A Political History of Western Europe Since 1945 by Derek W. Urwin

Author:Derek W. Urwin [Urwin, Derek W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General
ISBN: 9781317890751
Google: NWESBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-22T01:23:55+00:00

CHAPTER 15

ALIENATION AND PROTEST

Among the possible sources of alienation in western democracies … is the new democratic Leviathan itself … welfare-oriented, centralized, bureaucratic, tamed and controlled by competition among highly organized elites, and, in the perspectives of the ordinary citizen, somewhat remote, distant, and impersonal.

(Robert A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, New Haven, 1966, p. 399)

After 1945 an accumulation of political, military and economic problems had posed a severe challenge to parliamentary democracy in Western Europe. That threat had been successfully countered, and by the 1960s Western Europe was depicted as being on the threshold of post-industrialism, a coming society where economic growth and technological advance would reduce much of the drudgery of labour and satisfy the material needs of the population. Socioeconomic change, it was believed, had, through increasing affluence, launched a process of societal embourgeoisement. The net political outcome would be the end of ideological conflict: Keynesian-inspired neo-capitalism had defeated revolutionary Marxism. Competition would be more stylised, more concerned with the allocation of plentiful material goods and services than with principles. Guarding and directing this sanitised picture of material satisfaction was the welfare state, the paternalist benign government that had the economic base and techniques to ensure an effective distribution of goods and services among all segments of the population.

Within the space of a few years, such prognostications about the future – the belief in the durability of consensus and stability, economic growth, the satisfaction of material needs, the virtues of the welfare state – were shaken to the core. But long before the oil crisis of 1973 brought Western Europe face to face with a new world of economic stagnation and decline, it was confronted with an escalation of direct action which, with its ideological rejection of the political precepts of two decades of economic and political construction, rocked the continent’s complacency. The new groups and movements which sprang up after the late 1960s may have had specific policy objectives, but taken together they implied a desire for a reorganisation of the status and power relationships within society, a territorial reorganisation of the state system, and a return to principles and values which they felt had been jettisoned by governments and parties in a quest for economic growth that had turned into an auction where elites sought to outbid each other for popular support. The 1970s would be a decade of protest and alienation, of new movements, mostly organisationally inchoate, that expressed new principles, and involved a search for and demanded new forms of participation. The first major wave of rejection was a mobilisation of the young, especially students. If there was a catalyst of this rejection by youth, it was the Vietnam War, not just as an expression of super-power politics, but also as a symbol of an economic and cultural imperialism that threatened to swamp Europe.

1968 AND STUDENT PROTEST

The youth generation of the 1960s had been shaped by the stable and more prosperous postwar conditions: the harsh 1930s, Hitler and even Stalin were entries in history books.

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