Postwar

The story in brief

Tony Judt was a British historian at New York University who had written mostly on French intellectual history. Postwar, published in 2005, was his largest work, a history of the whole of Europe, east and west, from the end of the war in 1945 to the early years of the twenty-first century. It runs to some nine hundred pages. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2008 and died in 2010.

The book is organised in four parts. The first covers the years of devastation and recovery after 1945, including the expulsions of millions of people, the trials and purges of collaborators, and the onset of the Cold War. The second covers the years of prosperity and the welfare state in the West, and of Stalinism and its aftermath in the East, to the crises of 1968. The third covers the economic shocks and political changes of the 1970s and 1980s. The fourth covers the collapse of communism, the reunification of Germany, the wars in Yugoslavia and the expansion of the European Union. An epilogue reflects on how Europe came to remember the Holocaust.

The decisions that made it

Judt shows Europe’s postwar shape as the product of decisions taken under the pressure of ruin.

After 1945 the victorious powers, and governments across liberated Europe, had to decide how far to punish those who had collaborated with Nazi occupation. Trials and purges took place everywhere, but Judt shows that they were limited by necessity. New states needed administrators, teachers and police, and many of them had served under occupation. Most countries chose a degree of forgetting in order to rebuild.

Populations were moved on a vast scale. Borders were redrawn, especially in central and eastern Europe, and millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others were expelled or resettled, producing nation-states far more ethnically uniform than before the war. Judt notes that this brutal simplification contributed to later stability.

In 1947 the United States offered the Marshall Plan, aid for European reconstruction tied to cooperation among recipient countries. The Soviet Union refused it and kept its satellite states from accepting it. The offer and the refusal helped harden the division of Europe.

In western Europe, governments built welfare states and mixed economies, with public provision of health, pensions and education alongside market economies. Judt presents this as a decision rooted in the experience of the 1930s and the war, a determination never again to let economic collapse produce political extremism.

In 1950 French and German leaders agreed to pool their coal and steel industries, the first step toward what became the European Union. Judt shows the move as practical as much as idealistic, a means for France to contain Germany and for Germany to regain respectability.

In 1989 Soviet leaders, under Mikhail Gorbachev, chose not to use force to keep communist governments in power in eastern Europe. Within months they fell, largely peacefully, and in 1990 Germany was reunified.

What the book sees in them

Judt’s central theme is that Europe’s peace and prosperity were not inevitable but constructed, and that the construction rested on choices that carried moral costs. One of them was silence. For decades after the war, many European societies told themselves stories of resistance and victimhood, and avoided confronting their own complicity in the persecution and murder of Jews. Only from the 1960s, and more fully from the 1980s and 1990s, did the Holocaust become central to European memory. Judt’s epilogue argues that remembering it had become, by the end of the century, a condition of membership in Europe.

He also writes as someone who valued the postwar settlement, and especially social democracy, and who worried in the book’s final pages about whether its foundations would survive. He wrote at length on that worry in his last book, Ill Fares the Land (2010).

Since it was published

The years since have tested many of the arrangements whose creation Judt described: the financial crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis that followed, the migration crisis of 2015, Britain’s departure from the European Union, the rise of nationalist parties and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Readers have returned to Postwar to understand what was at stake. Its account of how Europe dealt with its past has also been widely cited in debates about how other societies should remember difficult histories.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what a new order must forget in order to function, and what it costs to forget. Postwar Europe needed the skills of people who had served under occupation, and it chose to look away from much of what they had done. The choice made recovery possible and left a moral debt that took decades to address.

It asks what institutions are built to prevent. Europe’s welfare states and its union were designed by people who had seen what happens when economies collapse and nations compete without restraint. Institutions keep their purpose only as long as people remember why they were built.

And it asks how lasting change actually happens. The European Union began not with a grand constitution but with coal and steel, a small practical step that created interests in further cooperation. The site’s idea page Path Dependence and Lock-In explores how such early steps shape later possibilities.