Postwar

Tony Judt presents a sweeping account of European history from the end of World War Two to the early 21st century. Judt conceives the project while changing trains in Vienna in December 1989, as Communist regimes collapse across Eastern Europe, and argues that the familiar postwar narrative must be rewritten in light of these revolutionary changes. Adopting philosopher Isaiah Berlin's distinction between the hedgehog and the fox, Judt declares this a "fox-like" history with multiple thematic threads rather than a single thesis. He identifies five interwoven themes: Europe's reduction from a continent of global empires to a diminished region dependent on outside liberators; the withering of grand ideological narratives; the accidental emergence of a distinctive European social model; Europe's complicated relationship with the United States; and the silences haunting the continent's story, above all the erasure of its multicultural past through genocide, expulsion, and ethnic homogenization.

The first section covers 1945 to 1953, beginning with the war's staggering toll. Approximately 36.5 million Europeans died in the conflict, with civilian casualties exceeding military losses in most occupied countries. Millions of displaced persons wandered the continent amid widespread starvation, disease, and lawlessness. A wave of retribution against wartime collaborators swept liberated nations: Norway prosecuted its entire collaborationist organization, while Italy's purge was largely abortive and Austria, declared Hitler's "first victim" under a 1943 Allied agreement, sidestepped collective responsibility almost entirely. In Germany, Allied denazification programs achieved limited results, with opinion polls revealing persistent pro-Nazi sentiment well into the 1950s.

Judt argues that wartime experience and interwar failures drove a broad consensus favoring state planning, nationalization, and comprehensive welfare provision. The British welfare state, based on the 1942 Beveridge Report, represented the most ambitious attempt at universal social coverage, while France pursued "indicative planning," a form of state-guided economic coordination short of Soviet central planning, under French economic planner Jean Monnet's direction. The Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947, proved decisive: roughly $13 billion in American aid over four years broke a crippling economic logjam, required European governments to cooperate in planning their recovery, and laid groundwork for future integration. Meanwhile, the incompatible objectives of the four occupying powers led to the division of Germany. The Berlin blockade of 1948 to 1949 crystallized the split: The Federal Republic of Germany was established in May 1949, and the Soviet Union responded by creating the German Democratic Republic that October. Across Eastern Europe, Stalin imposed Soviet-model institutions through coalition manipulation, rigged elections, and outright terror. Show trials targeting "national Communists," most notoriously the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, served as instruments of ideological control.

The second section spans 1953 to 1971. In Western Europe, Christian Democratic parties emerged as broad centrist coalitions, and the Cold War's freezing of international disputes provided a stable framework. GDP growth rates of five to six percent annually, full employment, and mass consumerism transformed daily life. The European Economic Community (EEC), established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, institutionalized Franco-German cooperation, though Britain remained outside. Judt identifies this period as "the Social Democratic moment," when government spending, progressive taxation, and comprehensive welfare provision achieved near-universal acceptance across the political spectrum. Decolonization reshaped Europe's self-image: the Dutch loss of Indonesia, France's defeats in Indochina and Algeria, and Britain's humiliation at Suez collectively forced European powers to redefine themselves. The Soviet crushing of Hungary's 1956 uprising revealed that Communism's monopoly of power could not be voluntarily relinquished. The construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 established a tense but stable equilibrium. Judt traces the cultural upheavals of 1968, from the French May Events to the Italian "hot autumn," arguing that the decade's lasting achievement was the dismantling of traditional authority rather than political revolution. The Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia's 1968 reform movement seeking liberalized socialism, and its suppression by the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led Eastern bloc military alliance, constitute in Judt's analysis the definitive death of the Communist idea in Europe, inaugurating two decades of cynical stagnation.

The third section covers 1971 to 1989. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the postwar fixed-exchange-rate international financial order, in 1971, together with oil shocks in 1973 and 1979, ended the postwar boom. Stagflation, deindustrialization, and rising unemployment battered Western European economies. Judt analyzes terrorist movements rooted in ethnic grievances, such as ETA in Spain and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, alongside ideologically driven groups like the Red Army Fraction in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. He traces the democratic transitions in Mediterranean Europe: the fall of the Greek colonels in 1974, Portugal's Carnation Revolution that same year, and Spain's post-Franco transition beginning in 1975. These transformations succeeded because insiders managed them, reassuring conservatives while accepting change, and because "Europe" offered a concrete destination replacing discredited authoritarian pasts. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's radical reshaping of Britain through privatization and free-market policies, and French Socialist President François Mitterrand's dramatic reversal from nationalization to market liberalization, signaled a broader shift in the relationship between state and economy. In Eastern Europe, intellectuals like Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Adam Michnik in Poland turned from Marxist revisionism to a rights-based discourse focused on civil society. The Helsinki Accords of 1975, by committing signatory states to respect individual freedoms, furnished dissidents with leverage to challenge Communist regimes using those regimes' own legal commitments.

The fourth section covers 1989 to 2005. Judt narrates the cascading collapse of Communist regimes in 1989. Poland's Round Table negotiations between the regime and opposition led to semi-free elections. Hungary opened its border with Austria, East Germany's population began a mass exodus, and on November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. Czechoslovakia's nonviolent "velvet revolution" followed, and Romania's Communist government was overthrown in a violent palace coup. Judt argues that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, by publicly renouncing the use of force to maintain control over Eastern Europe, was the "permissive and precipitating cause" of Communism's collapse. German reunification followed rapidly, driven by Chancellor Helmut Kohl's political maneuvering and American support, with French acquiescence secured through commitments to deeper European integration. The Soviet Union dissolved by the end of 1991, and Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two republics in January 1993. Judt assigns primary responsibility for the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to Serbia's leader Slobodan Milošević, whose manipulation of Serbian nationalism destroyed the federal system. The massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, which Judt describes as the worst mass murder in Europe since World War Two, represented a signal moral failure of the post-Cold War order. Post-Communist economic transitions brought painful costs as safety nets dissolved and privatization enriched a small elite. Judt surveys the European Union's development through the Maastricht Treaty, the introduction of the euro, and eastern enlargement, arguing that the EU's "democratic deficit," its governance by remote and weakly accountable institutions, generates growing public indifference. He notes the rise of xenophobic populist parties and the emerging gulf between cosmopolitan elites and populations suspicious of European integration. Judt presents the European social model, with its high taxes, generous welfare provision, and commitment to collective responsibility, as Europe's most distinctive achievement, while acknowledging its vulnerabilities to aging populations and globalization.

In an epilogue on European memory, Judt argues that Holocaust recognition has become the foundational moral reference point of postwar European identity. He traces the long, uneven process by which nations acknowledged their complicity in the destruction of Europe's Jews, from decades of suppression through belated trials and official admissions, warning that memorialization risks becoming a substitute for genuine historical understanding. The new Europe, he concludes, remains forever mortgaged to its terrible past, and only rigorous historical inquiry can guard against the distortions of memory.