Why Did Post-WWII Western Europe Do So Well?

April 10, 2008 guest lecture for PE 101

Lecture Audio: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_mov/20080410_111402.mp3

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Comments

[Neal]

Several possible reasons--shedding of colonies but keeping corporate structure--income with less expense.

And, sharply curtailing huge defense outlays by having the US shoulder the defensive and imperialist burden.

And, when all is destroyed, it is easier to begin new ways.

Those should be worth at least several development points every year.

[Fifi]

Mmm, yes.

Quibble : imperfect democracies? Compared to what?

[bakho]

Where was WWII fought? Despite the US history books that focus the US involvement in WWII in Western Europe, most of the war was fought in the countries to the east of Germany. France was overrun very quickly and at the beginning of the war. Toward the end there was less than 6 months of fighting in France and the rest of western Europe with the Germans retreating to defensive positions inside Germany. In Italy, there was fighting on the ground for a longer period and Italy did less well after the war. The air war by Germany against Britain created terror but not significant damage to infrastructure. Aerial bombardment at the beginning of the war was not capable of mass destruction. Toward the end, fire storms in Tokyo and Dresden did a lot of damage but those are the exceptions.

Of the 3 million Germans killed in WWI, most of them died on the eastern front. The Russians lost 20 million or so. From 1941 to 1945, an incredibly destructive ground war occurred in Eastern Europe. Many of the young men between the ages of 16 and 40 died in the conflict and many more died of diseases. At least 40 million people died in that theater of war alone. Two armies as large as the Russians and Germans will create massive destruction with WWII ground weaponry. Compared to Eastern Europe, Western Europe did not suffer the destruction from the war. The US suffered no destruction of its infrastructure at all.

One could also ask why the post Civil War Southern US states lagged behind the North in the post Civil War economy. Presumably, the south and north were operating under the same economic system, but with very different rates of growth.

[Nordic Mousse]

"Hard to see how we could have won WW2 without the aid of the Red Army"

Ahem, wouldn't the a-bomb have made a difference, Prof?

[Nordic Mousse]

bakho, one should mention that much of western Germany was rubble by the end of WW2, as pictures attest. Not just the dramatic ones, the whole place was a mess. One could also ask the surviving people themselves, if one can get them to speak

Of course, if they did speak, none of them would neglect to mention the Hamburg bombing, which leaves Germans in horror to this day - it can't be that often in history that hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless after only a couple of nights, not to mention the tens of thousands of dead

[bakho]

True, West Germany was a mess. But France, Britain and the US were not rubble to the same extent that the FSU was rubble from all the fighting and scorched earth. Additionally, a large swath of territory from Berlin to Moscow was rubble. On top of that, those areas were depopulated by genocide and mass murder conducted by both Hitler and Stalin. The FSU had much of their own rebuilding to do so far fewer resources were available for rebuilding the eastern block and the FSU had some issues with rebuilding potential competitors.

The economic project of rebuilding W Germany was far smaller than the economic project that was the Eastern Block (including E Germany). The US, Britain and France had far more economic resources to contribute than the FSU and far more incentive to rebuild W Germany as a buffer against the FSU than the FSU had to rebuild E Germany as a buffer against the West. Some of the difference in post-war development are products of the economic systems, but the starting points were not equal. The tendency in the west is to hype the virtues of western economics rather than make comparisons that are more studied and fair.