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112 of 121 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Narration and Analysis; Some Flaws; 4.5, December 8, 2005
This is, in many respects, an outstanding book. Judt accomplishes the daunting job of providing a solid narrative overview of European history (excluding Russia/Soviet Union)from the end of WWII to the present. Accompanying the narrative is a great deal of astute analysis, both of major trends and of specific episodes. The book is divided into 4 major periods; the immediate post-war era of reconstruction and the onset of the Cold War, the great boom of the 50s and 60s with its major demographic, social, and economic changes, the recessional period of the 70s and 80s, and the most recent period after the fall of the Soviet Union. The major theme is a multi-generational effort to build a Europe that avoids the mistakes that led to the catastrophes of the WWI-WWII period. Judt provides a guardedly positive view of European success. The factors that led to the catastrophe of the first half of the 20th century were strong nationalism and what might be called neo-mercantilism, authoritarian/totalitarian states, powerful ideologies (particularly Marxism), and great internal social discord. Judt sees modern Europe, with democratic and pacific states, its emphasis on economic integration, and social welfare systems aimed at guaranteeing a minimum amount of social amity, as largely escaping the problems that led to WWI and WWII.
Judt deals very well with the major events (and often their social consequences) that propelled Europe along this pathway. The crucial role of the US, and in an ironic way, of the Soviet Union, helped to rescue Western Europe from post-WWII devastation and provided an international framework that demanded western european cooperation. This included a great deal of intelligent decision making by Western European leaders, requiring for example, that the French accept a revitalized and eventually rearmed Germany, that the Germans ultimately accept the post-WWII borders. He devotes equal time also to the fate of Eastern Europe, which stands in some ways as a distorted mirror of the Western European experience. The later convergence of Eastern and Western European history after the fall of the Soviet Union is described particularly, both with its positive and many negative aspects. While this political story is the armature of the book, Judt does an excellent job of outlining the relevant social history. Nor is this book schematic, while this is an overview, we get enough relevant history of individual nations to be more than satisfactory.
Judt is an excellent writer and his analyses are often telling. Read, for example, his discussion of why so many major European leaders of the 50s were elderly men or his evenhanded analysis of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister of Britain.
As good as this book is, there are blemishes and some of them are significant. Judt's breadth and depth of knowledge are really impressive but I detected a number of factual errors. I am skeptical that the Chernobyl accident caused 30,000 deaths and that the partition of India caused "millions" of the deaths (the usual estimate is 1 million). Judt is wrong to imply that defeat at Dien Bien Phu brought France to the bargaining table at Geneva. There are also a number of significant omissions. Given the importance of the demographic and economic history covered by Judt, it would have been useful to include a small number of summary charts on these topics. Judt covers some intellectual history, especially as related to social history, but he makes a major (and all too common) error by not including any discussion of changes in the natural sciences. For example, he states that in the 50s, Paris was established (partly by default) as the intellectual capital of Europe. In a sense he is correct but the 50s and 60s were a golden age for British science and no country in Europe matched the productivity of British scientists. Who is the more consequential figure, Jean-Paul Sartre or the Briton Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA structure (among several important contributions to biology)? Cambridge, London, and Oxford were intellectual capital in a way Paris could never match.
A final and real sin of omission is the lack of appropriate footnotes and a bibliography. The absence of the latter significantly reduces the utility of this admirable book for Judt's fellow scholars, for students, and for the general reading public. Both Judt and his publisher should make an effort to rectify this flaw.
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57 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent survey, January 10, 2006
This is an excellent survey book for the general reader that pulls together the disparate developments in European history since the end of WWII. The result is a cohesive overview I have not found elsewhere, especially consideration of the turmoil in the Eastern bloc and the practical political problems.
I disagree with several criticisms levelled at the book in the following particulars. First, it is claimed that the book offers nothing new. That is true in the sense that what is reported it not new; however such an excellent overview is new.
Second, there are complaints about the lack of footnotes. On this I again say the book is an overview and not directed at specialists. Inclusion of anything approaching an academically adequate footnoting would have expanded the work to two or more volumes.
