With the economic aid of the Marshall Plan, the countries
of Western Europe (see Map 9.1) recovered relatively
rapidly from the devastation of World War II.
Between 1947 and 1950, European countries received
$9.4 billion to be used for new equipment and raw materials.
By the late 1970s, industrial production had surpassed
all previous records, and Western Europe experienced
virtually full employment. Social welfare programs
included affordable health care; housing; family allowances
to provide a minimum level of material care for
children; increases in sickness, accident, unemployment,
and old-age benefits; and educational opportunities. Despite
economic recessions in the mid-1970s and early
1980s, caused in part by a dramatic increase in the price
of oil in 1973, the economies of Western Europe had
never been so prosperous, leading some observers to label
the period a “golden age” of political and economic
achievement. Western Europeans were full participants
in the technological advances of the age and seemed
quite capable of standing up to competition from the
other global economic powerhouses, Japan and the
United States.
At the end of World War II, confidence in the ability
of democratic institutions to meet the challenge of the
industrial era was at an ebb. The Western democracies
had been unable to confront the threat of fascism until
the armies of the Wehrmacht began their march across
Europe at the end of the 1930s, and most succumbed rapidly
to the Nazi juggernaut. As the war finally came to a
close, many Europeans, their confidence shaken by bleak
prospects for the future, turned their eyes to the Soviet
model. In France and Italy, local Communist parties received
wide support in national elections, raising fears in
the United States that they might eventually be voted
into power in Paris and Rome.
By the late 1940s, however, confidence in democratic
institutions began to revive as economic conditions
started to improve. Even Spain and Portugal, which retained
their prewar dictatorial regimes until the mid-
1970s, established democratic systems in the late 1970s.
Moderate political parties, especially the Christian Democrats
in Italy and Germany, played a particularly important
role in Europe’s economic restoration. Overall, the
influence of Communist parties declined, although reformist
mass parties only slightly left of center, such as the
Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democrats in West
Germany, continued to share power. During the mid-
1970s, a new variety of communism, called Eurocommunism,
emerged briefly when Communist parties tried to
work within the democratic system as mass movements
committed to better government. But by the 1980s, internal
political developments in Western Europe and
events within the Communist world had combined to
undermine the Eurocommunist experiment.
World History
