Dan Stone. Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945

It should be easy to write a history of the tiny half-continent of Europe as our globe shrinks and the “national” becomes subsumed by the “transnational.” Dan Stone's absorbing and provocative work shows that writing this history remains vexingly difficult. Europe was at the heart of the Cold War, and that makes its postwar story much more than European. The single city Berlin reproduced the bipolar world in miniature, with welfare capitalism in its Western sectors but welfare dictatorship just a few streets to the East. Like the old German capital, Cold War Europe focused on big questions but also divided populations: how does one hold together Europeans' divergent experiences in a single narrative? Stone's solution is to admit to the division wrought by the Cold War while arguing for deeper unity. His chapters alternate between East and West but the book as a whole traces the adventures of the single concept “antifascism,” which Stone understands as a consensus favoring reasoned compromise that prevailed across the continent. “[A]ntifascism,” he writes, “became the basis of stability in postwar Europe,” a development that would help explain why Christian Democrats embraced welfare states along with corporatist labor arrangements (p. 9). Because Stone understands welfare states as postwar elites' antidote for fascism he sees the weakening of welfare states since 1989 as a sign of fascism's return. (Hence the book's title.) Is this intriguing intuition correct?

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