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Evans · Staying Alive in the Ruins: Plato to Nato · LRB 22 April 2021

Vol. 43 No. 8 · 22 April 2021

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 

by Paul Betts.

Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1

J
ust​over forty years ago, in 1980, I found myself by chance
teaching for a semester at Columbia University, armed with
the grandiose title of Visiting Associate Professor of European
History, provided with a free apartment and paid a salary not
far short of what I earned in a whole year as a lowly lecturer in the
UK. I’d never been to the US and knew nothing about Columbia or
indeed any other American university. The faculty mostly seemed
rather elderly to me, and so far as I could tell they lived upstate and
only came in to New York City once a week to dispense their
wisdom ex cathedra in very lofty and very lengthy lectures, which
were later explicated for students by a phalanx of teaching
assistants. Most of the professors evidently thought I was a grad
student, and in any case it was the grad students on whom I quickly
came to rely for my social life.

Several of my friends were engaged in teaching a two-semester

sophomore course called ‘Contemporary Civilisation’, and at first I
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thought how admirable this was: the university introducing its

students to the world today, no matter what subject they were
majoring in. What a splendid preparation for life after graduation!
My friends soon disabused me. It was a ‘great books’ course. It
began with Plato’s Republic and continued with the Bible, before
going on to Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,
Smith and so on. There was, it seemed to me, little sign of
contemporary civilisation. Fully occupied with delivering twice-
weekly lectures on Europe from 1870 to 1919 and a weekly graduate
class on imperial Germany, I considered myself fortunate that I
didn’t have to teach this course as well: I’d have struggled to keep
up since I’d never studied anything remotely resembling it myself.

‘Contemporary Civilisation’ was Columbia’s version of what in

other American universities went by the name of ‘Western
Civilisation’. Like them, Columbia had introduced it in the
aftermath of the First World War, with the intention of informing
the next generation of Americans about issues of war and peace,
and, more generally, telling them what their country had been
fighting for. American and Allied propaganda in the war had
portrayed the conflict as a struggle to defend European and
American civilisation against German barbarism. The enemy then
was ‘the Hun’: a term borrowed from an unfortunate speech given
by the kaiser in 1900, when German expeditionary troops
confronting the Boxer Rebellion were instructed to make
themselves remembered as the actual Huns had been after they
trashed the Roman Empire. A widely distributed American
recruitment poster showed a gorilla-like figure standing before the
ruins of Louvain cathedral, wearing a spiked helmet, with a club
marked ‘Kultur’ in one hand and a swooning, half-naked maiden
in the other. The poster urged young Americans to ‘destroy this
mad brute’.

In wartime propaganda, as in the newly created ‘Western Civ’

surveys, civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and
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Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating

influence of Christianity, but essentially they emphasised the
classical origins of the civilisation which educated elites in Europe
and the US claimed to defend. There were few major politicians in
the first half of the 20th century, and for some time afterwards,
who hadn’t received a classical education. In Britain, Margaret
Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris
Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from
memory.

In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul

Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western Civ’ at first hand,
perhaps underplays the classical origins of the idea. ‘Civilisation’ in
the classical tradition already incorporated many of its
contemporary meanings, from advanced technology and material
comfort to enlightened philosophising and artistic sophistication.
When, in his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark
asked himself, ‘What is civilisation?’, the answer was: ‘I don’t
know ... But I think that I can recognise it when I see it.’ What
Clark recognised was very much the ‘Western Civ’ idea, stretching
back to the Ancient Greeks and given new life by the Renaissance.
These assumptions were shared by Norbert Elias, whose The
Civilising Process (1939) had charted the history of manners and
civility, and the emergence of the modern state. What Betts shows,
however, is that the term had many uses and many different
definitions, even in the relatively short time between the end of the
Second World War and the present day.

During the war, Goebbels proclaimed that Germany was defending

European civilisation against the barbarism of the Bolshevik
hordes. Nazi propaganda condemned the ‘British barbarism’
demonstrated by the bombing of historic German towns – an
example, Goebbels said, of ‘England’s assassination of European
culture’. Hans Frank, governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland,
said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of
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European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art

collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of
Chopin and sent millions of Jews and other Poles to their deaths.

Contemplating the heaps of dead and dying in the liberated

concentration camps, the British MP Mavis Tate thought that
German rule in Europe represented the negation of civilisation.
She noted that it exposed ‘the deep streak of evil and sadism in the
German race, such as one ought not to expect to find in a people
who for generations have paid lip-service to Western culture and
civilisation’. When the surviving German war criminals were put on
trial at Nuremberg, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson told
the judges that ‘the real complaining party at your bar is
civilisation.’

