Introduction

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the belief that Europe was the centre of the civilized world was virtually unquestioned. European cultural influence, European imperialism, and the migrations of millions of Europeans had spread European society around the globe. When, for example, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Brazilians (of European extraction) planned the rebuilding of Rio de Janeiro, their model was not drawn from the New World; it was Paris. Paris was the epitome of European civilization and the model of what a city should be; European civilization obviously was the only civilization worth emulating. So emulate the Brazilians did. Parisian avenues were reproduced in Rio; French building styles were copied; French public parks were reproduced. When, in 1904, work was begun on Rio’s Haussmann-inspired boulevard, its ‘showcase of civilization’ the Avenida Central, one of the city’s literati, Olavo Blanc, could assert:

A few days ago, the picks, intoning a jubilant hymn, began the work of the Avenida Central’s construction, knocking down the first condemned houses. . . . With what happiness they sang, the regenerating picks! And how the souls of those who were there understood well what the picks were saying, in their unceasing rhythmic clamor, celebrating the victory of hygiene, of good taste, and of art. (Quoted in JeVrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48.)

When the elites of Rio sought models of ‘hygiene, of good taste, and of art’, it was to Europe that they looked.

They were not alone. Across the New World, the Old World provided the model. Europe provided the images of civilized society towards which civilized people strove. Structures whose architectural inspiration was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Greek temples, and Italian monuments multiplied. For example, Springfield, Massachusetts, could boast two classic Greek temples (the City Hall and the Municipal Auditorium) separated by a copy, in white marble, of Venice’s Campanile; and the citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, could admire their own full-scale replica of the Parthenon. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was the society of the Old World which provided the model for the society of the New.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the opposite seems true. Now the New World appears to provide the model for the Old. Whereas, at the beginning of the century, it was Paris which supplied the model for modernity and urbanity in cities such as Rio, towards its end the relationship appears to have been reversed: near Paris the glass towers of La Defense appear to be an American transplant, and between London and Birmingham Britain’s boldest new city, Milton Keynes, looks like an attempt to copy Brasilia. Furthermore, if anyone outside Europe were still keen to ape European society and European culture, it is far from clear just what they might attempt to copy. European society and European culture have become so fragmented and diffuse, and at the same time so greatly influenced by extra-European impulses that it no longer is certain to what these terms refer.

It is not the intention here to repackage the cliche that European society suddenly has been swamped by American culture— with MacDonalds becoming a feature of European cities from Dublin to Moscow and with Euro-Disney bringing Donald Duck and Goofy to shake hands with the European masses. Americanization is hardly new to Europe. During the inter-war years American influence was already widely felt in Europe; Coca Cola had already invaded the continent, and even in Nazi Germany the most popular film star of the 1930s was Clark Gable.

Nevertheless, there has been an important shift in focus. No longer are American public buildings modelled on European ones; as the century nears its end, it appears increasingly that Europe’s cities are modelled on those in North America.

How are we to explain the extraordinary, and changed, relationship between European society and extra-European societies during the twentieth century? A number of developments played a part. First, Europe’s position at the centre of the world economy was deeply damaged by the First World War. Economic leadership moved from the Old World to the New; after 1918 the world centre of economic gravity shifted from London to New York; and the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Russia’s civil war made Europe a much poorer place after 1918 than it had been before 1914. Secondly, after the violence and destruction of the Great War, European civilization appeared tarnished and no longer necessarily offered a terribly desirable model. Thirdly, the extraordinary emigration from Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was sharply reduced.

The history of European migration offers a good example of how European society and its relationship with the world beyond Europe changed during the twentieth century. During the century before the First World War nearly 50 million people emigrated to North and South America, most of them Europeans; this constituted the greatest migration of human beings the world had ever seen, and it more or less came to a stop during the inter-war years. The reasons are not hard to find: the end, as a consequence of the Great War, of the great economic boom which had set in during the 1890s; the restrictions to immigration put into place by the United States during the 1920s, with a quota system which shut out large numbers of potential migrants from southern and eastern Europe; and the deep depression of the 1930s which removed the demand for labour in countries which previously had accepted large numbers of people. This cutting off of European migration to the wider world was followed, during the 1940s, by forced mass movements of European populations within Europe: the terrible deportations carried out by the Nazis in their attempt to construct a racial ‘new order’; the mass deportations carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin; and the mass expulsions (for example, of more than 9 million Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland, and elsewhere in eastern Europe) which followed the Second World War as it was decided—in stark contrast to the case after 1918 — to create ethnic boundaries through ethnic deportations. By 1945, European society had become, in large measure, a society of refugees.

