Post-war British politics had to cope with a country whose traditional identity was quietly disintegrating. They were governed by the swings of the two-party Westminster system, by the stop-go performance of the economy, and, above all, by Britain’s long search for a post-imperial role. In July 1945 the dramatic election victory of the Labour Party introduced an extensive welfare state and a mixed economy, where evenly matched private and nationalized sectors competed. In the next half-century, three Labour governments ruled for a total of 17 years, three Conservative governments (up to 1992) for over 30. Thanks to the near-dictatorial powers of the parliamentary majority, each government’s programme tended to be reversed by its successor. The over-mighty position of the trade unions, for example, which had been encouraged by the Labour governments, was overturned by the fierce anti-union policies of the Conservatives in the 1980s. Attempts by assorted ‘third parties’ to stop the sterile duel—by the Liberals, by the Social Democrats in the early 1980s, and by the Liberal Democrats—repeatedly
failed. The unsteady performance of the economy created a climate of declining confidence. The long monetarist reign of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) chose an authoritarian book-keeping style to bring discipline to all spheres that the government could reach. The effect, perhaps unintended, was to create an unusual degree of centralized power, which all but eliminated the voice of local government and the regions. Many British institutions had remained undisturbed for longer than anyone could remember; and a succession of disgraceful or divisive episodes in the City of London, the police, the royal family, and the Church of England heightened the sense of authority in decline. British society was increasingly polarized: the relative prosperity of the new ‘enterprise culture’ was matched by the decay of the inner cities and their despairing underclass, by falling standards in education, and by juvenile crime. The cohesion of the state was also being shaken: an initial surge of national separatism in Wales and Scotland in the 1970s was checked by referenda, which upheld the status quo. But from 1969 a virtual civil war in Northern Ireland required a strong military presence and brought provincial self-government to an end. Scottish separatism revived in reaction to the Anglocentric stance of successive Conservative governments. By the time that the strong hand of Mrs Thatcher left the helm, there was a widespread awareness of British democracy in crisis.
As the Empire sank from view, however, Britain’s principal dilemma lay in the need to choose between her precarious ‘special relationship’ with the USA and the prospect of closer links with her European neighbours. The natural inclination was to get the best of both worlds: to give unstinting support to the USA and to NATO, and to join the European Community as well. With luck, the British could combine maximum economic benefits with a minimal loss of sovereignty and historic ties. General de Gaulle spotted this ploy, and blocked it. After his death, British entry to the EEC was successfully negotiated. But in the late 1980s the old dilemma returned; sooner or later, the British would be forced to make their choice. British diehards feared that the United Kingdom might lose its soul; their critics argued that internal problems could only be solved in the European context.
17
Amidst the confusion, some people wondered whether the United Kingdom would live to celebrate its tercentenary.
France, Italy, West Germany, and Great Britain—each with populations over 50 million—were by far the largest states of Western Europe. The smaller countries could best exert an influence by joining regional associations. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had co-ordinated their policies informally ever since the war; they completed the Benelux Economic Union in 1958. Riven by ethnic discord, Belgium turned itself in 1971 into a federalized union of three autonomous provinces—Flanders, Brussels, and Wallonia. In Scandinavia, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, all members of NATO, joined Sweden and Finland, both neutrals, in the Nordic Council, formed in 1953. In their internal politics, various brands of social democracy predominated. Generally speaking, the smaller the state the greater was its stake in eventual European union.
European fascism, though peripheral, was slow to disappear. The Salazar
regime in Portugal was not overturned till 1974. Franco’s regime survived in Spain until the Caudillo’s death in 1975. In Greece, deeply divided by the conflict in Cyprus, a junta of colonels seized power between 1967 and 1974. Spain’s transition from fascism to democracy presented relatively few problems. A programme of economic reform dating from the early 1960s had steadily removed many discrepancies. The revival of the monarchy in the person of King Juan Carlos provided a crucial source of political leadership; and there was a strong public consensus in favour of Spain’s accession to West European institutions. American support was also a factor. As a result, though negotiations between Brussels and Madrid were long and at points precarious, 141 sessions were sufficient for Spain to gain entry to the EEC in 1983, one year after joining NATO. Contrary to the gloomier predictions, the integration of a supposedly backward economy proved virtually trouble-free.
