A History of Europe since 1945

Why WWII was Transformative East/West Berlin Divide Communism Refugees/Immigrants/Ethnic Minorities/Racism/Colonies De-Germanization/Retribution: Anti-Americanism/Agnlo-Euro-Influence/Inter-Euro-Conflict: Politics/Religion/Language: In 4-5pages (1000-1250words), please answer the following question: Tony Judt writes in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 that the Second World War “changed everything....The old rulers of Bucharest and Sofia, Warsaw, Budapest and even Prague had no future: their world had been swept aside by the Nazis’ transformative violence. It remained only to decide the political shape of the new order that must now replace the unrecoverable past.”1 In a well-written manner, explain why the Second World War era was so transformative. Did the victorious European powers modify their views on “population politics,” or did they continue to embrace national homogeneity as an ideal solution for the continent’s problems? ● ● Rory Maclean, Berlin: Portrait of a City through the Centuries (275-294) ● “The battle of Berlin was among the bloodiest confrontations in history.” (pg. 278) ● “...the war had ended without ending.” (pg. 281) ● “To many, the Second World War didn’t end in 1945.” (pg. 293) ● “The Great Twentieth-Century War, which began in 1914, shattered empires and killed one hundred millions souls, severing Germany and heralding decades of repression.” (pg. 293) Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (142-163, 167-194) ● “Unable to retain people through ideology or mass initiatives alone, the regime worked to secure them one by one. It laid invisible snares person by person, subtler than guns and watchtowers.” (pg. 142) ● “There was always the threat of physical force, but the state’s greatest levers were intimidation, coercion, and persuasion at the level of the individual.” (pg. 143) ● “The regime also channeled resource toward people it wanted to see leave. On the flip side of border selection, those deemed detrimental to the state...could legally emigrate west ‘out of purely material considerations.’” (pg. 148) ● “The East German government’s intensifying efforts to classify and control its population frequently worked at cross-purposes, as different arms of the bureaucracy pursued different selection priorities.” (pg. 148) ● ● “In fact, the government may have expended as much effort selecting returnees out as it did recruiting them in.” (pg. 154) ● “A few western cities even petitioned East Germany to take people back. Then again, West Germany also ousted people it deemed undesirable...” (pg. 155) ● “Since neither East nor West wanted this subclass of border transgressors, the states kept deporting them back to each other.” (pg. 157) ● “The template of population politics connected to the template for the surveillance state.” (pg. 157) ● “...the government was seen as restricting the freedom of the press that undermined the administration...” (pg. 168) ● “While international recruitment ended in 1973, immigrants remained for decades without citizenship, and debate over their place in German society continues today.” (pg. 168) ● “The imperative for political conformity in East Germany, versus democratic freedoms in the West, resulted in a censored, authoritarian system backed by the Ministry for State Security.” (pg. 169) ● “Education diverged not only in ideological content but also in access – often limited by political background and adherence in the East and by socioeconomic status in the West.” (pg. 169-170) ● “East Germany organized citizens into mass organizations...” (pg. 170) ● “There was a sense that ‘this time the right ones were taken,’ as people had different sensibilities for troublemakers and upstanding citizens.” (pg. 174) ● “The government exerted control over people’s homes...” (pg. 181) ● “Border residents’ motivation for reporting was less often conviction than simply avoiding trouble.” (pg. 187) ● “The regime relocated hundreds of border citizens individually between 1961 and 1989.” (pg. 189) ● “Criteria for banishment, though, could be thin. Subjective transgressions such as criticizing the state, ‘idling at work’, or being an ‘uncertain element’ accounted for over a third of residence restrictions in the 1960s, while 5 percent were for ‘unknown reasons’.” (pg. 189) ● “In the sixties, as in the fifties, the county ‘smuggled out’ perhaps dozens of westerners who had lived in East Germany for years but proved more trouble, and cost, than they were worth.” (pg. 190) ● “The East German government not only selected out unwanted residents from the borderland but also selected East Germans wanting to move in.” (pg. 190) Reinhold Wagnleitner, “United States Press Politics in