Western European Political and Economic Trends Since the 1960s

Abstract

European economic and social renewal in the sixties provided strong support for the political status quo. Conservatives in Western Europe and Socialists in Scandinavia continued their decades-long rule during this long period of economic resurgence. But the economic downturn that began in the early seventies, described below, helped unseat incumbent political parties throughout Europe as electorates voted for change. A leftward trend that had begun in Western Europe in the sixties, as a result of relaxed East-West tensions and a growing Socialist political moderation, accelerated rapidly in the seventies. The apparent moderation and national-centered policies of some Western European Communist parties, or “Eurocommunists” as they were called for a brief period in the seventies, gained them some additional support. Europeans no longer thought that a vote for a Communist candidate was necessarily a vote for Moscow. The continued relaxation of tensions between East and West and Europe’s desire to pursue an independent foreign policy had promoted a policy of détente, or increased understanding and contacts, between Western Europe and the Communist world. These contacts, especially the economic ones, were maintained or even enhanced despite the United States-Soviet animosity in the early eighties. Gorbachev’s assumption of power again relaxed East-West tensions and permitted a resumption of contacts. By the mid-1990s, many of the former Communist states of Eastern Europe and the European successor states to the Soviet Union, most prominently Russia, had even signed a halfway house arrangement with NATO, the Partnership for Peace.

It’s not worth beating one’s head against the wall because there are more Germans than French.

President François Mitterrand, TV interview, July 14, 1994