Abstract
The end of 1945 marked a major caesura in Europe’s political, social, economic and cultural development. German hypernationalism had left the continent in ruins with tens of millions dead and much of the continent transformed into a wasteland of dead bodies, ruined cities, destroyed infrastructure and environmental disaster. ‘Postwar’ faced diverse challenges that were interconnected by the overriding question of how the reconstruction of the continent should proceed. The answers to this question were closely related to the post-war search for guilty men, i.e. those responsible for the destruction of Europe. In international politics, the Nuremberg trials answered that question—the National Socialist leadership and those serving its ideology and politics were tried and sentenced in an attempt juridically to lay the past to rest. But it was not just a question that looked for answers in international law and politics. The search for guilty men was going on in many countries of Europe, including all those that had been occupied during the Second World War and in which cases of collaboration had occurred.
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Notes
- 1.
Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
- 2.
Max Horkheimer, ‘Die Juden und Europa’, in idem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 380f. [first published 1939].
- 3.
On Communist interpretations of fascism see Stanley G. Paine, ‘Interpretations of Fascism’, in Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (eds), Fascism. Theories and Concepts (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 56f.
- 4.
On the strength of anti-capitalist sentiment in post-war Europe see also Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Picador, 2013).
- 5.
On the Communist transformation in Eastern Europe see Ann Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 (New York: Anchor, 2013).
- 6.
On ‘third force’ arguments in Britain, compare Darren G. Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945–1989 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Jonathan Schneer, Labour’s Conscience: the Labour Left 1945–1951 (London: Routledge, 1983).
- 7.
An interesting attempt, in the German context, to relativise the significance of 1945 as a decisive break is provided by Martin Broszat and Klaus-Dietmar Henke (eds), Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990).
- 8.
Sid Tarrow, ‘“Aiming at a Moving Target”: Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern Europe’, in Political Science and Politics 24:1 (1991), pp. 12–20.
- 9.
Sid Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 10.
Kevin Passmore, ‘Fascism as a Social Movement in a Transnational Context’, in Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective. A Survey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 579–618; Theodor Schieder (ed.), Faschismus als soziale Bewegung: Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983).
- 11.
Alain Tourraine, The Voice and the Eye: an Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
- 12.
Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- 13.
Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 14.
Robert Michels, ‘Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie: Parteimitgliedschaft und soziale Zusammensetzung’, in Archiv für Sozial- und Wirtschaftspolitik 23 (1906), pp. 471–556 and 25 (1907), pp. 148–231.
- 15.
Dieter Rucht, ‘Studying Social Movements: Some Conceptual Challenges’, in Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective. A Survey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 45.
- 16.
Friedhelm Neidhardt, ‘Einige Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Theorie sozialer Bewegungen’, in Stefan Hradil (ed.), Sozialstruktur im Umbruch. Karl Martin Bolte zum 60. Geburtstag (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1985), p. 195.
- 17.
Charles Tilly, ‘Social Movements and National Politics’, in Charles Bright and Susan Harding (eds), State-Making and Social Movements (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 306.
- 18.
Aidan McGarry and James Jasper (eds), The Identity Dilemma: Social Movements and Collective Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).
- 19.
For an introduction to resource mobilisation approaches in social movement studies see Bob Edwards and John D. McCarthy, ‘Resources and Social Movement Mobilization’, in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 116–152.
- 20.
Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 21.
An interesting approach to social movement studies that could perhaps be employed usefully here and that focusses on questions of the life cycle of social movements is Suzanne Staggenborg, Social Movements, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 22.
Dieter Rucht, ‘Öffentlichkeit als Mobilisierungsfaktor für soziale Bewegungen’, in Friedhelm Neidhardt (ed.), Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung, soziale Bewegungen (Opladen: Leske & Buderich, 1994), pp. 337–358.
- 23.
Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and USA since 1945: an Introduction’, in Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 32 (2004), p. 14.
- 24.
See, for example, the emphasis on expert cultures in Liz Sonneborn, The Environmental Movement: Protecting our Natural Resources (New York: Infobase, 2008).
- 25.
The importance of medical expertise is stressed in Alesha E. Doan, Opposition and Intimidation. The Abortion Wars and Strategies of Political Harassment and, for an earlier period and different place, Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- 26.
Marc Traugott, Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
- 27.
Dieter Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und die USA im Vergleich (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1994); J. Craig Jenkins‚ ‘Social Movements, Political Representation and the State: an Agenda and Comparative Framework’, in idem and Bert Klandermans (eds), The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 14–35.
- 28.
Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State: a Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 29.
For Germany, Dieter Rucht has attempted to differentiate different waves of social movement mobilisation; See Dieter Rucht, ‘Zum Wandel politischen Protests in der Bundesrepublik: Verbreiterung, Professionalisierung, Trivialisierung’, in Vorgänge 4:3 (2003), pp. 4–11; whether or not his framework can be generalised for Western Europe as a whole is something that needs to be tested further by comparative research.
- 30.
Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
- 31.
Gerald D. Kleinfeld and Lewis Tambs, Hitler’s Spanish Legion: The Blue Division in Russia in World War II (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 1979).
- 32.
David Redvaldsen, The Labour Party in Britain and Norway: Elections and the Pursuit of Power between the World Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
- 33.
Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 152.
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Berger, S. (2018). Social Movements and the Change of Economic Elites in Europe: An Introduction. In: Berger, S., Boldorf, M. (eds) Social Movements and the Change of Economic Elites in Europe after 1945. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77197-7_1
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