The Transformative Impact of World War II

The relentless advance of Allied forces in 1944 and 1945 achieved a victory, so complete as to prevent any revival of the defeated regimes. Although celebrated with justice by the victors, it was gained at an enormous cost to all of Europe. The excesses of the Soviet forces, which raped and looted their way through eastern Germany are now well known,⁴ but for many years this went unrecognised by western writers. If the conduct of the western Allies was far superior, total war cannot be waged without leaving desolation and a huge loss of civilian life in its wake and, what one author has called, "collective amnesia",⁵ has obscured the costs of liberation as armies fought their way through France, Belgium and Holland.

Europe in 1945 offered a picture of desolation and ruin. Parts of the Soviet Union had been fought over three times, while Poland had suffered aggression from both Germany and Russia in 1939 and the Soviet advance in 1944 had paused only to allow the German army to destroy Warsaw. Central Europe has been described as a "lunar landscape dotted with enormous heaps of rubble and bomb craters", ⁶ while, in Berlin, "Ninety-five percent of its urban area lay in ruins".⁷

The state of Britain and France was better only in comparison. Victorious but battered, Britain was, a threadbare and austere country with an exhausted economy, now that American aid was withdrawn, and the French economy was dislocated: "food was scarce in the winter of 1944-5, and there were virtually no reserves of gold or foreign currency".⁸

Two European civil wars (or one punctuated by a lengthy armistice) had not only resulted in the problems of reconstruction, but had substantially reduced the power and influence of the major European states with the exception of Russia, long perceived in western and central Europe as largely an extra-European power, but one whose armies had penetrated deep into Central Europe in 1945 much as they had done in 1815. As the Cold War developed, it became clear that only two powers in the world had emerged from the war with enhanced strength and that these two "super powers" were the USA and the Soviet Union or USSR.

A further weakening of the position of Europe came with the diminuendo of the colonial empires  of Britain, France and the Netherlands. The stress and expense of war and of humiliation at the hands of Japan had already impacted severely upon the positions of the imperial powers, while the opposition of the USA and of the emergent United Nations to colonial possessions was a further factor. Winston Churchill (1874–1965)  had, perhaps, failed to realise or had ignored the anti-colonial implications of the Atlantic Charter, which he and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)  had signed in 1941, or the strength of American opposition to empires. US policy was, nevertheless, ambiguous as anti-imperialism could conflict with its Cold War interests; having refused to back Britain during the Suez crisis in 1956, it proceeded to press her to retain bases of strategic importance, as with Cyprus and Diego Garcia.

The process of decolonisation  set in, sometimes "with astonishing – and in some cases excessive speed", as with the British Empire,⁹ at a single blow with the Dutch Empire, collapse and precipitate withdrawal as with the Belgian Empire, or accompanied by a hard and lengthy struggle as with France's wars in Vietnam and Algeria,¹⁰ but it was practically complete by the early 1960s.

Essentially the imperial powers lost the appetite and will to hold on to empires, which were no longer seen as worthwhile by their home electorates. As Mark Mazower (born 1958)  has commented, "imperial powers were rarely forced to retreat as a direct result of military insurrection – Algeria was the exception rather than the rule".¹¹ 

 Nevertheless, decolonisation impacted severely upon the political positions of the imperial powers, particularly Britain and France. Britain, at first sought a substitute for Empire in the Commonwealth, but was then to waver between Atlanticism and Europe, while France, hastily, turned its attention towards Europe and followed a policy of forming a close relationship with West Germany.

The physical and economic recovery of Europe was, despite the enormous damage done to the infrastructure, industry, agriculture and commerce, to be quicker than most observers expected and that of Western Europe was spectacular after the bleak and austere immediate post-war years. It has been argued that it was the depths to which Germany had sunk in 1945, the near-starvation, disorder and hopelessness that inspired a West German recovery that prioritised economic recovery stability, and order,¹² while another view is that it was a determined effort to erase the past.¹³

A major characteristic of those years was the deepening divide between Eastern and Western Europe, while the concept of central Europe, which states like Hungary and Czechoslovakia had identified with, disappeared for several decades as a political and cultural concept. These developments were underpinned by different economic and social systems and, if in part the result of the war and differing national traditions, were also consequent on America's aid to the West via the Marshall Plan.

A salient feature of the recovering Europe has been identified as the increased role of the state as director of economies and, via increased taxation and state welfare, of civil societies and the organisation and direction of states for the war effort has been held to be a major influence on these developments. A little disputed effect of total war is that it vastly increases the power of governments and both governments and peoples had become accustomed to, respectively, positions of command and dependency.

Whether these post-war developments represented a continuation of war-time systems of government, had already been evident in pre-war Europe, or were largely a response to the problems of a ravaged Europe can be debated. The more extreme forms of state control of economic and social life experienced by the states of Eastern and Central Europe may be seen as imported from, or imposed by, the Soviet Union, though many of these states had formerly been used to a high degree of government direction and were experiencing some of the worst problems of post-war dislocation and poverty.

Central to the recovery of Western Europe was a balance or synthesis between liberal capitalism and socialism, though in France and Italy this was challenged by powerful Communist Parties, strengthened by the Resistance movements which had developed late in the war. The general direction of governments' policies was contested between social democratic and moderate conservative parties, but moved steadily towards the latter from the early 1950s.