Europe in the Age of The Cold War,1945–75629in an early retirement, and he had twice been arrested
by the Gestapo. He founded a conservative party, the
Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which was heav-
ily Catholic but nevertheless tried to avoid the confes-
sional identity of the old Center Party. The CDU stood
for anticommunism, free-enterprise economics, and so-
cial conservatism, but Adenauer, like many British and
French conservatives, defended the welfare state and
drew on Bismarck’s example in the 1880s to advocate
“socially responsible” capitalism.
The CDU mixture of conservatism and socialism
won a narrow plurality of the votes for the German par-
liament (the Bundestag) in 1949 elections; the party ex-
panded that margin to win every national election of
the 1950s and the 1960s. Adenauer won the chancel-
lorship of West Germany by a single vote by allying
with a moderate third party (the Free Democrats)
against a strong Social Democratic Party. Adenauer’s
personality was more authoritarian than democratic,
but his fourteen-year chancellorship (1949–63) firmly
established the Federal Republic as a Western democ-
racy. Because of his influence, the capital of the new re-
public was situated in the small (100,000 population in
1939) Rhineland manufacturing town of Bonn where he
had been a student, and the Federal Republic was some-
times called the Bonn republic.
The greatest accomplishment of the Bonn republic
was an economic recovery called the Wirtschaftswunder
(“economic miracle”). The Wirtschaftswunderowed much
to American policy: Germany was included in the Mar-
shall Plan of 1948 and was given $3.5 billion by 1961.
Much of the credit for the recovery also belongs to the
finance minister in Adenauer’s cabinet, Ludwig Erhard.
Erhard was a professor of economics at the University
of Munich and the principal author of the CDU pro-
gram linking free-enterprise economics with social wel-
fare. He presided over a monetary policy that penalized
savings and favored the purchase of commodities. His
demand-driven economy created a huge increase in
production (see table 31.2). German steel production
had been 13.7 million tons in 1910, and East and West
Germany together produced only 13.1 million tons in
- By 1960 West Germany alone produced 34.1
million tons. Translated into a consumer economy, this
meant that West Germany manufactured only 301,000
automobiles in 1950 but more than 3 million in 1960.
This rapid growth of production virtually eliminated
unemployment, which fell below 1 percent. Credit for
this prosperity also belongs to the generation of work-
ers who lived with long workweeks (typically forty-
eight hours) and low wages (twenty-five cents per hour
in the 1950s—less than half of the American standard).
In return for social benefits, such as four to six weeks of
paid vacation per year, Germany obtained great labor
peace: During the first decade of the twentieth century,
Germany had lost an annual average of 6.5 million
working days to strikes; during the 1960s, West Ger-
many lost an average of 0.3 million working days.Europe and the World: The Age
of Decolonization, 1945–75
When World War II ended, Europe still held vast colo-
nial empires. Most of Africa, the Middle East, South
and Southeast Asia, the East Indies and Pacific Oceania,
and the Caribbean remained under imperial rule.
Movements for national independence had begun in
many areas before the war. After the war, the imperial
powers learned that they could not keep their empires
even by fighting major wars. The resulting breakup of
European colonial empires, called decolonization, is
one of the most important themes of twentieth-century
world history. As one non-Western nationalist put it,
decolonization changed “the international structure
more profoundly than did the two terrible world wars.”
That change happened rapidly. Most of South Asia and
the East Indies (more than 500 million people) won
self-government between 1946 and 1950. Most of
Africa (more than thirty countries) won independence
between 1956 and 1966.Product 1949 1959 1969
Pig iron 7,140 21,602 33,764
(1,000 tons)
Steel 9,156 29,435 45,316
(1,000 tons)
Natural gas 534 388 8,799
(million cubic meters)
Private cars 104 1,503 3,380
(1,000s)
Electricity 40.7 106.2 226.1
(million kilowatt hours)
Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1990(London:
Macmillan, 1975), pp. 372, 395, 467, 481.TABLE 31.2The German Economic Miracle, 1945–69