“WE HAVE TAKEN the decision to heal our continent.” Thus declared Anders Rasmussen, the Danish premier and outgoing president of the EU Council of Ministers, after the vote on enlargement at December’s Copenhagen summit.

His organic analogy, with its shades of St Augustine, is interesting. Wounds are healed, sickness is healed. Which is it that Rasmussen had in mind? Or was it both? Professor William Hitchcock, an American who teaches at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, speaks the same language: Europe has undergone “gradual healing rather than radical surgery”. His much-praised book sets out to be a history of Europe’s pathology, no less.

The title is not original. Fifty years ago, in 1952, Collins published Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, an account of the campaign in north-west Europe from the Normandy landings to the fall of Berlin. Wilmot, an Australian war correspondent who had covered the campaign for the BBC, “endeavoured to explain how the present situation came about; how and why the Western Allies, while gaining military victory, suffered political defeat”.

Highly critical of Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender, Wilmot described how the Continent was pulverised, then butchered unnecessarily. But, he wrote, Hitler’s strategic grasp had been no better. At Christmas 1944 the Führer ordered a massive counter-attack in the Ardennes with the strategic object of driving a wedge between the Western Allies and securing a compromise peace which would keep the Russians out of Germany (and out of much of Eastern Europe, too).

But by weakening his eastern front to find the troops for the Ardennes, all Hitler succeeded in doing, said Wilmot, was “holding the Anglo-American armies well to the west of the Rhine . . . giving Stalin the chance of advancing from the Vistula to the Oder on the eve of Yalta. This strategic situation reacted directly on the diplomatic discussions of that historic conference, for Stalin, having overwhelmed his enemies in the field, was able to outmanoeuvre his allies at the conference table . . . The struggle for Europe then entered upon a new phase which is still in the process of unfolding.”

This is the point at which Professor Hitchcock’s Struggle for Europe begins. Europe in 1945 was wounded and sick. The economic, social and geographical dislocation had been enormous — wounds inflicted by bombing and by a hugely destructive land campaign. The sickness followed in the form of anti-democratic infections. The treatment would be in large part American, but the patient would have to work hard at his cure too. Was the treatment successful? Hitchcock says yes — “a triumph over the odds”. How and why did it work? He describes four “interrelated factors” that help to explain the its success.

First, “Western Europe had a good Cold War”. The division of Europe into two rival blocs provided a sense of cohesion in Western Europe, making common cause with the United States. The manifestation of this was Nato, and to a lesser extent the EEC (Edward Heath: “The means are economic, the aims political”), both of which, says Hitchcock, “have continued to provide prosperity and security well after the end of the Cold War”.

The second factor — and here he is at odds with Wilmot’s vision — is that the very intensity of the Second World War, despite all its destructive horror, had, in the long run, a positive effect on the European economy. New men, “a talented class of civil servants”, emerged from the ruins, enabling massive state investment, together with politicians keen on bolstering social stability through economic growth as a way of keeping the European communist parties in the wings. But what is not entirely clear in Hitchcock’s account is how the wrecking of infrastructure, as opposed to the hindrance of antiquated industrial equipment, resulted in technological advance.

Why, for instance, did countries like France and Italy do so well when the devastation was nothing compared with that in Germany, the Low Countries or even Britain? It seems to pose the question: might some countries have been rather better served? Come, friendly bombs, and fall on . . ? A third explanation, says Hitchcock, is that “many Europeans over the past half century fought and died in the name of a free, democratic, and just Europe”. However — and here is his fourth and final factor — the transitions themselves were of moderation and compromise, avoiding “the pitfalls of violent revolution”.

Hitchcock’s history is, throughout, brilliantly concise, pithy, and sometimes acerbic. His account of the Falklands Conflict, for instance, a struggle which, he says, “rescued” the Thatcher Government (enabling it then to effect a cure for that secondary infection, “the British disease”), is an admirable four-page précis, although some will be surprised to read that “the military campaign proceeded smoothly for the British”, a doubtful accolade even by American standards of the time.

But his book is an unashamedly transatlantic history. If his account of the Falklands conflict surprises, his chapter on the Balkans will infuriate. And why not? The United States is a European power, and that is why Europe is fit and healthy.

What of the future? How can the patient remain fit and healthy? Europe “still faces many serious problems”, says Hitchcock, which he seeks to examine “in their historical context” (is it wise, or even possible, to do otherwise?). First there is the “persistence of division” along lines of race, ethnicity, culture and wealth. And here, not surprisingly, it all starts to get a bit shorthand, even if his statistics are impressive: with Turkey, for example, “the real — and unspoken — obstacle to EU entry is that Turks are Muslims”.

A second “problem” is the future of European democracy, faltering because of the lack of true choice between the parties, and the lack of accountability of EU institutions. But — and here may be the statesman’s view — “the greatest challenge for the EU in the next few decades will not be incorporating the relatively well-off Eastern European states but in helping to bring this giant, humbled, unpredictable nation, Russia, into the fold of developed, stable market democracies”. Surveying the wreckage of 1945 in Chester Wilmot’s Struggle for Europe, and the gloom of the near aftermath, one is even more impressed by the achievement since — a Europe “richer, freer, and more stable than at any time in its long history”. If it is true that nations that forget their history are doomed to repeat it, then Hitchcock’s Struggle for Europe ought to be part of a national curriculum, as, indeed, should Chester Wilmot’s.

• Allan Mallinson is the British military attaché in Rome. His next novel, The Sabre’s Edge, is published by Bantam on March 3

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