Third, it is claimed there are errors. Well, sure there are. Judt is writing about developments in 40+ nations which ranged from advanced to backward. However, given the volume of factual matter, there appear to be few errors.
Fourth, it is claimed that the book is too long. I disagree and believe that Judt did an excellent of job of editing down to get the book to the size it is. A reader who is not interested in some parts can skip them.
This is not a work for specialists who will likely criticize it as a popularization as they proceed to write their dry tomes no one but other specialists will ever read.
I grew up in the forties and fifties and spent most of 1961 to 1965 in West Germany in the military and as a foreigh exchange student. It was a delight to read Judt's research about those years and those that followed.
Great Book!
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What is the future of Europe?, September 16, 2006
"Postwar - A history of Europe since 1945" by Tony Judt is the best book I have read on the subject. Its perspective on events since 1989 up to 2005 is remarkably good.
Only two generations have passed since World War 2, and the risk with a book about this period is that its conclusions and themes may prove to be foolish in the fullness of time. One is reminded of Mao's response to a question about the consequences of the French Revolution, "It is too soon to tell."
We can probably be reasonably sure that the history of Europe from the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires plus the Soviet upheavals after WW1 to the final territorial and ethnic spasm in the Balkans in the 1990s can probably be written with some certainty, although we still lack access to original source documents for the Soviet role over that period.
All books dealing with post-war European history suffer from the fact that limited archival material from the Soviet Union has been available for study. Historians are forced to rely on sporadic Soviet documents and speeches and the assessments of western diplomats and analysts to interpret Soviet thinking and intentions.
The result is that this book (and others) views the history of the Communist world with Western eyes and Western mindsets. We are denied access to the thoughts, fears and hopes of communist politicians and dissidents and their influence on history. Hopefully, one day, more archival and other documents will become available to historians and a more balanced history will emerge over time.
If I may give another analogy: at present historians writing of the Communist world are peering through the windows of a house trying to understand the lives of the family living there. They see people going to and fro in the rooms. Occasionally they get glimpses of what the individuals are reading and writing. Sometimes a resident will hold up a photo or document for the historian to see. But the historian cannot hear what they say, nor can he go inside the house to talk to them or inspect their documents, or ask them their views on the outside world. He can draw conclusions only from what he sees through the windows.
A big message from this book is that the recovery and prosperity enjoyed by Western Europe for half a century is due to both the US and the USSR. The US provided critical economic aid and political support to Europe, including West Germany, because of the threat assumed to be posed by the USSR. Without such a threat, the US may have retreated into isolationism, leaving the Europeans to sort out the mess. Without the threat of the USSR, there may not have been the will forgo reparations from Germany and to encourage West Germany to recover. These were distinct possibilities in the immediate post-war period.
The book deals only with the history of Western Europe, with very little explanation of the impact of the rest of the world on that history. Events and policies in the USSR and USA are covered to the extent that they directly impinged on Europe. However, Communist and post-colonial developments in Asia and Africa certainly reinforced cold war attitudes in Europe, if they did not directly influence them.
What must still be provisional is the history of Europe since say 1990. Will the European Union and the Euro survive the test of time, or will one or the other go into the dustbin of history?
Judt's description of the moribund Soviet economies in the 1970s is the best I have read on the subject. The joke "You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you" sums up the cynicism and inefficiencies of Eastern bloc economies.
His account of the final years of the Eastern Bloc is excellent, as is discussion of the key issues facing Europe in the aftermath of its collapse and the apparent success of free market ideologies.
The final chapters of the struggle between socialism (in the form of modern European social capitalism) and capitalist individualism on the US model has yet to be written. Communism has probably failed for all time, but that does not mean that unrestrained US-style free enterprise will take over Europe. Beware of historians who proclaim "the end of history" and the "triumph of liberal democratic capitalism". Fortunately, Judt is too sensible to make such hubristic claims, although he does lean towards the European model.
Which model of society will "win" in the course of the 21st Century - the unfettered capitalism of the US, or the social capitalism of the EU? What is the future of the nation state in the face of the challenges from terrorist extremism?
These are important questions, and Judt's book provides the reader with an excellent exposition of the political, social and economic circumstances surrounding them.
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