Since World War II

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SINCE WORLD WAR II

Donna Harsch

How have historians applied the methods and perspectives of modern social history to the postwar era, the historical period from whence the discipline itself sprang? The five and half decades that followed the war have, in fact, remained relatively understudied, if only because social historians, like historians in general, prefer to investigate the bona fide past rather than what has just passed. Moreover, it may seem that a foreshortened perspective does not do justice to social-historical subjects such as class formation, family structure, or mentality that tend to change only over a substantial stretch of time. In consequence, studies of the decades since 1945 do not fill bookshelves quite as lengthy as those occupied by the voluminous specialized literature on, say, the industrial revolution. Historical attention has also been distracted by prewar interpretive issues, such as the causes, social and otherwise, of the rise of Nazism, rather than centered on postwar historical issues or broader studies that would embrace postwar developments in a larger social history of the twentieth century. The resultant paucity of work makes it at once simple and difficult to assess the historiography of social history after World War II. The discipline can be easily overseen, yet a sparse field offers a thin selection of the detailed empirical research that, hard to synthesize as it may be, constitutes the raw material of historiographical trends. Nonetheless, enough literature exists to allow not only a summary of social historians' major conclusions about the era but also a characterization of the field itself. Furthermore, the pace of sociohistorical inquiry is speeding up, as the time elapsed since the war lengthens and as the urgent need to explain it diminishes. Some findings call into question the notion that the war itself was as complete a watershed, in social history terms, has been supposed. In some areas, such as gender, important changes and breaks may have occurred a bit later.

The social-science corner of the field of postwar social history has been, this essay argues, quite well-tended. Because the period is so contemporary, social historians of the postwar era have been particularly influenced by the questions and quantitative research pursued by political scientists, sociologists, and economic historians. The social-science bent has also been fostered, no doubt, by the central place in all discussions of postwar Europe accorded the economic boom. Whatever the reason, scholars have produced a number of national and pan-European analyses of big social processes, including demographic, social-structural, educational, employment, consumption, and leisure trends. Working on this broad canvas, those in the field have arrived at an impressively wide consensus not only about the defining tendencies but about which ones represent continuity and which a break with the past. Historians also agree on periodization of the era, though, not surprisingly, their perceptions of the main dividing lines have shifted from the 1960s to the 1990s as new trends have been revealed or older ones reversed. The consensus on social trends even crosses deep political divides, especially those between authoritarian southern Europe and democratic northwest Europe.

Strong as it is on national and comparative syntheses of complex processes, trend-tracking, and periodization, the field has not agreed on a comprehensive theoretical construct for the era, hence the discussion here of the weaknesses and lacunae in the social history of postwar Europe. Having charted and labeled the key developments, historians have found it difficult to wrap them up as a single package. Certainly the period has earned several epithets, most of which append the prefix "post-" to a concept that characterizes the preceding era. Thus, scholars have bandied about "postindustrial," "postmodern," "post-Fordist," even "postcapitalist." Social historians, as well as other social scientists and humanists working on the period, have grown uncomfortable with their inability to confer an overarching identity on the era. Like historians in general, most have distanced themselves from modernization theory and so are left without an organizing principle that draws together the disparate and indisputably enormous changes that have occurred since 1945.

If it has not settled on a conceptual framework, the historiography of the era has at least grappled with this issue. Postwar social history remains weakest not at the high plane of theory but on the ground level of human experience. Not until the later 1990s did there appear a critical mass of historical studies that deconstruct general trends into their local variations or that examine social relations from the "bottom up" in this town or that industry. Social historians started only in the 1990s to mine qualitative, as opposed to statistical, archival collections to ascertain how individuals, villages, youth groups, women's associations, male choruses, soccer clubs, and so on adapted to political, economic, and social change. Typical social-historical topics—organized protest, industrial relations, interactions between state officials and citizens—have remained, by and large, the stuff of good reporting or, sometimes, bad sociology, rather than becoming the object of in-depth historical investigation. Few historians have exploited the abundant opportunities for oral history that the recency of the era affords. The field has also not made the "anthropological turn," that is, the shift away from a focus on social causes and effects and toward the interpretation of cultural practices and mentalities. Insofar as mentalities and their particular contexts have been explored, anthropologists themselves have done the work.

