Der Boom: 1948-1973, Gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Folgen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in Europa. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Michael L. Hughes

In the years from 1948 to 1973, Europeans as a group got richer faster than at any other period in their history. Kaelble and his coauthors offer historical perspectives on the causes and consequences of that startling dash to affluence.

Five of the articles in this book deal with economic aspects of the boom (including American firms in West Germany, direct investment abroad by German firms, convergence in economic structures in Western European states, and the postwar boom in Sweden), while three articles and the Introduction deal with social and political issues (including the sociopolitical context of economic growth in Spain and the comparative social development of France and Germany). The book discusses only non-Communist Europe.

Burkart Lutz offers a provocative new "paradigm" to explain the Boom, and economic development generally. He argues that capitalist economic development does not result systematically from some dynamic stability of modern industrial society. Rather, it has come in a series of lurches produced by singular constellations of factors, albeit always ones in which new reserves of labor have been mobilized from the traditional into the modern sector. Postwar European countries, he says, created obstacles to the wage collapses that had traditionally limited growth, allowing the boom to continue until traditional sectors and their labor reserves had been virtually eliminated. As provocative as his theory is, especially in light of the post-1973 stagnation, he does not here address a number of potential problems. For example, he does not consider other once-off factors besides those in the labor market that might (help) explain the Boom (e.g., the backlogs of demand and of new products and production technologies, the more or less continuous--hot or cold--warfare, 1939-73). And his emphasis on low wages as a cause of growth needs to be reconciled with relatively high growth rates at different periods in high-wage areas such as Britain and the United States and with low growth in low-wage areas in the tropics.

The Boom does seem to have had very significant social, political, and cultural, as well as economic, consequences, as Kaelble asserts. It dramatically improved standards of living but accelerated the erosion and in many cases the destruction of traditional ways of life (especially peasant agriculture and traditional small retailing and artisanry). It eased the legitimation of new democratic governments in many European states and made possible the financing of the welfare states and public services that are central to Europeans' lives. And it contributed to a fundamental transformation in many Europeans' values.

Klaus Megerle investigates the political and social integration of German refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe. He sees this embittered and impoverished group, probably correctly, as a potential time bomb in the new German democracy. He argues that economic growth contributed substantially to preventing their political radicalization by allowing their rapid economic integration. Yet the exact role of economic stability in legitimizing democracy remains unclear. Megerle, for example, does note that Nazi policies and German experiences, 1933-48, had left refugees and expellees (and presumably most other Germans) much less susceptible to political radicalization. And more research is necessary to try to establish to what degree democratic values had begun to take hold before prosperity.

In the Introduction and in their separate contributions, Gerhard Ambrosius and Kaelble focus on the degree to which economic development has tended to promote a convergence of economic and social structures and of attitudes among differing states and their citizens. Ambrosius, for example, shows how patterns of private consumption and of the distribution of labor and capital by industrial sector have come to converge among all (non-Communist) European states as they have experienced economic development--and particularly in the post-1945 period. Kaelble shows how family structure, labor force participation, consumption and housing preferences, educational attainments, social security systems, and popular attitudes in France and Germany have become much more similar since 1945. Both are at pains, though, to avoid a schematic reductionism. They do discuss the ways in which economic forces push economies and people into similar patterns. But they also emphasize that economic development can promote divergence (as between France and Germany, 1870-1914), that many differences remain among developed societies (including between France and Germany), and that other factors, especially demographic changes, played a major role in convergence too.

The book's narrow focus on Western Europe is unfortunate because statistical evidence suggests that between 1945 and 1980 economic growth in Eastern Europe, in terms of physical output, was virtually identical to that in Western Europe, despite the fundamental difference in economic systems. Further research on the meaning and reliability of East European statistics may alter this picture somewhat. But whatever the exact rates of growth, 1945-73, Eastern Europe almost certainly grew as dramatically, relative to its past economic experience, as Western Europe. Any attempt to explain the Boom's causes (and consequences) hence needs to at least explore the possibility that pan-European--or even world-wide--factors were at work.