Abstract
An impressive book in an interesting series, but this is certainly not a handbook. Indeed, if dropped from any height, this volume might well be fatal. As in any collection of this type, there is fascination to be had in considering the role of choice in deciding what to include and what to exclude, and there is particular interest in assessing the resulting emphasis/bias in the work as a whole. In part, therefore, taking up Dan Stone’s interesting piece on ‘Memory Wars in the “New Europe”’, there is the question of the perspective of the present, and this is of especial note because the book deals with the present. Given the latter point, it is particularly apparent that the role of economics receives less attention than it deserves. There are two fine chapters on the subject, but simply not enough, given the greater emphasis placed on cultural identities.
Furthermore, it is not clear that it is sensible to begin in 1945. Starting then entails a focus, as in Stone’s collection, on the legacy of the Second World War, on post-war recovery, on the Cold War, not least its early stages, and on the establishment on the European Economic Community, the basis of the modern European Union.
In contrast, starting at 1970 offers very different possibilities, and this is particularly true if the view is that from the mid 2010s, when, for many readers, the early Cold War is a dimming memory. Indeed, for the young, including the bulk of the electorate across Europe, 1945 is fairly distant.
Focusing on the post-1970 period offers a clear difference in coverage, and therefore theme. The years 1945–70 not only take us back to the Second World War, and its legacy in the shape of the stark divisions of the Cold War, but also deal with the prolonged post-war period of economic recovery and growth. This growth was important to social shifts and to a more general sense of improvement and prospects, contributing, more than its advocates realized, to the exuberant optimism and cultural and social experimentation known as the 1960s. More specifically, economic growth in Western Europe helped fuel the optimism of the early stages of Western European integration.
Starting in the 1970s takes us in different directions. For the political dimension, the focus is on the dissolution of the divisions that had characterized the previous quarter-century. The 1970s saw both East–West détente and, more significantly, the lasting collapse of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Greece, Portugal and Spain, in part the subject of a chapter by Helen Graham and Alejandro Quiroga. The fall of these regimes prefigured the changes that accompanied, and followed, the collapse of Communism. There was also, from the early 1970s, a challenge to the previous period of economic expansion. This challenge was a product not only of the major oil price shock following the 1973 Arab–Israeli Yom Kippur War, with the significant impact this had on inflation, growth and economic optimism, but also of serious fiscal and economic problems in the international commercial system, not least those that led to the end of the Bretton Woods fixed-rate exchange currency system. These problems prefigured both the subsequent decades of often troubled economic growth and the severe difficulties that persist today. More particularly, a growing sense of Europe as relatively less prominent and successful on a global scale became readily apparent.
The thought of possible alternatives indicates the stimulating nature of Stone’s collection, and, with the editor contributing three of the chapters, this is indeed a collection that bears his imprint more than most. His essay ‘Memory Wars in the “New Europe”’, which closes the book, is one of the best in the volume, although its focus on the shock of the past contrasts with another recent book from Oxford University Press, David Ellwood’s The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (2012), which very much puts the emphasis on the need to confront the new. Stone closes with the reflection ‘Now that post-war Europe is itself fast on the road to becoming history, its very past-ness means it too is ripe for inclusion in ongoing struggles to control memory and thus to shape the “new Europe”’ (p. 730). He also sensibly locates his essay in an international context of wider, global concerns with memory (pp. 726–8).
Memory is also of concern for Roger Markwick, although, again, it is the Second World War that is his topic, which offers a very partial way to engage with the number of narratives that can be offered for the period since 1945. In ‘The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory’, Marwick claims that the conflict has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union (p. 692), such that state propaganda ‘continues to strike a real resonance with the individual life and death experiences and memories of millions of former Soviet citizens’ (p. 693). Also on memory, Samuel Moyn considers ‘Intellectuals and Nazism’, suggesting that Holocaust memory was confronted mainly by adapting the old frameworks of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism (p. 690).
This emphasis on continuity appears from a different direction in ‘Images of Europe, European Images: Postwar European Cinema and Television Culture’, for Ib Bondebjerg suggests that ‘behind the contours of a new, digital, transnational media culture in Europe lie very old and well established differences’ between states (p. 666). Robert Young on postcolonialism is possibly less central than much that is left out of the book, while a similar comment could be made about an otherwise very fine piece, G. J. Ashworth and Brian Graham’s ‘Heritage and the Reconceptualisation of the Postwar European City’. Water supply or sewage disposal are clearly less significant. Similarly, the functional plays less than its appropriate role in Rosemary Wakeman’s account of mass consumption and leisure. A more anchored account is perforce provided by Leopoldo Nuti in his essay on ‘A Continent Bristling with Arms’. Like much of the book, this essay underplays the last quarter-century. In contrast, Ido de Haan on the Western European welfare state engages more directly with the situation since the Cold War.
The range of the book helps make it invigorating. There is also a welcome treatment of Eastern Europe, notably in chapters by Mark Pittaway and Douglas Selwage, and by Stone himself, while Martin Klimke on 1968 captures the importance of that year. Stephen Castles outlines the interplay between identities and citizenship, a relationship made dynamic by mass immigration. Thus, an important and worthwhile volume, and one that is very much of its time.