The historiography of the postwar era has not (yet) been etched with the distinctive methodological profile of either the "new" new social history of the 1970s or the sociocultural history that permeated the historiography in the 1980s. This essay ends with a brief consideration of why postwar social history has thus evolved. Like social history as a whole and indeed all historiography, postwar social history has been characterized by national differences in topic, method, and perspective. Thus the literature on each country has been shaped by the discipline's particular style in, for example, Great Britain, France, or Germany. The nature of the field has in turn interacted with a structural "recency effect" and the meaning of "1945" in each country to produce a social historiography that was more or less developed by the 1980s. However, at least until the mid-1990s, it everywhere tended to focus on impersonal social change writ large rather than on human agency and the history of everyday life.

DEFINING THE MAJOR SOCIAL PATTERNS

Like many social historians, those who study Europe in the second half of the twentieth century have been especially interested in the relationship between social change and economic development. In this case, they have asked about the impact of the extraordinarily steep, broad, and long economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s on living patterns, social structures, and class relations. Alongside other social scientists, they have explored, for example, the links between consumption patterns and rising incomes, social mobility and rising levels of education, or family organization and rising employment of married women. To address these issues, they have turned above all to the huge quantity, if not always unblemished quality, of statistics gathered on many aspects of life by every European regime since 1945. Their answers can be summarized in several categories that, taken together, constitute what are seen to be the main attributes of (Western) Europe's "new society" as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s: high rates of urbanization and the demise of a distinctly rural style of life; the attenuation of class antagonism and acceleration of social mobility; the extraordinary expansion of vocational, secondary, and higher education; the fall in the birth rate, rise of divorce, and semisocialization of child rearing; the emergence of a full-blown welfare state and its accompanying new relationship between government and citizen; and the triumph of "American-style" consumerism.

The postwar era, social historians have argued, witnessed not only the continuation of centuries-old European urbanization but, more significantly, the end of the sharp opposition between city and country that characterized large stretches of Europe in 1945. Rural areas, occupations, and people persisted; but after 1945 the lines between village and city blurred and the lives of villagers and city dwellers grew increasingly similar, thus blunting ancient mutual resentments. Historians and social scientists have written of the "death of a separate peasant culture" (Eric J. Hobsbawm) and the "end of the peasantry" (Henri Mendras), attributing its collapse to technological advances, urban migration, and the extension of consumer society into the countryside. The peasantry's demise has been of particular interest to historians of France, presumably because peasant culture persisted so robustly there through the 1940s, only to decline precipitously by 1970. The peasant way of life virtually disappeared, however, in every Western European country—even in authoritarian Spain, where the regime was invested in its preservation—and, though not for all the same reasons, in Eastern Europe as well. Farmers continued to form a strong bloc in European politics, yet even their protests mimicked the tactics of urban dissident movements.

If the gap between rural and urban narrowed dramatically as prosperity, tractors, and television penetrated the village, income disparities—another prominent topic in the historiography—remained wide in most Western European countries. However, inequality produced social and political consequences different from those that occurred before 1945. Class antagonism did not disappear but became milder and, when expressed, less likely to take violent, organized, or political forms. Social historians have associated this change with others: First, the gap between top and bottom did narrow to some extent. Moreover, mobility was rapid enough to assuage workers' sense of grievance. Full employment and, later, unemployment compensation also contributed to a change in workers' consciousness, as the social historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued. Workers were now linked to the bourgeoisie, as were farmers to city folk, by commonalities of consumption. Everyone shopped at chain stores and supermarkets and ever-increasing numbers of people owned expensive private goods such as a car, even if some drove a luxury vehicle and others a jalopy.

Expanding prosperity contributed to the decline of a distinct proletarian milieu. Even though workers continued to compose a plurality of most European populations, they were much less visible than before. Workers were ever less likely to hang out in pubs, cafés, or bars, not to mention union or political halls, and much more likely to go to the movies or watch television with their families. As working-class pursuits became more private, workers' lives became more like those of the middle classes. The decline of a separate, and politicized, proletarian milieu has particularly occupied the interest of historians of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), presumably because of the huge size, extraordinary network, and political significance of social democratic and communist organizations in Germany before 1933.

As the working-class way of life became less culturally distinct, bourgeois culture too grew less socially definable. Again, most authors contend that real changes underlay the decline of older social, cultural, and political distinctions. A different social structure emerged with the final disappearance of the aristocracy and the transformation of industrial barons into economic managers. The old middle class—shopkeepers, artisans, and other self-employed—shrank to a tiny minority of the European population and became, after a few last gasps, incapable of effective, usually reactionary, activity in defense of its interests. Social class was ever less defined by ownership of traditional kinds of property and ever more based on education and one's position within a bureaucratic hierarchy, whether corporate or governmental.

