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Workshop report (by Jessica Reinisch)
Following decades of widespread scholarly neglect, the last years have seen a growth of interest in the "the lost decade" that followed the end of the Second World War.[1] A number of recent publications and TV series have set out to scrutinise just how a continent that emerged from the war as a physical and moral wasteland could rebuild itself so dramatically. In history departments, too, interest in the post-war phenomenon has gained momentum. On 28 October 2005, a group of historians, most of whom have been grappling with problems of the post-war period for some time, took part in a one-day workshop at Birkbeck College on "Comparing Europe's Post-War Reconstructions". The workshop formally launched a series of meetings, research projects and publications held under the auspices of the Balzan Project at Birkbeck College. This project, which was established by Professor Eric Hobsbawm with a prize grant from the Balzan Foundation, is entitled Reconstruction in the Immediate Aftermath of War: a comparative study of Europe, 1945-1950 and is directed by David Feldman (Birkbeck) and Mark Mazower (Columbia).
This first workshop set out to lay foundations for future work by pinning down some of the most crucial historiographical and methodological issues which are integral to research on the post-war period. The day was divided into two sessions, each of which embodied a comparative element: the first session compared reconstruction in the aftermath of the two world wars, while the second session contrasted approaches to reconstruction after 1945 in Eastern and Western Europe.
1. Comparing Reconstruction in 1918 and 1945
Jay Winter (Florence/Yale) began the session with a paper which focused on the role of lawyers in the reconstruction efforts following the two world wars, and suggested that the frameworks of reconstruction differed substantially in both cases. He argued that when seen through the lens of legal paradigms, the approaches to social reconstruction in 1945 were very different from those in 1918. After 1945, complexities of a new order arose not simply from the fact that new legislation had to be drawn up, but that the previous detritus of occupation, collaboration and war had to be unravelled at the same time. Moreover, Winter argued that by 1945 a new legally-inspired language of human rights began to shape reconstruction agendas in ways that were completely new. He conceded that the situation in 1945 resembled that of 1918 in a number of ways, not least because both reconstruction periods blurred national boundaries and contained vital trans-national dimensions. Nonetheless, Winter insisted that by 1945 the language of social reconstruction, especially with regard to ideas about the rights of the individual and the sovereignty of states, had changed radically. Whereas the first half of the century had been marked predominantly by languages of class and nation, the second half was shaped much more by languages of civil society and human rights. Thinking about society and social reconstruction necessarily overlapped in both halves of the century. Nonetheless, Winter concluded, by 1945 the focus had shifted and the language of reconstruction had changed beyond recognition.
Lawyers played a substantial role in this shift. Winter focused on the work of René Cassin (1887-1976), particularly on his role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This WWI veteran had for much of the interwar period been a French delegate to the League of Nations, before he joined de Gaulle's Government in Exile as a Commissioner of Public Instruction. He also represented France on bodies such as the Permanent Conference of Allied Ministers of Education and the United Nations Commission on Inquiry into War Crimes. After 1946, Cassin was a vice-chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and active in the formulation of the draft of the Declaration of Human Rights. According to Winter, the "Cassinian framework of reconstruction" presented a fundamental challenge to the older concept of national sovereignty. Cassin believed that human rights should lay the foundation for all social reconstruction initiatives. Winter traced the beginning of discussions on human rights to the immediate post-war period, when the language of human rights "was in the air" and an extra-territorial framework for reconstruction was constructed for the first time. He concluded that soon after 1945 a new universality of human rights helped to redefine the state as a sovereign institution and shaped both domestic and foreign polices in countries across Europe.
In the second paper, Adam Tooze (Cambridge) looked at economic approaches to reconstruction in the aftermaths of the two world wars. He began by recounting two opposing modes of twentieth century economic development in Europe. In a first mode, historians have contrasted the largely unsuccessful reconstruction efforts after 1918 and the economically disastrous inter-war years with the hugely successful, even miraculous progress that was achieved after the Second World War. The question posed within this perspective - regarding why the earlier economic dynamism of the period before 1914 then stalled after the end of the war - has usually been answered in terms of Europe's relationship with the United States. After 1945 the U.S. behaved like the hegemonic power it was, and which it had failed to do in 1918. The drama of the Marshall Plan seemed to fit the effect of this see-saw pattern of American commitment. In a contrasting approach, economic historians such as Alan Milward and Barry Eichengreen have argued that the importance of the United States for European economic developments has been greatly overstated. In the case of the First World War, Eichengreen has maintained that the post-war crisis of the international monetary system was primarily a feature of internal political organisation rather than any American failures to intervene. In the case of the Second World War, Milward has shown that economically the Marshall Plan was not nearly as important as it was politically, and that the success of the post-1945 reconstruction was made possible above all through the combined forces of domestic social peace and liberalisation of trade.
