Throughout much of the twentieth century, struggles for social democratic reforms, such as those establishing generous welfare states and centralized collective bargaining systems, took place against the backdrop of the great power conflict of the Cold War. This fact has often colored interpretations of the gains made during these years. Looking back on the wave of reforms introduced during this era, it is hard to shake the impression that what divides that period — in which governments erected redistributive welfare states across much of the Global North — from our own is the absence of the existential threat of revolution, led by a powerful Soviet Union and communist parties governing a third if the world’s population.

That the threat of communism made social democratic reforms possible is a view widely shared across the political spectrum. In his important recent book on the postwar era, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, the historian Gary Gerstle makes the case that fear of Communism underpinned the postwar welfare state. These anxieties, Gerstle argues, “made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”

This was, Gerstle claims, not only true in the United States but across Europe in the decades following the conclusion of World War II. There, American financing for economic reconstruction, through measures like the Marshall Plan, gave life to economies ravaged by war. What motivated these measures was not good will but fears of an impending communist takeover, justified by events like the Greek Civil War, the growth of Italian Communism, and the November 1946 French parliamentary elections, in which France’s enormous Communist Party (PCF) finished with the largest number of seats in the National Assembly, winning over 28 percent of the vote and joining the resulting coalition government.