The Cold War, and the almost insurmountable state frontiers to which it gave rise, put a temporary halt to east-to-west migration within Europe. Immediately after the war, Europe continued to export considerable numbers of people: between 1946 and 1960, roughly half a million people left the continent annually. However, western Europe, which benefited from extraordinary economic growth and was temporarily cut off from its traditional sources of immigrants, then became a goal for migrants from other continents: from Africa and Asia, and from the Caribbean. With the transition from a period of low unemployment, which lasted roughly to the mid-1970s, to one of high unemployment in western Europe — subsequently joined by eastern European countries emerging into the cold economic winds of capitalism—this changed again. Western employers ceased recruiting foreign labour, but migrants from poorer countries continued to seek a better life in western Europe and immigrant communities continued to grow. Whereas at the beginning of the century Europeans, like European society, were items for export, towards the end of the century Europe became a major goal of poor migrants from elsewhere. Consequently, European society at the end of the century includes millions of people whose backgrounds and cultures are African and Asian. No longer is Europe colonizing the world, with its people and with its culture; now, at the end of the twentieth century, it is the former colonizers who are being colonized.

European society always has been in flux, fragmented and diverse, and during the twentieth century it became more fragmented and diverse than ever. But it is not enough simply to observe that European society has become diverse and that the idea of European society no longer possesses the coherence or attraction which it appeared to possess when the century began. It also is necessary to appreciate the general trends which have characterized and linked European societies during the twentieth century—what Europe has had in common as well as what has divided her.

Population

Many more people live in Europe in the late twentieth century than did at its beginning. Particularly in eastern and southern Europe, populations increased substantially during the century. However, probably the most striking demographic development in Europe during the twentieth century has not been population growth but the decline in fertility which, with varying speeds, has affected just about all the nations of the continent. During the nineteenth century, Europe contained some of the fastest growing populations in the world; during the twentieth, it came to contain those growing most slowly. This presents a fascinating paradox in the changing social mores of Europeans during the twentieth century: that increases in public preoccupation with sex have been accompanied by declines in child-bearing. Increasingly, sex in twentieth-century European societies was disconnected from reproduction; instead, as birth rates plummeted and sexuality became more public and explicit, it came to be regarded as a leisure pursuit and an advertising ploy.

Declines in population growth were accompanied by an upsurge of concern about the size and health of the population and interest in eugenics, the ‘science’ of race improvement by judicious mating. Concern to reverse declines in population growth, and to improve the health of the human stock arose across the continent—from Fascist Italy and Weimar and Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia and Romania under Ceausescu. States actively intervened to reverse falling birth rates, with various programmes ranging from the French assistance familiale designed to provide financial incentives for producing a large family and financial payments upon marriage, to Romanian bans on the means of fertility control and medical inspections to prevent women from resorting to abortion.

Across Europe profound changes in demographic structures unfolded in the twentieth century. Declines in fertility, reductions in family size (as a smaller proportion of couples had more than two children), later marriage (especially in northern and western Europe), and considerably increased life expectancy resulting from improvements in nutrition and medical care, have led to profound changes in the structures of population across the continent. European societies during the last quarter of the twentieth century contained smaller proportions of children and young people and larger proportions of the elderly than they had during the early decades of the century. Remarkably, perhaps, the two world wars which ravaged Europe had no great effect on these long-term demographic trends. Once the post-war baby booms had run their course, long-term trends towards smaller families resumed. Consequently, as the century nears its end societies across Europe contain ageing populations, a smaller proportion of which are children and young people in work, and a larger and larger proportion of which are pensioners.