Tooze argued that especially the proponents of the second model had often failed to come to grips with the role of the United States. Moreover, the main challenge for current historians was to overcome some of the assumptions which both models had incorporated. Both perspectives still conceived of Europe in Cold War terms, as a result of which both focused above all on the amazing economic recovery of countries in North-Western Europe. However, Tooze argued, since the construction of those perspectives European horizons have widened, and future research should look at how to integrate both Eastern and Western halves of the continent and also integrate the Southern European experiences. He pointed to a number of features which were shared by both Eastern and Western Europe. In both, modernisation had been made possible by a move from rural areas to the cities. Both halves often had similar basic assumptions about the demands for and benefits from industrialisation. Finally, in both halves of the continent post-war phenomena such as mass media, mass education, and new kinds of health care led to similar results. A closer look at other demographic data could reveal further similarities. Tooze concluded with a call to look at the Fiat and the Lada car as the real European post-war miracle. Within a few decades, production plants were set up across the continent and further afield, and these cars were sold in great numbers.
In his commentary, Peter Gatrell (Manchester) suggested that the two papers raised a series of questions about continuity and disjuncture in European history. Gatrell applauded Tooze's attempt to break down Cold War barriers and to integrate East and West, but thought that Southern and South-Eastern Europe should not be neglected in this context; those parts, too, had experienced a remarkable transition after 1945. Regarding Winter's paper, Gatrell regretted the historiographical silence on Soviet players in the development of human rights as part of a new language of reconstruction. He also questioned how important the story of Cassin actually was, and why it had passed historians of Western Europe by for so long. One kind of disjuncture in European history was suggested by Tooze's reference to modernisation, but Gatrell thought more research was needed on exactly what this modernity entailed.
More broadly, Gatrell suggested that one important lens which could help to bring both papers' subjects, as well as the post-war period much more generally, into focus was the problem of population displacement. Displacement and post-war reconstruction were linked on a number of levels. At the outset, war was a "refugee-generating process"[2] and formed the initial moment of displacement, which involved processes such as conscription, drawing on those elements that could be trusted and weeding out those that could not, and the mobilisation of civilian society. In both Eastern and Western Europe, migration was also a vital factor in the economic transformation of countries in the aftermath of war. Everywhere, labour shortages were chronic and foreign workers were needed to produce goods. While some economies drew on different categories of Eastern European workers, Soviet reconstruction plans built heavily on the use of German workers. Gatrell also pointed out that states had in the past not just produced displacement but also benefited from it: the widespread problem of displacement after 1918 then led to the reconstruction of nation-states. Similarly, one could add that the new ethnically homogenous states after 1945 were to a large extent made possible by the preceding displacement of ethnic minorities.
The discussion initially revolved around Tooze's argument on economic developments. Alan Milward pointed out that both he and Eichengreen had focused primarily on trade policy. The Marshall Plan was not large enough to stimulate Western European growth by expansion of its capital stock, thus the easing of trade restrictions rather than Marshall Plan aid itself provided the most important stimulus to economic growth. Exactly how trade liberalisation worked needed to be explored, as did the question of how economic reconstruction could actually proceed; after all, the Lada required income to buy it. Other participants raised questions regarding the comparability of post-war Japan's reconstruction to European developments. Sheldon Garon (Princeton) suggested that trade liberalisation was also crucial in the Japanese case, since, after all, there had been no Marshall Plan aid in Japan.
Much of the very vibrant discussion concerned the significance of the human rights story in post-war developments. Milward questioned exactly when and how the idea of human rights had begun to gather momentum. He agreed that there was mileage for Winter's argument as it concerned the 1970s, since human rights became the dominant discourse at Helsinki, and particularly important for the Soviet delegation present. But whether this also held true for the immediate post-war period was not clear. Mark Mazower (Columbia) argued that both Eastern and Western Powers mainly signed up to the UN Declaration because it was not binding, and that human rights were of little or no significance before the 1970s in Southern and Eastern Europe. A number of participants pointed to the flexibility of what rights could be included in the category of human rights. For example, Naoko Shimazu (Birkbeck) referred to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, where Japan wanted to add a clause on race, but was the race dimension taken up after 1945? Similarly, Milward pointed out that women's rights did not feature in the Helsinki document. Jay Winter argued that the immediate post-war years were important to the story of human rights, not least because they emerged as an unintended consequence of the Nuremberg trials. It was in the preparations for the Nuremberg proceedings that human rights were first paid detailed attention. After 1945, debates about what the state meant and was entitled to do all made negative reference to what the National Socialists had previously done. Even if the notion of human rights was in subsequent decades applied to quite different purposes, the post-war period saw their first application. In fact, Winter argued, human rights could be understood as a political and ideological code to help to clean up the physical and social mess which every government had to face in the wake of war. The discussion also touched on the Soviet position on human rights. Although the USSR had supported the Declaration of Human Rights, still little is known about Soviet legal work on rights. Timothy Snyder (Yale) pointed to the example of Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish Jewish practicing lawyer who had first coined the term 'genocide', which suggested that there was an Eastern European dimension to the construction of human rights discourse which needed to be explored further.
Another central point of debate regarded the context in which the post-war period should be looked at. Which broader chronologies could and should the immediate post-war years be fitted into? Could legal reconstruction, for example, actually proceed at the same time as social reconstruction? Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) pointed out that social reconstruction proceeded at a number of different levels, and thus contained narratives ranging from the work of international organisations at one end to the experiences of people living in their families and households at the other. Different chronologies would emerge for these different narratives, depending on what level of reconstruction was being looked at. A focus on what reconstruction meant for families, for example, would show that by the 1960s progress had made in areas such as electrification and the availability of bathing facilities at home, but that these developments actually continued trends of the 1920s which had got cut short. Others agreed that there were several different phases of reconstruction and suggested ways of separating them out. Jay Winter concluded the discussion with a plea to pay special attention to the period of 1944 to 1948. This period saw a very important short-term shift in language, with which a new social contract was then put together. He argued that there was some mileage in looking at reconstruction in the short-term, and then to go on to identify longer-term consequences in later decades.
2. Problems of Reconstruction in Eastern and Western Europe
Martin Conway (Oxford) and Timothy Snyder (Yale) gave a joint presentation of problems of reconstruction after 1945, where Conway concentrated on Western and Snyder on Eastern Europe. Conway first identified some implications which the term 'reconstruction' contained for thinking about the post-war period. He thought the term itself was vague and had multiple meanings, features which were, he argued, a sin of its origins. Since 'reconstruction' was a rhetorical and legitimising term which had been used to promote a particular political and economic order in post-war Europe, using the term now, he suggested, meant confronting a thesis that was defined at the time. 'Reconstruction' also implied a strictly secular history, which at the time clashed with and excluded, for example, the Catholic perspective on a post-war restoration of life. There was also an important chronological problem to looking at the immediate post-war years, since in 1945 history was not only running forwards, but also back to developments from before 1914. Reconstruction, he thought, thus had multiple strands to it, which made the subject lacking in fixed boundaries - geographical, thematic or chronological. Yet it was perhaps a useful prism through which the otherwise often uncontainable dynamics of the period from 1930 to the late 1940s could be studied. Snyder argued that in the Eastern European context, by contrast, the term 'reconstruction' was often used directly in reference to physical re-building, to taking broken fragments and building something new out of them. It was a process of both 're-making' and 're-doing'. The aftermath of war was seen by many optimistically and as a great opportunity to start over. He also pointed out that in the United States the term 'reconstruction' was primarily used in the context of the Civil War.
