All books about Europe since 1945 begin at roughly the same moment in time. What is more telling is where they choose to end. Dan Stone's intellectual starting point for his new survey of postwar Europe is not a triumphant 1989 or a tidy 2000, but rather the Europe of 2014—where neoliberalism reigns supreme; unemployment is high; far-right political parties like Greece's Golden Dawn, France's National Front, and Hungary's Jobbik crowd the headlines; and debates over complicity in the crimes of World War II are more vitriolic than ever. Stone's primary concern is not how Europe rebuilt itself after 1945, but how it went from its postwar stability to its troubled present.

Stone organizes his book around the making and breaking of what he calls the postwar consensus. This consensus was built out of the need to prevent the reemergence of fascism, a goal that required a dual commitment to the political ideology of antifascism, as well as to the socioeconomic ideology of the welfare state—within a capitalist framework in the West and a socialist one in the East. Antifascism was articulated differently on either side of the Iron Curtain as well, but, in broad outlines, it meant the creation of a national or regional unity based on the idea (or myth) of wartime victimhood and resistance to fascism. By insisting on the link between the welfare state and antifascism, Stone argues that Europe's postwar stability was rooted not only in prosperity but also in historical amnesia. The breakdown of the postwar consensus in the 1980s meant the rejection of a set of economic values and of useful wartime narratives. In its place came the rise of neoliberal economic policy, which Stone decries, and an explosion of divergent memories that has resulted in the development of popular Holocaust consciousness, as well as in the rise of the far right.

One of the benefits of this kind of approach is that it allows Stone to think in broadly European strokes without getting bogged down in the intricacies of specific national histories. It also means that the book concentrates on high politics and big structures, with only glancing attention to social or cultural history, or to the history of marginal groups. For similar reasons, decolonization gets short shrift in his narrative because Stone wants to see the breakdown of the postwar consensus after 1975 as the key mover in European history. In his conceptualization, the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activism since the 1980s was a misguided reaction to neoliberalism that is only tenuously connected to Europe's imperial past.

Another promise of Stone's approach is the way in which it includes both Eastern and Western Europe in a united narrative. Stone admirably gives equal weight to both halves of the continent, with each section of the book containing one chapter about the East and one about the West. In general, however, the work is much more convincing when it deals with Western Europe. Stone has read much of the key recent literature on Eastern Europe and tries to incorporate its insights. But he struggles to not take the West as the default norm. While Stone acknowledges that the image of Eastern Europe as a place of repression and deprivation is an incomplete picture, he repeatedly describes the region as bleak and gray, with a normality that is somehow “circumscribed” (151) rather than authentic. Eastern Europe in the 1970s only had a “perverted form of consumerism” and it “seems bizarre” (206) that its residents devoted their lives to trying to make the best of it. Instead of viewing Western consumerism as the “real” version, presumably because it offered better goods, it might be more productive to acknowledge that each system had its own perversities and its own version of normality. This is a missed opportunity because looking at consumerism as a set of values, desires, and expectations—rather than as just a basket of goods—might have made it possible to draw more meaningful comparisons between the lived experience of the postwar consensus on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Stone's argument is always admirably clear, but he tends to assume a lot of knowledge, which would make the book difficult for the typical undergraduate reader. For instance, the names of many people and events are bandied about without much explanation, and even big processes are sometimes only referred to in brief asides; the narrative often goes back and forth in time as well. That said, the book's innovative take on the postwar period has something important to offer, and is thus a worthy companion to Tony Judt's magisterial Postwar (2005). Stone's emphasis on the centrality of memory politics presents a new way of thinking about the connections among disparate phenomena, along with a new set of tools for explaining Europe's troubled present.