The social effects of economic changes were hastened, most analysts have argued, by the spread of mass culture via the electronic media. As Peter Stearns observed in European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1750 (1975), tastes were converging across the urban-rural boundary, class divides, and national borders as ever greater numbers of Europeans enjoyed more leisure, participated in similar leisure activities and vacations, and labored in the increasingly indistinguishable environments of the large, automated office and big, mechanized factory. In An Economic and Social History of Europe from 1939 to the Present (1987), Frank Tipton and Robert Aldrich pointed to the high television ratings of the 1955 World Cup series, broadcast over all Western Europe, as a watershed event that revealed both the expansion of leisure in postwar Europe and the shared ways Europeans spent their free time.

Whether because the social gap narrowed slightly or because dress, demeanor, and possessions no longer blatantly expressed "class," the meaning of that social division faded. Social historians not only agree that this process occurred but rank it as one of the most significant changes in European society since World War II. They do not, however, see the attenuation of class antagonism as linear, much less absolute. Each country followed its own path, and nowhere did class distinctions disappear. If the class struggle was no longer a central theme of social relations, tensions still flared, especially during periods of recession or inflation, such as in France and Italy in the late 1960s and in Great Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, the topic of class and its continuing significance has especially engaged historians of postwar Britain, presumably because the distinctions between "upstairs" and "downstairs" were understood to be especially sharp there before 1945. Surveying not only the British Isles but all Europe, Stearns and Herrick Chapman (1992) found class still to be a vibrant category of popular perceptions of society and criticized the "rosy view of homogenization" found in assessments of the "new Europe" from the 1960s.

Since the 1970s social historians have also become interested in the mass migration of workers between and into European countries as simultaneously a new source of social tension and a siphon of class antagonism. Initially that migration consisted mostly of southern Europeans going north; later, Europe received an influx of immigrants from former colonies and other countries. Although racism, not to mention chauvinistic nationalism, has an old, terrible history in Europe, largely new is its tendency to divide workers along ethnic lines in the factory and in the neighborhood. As a result, it has contributed, social historians have argued, to the decline of class-based politics and an increase in racial tension. In this way, as in so many others, Europe has become more like the United States. Social historians have in fact manifested considerable interest in the Americanization of Europe as well as in Europeans' love-hate relationship with the United States.

Clearly, one path of European and American convergence has been the rising educational levels on both sides of the Atlantic. From a continent starkly divided between a mass of elementary-school graduates and a thin layer of academics, Europe—west and east, north and south—has become a society of highschool and college graduates, a change that has greatly interested social-science historians. A dramatic improvement in vocational training inaugurated the educational reforms of the postwar era, allowing the majority of working-class boys to enter skilled occupations and also providing many proletarian daughters access to a vocation. The expansion of secondary schooling and universities, for its part, provided a new means of recruitment into social elites. Social historians have argued that this second stage of the educational boom reversed the order of class and gender effects achieved by the first phase. The expansion of higher education functioned less well as a lever to lift workers' children into the middle class than as a formidable leveler of young women's historic educational disadvantages.

The historiography has generally associated the education boom with two other developments: first, the emergence of a youth culture that crossed national boundaries in its tastes, styles, and mores and, second, the rise of new social movements, often peopled by students or graduates who discovered their political cause while at university. As one might expect, social historians have attributed social significance to the explosion and spread across Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, and Germany of the student movement for university reform and against consumer capitalism. When it comes to actual research, however, they have tended to leave the investigation of the mass strikes of the 1960s and the terrorism of the 1970s to political scientists and sociologists such as, most famously, Alain Touraine. Though the feminist movement emerged later in Europe and never attained the same strength as in the United States, the struggles for women's rights and, especially, for reproductive rights have since the late 1970s inspired more social-historical research than has the student revolt.

Interest in the women's movement was heightened by the recognition that this social movement was associated with a major social change: the demise of patriarchal power and the rise of the two-earner family. As measured by social historians, changes in the European family were many and varied. After the baby boom of the 1950s, the birth rate fell, reaching historic lows in virtually every country and approaching zero population growth in several by the 1970s. The institutionalization of a smaller nuclear family occurred along with changes in domestic gender relations. Wives' level of education rose, companionate marriage based on friendship and joint decision making spread, and both men and women expected sexual fulfillment in marriage; as a result of these tendencies, standards of marital happiness rose. As legal barriers to divorce fell in country after country, the divorce rate accelerated, accompanied by an increase in the percentage of single-parent families and of single-person households. Ever more married women entered the workforce, leaving only briefly to bear and raise children, although precise rates varied widely between countries like Spain and Portugal on the one hand and the Scandinavian countries on the other. The offspring of these women entered (usually public) daycare and kindergartens. Thus, the family declined as the primary institution for the socialization of young children.