The cultural life of Western Europe was conditioned by the climate of political liberalism, by great advances in technology and the mass media, especially television, and by a tidal wave of American imports. The overall effect was seen in the loosening of conventional restraints and, to some degree, in the reduction of national particularities. Freedom of the arts and sciences was taken for granted. Pluralism of views was the norm.
In philosophy, the existentialism of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) came into fashion after the war, whilst in the English-speaking world the followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), an Austrian on the Cam, thought that logical positivism had rendered all other philosophy redundant. In France, the devotees of Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) and his method of deconstruction imagined that all rationalist thought could be taken apart, and shown to be meaningless. Marxism was modish in intellectual circles for twenty or thirty years, leading to what has been called ‘the Great Confrontation’ between Marxist intellectuals, fed on Gramsci, Lukács, and Bloch, and their critics. The most devastating critique came from the Polish ex-Marxist, Leszek Kotakowski (b. 1927), whose
Main Currents of Marxism
(1978) served both as a handbook and as an obituary to the movement. European feminism received its modern manifesto in
The Second Sex
(1949) of Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre had written: ‘Hell is other people.’ His partner, de Beauvoir, wrote: ‘You are not born a woman; you have to become one.’ [
LAUSSEL
]
Growing respect for science, a very American trait, affected all branches of study. The social sciences—psychology, economics, sociology, political science— exerted a profound effect on all the older disciplines. Perhaps the most fruitful alternatives to the arid trends of the time, however, were supplied by the Austrian-born Karl Popper (1902–94). Popper’s
Logic of Scientific Discovery
(1934) overturned reigning assumptions about the scientific method. He argued, after Einstein’s example, that no knowledge was absolute or permanent, and that hypotheses were best established by searching for proof of their wrong-headedness. His
Poverty of Historicism
(1957) demolished the pretensions of social science to formulate laws governing historical development. His
Open Society and
Its Enemies
(1945) served to justify the liberal democracy which he would live to see triumph all over Europe.
In the arts, the tide eventually turned against the disintegrating tendencies of modernism; and the ‘post-modernist’ blend of old and new gained ground. International festivals such as those at Salzburg, Bayreuth, or Edinburgh broke down national barriers.
The communications media proliferated. In an age of almost total literacy, a free press flourished. Quality papers such as
The Times, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera
, or
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
were joined by popular news magazines, gutter-press tabloids, and from the 1960s by legalized pornography. Cinema, radio, and sound technology greatly extended the mass audience and created new art forms such as
musique concrète
. Nothing, however, could compare in the scale of its impact with television—whose general broadcasting began in France in December 1944, in Britain in 1946, in West Germany in 1952.
American influences were felt in almost every sphere, especially in Hollywood films, dance music, and popular dress. Youth fashions and ‘pop culture’, where adolescents dressed in unisex jeans jived and minced in imitation of film idols or rock stars, became entirely transatlantic and cosmopolitan. In a world conditioned by unrestrained commercial advertising, fears began to be expressed that ‘the media was the message’, in other words, that people could be conditioned to believe anything. American English—the language of NATO, science, and ‘pop’ alike—could not be resisted as the main vehicle of international communication. ‘Frangiais’ was officially condemned in France; but the teaching and, increasingly, the use of English came to be accepted as an educational and cultural priority in all West European countries. Mindless materialism, however, came to be regarded as the most insidious of American imports. It may have been very unfair to blame the USA for reducing Europeans to the level of economic animals; but Willy Brandt was expressing widespread feelings in this regard when he asked, ‘Do we all want to be Americans?’
