Tony judt postwar a history of europe s 945 (v5 0)

Table of Contents ABOUT THE AUTHOR Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Preface & Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE - Post-War: 1945-1953 I - The Legacy of War II - Retribution III - The Rehabilitation of Europe IV - The Impossible Settlement V - The Coming of the Cold War VI - Into the Whirlwind VII - Culture Wars CODA - The End of Old Europe PART TWO - Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971 VIII - The Politics of Stability IX - Lost Illusions X - The Age of Affluence POSTSCRIPT: - A Tale of Two Economies XI - The Social Democratic Moment XII - The Spectre of Revolution XIII - The End of the Affair PART THREE - Recessional: 1971-1989 XIV - Diminished Expectations XV - Politics in a New Key XVI - A Time of Transition XVII - The New Realism XVIII - The Power of the Powerless XIX - The End of the Old Order PART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-2005 XX - A Fissile Continent XXI - The Reckoning XXII - The Old Europe—and the New XXIII - The Varieties of Europe XXIV - Europe as a Way of Life Photo Credits Suggestions for Further Reading Praise for Tony Judt’s Postwar “If anyone can bring off the impossible task that Tony Judt has set himself in Postwar, it is he He brings to Postwar an astonishing range of knowledge and an intense political, intellectual and emotional engagement; these are nicely offset by the intellectual distance that the Channel and the Atlantic have helped to provide and by a wry sense of the innumerable ways in which events play tricks on all of us The result is a book that has the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia; it is a very considerable achievement Brilliant.”—The New York Review of Books “Postwar is a remarkable book The excellence of Postwar was no doubt hard to achieve but it is easy to describe The writing is vivid; the coverage—of little countries as well as of great ones —is virtually superhuman; and, above all, the book is smart Every page contains unexpected data, or a fresh observation, or a familiar observation freshly turned.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker “Massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable [Judt’s] book becomes the definitive account of Europe’s rise from the ashes and its take-off into an uncertain future.”—Time (One of the Must-Read Books of 2005) “Tony Judt is one of our most dazzling public intellectuals, as thoughtful as he is knowledgeable Postwar is like having an extended personal seminar on Europe’s journey back both from the ashes of World War Two and the cruel, totalitarian hold of Soviet communism.”—David Halberstam “Nobody is more qualified than Judt to combine serious descriptive history with incisive, original political analysis, to cover both western and eastern Europe, and to pass stinging yet informed judgments on the behavior and evasions, the deeds and the failings, of his subjects This monumental work is a tour-de-force.”—Foreign Affairs “Professor Judt knows more about contemporary Europe than almost any American (or any European, for that matter) In Postwar, he brings that formidable knowledge to bear on the inspiring story of Europe’s transformation from lethal division and devastating war to a peaceful, prosperous pancontinental union His history of how the Iron Curtain crumbled is definitive.”—T R Reid, author of The United States of Europe “An epically important subject—Europe as both the epicenter of political and ideological catastrophes in the last century and the principal laboratory for an experiment in whatever chance humanity has of a peace in the century just begun—has, to the benefit of us all, found the author it deserves Tony Judt, long one of the wisest heads and clearest voices around, has produced a magisterial history and a solid foundation for clear thinking about the future Postwar is meticulous in its scholarship, compelling in the story it tells, and passionate in its judgments A true masterpiece.” —Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution “Truly superb It is hard to imagine how a better—and more readable—history of the emergence of today’s Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written.”—Ian Kershaw “Magisterial He has written a magnificent conventional history of modern Europe, but its quality and its power come from the way he insists that his narrative is also a history of ideas and of the peculiar vulnerability of the European mind to ideologies and to the patterns of thought and political loyalty they impose.”—National Affairs “As soon as you realize how good it is, this book will frighten you This is a work which, on almost every page, evokes to readers over the age of forty what they once felt, hoped for, took part in, or fled from Judt has written, in great detail and at great length, the biography of a middle-aged continent trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go straight.” —Neal Acherson, London Review of Books “Rich and immensely detailed.”