4 - The two postwar eras and the conditions for stability in twentieth-century Western Europe

Summary

This chapter was originally drafted during tenure of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research on the United States and European reconstruction after World War II. Earlier versions benefited from conversation with Duke University colleagues as well as from discussion at seminars at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Princeton University, Harvard University, and the European Studies Center at the University of Chicago, and at Werner Conze's seminar for social and economic history at Heidelberg. A semi-final draft was presented as a paper at the Ninety-Third Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, held in San Francisco, December 1978.1 am grateful to Leonard Krieger, Richard Kuisel, and Carl Schorske for their comments at that session. The version reprinted here is especially indebted to the suggestions of Professor Kuisel, the subsequent critiques by the anonymous referees for the American Historical Review, and the comments of Patrick Fridenson of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. I have not reproduced here the comments by Charles P. Kindleberger and Stephen Schuker that were published along with the original article, nor my rebuttal.

Broadcasting over the BBC in November 1945, A. J. P. Taylor assured his listeners, “Nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life – that is, in private enterprise; or rather those who believe in it are a defeated party and a party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688.” Taylor proved to be wrong, or at least premature, about the end of private enterprise. The question here is why, at least in Western Europe, there was less transformation than he envisaged.