[MGSA-L] Postwar Reconstuction issue - Past and Present

[DANIEL P. TOMPKINS]

There is nothing urgent in this note.  It concerns the appearance of  *Past
and Present* *Supplement *(2011):

*Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945-1949*

and I'm sending it to various friends and contacts in addition to the Modern
Greek Studies Association -- people with interests in Poland, Greece,
Yugoslavia, and the study of legal history (because of one intriguing
reference to "crisis of law" by Mazower, below), as well as European and
Cold War history,  both because it might be of some interest and because I'd
be interested in hearing what folks have to say about it.

This is a longish post:  the quotes seemed worth including.  That is of
course another reason for putting it aside -- or for reading further.

Best,

Dan Tompkins*Past and Present* *Supplement *(2011)


Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945-1949


“This collection of essays offers new insights into the aftermath of the
Second World War. Rather than treating the years 1945 to 1949 as mere
precursors of the Cold War, it takes them to be a crucial period in the
reconstruction of European states and the re-modeling of European societies.
Contributors explore key arenas, such as the revival of material production,
the re-foundation of the state, its legitimacy and its monopoly of armed
force, the legacies of empire, the treatment of dislocated populations and
refugees, and the role of international organisations. As a result, the
volume sets European reconstruction in a genuinely global framework for the
first time. This supplement was edited by Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch,
and David Feldman.”

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/210/suppl_6.toc

Full table of contents:

http://past.oxfordjournals.org.libproxy.temple.edu/content/210/suppl_6.toc.pdf

or:

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=habsburg&month=1101&week=d&msg=TjwSkVwe0X%2BMBcF1FEtb6g&user=&pw
=



Also, a very full and useful Index:

http://past.oxfordjournals.org.libproxy.temple.edu/content/210/suppl_6/353.full

I accessed these through a university library, but I notice that googling
brings up

Specific comments on Greece, mostly in the Holly Case essay mentioned below,
concern the civil war, war damage and reconstruction and Yugoslavia.



Specific comments on Hungary, again mostly in Case’s essay, concern
communist-led reconstruction, confiscation of Jewish
property,industrialization, loss of territory, and reparation payments.

Here are quotes from a first reading of three contributions:

1)  “Reconstruction: the Historiographical Issues

Mark Mazower

The “new European narrative, which saw the period after 1945 as shaped as
much by the need to cope with past experiences as with the effort to build
new alliances from scratch, made it hard to sustain the old idea that 1945
had been a kind of Year Zero. If European history did not end in 1945, one
had to trace instead a longer-run story of continuities across the divide of
war.



“A seminal article by Jan Gross in 1989 had posed the problem of how Nazi
occupation, and the differential forms of Nazi occupation, might through the
impact of social disintegration have paved the way for the communist
takeover in Eastern Europe.  Perhaps therefore—and this obviously should not
have needed spelling out to the extent that it did—the origins of the post
war were to be found in the war years themselves. Ethnic cleansing was one
phenomenon whose history ran across the 1945 watershed; but the development
of corporatist partnerships in the iron and steel industries of the Ruhr was
another. Gross himself had argued that total war, the destruction of the
very fabric of society undertaken by the Nazis in Poland, for example,
itself shaped the possibilities for post-war reconstruction. The
extermination of East European Jewry, followed by the expulsion of the
region’s ethnic German population, meant the disappearance of much of the
old bourgeois class and culture and rendered the reshaping of society by
communist elites much easier. So did the legacy of German economic planning
and state control of heavy industry in particular across the region,
smoothing the post-war etatization of the commanding heights of national
economies. Blurring the Left-Right divide, post-war planning often built on
both wartime controls and the pre-war state plans developed by right-wing
regimes in places like Poland and Bulgaria.