—The New York Times Book Review “Tony Judt has produced not only the heaviest history of modern Europe ever written, but probably the best [He] moves fluently and deftly from politics and economics to films and television, whisking the reader through West German coalition-building, past the French New Wave, and on toward the Eurovision Song Contest [A] magnificently rich and readable book.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Masterly and exhilarating Judt has made the ‘culture wars’ between communism and anticommunism a special subject and he deals with this brilliantly once more Judt has a fine eye for telling detail This is a splendid book to which no review can proper justice So many subjects are adroitly dealt with.”—Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Spectator “This is the best history we have of Europe in the postwar period and not likely to be surpassed for many years Here [Judt] combines deep knowledge with a sharply honed style and an eye for the expressive detail Insightful analysis and excellent writing overall, this is history writing at its very best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[A] lively and thoughtful historical overview of today’s Europe from the end of World War II through the economic, social, cultural and political changes and continuities of the last sixty years Judt sees the bigger picture of the trends, events, and people that have made contemporary Europe This book is certain to be a major addition to postwar European studies.”—Library Journal “Elegant and provocative a genuinely magisterial account.” —The Times Literary Supplement “[Judt’s] prose is lean, his metaphors vivid He impressively covers a broad array of cultural themes.”—The New York Sun “Compelling and fluidly written.”—The Oregonian “Postwar, Judt’s learned, massive, and often quite wonderful summary of European public life since World War II A triumph of narrative.” —The Nation “For those who want to understand the course of contemporary Europe, the primary material is almost too copious and familiar; it takes a gifted historian to shape it into something fresh and coherent without sacrificing the details [Postwar] does just that it offers a brilliant and compelling synthesis of the past sixty years.”—Time Europe “Postwar is a stupendous contribution to understanding developments in postwar Europe, especially in the countries behind the Iron Curtain [Judt’s] brilliant survey of the culture wars is matched by his dramatic narrative of the political turmoil.”—15 Minutes “Unusually comprehensive and highly readable scholarship.” —International Herald Tribune ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tony Judt was born in London in 1948 He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995 The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , The New York Times , and many other journals in Europe and the United States Professor Judt is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Permanent Fellow of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna) took the decision to oust him 291 To be fair, the East German dissidents genuinely misread the courage of the crowds in November 1989 as the basis for a renewed socialist republic On the other hand, the source of that misreading was their blind failure to understand what ‘socialism’ had come to mean—and their own investment in its survival 292 In certain respects its Polish equivalent came in 1980-81—the political transition in Poland a decade later was an altogether more calculated and negotiated affair 293 The author, who was in Prague at this time, can vouch for the intoxicating feeling that history was being made by the hour 294 A cartoon in one of the ephemeral Prague student newspapers of December 1989 perfectly captures the generation gap A paunchy middle-aged man in an undershirt stares with distaste into his shaving mirror at a blowsy woman in the doorway, a dirty nightgown draped over her shoulders, her hair in rollers, a cigarette dangling from her lips ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ she taunts him ‘I’m your dream of 1968.’ 295 ‘If a people have never spoken, the first words they utter are poetry.’ Ferdinando Camon in La Stampa, ‘Tutto Libri’, December 16th 1989 296 At least until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the West had no further use for an antiSoviet maverick 297 The trial and execution by firing squad were filmed for television, but not shown until two days later 298 Officially, of course, the Turks didn’t exist: ‘There are no Turks in Bulgaria’ (Dimitur Stoyanov, Interior Minister) 299 Such considerations did not always apply in remote rural communities and small provincial towns, where the police continued to the very end to operate unhindered by television cameras or public disapproval 300 A backhanded nod to the Sixties’ only lasting monument, the idea that youth is an inherently superior condition—in the words of Jerry Rubin: ‘Never trust anyone over 30.’ 