The Greeks, in contrast, voted in September 1946 to retain their monarchy. Belgians kept theirs, too, but removed the incumbent, King Leopold III, as punishment for his cooperation with the Nazis. This decision, taken under public pressure in 1950 against the wishes of a slight majority of the population, sharply divided the country along communal and linguistic lines: francophone Walloons voted to remove Leopold from the throne, whereas 72 percent of Dutch-speaking Flamands expressed a preference for letting him stay. The French had no monarch on whom to vent their memory of wartime humiliation, and merely voted in 1946 to replace the disgraced Third Republic with a numerical successor. Like the German Basic Law of 1949, the constitution of the Fourth Republic was designed to eliminate so far as possible the risk of any surrender to authoritarian or caesarist sirens—an aspiration which was to prove singularly unsuccessful.
The Provisional or Constituent Assemblies which promulgated these post-war constitutions, proposed popular referenda on controversial topics and voted major institutional reforms were mostly canted to the Left. In Italy, France and Czechoslovakia Communist Parties did well after the war. In the Italian elections of 1946 the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) obtained 19 percent of the vote; the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) won 28.6 percent of the vote in the second French elections of that year, its best result ever. In Czechoslovakia, in the free elections of May 1946, the Communists secured 38 percent of the national vote (40 percent in the Czech lands). Elsewhere Communists did not fare so well in free elections, though better than they would ever manage again, ranging from 13 percent in Belgium to just 0.4 percent in the United Kingdom.
The Communists’ initial political leverage in western Europe came from their association with Socialist parties, most of which before 1947 were reluctant to break with the Popular Front-style alliance that had re-formed itself in the resistance movements. Socialist parties in France and Italy did almost as well as the Communists in initial post-war elections and considerably better in Belgium. In Scandinavia the Social Democrats vastly outscored any other party, obtaining between 38 and 41 percent of the votes in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in elections held between 1945 and 1948.
Nevertheless, outside Britain and the Nordic countries the ‘old Left’ of Communists and Socialists was never able to govern alone. In western Europe the balance was always held, and in many cases dominated by, a new political animal, the Christian Democratic parties. Catholic parties were familiar in continental Europe—they had long thrived in the Netherlands and Belgium. Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany had a Catholic Center Party and the conservative wing of Austrian politics has long been closely bound up with the (Catholic) People’s Party. Even ‘Christian Democracy’ itself was not an altogether new idea—its origins lay in early-twentieth-century Catholic reformism and Catholic movements of the political center that tried without success to make their way in the turbulent years following World War One. But after 1945 the situation was quite different and wholly to their advantage.
In the first place, these parties—especially the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in West Germany, the Christian Democrats (DC) in Italy and the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) in France—now had a near-monopoly of the Catholic vote. In 1945 Europe, that still mattered a lot: the Catholic vote was still heavily conservative, especially on social questions and in regions of high Catholic practice. Traditional Catholic voters in Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and southern and western Germany would rarely vote Socialist and almost never Communist. But, and this was the peculiarity of the post-war era, even conservative Catholics in many countries often had no choice but to vote Christian Democrat, despite the reformist bent of Christian Democrat politicians and policies, because conventional right-wing parties were either under a shadow or else banned outright. Even non-Catholic conservatives turned increasingly to the Christian Democrats, as a bar to the ‘Marxist’ Left.
Secondly, and for related reasons, Christian Democrat parties were the major beneficiaries of women’s votes—in 1952 some two-thirds of practicing Catholic women in France voted for the MRP. No doubt the influence of the pulpit played a role. But a large part of the Christian Democratic parties’ appeal to women lay in their programme. In contrast to the lingering insurrectionary undertone to even the most domesticated Socialist and Communist rhetoric, prominent Christian Democrats—Maurice Schumann and Georges Bidault in France, Alcide de Gasperi in Italy and Konrad Adenauer in the Federal Republic—always emphasised reconciliation and stability,.
Christian Democracy avoided class-based appeals and emphasized instead social and moral reforms. In particular, it insisted upon the importance of the
family
, a properly Christian theme with significant policy implications at a time when the needs of single-parent, homeless and destitute families had never been greater. Thus Christian Democratic parties were ideally placed to capitalize on virtually every aspect of the post-war condition: the desire for stability and security, the expectation of renewal, the absence of traditional right-wing alternatives and the expectations vested in the state—for in contrast to conventional Catholic politicians of an earlier generation, the leaders of Christian Democratic parties and their more radical younger followers had no inhibitions about enrolling the power of the state in pursuit of their goals. If anything, Christian Democrats of the first post-war years saw free-market liberals rather than the collectivist Left as their main opponents and were keen to demonstrate that the modern state could be adapted to non-socialist forms of benevolent intervention.
As a consequence, in Italy and West Germany Christian Democrat parties secured (with some American assistance) a near monopoly of political power for many years to come. In France—thanks to the corrosive effects of two colonial wars, followed in 1958 by De Gaulle’s return to power—the MRP did rather less well. But even there it remained the arbiter of power until the mid-fifties, with an uncontested claim to certain key ministries (notably Foreign Affairs). Catholic parties of a Christian Democrat bent exercised unbroken power in the Benelux countries for more than a generation, in Austria through 1970.
The leaders of Christian Democratic parties, like Britain’s Winston Churchill, were men of an earlier time: Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, Alcide de Gasperi five years later, Churchill himself in 1874. This was no mere coincidence or biographical curiosity. By 1945 many continental European countries had lost two generations of potential leaders: the first to death and injury in the Great War, the second to the temptation of Fascism or else to murder at the hands of Nazis and their friends. This shortfall manifested itself in the generally rather mediocre quality of younger politicians in these years—Palmiro Togliatti (who had spent much of the previous twenty years as a political operative in Moscow) was an exception. The special appeal of Léon Blum, who returned to public life in France after imprisonment by Vichy and incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, was not just his heroism but also his age (he was born in 1872).
