HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

A number of developments, which were common to most western European countries and which shaped their political, social and economic systems, are often put down to the experience and effects of the war. As we have seen, one result of the war was that the role of the state increased enormously in most countries, yet the degree to which this occurred and the forms it took differed widely, while there are anomalies in any easy elision from the war-time or pre-war experiences to this development.

It might have been expected that those countries in which society and economy were officially dedicated to the direction of the state would have moved with speed after the outbreak of war in the direction of a total mobilisation of all resources including human resources.

Such states have often been called "totalitarian", though human nature, even when faced with horrendous penalties for disobedience, has inevitably eluded total control. The pre-war Soviet Union got the closest to being a state where the party controlled nearly every aspect of life and had little need to move towards a war economy because it already had one: its command economy gave armaments production priority over living standards and continued to do so during and after the war.

Fascist Italy for all its supposed commitment to the corporate state never came close and the church, individual employers and the monarchy all retained a degree of autonomy and influence. Italy had peaked in armaments production and military spending before her entry into the war and both war-related production and the industrial economy as a whole fell back after 1940.¹⁸

One of the great paradoxes is that National Socialist Germany, the state, whose leaders' rhetoric was full of words like "planning", "corporation" and "state, party and society", had not prepared its economy for a long war and, allowing business interests, workers and consumers to enjoy something closer to a peacetime economy than any other combatant state, managed to avoid a total war economy until 1942. The reasons for this have been the subject of debate among historians: one answer has been that many of the problems facing the German economy were able to be solved by the state's territorial expansion and even impelled that expansion. 

Czechoslovakia offered rich pickings and it and further conquests provided raw materials and productive capacity and disguised the overheated state of the German economy, while prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union Germany was able, due to the pact with the USSR, to take raw materials from Eastern Europe without interference. Thus, it has been argued, Germany was able to do without the imposition of a total war economy during the first years of the war and spare its population the consequent hardships, though, of course, the bulk of the population was reduced to abject poverty in the war's final year.¹⁹

Another theory is that Hitler did plan for a total war, but one that would begin in the mid-1940s and found himself at war while plans for a total war economy had only begun to be implemented.²⁰ The National Socialists may also have been reluctant to impose sacrifices upon the population because of memories of the First World War, when civilian unrest at austerity was seen to have played a part in Germany's defeat.

Another paradox is that it was, Britain, arguably the most liberal-capitalist of pre-war European states, which, apart from the Soviet Union, achieved with its war economy the closest subordination of economy and society to the state, introducing rationing  and controls on travel, the direction of labour, and the limitation of the production of what were deemed luxury goods.

Though the efficacy and success of Britain's state direction of the economy and especially its record of productivity of war materials has been challenged, there was a widespread acceptance in 1945 that it had been responsible for seeing the country through to victory and Britain, for good or ill, continued to employ state control in its post-war recovery programme. There was a plethora of state controlled marketing boards and rationing persisted into the 1950s. This was a world where "the man from the ministry knows best".²¹

Rather than an effect of the war, it can be argued that the growth of the state was a predominant feature of all European societies, during and before the war, driven by the social tensions arising from industrialisation and urbanisation. Imperial Germany had, after all introduced a state insurance system in the late nineteenth century and the development of state welfare was a feature of the response to inter-war unemployment in most countries, as was state intervention on Keynesian lines to stimulate economies. Sweden, which was neutral in both wars, has been described as "relatively backward, both in economic and political terms" before 1914,²² but had by the 1970s become the epitome of the prosperous welfare state.

It may well be that we have to reassess the nature of the economic and social policies of the National Socialist regime in Germany and those of Vichy France when considering their impact upon post-war developments. Nazi economic policies had been largely welcomed by Germans in the 1930s and Mark Roseman (born 1958)  has observed that class relationships were visibly changing under the regime: "Everywhere there was the characteristic and curious mixture of the Fuhrer-Prinzip (sic) and egalitarianism".²³

He concludes that neither fascism nor war left many positive legacies, but certainly the years of Nazi rule reduced aristocratic influence and post-war Germany is sometimes seen as a "levelled middle class society".²⁴ The Vichy government in France, it has been suggested, had, despite its Catholic-conservative ideology, an approach to planning and a faith in a technocratic elite that had an enduring influence upon post-war French economic policies: it "attracted experts and technocrats.... their plans for modernization stood to prosper without the obstacles of parliament, party politics and trades unions".²⁵

Though largely still-born because Hitler viewed them as mere tools for exploitation, the economic agreements with Germany and Italy between 1940 and 1943 looked forward to the European Coal and Steel Agreement of 1951. In Britain, the war undoubtedly led to a controlled economy, and the Beveridge Report of 1942 is seen as leading to post-war welfare legislation and was a factor in the election victory of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee (1883–1967)  in 1945. Yet the 1930s had already seen improvements in the system of unemployment benefits and a number of planning initiatives introduced to stimulate the economy, while groups in the Conservative Party shared with Labour leaders a belief in the almost miraculous capacity of planning and corporatism to transform economies. 

In short, the evidence for a direct connection between the experience of the war and post-war developments is mixed and varied and, when the reaction against corporatism and the swing back to the free market and a lesser role for the state began, it can be seen, in its national variations, as return to pre-war trajectories. Britain, for instance, can be seen as taking up where it had left off in 1939 in moving from the 1950s towards a consumer-orientated economy and society.

Despite the continuities, however, it can be argued that the impact of and the memory of the war led to a major change in the role of the state and what it meant to citizens in much of western Europe had changed fundamentally by the 1960s. Rather than the focus of loyalty for cultural or ethnic reasons, a body to which the individual owed obedience, the state became a dispenser of rights and it owed the individual the good life, order and stability. This process has gone furthest in Germany and has been marked by the de-militarisation of the state and by what some have seen as "constitutional patriotism".²⁶

James Sheehan (born 1937)  has argued that the "civilian state", marked by a commitment "to escape the destructive antagonisms of the past" and provide the good life for its populace, has become the European model.²⁷ With the exception of France and Britain such states spend little on defence and restrict the roles of their armed forces. It has been questioned whether such liberal states can provide the sense of identity which has been such a function of nation states,²⁸ and whether the priority they place upon peace, though it may make them unlikely to start wars, fits them, either singly or as a group, to be able to prevent them.