The state increased its influence not only on the early-childhood development of Europeans but on every phase of their lives. Needy individuals, in particular, came to rely much less on family and much more on state intervention in periods of crisis. The European welfare states socialized many services and at least some industries, manipulated economic measures in order to create full employment, redistributed wealth via taxes and state programs, and provided health and other social insurance. After the flush days of the 1960s, state budgets were hard hit by the oil shocks of the 1970s and the aging of populations. A wave of privatization occurred in the 1980s, especially in Great Britain; but nowhere was the welfare state dismantled. Social historians concluded that people might grumble about taxes and bureaucracies but would not countenance a return to a society whose state did not guarantee at least social security, health insurance, and unemployment compensation.

One European postwar trend was of particular fascination to social critics and historians from the 1950s to the turn of the century: the triumph of consumer society in Western Europe and, after 1989, the extension of mass consumerism into Eastern Europe. Historians have attributed the breakthrough of mass, American-style consumerism, like other social changes, to the unprecedented prosperity generated by the long postwar boom. The boom, several historians have been at pains to point out, was founded on the continued and indeed rapid industrialization of European economies in the 1950s and 1960s. So, for example, industrial work relations spread quite dramatically among some subpopulations, such as women or southern Europeans. Yet social historians have not scrutinized their experiences, presumably because they did not constitute a break with the kind of work patterns already established in Europe. Rejecting the productionist bias of nineteenth-century studies, social historians have defined the "New Europe" instead by how, what, and how much it consumed—that is, by the market's new status as the main means by which people satisfied their bodily, emotional, and even spiritual needs. In dubbing the era the "Age of the Automobile," Hobsbawm referred not to "Fordism" and its mass-production methods but to mass accessibility to commodities on the one hand and to an individualistic, liberated, mobile style of life on the other.

WHAT'S NEW, WHAT'S NOT, AND WHY

The triumph of consumer society, then, stands at the heart of what is really different about the new age—and has, in turn, influenced the historiography of the era. Or does it—and has it? It is difficult, as Stearns and Chapman noted, to assess continuity and change in the postwar era because most of its major trends—including the spread of consumerism—continued prewar social tendencies. It is even more difficult to judge the nature of change because there occurred not a true recasting of the class structure, as in nineteenth-century western Europe, but a reformation of the occupational framework. Many historians maintain, nonetheless, that postwar changes, while neither new nor revolutionary, were so dramatic, profound, and transnational that their very quantity adds up to a qualitative shift toward a more open and dynamic society.

Hartmut Kaelble has taken the argument about the significance of a cross-national pattern of change one step further. In his A Social History of Western Europe, 1880–1980 (1989), he argued that Western European societies have converged substantially since 1945. Pointing to the trends outlined above, he maintained, first, that this convergence was multifaceted. Second, it stood in contrast to a tendency toward political and even social divergence through the 1930s. Third, it occurred without turning Europe into a version of the United States but preserved distinctively European urban patterns and styles of life. Finally, Kaelble posited, the social integration of Europe since 1950 contributed appreciably to the new peacefulness of European relations and to the political and economic integration that is still under way. Rather than look at Kaelble's converging metatrends, other historians have focused instead on differences in particular tendencies or on different rates of change within a similar trend. Thus, historians of women have shown an interest in why the rate of women's employment in Great Britain and especially the Federal Republic of Germany has lagged behind that in France and Sweden. They have pointed to the less advanced development of public child-care systems in the former two countries as one reason for the difference. Obviously, whether they support Kaelble's convergence theory or not, social historians of the postwar era share a trait that is pronounced in the social historiography of postwar Europe: a strong proclivity toward the comparative analyses of social trends.

Social, along with political, historians of the postwar era have long been interested in why the effects of World War II were so profoundly different from those of World War I. Whereas the unprecedented carnage of 1939–1945 ushered in an age of greater (Western) European unity, peace, and prosperity, in the wake of World War I followed discordance, crises, and, finally, an even more terrible war. Social historians have not denied the significance of the political lessons learned from the interwar crises or, certainly, the division of Europe between the superpowers as spurs to solidarity within each camp; but in their view the major generator of the New Europe is the economic boom. Like political historians and experts in international relations, they attribute the boom in part to international conditions (fostered, again, by the cold war) that helped jump-start Western European industry in the 1950s. But social historians, especially of the Federal Republic of Germany, also point to certain social effects of the war and immediate postwar years that were internally generated and peculiar to Europe. They cite, for example, the destruction of aristocratic and landed elites and the migration westward of young populations with considerable skills as difficult transitions that eventually contributed both to the more liberal and conciliatory political climate and to the economic dynamism of the 1950s. As for the authoritarian southern nations, economic dynamism followed by liberalization came later.

