For much of the second half of the 20th century, World War II and its aftermath were intertwined with the present day of Western Europe. War was understood to have created the world that emerged afterwards. This isn’t like that anymore. Our present is not dismantled from the past of the 20th century. As a result, World War II lost its explanatory function to understand modern socio-political reality.
[1945wasunderstoodastheoriginoftheColdWargeopoliticalorderandcontinentaldivisionEstablishedpostwarWesternEuropedemocracieswereshapedbyavarietyofinstitutionalstructuresandpoliciesaimedatcreatingconditionsforrepeatedrepetitionofthebloodyexperiencesofthefirsthalfofthecenturyTheconceptof”post-war”thatacquiredcurrencytowardstheendofthecenturyencapsulatedadeepersenseofwhatcameafter1945wascausaltothewarThisinterpretationwasencapsulatedbythesamenamebyTonyJudd[1945年は、冷戦の地政学的秩序と大陸の分割の起源として理解されていました。戦後西ヨーロッパで確立された民主主義国家は、世紀の前半の血なまぐさい経験の繰り返しを繰り返す条件を作り出すことを目的とした、さまざまな制度的構造と政策によって形作られました。世紀の終わりに向かって通貨を獲得した「戦後」の概念は、1945年以降に来たものが戦争との因果関係に立っていたというより深い感覚をカプセル化しました。この解釈は、トニー・ジャドの同名によってカプセル化されましたBooksPublished in 2005.
The academic investigation of ideas, policies and structures that led to the Third Reich’s massacre policy prompted a variety of offensive questions about modern Western European society. If genocide, massive violence, racial persecution was not solely about small gangs of criminals, as many states pretended in the aftermath of the war, then it was supported by a considerable number of Germans and other Europeans, and if it became possible, it suggested that the present was still inhabited by past genocides. The deeper continuity of people, ideas and institutions between wartime and postwar eras has now been at the heart of public debate.
Therefore, being involved in the history of war was not an intellectual entertainment, but a matter of general social and political urgency. This wasn’t as conspicuous as in France. In France, the issue of state cooperation during German occupation has been central to public debate over the past decade of the 20th century.
The American troops marched through Champion Elisade on August 29, 1944. Image: Point Set/Signal Team. sauce: Wikimedia Commons
This process of facing the “past that doesn’t leave the past” used Henry Ruso’s Influential Phrasesreached its climax in the 1980s at the trial of Maurice Papon, a former high-ranking Vichy official in charge of deporting Bordeaux Jews. After resuming his career in Morocco and Algeria, Papun was appointed chief of the Paris police and oversees the massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961. In 1967, he was forced to resign from the abduction of Moroccan Marxist Medi Ben Barca, causing Papon to fall into politics and a scan break.
Therefore, identifying origins and dynamics, not to mention the perpetrators of racist policies and massive violence, has freed the present from its dark past. Although it began early in the postwar period, the project came to the forefront in the 1980s and 1990s after those who were personally involved in the authoritarian regime of the mid-20th century stopped occupying central positions within the state structure.
In Germany, new concerns about studying the Holocaust as its own subject have been increasingly attached to the pseudo-psychological concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘comes to the conditions with the past’). This reflects the sense that non-Jewish Germans need to recognize and compensate for past crimes in order to complete the post-war democratic process. This led to a novel approach to “rememory politics,” a concept (like “postwar”) (like “postwar”). The result was a state policy focused on the destruction that the Third Reich produced and the responsibility of the masses.
In other Western European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France, historians had to overcome many social resistance to unearth the scope of cooperation and accomplice during German occupation, including those of their own state machinery in the Nazi genocide policy. The fundamental driving force behind these historical and broader social projects was to ensure that Europeans accept the unpleasant truth that crimes committed during wartime on Europeans cannot be projected onto others, but were inherent to the pregnancy of European nations and their societies.
Driven by strong ethical rationales, new involvement with the war was encapsulated in the cries of the assembly “Never Again”, and attracted primarily the recognition and memorial of various groups of victims whose outstanding experiences of persecution and suffering were often alienated or completely ignored by scholars and the public. However, there was also a broader preventive impulse inherent in new social debates about lessons drawn from war. This was the assumption that analyses of history provided resources to eliminate war and genocide repetition, and to educate European citizens about how society inoculates themselves against authoritarian movements and descent into genocide.
Today, this idea of World War II is almost at its conclusion. A distinctive feature of our time is the vast disruption of interconnectivity between the 20th century past and present 21st century. Indeed, Western European countries still practice customary commemoration rituals, paying tribute to the victims of the war and celebrating their heroic figures. In many countries, 1945 continues to function as a mythical moment that reestablished the European nation-state, and is celebrated on “liberation days” across the continent. The rise of the authoritarian movement, wartime collaboration, and the Holocaust still play a prominent role in secondary school curricula.
What has faded, however, is the belief that its involvement with the history of war could reveal fundamental truths about the current Western European countries and their societies. Despite the extensive use of historical analogies to explain Donald Trump and his European allies, we live in presents marked by a fundamental break with 20th century logic.
This means that World War II has not helped us to understand recent global political changes, representing the fundamental rupture of international cooperation and security structures established since 1945.
The social and political transformations caused by the war led to certain types of democracy. This called for the rise of the authoritarian movement through the integration of various social classes and their interest groups through the structure of corporate negotiations and the politics of material improvement for the broader sector of the population. However, this model of democracy is no longer functioning if it has been abandoned or its formal structure still endures.
This is clear from the widespread sense among people that the government no longer brings concrete benefits. As a result, most political parties are unable to attract large memberships and establish durable majority. The steady progress of the new populist movement, aimed at establishing very different types of political orders, is perhaps the most clear expression of how World War II stopped having the ability to explain politics today.
Even in public debate, World War II is gradually tolerated by a new politics of history that demonstrates the centrality of European colonialism legacy and the experiences of its victims. Unlike Central and Eastern Europe, which continues to be the center of public debate and is subject to intense political conflict, World War II has become a proper historical subject of Western Europe. Indeed, in recent years, populist parties in states such as Italy and Germany have sought to create noise by establishing the troubled aspects of the troubled countries of the mid-20th century. But despite predictable media attention, these are still not arguments that stimulate enthusiastic public interest. Political, war simply loses its power to shock.
Recognizing that war has no longer served as a starting point for “present history” does not mean that its involvement is worthless. On the contrary, the new types of questions scholars are seeking continue to be immediate and relevant. They include the importance of global entanglement and transfer during the war. deeper mechanisms and logic that have caused massive violence and genocide. The experiences of various victim groups and their treatment in postwar society. The way that ordinary people developed survival strategies to deal with war and occupation. The complex process of the transition from war to peace. The complexity of post-war reconstruction. This is a subject that resonates with everyone as they return to the European continent.
World War II will remain with us 80 years after its end, even if the questions it raised and the insights it offers fundamentally changed. While it no longer provides the keys to sociopolitical and global realities affecting Western Europe today, it continues to form a major reservoir of historical experience for Europeans seeking to understand the devastation and human suffering brought about by large military conflicts. Equally important is that Europeans can identify ways to climb from the deep byte created by massive wars and confront the difficulties of escaping its long-term legacy.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