Conway and Snyder then talked about problems of reconstruction within the different categories of the nation, the state, social classes and politics. Regarding the nation, Snyder argued that the Second World War had been an important nationalising impetus and had provided the state with new kinds of power. The first occupation of Eastern Europe actually took place in the period 1939-1941and resulted in massive population movements of Poles by Germans. The ingredients of national insularity were already in place by the time the war came to an end; a national consciousness had already been reconstructed some time before state-led reconstruction efforts began. Conway suggested that in the Western European context, nations had become increasingly mythologised during the war, as a result of which the need for recreating a sense of the nation was emphasised once the war was over. In the case of Belgium, for example, reconstruction emerged as part of a larger history of nationalism. He criticised the fact that although certain nationalist discourses were very successful, still much historical writing on post-war Europe has not taken this nationalist rhetoric into account.
At the level of states, Conway talked about Western European efforts to reconstruct state authority and produce a new state culture, where the state emerged as an agent for the solution of problems. The new state after 1945 was a self-limiting state, administered by a cadre of bureaucrats. These developments, he thought, produced a new and more effective form of state governance and state citizenship. Citizens were registered, put into categories, mobilised only within strict limits, and the state now appeared primarily as a provider of services. Snyder argued that the Soviet state, too, became a conservative state. But in other features developments in the Eastern European context differed from those outlined by Conway. The Soviet influence in Eastern Europe brought with it new kinds of hegemonic pressures and kinds of organisation. Borders were changed after 1945 as a direct results of thinking about states. Yet Poland emerged as an ethnically homogenous state not because of its altered borders, but because of processes of ethnic cleansing which had already taken place by 1945. States were transformed as Communists and the Red Army moved westwards.
At the level of social classes, Conway suggested that a certain social democratic perspective had associated the war with progressive social change, and in this view reconstruction was to build on and continue this progress. Actually, he argued, the war had had quite different effects. It had produced a new priority of rural over urban interests; it presented a victory of bourgeois interests, which were then further entrenched in post-1945 society and subsequent consumerist lifestyles and new professions; and it had presented a female victory over men. These three results together, he argued, produced conservative societies across Western Europe. By contrast, Snyder pointed out that there was certainly no victory of the bourgeoisie in Eastern European societies. For the Communists in power, pragmatic social change revolved around ideas of class. The middle-classes - mainly assimilated Jewish and German-speaking - had largely been destroyed, but the now empty property and buildings left behind by them provided a form of social advancement for others. The repopulation of these empty spaces was a way of bringing people into the cities, whose social advance, as they moved up into the middle classes, created loyalties to the new regimes. At the same time, the old intelligentsia was transformed into a new kind of technocratic intelligentsia. Finally, the Communist view that industrialisation was the main feature of reconstruction required the rebuilding of the working class.
Regarding politics, Conway suggested that trade unions and other intermediate institutions played an important role in most of Western Europe. Overall, political discourse incorporated a new individualistic focus and political assertiveness. Individual citizens worked out what they were entitled to from the state, but were suspicious about being mobilised to any particular ideological agendas. Conway also spoke about the predominant success of the centre right across Western Europe. In Eastern Europe by contrast, Snyder pointed out, politics became mass politics. Snyder concluded that there was an incredible economic and social transformation in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of war, as a result of which this period can legitimately be referred to as one of 'reconstruction'. Nonetheless, the physical rebuilding process was at all times closely accompanied by problems of legitimacy. Conway agreed that there was a pervasive sense of a crisis of legitimacy in the immediate post-war years. The new legitimacy of states after 1945 rested primarily on a new view of a limited democracy in the West.
In his commentary, Mark Mazower agreed that the contrasting stories of Eastern and Western Europe deserved detailed attention, which could help to break out of the old Cold War simplicity. He argued that Eastern and Western Europe were very similar in some features, for example in their very impressive growth rates and in their shared desire to go to technocrats as a way of avoiding outright ideology. For both, the 1940s were a most traumatic decade. In other aspects, however, Eastern and Western Europe were also very different. In the West, the powerful Left of the 1930s was succeeded after the war by a powerful Right and the display of strong anti-Communist tendencies. In the East, large parts of the bourgeoisie, aristocratic and Jewish culture had been wiped out in the 1930s, as a result of which no conservative reconstruction was actually possible after the war. The exact periodisation would differ for different themes of post-war reconstruction. Overall, Mazower did not share Conway's scepticism about the term 'reconstruction'. He emphasised that there was a lot of mileage in looking at the immediate post-1945 period. In particular, issues such as the relationship between war-time planning and post-war programmes, the significance of the New Deal in American post-war visions and the conflicting tendencies between international and national forces in the years after 1945 all deserved much more attention. Moreover, a focus not just on economic spending but also on tax could produce interesting insights into how the popular notion of what states could legitimately do changed in the aftermath of war. The acceptance of higher taxes resulted partly from a lasting critique of the laissez-faire economics of the 1920s, but also built on the often positively judged war-time experience of rationing. Mazower concluded with a call to conduct more research on ways in which reconstruction programmes across the continent were operationalised and built on the different European experiences of the war.
