HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The article evaluates the degree to which the Second World War was responsible for the development of Europe since 1945. It seeks to disentangle effects that were clearly directly due to the war from those which can be seen as the result of changes already affecting pre-war Europe, and those due to post-war developments, such as the Cold War and the European Union. It examines the relationship between long term social, economic and cultural developments and the impact of the war and political turning points.

The Impact of the War

That great events have great effects seems a truism and it would follow that the Second World War, a conflict which caused a colossal loss of life, saw a continent divided as mighty armies strove for supremacy, and ended with much of Europe in ruins and the rest impoverished, must have had a transforming effect. Few would deny that the great context for the development of Europe, politically, socially and economically, in the immediate post-war years was the war, but did it really transform Europe and, if so, for how long?

Among the problems in assessing the changes to Europe, its nations, societies, economies and cultures, that may or may not be seen as consequent upon the war is the perennial historian's dilemma in distinguishing between short and long term developments. Many of the changes that seem at first sight to have been due to the conflict and its aftermath may well have been simply the further effects of salient developments evident before the war. Then, of course, the impact of the war varied considerably as between the defeated and the victorious states, and indeed between combatants and neutrals, the latter providing a "control" for any assessment of the war's effects. Post-war Germany and Poland looked very different in, say, 1950 to what they had been in 1939, but can the same be said for Sweden or, for that matter, Spain?

An essay on this subject written in, shall we say, 1950, 1970 or 1992, would have a very different perspective, for many of changes made by the war were far from permanent and, arguably, post-war developments had a greater effect. This is most obviously the case when we consider the redrawing of the map of Europe in the immediate post war period. The war ended with what in historical terms was an odd peace, for there was no peace treaty with Germany,¹ in part because the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers had left no authority to conclude peace with, and also because of the disintegration of the alliance of the victorious powers shortly after the moment of victory. Nevertheless, states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) disappeared, frontiers were changed, and, most importantly, the division of Germany into occupied zones provided the blueprint for the emergence of two German states. In general, East Central Europe moved west, in terms of frontier changes, seen most evidently in those of Poland, which lost territory to the Soviet Union and gained it at the expense of what had been Germany, and because of the movement of millions of people, expelled from their homes and moving west in search of security. There was also a movement in the opposite direction as Latvians and other Baltic people and numerous other ethnic groups, such as Crimean Tartars, were forcibly moved eastwards by the Soviet authorities.

A feature of the post-1945 settlement was thus, if settlement is not an inappropriate term, the brutal displacement of populations. Whereas the Versailles Settlement  had attempted to make frontiers coincide with national or ethnic divisions, the aftermath of the Second World War saw peoples made to fit frontiers. In particular, millions of Germans were expelled from East Prussia and other German territory ceded to Poland, and from the Sudetenland, while there were parallel movements of Poles from the territories ceded to the Soviet Union into that gained from Germany. Although the fate of Eastern and Central Europe was largely decided at Yalta in February 1944, the future political shape of the continent was formally agreed at Potsdam,  17 July to 2 August 1945, where the Allied leaders decided that there should be an inter-allied council to co-ordinate the four occupied zones of Germany and agreed that Austria should be independent, France be returned Alsace-Lorraine, and Czechoslovakia the Sudetenland, and that Poland's western frontier should be the Oder-Neisse Line (previously the Curzon and then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line).

The palimpsest of the 1945 arrangements was distinct in 1950 and discernible in 1970 or even the late 1980s, when troops of the wartime allies still garrisoned Berlin, but by 1992, after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the "velvet" revolutions in the satrap people's republics, and the reunification of Germany, the map of Europe resembled that in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, rather more than that of 1945-92, though the end of Yugoslavia and recent events in the Ukrainian Republic remind us that political geography is rarely permanent; a hundred-year-old inhabitant of Lviv will have been an Austro-Hungarian, a Polish, a Soviet, and a Ukrainian national during his or her lifetime.

We must also consider the view that the two World Wars should not necessarily be treated as autonomous but perhaps be seen as parts of a single conflict, a "Thirty Years War" of the twentieth century,² a conflict that arose from the long-term political and economic rivalries of great powers and Europe's fault lines which led these rivalries to ignite into warfare. It is, indeed, possible to argue that the Cold War period can be seen as at least a sequel to it. Such an interpretation of the dark history of Europe in the twentieth century does, of course, downgrade the importance of ideology and of the "great dictators" and has been attacked on the grounds that the coming to power of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was, not only the major cause of World War II, but that his hysterical and paranoid agenda gave that war its own unique and horrific nature.³ Acceptance of the "long war" thesis would tend to shift enquiry from the particularity of World War II as an engine of change to longer term European developments, problems and rivalries.

Nevertheless, the outcome of the Second World War and the nature of the fracturing alliance that triumphed was clearly the major factor in determining, in political-geographic respects, the map of post-war Europe. Its impact was clearly discernible for nearly half a century, although we can debate whether it was the position of the armies of the western powers vis-a-vis the Red Army in 1945 or the subsequent announcement of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947, the formation of NATO in 1948,  or the entry of West Germany into the alliance in 1954 that decisively made for a divided Europe. In that the division was also an ideological one, it determined the nature of economies and societies. It is, however, when we come to the economic and social effects of the war upon Europe, that determining the degrees and the ways in which the experience of the war as well as its outcome shaped the post-war world becomes difficult. The major problem is that of distinguishing between pre-war influences, the experience of the war, its result, and the Cold War, which followed so swiftly.

Source: A.W. Purdue, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/alliances-and-wars/war-as-an-agent-of-transfer/a-w-purdue-the-transformative-impact-of-world-war-ii
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