Certainties of the postwar world are ending

We are therefore coming to the end of the postwar era and are entering the post-postwar world.

For almost all of my life, postwar has made sense as a description of politics, of the economy and of culture. The term could be, and has been, used liberally to date events and measure progress. It denoted the world order and was synonymous with modernity. Nobody needed ever to say which war was being alluded to. It was a reference that required no explanation and described assumptions and experiences that were near-universal.

Signs that this is no longer the case are all around us. The assumptions of postwar politics are crumbling. That is not to say that nobody any longer holds to the main tenets. Indeed, in many cases I hold to them myself. But they are no longer universal assumptions. In particular they are not the assumptions of new generations of voters.

Let me give some examples, big and small. First and most obviously, Pax Americana. The US emerged from the Second World War as the dominant power, militarily, economically and culturally. The British right admired the energy and productiveness of its capitalist economy. The British left admired its openness and apparent lack of class barriers. Young people danced to American music, watched American movies and wore American clothes. Even those who resisted American hegemony accepted that it existed.

As the postwar era ends, American power, the advantages of its political system, the robustness of its economy and its status as a success story that demanded emulation are all much more widely questioned.

Along with this, of course, goes the Cold War, for decades the organising principle of international politics. Those wishing to associate capitalism with prosperity and freedom have been able to rely on the immediate postwar experience of communism to make the argument for them.

Now a new generation is growing into adulthood who not only have (obviously) no recollection of Stalin, but have encountered few, if any, of socialism’s great failed states. The robust postwar consensus that the western economic model represented the future is robust no longer.

Another staple of the postwar era now fast disappearing is the power of the Munich analogy. Whether or not it is an accurate view of what transpired, Britain emerged from the Second World War with a strong view that the 1938 Munich accord with Hitler was dishonourable and naive. Dictators cannot be appeased. Chamberlain was one of history’s great fools for trying.

Records show that the Munich analogy played an important part in the case made for war in Korea, in Suez, in Vietnam, against the Sandinistas and in both campaigns against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Now its power has definitely begun to wane. In the 2013 debate on taking military action against Syria, the British government hoped that the Munich analogy would triumph and would make the case for action to deter Bashar Assad. Instead, it found that Vietnam and Iraq analogies had taken its place.

Another indication of the passing of the postwar era was Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. A common portrayal of that choice is that it was a manifestation of Britain’s foolish view that it can stand alone, born out of a myth about how it won the Second World War. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Another way of looking at it is that the fears that led to the creation of the EU had simply lost their power for a lot of people.

When Remainers warned that European unity was essential to British peace, they relied on a memory of conflict whose repetition seemed to many people remote and unlikely, even laughable. It is noteworthy that along with the young, who are instinctively internationalist, those with direct experience of the war as adults were more likely to support Remain.

And then there is the debate about how Britain should see its history. The postwar consensus was uncomplicated. This country had stood alone against tyranny until the new world had come to the aid of the old. It had made huge sacrifices but had prevailed, and good had prevailed with it. After the war it had then accepted the case for national self-determination and set about dismantling its Empire.

This loomed so large in the immediate experience of those who survived the war and their children that it seemed almost to be our history, rather than just part of it. But as memories of the Second World War recede, it takes its place in the long parade of events. Perspectives change with time. When you become six years old you think of your fifth birthday as being a long time ago. When you are 50 both your fifth and sixth birthdays seem as if they happened at about the same time. There were roughly (I’m sure I’m embroiling myself in some arcane academic debate with this observation) 500 years between the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, yet now they both seem aspects of ancient history.

So now we are moving towards a richer understanding of our past, which includes mistakes and not simply glorious successes. The argument that we must consider slavery and the heights of the Empire as part of our political legacy is less the result of some “woke” ideology than it is of the natural passage of time providing a different perspective.

For years it would have seemed unthinkable for Britons to be discussing the status of Sir Winston Churchill as a national icon. The Second World War was immediate while his attitude to Indian independence was ancient history. As we move into the post-postwar era a more rounded consideration of his whole career is inevitable and, actually, desirable.

All these changes mean that it no longer makes sense to talk with ease about our era as postwar, a period with the Second World War as its major reference point and whose policies flow from an attempt to recover from that war and prevent it happening again. Maybe we need a new term. Post-Covid?

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk