Postwar Europe:

1
Postwar Europe

• Social and Economic Change
• A new Europe?

2
Time line

• 1945-1950
• Reconstruction and recovery
• 1950-1973
• The postwar economic miracle
• Sustained economic growth 4-5, sometimes 6
  per annum
• 1973-1979
• First and second energy crises
• Stagflation growth of unemployment and
  inflation
• 1980s and 1990s
• Retrenchment in some countries
• Slower economic growth (1-3 per annum)

3
Facets of change

• Work
• Shift from agriculture to manufacturing
• Shift from manufacturing to tertiary or service
  sector (e.g. white collar, public sector, more
  educated)
• Urbanization
• Shift from countryside to cities
• From smaller to larger cities
• To suburbs?

4
Changes in patterns of consumption

• From small shops to hyper-market
• An end to scarcity
• Housing
• Phones
• Consumer durables
• Changes in modes of transport
• Shifts in vacation patterns

5
Changes in immigration patterns

• From 1870s to WWI net outflow
• Interwar period internal and external migration
  disrupted
• World War II
• Large numbers of people displaced
• Flow of population west
• From 1960s 1973
• Labour shortages result in recruitment of
  guestworkers from Mediterranean rim to northern
  Europe
• Since then, legal immigration curtailed but large
  numbers of asylum seekers, before and after 1989

6
Characteristics of European Society

• From Sakwa and Stevens textbook
• Individualism
• Rationalization
• Capitalism
• Constitutionalism

7
Individualism

• Erosion of earlier class and religious divisions
• Diminished sense of class identification
• Mobility
• Decreasing religiosity
• Weakening of family ties
• But considerable variation from country to
  country
• Contrast between Scandinavia, Netherlands,
  Germany vs. Italy

8
Rationalization

• Complex, interdependent structures
• Processes of systemization
• Regulation by fixed rules, processes

9
Capitalism

• With collapse of communism, predominant form of
  economic life
• But different variants
• Rhineland or organized capitalism
• Greater coordination among economic actors
• Greater role of state, as corrective
• Liberal capitalism
• State in background
• But guarantees of minimal levels of subsistence
• Importance of public sector for both

10
Constitutionalism

• Prevalence of constitutional government
• Before the 1970s
• Western Europe (with the exception of Portugal,
  Spain and Greece)
• From 1970s
• Democratization in southern Europe
• From 1989
• East and central Europe as well
• With development of European Union, multilevel
  governance under EU