The referendum established a new, Fifth Republic. De Gaulle was elected its first President three months later.
When the Belgians abandoned the Congo in 1960 they left behind just thirty Congolese university graduates to fill four thousand senior administrative positions.
Between 1954 and 1962, 2 million French soldiers served in Algeria; 1.2 million of them were conscripts.
Quoted in Fernand L’Huillier,
Dialogues Franco-Allemandes 1925-1933
(Strasbourg, 1971), pp. 35-36.
The Canal itself had always been within Egyptian territory and indisputably a part of Egypt. But most of its revenues went to the foreign-owned company.
Quoted in Alan Milward,
The European Rescue of the Nation-State
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, U of California Press, 1992), page 429.
Andrew Moravscik,
The Choice for Europe. Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998), page 137.
The Stalinist leadership remained firmly in place, trials continued
in camera
for two more years and on May 1st 1955 a grotesque, over-sized statue of Stalin was erected on a hill overlooking Prague. De-Stalinization would not reach Czechoslovakia until a decade later, with dramatic consequences.
Kádár, whom Nagy had released from prison three years before, was appointed First Secretary of the Hungarian Party on October 25th. He replaced Gerö, whose security forces had fired on unarmed demonstrators in Parliament Square that same morning.
That the Soviet leader could know this as early as October 28th, three days before the Anglo-French invasion began, suggests that Soviet intelligence was even better than the Western Allies feared at the time.
Even Gomułka, in Poland, acceded readily enough to Soviet arguments. In Poland, Nagy’s departure from the Warsaw Pact
was
a source of anxiety—the Poles’ fear of German territorial revisionism gave them a special interest in the security arrangements guaranteed by Soviet arms. It should be noted, though, that in a meeting with Khrushchev in May 1957 Gomułka tried hard, albeit without success, to dissuade the Soviet leader from putting Nagy on trial.
In particularly backward organizations, like the French Communist Party (which for a long time denied all knowledge of Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin), many members abandoned the Party not so much because of what was happening in the Soviet bloc, but because the local leadership forbade any discussion of it.
One should not, however, overstate the speed with which old regulations were swept aside. Well into the 1960s the Italian government, for example, found it politically prudent to maintain Fascist-era tariffs and quotas on foreign cars, the better to protect domestic producers (essentially FIAT). British governments pursued similar strategies.
2
Much of which would be recycled as loans to that same Third World, now saddled with crippling debts.
3
Great Britain, as so often, was different. In 1956, 74 percent of the UK’s exports went outside of Europe, mostly to its colonies and to the Commonwealth. Even in 1973, when the UK finally entered the EEC, only one-third of its export trade was directed at the twelve countries that would form the European Union in 1992.
By way of comparison it might be noted that the figure for the USA in 1950 was 12 percent employed in agriculture.
Sweden constitutes a partial exception—the key to Swedish post-war prosperity was the creation of a manufacturing specialty in high-value products. But the Swedes had access to a pool of cheap and readily available (Finnish) immigrant workers, as well as a hydroelectric power industry that cushioned the country from oil-price shocks. Like Switzerland, and for similar reasons, they constitute a special case.
The contrast with past practice is revealing. In earlier stages of French industrialization even the great Parisian investment banks had lacked the resources to support the modernization of the country’s industrial infrastructure, and had received no help or encouragement from the government. The dilapidated condition of French factories, roads, rail networks and utilities in 1945 bore eloquent testament to these shortcomings.
By 1950, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Albania were the only European countries where more than one child in ten died before the age of one. In west Europe the last-placed country was Portugal, where the infant mortality rate in 1950 was 94.1 per thousand.
The following year, in March 1956, this right was extended to all French workers. Renault workers obtained a fourth week of paid vacation in 1962, but on this occasion it took seven years before the rest of the country followed suit.
With the result that as tourism began to develop towards the end of the Sixties there was actually a shortage of workers in Greece itself, for the most menial jobs.
Just fifteen years earlier, in 1958, there had been 25,000 Italians, 4,000 Yugoslavs and not enough Turks to be recorded in official censuses.
These draconian restrictions on colonial immigration reflected mainstream opinion in both major parties. However, less than a generation before and in rather different circumstances, the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had written thus, in July 1948: ‘It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom. That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.’
The exception was Italy, where in 1971 less than 5 percent of all purchases were made in the country’s 538 supermarkets and almost everyone continued to use local, specialized shops. This was still true twenty years later: in 1991, by which time the number of food outlets in West Germany had fallen to 37,000 and in France to a mere 21,500, there were fully 182,432 food stores in Italy. Per head of the population, only Poland had more.
There were ‘cultural’ objections as well. In 1952 the French Communist author Roger Vailland asserted that, ‘[i]n a country like France, where—except for two months a year, and not every year—it is always so cold that a food-box on the window ledge will keep the roast for a weekend, and more, a fridge is a “symbol” an (American) “mystification.’
Only in 1963 did
Electricité de France
begin upgrading their urban power lines to permit the running of multiple appliances—the countryside followed some years later.
An exponential increase nicely captured in the opening scene of Fellini’s
8 ½
(1963). Even by Fellini’s own standards, this urban traffic jam would have been bizarrely implausible just a few years earlier.
