A History of the World (81 page)

Inside the US, Japanese citizens were interned, but for many life continued almost normally. There was a huge military-driven industrial boom, which set the seal on Roosevelt’s New Deal expansion of federal government, and a vast expansion of Washington bureaucracy. American women were recruited to work in the factories, giving them opportunities and self-confidence they might not have had in peacetime.

The British experience of the war was deeply ambiguous. No thoughtful Briton could have missed the message contained in a series of early defeats. Britain and France had gone to war on the basis of the fantasy that they could somehow – nobody knew how – come to Poland’s aid. After an initial quiet spell, the British were humiliated in Norway and then comprehensively defeated by the German blitzkrieg through France. The Battle of Britain saved the islands from the threat of invasion, and the Luftwaffe blitz on British cities produced a remarkable outpouring of solidarity and defiance. But these events could not dispel the poor performance of the British army in Greece and initially in North Africa, nor the humiliation of the Japanese advance almost to the borders of India, after the surrender of Singapore. The defeat of German armies at El Alamein and the increasingly savage bombardment of Germany by RAF Bomber Command, who lost a huge proportion of their aircrew, began to restore national self-confidence, as did the successful invasion of Sicily, then Italy.

But it was obvious even after D-Day that British power was shrivelling. In the Far Eastern empire, the defeat of white European armies by the Japanese would never be forgotten, while India would go almost as soon as the war was over. By then Britain was virtually bankrupt, deeply in hock to the United States for its war-fighting equipment and even for food. As with defeated France and Holland, the British grip on other parts of the world was fatally weakened. France would lose her empire in Indo-China and North Africa; but for
France, the humiliation of that surrender did have a silver lining. Ever since the revolution, France had been struggling between her monarchical history and her more recent secular and republican personality. After the fall of conservative France’s client Nazi state, headquartered at Vichy, this argument effectively ended.

The Melting of Nations

Europe had given the world modern nationhood. It had been an ambiguous gift. We have seen how Europeans advanced from living in territories ruled by families to developing a stronger sense of themselves as rival and thoroughly coherent language groups. Monarchies had slowly and painfully given way to representative democracies; mythic pasts had been concocted for the new nations, along with striped flags, wedding-cake parliament buildings and unified legal systems. This way of doing things had been exported first to North America. Then Latin America had taken it up, and Japan too. In Africa, colonial frontier lines from the nineteenth century became national boundaries in the twentieth, as tribal societies reorganized themselves into liberated nations. In the Middle East, Europeans carved nationstates out of the rotting corpse of the Ottoman Empire. Though there were many people around the world who did not think of themselves as members of nations, the European system was so far advanced that it became impossible to imagine it reversed. A world of national identities and passports came together, apparently quite logically, in the United Nations, founded in San Francisco in 1945.

But just at this moment, when Europeans might have celebrated the global domination of their local political invention, this next world of flags, boundaries, constitutions and presidents, they instead began to try to melt the nation-state away again. The reason was obvious: nationalism had just torn Europe apart.

In particular, after four modern wars between Frenchmen and Germans – the Napoleonic, the Franco-Prussian, and the two world wars – these countries had to come to a new understanding. In a now divided Germany, nationalism had virtually collapsed. Under Charles de Gaulle, France was rebuilt politically: French presidents would achieve more personal power than politicians anywhere else in
modern Europe. France soon cast aside the autocratic and self-intoxicated de Gaulle, but France’s always formidable political class would find in the embryonic European Union a new national purpose. West Germany became the key French ally.

Committed to very tough financial policies so as to ensure no return to the inflation of the Weimar years, lacking substantive military of their own, and doggedly determined to work their way up from the ashes of 1945, the West Germans, now with their capital in the small town of Bonn, created a success story for which ‘economic miracle’ was a fair description. Other smaller European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg formed a customs union, as did France and Italy. All were beneficiaries of the huge postwar American aid package, the Marshall Plan, which poured food and industrial essentials into the ravaged continent – or rather, into that part of it on the western side of the ‘Iron Curtain’. US motives included the need to stave off Communism and keep the loyalty of Western Europe, but it was a programme of great generosity and wisdom that allowed Europe to recover from the war remarkably quickly.

