Current Affairs: In his introduction to this mighty book, Tony Judt reveals that he first decided to write it 16 years ago on his return to Vienna from Prague. A couple of weeks earlier, the Velvet Revolution had tossed the Czechoslovak communist party's monopoly on power into Trotsky's rubbish bin. It was obvious that an "era was over and a new Europe was being born".
Of course, this truism begs the question: what was the true nature of the dying beast and what new life form was emerging to replace it? "Every epoch is a sphinx that plunges into the abyss," Judt quotes Heinrich Heine at the very beginning of the book, "as soon as its riddle has been solved." And although at more than 800 pages it is a challenging journey, by the end the reader feels that Judt has gone a long way to solving the riddle of post-war Europe.
It is our considerable fortune not only that a historian as gifted, ambitious and relentlessly industrious as Judt has attempted to answer this question, but that he took 16 years to do it. For in many illuminating respects, the intellectual energy behind this book has been refracted through the experience of the last decade and a half. In consequence, this history helps us to understand the confused and uncertain situation in which Europe now finds itself.
Judt does not labour the point but he identifies the emergence and decline of the Cold War in Europe as the end of an era that had begun at the turn of the 19th century, the smouldering ashes of a history which saw Europe emerge as a power whose writ ran across many parts of the globe. The hubris this engendered led to a downfall in the form of two world wars that was even more awesome to behold than its rise. And the Cold War was the thumping hangover after a party that the organisers had allowed to run out of all control.
Like most hangovers, this one involved the paradox of both remorse about the events of the previous evening and a desire to forget them as soon as possible; the continuing danger of violent sickness; but also the beginning of physical regeneration and philosophical reflection with an eye to improving one's moral purpose.
This general exhaustion enabled Europe to accommodate its own division and that of its most powerful member, Germany. The French were entirely at ease with the idea from the very beginning - indeed the spasms of nostalgia for the certainties of the Cold War were audible around the Elysée Palace well into the 1990s, as Judt notes. Once the boundaries were sorted out, the Americans were happy to live with it, expressing their rivalry with the Soviets vicariously through space travel, the arms build-up and the apparently dispensable peoples of the developing world.
Significant characters among the German elite, such as the right-wing media magnate Axel Springer, expressed aversion to the division by persistently referring to the "so-called German Democratic Republic" or by placing its acronym, DDR, in parentheses. But for every Axel Springer, there were plenty of people, such as the right-wing king of Bavarian politics, Franz Josef Strauss, who were happy to engage in all sorts of dubious business with the communist authorities in east Berlin. Few West Germans evinced any great urge to push a political agenda of reunification once their living standards started going up at around the same time as the Berlin Wall did.
And so, thanks to the Red Army's grim rather than brutal occupation of eastern Europe, western Europe was able to embark on an adventure that would lead to unprecedented affluence, underwritten by American security structures. The heady mix enabled us to rewrite unwittingly the book of European values. Previously a complex mixture. which combined great cultural, technological and political achievements with global mass murder and colonialism, by the time 1989 came along we had placed sufficient clear blue water between the mass murder and colonialism aspects to celebrate European values (increasingly in opposition to American as well as African and Asiatic values) as meaning impeccable governance, respect for human rights, Shakespeare, Beethoven and a liberal moral code (as well as that bit of Russia represented by Tolstoy and his ilk).
One might even excuse the east Europeans for not having caught on. During the wars of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, a grisly joke circulated about how the Serbs and the Croats thought that by slaughtering each other and the Bosnians, they were emulating traditional European values.
No question, though, the current touchy-feely European values represent an admirable aspiration, if one that looks out of sync with those of its chief ally. And this is where the secret success of Judt's book lies - he is able to inject a strong sense of why and how Europe developed as a political entity (in part by addressing the hitherto unnecessary question of definition) during the Cold War period. At the time, all that business with the EEC and trade deals appeared to be simply a valuable if tedious mechanism to ensure that the Germans and French remained friends and that we would all behave tolerably politely to one another as we took our increasingly frequent holidays abroad.
Because he has waited those 16 years, Judt is able to look at Europe's development through the experience of the 1990s when for many more reasons (not least of which are globalisation and the rise of China and India), the issue of European unification appears in a new light. Ironically, Judt enables Europe, whose post-war fate is usually understood to have been determined by two superpowers, to move much closer to centre-stage in this history.
He does so with an elegance and clarity that as a writer I can only envy. His relaxed ability to focus in and out from the fate of individual countries to the overarching narrative is perhaps unmatched. Furthermore, he drops in just the right dose, where necessary, of cultural commentary to illuminate his points. His pithy assessments of Europe's intellectual history (including a bravura passage on deconstructionism) are unrivalled.
Having said that, I disagreed with a number of his assertions - his dismissal of the economic and cultural importance of punk rock is demonstrably wrong and perhaps betrays his date of birth (well, 10 years older than me anyhow). More seriously, I think he underestimates the strength of liberal opinion in Germany during the 1970s about the state's potential to encroach on civil liberties. And to do so by quoting just one rather crass polemical movie, Germany in Autumn, is very unfair given the wealth of superb German films at the time which dealt with this issue much more thoroughly.
But this enhances rather than detracts. It is healthy to duel with such details. And I find myself not being offended but intrigued as to why Turkey is barely mentioned. Having finally admitted (thank God) that eastern Europe and the Balkans are part of Europe, what is the sphinx of history going to tell us in the forthcoming era about Turkey? Notwithstanding these details, and my curiosity, what nobody can challenge is that Tony Judt has written the standard reference work on European post-war history. It will provoke fruitful debate, but I find it hard to imagine that it will ever be surpassed.
Misha Glenny is a historian and broadcaster, currently writing a book on organised crime and globalisation
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 By Tony Judt Heinemann, 960pp. £25