Part 3: This was also the period in which the dominant narrative of the Second World War began to change. From 1945 into the late 1960s, the storyโas reflected in the memoirs of de Gaulle, Churchill, and Eisenhower, early school curricula, and Soviet accountsโcentered on victory, struggle, heroism, national sacrifice, and the defeat of a military and political enemy.
From the late 1960s onward, the moral center of gravity increasingly shifted toward the Holocaust, human rights, and a language of universal guilt and redemption. The war was increasingly understood not simply as a conflict between states and armies, but as a foundational moral drama about atrocity, culpability, and the protection of the individual.
The significance of the 1960s, therefore, lies not simply in the fact that Western societies became more liberal, but that they had not been fully liberal in the first place. The postwar decades were a distinct settlement of their own: democratic and welfare-oriented, yet socially conservative, nationally bounded, and confident in traditional institutions and moral norms.
The decisive transformation came later. The liberalization of the West accelerated dramatically in the 1960s and early 1970s. Civil rights, immigration reform, feminism, sexual liberalization, anti-discrimination law, declining religious authority, the transformation of family law, student radicalism, decolonization, and the emergence of a universalist human-rights language fundamentally altered how Western societies understood authority, citizenship, morality, identity, and individual freedom.
The 1950s were therefore not simply a primitive version of the liberal society that followed; they were a different social order. The democratic and welfare institutions established after 1945 created the framework within which the later transformation could occur, but the cultural assumptions of that era remained substantially different from those that became dominant after the 1960s.
The social revolutions of the 1960s thus did more than liberalize Western society. They displaced an older model built around social restraint, inherited institutions, national continuity, and collective obligation, replacing it with one increasingly organized around individual autonomy, formal equality, cultural pluralism, and universal rights. That transformation greatly expanded personal freedom and equality, but it also weakened older assumptions about family, citizenship, national identity, and demographic continuity. Restrictive immigration systems disappeared, traditional family norms lost authority, and older ideas of national distinction became harder to defend in universalist terms. The consequencesโimmigration, demographic decline, changing family structures, national identity, and social cohesionโwould become major political questions in the decades that followed.
The central historical point is therefore straightforward: the West did not go from traditional conservatism to modern liberalism immediately after 1945. The postwar decades were an intermediate order of their own. The decisive acceleration came during the โLong 1960s,โ stretching roughly from 1958 to 1975, when the assumptions of that order were progressively dismantled.
The influence of the โLong 1960sโ ultimately forged contemporary liberalism and laid the foundations for many of the political and legal narratives that still dominate Western discourse.
