Socialism and Democracy

ISSN: 0885-4300 (Print) 1745-2635 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csad20

A People's History of Modern Europe

Steve McGiffen

To cite this article: Steve McGiffen (2016) A People's History of Modern Europe, Socialism and
Democracy, 30:3, 124-127, DOI: 10.1080/08854300.2016.1223866

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2016.1223866

Published online: 21 Oct 2016.

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Download by: [University of Sussex Library] Date: 17 September 2017, At: 06:24
 Socialism and Democracy, 2016
Vol. 30, No. 3, 124 –155

Book Reviews

William A. Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe (London: Pluto

Press, 2016)
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These are momentous times in Europe. Having said that, it’s prob-
able that I could have written the same sentence at any time since the
concept of “Europe” arose, without raising too much controversy.
What qualifies our own times for that label is, above all, the slow but see-
mingly inevitable dance of the European Union toward the grave. The
Brexit, and the ludicrous (on all sides) non-debate which preceded it,
has sent shock waves through the European establishment and
smashed the United Kingdom’s few remaining political certainties to
smithereens. In doing so, it has provided a timely illustration of Pelz’s
underlying message, that history is capable of being read in many differ-
ent ways and its content manipulated to many different ends.
This may seem obvious to many of this journal’s readers. Pelz’s
book however, is not aimed principally at people like himself and
this reviewer, proud possessors of our history doctorates and many
years of education, though even the well-educated non-specialist will
find its wide-ranging synthesis of value. Dr Pelz teaches at a Commu-
nity College and is one of the prime movers behind Chicago’s Open
University of the Left. He is skilled at communicating complex and
challenging ideas to people who may have been fed anything but all
their lives, including in their past education. This, along with his
own specialisms in various aspects of German history, means that he
is well-qualified to take on the daunting task of summarizing
Europe’s development from feudal times to the twenty-first century.
The book should help to provide an antidote to the fact that most
Americans often make ill-founded assumptions about things European.
Indeed, this is scarcely confined to the western side of the Atlantic. The
British recently voted in a BBC poll to determine who was the Greatest
Briton. Winston Churchill came top. This is a frighteningly inappropri-
ate application of democracy, as illustrated by the absurd result, but it
does illustrate how divergent people’s views of the past can be, and
how they can be manipulated. In my view Churchill was a typical
product of the English ruling class and a typical Tory, a man who
hated working people, Jews, Indians, Africans and so on, a drunk and
 Book Reviews 125

a depressive and quite unfit to lead a nation at war. Positive views of the
man clearly did not abound in 1945 when he led the Conservative Party to
its greatest ever defeat. But that is perhaps unfair, as the Winston Churchill
who topped the popularity poll – ahead of Charles Darwin and William
Shakespeare – didn’t exist back then. He was a very different Winston
Churchill to the one that did so badly in the rather more important
contest in 1945. He was invented in the years after the war, and especially
following his death in 1965, to provide the nation with a depoliticized
hero. The same is true of many other historical figures: Joan of Arc and
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William Wallace are two that spring to mind whose reinvented popular
personae bear no relationship to their reality as living human beings.
America has plenty of its own, from Billy the Kid to Ronald Reagan.
This applies also to events. As a child in the 1950s and early 1960s
I would have had no hesitation in listing Dunkirk as one of Britain’s
most heroic military escapades, rather than a farrago of fatal errors
created by general inexperience and ruling-class incompetence.
Britain, we were told at school, had not been invaded since 1066, and
only later did you begin to wonder how 1688 fitted into that scenario,
not to mention a host of lesser incursions. The British had won the
battle of Waterloo and saved Europe from the tyranny of a fanatical
megalomaniac. The reality was that British soldiers were in the min-
ority of a multinational force. Widespread opinion, in addition, is
that they actually “saved” Europe for the tyrannies which as a result
of Napoleon’s defeat continued to grind down everyone else.
Pelz’s book ranges wide and long over such controversies. He wisely
leaves the classical world alone. It has its own specialists and its own
excellent popularizers. He begins instead with the middle ages, a
period in which Europe, as he says, “became decentralized and
chaotic”, as it may be doing once more. As we move closer to our own
time, the amount of attention devoted to each period and its major
events increases. He correctly points out that ‘the Reformation’, of
which he provides an excellent summation, was actually a many-sided
series of events. A pattern is established in which different classes with
widely differing aims come together in inevitably temporary alliances
before the more powerful elements turn on their one-time allies.
The same thing can be seen to happen in both the English and French
Revolutions, each of which is given a separate chapter. The treatment,
though necessarily brief, is coherent and certainly sufficient to encourage
people to look further into these key events. Further chapters deal
respectively with the industrial revolution, the period of working-class
awakening from 1848 to the Paris Commune, and the consolidation
and institutionalization of proletarian power in the latter part of the
 126 Socialism and Democracy

