Thursday, March 28

Europe, its crises and its strength

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Western Europe experienced a golden age of economic and social development. In this period, the average growth of the continent stood at 2.8% per year, employment was abundant, new social programs were created, and education, including higher education, became universal. There are many theories about what caused this true golden age, but we can point to at least four main factors. One was the transformation of capitalism, which abandoned the economic orthodoxy that had caused and deepened the great depression unleashed in 1929. Now it has become more social, the benefits are distributed more and better among the population; and the State took on a fundamental role by nationalizing, planning or regulating key sectors, and implementing redistributive policies paid for with progressive tax systems. The next factor was a commitment to industrialization, which provided good, stable jobs and wealth for families (in 1948, European industrial production represented 39% of the world; in 1970, it rose to 48%). The third was the availability of abundant and cheap sources of energy, especially after the exploitation of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, discovered shortly after the end of the war. The fourth and last was the growing cooperation and coordination of the countries of the continent that in 1993 would lead to the creation of the European Union. But there is also one last factor, very difficult to quantify (very often ignored by neoliberal capitalism, until yesterday a great partner and even admirer of Putin and Xi Jinping) but which seems decisive to many of us: that Western Europe -at the time with notorious exceptions such as Spain and Portugal – was and continues to be a continent of democracies, and that this has allowed us to peacefully discuss our problems and negotiate solutions that benefit the majority.

Europe’s success was not guaranteed in 1945. The challenges were enormous. The Nazis had been defeated, but Stalin’s troops were encamped in the heart of the continent, ruthlessly implanting copies of the Soviet dictatorship. Fascists and war criminals hid in plain sight, often relying on the complicity of their communities. Tens of millions of people had become refugees. Numerous key infrastructures were destroyed (for months the Rhine River had only one usable bridge). Tens of millions of houses had been destroyed. Food and fuel were scarce. To make matters worse, many governments of the newly liberated nations set out to reconquer, through blood and fire, their lost empires or those threatened by the Axis powers during the war (France in Vietnam and Algeria; the Netherlands in Indonesia), and other countries, such as the Kingdom, they clung to their colonial fantasies, applying in their overseas territories (Kenya or Malaysia) repressive laws and policies that had nothing to envy to those of the recently defeated fascist regimes. And all this in the midst of a technical bankruptcy of the state finances only palliated by American aid which, especially through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, by 1948 totaled 25,000 million dollars, to to which some 13,200 more from the Marshall Plan were added between that year and 1952.

However, the European economy took off. Between 1947 and 1950, steel production increased by 70%, automobiles by 150%, and petroleum products by 200%. No less important, exports also grew by 91%. The country that benefited most from this spectacular growth was Germany, whose industrial production grew by a phenomenal 600% between 1948 and 1962. But these economic achievements were not without major obstacles. Democracy did not take hold easily in many countries. Political crises were constant and lasted far beyond what is often remembered. Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets between June 1948 and May 1949. Only an ingenious and very dangerous airlift saved the city from hunger and cold, which from being a symbol of Nazism became an emblem of defiance of Stalinist tyranny. France suffered three coup attempts between 1958 and 1962. Italian democracy was based on the permanent exclusion, by any means, of the thriving Communist Party. In addition, after auspicious steps towards European unity such as the creation of the OECD in 1948, the Council of Europe in 1949 and the Coal and Steel Community in 1952, in the second half of the fifties the process was bogged down, among other things because of France’s nuclear ambitions and its reluctance in the face of Germany’s reaming, which entered NATO in 1955. It had to be the double crisis caused by the pathetic Franco-British neo-imperial aggression against Egypt in October 1956 and the bloody Soviet invasion of Hungary in November, the one to remind Europeans of their weaknesses in the face of the real great superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and of the need for greater cooperation between them. In March 1957 the Treaty of Rome and the creation of Euratom were signed. Europe was born.

The postwar economic and social model worked well until 1973, when the oil embargo that followed the Yom Kippur War ended up causing a 400% rise in fuel prices in a few months. By then, the world financial system, based on the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, was already leaking, in part because of the huge US fiscal deficit caused by the Vietnam War. The neoliberal economic policies that were implemented in the following years ended the social consensus of the European Golden Age. The role of the State in the economy was becoming blurred. The financial and speculative sectors were the great beneficiaries while, at the same time, the continent began to de-industrialize. The once proud and confident working class cracked, something that far-right populists later used to launch hate speech and exclusion. Although the economy of the Soviet bloc was rotten, in the 1970s it seemed that the sick man on the continent was Western Europe (it had to be the brave Polish workers and intellectuals who proved the truth to the free world, already in 1980). In the face of the crisis, Europe’s response was not a return to nationalism but rather more unity. In 1974 the Council of Europe was created. In 1978 it was decided that the European Parliament would be elected by direct vote of the citizens. In 1985, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, began to work for the creation of a true single market, which finally saw the light of day in February 1986. A month earlier, Portugal and Spain had been admitted to the organization.

Today more than ever we must remember that freedom and justice have united and made Europeans prosperous. During the four decades that followed the defeat of Nazi terror, and beyond, Europe found its strength in righting wrongs and deepening cooperation between states. Meanwhile, for the first time in more than five centuries, Europeans gave up attacking other peoples -the continent ceased to be oppressive and colonialist- and internalized the discourse of defense of peace and human rights. This is how we got out of our crises. And it must be repeated, because this truth will always hurt both those who have no other ideology than that of money and tyrants, especially those who presume to know a lot of history.



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