The perils of peace

In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever.

That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914. Three decades thereafter saw a terrifying regression, two wars on a scale surpassing anything ever known, totalitarian regimes called Communist and Fascist of a kind also never known before, economic collapse and mass-murder: in the title of Mark Mazower’s book about 20th-century Europe, this was a Dark Continent. Even at the moment Hitler killed himself, there was no necessary reason to suppose that it was the previous appalling 30 years which had been aberrant rather than the century before them. How that question was answered — how Europe recovered and came to enjoy for the past 60 years what has been, for all of many woes and setbacks, by any standards another golden age — is the subject of Judt’s masterly and exhilarating Postwar.

Immediately after VE-Day the prospects were by no means all promising. The Wehrmacht had been defeated but the Red Army (which had done most of the defeating) stood on the Elbe, and for several years, in Denis Healey’s phrase, needed only boots to reach the Atlantic. Half of Europe had exchanged one tyranny for another; for a time it looked as though Stalin could increase his reach by democratic means — in 1946, the Communists won 28.6