At first the victorious Allies were preoccupied with the immediate problems of refugees, resettlement, and reparations and they were obliged to co-operate in the joint administration of Germany and Austria. Yet the division of Europe did not crystallize immediately. As Stalin correctly predicted, the social and political systems of East and West were destined to follow the positions of the occupying armies. The division of Europe was implicit in the state of affairs at war’s end.
#EUROPE A HISTORY NORMAN DAVIES PDF FREE#
By that time, almost all of Europe’s peoples were free to determine their own destiny. Overall, they may be said to have begun on VE Day,, and to have ended with the final disband-ment of the Soviet Union in December 1991. They continued through four decades of the Cold War (1948–89) and they drew to a close with the astonishing reign in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91). They began in the immediate post-war era (1945–8), when Allied unity was lost. ‘Europe has two lungs,’ declared a Slavonic Pope ‘it will never breathe easily until it uses both of them.’ 1Įurope’s wasted years fall neatly into three periods. Citizens of the former Soviet bloc were mightily impressed by Western Europe’s food mountains but there is every reason to believe that their aspirations to rejoin ‘Europe’ had a spiritual as well as a material dimension. Soviet tyranny was very effective in promoting the European ideal by default. By the late 1980s the European movement seemed to be moving towards maturity at the very time that Soviet communism was climbing onto its death-bed.ĭespite the divisions, however, the concept of Europe was no less alive in the East than in the West. Under the leadership of NATO, West Europe’s defences held firm against a Soviet threat that grew ever less credible. Whilst the Kremlin coped ever more ineptly with its muscle-bound empire, the rapid process of decolonization in Asia and Africa liberated West Europe’s imperial powers for a new future in an integrated Europe. Membership doubled from six in 1956 to twelve in 1983, with many applications pending. Inspired by the example of West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the original members of the European Economic Community had little difficulty in publicizing the benefits of their cause. With the assistance of the USA, Western Europe rapidly emerged from the post-war ruins and set a course for unrivalled prosperity. In the event, the West proved itself to be immeasurably more dynamic than the East. Even so, the alternative prospect of an all-European communist camp was not effaced for many decades. In the Council of Europe (from 1949) and in the EEC and its associated bodies (from 1956), it founded a complex of institutions, which were designed to expand as more and more European countries were welcomed into the fold. First as a moral campaign for reforming international relations, and later in the realm of economic cooperation, it fostered a new sense of community. In Eastern Europe it belied the optimism of official propaganda, and remained a dominant note in people’s inner lives until the ‘Refolution’ (revolution by reform) of 1989–91.įortunately, for those who wished to heal the wounds, the division of Europe helped to stimulate the strong European movement which had been planted before the war, and which now grew up in the West. It faded soon enough in most Western countries, but surfaced again with the peace movement and the anti-nuclear protesters of later decades. The mood of futility was well caught in the post-war circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophers of existentialism. Immense resources were poured into unproductive tasks, especially in the East there were few countries who could maintain a neutral stance and the construction of European unity was repeatedly postponed. The vast sacrifices of the Second World War did not generate security: the Continent was soon divided into rival political and military blocs whose energies were squandered for nearly fifty years. T HERE is a strong sense of futility about Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.