Chapter 29: Challenging the Postwar Order

Reform and Protest in the 1960’s

Cold War Tensions Thaw

• In western Europe, the first two decades of postwar reconstruction had been overseen for the most part by center-right Christian Democrats, who successfully maintained postwar stability around Cold War politics, free-market economics with limited state intervention, and welfare provisions.

• Despite these exceptions, the general leftward drift encouraged a gradual relaxation of Cold War tensions.

• Though the Cold War continued to rage outside Europe and generally defined relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, western European leaders took major steps to normalize relations with the East Bloc.

• Brandt’s gesture at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial and the treaty with Poland were part of his broader, conciliatory foreign policy termed Ostpolitik (German for “Eastern policy”).

• Brandt’s Ostpolitik was part of a general relaxation of East-West tensions, termed détente, which began in the early 1970s.

• Though Cold War hostilities continued in the developing world, direct diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union grew less strained.

• The move toward détente reached a high point when the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European nations (except isolationist Albania and tiny Andorra) met in Helsinki to sign the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975.

• Newly empowered Social Democrats of western Europe also engaged in reform at home.

• By the early 1970s state spending on such programs hovered around 40 percent of the gross domestic product in France, West Germany, and Great Britain, and even more in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

The Affluent Society

• The political shift to the left in the 1960s was accompanied by rapid social change across western Europe.

• Many Europeans now had more money to spend on leisure time and recreational pursuits, and one of the most noticeable leisure-time developments was the blossoming of mass travel and tourism

• Consumerism also changed life at home. Household appliances that were still luxuries in the 1950s were now commonplace; televisions overtook radio as a popular form of domestic entertainment while vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines transformed women’s housework.

• Intellectuals and cultural critics greeted the age of affluence with a chorus of criticism.

• Some worried that rampant consumerism created a bland conformity that wiped out regional and national traditions.

• Worries about the Americanization of Europe were overstated.

• European nations preserved distinctive national cultures even during the consumer revolution, but social change nonetheless occurred.

• Even in traditionally Catholic countries, such as Italy, Ireland, and France, outward signs of popular belief seemed to falter.

• At the Second Vatican Council, convened from 1962 to 1965, Catholic leaders agreed on a number of reforms meant to democratize and renew the church and broaden its appeal

• Family ties also weakened in the age of affluence.

The Counterculture Movement

• One of the dramatic results of economic prosperity was the emergence of a youthful counterculture that came of age in the mid-1960s.

• Simple demographics played an important role.

• Young soldiers returning home after World War II in 1945 eagerly established families, and the next two decades brought a dramatic increase in the number of births per year in Europe and North America.

• Counterculture movements in both Europe and the United States drew much inspiration from the American civil rights movement.

• If dedicated African Americans and their white supporters could successfully reform entrenched power structures, student leaders reasoned, so could they.

• Dreaming of economic justice and freer, more tolerant societies, student activists in western Europe and the United States embraced new forms of Marxism, creating a multidimensional and heterogeneous movement that came to be known as the New Left

• Such rarefied ideas fascinated student intellectuals, but much counterculture activity revolved around a lifestyle rebellion that seemed to have broad appeal.

• The revolutionary aspects of the sexual revolution are easily exaggerated.

• According to a poll of West German college students taken in 1968, the overwhelming majority wished to establish permanent families on traditional middle-class models.

• Along with sexual freedom, drug use and rock music inspired lifestyle rebellion.

• Carnaby Street, the center of “swinging London” in the 1960s, was world famous for its clothing boutiques and record stores, revealing the inescapable connections between generational revolt and consumer culture.

The United States and Vietnam

• The growth of the counterculture movement was also closely linked to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

• In the end, the American strategy of limited warfare backfired.

• The undeclared war in Vietnam, fought nightly on American television, eventually divided the nation. Initial support was strong.

• Criticism reached a crescendo after the Vietcong staged the Tet Offensive in January 1968.

• The Communists’ first comprehensive attack on major South Vietnamese cities failed militarily.

• President Richard M. Nixon (r. 1969–1974) sought to gradually disengage America from Vietnam once he took office.