301 This line of reasoning was developed by Voltaire, among others, and is elegantly explicated by Larry Wolff in Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, 1994) 302 Even Reagan’s initial response to the declaration of martial law in Poland was distinctly lukewarm Only after loud public criticism (from Henry Kissinger, among others) did official Washington adopt the hard-line stance for which it became better known 303 In August 1989 the deputy chairman of the Social Democratic Party had criticized the Kohl government for ‘aggravating’ the crisis by welcoming East German refugees who were seeking to come west via the newly opened Hungarian border However in Berlin (a traditional SPD stronghold) the SPD did much better in the elections of 1990, winning 35 percent of the vote 304 Bohley’s own response was to observe somewhat sourly: ‘We wanted justice and we got the Rechtstaat [constitutional state].’ 305 De Maizière’s second act was at last to acknowledge East Germany’s shared responsibility for the Holocaust and allocate DM6.2 million for reparations 306 It is no coincidence that Mitterrand was the only major Western political figure to accommodate himself without hesitation to the apparent overthrow of Gorbachev in the abortive Moscow coup of the following year 307 It is not a little ironic that Mitterrand’s successors are now having to grapple with the budgetary constraints and social consequences of that same treaty 308 Not the least of which was the appointment of Mitterrand’s crony Jacques Attali as head of a new institution—the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)—with a remit to invest in the rebuilding of Eastern Europe After spending millions refurbishing a prestigious building for himself—but very little on the bank’s putative beneficiaries—Attali was ignominiously removed The experience did no discernible damage to his considerable self-esteem 309 There is some evidence that Gorbachev conceded this crucial point inadvertently, when he acceded in May 1990 to President Bush’s suggestion that Germany’s right of self-determination should include the freedom to ‘choose its alliances’ 310 In Grass’s view, modern German history consists of a perennial disposition to bloat and expand, followed by desperate attempts at constraint by the rest of the continent—or in his words: ‘Every few years, for our all-German constipation, we are given a Europe-enema.’ 311 Note that just eight weeks earlier Gorbachev had adamantly refused to consider any such change 312 The five central Asian republics—Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tadjikistan, Turkmenia and Uzbekistan— between them covered more land (18 percent of Soviet territory) than any republic other than Russia itself, although their combined share of Soviet GNP in September 1991 was just 9.9 percent But their story falls outside the bounds of the present book 313 But mostly unpredicted For an impressive exception, see the essays by Roman Szporluk: written over the course of the Seventies and Eighties and gathered in Russia, Ukraine and the Break-Up of the Soviet Union (Hoover Institution, Stanford, 2000) 314 And should not be confused with historical Moldavia just across the Prut river in Romania 315 The Azeris being of Turkic origin, part of the background to these tensions can be traced to the Armenian massacres of World War One in Ottoman Turkey 316 The characteristic Russian self-image, an unstable alloy of insecurity and hubris, is nicely captured in remarks by the liberal philosopher Peter Chaadayev, from his ‘Philosophical Letters’ of 1836: ‘We are one of those nations which not seem to be an integral part of the human race, but which exist only to give some great lesson to the world The instruction which we are destined to give will certainly not be lost: but who knows the day when we shall find ourselves a part of humanity, and how much misery we shall experience before the fulfillment of our destiny.’ 317 That is one reason why the end of the Soviet Union was and is a source of genuine regret among many Russians ‘Independence’ for everyone else meant something gained; independence for Russia itself constituted an unmistakable loss 318 Yeltsin received 57 percent of the vote in a turnout of 74 percent 319 The exception was French President Franỗois Mitterrand, still uncomfortable with the destabilization of eastern Europe and a little too quick to acknowledge the plotters’ success in restoring the status quo ante 320 Even in Ukraine, where many Russian-speakers had been wary of talk about national independence, the coup of August had a dramatic impact on the public mood: on August 24th the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet voted for independence, subject to a referendum, by 346 votes to When the national referendum was held on December 1st, 90.3 percent (in a turnout of 84 percent of the electorate) voted to leave the Soviet Union 321 The will, but not the means Had Gorbachev—or