PERIODIZATION

Social historians have constructed their periodization of the postwar era in Western Europe above all around its economic phases. The first period, from 1945 to 1950–1951, was one of dearth, social crisis, and mass migrations. The boom ushered in two decades of rising prosperity that was punctuated at the end (1966–1971) by a sudden and cross-European rise in social unrest associated with the explosion in the student and working-class populations. The years from 1973 through the late 1980s are grouped together as a time of economic malaise, characterized by inflation, budget crises, stagnation, and high levels of long-term unemployment, although this was also a period of significant democratization. Finally, the 1990s are seen as a decade of partial economic recovery that was also distinguished by striking political developments. Social historians highlight, first and foremost, the end of communism in Eastern Europe, but also emphasize the rapid steps toward, on the positive side, European unity and, on the negative side, the resurgence of nationalism and instability, particularly in the Balkans.

This periodization, by attributing as much significance to the postwar economic boom as to the wars and political upheavals of the first half of the century, challenges the utility of the conventional periodization of twentieth-century history. It also diverges from perceptions of the postwar era that cast the 1950s as socially dull, conformist, conservative, and even retrograde rather than as a decade that harbored new social tendencies and so prepared the way for changes in the family, the position of women, and generational relationships in the 1960s and 1970s. Although at any given point scholarly definitions of both the intervals and the meaning of the periodization have tended to intersect, definitions have varied according to when the appraisals were written. Commentaries on the "golden years" of the 1950s and 1960s that appeared during those years were not mindlessly optimistic, but they did tend to overestimate the transformative impact of mass consumption and changes in class structures. Overviews of postwar development written in the late 1970s were not all retrospective gloom and doom, though their sense of postwar development—and emphasis on what had not changed—was clearly colored by the mood of crisis that gripped Europe during the decade's oil crises and wave of terrorism. Their authors were more likely, for example, to highlight the devastating effects on certain regions of the decline of old industries such as textiles and mining than to trumpet, as had earlier writers, the rise of new industries such as petrochemicals and electronics.

THEORIZING CONSUMER SOCIETY

In The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (1994), Hobsbawm held that the postwar world had undergone a great social transformation. Yet simultaneously, he acknowledged the difficulty of characterizing this new world of constant change. Hobsbawm, as had Stearns and Kaelble in their own surveys of the era, rejected the term "postindustrial," coined in 1959 by the American sociologist Daniel Bell (first appearing in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting), as a misnomer, at least for Europe. After all, the continent experienced not only greater industrialization into the 1970s but also the continuation of other classic trends of the industrial age. Other historians, though, have found the term useful. If not postindustrial or, in a subsequent variation, post-Fordist, they have often appended "postmodern" to at least the period after the 1970s. The sociological economist Amitai Etzioni in 1968 first applied this term to the radical transformation of the technologies of communication and knowledge after 1945. Recognizing that the social-structural effects of the technological revolution remain unclear, historians use the concept to refer to a vaguer, though palpable, shift in social mentality that has accompanied the movement toward a Europe dominated by the production of services of all kinds.

Other versions of "post-" mania have been less controversial. On the one hand, it is accepted that Eastern Europe became "postcommunist." On the other hand, virtually no historian has embraced the term "post-capitalist," put forward in the 1960s by the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf as a label for Western Europe, if only because in the 1990s the market organization of the economy experienced a resurgence throughout Europe and, of course, in Eastern Europe in particular. Even the social democratic parties that came to power in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s pursued economic policies more neoliberal than socialist.

