For my research, I had to consult a couple of paragraphs in Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. And that was a mistake because this turned out to be one of those “You’ll have to tear this 900-page volume out of my cold, dead hands if you want me to let it go before I read every word of it, twice” books.
I don’t like books that tell me what I already know. I prefer the kind of research that surprises me. Europe after 1945 always seemed like too familiar a topic for me to consider reading anything else about it, so I would have never picked up Judt’s book on my own.
Judt espouses a very interesting approach to the history of the XXth century in Europe that seems to be gaining in popularity these days. Europe couldn’t deal with its enormous ethnic diversity packed into a small territory, Judt says (and Helen Graham says something similar.) So between 1914-45, Europe fought incessant wars trying to push every ethnic group into its own small parcel of land:
Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities—the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union—an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted—stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe.
Maybe you heard this before, but for me this is a strikingly novel approach. And it makes sense, too.
Remember what happened when there wasn’t anybody left to keep Yugoslavia together with an iron fist? And have you noticed what is happening now when millions of representatives of different ethnic groups are pouring into Europe?
This is fascinating stuff, people.
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