The Penguin History of the World

That there were clear limits to the dislocation of the old monolithic unity of Communism was clearly enough shown in 1968 when a Communist government in Czechoslovakia set about liberalizing its internal structure and developing trade relations with West Germany. This was not to be tolerated. After a series of attempts to bring her to heel, Czechoslovakia was invaded in August of that year by Warsaw Pact forces. To avoid a repetition of what had happened in Hungary in 1956, the Czech government did not resist and a brief attempt to provide an example of ‘socialism with a human face’, as a Czech politician had put it, was obliterated.

None the less, Sino-Soviet tension combined with tremblings within the eastern bloc (and perhaps the uneasiness of the United States over relations with Latin American countries) to lead to suggestions that the world as a whole was abandoning bipolarity for ‘polycentrism’, as an Italian Communist called it. The loosening of Cold War simplicities had indeed been surprising. Other complicating developments had meanwhile emerged in western Europe. By 1980 it was clear that one of the historic roles of its peoples was over since they by then ruled no more of the world’s surface than their ancestors had done 500 years earlier. Huge transformations had taken place, and irreversible things had been done since then. Although Europe’s imperial past was over, the discovery of a new role was well under way. Western Europe had begun to show some of the first, feeble signs that nationalism’s grip on the human potential for large-scale organization might be loosening in the very place where nationalism had been born.

Legacies of common European experience have been traced by enthusiasts back to the Carolingians, but 1945 will do as a starting-point. From that date the continent’s future for more than forty years was mainly determined by the outcome of the war and Soviet policy. The likelihood of another great civil war in the West over the German question seemed remote since defeat and partition had disposed of the German problem and so quietened the fears of France. Soviet policy had then given the western countries many new reasons to co-operate more closely; the events in eastern Europe in the late 1940s struck them as a warning of what might happen if the Americans ever went home and they remained divided. The Marshall Plan and NATO turned out to have been the first two of many important steps towards the integration of a new Europe.

That integration had more than one source. The initiation of the Marshall Plan was followed by the setting-up of an Organization (at first of sixteen countries, but later expanded) of European Economic Co-operation in 1948, but the following year, a month after the signing of the treaty setting up NATO, the first political bodies representing ten different European states were also set up under a new Council of Europe. The economic forces making for integration were developing more rapidly, however. Customs Unions had already been created in 1948 between the ‘Benelux’ countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), and (in a different form) between France and Italy. Finally, the most important of the early steps towards greater integration emerged from a French proposal for a Coal and Steel Community. This came into existence formally in 1952 and embraced France, Italy, the Benelux countries and, most significantly, West Germany. It made possible the rejuvenation of the industrial heartland of western Europe and was the main step towards the integration of western Germany into a new international structure. Through economic rearrangement, there came into existence the means of containing while reviving West Germany, whose strength, it was becoming clear, was needed in a western Europe menaced by Soviet land power. Under the influence of events in Korea, American official opinion (to the consternation of some Europeans) was in the early 1950s rapidly coming around to the view that Germany had to be rearmed.

Other facts, too, helped to ease the way to supranational organization in Europe. Political weakness, of which their domestic Communist parties were symptoms, subsided in both France and Italy, mainly thanks to economic recovery. Communists had ceased to play any part in their governments as early as 1947, and the danger that French and Italian democracy might suffer a fate like Czechoslovakia’s had disappeared by 1950. Anti-Communist opinion tended to coalesce about parties whose integrating forces were either Roman Catholic politicians or social democrats well aware of the fate of their comrades in eastern Europe. Broadly speaking, these changes meant that western European governments of a moderate right-wing complexion pursued similar aims of economic recovery, welfare service provision and western European integration in practical matters during the 1950s.