Historians who have refused to see the world since 1945 as a postscript are at the same time increasingly reluctant to encompass it within the long-term and universalizing pattern of development encapsulated in the theory of modernization. Historians and other scholars have questioned the usefulness of the concept on several grounds. First, its normative and teleological assumptions have come under attack by historians who point out that, in the twentieth century, modernity's dissonances tended to drown out the harmonious strains of its progressive march. Works on the postwar era that appeared after the 1970s highlighted the troubles in paradise such as environmental degradation, loss of regional diversity, and erosion of traditional culture. Second, ever more scholars have come to doubt the theory's ability to describe social facts. Historians of the postwar era have argued that modernization theory cannot encompass the fragmentary and contradictory currents of social and cultural "progress" and "regression"—such as the renascence of regionalism and racist nationalism in Western and Eastern Europe—that characterize change in even the most highly industrialized and, indeed, postindustrial European societies. Thus one might say that social-historical interpretations often adopt a "postmodern" viewpoint insofar as they stand judgment on modernity, counting not its blessings but its costs. Yet this critical perspective cannot be assimilated to the post-industrial, postmodern camp, for its adherents see postwar European society as shaped by modern developments taken to their extreme, if not necessarily logical, ends.

A SOCIAL, BUT NOT YET A PEOPLE'S, HISTORY

The historiography of postwar Europe, distancing itself from modernization theory with its underpinnings in social-science methodologies, has also been moving away from its fascination with big social trends. An outline of a social history that is new to the study of postwar Europe has begun to take shape. This emergent history rests, like the familiar social histories of industrialization, on painstaking archival reconstructions of the evolution of one region, town, or industry across periods of economic expansion and contraction. Alternatively, its practitioners track the history of one social group's occupations, education, and living patterns, such as those of women or workers. Or they trace the development of a particular social activity, such as radio listening, or organization, such as sports leagues. Social-historical publications cover topics of interest including urban planning; nuclear power; tourism, radio, and other leisure pursuits; women's integration into the industrial labor force; and the assimilation of refugees after the mass migrations of the mid-1940s. Articles and books in the field offer social-historical versions of discourse analysis: they plumb the daily press, official records and decrees, written memoirs, and interviewees' memories to trace, to take two disparate examples, popular perceptions of American culture and GI's or the gendered construction of shopping in the new consumer economy. Findings have suggested that, just as national surveys and comparative syntheses of social change established, by the 1960s Europeans were already living tremendously different lives from those twenty years earlier. Yet these studies have also uncovered the persistence of the old within, around, and against the new—documenting, for example, continuities in male attitudes about the proper gender of industrial labor or in the socializing patterns and cultural beliefs of refugees. The goal of such research is to obtain a rich picture of how Europeans actually used and interpreted their prosperity, greater social mobility, higher education, and more egalitarian family structures.

The attention to popular experience and local processes has not yet touched all the big issues. The decline of peasant culture, for example, needs to be addressed. The anthropologists Lawrence Wylie and Julian Pitt-Rivers produced classic treatments of villages after the war, but these date to the 1950s. The shrinking of the old middle classes and their demise as a sociopolitical force also remain understudied topics, with the exception of the 1956 book on the Poujadist movement, a right-wing French protest movement in the 1950s, by the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann. The social experiences and cultural adjustments of immigrants from Africa and southern Europe into Europe's northwestern nations since the 1960s also deserve greater attention. The social history of Eastern Europe is in general underresearched, including not just the fate of its peasant and lower-middle-class cultures but also the experience of workers during the Stalinist-style industrialization there in the 1950s. The opening of the archives in Eastern European countries in the early 1990s allowed graduate students from every European nation, the United States, and Canada to conduct research into myriad important social-historical topics. The emerging dissertations and books based on these researches mark an important stage in the social history of the period.

NATIONAL TRENDS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The country whose postwar social history has received the most attention is Germany, especially its western part (although comparative German history has become a growth field). German historians have, not surprisingly, played the prominent role in this research, but they have been joined by both Americans and Britons in the field. Several factors explain the preeminence of the German wing of postwar social history and the great interest in understanding German social development. Of all Western European countries, the political break across the 1945 divide was most dramatic in what became the Federal Republic of Germany. German historians have been eager to determine what exactly distinguishes, and why, the second postwar era from the first. Social historians, for their part, have a special interest in Germany's postwar evolution. Central causes of the character, popular appeal, and political-military course of National Socialism must be sought, they have argued, in German society and culture from 1900 to 1945—in short, the "German question." Similarly, they attribute German political stability since 1945 to the nation's new social dynamics. To understand what changed in German political culture and whether it has become more like that of its western neighbors, they have been determined to establish the exact nature of social change and continuity after the war. Interest in social history was also motivated by the massive transfer and flight of Germans from the east after 1945, a topic that is probably better researched than any other social question in Germany.