These demographic changes greatly altered popular perspectives and expectations. European women (very few of whom now die in childbirth and for whom child-bearing no longer necessarily occupies so large a proportion of their adult lives) increasingly entered the paid labour-market during their middle years. Across the continent, rates of infant mortality and death in childbirth declined steeply (although there have been tragic recent reverses, particularly in eastern Europe). By the second half of the twentieth century, most European parents could expect that their children would survive the first year; few European children were cut down by infectious diseases; and infectious diseases ceased to pose the threat to adult Europeans which they had in the nineteenth century. Two examples may serve for many: polio ceased to haunt Europeans with the spectre of a lifetime of paralysis after inoculation became widespread from the 1950s; and tuberculosis, which had cast a terrible shadow across the lives of millions of Europeans, became a rarity in many countries of the continent once they recovered from the effects of the Second World War (although the spread of AIDS and poverty may make it more common again). Whereas tuberculosis may be characterized as the fatal disease of the nineteenth century, the fatal disease of the twentieth century has been cancer.

The position of the elderly too has changed profoundly. At the outset of the century there were few pensioners. People who reached the grand old age of 65 usually had to keep working. Now almost all Europeans expect to receive pensions when they are elderly, and a major proportion of public expenditure in European countries has gone to provide state pensions for the increasingly large proportion of the population which is retired. Retirement has become a common expectation of Europeans as they reach their sixties, and many more of them now reach their sixties and seventies than was the case one hundred years ago.

Finally, it is worth noting that the nuclear family is a phenomenon of a specific time and place: of the developed world during the twentieth century. The self-contained family unit consisting solely of parents and children probably only became widespread in Europe during the middle decades of the twentieth century. During the previous decades, poverty, the absence of social services (such as the provision of old people’s homes), and high death rates made such a family unit rather rare; during the final decades of the twentieth century, at least in the more advanced states of western Europe, liberalization of divorce laws and concomitant increases in divorce, together with steep rises in the numbers of children born out of wedlock, have led to huge increases in the number of single-parent households. The nuclear family, far from embodying an eternal moral truth, may be only a fleeting social form which enjoyed popularity during a short period between the demographic revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the one hand and the late twentieth century ‘divorce revolution’ (to use the phrase of Lawrence Stone) on the other.

Labour

The work which most Europeans do in the late twentieth century is quite different from that which their ancestors did at its beginning. Although the world’s most industrialized regions were located in Europe at the outset of the century, the continent also contained largely rural societies and agriculture was the sector of the economy which provided livelihoods to the largest number of people. This was the case not only in the less developed societies of southern and eastern Europe — of Spain, Portugal, Romania, Russia—but of northern and western Europe as well. When the century opened the majority of France’s population still lived in communities with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants; Denmark and Sweden were largely rural; and more than twice as many Germans were employed in agriculture as in heavy industry. Times changed: in France, for example, while there still were roughly 4 million independent farmers in 1945, by the beginning of the 1980s there were only 1.5 million.

While the proportion of the population earning a living from agriculture declined steeply across Europe—east and west— during the twentieth century, this was not necessarily accompanied by a corresponding rise in the proportion employed in industry. The beginning of the century, as we now can see with the benefit of hindsight, was the high-water mark of classic industrialization, and the economic difficulties of the inter-war period stemmed in part from a decline in old heavy industries (iron, steel, coalmining, shipbuilding) which has continued to the present. In the more developed economies the numbers of people employed in coalmining, steel-making, and shipbuilding have fallen sharply; eastern Europe lagged behind in this regard, as socialist industrialization involved the planned growth of yesterday’s industries, but the phenomenal collapse of eastern European industry and corresponding increases in unemployment after 1989 indicate that eastern Europe is rapidly catching up with the west in this respect at least.