At first sight it may seem rather odd that so much of the rehabilitation of postwar Europe was the work of men who reached maturity and entered politics many decades before. Churchill, who first entered Parliament in 1901, always described himself as a ‘child of the Victorian Age’. Clement Attlee, too, was a Victorian, born in 1883. But it is perhaps not so very surprising after all. In the first place such older men were rather unusual in surviving politically and ethically unscathed from thirty years of turmoil—their political credibility enhanced, as it were, by their scarcity value. Secondly, they all came from the remarkable generation of European social reformers who reached maturity during the years 1880-1910—whether as socialists (Blum, Attlee), liberals (Beveridge, or the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi, born in 1874) or progressive Catholics (De Gasperi, Adenauer). Their instincts and interests were very well suited to the post-war mood.
But thirdly, and perhaps most important, the old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity. The vogue between the wars had been for the new and the modern. Parliaments and democracies were seen by many—and not just Fascists and Communists—as decadent, stagnant, corrupt and in any case inadequate to the tasks of the modern state. War and occupation dispelled these illusions, for voters if not for intellectuals. In the cold light of peace, the dull compromises of constitutional democracy took on a new appeal. What most people longed for in 1945 was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms. Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep longing for normality.
Statesmen whose experience reached back beyond the troubled inter-war decades to the more settled and self-confident era before 1914 thus had a particular attraction. In the continuity of their person they could facilitate a difficult transition from the over-heated politics of the recent past to a coming era of rapid social transformation. Whatever their party ‘label’, the elder statesmen of Europe were all, by 1945, skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible. This personal distance from the over-confident dogmas of inter-war politics faithfully reflected the mood of their constituents. A post-‘ideological’ age was beginning.
The prospects for political stability and social reform in post-World War Two Europe all depended, in the first place, on the recovery of the continent’s economy. No amount of state planning or political leadership could conjure away the Himalayan task facing Europeans in 1945. The most obvious economic impact of the war was on housing stock. The damage to London, where three and a half million homes in the metropolitan area were destroyed, was greater than that wrought by the Great Fire of 1666. Ninety percent of all homes in Warsaw were destroyed. Only 27 percent of the residential buildings in Budapest in 1945 were habitable. Forty percent of German housing stock was gone, 30 percent of British, 20 percent of French. In Italy 1.2 million homes were destroyed, mostly in cities of 50,000 or more people. The problem of homelessness, as we have seen, was perhaps the most obvious consequence of war in the immediate post-war era—in West Germany and Britain the housing shortage would last well into the mid-1950s. As one middle-class woman expressed it, upon emerging from a Post-War Homes Exhibition in London: ‘I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition.’
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The second area of evident damage was in transport—merchant fleets, railway lines, rolling stock, bridges, roads, canals and tramways. There were no bridges across the Seine between Paris and the sea, just one left intact across the Rhine. As a consequence, even if mines and factories could produce necessary goods they could not move them—many European coal mines were working again by December 1945 but the city of Vienna was still without coal.
The visual impact was the worst: many countries
looked
as though they had been battered and broken beyond any hope of recovery. And it was true that in almost every European country involved in the Second World War the national economy stagnated or shrunk when compared even with the mediocre performance of the inter-war years. But war is not always an economic disaster—on the contrary, it can be a powerful stimulus to rapid growth in certain sectors. Thanks to World War Two the US surged into an unassailable commercial and technological lead, much as Britain had done during the Napoleonic wars.
And indeed, as Allied surveyors soon realized, the destructive
economic
impact of the war against Hitler was by no means as total as they had first thought, even in Germany itself. The bombing campaign, for all its human costs, had wrought less economic damage than its advocates expected. Little more than 20 percent of German industrial plant had been destroyed by May 1945; even in the Ruhr, where much Allied bombing had been concentrated, two thirds of all plant and machinery had survived intact. Elsewhere, in the Czech lands for example, industry and agriculture thrived under the German occupation and emerged virtually unscathed—Slovakia, like parts of Hungary, saw accelerated industrialization during the war years and actually emerged better off than before.
The dramatically skewed nature of much of the damage, such that it was people and places that suffered terribly while factories and goods were relatively spared, contributed to an unexpectedly speedy recovery after 1945 of core economic sectors. Engineering industries flourished during the war. The UK, the USSR, France, Italy and Germany (as well as Japan and the USA)
all
emerged with a larger stock of machine tools than they started with. In Italy only the aeronautic and shipbuilding industries suffered serious damage. Engineering firms situated in the North, and thus out of reach of the heaviest fighting during the Italian campaign, did rather well (as they had in World War One), their wartime output and investment more than compensating for any harm they suffered. As for the machine tool industry in what became West Germany, it lost just 6.5 percent of its equipment through war damage.
In some countries, of course, there
was
no war damage. Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden all remained neutral throughout the conflict. This does not mean that they were not affected by it. On the contrary, most of the European neutrals were intimately engaged, albeit indirectly, in the Nazi war effort. Germany depended heavily on Franco’s Spain for its wartime supply of manganese. Tungsten reached Germany from Portugal’s colonies, via Lisbon. Forty percent of Germany’s wartime requirements in iron ore were met from Sweden (delivered to German ports in Swedish ships). And all this was paid for in gold, much of it stolen from Germany’s victims and channeled through Switzerland.