nineteenth century. Up to this point it’s tempting to take a “left Whig-

gish” line in which the proletariat emerges, formulates its demands
and builds organizations capable of pursuing them, and though stop-
ping short of social revolution, massively improves its standard of
living and degree of freedom. It’s a temptation which Pelz largely
avoids, but one which is in any case blown away by the massive confla-
gration which erupted in 1914. The First World War brought several
worlds to an end and set the stage for a very different kind of struggle.
Although the improvement in working people’s lives was not ended
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by that war, and although the conflict created the conditions for the
first proletarian revolution, it also ushered in a period which in most of
Europe was characterized by defeat for the workers’ movement.
Pelz’s analysis of the Russian Revolution and the failed revolutions
in central Europe which accompanied it owes a debt to both Trotsky
and Luxemburg, and is none the worse for that. Indeed, it is in
dealing with German history in this period that his own expertise
becomes most powerfully evident. This forms part of his wide-
ranging narrative of the Great Depression in Europe and the conse-
quent rise and fall of fascism and Nazism.
Moving on to the postwar period, Pelz provides a corrective to the
increasingly widespread myth that the European Economic Commu-
nity – the predecessor of the current European Union – was
founded by far-sighted, progressive, peace-loving leaders who
wanted nothing but to ensure that war, at least on their continent,
was consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet he does this largely by
implication, leaving us wanting “A People’s History of the European
Union” to complement his book. The EEC was in fact founded as a
Cold War maneuver, partly on the initiative of Allen W. Dulles, the
same CIA man who engineered Italian “democracy” to keep the Com-
munist Party well away from power. This is one area to which I would
have liked to see more attention paid. The fact that “European Union”
does not appear in the index is certainly a misleading oversight, but the
reader never quite gets a feel for the way in which the peculiar form of
neoliberal federalism which has eroded European democracy over the
last four decades emerged and became dominant.
These are quibbles, the last of which is informed by my own rather
reluctant specialism of recent years. Every specialist in some aspect of
the last thousand years of European history will probably have his or
her own, similar disappointments. The great achievements in the arts
and sciences, engineering and navigation are virtually ignored, but
perhaps someone out there could complement this volume with a
people’s history of these fields of human endeavor, each of which of
 Book Reviews 127

course interacts powerfully with the processes with which this book does
deal. Yet to synthesize a millennium in fewer than 300 pages is no mean
feat. As it turns out, it was well worth the considerable effort involved.
The timeliness of this book is illustrated by the Brexit vote. Possibly
the most absurd outcome of this vote was a march by tens of thousands
of people, most of them young, most of them believing themselves to
be progressive and, in American terms, “liberal” in support of the
European Union and the United Kingdom’s continued membership
of it, in the wake of the electorate’s, to them, unwelcome decision.
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They would all have accepted the term “pro-Europe”, which has
sadly been embraced by all sides, though as with “pro-life”, in real
terms it means more or less the opposite of what it came to signify.
I am almost certain that only a tiny percentage of those marchers
were aware of the fact that they were expressing support for a
“Union” which has removed many deeply political questions from
any effective control by elected politicians, let alone the people who
elect them; that they were expressing support for a body whose
supreme court, the European Court of Justice, has on more than one
occasion declared strikes against foreign employers who pay below
the going rate to be an illegal interference with the right of establish-
ment; or (less forgivably) that they were enthusing about an unelected
cabal which has driven a majority of Greece’s people into dire poverty.
For the record, I am happy to be European, I live in France and
intend in the course of time to die here. Prior to that I lived in
Belgium, and far from being a “Little Englander” I travel to England
just once or twice a year, only to visit friends and watch my football
team, and have no intention of ever moving back there. I speak two
European languages other than my own, and work on an ad hoc
basis for a Dutch political party. Yet, had a reactionary law not
deprived me of my vote on the grounds that I’ve lived outside the
UK for more than fifteen years, I would have cast it – though in the
end with a heavy heart and some trepidation – for Brexit.
I mention these personal details only in order to underline William
Pelz’s point: history is complicated, assumptions are dangerous, and
there are far more than two sides to every story.

# 2016 Steve McGiffen

International Relations
American Graduate School in Paris
spmcgiffen@yahoo.co.uk
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2016.1223866