ABSTRACT
Life in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was marked by what Göran Therborn has called the “high noon of industrial society.”1 This was so both in the East and in the West of the continent. More precisely, this zenith lasted in the West until the 1970s and in the East until 1989. The half-century between 1945 and 2000 thus comprised two distinct and at the same time connected era’s. The first was what is commonly referred to as the postwar period, featuring a continuous expansion of largescale industrialization and urbanization, an age in which wage-earner families became almost a form of fixed capital after having gained rights to education, housing, pensions, illness benefits, and social security.2 The second, beginning in the 1970s and as yet unfinished, saw the partial transformation of the West European welfare state into what Philip Cerny has called a “competition state,”3 anchored in a technocratic European Union and focused less on rights than on budgets and competitiveness. This transformation was paralleled in the East by the transition, after 1989, from paternalistic socialist to dependent capitalist states that seek economic growth by inserting themselves in the economic, political and cultural networks of the West. This shift led to an unevenly deindustrialized, service-intensive, socially segmented, and ethnically divided Europe with increasing disparities in income, rights, and power. This is especially the case in the East-far more dramatically so than in the West. This chapter will focus on a number of key issues to understanding these transformations. How do we explain the social make-up of the postwar period in Europe? How do we account for the shift to new relationships after the 1970s? And what are the precise characteristics of the postindustrial period in European societies?
