Nato<\/a>, the mutual defence organisation founded in 1949, provided a security umbrella under which prosperity could grow.<\/p>\nThis was accompanied by a conviction among postwar European politicians that their continent should never again be the crucible for terrible conflict. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman of France, Paul-Henri Spaak from Belgium, Alcide De Gasperi of Italy, Konrad Adenauer and Walter Hallstein from Germany along with other \u201cnew Europeans\u201d determined to create economic relationships and political structures which would bind together European states in such a way as to make further warfare between them unthinkable. The first Congress of Europe met in The Hague in May 1948. Winston Churchill was the keynote speaker. \u201cWe shall only save ourselves from the perils which draw near,\u201d he said, \u201cby forgetting the hatreds of the past, by letting national rancours and revenges die, by progressively effacing frontiers and barriers which aggravate and congeal our divisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though his own country was reluctant to heed this advice, others in Europe did. What began as the European Coal and Steel Community evolved into the Common Market, then the European Economic Community and ultimately into a European Union of 28 members. No one was ever compelled to join what became the world\u2019s most prosperous trading area. The EU, for all its flaws, is the most successful example of soft power in the history of the world.<\/p>\n
To begin with, Britain stood aloof from this inflection point in the history of its continent. This was an error, but it was an understandable mistake. Britain\u2019s second world war experience was unique. It was neither an aggressor nor one of the conquered. Unlike Germany, Britain felt no war guilt. It had not started out on the wrong side, unlike Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union. It had not arrived to combat late, unlike the United States. The superpowers might have the greater armies, but Britain\u2019s lonely defiance of Hitler in 1940-41 had been critical to the prevention of enduring Nazi domination over Europe. Britons wrapped themselves in a proud national legend about their war record.<\/p>\n\n\nThe close bond with the United States enhanced Britain\u2019s leverage in Europe<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n
This kept out a bit of the chill when the costs were counted. While British self-esteem in 1945 was higher than it had been in living memory, the country\u2019s situation was dire. The conflict had severely depleted national wealth and accelerated the end of empire. It took a while for Britain to shed world power illusions and responsibilities, and the country was taught a rough lesson about its diminished place in the global order by the 1956 Suez humiliation. It then suffered the indignity of Charles de Gaulle saying non<\/em> to Britain\u2019s belated application to participate in the EEC, only finally joining in 1973.<\/p>\nDean Acheson famously sneered that \u201cBritain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role\u201d. There was some truth in this when he said it, but Britain did ultimately fashion an effective place for itself in the postwar world. The close bond with the United States, while not always quite the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d hailed by successive generations of prime ministers, enhanced Britain\u2019s leverage in Europe. Engagement with Europe made Britain more valuable to and influential with the US. The Commonwealth added a third sphere.<\/p>\n
Britain played a significant role in promoting liberal, democratic values in what became known as \u201cthe western world\u201d and setting them as the standard to which others should aspire. British lawyers and politicians played large parts in drafting the European convention on human rights. John Maynard Keynes was a key player at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which shaped the postwar financial architecture and was the first international agreement to make a goal of spreading development around the world. This was the beginnings of an understanding that an impoverished planet is an unstable one. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, forerunner to the World Trade Organization, was established to expand free trade and prevent a slide back into the beggar-my-neighbour protectionism which had been a characteristic of the calamitous 1930s. For good or bad, largely good, the western allies embedded liberal norms in international treaties and institutions.<\/p>\n\nWinston Churchill addresses the Congress of Europe in The Hague in 1948 where closer European union was discussed. Photograph: Kurt Hutton\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe United Nations<\/a>, born in October 1945, has not fulfilled all the hopes of its founders. It did not stop further wars nor prevent shameful genocides. The UN has provided a global forum for the articulation and resolution of conflict, its agencies have contributed to progress in human development, and it has proved a lot more durable and useful than the hopeless prewar League of Nations.<\/p>\nThe result of all this postwar statecraft was to fashion a rules-based international order of a kind that the world had never before seen. This did not serve human kind perfectly, but it was a vast improvement on what had gone before. Among the many gains from the more integrated world which has developed in the decades since 1945, there has been a dramatic decline in the proportion of humanity living in absolute poverty. When the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire followed, it was briefly possible to believe that the arc of history irreversibly favoured freedom, internationalism and democracy.<\/p>\n
This view failed to anticipate the emergence of fresh challenges, such as Islamist fundamentalism, and the revival of old ones, such as aggressive nationalism. Complacency about the economic order and how it distributed the fruits of progress was shattered by the financial crash of 2007-08. This catalysed an ongoing cultural and political backlash against globalisation and liberal government.<\/p>\n
The assumptions and structures within which the western world lived for many decades after 1945 now seem much more contingent. The EU is racked with internal tensions. For the first time in its history, it is going to lose a member, and a big one, unless Britain has a last-gasp change of heart about Brexit. For the first time since 1945, the White House is occupied by a president who rejects fundamental tenets of the postwar order and whose assaults on its international institutions are placing western alliances under acute stress. Authoritarianism is resurgent from Russia to Turkey to the Philippines to Venezuela. The totalitarians of China promote their political model as both more stable and better able to deliver economic progress than the messy democracies. Global cooperation is needed as much as ever, not least in the face of the climate crisis, but it is harder to come by. Some find ominous parallels between the troubled second decade of the 21st century and the 1930s.<\/p>\n
The conclusion to draw from this is not that human rights, pluralism, open societies and the rule of law are doomed, but that they need constant advocacy, effort and guardianship. This was the key insight of the enlightened leaders who determined to learn from the horrors of the second world war. They grasped that peace, freedom and prosperity can never be taken for granted. They have to be worked for. Better worlds only happen when the vision to conceive them is combined with the will to create them.<\/p>\n
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