Joining nations 1947-1990

ONE

SETTING THE SCENE

THE BACKCLOTH OF WAR

THE IIW was conceived in Western Europe in 1947 and born in 1948. At the time of writing, no one under the age of 65 can have adult memories of the years immediately after the end of the Second World War in 1945 · To understand the forces which contributed to the creation of the IIW, it is necessary to try to place the vision and the initiative of the founders in the context of a period which is increasingly remote. wrote the English poet Wordsworth of the outbreak of the French Revolution. There can have been few, young or old, at least in Europe, who shared these sentiments in the uneasy dawn of peace in 1945· Relief at the end of the fighting was tempered by grief for the casualties of war and by the unwelcome discoveries about human nature revealed in the aftermath of the conflict - discoveries epitom– ised by expressions such as holocaust, gas chamber, concentration camp, collaboration and deportation. A new cause for disquiet was the existence of the atomic bomb, first revealed when two were dropped on Japan in August l 945; the morality of the use of the bomb was anxiously debated amid a universal perception that an irrevocable step had been taken towards future dangers too horrible to contemplate. By l 947, this post-war gloom was made darker still by the realisa– tion that the victorious war-time alliance was not oniy breaking up but turning into two antagonistic camps, symptomatic of which was the civil war which raged in Greece until I 948 . Equally characteristic of the widening division between East and West was the refusal of the countries of Eastern Europe to participate in the Marshall Plan Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven