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Report (by Matthew Frank)Day 1
Mark Mazower (Columbia) opened the first panel on ‘Periodization’ with a wide-ranging paper that took stock of the trajectories along which the Balzan Project had so far progressed and the directions in which research under the rubric of ‘reconstruction’ might go. In his brief historiographical overview of this subject, Mazower pointed out that ‘reconstruction’ is largely a post-Cold War concern. The end of the Cold War stimulated a search for new beginnings, changed the terms of reference about the post-war period and led to a ‘broadening of the historiographical-spatial framework’ of discussion. Human rights, internationalization and the emergence of an international order in general, ethnic cleansing and forced population movements, ‘aftermaths’, and rethinking about the notion of Europe, are all points of reference for a post-Cold War reading of the 1940s. Yet to some extent, this (re)discovery of the 1940s, Mazower maintained, had now gone too far and led to a rather idealized take on a period which had also witnessed the collapse of international norms and order, and intense politicization and contestation of new international agencies. This recent ‘golden age’ telling of the 1940s can be explained, he argued, in the light of disillusionment with the Bush Administration and the current assault on human rights in liberal democracies.
Jakob Tanner (Zürich) reflected on the very notion of periodization and its usefulness for historicizing reconstruction. Periodization, he argued, allows for the discussion of recurrence as well as the concept of time, and therefore gives us the opportunity not only to compare reconstructions but to do so with a ‘long view’. Tanner suggested that we see the short 20th Century as falling into two parts: a period of social and political upheaval followed by one characterized by the growth of consumerism and democratization, with 1945 as the caesura. Adam Tooze (Cambridge) then outlined some of the alternative narratives on post-war European reconstruction offered by economic historians. He emphasized the continuities in economic activity in the period of reconstruction - that war ends yet economic activity must go on - and how these continuities, particularly in the case of the reorientation of Nazi war industries, carry with them an awkward legacy which economic historians have as yet not adequately addressed. Continuities notwithstanding, he thought it possible to find breaks in the narrative of economic reconstruction. The signing of US-backed London Debt Agreement 1953, which blocked any further claims on German state and companies, constituted a ‘financial zero hour’ of sorts. On balance, however, Tooze favoured a periodization that spilt backwards into the interwar period and forwards into the 1970s, rather than one that posited a neat period of chaos followed by order.
The discussion which followed examined alternative ways of thinking about political divisions on the continent beyond the Cold War binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’: new states versus established states, for example, each with different obligations and responsibilities; or the idea of democratic versus non-democratic states. As far as the lessons drawn from the post-1919 settlement were concerned, it was noted that in the post-1945 period there was a deep distrust of mass democracy as it was perceived to have contributed to the collapse of the interwar order. This distrust gave rise to notions of ‘limited democracy’ and further recourse to technocratic elites. Indeed, post-1945 saw the emergence of a universalism of technical and scientific expertise alongside other universalisms, such as that of ‘human rights’ which replaced the discredited minorities rights regime of the interwar period.
The papers in Panel 2 on the ‘Cold War’ examined European reconstruction from the twin polarities of Soviet and United States policy. In his paper on the Soviet Union after 1945, Mark Harrison (Warwick) argued that the combination of a resilient economy and dictator largely explains why Soviet consumers within a decade of the devastation wrought by the war were able to enjoy a relative ‘golden age’. Efficient rule preserved the working arrangements of the wartime economy, and the regime became more rational, for example, in its use of selective terror. Yet Harrison added that the Soviet economy appeared resilient because it had accumulated a backlog of unfulfilled growth, and postwar growth in the decade and a half after the Second World War seems far less impressive if seen as part of longer-term trends.
Silvio Pons (Rome), turning to Soviet relations with Cominform and Western European Communist Parties, underlined the contrasts between the two post-war eras when it came to Soviet geopolitical objectives. Post-1945, the Soviet Union was no longer marginal to European politics, yet showed extreme caution in western Europe. The Soviet aim of consolidating eastern Europe as well as the conflict over Germany and with Yugoslavia explains this circumspection. Western Communist parties henceforth played a limited role in Soviet geopolitical thinking, settling into a sort of ‘permanent opposition’ and concentrating on internal policy issues and anti-American propaganda.
Addressing the issue of American thinking in the early Cold War, Anders Stephanson (Columbia) argued that the Truman Doctrine needed to be seen as a discursive framework. For the Americans, the Truman Doctrine constituted a universalist binary, but one in which the two terms in opposition were not equal in agency. The ‘other’ (totalitarianism) only existed parasitically on freedom and could not exist without it, whereas freedom would always exist. Within the ‘Free World’, he pointed out, there was a dialectical division between the ‘messianic agent’ (the USA) and the rest, between the salvational agent and the saved. Stephanson noted that the US has been ‘messianic’ at very precise moments in its history - for example, 1917-19 and 1947 - when it acted as an agent that exercised and imposed peace.
Much of the ensuing discussion focused on Soviet policy towards post-war Europe. There was agreement that Stalin was not necessarily opposed to different roads to communism on a case by case basis, but that it was nevertheless difficult to be certain of his real intentions. In conversations with foreign communists, for example, Stalin was elusive and frequently made contradictory statements. Even with the opening of Soviet archives, Stalin therefore remains an enigma. On the question of the Soviet economy, there was some doubts expressed at how successfully and rapidly it really recovered when living standards were taken into account. The efficiency and rationality of post-war Stalinism was also questioned, with reference to the repression of western Ukrainians, for example, and internal developments in eastern Europe.
The first day of the conference ended with a panel on ‘Postwar on Film’ and the screening of seven short films on postwar reconstruction. Toby Haggith (IWM) introduced two British state-funded films about reconstruction and peace aims - Dawn Guard (1941), and United Harvest (1947) - both of which stressed the importance of planning, state intervention and popular engagement in postwar reconstruction. Suzanne Langlois (York University, Toronto) followed with two films from the National Film Board of Canada - Food: Secret of the Peace (July 1945) and Suffer Little Children (December 1945) - stylistically similar to the British ones, and clarion calls for international action for the relief of Europe. Ben Shephard (Oxford/Bristol) presented Cesta Zpátky (The Way Home), a film on repatriation produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information in 1946, and A Defeated People (1946), by the British documentary-film maker Humphrey Jennings, which captures British ambivalence towards its role in post-war Germany. Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) introduced the final film - Rok 1946 (The Year 1946) - an upbeat summary of the achievements of the Polish people and state released on the eve of the elections of January 1947.
Day 2
The second day of the conference opened with a panel on the ‘Regaining the Monopoly of Force’. Drawing on case studies from wartime and postwar Belgium, Pieter Lagrou (Université Libre de Bruxelles) examined the use of firearms by agents of the state to test the notion of the monopoly of force. He demonstrated how the role of state agents and the meaning of the monopoly of force was redefined in the post-Nazi era i.e. as a normative change in the light of the emergence of the human rights doctrine. Lagrou pointed out that in Belgium, as in Germany, there was no retroactivity in trials. Hence, the state had to fall back on traditional penal codes and ‘normal’ crimes like manslaughter, and try wartime cases under this rubric. Richard Bessel (York) also dealt with agents of state. His paper focused on the restoration of order in Soviet-occupied Germany and the role that the establishment of the Volkspolizei played in this. He argued that the relationship between the growth of police and the reestablishment of order was not clear cut, as it occurred at a time when the police were manifestly unable to impose control. He concluded that credit for the reestablishment of order was in large measure due to the improvement in economic conditions rather than the expansion of the police. Pamela Ballinger (Bowdoin College) meanwhile concentrated on the problems states faced in re-establishing de facto sovereignty along a contested frontier, and on what (re)gaining force meant in areas where there were competing agents for this monopoly. Her focus was on the Italian-Yugoslav border - the ‘Julian March’ - and on the actions of Yugoslav authorities that produced the migration of some 200-250,000 Italians from Istria. Ballinger suggested that the Istrian case might lead us to rethink other post-war population displacements, such as the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe, and to reconceptualize the role of ‘force’ in forced migration more generally. She asked if perhaps scholars have gone too far in overly ethnicizing post-1945 migration and simplifying the complex interplay of personal, ideological, political, and ethnic reasons behind displacement.
The ensuing discussion picked up on Ballinger’s point. There were, it was agreed, certain parallels between the German and Istrian cases, but only to a certain degree: the mass migration of Germans from the east happened in waves, and there was even some reflux of population in summer 1945. On a more conceptual level, there were problems with the terminology of forced migration. The concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ itself was a problematic one, without a clear genealogy and open to political abuses, that might have proven useful for revisiting violence in the past but was too ‘presentist’. The concept of the monopoly of violence was also questioned in the discussion. Breslau in 1945 was cited as an example where there was an absence of the state and different groups were seeking legitimacy by gaining control of the police and the power to make order. In contested areas such as these there is was not always a clear cut relationship between order and sovereignty.
The papers in Panel 5 on ‘Empire’ dealt with the dilemmas which European colonial powers faced as they carried out the simultaneous tasks of reconstruction in the metropole and the periphery. In his paper on reconstructing empire in British and French Africa, Frank Cooper (NYU) argued that the post-war weakness of European colonial powers made the attraction of empire even greater than before, but at the time when they were least equipped with the resources to retain it. After the failure to recolonize in Asia, both France and Britain looked to Africa as a way out of the dollar crisis. In its search for new bases for legitimizing empire, Cooper showed how postwar French dialogues on colonialism had a ‘schizophrenic character’ that was inclusive but not equal and which veered between exploitation and development. African nationalists saw opportunities to make claims to political and economic sovereignty as part of a wider more diverse polity under the rubric of ‘pluralist democracy’. Hence, the project of reconstructing empire sowed the seeds of its own undoing.
Peter Romijn (Amsterdam) and Remco Raben (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation) in their joint presentation demonstrated how in the case of the Netherlands attempts at re-establishing control over the colonial economy and at outmanoeuvring nationalists in the colonies misfired politically and earned the Dutch government international opprobrium. For the Netherlands, decolonization was a process of reeducation and reorientation, compelling it to redefine its international role and to see the world through the lens of foreign rather than colonial relations. Nick White (John Moores University) presentation on the ‘new imperialism’ in the British Empire after the Second World War also showed how attempts at rejuvenating empire were ultimately counter-productive. The dollar-earning potential of a colony such as Malaya meant that is was too important to lose and it became a priority for postwar reconstruction. Yet uneven development, economic mismanagement, the resulting insurgency and the need to find an acceptable nationalist alternative to the communists meant that this ‘second colonial expansion’ carried out in the interests of metropolitan reconstruction actually sped up the process of decolonization and the disintegration of the British empire.
The discussion which followed focused on the renewed post-war prerogative of empire. How could empire be made justifiable once it had become - post-Atlantic Charter - a ‘dirty word’? This dilemma in large part explained the attempts to reinvent the French empire as the French Union, or the British empire as the Commonwealth. The colonial experiment was ‘new’ in other ways, too. A new generation went out to the colonies after the Second World War and many stayed on into the 1950s as advisers and entrepreneurs. The imaginative conception of Europe’s relationship with empire - previously been seen through the lens of ‘race’ - was also reconstructed in the wake of Nazism, and the colonial problem came to be seen as a developmental rather than a racial one. In other words, over time and with sufficient guidance, Africans would become more ‘European’ and become less ‘African’.
The final panel on ‘Internationalization’ began with a paper by Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) on the international dynamics of postwar relief. Reinisch outlined the arguments about internationalization that led to the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), isolating two competing visions of internationalism that emerged from these debates. On the one hand, there was a form of American missionary liberal internationalism which called for the creation of (American-led) international infrastructure for the supply and delivery of aid - the internationalization of the New Deal. Against this there was a state-based view which saw internationalism as guaranteeing the rights of small nations in the face of an external - i.e. Soviet/communist - threat, and which was sceptical of an over-reliance on the Anglo-Americans and their domination of ‘international’ initiatives. The problem of reconciling these competing visions resulted in a fragile consensus on internationalization and led - ultimately - to the disintegration of these efforts.