The concentration on German social history in the postwar era derives, too, from the character of historiography in the Federal Republic. The German historians who inaugurated modern social history—called the Young Turks because of the challenge they posed to the conventional methods—in the late 1960s, such as Hans Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, and Hans Mommsen, listed toward the social-science corner of the field and showed a keen interest in the comparative social development of Germany, western European nations, and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They drew a sharp line between their comparative, structural perspective and the dominant tradition of national political history for which the German academy was once famous and, after 1945, infamous. Though Wehler and others directed their critical sights on Germany before 1945, some of their students chose to apply their training in sociological methods and issues to contemporary history.

German social history's own history has been subjected, ironically, to the same critical questions about continuities with the pre-1945 and especially National Socialist past as those it posed concerning German society and traditional German historiography. In the late 1990s several scholars established that the deceased historians Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder, whose students in the 1950s developed into the 1960s generation of Young Turks, had written position papers during the war on the right of Germans to settle eastern Europe. These papers promoted a chauvinistic agenda and were suffused with National Socialist assumptions about ethnic hierarchies. The discovery unleashed a controversy about why their students, now famous historians in senior university posts, had failed to question them or other older social historians about their activity during the Third Reich. It also ignited a continuing debate about what came to be called the "brown roots of social history" in Germany (brown being the color associated with the Nazis because of their uniforms). Both Conze and Schieder conducted research on the postwar era. Schieder, in fact, directed the huge government-financed project of the 1950s that gathered statistics and qualitative evidence on what happened to the German refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe. This controversy touched, if far from tainted, the history of postwar social history.

Into the early 1990s the social history of France in the 1950s and 1960s consisted of a relatively small number of syntheses of social, economic, and policy trends. Overviews of French development that appeared in the 1980s argued that 1950s policymakers had taken the country through a planned leap into modern life after the crisis of the Third Republic and the shock of German occupation. The results, they believed, clearly broke with decades of social and economic stagnation. Only in the late 1990s did there appear a specialized social-historical literature, mainly written by young American scholars, on particular aspects and local versions of French social change. Several reasons underlie the lagging development of postwar social history in France. First, 1945, dramatic though it was, did not, as in Germany, constitute the so-called zero hour, much less the end of an aggressive, murderous regime. Compared to German historians' anxious scanning of their nation's recent history, the French did not feel the need to establish exactly what was different about the New France in order to assure themselves and their readers that the Old France would not reemerge. In fact, the French were more invested in denying the French roots of the country's own wartime regime. Second, modern social history in France was the child of the Annales school, famous for its interest in the longue durée of historical evolution and its contempt for short-term trends; in continuity rather than breaks; in slow-brewing popular mentalities rather then elite-driven "events"; and, finally, in medieval and early modern history. French social historians have, as a result, been inclined to shy away from contemporary history.

In Great Britain, too, the meaning of "1945" there and the character of the historiography conspired to reduce the interest of social historians in the postwar era. Whether looked at from a political or social angle, the break there was less dramatic than in any other major European combatant. The country was already highly urbanized and industrialized in 1945; changes in class relations were not very noticeable there until the 1980s, following the onset of rapid deindustrialization. Moreover, the economic boom was considerably weaker and shorter in the United Kingdom than in Germany, France, or Italy. Early postwar governments followed an assertive socialization policy and created a well-developed welfare state, but the social effects of these policies emerged only over several decades. Finally, British social historians have generally concentrated on the industrial revolution as the most important era of social change in modern British history. Thus, the British historiography, even more than the French, has been characterized by synthetic treatments of national social development over the entire postwar era or the twentieth century as a whole.

As the postwar era in Europe—defined by political scientists and historians as having ended with the fall of communism—recedes in time, research into the social and sociocultural aspects of its history will most certainly flourish, as has the field's knowledge of earlier historical periods.

See alsoImmigrants (in this volume);Modernization; Migration; Birth, Contraception, and Abortion; The Welfare State (volume 2);Social Class; Social Mobility; Student Movements (volume 3);Consumerism; Schools and Schooling; Standards of Living (volume 5); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Comparative and Pan-European Literature

Ambrosius, Gerold, and William H. Hubbard. A Social and Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York, 1994.

Kaelble, Hartmut. "Boom und gesellschaftlicher Wandel 1948–1973: Frankreich und die Bundesrepublik, Deutschland im Vergleich." In Der Boom 1948–1973: Gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Folgen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in Europa. Edited by Hartmut Kaelble. Opladen, Germany, 1992.

Kaelble, Hartmut. A Social History of Western Europe, 1880–1980. Translated by Daniel Bird. Dublin and New York, 1989.

"Looking for Europe." Daedalus 108 (winter 1979). Special issue.