Austria” (84-107) ● “...another, more important point was the banishing of all German influence in the new press, or the “de-Germanization” of the entire information machinery.” (pg. 84) ● “Yet, officially nonpartisan, conservative individuals received preferential treatment in the distribution of licenses...these licensees guaranteed an antiCommunist stance.” (pg. 85) ● “...considerable motivation for the eventual departure from a stringent denazification course was rooted in the logic of the Cold War. While rallying for a consensus in support of the anti-Communist potential could be exploited.” (pg. 86) ● ● “The silent acceptance of the US authorities of these obvious violations and the breach of the original contract shows that American occupation politics were motivated by other social priorities by 1947 at the latest.” (pg. 89) ● “...the deep, dark, universally lurking threat of Communism...” (pg. 94) ● “...censorship measures...had been initially implemented against all forms of fascist activities, and...became directed almost wholly toward Communist newspapers after 1947...” (pg. 97) ● “The influence of US news agencies was by no means limited to Austria but also included all of Western Europe.” (pg. 100) ● “The central priorities of all activities of the US press officers in Austria...were first and foremost the long-term stability of a democratic press and the battle against Communism.” (pg. 106) ● “On the one hand, the influence of the Communist press was almost completely suppressed thought the increased aggravation of preexisting antiCommunist sentiments. On the other hand, US press officers left a press landscape behind in which the majority of journalists were not only clearly anti-Communist but also pronouncedly pro-American.” (pg. 107) Peter Gatrell, “‘Villages of Discipline’: Revolutionary Change and Refugees in SouthEast Asia” (203-222) ● “...’to keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no less’,” (pg. 203) ● “Persecution reached its peak in 1978, when the government of Burma targeted the 800,000 strong Rohingya Bengali-speaking Muslim minority, declaring them to be ‘non-nationals’.” (pg. 203) ● “In 1988, those fleeing Vietnam, many of them by boat, were held in detention centres, where officials decided who qualified as refugees.” (pg. 204) ● “...denied refugee status to ‘boat people’ unless they could prove persecution.” (pg. 204) ● “Those who were able to flee cultivated a sense of being doubly victimized, not just by communist regimes but by being forced to spend years in camps prior to resettlement.” (pg. 205) ● “The subsequent division of the country into North and South following the Geneva Accords (1954) displaced hundreds of thousands of people.” (pg. 205) ● “The bitter divisions created by the war were reflected in rival analyses, which attributed displacement either to military attacks by the Vietcong of to the impact of American military ‘pacification’ tactics.” (pg. 207) ● “The government of South Vietnam emphatically defined refugees as ‘war victims who leave their homes to escape from communist terrorists or to evade military action’, a definition that omitted the fact that around one-tenth of the total displaced population comprised people who had been forcibly relocated by the government of South Vietnam.” (pg. 207) ● “On coming to power the Khmer rouge ruthlessly targeted ‘class enemies’ as well as Muslim, Chinese, and Vietnamese ethnic minorities whose position was already exposed.” (pg. 213) ● “...refugees were closely scrutinized for political suitability and signs of physical or mental disability.” (pg. 217) ● “Revolution produced winner and losers.” (pg. 220) ● “Privileged and powerful refugees as well as those with desirable skills were quickly spirited away to safety...Others were detained in camps for much ● longer. Those who could not construct a convincing case were sent back...” (pg. 220) ● “Here, as elsewhere, the tide of public opinion and government policy turned against refugees.” (pg. 221) Postwar – Tony Judt - (13-99, 129-164, 241-359, 585-633, 701-800) ● “In those countries occupied by Nazi Germany, from France to the Ukraine, from Norway to Greece, World War Two was primarily a civilian experience...this was a war of occupation, of repression, or exploitation and extermination...” (pg. 13-14) ● “Unlike World War One, then, the Second War – Hitler's War – was a near universal experience. And it lasted a long time – nearly six years for those countries (Britain, Germany) that were engaged in it from beginning to end.” (pg. 14) ● “It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.” (pg. 14) ● “...the war’s impact was measured not in terms of industrial profit and loss, or the net value of national assets