Harold James (Princeton) in his paper on the Bretton Woods discussions demonstrated why agreement on monetary policy was possible in 1944 when it had eluded previous generations. In James’s view, the key to the success of Bretton Woods was that the issue of trade liberalization, on which the US had a distinct and uncompromising vision, had already been dealt with. Without this obstacle, negotiators were free to discuss monetary policy on its own terms. James pointed out that Bretton Woods was the only instance in history of a major redesign of international monetary policy (despite later attempts to do so), adding that its greatest success was perhaps its least recognized one: it gave rise to GATT which brought openness to trade in the 1950s.
The final paper by Waqar Zaidi (Imperial) examined British liberal internationalist proposals for the internationalization of atomic energy. Focusing on the work Chatham House Atomic Energy Study Group (1946), Zaidi argued that although these debates over atomic technology were an intensely national affair, they were also informed by liberal internationalist rhetoric about science and technology. Ultimately, however, this functionalist thinking on atomic energy, as elsewhere on European integration and international relations, was increasingly out of touch with the realities of techno-nationalist national reconstruction.
All three papers, it was noted in the ensuing discussion, were studies of the failure or partial failure of internationalization. Did this underline the limited appeal of internationalism? Was the narrative of post-war internationalism one of a succession of narrowing visions? The triumph of democracy and the nation-state in 1945, which imposed limits on what inter- or supra-national agencies could do, was offered as an explanation for this thwarted internationalism, as was the greater degree of pragmatism and realism in 1945 compared with some of the more idealistic forms of thinking about internationalism in 1919. Several participants wondered where the Soviets fitted into this essentially Anglo-American narrative of internationalism, and if they could be brought back into the equation by linking the issue of internationalization with the Cold War and Soviet concerns over security. Internationalisms other than those liberal in nature also needed to be addressed. From a Continental perspective, socialist internationalism was the competing vision in 1945, and by the 1950s Christian Democratic internationalism - i.e. Catholicism - had assumed a pronounced role in the movement towards European integration.
Before wrapping up the conference, Mark Mazower paid tribute to the Balzan Foundation and Professor Eric Hobsbawm whose generosity had made all these meetings possible. Although the last gathering, this was not the final offering from the Balzan Project on the theme of post-war reconstruction. A special edition of the Journal of Contemporary History based on the workshop on relief and reconstruction has already appeared in print, and a collected volume on displacement is forthcoming with Palgrave (both edited by Jessica Reinisch). [3] A collection based on this conference is also planned. Perhaps attention, as some participants suggested, will now turn to the 1950s. What is certain, however, is that thanks not least to in part to initiatives such as this, the immediate post-war period can no longer conceivably be portrayed as ‘the lost decade’. [4]
References
[1] See http://www.balzan.bbk.ac.uk/
[2] See Jessica Reinisch, "Comparing Europe’s Reconstructions: First Balzan Workshop, Birkbeck College, London, 28 October 2005", History Workshop Journal, 61:1 (Spring 2006), 299-304; Flora Tsilaga, "Relief and Rehabilitation in the Immediate Aftermath of War: Second Balzan Workshop, Birkbeck College, London, 16 June 2006", History Workshop Journal, 63:1 (Spring 2007), 371-4; Elizabeth White, "Displacement and Replacement in the Aftermath of War, 1944-1948: Third Balzan Workshop, 18-19 September 2006", at http://www.balzan.bbk.ac.uk/page19.html; Waqar Zaidi, "Planning, Production and Reconstruction in Postwar Europe: Fourth Balzan Workshop, 26 June 2007", History Workshop Journal, 65:1 (Spring 2008), 279-84.
[3] Special issue on "Relief in the Aftermath of War", Journal of Contemporary History, 43:3 (July 2008).
[4] See the reference to the BBC programme of this name in the report on the first Balzan workshop: Reinisch, "Comparing Europe’s Reconstructions", 299.
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