the August plotters—chosen to use the army to crush all opposition, it is by no means sure that they would have failed 322 This occasioned some ill-feeling among Czechs On a visit to Prague in 1985 the present author was regaled by liberal Czechs with accounts of the privileges accorded by the regime to the Slovak minority Schoolteachers from Slovakia—recruited to teach in Prague’s elementary schools and deemed by parents to be hopelessly provincial and inadequate to the task—were a particular target of resentment 21The appearance of a separate Hungarian party reflects the presence on Slovak territory of some 500,000 Hungarians, 10 percent of the population of Slovakia 323 Quoted in Mladá Fronta dnes 12th March 1991 See Abby Innes, Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (Yale U.P., Newhaven, 2001), page 97 324 The political split proved easier to manage than the economic one—it was not until 1999 that agreement over the division of Czechoslovakia’s federal assets was finally reached 325 Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje (the capital of Macedonia) were all among the fastest growing cities of Central Europe between 1910 and 1990 326 ‘We shall kill some Serbs, deport others, and oblige the rest to embrace Catholicism’—thus the Ustashe Minister of Religion in Zagreb, July 22nd 1941 327 On a ‘fact-finding’ visit to Skopje just after the 1999 Kosovo war the present author was ‘confidentially’ informed by the Macedonian Prime Minister that Albanians (including his own ministerial colleague who had just left the room) were not to be trusted: ‘You can’t believe anything they say—they just are not like us They are not Christian’ 328 This was not, of course, the way things appeared to Croats and others, who could point to Serb domination of the national army (60 percent of the officer corps was Serb by 1984, a fair reflection of Serb presence in the population at large but no more reassuring for that) and Belgrade’s disproportionate share of investment and federal expenditure 329 Since ethnic identity in Yugoslavia could not be ascertained from appearance or speech, roaming militias relied on villagers ‘fingering’ their neighbours—families with whom they had often lived at peace, sometimes as friends, for years and even decades 330 Between 1992 and 1994 the UN agencies in the Balkans were all but complicit with the Bosnian Serbs—allowing them, for example, an effective veto over what and who could enter and leave the besieged city of Sarajevo 331 It was at French insistence that the signing ceremony was held in Paris—an exercise in ceremonial overcompensation that only drew attention to France’s previous reluctance to act against the Serbs 332 The NATO-led Stabilization Force was replaced by the European Union’s EUFOR on December 2nd 2004 333 The ageing Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, manipulating nationalist sentiment for electoral advantage, claimed that the term ‘Macedonia’ was part of his country’s ancient heritage and could apply to only the northernmost region of Greece itself If the Slav state carved out of southern Yugoslavia called itself by that name it must harbour irredentist ambitions What Papandreou could not acknowldge was that many of the ‘Greeks’ of Greek Macedonia were themselves of Slav descent —albeit officially Hellenized for patriotic ends 334 In the winter of 1996, following palpably fraudulent results in local elections, Serb students demonstrated for three months in the streets of Belgrade, protesting Milošević’s dictatorship and demanding change They received no support or encouragement from the Western powers, however, who looked upon Milošević as a stabilizing factor in the post-Dayton years and did nothing to weaken his position 335 And as with the Sarajevo atrocity, Belgrade and its apologists insisted either that it never happened or, when that became untenable, that it was a staged ‘provocation’ by the victims themselves 336 Janvier’s performance aroused demands in France and elsewhere that he be co-indicted for responsibility in the subsequent massacre 337 Among a younger generation, business-oriented and impatient to escape their country’s encumbering past, it even brought forth a new conformism to substitute for the wooden public language of Communism: uncritical adulation for the mantras of neo-classical economics blissfully unclouded by any familiarity with their social cost 338 Giving rise to nationalist jitters at the prospect of Prague’s re-absorption into a Greater German CoProsperity Sphere—and a popular joke: “I have some good news and some bad news about Czechoslovakia’s post-Communist prospects.” “What’s the good news?” “The Germans are coming!” “And the bad news?” “The Germans are coming.” 