• Although the storm of criticism in the United States passed with the peace settlement, America’s disillusionment with the war had far-reaching repercussions.

Student Revolts and 1968

• While the Vietnam War had raged, American escalation had engendered worldwide opposition.

• New Left activists believed that the United States was fighting an immoral and imperialistic war against a small and heroic people, and the counterculture became increasingly radical.

• Political activism erupted in 1968 in a series of protests and riots that circled the globe.

• One of the most famous and perhaps far-reaching of these revolts occurred in France in May 1968, when massive student protests coincided with a general strike that brought the French economy to a standstill.

• The “May Events” might have been a typically short-lived student protest against overcrowded universities, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and the abuses of capitalism, but the demonstrations triggered a national revolt.

• In the end, however, the goals of the radical students did not correspond to the bread-and-butter demands of the striking workers.

• As the political enthusiasm of the counterculture waned, committed activists disagreed about the best way to continue to fight for social change.

• Others followed a more radical path. Across Europe, but particularly in Italy and West Germany, fringe New Left groups tried to bring radical change by turning to violence and terrorism.

• Counterculture protests generated a great deal of excitement and trained a generation of activists.

The 1960’s in the East Bloc

• The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 suggested that communism was there to stay, and NATO’s refusal to intervene showed that the United States and western Europe basically accepted the premise.

• East Bloc economies clearly lagged behind those of the West, exposing the weaknesses of central planning.

• Recognizing that the overwhelming emphasis on heavy industry was generating popular discontent, Communist planning commissions began to redirect resources to the consumer sector.

• In the 1960s Communist regimes also cautiously granted cultural freedoms.

• In the Soviet Union, the cultural thaw allowed dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to publish critical works of fiction, and this relative tolerance spread to other East Bloc countries as well.

• Cultural openness only went so far, however.

• The most outspoken dissidents were harassed and often forced to emigrate to the West; other critics contributed to the rise of an underground samizdat literature that emerged in the Soviet Union and the East Bloc.

• The citizens of East Bloc countries sought political liberty as well, and the limits on reform were sharply revealed in Czechoslovakia during the 1968 “Prague Spring” (named for the country’s capital city).

• Remembering that the Hungarian revolution had revealed the difficulty of reforming communism from within, Dubček constantly proclaimed his loyalty to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

• Shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) announced that the Soviets would now follow the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, under which the Soviet Union and its allies had the right to intervene militarily in any East Bloc country whenever they thought doing so was necessary to preserve Communist rule.

Crisis and Change in Western Europe

Economic Crisis and Hardship

• Starting in the early 1970s the West entered into a long period of economic decline.

• One of the early causes of the downturn was the collapse of the international monetary system, which since 1945 had been based on the American dollar, valued in gold at $35 an ounce.

• Even more damaging to the global economy was the dramatic reversal in the price and availability of energy.

• Over the years OPEC, the Arab-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, had watched the price of crude oil decline consistently compared with the rising price of Western manufactured goods.

• The stage was thus already set for a revolution in energy prices when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, setting off the fourth Arab-Israeli war.

• Coming on the heels of the upheaval in the international monetary system, the revolution in energy prices plunged the world into its worst economic decline since the 1930s.

• Unemployment rose, productivity and living standards declined, and inflation soared.

• Economists coined a new term— stagflation— to describe the combination of low growth and high inflation that drove the worldwide recession.

• Anxious observers, recalling the disastrous consequences of the Great Depression, worried that the European Common Market would disintegrate in the face of severe economic dislocation and that economic nationalism would halt steps toward European unity.

• The developing world was hit hard by slowed growth, and the global economic downturn widened the gap between rich and poor countries, however.

• Even though the world economy slowly began to recover in the 1980s, western Europe could no longer create enough jobs to replace those that were lost.

• Scholars spoke of the shift as the arrival of “the information age” or postindustrial society.

• The crisis struck countless ordinary people, and there were heartbreaking human tragedies— bankruptcies, homelessness, and mental breakdowns.

• With the commitment of governments to supporting social needs, government spending in most European countries continued to rise sharply during the 1970s and early 1980s.

• While this increased spending was generally popular, a powerful reaction against government’s ever-increasing role had set in by the late 1970s that would transform governance in the 1980s.

The New Conservatism

• The transition to a postindustrial society was led to a great extent by a new generation of conservative political leaders, who believed they had viable solutions for restructuring the relations between the state and the economy.

• The new conservatives of the 1980s followed a philosophy that came to be known as neoliberalism because of its roots in the free market, laissez-faire policies favored by eighteenth-century liberal economists such as Adam Smith.

• Neoliberals also called for privatization— the sale of state-managed industries to private owners.

• The effects of neoliberal policies are best illustrated by events in Great Britain.

• The broad shift toward greater conservatism, coupled with growing voter dissatisfaction with high taxes and runaway state budgets, helped elect Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) prime minister in 1979.

• Though she never eliminated all social programs, Thatcher’s policies helped replace the interventionist ethos of the welfare state with a greater reliance on private enterprise and the free market

• In the United States, two-term president Ronald Reagan (r. 1981–1989) followed a similar path, though his success in cutting government was more limited.

• West Germany also turned to the right.

• After more than a decade in power, the Social Democrats foundered, and in 1982 Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl (b. 1930) became the new chancellor.

• The most striking temporary exception to the general drift to the right in European politics was François Mitterrand (1916–1996) of France.

• Despite persistent economic crises and high social costs, by 1990 the developed nations of western Europe and North America were far more productive than they had been in the early 1970s.

Challenges and Victories for Women

• The 1970s marked the arrival of a diverse and widespread feminist movement devoted to securing genuine gender equality and promoting the general interests of women.

• Feminists could draw on a long heritage of protest, stretching back to the French Revolution and the women’s movements of the late nineteenth century.

• Only through courageous action and self assertive creativity could a woman become a completely free person and escape the role of the inferior “other” that men had constructed for her gender.

• The Second Sex inspired a generation of women intellectuals, and by the late 1960s and the 1970s “second-wave feminism” had spread through North America and Europe.

• Many other women’s organizations rose in Europe and North America.

• The diverse groups drew inspiration from Marx, Freud, or political liberalism, but in general feminists attacked patriarchy (the domination of society by men) and sexism (the inequalities faced by women simply because they were female).

• The movement also addressed gender and family questions, including the right to divorce (in some Catholic countries), legalized abortion, the needs of single mothers, and protection from rape and physical violence.

• In countries that had long placed women in a subordinate position, the legal changes were little less than revolutionary.

• While the women’s movement of the 1970s won new rights for women, subsequently it became more diffuse, a victim of both its successes and the resurgence of an antifeminist opposition.

The Rise of the Environmental Movement

• Like feminism, environmentalism had roots in the 1960s counterculture.

• By the 1970s the destructive environmental costs of industrial development in western Europe and the East Bloc were everywhere apparent.

• Environmentalists had two main agendas.

• First, they worked to lessen the ill effects of unbridled industrial development on the natural environment.

• Second, they argued that local environmental problems often increased human poverty, inequality, and violence around the globe.

• Environmental protesters also built new institutions, particularly in North America and western Europe.

• In the East Bloc, government planners increasingly recognized and tried to ameliorate environmental problems in the 1980s, but official censorship meant that groups like the Greens would not emerge there until after the end of Communist rule.

Separatism and Right-Wing Extremism

• The 1970s also saw the rise of determined separatist movements across Europe.

• In Ireland, Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland— and in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the East Bloc— regional ethnic groups struggled for special rights, political autonomy, and even national independence.

• The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), a paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland, used similar tactics.

• Mainstream European politicians also faced challenges from newly assertive political forces on the far right. Right-wing political parties such as the National Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, the Austrian Freedom Party, and the National Democratic Party in West Germany were founded or gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s.

• Though their programs at times veered close to open racism, they began to win seats in national parliaments in the 1980s.

The Decline of “Developed Socialism”

State and Society in the East Bloc

• By the 1970s many of the professed goals of communism had been achieved. Communist leaders in central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union adopted the term developed socialism (sometimes called “real existing socialism”) to describe the accomplishments of their societies.

