In two further respects, World War II left a lasting mark on Europe. The first and most obvious was its division between East and West. Both U.S. and Soviet troops, from opposite directions, had helped to liberate Europe, and on April 25, 1945, they met on the Elbe River. They toasted each other and posed for the photographers; then the Soviets dug themselves into new defensive positions, still facing west.
It was not a confrontation, but it was symbolic. Stalin had long made clear that he sought to recover the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as the part of Poland that the Poles had seized after Versailles. He also expected a free hand in exerting influence on the rest of eastern Europe. At a meeting in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill had largely conceded this principle, proposing 90 percent Soviet influence in Romania, 90 percent British influence in Greece, 75 percent Soviet influence in Bulgaria, and a 50–50 split in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Cynical as this might seem, it was a tacit recognition of strategic and military facts. Similar considerations determined the East-West zonal division of Germany, which endured in the form of two German republics until their reunification in October 1990.
The fact that the U.S.S.R. and the United States now faced each other in Europe along the so-called “Iron Curtain” denounced by Churchill in his Fulton, Mo., speech on March 5, 1946, dramatized Europe’s final legacy from World War II. This was a drastic reduction in wealth, status, and power.
In financial terms, World War II had cost more than the combined total of all European wars since the Middle Ages. Even Britain, which had been spared invasion, had been transformed from the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor, and much of continental Europe was obliged to continue living on credit and aid. Economically, all Europe’s once great powers were dwarfed by the world’s superpowers. Their status was diminished still further when their remaining colonies were freed. Postwar Europe Planning the peace
International planning for peace after World War II took place on a world scale. Within five years, in an extraordinary burst of energy and imagination, statesmen endowed the world with almost all its existing network of global institutions: the United Nations (UN), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Monetary Fund (the IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the IBRD, or World Bank), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the International Court of Justice, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Some of these, especially the UN, were to reveal limitations. But they embodied serious efforts to replace outdated national and bilateral diplomacy with permanent multilateral institutions.
Europe, 1945–90.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Domestically, many people’s first instinct after World War II was to return to normaclass="underline" to restore law and order after the euphoric anarchy of liberation; to repatriate prisoners and demobilize soldiers; to reopen the bombed Teatro alla Scala, Milan, and have Arturo Toscanini conduct there again; and to bring back long dresses with Christian Dior’s “New Look.” At the same time, however, there was deep eagerness for change. Even more than World War I, World War II had been a democratic war, fought against dictatorship as much as against aggression. Like many wars, it had brought forth military and other leaders from the rank and file. For many the aim was to inaugurate a new and more just society within nation-states that were pledged to work together for peace. “From Resistance to Revolution” was the masthead slogan of Combat, the left-wing French Resistance newspaper founded in 1941 but after the war edited as a Paris daily by the novelist Albert Camus. The words could well have been endorsed by others, especially the radical Action Party in Italy and many socialists there and elsewhere.
No less innovative, if less radical, were the Christian Democrat parties springing up or being revived: the Christian Democrats in Italy, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, the Dutch People’s Movement in the Netherlands, the Popular Republican Movement in France. At that time, most such Roman Catholic parties had a more left-of-centre tone than was later the case.
Britain had no Christian Democrat party, and its Labour Party had less in common with continental socialist ideology than with nonconformism and the trade union movement. Yet the British people shared the general impatience for change, as they showed when they voted in large numbers for Labour in the 1945 general election, roundly defeating the Conservatives under Winston Churchill, who had led the country so memorably during the war.
In its election manifesto, the Labour Party proposed a program of nationalization of the Bank of England, of fuel and power, of iron and steel, and of inland waterways. It endorsed the Education Act already steered through by the moderate Conservative R.A. Butler. It proposed a national health service and a social security system, and it called for physical controls to allocate raw materials, limit food prices, provide new homes, and direct the location of industry.
Similar reforms were envisaged throughout western Europe. They embraced more equality, fairer shares, and better social conditions—full employment, higher wages, fairer taxes, more trade union rights, antitrust provisions, government-funded social security, and (where necessary) land reform. Such measures also implied far more central control of the economy.
“Planning” was now a common objective. In Italy it was the responsibility of the Institute of Industrial Reconstruction. In Britain the government maintained the machinery of statutory controls that it had used in wartime. In Germany the banks played a major role in forecasting, steering, and assisting investment. But in France it was the extraordinary Jean Monnet who made planning a concerted national effort rather than a set of directives from above.
Between the wars Monnet had been deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, a private banker, and a negotiator for the French government. In the United States during World War II he had helped to spur Roosevelt’s Victory Program of aircraft for the Allies. Subsequently, in Algiers, he had helped to reconcile General Charles de Gaulle with his American-backed rival General Henri Giraud. It was to de Gaulle, who shortly became premier of France, that Monnet proposed a planning commissariat, attached only to the prime minister’s office and bringing together for the first time in France industrialists, labour unions, and senior civil servants to discuss production targets, supplies, bottlenecks, and urgent action in key sectors of the economy. Revolutionary at the time, the plan was highly successful and was soon imitated elsewhere.
National planning alone, however, could not solve Europe’s problems. Joint action was needed, as was help from the United States. In 1947, two years after the end of the war, many Europeans were still leading a Spartan existence. Everywhere, food continued to be rationed. Dimmed lights, brownouts, and power cuts were still common. A hard winter and waves of strikes added to the general misery. Underlying it was the stark fact that the countries of Europe were in serious financial trouble.