24.3: The Postwar Boom and Cultural Change

The governments of Western Europe sought to ease trade across their borders, forming federalist bodies meant to make economic cooperation easier. In 1957, central continental Europe founded the European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the Common Market. The resulting free trade zone and coordinated economic policies increased trade fivefold in the years that followed. Britain opted not to join; and as a result, its growth rates lagged significantly.

Fueled by coordinated government action and Marshall Plan loans, the Western European countries were able to vault to higher and higher levels of wealth and productivity by the mid-1950s. Between 1950-1970, real wages in England grew by 80%. French industrial output doubled between 1938 and 1959, and West Germany’s exports grew by 600% in the 1950s. The years between 1945 and 1975 were described by a French economist as the trente glorieuses: The Thirty Glorious Years. Regular working people experienced an enormous, ongoing growth in their buying power and standard of living.

With the welfare state in place, many people were willing to spend on non-essentials, buying on credit and indulging in new consumer items like cars, appliances, and fashion. In short, the postwar boom represented the birth of the modern consumer society in Europe, which was paralleled in the United States. Increasingly, only the very poor were not able to buy non-essential consumer goods. Most people were able to buy clothes that followed fashion trends. Middle-class families could afford creature comforts like electric appliances and televisions. Increasingly, working families could even afford a car, something that would have been unheard of before World War II.

Part of this phenomenon was the baby boom. While not as extreme in Europe as in the US, the generation of children born in the first ten years after WWII was very large, pushing Europe’s population from 264 million in 1940 to 320 million by the early 1970s. As the generation became teenagers in the 1960s, a massive explosion of popular music witnessed the most iconic musical expression of youth culture: rock n’ roll. These “boomers” were also eager consumers, fueling the demand for fashion, music, and leisure activities.

Meanwhile, the sciences saw breakthroughs of comparable importance. The basic structure of DNA was identified in 1953. Terrible diseases were treated with vaccines for the first time, including measles and polio. Organ transplants became a reality in the 1950s. Thus, life itself could be extended in ways hitherto unimaginable.

Church attendance was dramatically different between the U.S. and European cultures. Consumerism (in a way) replaced religiosity in Europe. The postwar period saw church attendance decline across the board in Europe, hovering around 5% by the 1970s. In an effort to combat this decline, Pope John XXIII called a council, known as “Vatican II” (1962-1965), which revolutionized Catholic practices in an effort to modernize the church and appeal to more people. One of the noteworthy changes was that mass was increasingly conducted in vernacular languages instead of in Latin - over four centuries after that practice had first emerged during the Protestant Reformation.