339 A notable exception to this story is Estonia, which has benefitted hugely from its virtual adoption by its Scandinavian neighbours In 1992, when it left the ruble zone, 92 percent of Estonia’s trade was with the former Soviet Union Five years later over three quarters of that trade was with the West, much of it across the Baltic 340 And inefficiency—one irony of ritualized privatization in eastern Europe was that once collective farms were broken up into tiny plots they could no longer be worked by tractor but only by hand 17It is estimated that inflation in post-Communist Ukraine reached an annual rate of 5,371 percent in 1993 341 But Romania is perhaps unique In the Bucharest mayoral elections of 1998 the Romanian Workers’ Party blanketed the city with posters of Nicolae Ceauşescu ‘They shot me’, the posters read ‘Do you live any better? Remember all I did for the Romanian people’ 342 And even on occasion with unreconstructed Fascists, nostalgic for the better days of World War Two —notably in Croatia 343 Though not, perhaps, across the self-serving moves of certain prominent writers—who would have risked little by declining their services: e.g Christa Wolf, whose much-vaunted literary ambivalence appears somehow less admirable in the light of later revelations of her cooperation with the Stasi 344 By way of comparison, the Gestapo in 1941 had a staff of fewer than 15,000 to police the whole of greater Germany 345 From the Czech lustrace, meaning ‘bringing to light’, though the translation carries purgative connotations as well 346 I am indebted to Dr Jacques Rupnik for the reference 347 Julius Caesar’s Gallia Belgica lay athwart the line that was to separate Gallo-Roman territories from the Franks and mark the boundary thenceforth demarcating Latinate, French-dominated Europe from the Germanic north 348 The main newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, have almost no readers outside the French- and Dutch-speaking communities respectively As a result, neither takes much trouble to report news from the other half of the country When someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice-versa) subtitles are provided Even the automatic information boards on interregional trains switch back and forth between Dutch and French (or to both, in the case of Brussels) as they cross the regional frontiers It is only partly a jest to say that English is now the common language of Belgium 349 The more historically disposed perhaps called to mind the passage in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène by the Comte de Las Cases, where the exiled Napoléon Bonaparte envisages a future ‘association européenne’ with ‘one code, one court, one currency’ 350 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, just in time to be (somewhat reluctantly) committed to NATO’s engagement in Kosovo Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia were admitted in 2004 351 The economic recession of the early Nineties also helped, contributing to a widespread view in Sweden especially that the country’s exporters could not survive without unrestricted access to the European market 352 See Chapter 21 The pain was real enough East European countries lost between 30 and 40 percent of their national income in the years after 1989 The first to recover its 1989 level was Poland, in 1997; others took until 2000 or beyond 353 A highly optimistic assumption In the years following their accession to the EC in 1986, the economies of Spain and Portugal grew on average between percent and 1.5 percent faster than the rest of the Community 354 On January 1st 2002 a total of 600,000,000,000 euros in cash was seamlessly distributed and introduced across the euro-zone countries, a remarkable technical achievement 355 If they still worked as smoothly as they did it was at least in part because the federal machinery was so very well oiled, not least by money: in the 1990s Switzerland was still by most measures the world’s wealthiest country 356 Quoted in Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, 1984), p 63 357 The decline in the Dutch vote may be especially ominous Once the kernel of European enthusiasm and a generous contributor to EC and EU funds, the Netherlands in recent years has been retreating into itself—a development both illuminated and accelerated by the rise of Pim Fortuyn and his subsequent assassination 358 It is perhaps worth adding that in January 2004 only one French adult in fifty could name the ten new EU member states 359 Not everywhere, however: in the UK—as in the US—the income spread between the wealthy and the rest grew steadily wider from the late 1970s 360 The ECJ should not be confused with the European Court of Human Rights, set up under the auspices of the Council of Europe to enforce the 1953 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 361 In Giscard’s ‘Constitution for Europe’, Article 3(I) defines the Union’s aims as being ‘to promote peace, its values, and the well-being of its peoples’ 362 Quoted by Andrew Moravscik in The Choice for Europe (New York, 1998), p 265 363 Mordantly predicted at the time by the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who foresaw that the Europeans ‘will screw up and this will teach them a lesson’ 364 The EU was not alone in subsidizing its own farmers to the detriment of others It was not even the worst offender: Norway, Switzerland, Japan and the US all pay out more in per capita terms But the EU appeared somehow more hypocritical While Brussels preaches virtue to the world at large, its own practice is often quite selective East Europeans, instructed to incorporate and adopt a veritable library of European Union regulations, could hardly fail to notice the frequency with which West European governments exempted themselves from those same rules 365 In 1995, according to a UNICEF study, one British child in five lived in poverty, compared with one in ten in Germany and one in twenty in Denmark 366 Invoking slightly different criteria to make a similar point, the Cambridge political theorist John Dunn divides the workforces of wealthy countries into ‘those who can individually take very good care of themselves on the market , those who can hold their own only because they belong to surviving units of collective action with a threat advantage out of all proportion to the value of individual members’ labour, and those who are already going under, because no one would chose to pay much for their labour’ Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason Making Sense of Politics (London, 2000), p 333 367 Gorz, as befitted a man of his time and politics, assumed that this new class would in turn fuel a new generation of radical social movements To date there is little evidence of this 368 In 1992 alone, the Federal Republic opened its doors to nearly a quarter of a million Yugoslav refugees Britain admitted 4,000; France just 1,000 369 At the end of the twentieth century there were an estimated million Gypsies in Europe: some 50,000 in Poland, 60,000 in Albania, half a million in Hungary, perhaps 600,000 each in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and at least million in Romania The prejudice and abuse to which they were exposed was common to every country in which the Gypsies lived (not to mention places like Britain to which they were forbidden entry) 370 The Dansk Folkeparti originated in a breakaway from the Danish Progress Party, itself a product of the anti-tax movements of the early 1970s (see Chapter 14) but considered by a new generation of radicals to be too ‘soft’ on the EU and insufficiently anti-immigrant 371 In Switzerland, where anti-immigrant prejudice was especially widespread in the German-speaking cantons, the racism was not always buried: one election poster showed an array of dark-skinned faces over the caption ‘The Swiss are becoming Negroes’ 372 With one exception: Edith Cresson—a former French Socialist Prime Minister turned EU Commissioner—contributed to the discrediting of the whole Commission when it was revealed in 1999 that she had used her power in Brussels to invent a well-paid consultancy for her former dentist 373 Even taking into account the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties, the number of war-related deaths in Europe in the second half of the century was less than one million 374 Raymond Aron (born in 1905) shared some of Zweig’s wistful memories, if not his despair: ‘Ever since, under a July sun, bourgeois Europe entered the century of wars, men have lost control of their history’ 375 Many Poles, it should be noted, also insist upon their country’s place at the centre of Europe—a revealing confusion 376 Much the same is true of Albanian Kosovars Liberated by NATO from Serbian oppression, they aspire to independent statehood less from nationalistic ambition than as a surety against the risk of being left in Serbia—and out of Europe 377 Anna Reid, Borderland A Journey through the history of Ukraine (2000), p 20 Hence the place of ‘Europe’ in the language and hopes of the Ukrainian revolution of December 2004 378 See Tony Judt, ‘Romania: Bottom of the Heap’, New York Review, November 1st 2001 379 As the common language of many tens of millions of people in the Americas, from Santiago to San Francisco, the international standing of Spanish was nevertheless secure The same was true of Portuguese, at least in its quite distinctive Brazilian form 380 With the exception of Romania, where the situation was reversed and French had by far the broader constituency 381 The exception in this case is Bulgaria, where Russia and its language had always found a more sympathetic reception 382 Respectively the French, German and Italian flagship expresses 383 In June 2004 the present author received the following greeting from a correspondent in the foreign ministry in Zagreb: ‘Things here good Croatia got EU membership invitation This will change many mental maps’ 384 Hungarians in twenty-first-century Romania, Slovakia and Serbia were another, smaller post-imperial minority: once dominant, now vulnerable In the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia, Hungarians who had lived there for centuries were periodically assaulted and their properties vandalized by Serb youths The response of the authorities in Belgrade, who appeared to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the catastrophe of the Nineties, was depressingly predictable: the attacks were not ‘serious’ and in any case, ‘they’ started it 385 Quite the opposite In a series of measures in the spring and summer of 2004 the authorities significantly curtailed both the rights of the press and the already restricted opportunities for public protest Russia’s brief window of freedom—actually disarray and the absence of constraint rather than genuine constitutionally protected liberty—was fast closing In 2004, Russian observers estimated that KGB-TRAINED officials occupied one in four of civilian administrative posts in the country 386 Including the domestic political calculations of Greek politicians, who for many years used their vote in Brussels to hinder and block any movement on Turkey’s candidacy 387 In addition they were wont to see as ‘European’ an idealized free-market, contrasting it with the graft and cronyism of Turkey’s own economy 388 The Christian Democratic Union in Germany was officially opposed to Turkey joining the EU 389 Democratic Spain did indeed develop an official ‘heritage’ industry, fostered by its Patrimonio Nacional, but the latter took care to emphasize the country’s distant Golden Age rather than its recent history 390 In T R Reid, The United States of Europe The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (NY, 2004), p 131 391 Britain was not unique In one week in September 2004 the Spanish national lottery, El Gordo, took in 5,920,293 euros 392 Though not yet constrained by the American obligation to partner a white male (host) with a black male (sports), a white female (soft news/features) and a weather-person (colour/gender optional) 393 The death and morbid afterlife of Princess Diana may seem an exception to this rule But even though many other Europeans watched her funeral on television, they lost interest soon enough The bizarre outpouring of public grief was a strictly British affair 394 The notorious exception was a tiny but very hard core of German and (especially) English fans who travelled to international games explicitly in search of a fight, to the utter mystification of everyone else 395 In January 2003, at the initiative of the Spanish and British prime ministers, eight European governments (Britain, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) signed a joint declaration of pro-American solidarity Within a few months the Hungarians and Czechs were privately expressing their regrets and expressing bitterness at having been ‘bullied’ into signing by the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar A year later Aznar himself was thrown out of office by Spanish voters, in large measure for having led Spain into the ‘coalition’ to invade Iraq —something to which the nation was overwhelmingly opposed 396 ‘Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading “Love Thy Neighbor”, but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation’ T R Reid, The United States of Europe (NY, 2004), p 218 397 The new business class in Eastern Europe, it should be noted, ate, dressed, phoned and drove European To be modern it was no longer necessary to imitate Americans Quite the contrary: American consumer products were frequently disdained as ‘dowdy’ or ‘bland’ 398 In France in 1960 there were four workers for every pensioner In 2000 there were two By 2020, on present trends, there would be just one 399 In 2004, health costs absorbed percent of GDP in Sweden but 14 percent in the USA Four-fifths of the cost was borne by the government in Sweden, less than 45 percent by the Federal government in the US The rest was a direct burden on American businesses and their employees Forty-five million Americans had no health insurance 400 Under Delors’ successors the pendulum has shifted: the Commission is still as active as ever, but its efforts are directed to de-regulating markets 401 In Europe, but not in America In international surveys at the end of the twentieth century, the number of Americans claiming to be ‘very proud’ of their country exceeded 75 percent In Europe only the Irish and the Poles exhibited similar patriotic verve; elsewhere the number of ‘very proud’ people ranged from 49 percent (Latvians) to 17 percent (former West Germans) 402 The American prosecutor Telford Taylor was struck by this in retrospect but acknowledges that he did not even notice it at the time—a revealing admission See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (NY, 1992), p 296 403 In the town of Pithiviers, near Orléans, where Jewish children rounded up in Paris were kept until their shipment east, a monument was actually erected in 1957 bearing the inscription ‘A nos déportés morts pour la France’ Only in 1992 did the local municipality erect a new plaque, more accurate if less reassuring It reads: ‘To the memory of the 2300 Jewish children interned at the Pithiviers camp from July 19th to September 6th 1942, before being deported and murdered in Auschwitz’ 404 Giuliana Tedeschi is quoted by Nicola Caracciolo in Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 1995), p 121 405 In post-war Britain, an unusually thin or sickly person might be described as looking ‘like something out of Belsen’ In France, fairground chambers of horror were labelled ‘Buchenwalds’—as an inducement to voyeuristic trade 406 See The Times Literary Supplement for October 4th 1996 Jews were not the first people in Britain to opt for discretion where the Holocaust was concerned The wartime government under Churchill chose not to deploy information about the death camps in its propaganda against Germany lest this incite an increase in anti-Semitic feelings—already quite high in some parts of London, as wartime intelligence reports had noted 407 Especially in America In 1950 the Displaced Persons’ Commission of the US Congress stated that ‘The Baltic Waffen SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States’ The Baltic Waffen SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course ‘our’ Nazis I am grateful to Professor Daniel Cohen of Rice University for this information 408 Except of course in Israel 409 In October 1991, following the desecration of tombs in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, Gallup polled Austrians on their attitude to Jews: 20 percent thought ‘positions of authority’ should be closed to Jews; 31 percent declared that they ‘would not want a Jew as a neighbour’; fully 50 percent were ready to agree with the proposition that ‘Jews are responsible for their past persecution’ 410 The Poles happily agreed—for these purposes Warsaw saw no impediment to defining Jews as Poles 411 Ondergang was published in English in 1968 as The Destruction of the Dutch Jews 412 See Sonia Combe, Archives interdites: Les peurs franỗaises face l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), p 14 413 Professor Paxton of Columbia University, who had initiated historical investigation into Vichy’s crimes nearly a quarter of a century earlier (when most of his French colleagues were otherwise engaged), took a less monastic view of his professional calling and gave important testimony 414 When US President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Germany in 1985, was advised to avoid the military cemetery at Bitburg (site of a number of SS graves) and pay his respects at a concentration camp instead, Chancellor Kohl wrote to warn him that this ‘would have a serious psychological effect on the friendly sentiments of the German people for the United States of America.’ The Americans duly capitulated; Reagan visited Belsen and Bitburg 415 Quoted by Ian Buruma in ‘Buchenwald’, Granta 42, 1992 416 When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicitly limited the benefits to those expropriated after 1948—so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power 417 Under President Putin, Russia continues to insist that the Balts were liberated by the Red Army, after which they voluntarily joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 418 The memorial was not uncontroversial: in addition to many who disliked its abstract conception there were those, including a Christian Democrat Mayor of the city, Eberhard Diepgen, who criticized it for helping turn Berlin into ‘the capital of repentance’ 419 In March 2004 eighty-four Hungarian writers, including Péter Esterházy and György Konrád, left the country’s Writers’ Union in protest at its tolerance of anti-Semitism The occasion for the walk out were comments by the poet Kornel Döbrentei following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész The prize, according to Döbrentei, was ‘conscience money’ for a writer who was just indulging the ‘taste for terror’ of ‘his minority’ 420 The last statue of Franco in Madrid was quietly removed at dawn, in front of an audience of one hundred onlookers, on March 17th 2005 421 ‘We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses We are an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications, or their attributes or their good luck did not touch bottom Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or they returned mute.’ Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (NY, 1988), pp 83-84 422 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), p 116 ... Credits Suggestions for Further Reading Praise for Tony Judt s Postwar “If anyone can bring off the impossible task that Tony Judt has set himself in Postwar, it is he He brings to Postwar an astonishing... closed The history and memory of the Second World War were typically confined to a familiar set of moral conventions: Good versus Evil, Anti-Fascists against Fascists, Resisters against Collaborators... film classic of 1937, the Grand Illusion of the age was the resort to war and its accompanying myths of honour, caste and class But by 1940, to observant Europeans, the grandest of all Europe s illusions