Post-war social life was much more relaxed and egalitarian than previously. The war had acted as a great leveller: the old hierarchies of class, profession, and family origins did not entirely disappear; but people became more mobile, and rising standards of living ensured, as in America, that wealth and income should be the main criterion of status. Motorization proceeded apace, as did the mass adoption of domestic appliances. By the 1970s an absolute majority of West European families, including the working class, possessed a motor car, a washing-machine, and a refrigerator, and could travel abroad for summer holidays on the Mediterranean beaches. East Europeans could only watch with envy. At the same time, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Community, which dispensed huge subsidies, served to redistribute wealth from the town to the countryside. Starting from the 1960s, several million peasants were transformed into relatively prosperous farmers. Primitive villages, especially in France, Germany, and northern Italy, were rapidly modernized and mechanized.
A number of structural changes made a deep impression on social attitudes. The ‘Welfare State’—which provided a wide range of services such as Britain’s National Health Service (1948), West Germany’s model pension scheme, or France’s massive HLM projects for cheap housing—removed many of the traditional anxieties about ill health, unemployment, homelessness, and old age. But it also served to create a form of psychological dependence where people could relapse into torpor, expecting to be coddled by the state from cradle to grave. It certainly did not eliminate the problems of poverty, which in a generally affluent society were particularly bitter. Rising wages turned the masses into ‘consumers’, pressured to become big spenders by aggressive advertising and by social emulation. Consumerism certainly fuelled the economy; but it turned material advancement into the goal, not the means; it threatened to reduce politics to a debate about the supply of goods; and it taught young people that possessions alone brought fulfilment. Since it put a dazzling supply of desirable goods before people’s eyes, it was a more effective form of materialism than that which communist propaganda was advocating in the East.
The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, facilitated by general access to the contraceptive pill, rapidly destroyed conventional mores. It eliminated the social shame of extramarital sex, bastardy, homosexuality, divorce, and unmarried cohabitation. In most countries it was accompanied by the de-closeting of homosexuals, by the decriminalization of consensual sodomy in private, by the relaxation of laws on pornography and obscenity, and by the widespread legalization of abortion. There were considerable variations in the tempo of change, with Denmark in the van and Ireland in the rear. And there was a strong reaction, especially in Catholic circles, where fundamental values of marriage, family, and human love were thought to be under threat.
Religious life experienced a serious decline. Wartime horrors and post-war materialism destroyed many people’s faith. Church-going ceased to be a social convention, and was left to the private inclination of families and individuals. Semi-deserted churches, lacking both congregations and regular clergy, could be encountered not only in city centres and industrial suburbs but also in rural areas. Protestant England and Catholic France were both badly hit. For the first time in 1,500 years Christianity was becoming a minority belief.
One response lay in ecumenism. From 1948 the World Council of Churches, with headquarters in Geneva, brought together the main Protestant and Orthodox Churches with the aim of voluntary co-operation. Its high ideals were not always immune from low politics.
At first the Roman Catholic Church stayed aloof. In the 1950s, a minor French experiment of ‘worker-priests’ working in industry was suppressed by the Vatican. But the elevation of Cardinal Roncalli, a man of radiant humanity, as Pope John XXIII (1958–63) marked the turning towards comprehensive reform. His Encyclical
Pacem in Terris
was addressed, exceptionally, to people of all faiths.
Mater et Magistra
showed concern for world social welfare. His convocation of
the 21st Ecumenical Council of the Universal Church, known as ‘Vatican IIÙ launched the most radical change of direction since the Council of Trent.
Vatican II, whose four sessions lasted from October 1962 to December 1965, has been labelled ‘the end of the Counter-Reformation’. In the battle between conservatives and liberals, many of the proposed reforms were diluted or rejected: the declaration absolving Jewry from accusations of deicide was passed in modified form; the proposals favouring modern methods of birth control was scotched. But the powers of the Curia were clipped; the obligatory Tridentine Latin Mass was to be replaced in the Roman rite by vernacular liturgies; the laity were given greater responsibility; restrictions on intermarriage were relaxed; and the seal of approval was given to ecumenism. Most importantly, a new, open, flexible spirit took flight.