"A New Europe?" Daedalus 93, no. 1 (1964). Special issue.

Siegrist, Hannes, Hartmut Kaelble, and Jürgen Kocka, eds. Europäische Konsumgeschichte: zur Gesellschaftsund Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert). Frankfurt and New York, 1997.

Siegrist, Hannes, Hartmut Kaelble, and Jürgen Kocka, eds. "Sozialgeschichte in Frankreich und der Bundesrepublik: Annales gegen historische Wissenschaften?" Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1978): 77–93.

Sampson, Anthony. Anatomy of Europe: A Guide to the Workings, Institutions, and Character of Contemporary Western Europe. New York, 1968.

Stearns, Peter. European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1750. 2d ed. New York, 1975.

Stearns, Peter, and Herrick Chapman. European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1750. 3d ed. New York and Toronto, 1992.

Tipton, Frank B., and Robert Aldrich. An Economic and Social History of Europe from 1939 to the Present. Baltimore, 1987.

Works on France

Ardagh, John. The New French Revolution. A Social and Economic Survey of France, 1945–1967. London, 1968.

Bloch-Lainé, François, and Jean Bouvier. La France restaurée, 1944–1954: Dialogues sur les choix d'une modernisation. Paris, 1986.

Fourastié, Jean. Les trente glorieuses; Ou, La revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris, 1979.

Hecht, Gabrielle. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

Hoffmann, Stanley. Le mouvement poujade. Paris, 1956.

Larkin, Maurice. France since the Popular Front: Government and People, 1936–1986. Oxford and New York, 1988.

McMillan, James F. Twentieth-Century France: Politics and Society, 1898–1991. London, 1992.

Mendras, Henri, with Laurence Duboys Fresney. La seconde révolution française, 1965–1984. Paris, 1988.

Ross, George. Workers and Communists in France: From the Popular Front to Eurocommunism. Berkeley, Calif., 1982.

Wakeman, Rosemary. Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945–1975. Cambridge, Mass., 1997.

Works on Germany

Conze, Werner, and M. Rainer Lepsius, eds. Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Beiträge zum Kontinuitätsproblem. Stuttgart, 1983.

Erker, Paul. Ernährungskrise und Nachkriegsgesellschaft: Bauern und Arbeiterschaft in Bayern 1943–1953. Stuttgart, 1990.

Kaschuba, Wolfgang, Gottfried Korff, and Bernd Jürgen Warneken, eds. Arbeiterkultur seit 1945: Ende oder Veränderung? Tübingen, 1991.

Klessmann, Christoph. Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970. Bonn, 1997.

Münz, Rainer, Wolfgang Seifert, and Ralf Ulrich, eds. Zuwanderung nach Deutschland: Strukturen, Wirkungen, Perspektiven. Frankfurt, 1999.

Niethammer, Lutz, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling. Die volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR: 30 biografische Eröffnungen. Berlin, 1991.

Schildt, Axel. Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien, und "Zeitgeist" in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre. Hamburg, 1995.

Schildt, Axel, and Arnold Sywottek, eds. Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre. Bonn, 1993.

"Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland." Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995). Special issue.

Works on Great Britain

Cannadine, David. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York, 1999.

Gillis, John R. For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present. New York, 1985.

Marwick, Arthur. Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France, and the USA since 1930. 2d ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., 1990.

Marwick, Arthur. The Penguin Social History of Britain: British Society since 1945. London, 1995.

McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford and New York, 1998.

Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London and New York, 1989.

Pugh, Martin. State and Society: British Political and Social History, 1870–1997. 2d ed. London, 1999.

Topical Literature: Women

Brookes, Barbara. Abortion in England, 1900–1967. London and New York, 1988.

Budde, Gunilla-Friederike, ed. Frauen arbeiten: Weibliche Erwerbstätigkeit in Ostund Westdeutschland nach 1945. Göttingen, Germany, 1997.

Duchen, Claire. Feminism in France from May '68 to Mitterrand. London and Boston, 1986.

Heitlinger, Alena. Reproduction, Medicine, and the Socialist State. New York, 1987.

Katzenstein, Mary F., and Carol M. Mueller, eds. The Women's Movements of the United States and Western Europe: Consciousness, Political Opportunity, and Public Policy. Philadelphia, 1987.

Morcillo, Aurora G. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco's Spain. DeKalb, Ill., 2000.

Saraceno, Chiara. "Constructing Families, Shaping Women's Lives: The Making of Italian Families between Market Economy and State Interventions." In The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution. Edited by John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. Pages 251–269.