Europeana (Dalkey Archive Essentials)

Historian Tony Judt notes that the state of affairs was so bad in postwar Europe that only the state could offer hope of salvation to the masses of displaced people. So it did. Everything from generous unemployment insurance to universal health care became common after the war in ways that never caught on in America.

by the end of the 20th century, wars had been waged on a scale never before imagined, and a number of Utopian, strictly secularist ideologies – each in its own way the inheritor both of the Enlightenment project to remake society on a more rational model and of the late 19th-century project to ‘correct’ human nature through the mechanisms of a prov

Many years later, a debate was sparked in post-war Germany over the ‘barbarization’ of soldiers on the Eastern Front.22 It was widely believed that the Wehrmacht, unlike the SS, had generally upheld the standards of good soldiering, and that ordinary German soldiers had not been guilty of serious atrocities. This myth was easily shown to be false.

Europe, for the opening decades of the post–Cold War era, appeared to be another successful region of the world: at peace, democratic, and economically developed. The European Union not only expanded (from a dozen members when the Cold War ended to more than twice that number over subsequent decades) but also introduced a shared currency (the euro)