Europe after 1945

For European historians to begin seeing the second half of the twentieth century as a distinct period has taken a very long time. Despite the lengthening gap between then and the ever-moving now, the time since 1945 was treated mainly as an aftermath, appearing in twentieth-century textbooks as a coda to the main story, which centred on the two world wars and the ‘interwar’. In the earliest versions this was undoubtedly connected to generation: for those who lived and wrote under the immediate shadow of Nazism, postwar Europe was the quiet and livable normality of the present tense, whereas history, in contrast, was to be found in all the spectacle and turbulence that came before.¹ For a long time for the purposes of teaching and disciplinary identity – for distinguishing history from social science – the boundary ran straightforwardly through 1945. Only in the 1990s did a number of general histories begin to appear, self-consciously taking stock of the twentieth century from the vantage point of its end, most of them covering the world as a whole rather than Europe as such.² But with one or two early exceptions European historians still seemed reluctant to appraise the post-1945 era discretely and on its own terms.³

The usual nervousness about distance and perspective cannot by itself explain this reticence. While ‘Europe between the wars’ was already being tackled in the 1960s at a mere quarter-century’s remove, the post-1945 era had to wait for almost double that time to elapse. This need for much greater distance had something to do with the psychology of the momentousness of the end of the war, which established ‘1945’ as a remarkably durable baseline. So long as the stability of Western European political arrangements, the effects of the peacetime affluence and the Cold War’s determinative framework still held, the indefinitely expanding present of the ‘post-1945’ could also continue to unfold. While the watershed of 1968–73 and the ensuing disorder of the 1970s and 1980s certainly damaged those certainties, moreover, it required the Gorbachev era, the Revolutions of 1989, and the end of Communism to prepare the ground for closure.⁴ Once the twentieth century as a whole had been captured in Eric Hobsbawm’s and Mark Mazower’s magisterial summations, accordingly, others began the work of conceptualizing the long postwar.⁵

This provides an avowed starting point for each of the two books under review. Thus Tony Judt opens his account on a platform of Vienna’s main railway station in December 1989, where his own journey between Prague and western Europe becomes an allegory for Europe’s passage between eras, the extended ‘postwar’ of his book’s title and the ‘new Europe’ then in process of being born. If for Judt it was the 1989 revolutions that opened the way for necessary reappraisal, then for Tom Buchanan the vantage point came from the larger process of continental unification which the changes of 1989–91 also brought to fruition. Each of these accounts then becomes cast in the long shadow of the war. Buchanan begins with a late speech of François Mitterand, who in January 1995 reminded the European Parliament of the ‘grief, the pain of separation, the presence of death’ inflicted by the nationalist rivalries reaching their brutal climax during 1939–45, to which the intervening history of ‘peace and conciliation’ could now be counterposed. Judt likewise builds his entire 871-page account around the process, unevenly accomplished country by country in east and west, of negotiating an escape from the unfinished legacies of the war’s psychic effects. Together, the cover images of the two books emblematically frame the story. Judt’s Postwar shows a lone man facing away from the camera...