From Renewal to Decline
After giving a rave review to Ian
Kershaw’s “To Hell and Back” three years ago, I was looking forward this sequel
on the history of Europe from 1950- 2017. Unfortunately I was somewhat
disappointed. Perhaps it is difficult for historians to write about events they
lived through, and like him I lived through many of the events he discusses.
In 1950 Europe was in ruins and the
nuclear sword of Damocles was hanging over the continent by the American and Soviet
super powers. The Marshall Plan was just beginning to take effect and it
remained to be seen whether or not a real recovery would take place. Twenty
years later Western Europe was largely booming and in the east a drab poverty
was the rule of the day.
To Kershaw Europe’s great success during
that period was the establishment of the welfare state. To me, on the other
hand, the great achievement was placing the economy largely on a market-oriented
footing that enabled the boom. Here much credit goes to the German economic
miracle.
Kershaw is a child of 1968, but never
mentions his own role in the youthful cultural and political revolution that
took place then. He was 25 at the time. Although I experienced 1968 in America
it is my understanding that far from being separate, the cultural revolution
was part and parcel with the political revolution. Even the most serious of politicos
of the day we caught up in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. Nevertheless Kershaw rightly states that to
the youth in the East, the western revolutionaries were clueless had had no
idea how repressive a state could be. In other words they were spoiled
children.
Kershaw gives great credit to Gorbachev
in ending the Cold War Personality is important, just as the roles of Hitler,
Stalin and Churchill were important in his earlier volume He also rightly gives
credit to German prime minister Helmut Kohl However, he fails to credit the
very deft handling of bringing about the end of the Cold War to the Bush-Baker
team in the U.S.
He is way too critical of Margaret
Thatcher’s harsh neo-liberalism. In my opinion Thatcher saved Britain by being
Churchillian in reorganizing the economy for economic growth. Kershaw is way
too concerned about the collateral damage, but to paraphrase the master builder
Robert Moses, “you have to break eggs in order to make an omelet.
Although the E.U. started with great
promise, its survival is open to question. The first failure was its lack of
intervention in the Yugoslavian Wars, a humanitarian disaster that required
U.S. military force and diplomacy to bring it to an end. The E.U. failed to
listen to the anti-immigrant stirrings in the late 1990s that would come to a
full boil in 2015. To all too many Europeans the E.U. is being run for the
elite by a group of nameless and faceless bureaucrats. That is one reason why
the U.K. wants to leave. Kershaw is part of that elite. And to top it off,
Europe remains unwilling to fund its own defense.
He rightfully calls out unregulated
finance capitalism to for causing the 2008 financial crisis. Although the
crisis had its origins in the U.S., Wall Street was aided and abetted by greedy
European banks chasing yield. Further, while the U.S. required its banks to
recapitalize, Europe did not. Hence the crisis lingers today where negative
interest rates are becoming normal.
I don’t think Kershaw was harsh enough
on the communist governments of the East. I was in East Berlin and Moscow in
the spring of 1990. The contrast between East and West Berlin was striking.
Simply put the West was alive and the East was dead. In Moscow such common drug
store items as Bayer Aspirin and Tampax was not available even for upper middle
income consumers.
I have two other quibbles he leaves out
data on the collapse in birthrates across Europe, especially in the East, Italy
and Spain. That is evidence of the lack of a future orientation and it will
make the welfare state promises made to elderly untenable. Lastly he completely
leaves out the rise of antisemitism, the scourge of Europe in his first volume.
It is not only coming from the far right,
but we see it in the Moslem immigrants and in Britain’s Labour Party.
Despite my criticisms, Kershaw has given
us a very usable history of how modern Europe came into being and for that he
deserves credit.
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