The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe

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. "I 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. Posed in broader terms, how did Western Europe achieve political and social stability by the mid-twentieth century after two great, destructive wars and the intervening upheaval. Historians often treat stability as a passive coming to rest or a societal inertia that requires no explanation. In fact, stabilization is as challenging a historical problem as revolution. It can emerge dramatically. As one historian who has focused on the process wrote, "Political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice."2 Stabilization, moreover, does not preclude significant social and political change but often requires it. Certainly the two world wars broadened democracy in Britain and stimulated economic transformation in France. World War II finally removed the contradictions between modernity and reaction in Germany, thereby facilitating a meritocratic pluralism. Yet, despite the transformations, earlier liberal and elitist arrangements that governed the distribution of wealth and power either persisted or were resumed after authoritarian intervals. And at least until