Europe's Troubled Peace, 1945-2000 (review)

Tom Buchanan has a refreshingly different take on European history since 1945. Whereas most texts draw the curtain down around 1989, proclaiming the end of the Cold War to be the end of an era, Buchanan offers the proposition that the fall of the Berlin Wall was in fact the opening of the second act in the continuing drama of European unification. Since the Second World War and despite appearances, he contends, Europeans of all stripes—West, Central, and East—had been drawing closer together. In addition to thus extending the usually shortened twentieth century by at least a decade, Buchanan identifies six themes he intends to follow through this new period: politics, international relations, the economy, social divisions, culture, and European imperialism. That is, of course, quite a full menu for anyone, and were Buchanan able to fulfill such a promise for all of Europe over a span of fifty-five years, this would unquestionably be THE textbook for upper-division courses in European history.

Insofar as it establishes a different paradigm for understanding the development of Europe after 1945, that may indeed be the case anyway. Buchanan frames each chapter as one step in the process of creating a new, distinct European identity, and often does so in thought-provoking and surprising ways. In the ideological differences of the 1980s, for example, when Britain cleaved to Thatcherite conservatism and the Atlantic Alliance while France delved headlong into socialism, Buchanan finds and draws out parallels in economic policy (p. 222). In the cultural fragmentation of that decade, he uncovers a coherent society. "Despite the new individualism," he writes, "the decade was marked by new solidarity." (p. 198). In the anti-Stalinist upheaval of Eastern Europe after 1956, he sees societies moving toward the alternative (i.e., neither American nor Soviet) model taking shape in Western Europe even after the revolutions were suppressed (p. 167).

There are understandably, however, areas where Europe's Troubled Peace falls short of this lofty standard. While the other themes are clear enough in the initial three chapters, which deal with the aftermath of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, they are harder to discern thereafter. The remaining chapters follow a fairly standard chronological and geographic division, alternating between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and the discrepancy between themes and narrative grows over time as Buchanan is forced to work with rawer and rawer data. The Eastern portions do tend, as is standard, to get short shrift for much of the text. To some extent, this is unavoidable; they were part of the Soviet Bloc, and as such they pursued fairly uniform policies. Buchanan does, however, take time and care to point out distinct national developments as they occur within that framework. The Romanian, Yugoslav, and Albanian—yes, Albanian—styles of socialism are discussed as alternatives to the recrudescence of Soviet bureaucratic management that swept most of Eastern Europe during the Brezhnev years, for instance (pp. 160–63). So while the organization is not unusual, the content is.

Buchanan's text on Western Europe is also anything but standard. Perhaps because his background includes work on the Spanish Civil War, Buchanan includes far more, and far more detailed material about states on the so-called periphery of Europe—Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic States—than most surveys. Buchanan discusses the Portuguese revolutionary movement of the mid-1970s, for example, at some length, and follows this up with a brief overview of parallel developments in Greece (pp. 191–93). Swedish politics, usually reserved for discussions on the evolution of the social welfare state, garner serious attention as an example of the shift in attitudes and roles for Western European socialists in the 1950s (pp. 115–16). Even his discussion of the larger and more familiar states—Germany, France, Italy, and Great Britain—has a new and lively cast to it. Buchanan's survey of Western European...