In 1945, the victorious Allies faced many of the same problems they
thought they had faced in 1918. But the destructive effects of
‘barbarism’ were now greater and more obvious. For one thing, the
scale of the material damage inflicted on Europe was
unprecedented. Entire cities were razed. Tens of millions of people
were starving, destitute and homeless. And the Nazis had departed
radically from the widely understood standards of decency and
humanity that were central to the concept of civilisation.

Initially, there was a marked reluctance on the part of the Allies to

embark on a programme of ‘re-civilising’ the Germans. Betts
doesn’t mention the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialise Germany,
which, though it was never formally adopted, exerted a powerful
influence on American policy in the immediate aftermath of the
war, but he does make clear that it wasn’t until 1946 that food and
funds and other kinds of aid began to flow into Germany. The
Marshall Plan, which poured millions of dollars into Western
Europe on the condition that recipient countries accepted the
principle and practice of liberal democracy, was intended, in the
words of the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, to fulfil ‘the task of

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saving Europe for Western civilisation’. The reconstruction effort

was driven by a growing fear that, without it, the Germans would
become susceptible to Communist or neo-Nazi propaganda. The
doctrine of collective guilt underpinned a policy of ‘non-
fraternisation’ with individual Germans until it was suggested that
the Red Army, more lenient in this respect, might be winning over
more Germans than the British and Americans might like. The
Cold War had begun.

The re-civilising of Germany was made easier by the concession

that Germany had been civilised before 1933, possessing legal
norms that the defendants at Nuremberg knew they were violating.
Amounting to a distinction between the Nazis and the Germans – a
distinction which wartime propaganda and early postwar reactions
to Nazi atrocities had threatened to obliterate – this helped the
occupying powers in their efforts to ‘re-educate’ ordinary
Germans. While the British adhered to the well-established
concept of the ‘two Germanies’, and tried to bring out the civilised
tradition of Beethoven and Goethe while suppressing the
uncivilised tradition of Bismarck and the kaiser, the French sought
to convert the Germans by introducing them to the universal values
of French culture. Germans themselves paid little attention, at least
to begin with, as they tried to stay alive among the ruins.

American policy was driven by the belief that the Germans needed
reconnecting with contemporary Western civilisation. This could
prove tricky, however. When the CIA sponsored a travelling
exhibition called Advancing American Art, showcasing work by
Abstract Expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb and designed to
show that American culture was a world away from the pseudo-
classicism of Nazi art and the crude propaganda of Soviet socialist
realism, the House Un-American Activities Committee condemned
it and funding was withdrawn. The CIA continued to promote
exhibitions in Germany by Abstract Expressionists, but covertly.
Backing these initiatives was another CIA-sponsored institution,
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the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which supported magazines

such as Der Monat and, in Britain, Encounter, to cultivate American
values. For a long time, the identity of these magazines’ backers
remained hidden from most of their contributors. Regardless of
the controversy aroused when it was eventually exposed, the CCF
illustrated a key aspect of the mainstream US concept of
civilisation in the 1950s: its identification with liberalism.

Betts emphasises, perhaps overemphasises, the contribution of

photojournalism to these efforts, though this enables him to
include illustrations that give a good flavour of the period. Policies
– such as the shift in 1946-47 from starving the Germans to feeding
them – were made in the end by politicians, not journalists. The
Cold War was remoulding Western civilisation into ‘Judeo-
Christian civilisation’, a concept endorsed by Eisenhower in 1952,
shortly before he entered the White House. Catholic-Protestant
reconciliation underpinned the Christian Democratic idea that, as
the Italian politician Alcide de Gasperi put it, ‘Christianity lies at
the origin of this European civilisation.’ Faced by the threat of
atheist communism from the east, politicians relegated the
classical heritage to a subordinate role. What’s more, downplaying
democracy and human rights in favour of Christianity allowed the
Catholic dictatorships of Franco and Salazar to be welcomed into
the club.

