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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Barbarism and Civilisation: A History of Europe in Our Time

Best or worst?

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century

Six decades or more later what may seem just as remarkable is the way European life regained some measure of morality, and how civilisation was recovered. The degree of change in the 30 years after the war was astonishing, in some ways more so than what the past 30 years have witnessed. With a struggle or without, the European powers shed their empires. Stalinist tyranny had its last frightful spasm, with show trials and brutal repression throughout east Europe. And yet another world war was averted, while it gradually became clear that Communism was decaying from within, until the final collapse, and what Wasserstein calls ‘the zigzag road to European unity’.

No book of this length can be inerrant. The figure of 400,000 German civilians killed by bombing in the second world war is considerably lower than that usually accepted (although when, for example, the estimates for the Yugoslav dead in that war can range so wildly it isn’t easy to be confident about any such figures). On a trivial level, Roy Jenkins was not a member of Harold Wilson’s Cabinet when it was formed in 1964, and it was not the case that James Callaghan’s ‘decided’ to call an election in 1979: he had no choice when his government was defeated in the Commons. There are also broader, presumably deliberate, choices of emphasis and omission. The book is excellent on economic and social aspects, including such neglected topics as sewage, but contains little about high culture, art, music and literature, and not much either about popular culture, including sport. The dramatic end of the 1966 World Cup gets a mention, but not the ‘miracle of Bern’ in 1954, when West German victory played an important part in restoring national pride.

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