Rosalind Crone
Not everyone in Europe would have experienced the interwar period as a time of great social change, or ‘modernity’. This is particularly evident when we look at some broad demographic data from across the continent.
State | 1900/01 | 1910/11 | 1920/21 | 1930/31 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Austria | n/a | 66481 | 6426 | 6672 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | 29 | 28.1 |
Belgium | 6694 | 7424 | 7406 | 8092 |
% in major cities | n/a | 13.8 | 13.8 | 17.5 |
Bulgaria | 4338 | 43382 | 4847 | 6305 |
% in major cities | n/a | 2.4 | 3.2 | 4.6 |
Czechoslovakia | n/a | 13599 | 13612 | 14730 |
% in major cities | n/a | 1.6 | 5 | 5.8 |
Denmark | 2450 | 2757 | 31043 | 3551 |
% in major cities | n/a | 20.3 | 18.1 | 21.7 |
Estonia | n/a | n/a | 1105 | 1122 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Finland | 2656 | 2943 | 3148 | 3463 |
% in major cities | n/a | 5 | 6 | 7 |
France | 38451 | 39192 | 38798 | 41228 |
% in major cities | n/a | 12.2 | 12.6 | 11.9 |
Germany | 56367 | 649264 | 63181 | 66030 |
% in major cities | n/a | 14.3 | 18.3 | 21.4 |
Greece | 2434 | 2632 | 5017 | 7201 |
% in major cities | n/a | 12.3 | 9.4 | 9.6 |
Hungary5 | n/a | 7615 | 7990 | 8688 |
% in major cities | n/a | 11.6 | 14.8 | 11.6 |
Ireland | 4459 | 4390 | 29726 | 2963 |
% in major cities | n/a | 6.9 | 13.4 | 14.1 |
Italy | 32475 | 34671 | 364067 | 41177 |
% in major cities | n/a | 10 | 11.3 | 12.7 |
Latvia | n/a | n/a | 1596 | 1951 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | 17.9 | 19.4 |
Lithuania | n/a | n/a | 2116 | 2597 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Luxembourg | 236 | 260 | 261 | 300 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Netherlands | 5104 | 5858 | 6865 | 7936 |
% in major cities | n/a | 21.9 | 21.9 | 22.3 |
Norway | 2240 | 2392 | 2650 | 2814 |
% in major cities | n/a | 10.2 | 9.7 | 9 |
Poland | n/a | n/a | 27177 | 32107 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | 5.8 | 6.2 |
Portugal | 5423 | 5958 | 6087 | 6826 |
% in major cities | n/a | 7.3 | 8 | 8.7 |
Romania8 | 5957 | 7235 | 15635 | 18057 |
% in major cities | n/a | 4.7 | 2 | 3.5 |
Russia/USSR | 1263679 | n/a | 136900 | 170467 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | 3.5 | 4.5 |
Spain | 18594 | 19927 | 21303 | 23564 |
% in major cities | n/a | 7.9 | 9 | 9 |
Sweden | 5,137 | 5522 | 5905 | 6142 |
% in major cities | n/a | 9.2 | 10.5 | 12.1 |
Switzerland | 2315 | 3753 | 3880 | 4006 |
% in major cities | n/a | 6.6 | 6.8 | 9.3 |
Great Britain (excl. Ireland) | 37000 | 40831 | 42769 | 44795 |
% in major cities | n/a | 30.7 | 30.4 | 31.4 |
Yugoslavia | n/a | n/a | 11985 | 13934 |
% in major cities | n/a | n/a | 1.8 | 3.3 |
Look at Table 1 and answer the following questions:
Even though the population of Europe continued to increase after the First World War, you might have noticed that the rate of growth was much higher in some countries and regions than in others. Generally speaking, populations of countries in the east and south of Europe tended to grow at a faster rate than those of the north-west. The slow growth of the latter is indicative of a decline in the birth rate in those countries, due in large part to the active limitation of family size. Starting with the upper classes and moving slowly down the social scale, parents chose to limit the numbers of their children. Whereas large families with four or more children were common across Europe at the turn of the century, in the interwar years the presence of such families declined in western Europe (for example, the average number of children born per marriage in Germany dropped from 4.7 before 1905 to 2 in 1925–29), a trend that both intensified and spread to southern and eastern Europe after 1945 (Ambrosius and Hubbard, 1989, p. 23; Usborne, 1992, p. 33). Anxieties about population growth before 1914 were exacerbated by losses of the First World War – around 1.3 million French, 2 million German and 750,000 British soldiers died in the conflict. Not only was there a sharp decline in the birth rate during the war, but recovering birth rates in the interwar years never again reached levels seen in the nineteenth century. However, some historians have argued that images of a postwar cohort of spinsters in western European countries were often the products of population panics and did not necessarily reflect reality (Pugh, 2009, pp. 124–7).