Where employment clearly has increased is elsewhere: in white-collar work, services, state employment, medical care, and social welfare. With the possible exception of services, this general trend occurred in the now defunct socialist systems of eastern Europe as well as the capitalist economies in the western half of the continent; indeed, the socialist systems of eastern Europe spawned state bureaucracies which provided employment for huge numbers of people. The growth in white-collar and service-sector employment paralleled a tremendous increase in the number of women working outside the home. While the largest single source of employment for single women outside their own homes — domestic service — virtually disappeared in Europe, there has been a huge increase in the number of married women working, particularly during the second half of the century. Here too developments in the formerly socialist half of the continent paralleled (in a more extreme form) those in the western half, as female participation rates in the labour-market came to exceed 90 per cent. Virtually all women between the ages of 18 and 60 had to work outside the home under ‘real-existing socialism’; virtually none was able to remain a ‘mere’ housewife.

Where there has been employment there also has been unemployment. Looked at from a long-term perspective, at least in those European countries which have a largely uninterrupted history of market economics, European labour-markets have been characterized by four main periods during the twentieth century: (1) a period of relatively low unemployment until the end of the First World War; (2) a period of high unemployment during the inter-war period; (3) a period of low unemployment from the Second World War until roughly the mid-1970s; and (4) a period of relatively high unemployment since the mid-1970s. Each of these has affected not only the material conditions and daily lives of millions of people in Europe; each also has shaped hopes and expectations. During the inter-war period Europeans often looked back with longing to the imagined normality of the pre-1914 world; Europeans emerging from the Second World War were haunted by the spectre of the economic crises which followed the First and the savage depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s and their possible repetition; in the last quarter of the century Europeans routinely expected politicians somehow to reconstitute the ‘full employment’ of the 1950s and 1960s.

Incomes and Living Standards

There can be little doubt that real incomes and living standards rose in most of Europe during the twentieth century, although many Europeans suffered terrible poverty as a consequence of war, inflation, and economic depression. While hundreds of millions of Europeans are better housed, better clothed, and better nourished at the end of the twentieth century than were their forebears at its beginning, the road to improvement has been extremely bumpy and many Europeans have fallen by the wayside.

The greatest improvements were experienced by inhabitants of western Europe during the decades after the Second World War. After the stagnation which characterized most European economies during the inter-war years and the destruction caused by the Second World War, during the 1950s and 1960s western Europe benefited from the greatest economic boom the world has ever known. Real incomes rose substantially, and the proportion of income spent on basics (in particular food) declined as expenditure on what previously had been considered luxuries (private motor vehicles, washing machines, holidays, and tourism) increased. Consequently, these luxuries no longer were the exclusive property of the upper and middle classes. In the eastern half of the continent a stunted parallel development occurred. There too real incomes rose, although from a lower base and within a framework of shortages and artificial prices which made many items of consumer expenditure (private cars, for example) effectively beyond the reach of most people.

The rise in real incomes in Europe during the twentieth century was accompanied by the squeezing of income differentials. That is to say, at the beginning of the century the incomes of the European bourgeoisie were far higher relative to working-class incomes than in the last decades of the century. This reduction of income differentials has had considerable consequences: for example, the virtual disappearance of domestic service as an employer of single women (only partly compensated for by the employment of au pairs), and the recent growth of do-it-yourself in the realm of house repairs. In the late twentieth century Europe’s middle classes expect to cook and clean for themselves, and many are prepared to hang their own wallpaper and plumb their own sinks, tasks which few of their counterparts earlier in the century would probably have considered doing for themselves. This change has been paralleled by the introduction into the home of so-called ‘labour-saving devices’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cooking and cleaning—without the benefits of electric refrigeration, power vacuum cleaners, or gas central heating—involved much more heavy work than in recent decades; the demise of relatively cheap labour has been compensated for to some extent by a technological revolution in the home.

In socialist eastern Europe after the Second World War a far more extreme version of income levelling occurred, as ‘workers’ states’ (the primary employers) depressed professional salaries relative to workers’ wages. One consequence of the levelling of incomes and living standards in socialist eastern Europe was that the distinction between ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’ neighbourhoods largely disappeared; the levelling of incomes, extremely low subsidized rents, the extreme shortage of housing, and the virtual monopoly of its distribution in the hands of state authorities meant that almost all people, except for the political elite, were in the same boat—or housing estate.

