Judt's Postwar

One of the upsides of the work-related travel that took up most of last week was that I had plenty of time, on planes and in the hotel, to finish Tony Judt's Postwar. I don't believe that I can urge you all to read this book enough. It's a great read, expansively treating multiple aspects of postwar European history--politics and diplomacy, economics, social and cultural (and even intellectual) history. At over 800 pages, it's quite a commitment of time, but I found that the book was actually hard to put down.

To be honest, my favorite parts of the book were the sections on the Cold War and the immediate postwar period. It's not that the lengthy discussions of European economic integration aren't really important. It's just a matter of taste.

Judt argues that the postwar-Cold War period, in retrospect, was a parenthesis, the extended end of the 30-year European civil war that started in 1914--a parenthesis, an interim, rather than a new age of its own. I think that that's pretty persuasive. It also makes me wonder about our present time. There's a lot of talk about "the Long War," about a generation-long "war against terror." But it's likely that, in 10 years, such talk will appear, in retrospect, to have been misguided (at best). I remember the end of the Cold War--one year, the Soviet Union was a great threat . . . the next year it no longer existed. The end of the Cold War demonstrates that major changes can occur quickly, in unforeseen ways.

Now, Judt makes pretty clear that he thinks that Gorbachev brought down the USSR, if unintentionally. And this also makes me think. Powerful states can sometimes be conquered from without, but more often such states come to woe because of the unintentional results of their own leaders' actions. In the case of the USSR, it was partly unsustainable reform, partly a failed military adventure in Asia (remember when the Soviets failed in Afghanistan?).

I'm not saying . . . but . . . it does make one nervous. It certainly can't help matters when a nation's leader decides to escalate a war that has, at best, little support in public opinion.