Patchwork politics
http://economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5165384
Nov 17th 2005
From The Economist print edition
TONY JUDT decided to write "Postwar" while changing trains at
Vienna's Westbahnhof terminus in December 1989. One historical era was
ending and another was about to begin. Mr Judt, a Londoner who was
educated at Cambridge and in Paris, and who is now professor of
European Studies at New York University, believes that 1989 marked the
end of the legacy of the second world war. The 44 years that followed
were, in a sense, an "interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the
unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue
had lasted for another half century."
If the first world war destroyed old Europe, the second, Mr Judt
believes, created the conditions for a new, non-ideological Europe. The
grand ideas which had shaken the continent since the French Revolution
were now dead. All that was left was "the promise of liberty", a
promise fulfilled in western Europe in 1945, but which the rest of
Europe had to wait for until 1989.
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