“Having accepted the obvious importance of Nazi occupation and the war, it
remains to determine precisely what that legacy was. The occupation itself
had, after all, affected different areas quite differently. This is
obviously a vast subject and a differentiated assessment of the war’s impact
has hardly yet begun to be made (though the raw materials are there in the
numerous analyses produced by various League of Nations bodies and by UN
planning agencies such as UNRRA). To take but one example, the impact on
European health remains poorly understood. Certain obvious population
categories excepted, the overall impact was less catastrophic than it had
been in the First World War, and outside the occupied Eastern territories,
major famines and epidemics were actually rather rare. There was, for
instance, no repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic that had devastated much
of the world. No one has recently subjected to scrutiny the statistics for
wartime mortality that were produced during and immediately after the war,
despite the fact that the figures they generated were often used to justify
requests for post-war aid or other kinds of assistance. Pieter Lagrou has
suggested that there was considerable exaggeration in the French figures;
the same may well be true for Poland and elsewhere. And this matters, since
how we assess the success or failure of reconstruction is dependent on
getting a proper sense of what had actually happened—as well as what people
believed had happened—in the preceding few years.



“A few further caveats about the post-Cold War optic may also be in order.
The tendency to project back into the late 1940s the human rights norms and
aspirations of the 1990s and early twenty-first century has led to a certain
amount of anachronism. Accounts praising American internationalism, while
explicable as reactions to trends in American foreign policy under George W.
Bush, have turned out to be limited as accounts of the post-war conjuncture.
One notable absence, for instance, from much of this literature has been any
assessment of the Soviet role in international law and rights talk. Bringing
this back in would allow the human rights/international law theme to be
linked more persuasively to ideology and politics instead of presenting it
as a self-evident good. And in any case, as Marti Koskenniemi has argued,
one can make just as compelling a case for seeing the 1940s in terms of the
crisis of law rather than the victory of law and for focusing instead on the
rise of an alternative universalizing ideology of expertise, science, and
technical knowledge that assumed a Leftish coloration in Julian Huxley’s
scientific humanism, and an increasingly Rightward one in the work of
American modernization theorists.”



(The Jan Gross essay is:  J. Gross, ‘The Social of War: Preliminaries to the
Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe’, *East European
Politics and Societies*, 3:2 (Spring 1989), a theme explored at greater
length in two masterly books: *Polish Society under German Occupation: the
Generalgouvernement, 1933–1944* (Princeton, 1979) and *Revolution from
Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western
Belorussia* (Princeton, 1988).   Mazower also credits previous work on
reconstruction by Tony Judt and Istvan Deak, among others.)

2) “Reconstruction in East-Central Europe: Clearing the Rubble of Cold War
Politics”



Holly Case,  Cornell University



“Post-World War I political fantasies of national homogenization were also
declared realized in Poland in the wake of World War II, as territorial
changes resulted in the expulsion of Germans from the western territories
and the resettlement of many Poles from other parts of Poland, including the
eastern territories (lost to the USSR), in their place. As a result, the
country went from being sixty-nine per cent Polish in 1931, to being more
than ninety-eight per cent Polish by 1971. Poland’s post-war leadership cast
the state’s territorial acquisitions to the west in particular as the *sine
qua non* for post-war reconstruction. The Minister of Industry and President
of the Economic Committee of the Cabinet thus told the National Council on
21 September 1946, that ‘No economic reconstruction of Poland is possible
without our holding the Western Territories. Without the Western Territories
Poland cannot exist as an economically sovereign state.’



“While the progress of reconstruction in Poland and Czechoslovakia was in
many respects helped along by territorial gains and the confiscation of
German and other assets, in the countries that lost territory or had to pay
reparations to the USSR following the Second World War—particularly Hungary
and Romania—there were other territorial and demographic challenges. In the
case of Hungary, reconstruction efforts included a drive to develop
infrastructure in the provinces, rather than focusing on the capital city of
Budapest as previous regimes had done. Furthermore, in both Hungary and
Romania confiscated Jewish property had driven parts of the wartime economy
and covered for shortfalls, providing a source of income that was no longer
available to post-war governments. The new regimes also faced having to
explain why relinquishing Bessarabia to the Soviet Union or Transylvania to
Romania did not represent a betrayal of the ideals of the nation. Exiled
politicians from these countries were especially outspoken in their
condemnation of ‘Soviet imperialism’.



