Europe's new narrative.

• Author: Walker, Martin
• Position: Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 - Book review

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Penguin Press: New York, 2005), 964 pp., $39.95.

THE THEME of Tony Judt's magisterial history of Europe since 1945 hinges on the symbolic moment that he suggests took place in Paris on December 28, 1973, when "the Master Narrative of the twentieth century ... [and] its core assumptions began to erode and crumble" with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. This was not the first, and certainly not the most literary, exposure of the Soviet experiment as "a barbaric fraud", but it was the fatal blow to the long and lingering loyalty that so many Europeans had maintained to the utopian hopes of the 1917 Revolution, a loyalty that was given a new lease of life by the epic of the Red Army's resistance and its march to Berlin in 1945. And in rejecting the last claim of Soviet communism to be on the side of history or social progress or even human decency, the recognition of the gulag required Europeans to question anew the assumptions that lay behind so many of the national and political myths that had survived the double suicide of Old Europe in the First and Second World Wars. Like Auschwitz, the gulag was unforgivable; there was nothing inevitable about "History" that could not be changed by individual courage and decision; the Left could not therefore be pardoned for Marxism's sins by pleading good intentions.

After The Gulag Archipelago it was no longer conceivable that an eminent British liberal Marxist like E. P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class (1966), could complain to East European dissidents, as he did to Poland's Professor Leszek Kolakowski after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, that their critiques of Moscow were undermining the West's faith in socialism. By 1978, with the publication of Francois Furet's Penser la Revolution Francaise, Frenchmen even had to reconsider the great myth of 1789 as the founding triumph of the Rights of Man and of the modern politics of Left and Right. The British rethought the welfare state of 1945 and the abiding political fairy tale of One Nation and in 1979 elected Margaret Thatcher to transform their economic system and their social order. Germany's Social Democrats had to ask searching questions about the utility of Ostpolitik and to acknowledge the lethal cunning of an American foreign policy that had inserted the Helsinki process like a crowbar into the vulnerabilities of the Soviet empire. By 1982 Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats were in power, and France's Socialist President Francois Mitterrand was calling on his country's businessmen to modernize "a l'Americaine." By the end of that decade, the heirs of Helsinki across Eastern Europe had seized their moment, and first the Berlin Wall and then the entire Soviet edifice had crumbled away unlamented.

JUDT, BORN and educated in Britain, now lives and teaches at New York University, where he directs the Remarque Institute for European Studies. But this is a book of a classic European intellectual who is as at home with the thought and intellectuals of Paris, Warsaw and Prague as he is with the details of British economic crisis and German Wirtschaftwunder (economic miracle). He has written a magnificent conventional history of modern Europe, but its quality...