The first crucial anti-national step was the formation of the European Iron and Steel Community in 1952 which, though it included Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands too, was essentially a way of integrating French and West German heavy industry so closely that they simply could not go to war again. It was followed by the same six members joining together as a trading union, the European Economic Community, in 1958. Driven by a commission of civil servants from the member states, regular summits of national leaders and later including a parliament, the EEC evolved by stages into today’s European Union of twenty-seven nations. Always the drive was towards supranationalism, a persistent, gentle downward pressure on national independence. It was touted as bringing greater trading efficiency and therefore prosperity, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, Eastern European states rushed to join it as a guarantor of market freedom and enrichment. But the EU’s real aim was to melt the nations down, abolishing national customs posts, using not an army but harmonized laws, common standards and eventually a single currency too, the euro – aimed for since 1969 but not fully launched until 2002.

This was highly political, but not politics as Europeans had ever known it before. It was the deliberately bland alternative to Europe’s vivid interwar years with their short-lived socialist governments, the Soviet-funded Communist fronts, and the strange glamour of Fascism. ‘Europe’, with its own flag, anthem, aid and foreign policies and central bank, is neither country nor empire. Counted as a single economy, it is the world’s largest, a little ahead of the US, but has no military forces nor any real leader – no visible president in world affairs. Rich, nervous, herbivorous, feared by nobody except nationalists, it is also admired enough to be copied, in a more dilute form, by South Americans and Africans. Yet it has not managed to convince its own people it is really democratic, either. Nor is it. A democracy has always depended on a common sense of belonging, mostly based on a language and shared history; Europe’s nation-states still enjoy too much local support for their citizens to think of themselves as European first, and French – or Greek – or British – second. The economic crisis which hit members of the Euro currency in 2010–12 exposed the tensions dramatically.

Politics continued, of course, inside the European states. Left-wing Germans in the West abandoned Marxism for a soft social democracy, which also became popular in Scandinavia. In some countries, notably France and Italy, Moscow-backed Communists struggled seriously to gain power, but were pushed back by capitalist parties, generally social democratic or Catholic. In Italy, the Communists later broke with Moscow and developed their own form of ‘Euro-communism’, but never defeated the American-backed centrist parties, who delivered growth and good times, despite being corrupt. Franco’s Spain, and Portugal after the dictatorships of Salazar and Caetano, managed to shed their quasi-Fascist identities and embrace mainstream politics. In Britain, a socialist government ousted Churchill’s Conservatives and went further in the creation of a welfare state than ever before; but it had gone by 1951, after which Britain too experienced a long period of centre-right government. France, Britain, Belgium and Portugal all expended much political energy struggling with the problems of decolonization – often a barely dignified scuttle.

The war, which had opened in a Europe dominated by dictators and had become a war of empires, produced a Europe of committees, self-consciously managing to get by without political heroes; and
shorn of empire. British critics of the European project, referring to its political capital in Brussels, spoke of the ‘Belgian empire’, but this was at least partly a joke. If it was an empire, it was one whose colonies had come voluntarily, even eagerly, under its embrace, and whose impact on the rest of the world was minimal. World influence was anyway something that postwar Europeans mostly shrank from. Culturally, and in her business attitudes, Europe became a follower of America. In other circumstances the US would surely have also risen to dominate Europe. But the war hastened this dramatically. America, which had grown a mighty state apparatus first in response to the Depression, and then in war, was handed a global role that many Americans would have regarded with incredulity and alarm just seven years earlier. But this was the inevitable consequence of America’s new weapon.

The Missing City

In the auditorium of a small hastily built town for some six thousand people in the desert high country of New Mexico, a tall, gangling man in his early forties pushed his way through the crowd. It was the afternoon of 6 August 1945. The man climbed onto the stage, then turned and looked down. He paused. Then he put his hands together over his head in the traditional boxer’s fist-pump of triumph. A ragged cheer went up. He told the crowd he was proud of what they’d achieved together. Later on, people would disperse for parties; but some did not feel like partying. Some just hung around and talked about what they had done.