The Cold War also brought the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Eisenhower’s warning in 1953 that nuclear war would mean the
‘probability of civilisation destroyed’ was echoed by the Soviet
premier Georgy Malenkov: he said it would bring ‘the end of world
civilisation’. Fear of catastrophe encouraged the negotiation of
agreements such as the 1949 Geneva Convention for the Protection
of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which strengthened similar
agreements signed before 1914 but treated as a dead letter between
1939 and 1945 (and not just by the Nazis). For most people in
Europe, though, ‘civilisation’ in the 1950s meant material progress.
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America, as the French poet Louis Aragon complained, was a

‘civilisation of bathtubs and Frigidaires’. Betts cites a 1954 opinion
poll which asked French women what they wanted out of life: 22
per cent said love and 54 per cent ‘material wellbeing’. Left-wing
European intellectuals worried openly that American consumerism
was undermining European civilisation and drowning it in a wave
of Coca-Cola and rock’n’roll. American sociologists decried the
dumbing down of civilisation in a levelled-out ‘mass society’. On
both sides of the Iron Curtain, a proliferation of etiquette books
emphasised the importance of civility and moderation, in contrast
to the fascist values propagated before 1945.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Betts’s book is the attention

he pays to the reconstitution of European overseas empires as part
of the effort to reconstitute European civilisation overall. Integral
to this effort was the familiar claim that the colonial empires were
justified because they were extending the benefits of European
civilisation to parts of the world that remained uncivilised in many
ways. But in the climate of the postwar world this was a lost cause.
Japan’s easy conquests in the Far East had torpedoed the claims
made for British, French and Dutch superiority to Asians. India
became independent in 1947. Brutal campaigns waged by the
French in Algeria, and by the British in Malaya and Kenya,
destroyed the idea that European civilisation meant peace, order
and the defence of human rights. Both the US and the USSR
distanced themselves from European attempts to cling on to
empire. In 1956 there was the debacle of Suez. In 1960 Harold
Macmillan recognised the inevitable when he conceded the power
of anticolonial liberation movements in his ‘wind of change’
speech.

African nationalist intellectuals were by now appropriating the

language of civilisation for themselves. Colonialism, they argued,
had corrupted or displaced African civilisations, whose
achievements could be seen in spectacular archaeological sites
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such as Great Zimbabwe that had been ignored by the colonisers,

or falsely ascribed to mysterious white people by racists such as Ian
Smith. Hugh Seton-Watson, an anti-communist historian of
Eastern Europe, claimed that decolonisation was not ‘a glorious
extension of democracy, but a tragic decay of civilisation, similar to
the decline of the Roman Empire, and followed by the same result,
reversion to barbarism’. His views were echoed by other
conservatives. But they were challenged by writers such as Léopold
Sédar Senghor, who borrowed from the German anthropologist
Leo Frobenius to argue there had been a major precolonial African
civilisation. He had to be somewhat selective in his borrowings,
since Frobenius, a friend of Wilhelm II, believed that the
civilisation had been founded by white men and had degenerated
once they abandoned it.

For newly independent African states, exhibitions of precolonial

sculptures, masks and monuments provided evidence of a vibrant
cultural heritage. This idea blended into the concept of world
civilisation, which became influential in the late 1950s and early
1960s. Unesco, founded in 1945, expressed the idea in the multi-
volume History of Mankind (1963-76), whose bland optimism and
avoidance of controversial political issues was widely criticised by
historians. Far more successful was the parallel forty-volume
History of Civilisation series, which brought together a diverse
collection of historians including Eric Hobsbawm, Friedrich Heer
and Michael Grant to produce single-author volumes on particular
time periods and parts of the globe. Underpinning the concept,
developed by its enterprising publisher George Weidenfeld, was
the French idea of civilisation as encompassing material life and
economies, ideas and mentalities, science and the arts, alongside
the politics, revolutions and wars that were the traditional subjects
of history.

Unesco scored a far greater and more lasting success with its
invention of World Heritage Sites, a popular idea that had its
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origins in the multinational effort to rescue Ancient Egyptian

monuments and artefacts threatened in the 1960s by the building
of the Aswan Dam. As they proliferated across the globe, World
Heritage Sites succeeded in breaking the identification of
civilisation and heritage with Europe. The initiative also ran
counter to the Western designation of civilisation as Christian.
Communist governments in Eastern Europe saw that they could
put themselves on an equal footing with the West by propagating
the idea of ‘socialist civilisation’, which they sought to extend to
the global south, supporting liberation movements in colonies
such as Angola and Mozambique and backing the anti-apartheid
cause in South Africa. This challenged the concept of Judeo-
Christian civilisation adhered to by spokesmen for apartheid such
as D.F. Malan, who declared the racial differences between blacks
and whites to be ‘the physical manifestation of the contrast
between two irreconcilable ways of life, between barbarism and
civilisation, between heathenism and Christianity’.

