Education

A central element of the state’s role in European societies has been the provision of formal education. By the late nineteenth century most European states had made schooling legally compulsory; and at the outset of the twentieth century the countries of northern and western Europe contained the world’s most literate and best-educated populations. The inhabitants of the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia already had achieved virtually complete literacy by the end of the nineteenth century. However, southern and eastern Europeans lagged behind. At the turn of the century only about one-fifth of the Russian population was literate, and only about one-tenth of the female rural population could read and write. Before the First World War, in neither Italy nor in Spain did half the children in the age-group 5-14 actually attend school. And on the eve of the First World War only about one-third of the adult population of Portugal, Spain, Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria could read and write. This altered in the course of the twentieth century, as (in this regard at least) the south and east of Europe caught up with the north and west. Adults in present-day Spain and Italy are largely literate, as are those in eastern Europe.

The extension of formal education and mass literacy campaigns were among the most successful programmes of the erstwhile socialist states of eastern Europe. Of course, political control was a motive here, nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union/Bolsheviks. Short Course may have been neither a literary masterpiece nor a model of historical accuracy, it was a book presented to millions of newly literate people. As the century nears its end and many of the achievements of socialism in eastern Europe reveal themselves to have been of dubious value, the educational campaigns which put almost all of eastern Europe’s children in schools and taught almost all of eastern Europe’s people to read and write may be Marxist-Leninist socialism’s lasting positive achievement.

Of course, the expansion of educational provision (and of the state’s role in it) was not just a matter of primary schools and basic literacy. Much more striking has been the expansion in the provision of secondary, technical, and higher education across Europe. At the beginning of the century, only a small minority of children remained in secondary education beyond the schoolleaving age, even in the relatively advanced countries of northern and western Europe. Higher education was for the few, and almost all of those few were men. In 1910 in no country in Europe were more than 2 per cent of people aged between 20 and 24 in higher education; and generally only about one-tenth of these were women. During the second half of the century higher education became a huge industry across Europe, employing hundreds of thousands of people and teaching millions of students. Higher education ceased to be something to which only a tiny proportion of the population could aspire; instead, it came to be regarded as a passport to a growing number of well-paid jobs in increasingly meritocratic societies in which academic qualifications and expertise-measured in certificates, diplomas, and degrees-were seen as absolutely necessary.

Communications

Literacy promotes reading. Or does it? It is a paradox of the social history of twentieth-century Europe that the establishment of near universal literacy has been paralleled by a diminution of the literary standards of mass-market newspapers and a vast increase of readily available pornography. The main reason for the change, however, is less that standards have fallen than that the nature of communications has changed. Europeans, like most inhabitants of the developed world, receive their news of the world almost instantly, via radio and television. This, indeed, is one of the great social changes of the twentieth century: people can be aware much more quickly of momentous political events far away than were their forebears at the beginning of the century.

Compare how Europeans learned of the outbreak and course of the First World War, of the Second World War, and of more recent conflicts-say, the Gulf war of 1991 or the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. When the First World War broke out, most Europeans found out about these momentous events from newspapers or from publicly displayed pronouncements; their news of developments on the battlefield, in so far as it did not come by word of mouth, came from the printed media — often days after the event.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe things were very different. The main source of current news was the radio, and one could hear war being declared as it happened; newsreels provided images of what had occurred during the previous week. More recently, television became the main and instant source of news and entertainment. European television viewers watched Baghdad being bombed as it happened, and graphic pictures of the miseries inflicted on the population of Sarajevo were presented in their living-rooms on the day they occurred (often courtesy of an American television news network). This is a far cry from the way in which news spread of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo nearly eight decades previously.

The history of the communications and media revolution is not one of benign progress, devoid of political content. During the twentieth century, European states attempted to control the media as never before. As means of communications improved and developed, so did the concern of government to control and censor. Censorship was, of course, nothing new. However, the extent and brutality of attempts to control the communications media have been unprecedented. The spread of radio coincided both with the great inter-war depression (during which radio receivers were one of the few items of consumer expenditure to increase) and with the dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. As microphones were installed in the piazza and radios came into millions of homes, European dictatorships with totalitarian claims to control the whole of society sought to eliminate all dissenting voices in the public sphere. Yet we should not assume that such developments were the exclusive preserve of dictatorships: the model for George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in his 1984 was not in Berlin or Moscow, but the wartime Ministry of Information in London.

The spread of communications media has involved not just hundreds of millions of Europeans becoming listeners to radio, and later viewers of television in the privacy of their own homes. Perhaps even more important in changing how Europeans lead their everyday lives has been the growth of private telecommunications. At the turn of the century businesses and government offices in the more developed parts of the continent were able to communicate with one another by telephone, although messages still tended to be sent via messengers or the post; private telephones were limited to the well off, and long-distance and international communication was extremely difficult by more recent standards. However, with the increase in prosperity enjoyed by western Europeans during the second half of the century came a boom in private telephone usage. Millions of homes were connected to national (and international) telephone networks; telecommunications beyond the local area became progressively easier, to the point where dialling a number in another country differed little from dialling a number across town. Hundreds of millions of Europeans were put into instant contact with people outside of their own localities.

In this, first northern and western Europe and later (and less thoroughly) southern and eastern Europe essentially followed an American lead, treading a path down which the inhabitants of the United States had already passed. In yet another sphere, revolutionary change in the ways European societies functioned during the twentieth century meant essentially that Europe was following trends established elsewhere. This did not necessarily mean that European societies were becoming Americanized (although Europeans may frequently have regarded this as so), but that the same things were changing the ways in which Europeans lived as had changed Americans’ lives.