The squeezing of income differentials in capitalist systems was due not only to trade union pressure and legislation to protect wage-earners, but also to inflation. Indeed, rapid inflation affected the lives of almost all Europeans since the First World War. While during much of the nineteenth century (except, for example, during the Napoleonic wars) Europeans enjoyed fairly stable prices, the twentieth century has been a century of inflation. European societies experienced some of the worst inflations the world has ever seen (in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Russia after the First World War; in Hungary after the Second World War; in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia after the collapse of Marxist-Leninist socialism); no European country, not even Switzerland, escaped completely. Consequently, price and price-wage relationships have shifted and personal and corporate savings periodically have been ravaged. The accumulated private capital of generations has at times been wiped out in various countries across Europe, leaving people more dependent upon the state for welfare and for investment.

Despite inflation, there can be no denying that hundreds of millions of Europeans became far wealthier towards the end of the twentieth century than their great-grandparents were as the century began. During the twentieth century, most European societies left a domestic economy of self-sufficiency behind; despite savage economic crises and terrible wars, nearly three decades of almost uninterrupted economic growth after the Second World War brought mass consumer society to tens of millions of western Europeans. This was true not only for the affluent countries of northern and western Europe but also, to a lesser extent, for southern and eastern Europe as well. Indeed, one reason for the destabilization of eastern European socialist regimes during the 1980s was that their populations had come to expect the fruits of a consumer society which the state-socialist regimes were unable to deliver. In western Europe, in particular, people increasingly came to regard themselves as consumers (rather than as producers), with their self-identity shaped to a considerable degree by what make of car they drove, what kind of furniture and decor they chose for their homes, what sort of holiday they took. No longer did Europeans simply purchase margarine: they bought Flora or Rama.

Town and Country

Enormous changes in how Europeans lived their lives during the twentieth century resulted from the decline in numbers employed in agriculture. The nineteenth century may be seen as the century of European industrialization, with railways spreading their tentacles across the continent and the landscapes of great industrial regions such as Lancashire, Upper Silesia, and the Ruhr becoming filled with textile mills, pit-heads, and iron smelters. Nevertheless, as we have seen, at the outset of the twentieth century the single most important source of livelihood across Europe was agriculture—not just in the predominantly rural countries (Russia, Portugal, Spain, southern Italy, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria) which comprised so much of Europe but even in the great industrial powerhouse of Germany. It is worth remembering, therefore, that the confident European society which provided the model for civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century was far removed from the societies in which most Europeans lived. At the beginning of

The century most Europeans lived in communities which revolved around the parish pump, not the factory or the opera house.

As the proportion of European populations living on and from the land declined, the relative economic (and social and cultural) importance of the countryside diminished. The exploitation of green-field sites in capitalist western Europe and the industrialization of previously rural regions in socialist eastern Europe provided new employment possibilities to populations which previously had had to rely essentially upon agriculture for a living. In western Europe increasing numbers of people living in rural villages came to earn their livelihoods in towns and to commute daily to offices or factories. Urban lifestyles became the norm, even for Europeans not living in urban areas — but who, like their city cousins, became connected to the wider world first via radio and telephone, then via television and satellite dish.

Nevertheless, the diminished importance of the countryside to European society does not mean that the twentieth century has been the century of European urbanization—at least in so far as western Europe is concerned. The nineteenth century was the century of classic urbanization in Europe. The urbanization of the twentieth century has been different: first, the cities of western Europe which had become the great metropolises of the world by the end of the nineteenth century—London, Paris, Berlin—have not grown appreciably since the First World War; urban growth has been of the periphery and suburbs, rather than inner London, historic Paris within the Peripherique motorway, or Berlin as defined before the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920. Secondly, the greatest urban growth in Europe has been in the east, not the west: in Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, Warsaw; not London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Paris. There the introduction of socialist planned economies and forced industrialization led to enormous urban growth, in many cases built on the rubble left behind by war—the civil war in Russia and the Second World War. Thirdly, there has been a trend towards increased residential persistence: Europeans became less likely to move home. In western Europe, this has been due partly to increased owner occupation; in socialist eastern Europe, it resulted from the state regulation of a housing market characterized by extreme shortage. Fourthly, the face of much of Europe was scarred by a Second World War which generally affected the towns more than the countryside, as cities from Stalingrad to Rotterdam were reduced to rubble. Finally, the rapid (re-)building of European cities led to the construction of massive high-rise housing developments, which buried the distinctiveness of individual European cities under the projects of planners and tonnes of concrete.