T
he backlash​against the secular, progressive concept of
civilisation found dramatic expression in Greece in the
coup of April 1967, led by colonels in fear of a socialist
victory at the upcoming national elections. The coup had
been necessary, one of the colonels proclaimed, because ‘we had
arrived at a situation of anarchism in this country of Helleno-
Christian civilisation.’ ‘Greece is a mission,’ another said, ‘and this
mission consists of civilisation.’ This did not prevent them from
arresting and torturing thousands of their opponents. Nor did it
stop them adding the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles to their
already extensive list of banned works. The coup earned the
colonels condemnation across the globe, and few were sorry when
the regime was brought to an end in 1974. But neither the
overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 nor the death of
Franco the following year prevented the return of civilisation’s
identification with Christian conservatism in the following decade.

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The Islamic revolution in Iran and the ascendancy of hardline

theocracy sparked a sense that civilisation was in crisis, fanned ten
years later by Khomeini’s incitement to Muslims to kill Salman
Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. When the end of
the Cold War determined that Russia could no longer serve as the
antithesis of civilisation in the eyes of Christian conservatives,
Islam provided a handy substitute. ‘Global politics,’ Samuel
Huntington wrote in 1996, ‘is the politics of civilisations,’ a politics
in which the ‘rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of
civilisations’. The sense that Christian civilisation was threatened
by violent Islamist barbarians was deepened by 9/11, the Iraq War,
the Taliban and Islamic State. Beheadings and public stonings
weren’t civilised and nor was the destruction of ancient
monuments such as the city of Palmyra and the buddhas of
Bamiyan.

Unesco condemned these and other acts of cultural vandalism as

crimes against world civilisation, though the ‘civilised’ world did
not scruple to exploit these crimes for its own purposes: between
2007 and 2009, customs officials at Heathrow confiscated 3.4 tons
of antiquities looted from war zones in Iraq and elsewhere,
intended for sale on the international market. Civilisation under
threat was the theme of a BBC television series broadcast in 2018,
which opened with video footage of the destruction of Palmyra.
Entitled Civilisations, it was clearly intended to dethrone the
Eurocentrism of Kenneth Clark’s series of the 1960s. But Unesco-
style liberal multiculturalism had to compete with the growing
resurgence of older and narrower ideas of civilisation, summed up
in Niall Ferguson’s 2011 TV series and book Civilisation, which
argued that the West had achieved world dominance through a
combination of competition, science, property-owning democracy,
modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work
ethic. Even this upbeat account ended, however, with a warning
that civilisation in ‘the West’ was now under threat – though if, as

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the subtitle asked, the West was about to become ‘history’, this was
only because it had lost faith in itself.

Ferguson shared Unesco’s emphasis on scientific progress, legal

accountability, human rights and democratic politics. But in his
pessimistic concluding chapters, Betts charts the narrowing of the
idea of civilisation to a strong identification with Christianity,
political authoritarianism and scientific denialism. Real and
would-be populist authoritarians, from Orbán to Trump, have
uncoupled the idea of civilisation from many of the concepts with
which it was associated in the Unesco tradition. Where George W.
Bush, speaking in Warsaw in 2003, referred to democracy thirteen
times, and talked, like his predecessors since Truman, of ‘the free
world’, Trump’s inaugural address in 2017 mentioned democracy
only once. ‘In Trump’s parlance,’ Betts notes, ‘civilisation replaced
democracy and human rights as sources of allegiance and identity.’
In 2017, Trump declared that his mission abroad was to defend the
‘civilised world’ against terrorism: ‘Our civilisation will triumph.’

In the view of modern conservatives, civilisation is Christian, and it

is under threat above all from the Islamic world. In this view,
secularism is too feeble a force to ward off the threat. This brings
with it in turn a populist scepticism about secular science, above all
the science of climate change, with its unacceptable attacks on
material civilisation: cars, fossil fuels and all the other sources of
global warming that have underpinned the prosperity and
wellbeing of advanced industrial societies. On the far right, a racist
understanding of civilisation has been used to warn the ‘white
majoritarian culture’ about the dangers of immigration. Orbán,
who has built a wall on the Serbian border to keep out migrants,
declares that he is defending the whole of European civilisation.
Yet for liberals and the left, Betts observes, the idea of civilisation
is ‘a source of chagrin and loathing, a hangover from the era of
imperialism’. By vacating the field, they have left the rhetoric of
civilisation to the right, to be deployed in the service of
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nationalistic and anti-democratic ambitions. Perhaps, given the

many reconceptualisations of civilisation over time, this may
change at some point in the future. But it doesn’t look likely soon.

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