The man was Robert Oppenheimer. The town was Los Alamos. The crowd were the people, scientists, soldiers and helpers who had made the world’s first atom bomb. And what they had achieved a few hours previously was the death by burning, radiation and debris of seventy thousand Japanese civilians in the city of Hiroshima. The total death-toll would rise fast through cancers and other effects to as many as two hundred thousand.

Oppenheimer, the director of the ‘Manhattan Project’ which produced the bomb, was a cultivated mongrel – an excellent example of the intertwining of European and US twentieth-century history. He
was an early opponent of Fascism who had gone so far as to hand money over to Communists to help the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He would later be accused of having been a paid-up member of the Communist Party himself, something he denied. He was fixated by Hitler. He told the crowd that day in Los Alamos that he was only sorry America hadn’t developed the bomb early enough to use it against the Germans. (Hitler had killed himself three months earlier, on 30 April, and the German surrender had been signed on 9 May.) Oppenheimer’s team was full of Europeans, refugees from Nazi Europe or simply dedicated scientists determined that it would be the democracies, not the dictatorships, that first got ‘the bomb’.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was German-Jewish himself, at least by origins, though his wealthy New York family were uninterested in traditional Jewish traditions or religion. He was brought up in an intensely highbrow, liberal family who had paintings by Van Gogh, Renoir and Picasso on their walls, who loved the music of Beethoven, learned Latin and Greek, and travelled to Europe. They were members of the Ethical Cultural Society, a secular Jewish organization which stressed good works and humanitarianism. As a young man, entranced by science, Oppenheimer would idolize the young physicist Niels Bohr and then go to Cambridge to study physics and maths. In Europe he would mingle with some of the greatest minds of theoretical physics at its most exciting period – the Danish Bohr, the Englishman Paul Dirac, the German Werner Heisenberg, the Austrian Wolfgang Pauli, the Italian Enrico Fermi and the Jewish-German Max Born. He would study at Göttingen, the Saxon university, and in Zurich.

Yet Oppenheimer was also intensely American, and his story exemplifies the shift of power from Europe to the US. Delighting in the countryside of New Mexico and California, by the mid-1930s he was settled at Berkeley, California, teaching at the California Institute of Technology. It may have been on the West Coast, but it was certainly not cut off from events in Europe. Jewish refugees from Germany, socialists and pro-Moscow Communists were part of his social circle. Arguments about the nature of Stalinism, what could be done about Hitler and the failure of the democracies to intervene in the Spanish war bubbled away on terraces overlooking San Franciscan gardens and continued during horse-rides. The Depression, followed by
Roosevelt’s New Deal, had radicalized many in California, and Oppenheimer was not especially unusual in flirting with Communist thinking and the various ‘front’ organizations. He read Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s propagandistic account of the glories of life under Stalinism,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?

This was the political side of Oppenheimer’s world, which would get him into trouble after the war when US anxiety about ‘red’ infiltrators was at its height. But it was only a part of his life, and rather smaller than the part that led him to run the Manhattan Project. An intellectual gannet who gobbled up information in many fields, Oppenheimer worked on everything from the positron to the neutron star and black holes. He did key work on quantum mechanics and gravitational collapse, and was unlucky to miss a Nobel Prize.

It had been clear well before the war, from research on the structure of atoms, that in theory it would be possible to release vast amounts of energy – a huge explosion – by splitting atoms and creating a nuclear chain reaction. Albert Einstein had signed a letter to Roosevelt warning him of the danger of such a novel weapon. He had suggested that the American President order the stockpiling of uranium (the likeliest raw material for such an explosion because of its weak atomic structure) and press ahead urgently with research. After two émigré German scientists in Birmingham made a mathematical breakthrough showing it would be possible to produce the reaction in a quantity of uranium or plutonium small enough to be carried in an aircraft, the US started to take the idea seriously.