in 1945 when compared to 1938, but rather in the visible damage to their immediate environment and their communities.” (pg. 16) ● “It is estimated that about thirty-six and a half million Europeans died in between 1939 and 1945 from war-related causes...” (pg. 17) ● “But what is most striking of all is the number of non-combatant civilians among the dead: at least 19 million, or more than half.” (pg. 18) ● “Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported, and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43.” (pg. 23) ● “Involuntary economic migration was thus the primary social experience of World War Two for many European civilians...” (pg. 24) ● “What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. In part this was the outcome of ‘voluntary’ ethnic separation...” (pg. 24) ● “The Soviet authorities in their turn engineered a series of forced population exchanges between Ukraine and Poland...In the course of a few months what had once been an inter-mixed region of different faiths, languages, and communities became two distinct, mono-ethnic territories.” (pg. 25) ● “Here as elsewhere, the populations concerned were not consulted. But the largest group affected was the Germans.” (pg. 25) ● “Eastern Europe had been forcible cleared of its German populations” (pg. 26) ● “’The scale of this resettlement, and the conditions in which it takes place, are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors first hand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.’” (pg. 26) ● “...they acquiesced readily enough in the population transfers. If the surviving minorities of central and eastern Europe could not be afforded effective international protection, then it was just as well that they be dispatched to more accommodating locations. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ did not yet exist, ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● but the reality sure did – and it was far from arousing wholesale disapproval or embarrassment.” (pg. 27) “With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogeneous than ever before.” (pg. 27) “Throughout 1945 and 1946 Western authorities preferred to ignore such feelings on the whole and oblige Soviet and other east European citizens to return home, sometimes by force.” (pg. 30) “The criteria for admission were simple – western European states were interested in strong (male) manual workers, and were not embarrassed to favor Balts, Poles, and Ukrainians on those grounds whatever their wartime record.” (pg. 31) “There had never been any question of returning Jews to the east – no-one in the Soviet Union, Poland, or anywhere else evinced the slightest interest in having them back. Nor were the Jews particularly welcome in the west...” (pg. 32) “It was in the Balkans, however, that the Second World War was experienced above all as a civil war, and a uniquely murderous one at that.” (pg. 34) “The post-war impact of these European civil wars was immense. In a simple sense they meant that the war in Europe did not finish in 1945, with the departure of the Germans...” (pg. 35) “In the truest sense of a much-abused term, they transformed World War Two – Hitler's War – into a social revolution.” (pg. 35) “...the serial occupation of territory by foreign powers inevitably eroded the authority and legitimacy of local rulers.” (pg. 35) “The liquidation of old social and economic elites was perhaps the most dramatic change.” (pg. 36) “The outcome was a radical transformation of the social landscape...This leveling process, whereby the native populations of central and eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler’s most enduring contribution to European social history.” (pg. 36) “Above all, violence became a part of daily life...in occupied Europe authority was a function of force alone, deployed without inhibition. Curiously enough, it was precisely these circumstances that the state lost its monopoly of violence. Partisan groups and armies competed for a legitimacy determined by their capacity to enforce their writ in a given territory.” (pg. 37) “Everyone, in short, had a good reason to be afraid of everyone else. Suspicious of other people’s motives, individuals were quick to denounce the for some presumed deviation or illicit advantage. There was no protection to be had from above: indeed, those in power were often the most lawless of all.” (pg. 37-38) “Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent.” (pg. 38) “Changes on this scale can only be described as revolutionary. Like the war itself, they represented a radical caesura, a clear break with the past, and a preparation for even bigger changes still to come.” (pg. 39) “The punishment of collaborators (real and imagined) began before the fighting ended.” (pg. 42) “Wreaking revenge on fallen women was one way to overcome the discomforting memory of personal and collective powerlessness.” (pg. 43) ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● “As a result, once the Germans retreated, the first victims of spontaneous retribution in the East were ethnic minorities. The Soviet forces and their local allies did nothing to discourage this. On the contrary, spontaneous scoresettling (some of it not altogether unprompted) contributed towards a further removal of local elites and politicians who prove an impediment to post-war Communist ambitions.” (pg. 43) “In Poland, the main target of popular vengeance was frequently Jews.” (pg. 43) “What was a ‘collaborator’?” (pg. 44) “...the only sense in which the crime of collaboration could be said to fall under existing law was when it amounted to treason.” (pg. 44) “Many men and women were unfairly singled out and punished. Many more escaped retribution altogether. There were multiple procedural irregularities and ironies, and the motives of governments, prosecutors, and judges were far from unsullied – by self-interest, political calculation, or emotion.” (pg. 45) “Responsibility for these, like other war crimes, was imputed to the Germans alone.” (pg. 47) “The purges in Greece were thus blatantly political.” (pg. 49) “Any judicial process brought about as the direct consequence of a war or a political struggle is political.” (pg. 49) “The Yugoslavs executed and deported many ethnic Hungarians for their role in Hungarian military massacres in the Vojvodina during January 1942...” (pg. 50) “Indeed, so widespread was the view that ultimate blame for the horrors of World War Two must fall on German shoulders alone that even Austria was held exempt.” (pg. 52) “This distrust of short-term memory, the search for myths of anti-Fascism – for Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters, or a Poland of victims – was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe.” (pg. 61) “The sheer scale of the European calamity opened new opportunities. The war changed everything. A return to the way things had been before 1939 was out of the question almost everywhere.” (pg. 63) “For this new generation, politics was therefore about resistance – resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past.” (pg. 64) “...the Second World War transformed both the role of the modern state and the expectations placed upon it.” (pg. 73) “The most important difference lay in the schemes set in place to pay for the new public provisions.” (pg. 73) “The British Welfare State was both the completion of an earlier cycle of reforms...and a genuinely radical departure.” (pg. 75) “Thanks to the coming of welfare states Europeans ate more and (mostly) better, lived longer and healthier lives, were better housed and clothed than ever before. Above all, they were more secure.” (pg. 76) “The post-war state all across Europe was a ‘social’ state, with implicit (and often constitutionally explicit) responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.” (pg. 77) Agrarian reform pg. 77 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● “The problem of homelessness, as we have seen, was perhaps the most obvious consequence of war in the immediate post-war era...” (pg. 82) “And it was true that in almost every European country involved in the Second World War the national economy stagnated or shrunk when compared even with the mediocre performance of the inter-war years.” (pg. 83) “Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous – indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war proved lasting...” (pg. 84) “Whatever was to become of Germany itself, the region separating Germany and Russia could not be left in uncertainty.” (pg. 129-130) “The only acceptable outcome for Stalin was the establishment...of governments that could be relied upon never to pose a threat to Soviet security.” (pg. 130) “By the end of the war, or very shortly there-after, every country in eastern Europe had such a coalition government.” (pg. 131) “Control, in fact, mattered much more than policies.” (pg. 131) “The result was that Communist parties adopted instead a strategy of covert pressure, followed by open terror and repression.” (pg. 132) “Socialists who protested or opposed the new Party were denounced, expelled, and at the very least forced out of public life or into exile.” (pg. 133) “Accordingly, the Peasant Party was steadily edged aside, its supporters threatened, it leaders attacked, its credibility impugned.” (pg. 136) “Just as he had done with the Bolshevik Party itself twenty years before, Stalin set out to penalize and discredit the ‘rightist’ deviation.” (pg. 143) “...Yugoslavia represented the international equivalent of a ‘left opposition’ to Stalin’s monopoly of power and a conflict was inevitable...” (pg. 145) “It is significant that the attacks on Tito and his followers coincided with the full flowering of the Stalinist personality cult and the purges and show trials of the coming years.” (pg. 145) “...no one wanted to put weapons in the hands of Germans just five years after the liberation of Europe; on the other hand,...there was something perverse about spending billions of dollars to defend the West Germans from Russian attack without asking them to make a contribution of their own.” (pg. 153) “More prosaically, the Great War had brought French and Germans, in a curious way, to a better appreciation of the mutual dependence.” (pg. 153) “The British experienced World War Two as a moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than as a corrosive rent in the fabric of the state and nation...In France the war had revealed everything that was wrong with the nation’s political culture; in Britain, it had seemed to confirm everything that was right and good about national institutions and habits.” (pg. 161) “What the Russians decidedly did not want at any price was a re-militarized West Germany.” (pg. 243) “Some groups on Austria were inevitably left out – small shopkeepers, independent artisans, isolated farmers, anyone whose work or awkward opinions placed them outside the grid of allocated benefits and positions. And in districts where one or other side had an overwhelming advantage, ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● proportionality would sometimes be ignored in favor of a monopoly of posts and favors for members of that party.” (pg. 262) “...lifelong distinctions shaped the routines of Dutch-speakers in northern Belgium and marked them off absolutely from the French-speakers of Wallonia, even though in this case both communities were overwhelmingly Catholic.” (pg. 264) “...the world was still divided between rulers and ruled, powerful and powerless, wealthy and poor, to an extent that seemed unlikely to be bridged in the near future.” (pg. 280) “The government of liberated France showed little concern for Arab sentiment...” (pg. 286) “The British were granting independence to their African colonies. Even the Belgians had finally released the Congo...” (pg. 288) “...French people voted overwhelmingly to free themselves of the Algerian shackle. Two days later Algeria became an independent state.” (pg. 288) “France was effectively shut out of all major decisions over Germany. Intelligence-sharing between Britain and the US was never extended to France (which was rightly assumed to be dangerously leaky). The nuclear ‘club’ did not include France, reduced thereby to unprecedented irrelevance in international military calculations.” (pg. 291) “If Britain wished to be a US satellite, so be it. But it could not be ‘European’ as well.” (pg. 292) “India, Pakistan, and Burma were granted independence in 1947, Ceylon the following year. The process was hardly bloodless – millions of Hindus and Muslims were massacred in ethnic cleansing and population exchanges that followed – but the colonial power itself withdrew relatively unscathed.” (pg. 293) “The first lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer maintain a global colonial presence.” (pg. 298) “The second lesson of Suez...was that the UK must never again find itself on the wrong side of an argument with Washington.” (pg. 299) “An estimated 200,000 people – over 2 percent of the population – fled Hungary in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation...” (pg. 318) “What the Kremlin could not condone was the Hungarian Party’s abandonment of a monopoly of power, the ‘leading role of the Party’...Such a departure from Soviet practice was the thin edge of a democratic wedge that would spell doom for Communist parties everywhere.” (pg. 320) “The Mediterranean countries, Scandinavia, Ireland and eastern Europe were still primarily rural and, by any measure, backward.” (pg. 327) “The Germans – like the Swiss, French, Belgians, or British – did not especially welcome the sudden interruption of so many foreigners on their soil. The experience of living among so many people from unknown foreign lands was unfamiliar to most Europeans.” (pg. 335) “What made the difference, of course, was that these people were brown or black...Already in 1958, race riots in west London alerted the government to the perceived risk of permitting ‘too many’ immigrants to enter a historically white society...The UK brought in the first of many controls on non-European immigration.” (pg. 336) ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● “When