by languages of class and nation, the second half was shaped much more by languages of civil society and human rights.

Lawyers played a substantial role in this shift. Winter focused on René Cassin (1887-1976), a vice-chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from its creation in 1946 until 1955, who had been active in the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights. According to Winter, the 'Cassinian framework of reconstruction' presented a fundamental challenge to the older concept of national sovereignty. Cassin believed that human rights should be the foundation for all social reconstruction initiatives. Winter traced the beginning of discussions on human rights to the immediate post-war period, when the language of human rights 'was in the air' and an extra-territorial framework for reconstruction was constructed for the first time. He concluded that soon after 1945 a new universality of human rights helped to redefine the state as a sovereign institution and shaped both domestic and foreign polices in countries across Europe.

Adam Tooze (Cambridge) examined economic approaches to reconstruction in the aftermaths of the two world wars. He began by recounting two opposing modes of twentieth-century economic development in Europe. In the first, historians have contrasted the largely unsuccessful reconstruction efforts after 1918 and the economically-disastrous inter-war years with the hugely successful, even miraculous progress that was achieved after the Second World War. The question posed within this perspective &#x02013...