Local response to this innovation followed historical precedent: English motorists, regarding meter charges as a form of unauthorized taxation, withheld payment. The French registered their disapproval by decapitating Parisian meters.
The first European hypermarkets, defined as stores with at least 25,000 square feet of space on a single level and typically located at least two miles from a town center, began to appear at the end of the 1960s. By 1973 there were about 750 of these giant stores in Western Europe, 620 of them in France and West Germany alone. In Italy in that same year there were just three. Twenty years later there were fully 8,000 hypermarkets and superstores in France . . . but still just 118 in Italy.
Between 1959 and 1973, the number of visitors to Spain rose from 3 million to 34 million. Already in 1966 the number of annual tourists in Spain—17.3 million—far surpassed the totals for France or Italy. In parts of the north-east and Spain’s Mediterranean littoral, the transition from a pre-industrial economy to the age of the credit card was accomplished in half a generation. The aesthetic and psychological impact was not always positive.
With the exception of the Iberian peninsula and the southern Balkans, where radio ownership in 1960 was roughly comparable to that of Western Europe thirty-five years earlier, and where people still clustered in cafés to listen to news and music.
Paul Ginsborg,
A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics 1943-1988
(1990), p. 240.
It is perhaps worth emphasizing the marginality of jazz. Like American folk music in the sixties, jazz was only ever appreciated and bought by a small number of people in western Europe: usually educated, bourgeois or bohemian (or, typically, both) and rather older than the average rock-and-roll enthusiast. The situation in eastern Europe was a little different. There jazz was American (and black), therefore both exotic and subversive, Western yet radical—and carried a charge quite lacking further West.
The American writer William Stead published
The Americanization of the World
in 1902: anticipating his subject, perhaps, but not by much.
In 1960 the German economy grew at a rate of 9.0 percent per annum, the British economy by 2.6 percent: the slowest rate in the developed world, except for Ireland—which at this time was still far from ‘developed’.
Quoted in Peter Hennessy,
Never Again. Britain 1945-1951
(1993), p.117.
Liberal parties and thinkers in Germany and Italy, like the small free-market wing of Britain’s Conservative Party, did not join in this consensus. But at the time—and in part for this reason—they wielded little influence.
Contrast Italy, which had 13 different governments and 11 different prime ministers in the same period—or France, which had 23 governments and 17 prime ministers between 1945 and 1968. Long-serving party leaders were a Swedish speciality: Erlander’s predecessor as Chairman of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Per Albin Hansson, had held the post from 1926-1946.
The Saltsjöbaden Pact resembled in certain respects the
Arbeitsfrieden
(Labour Peace) reached in Switzerland the previous year, in which employers and workers agreed to establish a system of non-confrontational collective bargaining that was to prove an enduring cornerstone of the country’s future stability and prosperity. However, whereas the Swiss
Arbeitsfrieden
was intended to keep government
out
of economic bargaining, the Saltsjöbaden Pact committed the government to working in harmony with owners and employees for the common interest.
The suicide rate in western Europe by 1973 was indeed highest in the most developed and prosperous countries: Denmark, Austria, Finland and West Germany. It was lowest at the poorer fringes: per head of population, the Danish suicide rate was six times that of Italy, fourteen times that of Ireland. What this suggests about the depressant effect of prosperity, climate, latitude, diet, religion, family structures or the welfare state was obscure to contemporaries and remains unclear today.
Ironically, it was the Swedish Social Democrats who for a long time showed more interest in Vienna’s early-twentieth-century ‘Austro-Marxist’ theorists Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding. Their Austrian successors, by contrast, were typically happy to put all that behind them—save for the occasional echo, as in the Austrian Socialist Party’s 1958 program, where it was opaquely asserted that ‘democratic socialism occupies a position between capitalism and dictatorship’ . . .
For this translation, see Bark & Gress,
From Shadow to Substance. A History of West Germany
, Volume 1 (1992), Chapter 16.
The destruction of the selective state schools of England merely drove more of the middle class to the private sector, thus improving the prospects and profits of the fee-charging ‘public schools’ that Labour’s radicals so despised. Meanwhile selection continued, but by income rather than merit: parents who could afford it bought a home in a ‘good’ school district, leaving the children of the poor at the mercy of the weakest schools and the worst teachers, and with much reduced prospect of upward educational mobility. The ‘comprehensivisation’ of British secondary education was the most socially retrograde piece of legislation in post-war Britain.
With the demise of clerical politics, political anti-clericalism lost its raison d’être—ending a cycle of quarrels and obsessions that had endured for nearly two centuries.
In Ireland, however, the authority of the Church and its involvement in daily politics was sustained rather longer—well into the nineties.
In a representative outburst, Osborne writes of British royalty as ‘the gold filling in a mouthful of decay’.
Godard in particular had decidedly eclectic tastes. He is reported to have been ‘mesmerized’ by Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar
(1954) starring Joan Crawford.
Italians could certainly
design
cars, as any motor racing enthusiast would confirm. It was Italian coach-builders who first removed mudguards, running boards and other redundant excrescences from small family cars—much as Milanese tailors in the same years were eliminating trouser turn-ups and inventing the sharp, clean lines and cut of the modern Italian suit. What Italian car manufacturers appeared unable to do with any consistency was
build
the cars that their draughtsmen had imagined.