In the decade after 1945, as the Cold War freeze set in, a new
Europe slowly began to emerge from the ruins of the Second World
War, based on a broad rejection of the fascist past that had so
scarred the continent's recent history. In the East, this new
consensus was enforced by Soviet-imposed Communist regimes. In the
West, the process was less coercive, amounting more to a consensus
of silence. On both sides, much was deliberately forgotten or
obscured. The years which followed were in many ways golden years
for western Europe. Democracy became embedded in Germany, and
eventually triumphed over dictatorship in Spain, Portugal, and
Greece. Britain and France faced up to the necessity of
decolonization. The European Economic Community was founded and
went from strength to strength, as the economies of western Europe
bounced back from the devastation of the war. The countries of the
East lagged far behind and seemed caught in a perpetual game of
catch-up, but even there conditions had improved since the end of
the war, albeit at a much slower rate. Above all, throughout this
period the European world continued to be sustained by the broad
anti-fascist consensus that had emerged in the years after 1945.
However, as Dan Stone shows in this new history of the continent
since the war, this fundamental consensus began to break down in
the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, a process which has
rapidly accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Globalization,
deregulation, and the erosion of social-democratic welfare
capitalism in the West, and the collapse of the purported Communist
alternative in the East, have all fatally undermined the post-war
anti-fascist value system that predominated across Europe in the
first four decades after the end of the Second World War.
Ominously, this has been accompanied by a rise in right-wing
populism and a widespread revision of the anti-fascist narrative on
which this value system was based. The danger of this shift is now
evident: financial and social crisis, an increasing inability on
the part of European populations to resist historical myth-making,
and the re-emergence of fascist ideas. The result, as Dan Stone
warns, is socially divisive, politically dangerous, and a genuine
threat to the future of a civilized Europe.
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