Goodbye to All That?: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Dan Stone

In the decade after 1945, as the Cold War freeze set in, a new Europe slowly began to emerge from the ruins of the Second World War, based on a broad rejection of the fascist past that had so scarred the continent's recent history. In the East, this new consensus was enforced by Soviet-imposed Communist regimes. In the West, the process was less coercive, amounting more to a consensus of silence. On both sides, much was deliberately forgotten or obscured.
The years which followed were in many ways golden years for western Europe. Democracy became embedded in Germany, and eventually triumphed over dictatorship in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Britain and France faced up to the necessity of decolonization. The European Economic Community was founded and went from strength to strength, as the economies of western Europe bounced back from the devastation of the war. The countries of the East lagged far behind and seemed caught in a perpetual game of catch-up, but even there conditions had improved since the end of the war, albeit at a much slower rate. Above all, throughout this period the European world continued to be sustained by the broad anti-fascist consensus that had emerged in the years after 1945.
However, as Dan Stone shows in this new history of the continent since the war, this fundamental consensus began to break down in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, a process which has rapidly accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Globalization, deregulation, and the erosion of social-democratic welfare capitalism in the West, and the collapse of the purported Communist alternative in the East, have all fatally undermined the post-war anti-fascist value system that predominated across Europe in the first four decades after the end of the Second World War.
Ominously, this has been accompanied by a rise in right-wing populism and a widespread revision of the anti-fascist narrative on which this value system was based. The danger of this shift is now evident: financial and social crisis, an increasing inability on the part of European populations to resist historical myth-making, and the re-emergence of fascist ideas. The result, as Dan Stone warns, is socially divisive, politically dangerous, and a genuine threat to the future of a civilized Europe.

Genres: History, European History, Politics, Nonfiction

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Dan Stone was born in Lincoln and brought up in Birmingham. He studied at the University of Oxford and since 1999 has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. Dan is a historian of modern Europe with particular interests in the Holocaust, comparative genocide, fascism, race theory, and the history of anthropology.

Reviews

[Jemma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this book is a comprehensive historical narrative - which is important. The important part of this book is the final two chapters, particularly relevant with the upcoming election... Read something important today:

What we see today is the coming together of … on one hand, The economic argument that the social welfare state is either too expensive (western Europe) or a form of authoritarianism (eastern Europe) and on the other hand, a steady revisionism of the past which baulks as the rise of ‘Holocaust consciousness’ and human rights discourse and which seeks to replace antifascism with a ‘post fascist’ narrative which will succeed as a result of people’s ignorance of history and by appealing to resentment and frustration at ‘political correctness’. The Cold War and its demise confused the issue making people think that the discrediting of communism necessarily led to the rejection of antifascism. If this trend is not halted then by the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, a Europe of protectionist, nationalist micro-states led by populists demanding ‘national preference’, but without the means to pay for it and unwilling to admit the foreign labour necessary to sustain it, will once again march the continent into the abyss.

[Reko Wenell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very solid postwar history of Europe, giving you a good picture of all the important developments, though I would stick with reading Judt’s ”Postwar” if you only pick one. The idea binding the whole book together is the concept of ”antifascist consensus” which took place in different forms in both East and West after WWII. I won’t dive deeper into it now as I already wrote a university essay on it, so it should suffice to say that the concept is a very helpful one for understanding postwar Europe.

[Sini Vehniäinen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish every European (and American) would read this.