V-E Day: From Rubble To Renewal

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Forty years after V-E day, the world's greatest battleground is a Continent revived and prosperous, free from war for those four decades. It is also a Continent dramatically divided, slightly uncertain of its future, and sometimes sadly aware that it has yielded its place at the center of the world to the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

On May 8, 1945, one world ended and another began. When all the ghastly totals were added up, it would be reckoned that some 40 million Europeans had lost their lives during the war; alongside them fell 160,045 Americans, 45,057 Canadians and thousands of others of non-European nationalities. Since then, in a near-miraculous turnabout, the nations of Western Europe have risen from the rubble and grown into the world's second-largest economic entity, ranking below only the U.S. In a remarkable fashion, that accomplishment owes much to the superpowers. From the West came the generosity and vision of the U.S., through the Marshall Plan; that grand recovery scheme, conceived under the aegis of then Secretary of State George C. Marshall, gave Western Europe more than $13 billion to build a new economic foundation. From the East came the threat represented by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet despot whose Red Army divided the Continent in half, and who spurred movement toward greater unity in the West through his cold war policies. Says Andre de Staercke, a former Belgian diplomat: "We should build a statue to Stalin in every public square in Europe, because he showed us the danger [of disunity]."

As the pain of war and the threat of Soviet expansion have receded in Western Europe's memory, a new generation is uneasy with the perception that the Continent's fate is not in its own hands but in those of the superpowers. There are signs that Eastern Europe too is experiencing a change. Says Rumanian-born Political Scientist Pierre Hassner, a research fellow at Paris' National Foundation of Political Science: "There is a tension between the rigid East-West strategic balance on the one hand and changing popular attitudes and life-styles on the other. The security arrangement has guaranteed four decades of peace, but people are increasingly weary of a system that represses their aspirations."