The changes outlined above, together with the replacement of horse-powered transport by motor-driven transport, also altered the relationship of most Europeans to animals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, before the spread of the internal combustion engine and with agriculture still the largest single source of employment, contact with animals was a regular and essential part of everyday life for most Europeans. They met them on their streets, kept them in their back gardens, rode them, and slaughtered them. Relatively few Europeans — at least in the northern and western parts of the continent—now keep animals in their back gardens, milk cows, drive horses or oxen; today for most Europeans regular contact with animals is limited to caring for domestic pets.

Travel and Leisure

Europeans became far more mobile in the course of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, most people’s principal everyday means of transport was their own feet. Since the Second World War, however, the private motor vehicle has become the most important mode of transport for tens of millions of Europeans. In France, for example, whereas in 1938 there was one private motor vehicle for 20.8 inhabitants, by 1980 this ratio stood at one car for every 2.9 inhabitants; in the Netherlands the ratio fell from 90.9 to 3.1 during the same period, in Switzerland from 55.5 to 2.8, and in Italy from 125 to 3.2. Not even the erstwhile socialist societies of eastern Europe (with the exception of Albania) completely escaped private motorization during the 1970s and 1980s, as clones of Fiat cars were churned out in their hundreds of thousands from Russian and Polish factories.

Although it is now common to bemoan the effects of the motor car upon the environment, private motor-vehicle transport has been liberating for millions of people. Rural inhabitants with their own motor transport could travel easily to town; the countryside became accessible to motorized urban dwellers to an extent never before experienced; the geography of employment, commerce, and leisure altered once people no longer were limited as to where they could work and shop by how far they could walk or by the routes offered by public transport operators.

Europe gave the world its first motor vehicles (those of Gottfried Daimler in Stuttgart and Karl Benz in Mannheim in 1885) and its first motorways (the German autobahn network). Nevertheless, pictures of clover-leaf motorway intersections and of suburban motorists now are associated more with twentieth-century America than with Europe. It was in the United States that levels of economic well-being allowed the first mass motorization during the second and third decades of the century; and it was in the United States that the massive interstate highway building programme brought motorways to the masses. Europe lagged behind. In western Europe — despite the building of the German autobahn network during the second half of the 1930s—mass motorization did not come about until after the Second World War.

This motorization might be regarded as evidence of an Americanization of European society. In fact, it is more a sign that in recent decades the population at least of western Europe achieved levels of personal wealth similar to those enjoyed by the majority of United States citizens. While the result is not necessarily American, it is not necessarily European either. The transport revolution of the twentieth century eroded that self-confident European urban culture which had served as a model in so much of the rest of the world. While a hundred years ago the Paris Opera may have been an object to be copied, it cannot really be said that the Paris Peripherique provides a model for anything. Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction is neither a copy of an American road nor a distinctive European approach to traffic flows; it is just another motorway junction, much like motorway junctions in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Rio.

Improved mobility meant not just getting to work or to the shopping mall more swiftly. It also allowed a phenomenal growth of tourism. At the beginning of the century, tourism was reserved for the wealthy. During the twentieth century millions of Europeans came to expect a holiday, often involving foreign travel, almost as a matter of right. The most phenomenal growth of the European tourist industry occurred after the 1960s-an-other reflection of the achievement of high levels of personal wealth (at least in northern and western Europe), as well as of cheap air travel. However, the beginnings of modern mass tourism in Europe can be traced to the inter-war period-with the growth of Butlins in Britain, the dopolavoro in Fascist Italy, and the Nazi Kraft durch Freude organization. Although their achievements fell somewhat short of their propaganda, these programmes consciously extended mass leisure activities to Europeans who never before had enjoyed tourist travel, but whose children and grandchildren came to expect it.

The mass tourism of late twentieth-century Europe had a number of important characteristics. First, it was a consequence of the extension of lengthy paid holidays to the great mass of full-time employees. Secondly, it became international: it no longer is exceptional for Europeans to hold passports for foreign travel; in striking contrast with the tourism of the 1930s, the tourism of the 1980s commonly involved travel across national frontiers. This meant that millions of western Europeans were exposed to countries, languages, and cultures other than their own-even if this contact frequently was limited to enjoying fish and chips or bratwurst on the Costa del Sol rather than in Leeds or Nuremberg. Thirdly, the tourism boom in western Europe had its parallels in socialist eastern Europe. Although socialist tourism tended to be heavily subsidized, low-quality group travel organized through the state-regimented trade unions and offering very limited opportunity for international travel, Europeans in the socialist east also came to expect annual holidays and travel. At the same time, the inadequacies of travel for eastern Europeans —restrictions on international travel especially to the West, the lack of convertible currency, the difficulties facing anyone who preferred individual travel to organized group activities —helped to undermine the socialist regimes in the eyes of their populations. The inhabitants of Dresden and Prague wanted the same leisure and travel opportunities which their cousins in Dusseldorf and Vienna enjoyed.

State and Society

At the beginning of the twentieth century the contact which most Europeans had with the state was, compared with today, rather limited. Men were conscripted into national armies; businesses faced increasing regulation; urban police and rural gendarmes enforced order; and criminals and the destitute sometimes landed in prison or the poor house. However, few Europeans carried identity documents issued by the state, the state’s tax demands were by present-day standards very modest, and almost no one expected that the state would or should provide for them if they fell ill or became disabled or pay pensions if and when they became old. The social dimension of state provision was conspicuous largely by its absence.

By the last third of the century, this had changed profoundly. Where once an extended family may have been expected to care for the elderly or incapacitated, Europeans came to look to the state for aid. Women’s economic dependence upon men was replaced to some extent by economic dependence upon the state. Millions of parents received state child benefit; millions of Europeans collected state unemployment benefit; vast social service organizations were created and armies of social workers employed by European states; millions of Europeans dwelt in state-built (and often state-subsidized) housing; health care was administered through state-run or state-supervised health insurance schemes.

While the origins of modern social welfare may be traced to the late nineteenth century, and in particular to Bismarck’s introduction of social insurance in Germany during the 1880s, its expansion has been a largely twentieth-century affair. The world wars, which saw increased state regulation and intervention in almost all aspects of social life, left millions of invalids, widows, and orphans in their wake and thus created the demand for an enormous extension of state welfare provision. This trend was furthered by the advent of political systems with totalitarian claims to run society, and rising expectations that the state has a duty to provide for its citizens. Then the great western European economic boom, which lasted almost without interruption from the Second World War until the late 1960s, provided the resources for a seemingly open-ended expansion of welfare provision (for example, the linking of state pensions to the cost of living, beginning in West Germany in 1957). Even more comprehensively, if less effectively, the socialist regimes of eastern Europe expanded the role of the state in welfare provision. Vast subsidies were channelled into child care (to enable women to work in economies which were extremely labour intensive), into keeping down prices for basic foodstuffs, into organized leisure pursuits, and into cheap subsidized housing. While this experiment proved resoundingly unsuccessful, as the collapse of eastern Europe’s economies after 1989 exposed the often dire state of actual welfare provision and levels of investment, the general development paralleled what occurred elsewhere in Europe.

The extension of state welfare during the twentieth century arose from strong ideological motives. It spelled ‘progress’; it allowed the state’s administrative control over the peoples of Europe to increase; and it was guided by what may be described as therapeutic intentions. That is to say, European states designed interventionist programmes to combat social practices which allegedly undermined the health of society. Images of a healthy society guided attempts by state institutions across Europe to intervene in the lives of their subjects and to shape social developments —whether these attempts were in the form of the relatively benign technocratic urges of Swedish social democracy, Francoist myths of a healthy moral Spain, a socialist society which was supposed to have created Soviet man, or the horrific racialist Utopia which the Nazis aimed to achieve through the extermination of human beings of allegedly lesser worth. European interventionist states became, in their various ways, the self-appointed doctors of European societies.