The debate demonstrated the enthusiasm and engagement of the participants regarding research of the post-war period. The discussion focused above all on the usefulness of the post-war focus and on conceptual problems involved in a study of the immediate post-war period. Eric Hobsbawm (Birkbeck) emphasised the importance of paying close attention to physical reconstruction and its accomplishments in the early post-war period. While Germany, for example, still looked completely hopeless and desolate in 1946, the following few years saw extraordinary achievements. Research was needed to understand how this happened. In Eastern and Western Europe, a central component to this reconstruction was state action. In the period of 1945 to 1960, the territorial state gained maximum power to do things, regardless of how self-limiting it may have appeared to be. In Eastern Europe, in particular, much state action was unmediated, and everywhere in Europe the public sector was crucial. Both East and West also shared the problem of having to deal with millions of refugees. Overall, the few initial years of the post-war developments required detailed research. Jay Winter agreed on the usefulness of looking at reconstruction, and thought this could also usefully be approached from a demographic perspective. He suggested, for example, that research on the timing of the post-war baby boom in both East and West would yield suggestive results. In the West, fertility rates rose some time before actual reconstruction programmes started, which could be explained as a conservative response to the deconstruction of family life during the war. Divorce rates, too, would be interesting in this context.
The relationship between war-time and post-war visions was also debated at length. Ben Shephard (Oxford) pointed out that war-time conferences on post-war reconstruction such as a Fabian Society conference held in Oxford in 1942 already created the intellectual and organisational framework for post-war programmes, especially by arguing that a new inter-state organisation was needed to deal with the post-war needs. Some participants thought it would be useful to ask not just how the post-war period was evoked during the war years, but also how the war was then assessed in the immediate post-war period. Snyder commented on the fact that some models for reconstruction after 1945 were actually pre-war models. In Poland, for example, the state-led industrialisation policy was intimately bound up with the national question. Other speakers pointed out that the bourgeois, conservative and rural focus of post-war Western societies as suggested by Conway would have important implications on the legitimacy and involvement of those groups excluded from this focus. The issue of tax was again raised in the discussion, and Conway, for example, suggested that we need to understand the change in the threshold tolerance level, particularly how some social groups thought they could get a good deal from the state by paying their taxes. Conway also clarified that he thought women were an important factor in the conservative stabilisation of society. They campaigned on family and welfare issues, and as such their work was part of the creation of modern nuclear families. Snyder talked about the importance of the fact that the demarcation line between private and public spaces in Eastern Europe became more important as time went on. A number of participants echoed Hobsbawm's call to emphasise the physicality and materiality of the post-war period.
In their different ways, all papers and much of the discussion grappled with the problem of how Cold War mindsets could be overcome and a history of post-war Europe could be written by reference to both Eastern and Western halves. Many participants confirmed that the immediate post-war period deserved to be taken seriously in its own right, but suggested that different themes could then also be followed up in subsequent post-war decades or traced back to the first half of the twentieth century. The discussion demonstrated that issues of chronology and periodisation, as well as questions regarding the different levels at which reconstruction took place and the differences between often clashing reconstruction agendas all deserve much more research. Overall, 'post-war reconstruction' emerged as a valuable vehicle for understanding the immediate post-war period as well as its antecedents and implications. Perhaps even more importantly, the concept was welcomed by many as a tool for evaluating both American involvement throughout Europe's twentieth century and the shape of Europe today.
Notes
[1] "The lost decade 1945-1955", recent BBC Four series, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/lostdecade/
[2] Aristide Zolberg, 'The formation of New States as a Refugee Generating Process', May 1983, Vol.467, Annals American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, p. 24-38.
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