State | City | 1910/11 | 1920/21 | 1930/31 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Austria | Vienna | 2031 | 1866 | 1874 |
Czechoslovakia | Prague | 224 | 677 | 849 |
Germany | Berlin | 2071 | 3801 | 4243 |
Belgium | Brussels | 720 | 685 | 840 |
Bulgaria | Sofia | 103 | 154 | 287 |
Greece | Athens | 167 | 301 | 453 |
Russia | Moscow | 1533 | 1050 | 2029 |
Yugoslavia | Belgrade | 91 | 112 | 267 |
Poland | Warsaw | 872 | 931 | 1179 |
Italy | Rome | 542 | 692 | 1008 |
Netherlands | Amsterdam | 574 | 642 | 752 |
Hungary | Budapest | 880 | 1185 | 1006 |
France | Paris | 2888 | 2907 | 2891 |
Great Britain | London | 7256 | 7488 | 8216 |
Denmark | Copenhagen | 559 | 561 | 771 |
Look at Tables 1 and 2 and answer the following questions:
It is important not to equate the process of urbanisation with industrialisation. A large number of those states in eastern Europe had expanding urban populations in the interwar years yet were not industrialising at any significant pace. In the 1930s, when the agricultural labour force in Britain had shrunk to 5 per cent of the population, and in Germany, France and much of Scandinavia to around 20 to 30 per cent, in eastern Europe, and particularly in the Balkans, agriculture continued to dominate, employing between 50 and 75 per cent of the populations (Wasserstein, 2009, p. 213). Derek Aldcroft has described the periphery of states stretching from eastern Europe around the rim of the Mediterranean (for example, Greece, Spain and Portugal) as Europe’s ‘third world’ during the interwar years. These states tended to be dominated by an antiquated and inefficient agrarian sector based on peasant self-sufficiency, smallholdings, overpopulation on the land, primitive farming techniques, lack of capital investment and poor education. The general poverty of the countryside meant that the market for industrial goods was small and growth discouraged. For example, 40 per cent of Hungarians were poor peasants who lived at a minimum level of subsistence and considered the most basic items such as shoes and clothes a luxury (Aldcroft, 2006, pp. 175–7). R.J. Crampton adds that often any surplus money was spent on family, religious or community festivals, and not reinvested in agriculture or used to purchase modern industrial goods (1994, p. 35). Thus it would seem that we could hardly describe society in these countries as ‘modern’ (see Figure 1).
However, some historians have argued that the backwardness of life in these states has been overplayed. For instance, Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries caution us not to paint too bleak a picture of interwar eastern Europe, quoting the observations of Hubert Hessell Tiltman in his Peasant Europe, published in 1934:
The Bulgarian people have been ‘lifted off the floor’ … The poorest Bulgarian peasant today generally has his land, his house, some pieces of furniture and his self-respect … And with this psychological transformation the health of the people has improved. The death rate, though still high, is falling … The peasantry live in modern two-roomed dwellings, often built of designs supplied by the state, and their animals are housed separately. The earth floors have been replaced by brick and wood. There are windows that open … Many … now sleep on beds and eat sitting at tables. Separate plates for each person have replaced the old communal bowl. Electric light, even, has come to some of the villages.
(Quoted in Bideleux and Jeffries, 1998, pp. 451–2)
This source is a helpful reminder that the process of modernisation or experience of modernity was uneven, that we cannot necessarily divide Europe into those countries which were modern and those which were ‘backward’. Prague and Krakow became vibrant hubs of modernist culture during the 1920s, attracting intellectuals from the east and exporting new ideas in photography to the west (Fischer, 2010, p. 193). Conversely, Martin Pugh states that life in rural Britain demonstrated greater continuity than change in the interwar years (2009, pp. 260–1).
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