With communist ministers in the postwar governments of Belgium, France, and Italy, and with communists fomenting political strikes, some feared similar takeovers in the West. Germany, however, was the scene of the sharpest clash. For several years, by a leapfrog process of move and countermove, the eastern and western occupation zones of Germany had gradually been solidifying into separate entities. When in June 1948 the Western authorities issued a new western deutsche mark, the U.S.S.R. retaliated by imposing a land blockade on Berlin, which was jointly administered by the four occupation powers but was physically an enclave within the Soviet zone. The West responded with a massive 11-month airlift of food, goods, and raw materials. Meanwhile, 12 Western countries—Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States—negotiated and signed on April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty, agreeing “that an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all.” Almost immediately, the U.S.S.R. called off the Berlin blockade.
Within a few weeks, Germany was formally divided into two rival republics. The Cold War had reached a climax. Western Europe had drawn even closer to the United States.
Affluence and its underside
The West German currency reform that produced the western deutsche mark was a courageous act. It exchanged one deutsche mark for 10 obsolete reichsmarks; later the rate was slightly reduced. In one respect, the result was similar to that of Weimar’s hyperinflation; paper savings were suddenly devalued. This time, however, there was a limit to any losses. What was more, quite small quantities of the new currency would actually buy goods. When Ludwig Erhard, the economic director who had undertaken the reform, also dismantled price and other controls, the scene was set for the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, the German “economic miracle,” fueled by freedom and competition and the energy they released.
By 1950 West Germany’s gross national product had caught up with the 1936 figure. Between 1950 and 1955 the national income rose by 12 percent a year, while exports grew even faster. From a small deficit in 1950, gold and foreign currency reserves increased to nearly 13 billion deutsche marks by 1955, while unemployment fell from 2.5 million to 900,000. Per capita income nearly doubled. New homes were built at the rate of 500,000 a year. By 1955 West Germany had more than 100,000 television sets. Bombed cities had been rebuilt. Every other family seemed to possess a Volkswagen “beetle” car.
West Germany’s was not the only economic miracle. France, spurred by the bright young graduates of grandes écoles like the Polytechnique, was modernizing rapidly—electrifying railways, launching new power projects, discovering natural gas, building nuclear reactors, mechanizing coal mines, and designing the Caravelle jet airplane. In 1948 France’s total output had been only just above the 1936 level. By 1955 it was half again as high. Between 1955 and 1958 French productivity increased by 8 percent a year, faster than anywhere else in Europe.
Italy, however, was not to be left behind. With a comparatively low starting point, plentiful labour, and new discoveries of oil and, especially, natural gas, it was able to increase the gross national product by 32.9 percent between 1950 and 1954. In Italian industry between 1950 and 1958, the average annual growth rate was 9 percent. As in West Germany, the transformation was visible: better clothes; smarter shop fronts; higher meat consumption; bicycles replaced by motor scooters and later by small cars.
In Britain, although there was no economic miracle, there were industrial success stories in chemicals, quality cars, nuclear energy, and aviation. It was a British airline that in 1952 inaugurated the world’s first purely jet airline service. By the end of the decade, Heathrow in London was the busiest airport in the world.
By 1955 all western European countries were producing more than in the 1930s. Abroad, from 1952 onward, western Europe was earning more than it spent. Between 1950 and 1955, average productivity in Europe increased by 26 percent. Although British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was both misunderstood and mocked when he made the remark, he had some justification for telling an audience on July 20, 1957: “Most of our people have never had it so good.”
The benefits, for ordinary Europeans, took many forms. There was easier access to higher education and cheaper mass travel. There was more varied food; there was better health, preserved by better medicine. There were new synthetic materials, more plentiful housing, and wider automobile ownership. There were stereophonic recordings, colour television, high-fidelity audio equipment, and cheap paperback editions of serious books. There were new, more classless eating-houses, pedestrian precincts, supermarkets, and shopping malls. What its critics called “Americanization” had arrived.
But affluence had a downside, in Europe as elsewhere. It often harmed the environment: more cars meant more roads, and more yachts meant more marinas. It multiplied the production of waste, not all of it biodegradable. It sometimes seemed to glorify greed and snobbery, especially when it passed some people by. It troubled the young and the thoughtfuclass="underline" their material needs sated, they might be left asking, “So what?” With money more plentiful, it was easier to be spendthrift. With greater prosperity, drug abuse and alcoholism became more common; so, paradoxically, did hooliganism and casual crime. One of the by-products of the affluent society was self-doubt and self-questioning—the kind of critique of “consumer values” that was voiced by student rebels in and around 1968. It left many Europeans unsure of their deeper objectives and, still more, of their role in a bewildering world.
The reflux of empire
One major change in the world during the decades that followed World War II was the emergence of more than 50 new sovereign states. Essentially, this was the result of decolonization.
Before World War II the countries of western Europe had ruled, controlled, or powerfully influenced vast tracts of territory overseas. The main exceptions were Spain, which had long since lost its empire, and Germany, whose colonies had been confiscated after World War I. Otherwise, Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal remained imperial powers, holding direct or indirect sway over most of Southeast Asia, parts of the West Indies, nearly all of Africa, and much of the Middle East.
Gradually, what had once been colonies, protectorates, or client states won their independence. Some 800 million people were now responsible for their own affairs. Few were richer or more secure. Many retained links with Europe—linguistic, cultural, economic or commercial; many depended on European investment and aid. But they were free of their colonial masters. Painfully, and sometimes violently, the old order had been superseded, and new relationships had to be built.
The Italian colonies in North and East Africa, like the Japanese empire in East Asia, were dismantled fairly quickly. Independence likewise came early to various Middle Eastern countries, although for many years European influence there continued. Egypt had become formally independent in 1922, Iraq in 1932, and Lebanon and Syria in 1941. Iran’s independence was guaranteed by Britain and the U.S.S.R. in 1942. The year 1946 saw Jordan’s independence, and 1948 the proclamation of Israel. Historical ties (including the memory of Hitler’s Holocaust), strategic pressures, and the need for Middle Eastern oil kept Europe deeply involved in the area long after most of its countries’ formal independence had become much more real. The Suez expedition of 1956 actually brought down a British government; oil price rises in the 1970s caused a European recession; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 for a time seemed to threaten the risk of world war.