“Comparison of post-war East-Central European states’ economic performance
with that of Greece in particular has rarely if ever been undertaken. This
oversight stems in part from the fact that the struggle for the geopolitical
soul of Greece was the centerpiece of the Truman Doctrine and thus a crucial
starting point of the Cold War, one that played a significant role in the
Cold War politics of comparison embedded in the showcasing of the ‘Greek
economic miracle’ of the 1950s to 1970s. The omission of Greece is also the
result of the Greek Civil War and accompanying economic crisis which lasted
throughout the first four years of the period of reconstruction*.*



“(footnote) A partial exception can be found in the work of John R. Lampe,
specifically, Lampe, *Balkans,* 218–23; John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson,
*Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing
Nations* (Bloomington, 1982), 579–80, 597. The comparison reveals that even
as late as 1980 Yugoslavia was outperforming Greece in standard of living
indices. Lampe, *Balkans,* 220)

…



“The fallibility of neoliberal economists that has been foregrounded lately
may cause us to revisit some of their earlier work and start asking some
difficult questions, such as: Were there global trends at work in the
immediate post-war period—in terms of economic planning ideas and practices,
raw materials supply and labour issues—that could be drawn out through
sustained comparison of East-Central Europe with other parts of the world,
such as Latin America, for example? Was the so-called ‘Western European
miracle’, so much a product of the Cold War conceptually that it cannot in
the long term survive the Cold War’s disappearance (either as an idea or as
an economic phenomenon)? If Greece was the poster child of the Western model
for reconstruction, what does the recent and flamboyant failure of the Greek
economy reveal about the ‘reality’ of the economic ‘division of Europe’?
Accordingly, why are there so few sustained comparisons of East-Central
European economic performance with states to which they were more readily
comparable during the interwar period? And what would such comparisons
reveal? Closer study of the period of reconstruction, and above all a
careful comparison across European states for this period is long overdue
and would certainly render the mechanisms by which Cold War politics have
shaped our conception of European states’ economies—as well as our
conceptual geography of Europe as a whole—more transparent.”



3)  “‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children between Nationalism and
Internationalism”

Tara Zahra, University of Chicago



Nothing specific here on the *paidomazoma* but perhaps a worthwhile general
perspective on displaced children.



Conclusion:  “Aleta Brownlee, the Chief of UNRRA and IRO’s child welfare
division in the American zone of Austria recalled that as Cold War divisions
hardened, ‘United Nations worked against each other, ex-enemies became
friends, West was set upon East, the Catholic Church against communism’. The
preponderance of displaced children in Austria were of Slavic nations, and
at least one high-ranking representative of an occupying power stated the
position that ‘there are too many Slavs anyway’.



“In 1951, Hannah Arendt famously observed that the refugee camps of interwar
France had exposed the limits of the universal ideal of ‘human rights’.
Ultimately, such rights were nothing but empty promises to displaced persons
who lacked national citizenship. ‘The conception of human rights, based upon
the assumed existence of human beings as such, broke down at the very moment
when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted
with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific
relationships—except that they were still human’, she maintained…. Arendt’s
insight, it seems, applied to the post-war world of the displaced persons
camp, the children’s home, and the orphanage, as well as to the interwar
refugee camp. Reconstructing Europe after Nazi occupation required affirming
a form of national sovereignty that was located as much in the control of
children’s futures as in the control of state borders.”


See also this author’s ““The Psychological Marshall Plan”: Displacement,
Gender, and Human Rights after World War II,” *Central European History *44
(2011)


-- 
Daniel Tompkins
pericles at temple.edu
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