• Everyday life under developed socialism was defined by an uneasy mixture of outward conformity and private disengagement— or apathy.

• East Bloc living standards were well above those in the developing world, but well below those in the West

• Women in particular experienced the contradictions of the socialist system.

• Official state policy guaranteed equal rights for women and encouraged them to join the workforce in positions formerly reserved for men, while an extensive system of state-supported child care freed women to accept these employment opportunities and eased the work of parenting.

• Though everyday life was fairly comfortable in the East Bloc, a number of deeply rooted structural problems undermined popular support for Soviet-style communism.

• For a number of reasons, East Bloc leaders refused to make the economic reforms that might have made developed socialism more effective.

• First, a move toward Western-style postindustrial society would have required fundamental changes to the Communist system.

• Second, East Bloc regimes refused to cut spending on the welfare state because that was, after all, one of the proudest achievements of socialism.

• Third, the state continued to provide subsidies to heavy industries such as steel and mining.

• Economic decline was not the only reason people increasingly questioned one-party, Communist rule.

• Though many East Bloc citizens still found the promise of Marxist egalitarian socialism appealing, they increasingly doubted the legitimacy of Soviet-style communism: the dream of distributing goods “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs” (as Marx had once put it) hardly made up for the great structural weaknesses of developed socialism.

Dissent in Czechoslovakia and Poland

• Stagnation in the East Bloc encouraged small numbers of dedicated people to try to change society from below.

• In Czechoslovakia in 1977 a small group of citizens, including future Czechoslovak president Václav Havel (1936–2011), signed a manifesto that came to be known as Charter 77.

• In Poland, an unruly satellite from the beginning, the Communists had failed to dominate society to the extent seen elsewhere in the East Bloc.

• In August 1980 strikes broke out across Poland; at the gigantic Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk (formerly known as Danzig) sixteen thousand workers laid down their tools and occupied the plant.

• Led by feisty Lenin Shipyards electrician and devout Catholic Lech Wałęsa (b. 1943), the workers proceeded to organize a free and democratic trade union called Solidarity

• Solidarity’s combination of strength and moderation postponed a showdown, as the Soviet Union played a waiting game of threats and pressure.

• Outlawed and driven underground, Solidarity survived in part because of the government’s unwillingness (and probably its inability) to impose full-scale terror.

• The rise and survival of Solidarity showed that ordinary Poles would stubbornly struggle for greater political and religious liberty, cultural freedom, trade-union rights, patriotic nationalism, and a more humane socialism.

From Détente Back to Cold War

• The Soviets and the leaders of the Soviet satellite states also faced challenges from abroad as optimistic hopes for détente in international relations gradually faded in the late 1970s.

• President Jimmy Carter (r. 1977– 1981) tried to lead NATO beyond verbal condemnation of the Soviet Union and urged economic sanctions against it, but only Great Britain among the European allies supported the American initiative.

• The Atlantic alliance endured, however, and the U.S. military buildup launched by Carter in his last years in office was greatly accelerated by President Reagan, who was swept into office in 1980 by a wave of patriotism and economic discontent

• Margaret Thatcher worked well with Reagan and was a forceful advocate for a revitalized Atlantic alliance, and under Helmut Kohl West Germany likewise worked with the United States to coordinate military and political policy toward the Soviet bloc.

Gorbachev’s Reforms in the Soviet Union

• Cold War tensions aside, the Soviet Union’s Communist elite seemed safe from any challenge from below in the early 1980s

• Although the massive state and party bureaucracy safeguarded the elite, it promoted widespread apathy and stagnation.

• A lawyer and experienced Communist Party official, Gorbachev was smart, charming, and tough.

• In his first year in office, Gorbachev attacked corruption and incompetence in the bureaucracy and consolidated his power.

• To accomplish this economic restructuring, or perestroika, Gorbachev and his supporters permitted an easing of government price controls on some goods, more independence for state enterprises, and the creation of profit-seeking private cooperatives to provide personal services.

• Gorbachev’s bold and far-reaching campaign for greater freedom of expression was much more successful.

