17 quotes
The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state, after all, were the middle classes.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
This fear of serving anti-Soviet interests was not new. But by the early fifties it was a major calculation in European intellectual debates, above all in France.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe—the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century—had ceased to exist.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Behind the long ‘Social-Democratic moment’ in Western Europe there had lain not just pragmatic faith in the public sector, or allegiance to Keynesian economic principles, but a sense of the shape of the age that influenced and for many decades stifled even its would-be critics.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
In cultural matters, the Communists did not even need to take the initiative. Fear of American domination, of the loss of national autonomy and initiative, brought into the ‘progressive’ camp men and women of all political stripes and none.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens. Like Lenin, Stalin understood the need for enemies, and it was in the logic of the Stalinist state that it was constantly mobilizing against its foes—external, but above all domestic.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
‘Anti-Fascism’, with its sub-text of resistance and alliance, was also related to the lingering favorable image of the wartime Soviet Union, the genuine sympathy that many Western Europeans felt for the heroic victors of Kursk and Stalingrad.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
In fact, Yalta left the truly important issue—arrangements for post-war Germany—off the table precisely because it was so important and intractable. And it is unlikely that the Western leaders could have got a better deal out of Stalin during these last months of the war, even if it had occurred to them to try.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
If the Left had the wind in its sails and History on its side, then a new generation of Right-wing literati would take pride in being defiant losers, turning the genuine decadence and death-seeking solipsism of inter-war writers like Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger into a social and sartorial style—thereby anticipating the ‘young fogeys’ of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
It should be clear from this narrative that there is little to be gained from asking 'who started the Cold War?' To the extent that the Cold War was about Germany, the final outcome—a divided country—was probably preferred by all parties to a Germany united against them. No one planned this outcome in May 1945, but few were deeply discontented with it.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)