the boom ended and it came time to lay off excess labour, the immigrant and migrant workforce was the first to suffer.” (pg. 337) “Anti-Americanism – the principled distrust and dislike of American civilization and all its manifestations – was typically confined to cultural elites whose influence made it appear more widespread than it was.” (pg. 353) “Britain was the only European state to emerge unambiguously victorious from World War Two.” (pg. 354) “Communist Party First Secretaries in the Caucasus, or the central Asian republics, were typically chosen from the dominant local ethnic group. To secure their fiefdom these men were understandably drawn to identify with their ‘own’ people...” (pg. 602) “As in neighboring Yugoslavia, so in Bulgaria: a tottering Party autocracy turned the full fury of ethnic prejudice upon a helpless domestic victim.” (pg. 626) “In 1984 it was officially announced that the Turks of Bulgaria were not ‘Turks’ at all but forcibly-converted Bulgarians who would now be restored to their true identity. Muslim rites (such as circumcision) were restricted and criminalized; the use of the Turkish language in broadcasting, publications, and education was proscribed; and in a particularly offensive (and angrily resented) move, all Bulgarian citizens with Turkish names were instructed henceforth to assume properly ‘Bulgarian’ ones instead.” (pg. 626) “At least one significant fault line – that separating liberal democrats from populist nationalists – could already be detected...” (pg. 629) Language barrier in Belgium (pg. 712) “But on the other hand the [European] Union was functionally exclusive. Each new agreement and treaty had further complicated the requirements placed upon member-states in return for binding them in the ‘European’ family; and these regulations and rules had the cumulative result of building ever-higher fences to keep out countries and people who could not meet the tests.” (pg. 718) “Like its American equivalent, the European under-class was determined not only by poverty and unemployment (or under-employment) but also increasingly by race.” (pg. 739) (1990s) “If the high-paying city jobs were still going to white Europeans (and North Americans) nearly all the low paying work...was now done not by traditional ‘second-class’ Europeans...but by ‘minorities’, often black or brown, many of them without working papers.” (pg. 739) “Immigration, through perennially discouraged and rigorously controlled throughout Western Europe, was thus still a major demographic factor...” (pg. 740) “The new under-class consisted of people excluded not so much from work as from ‘life chances’...” (pg. 741) “...all of them had proven unexpectedly adept at exploiting ‘anti-immigrant' sentiment. “Whether, like the British National Party, they railed against ‘ethnic minorities’ or, like the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, they targeted ‘immigrants’--in German the preferred term was ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’---the parties of the far Right found rich pickings in these years.” (pg. 742) ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● “The presence in increasing numbers of a visible and culturally alien minority in their midst – and the prospect of even more foreigners feeding at the welfare trough or taking ‘our’ jobs once the floodgates from the East were open – was icing on the cake...” (pg. 742) “In Austria as in France it was the fear and hatred of immigrants...that has replaced the old obsessions – anti-Semitism especially – as the tie that binds the far Right.” (pg. 745) “There was no assigned corner for Islam in the French memory palace...the omission nevertheless illustrated the trouble that France, like its neighbors, was going to have in accommodating the millions of new Europeans in its midst.” (pg. 774) “The attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions – concentrated in the first years of the new century – aroused concern not because of their scale, or even on account of their racist character, but because of their implicitly intercommunal nature.” (pg. 775) “Racially motivated attacks on Arabs...were far more numerous that assaults on Jews. In some cities they were endemic.” (pg. 775) “The troubling aspect of the new anti-Semitism was that while, once again, Jews were the victims, now it was Arabs (or Muslims) who were the perpetrators.” (pg. 775-776) “The old political extremes – far Left, far Right – were now frequently united: typically in their opposition to foreigners and their shared fear of European integration.” (pg. 784) “...the presumptively ‘un-American’ qualities of Europe were fast becoming the highest common factor in European self-identification.” (pg. 790)