• Very popular in a country where censorship, dull uniformity, and outright lies had long characterized public discourse, the newfound openness, or glasnost, of the government and the media marked an astonishing break with the past.

• Democratization was a third element of reform.

• Beginning as an attack on corruption in the Communist Party, it led to the first free elections in the Soviet Union since 1917.

• Democratization also ignited demands for greater political and cultural autonomy and even national independence among non-Russian minorities living in the fifteen Soviet republics.

• Finally, Gorbachev brought reforms to the field of foreign affairs.

• He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 and sought to reduce EastWest tensions.

• By early 1989 it seemed that if Gorbachev held to his word, the tragic Soviet occupation of eastern Europe might wither away, taking the long Cold War with it once and for all.

The Revolutions of 1989

The Collapse of Communism in the East Bloc

• The collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet satellite states surprised many Western commentators, who had expected Cold War divisions to persist for many years.

• In this general climate of economic stagnation and popular anger, Solidarity and the Polish people led the way to revolution.

• Lacking access to the state-run media, Solidarity succeeded nonetheless in mobilizing the country and winning all but one of the contested seats in an overwhelming victory.

• Hungary followed Poland. Hungary’s Communist Party boss János Kádár (KAH-dahr) had permitted liberalization of the rigid planned economy after the 1956 uprising in exchange for political obedience and continued Communist control.

• In an effort to strengthen their support at home, the Hungarians opened their border to East Germans and tore down the barbed wire curtain separating Hungary from Austria.

• The flight of East Germans fed the rapid growth of a homegrown, spontaneous protest movement in East Germany.

• In Czechoslovakia, Communist rule began to dissolve peacefully in November to December 1989.

• This so-called Velvet Revolution grew out of popular demonstrations led by students and joined by intellectuals and a dissident playwright-turned-moral-revolutionary named Václav Havel (1936–2011).

• In Romania, popular revolution turned violent and bloody.

• A coalition government emerged, although the legacy of Ceauşescu’s long and oppressive rule left a very troubled country.

German Unification and the End of the Cold War

• The dissolution of communism in East Germany that began in 1989 reopened the “German question” and raised the threat of renewed Cold War conflict over Germany.

• Over the next year, however, East Germany was absorbed into an enlarged West Germany, much as a faltering company is swallowed by a stronger rival and ceases to exist.

• Three factors were particularly important in this outcome.

• First, in the first week after the Berlin Wall was opened, almost 9 million East Germans— roughly half of the total population— poured across the border into West Germany

• Second, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and his closest advisers skillfully exploited the historic opportunity handed them.

• Third, in the summer of 1990 the crucial international aspect of German unification was successfully resolved.

• Unification would once again make Germany the strongest state in central Europe and would directly affect the security of the Soviet Union.

• The peaceful reunification of Germany accelerated the pace of agreements to liquidate the Cold War.

• Peace in Europe encouraged the United States and the Soviet Union to scrap a significant portion of their nuclear weapons in a series of agreements.

• For the first time in four decades, Soviet and American nuclear weapons were not standing ready for mutual destruction.

The Disintegration of the Soviet Union

• As 1990 began, the tough work of dismantling some forty-five years of Communist rule had begun in all but two East Bloc states— tiny Albania and the vast Soviet Union.

• In February 1990, as competing Russian politicians noisily presented their programs and nationalists in the non-Russian republics demanded autonomy or independence from the Soviet Union, the Communist Party suffered a stunning defeat in local elections throughout the country.

• Gorbachev responded by placing an economic embargo on Lithuania, but he refused to use the army to crush the separatist government.

• Despite his victory, Gorbachev’s power continued to erode, and his unwillingness to risk a universal suffrage election for the presidency strengthened his great rival, Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007).

• Opposed by democrats and nationalists, Gorbachev was also challenged by the Communist old guard.

• In August 1991 a gang of hardliners kidnapped him and his family in the Caucasus and tried to seize the Soviet government.

• The leaders of the coup had wanted to preserve Communist power, state ownership, and the multinational Soviet Union; they succeeded in destroying all three.

• The independent republics of the old Soviet Union then established a loose confederation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which played only a minor role in the 1990s.