Resonant Reading (Saturday)-Elder Statesmen-Judt

Saturday, October 18th

At first sight it may seem rather odd that so much of the rehabilitation of postwar Europe was the work of men (Winston Churchill (born 1874) Clement Atlee (born 1883), Konrad Adenauer (born 1876), Alcide de Gasperi (the leader of Italian Christian Democratic Partym born 1881)) who reached maturity and entered politics many decades before. But it is perhaps not so very surprising after all.

The old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity. The vogue between the wars had been for the new and the modern. Parliaments and democracies were seen by many—and not just Fascists and Communists—as decadent, stagnant, corrupt and in any case inadequate to the tasks of the modern state. War and occupation dispelled these illusions, for voters if not for intellectuals. In the cold light of peace, the dull compromises of constitutional democracy took on a new appeal. What most people longed for in 1945 was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms.

Statesmen whose experience reached back beyond the troubled inter-war decades to the more settled and self-confident era before 1914 thus had a particular attraction. In the continuity of their person they could facilitate a difficult transition from the over-heated politics of the recent past to a coming era of rapid social transformation. Whatever their party ‘label’, the elder statesmen of Europe were all, by 1945, skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible.
—Tony Judt, Postwar