The Struggle for Europe: the history of the continent since 1945, by William I Hitchcock

An earnest US academic marks Europe's postwar report card: not bad, but room for improvement. Richard Vinen questions his black-and-white idealism

Americans to James Baker to John Malkovich and Joe Klein seem to be falling over themselves to denounce Europe at the moment. For them, the old continent is marked by economic sclerosis, by diplomatic irresponsibility, and by the revival of dark political forces from the Thirties. William Hitchcock, a young history professor at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, has a different approach. He is pro-European, both in the narrow sense that he favours closer European union, and in the more general sense that he regards recent European history as a success story. The continent is more democratic and more prosperous than ever before.

The optimism is refreshing, and this well-informed work is written in robust and readable prose that owes more to Raymond Chandler than to Fowler's Modern English Usage. The book ranges widely – though, perhaps inevitably in a work of such scope, it is not a comprehensive history. Most of it concerns the major powers (Britain, France and Germany) with uneven coverage of other countries.

We get a very interesting section on Greece, but practically nothing on Sweden, which many postwar social democrats saw as the most important centre of political experiment on the continent.

Hithcock's account is event-driven – événementiel – and focuses on politics and diplomacy. A good deal of attention is given to biography. Churchill (really more of an American icon than a European one), Adenauer, Thatcher and Gorbachev are all discussed at length.

We are told that the Fifties was the decade of Erhard and the Sixties that of de Gaulle. Hitchcock is not much interested in social change that was not directly linked to political change, which is why his account works best for the immediately postwar period, when politics did penetrate everyday life very deeply.

There is a dutiful nod to the influence of feminism in the early Seventies, but little sense of the ways in which relations between men and women have changed in the last half century. A reader of this book might conclude that Simone de Beauvoir only mattered as a minor critic of American foreign policy.

The emphasis on history as the clash of ideologies or powers leaves out some subtle but important changes that occurred within each ideological bloc. Thus Hitchcock's analysis of the Communist Europe hinges around moments of crisis when the regime was challenged (1956, 1968, 1989), rather than around the gradual change produced by urbanisation, industrialisation and the expansion of education. It might be argued that the life of the average Hungarian was changed more by rising prosperity between 1956 and 1988 than it was by the fall of Communism.

Similarly, Hitchcock's analysis of capitalism is mainly to do with economic management – how the state tried to control the economy – but he does not acknowledge the extent to which capitalism itself has been transformed by cultural and technological change. The capitalism of call centres in the Nineties was very different from the capitalism of car factories in the Fifties.

Neglect of social history weakens some of the political interpretations. One gets little sense of the constraints under which political decisions were made.

Why is it that Edward Heath's attempts to shift economic policy to the right failed while Thatcher's attempts a decade later succeeded? Why was de Gaulle able to rally the French in 1958 but not in 1968? Why did Gorbachev break with his friends involved in the Prague Spring during the late Sixties, but then implement some of the policies that they had proposed during the late Eighties?

There is a touch of Graham Greene's Alden Pyle, the "quiet American", in Hitchcock. He has Pyle's moral earnestness – his is a history of clear rights and wrongs. Like Pyle, he is much exercised by two great evils. The first of these is Communism: Hitchcock's disapproval of Communism is so strong that he does not really manage to explain why so many intelligent people, including some distinguished historians, once believed in it.

The second great evil is imperialism. For Hitchcock, empires involved a clear-cut confrontation between imperial exploitation and the struggles of dominated peoples to be free. This interpretation glosses over many complexities.

The separation of the races in the European empires was not as sharp as it was in the US (black men became government ministers in France at a time when they would have been lucky to get served at many American restaurants), and imperialism involved a degree of co-operation between the colonisers and local population.

Equally, decolonisation involved conflict between colonised peoples as much as between them and their imperial masters. Hitchcock devotes only a few sentences to the savage inter-communal massacres that accompanied British withdrawal from India. He concedes that at least half of the 350,000 Algerians who died during the war against French rule were killed by other Algerians, but his own analysis concentrates on conflict between the French and the Algerians. Incidentally, an American who condemns French behaviour in Algeria would do well to remember that Paul Aussaresses (the most savage French agent of repression) subsequently helped train American forces at Fort Bragg. Hitchcock berates Ernest Bevin for failing to recognise that the "Jews had earned their state", but does not engage with the fact that Palestine in 1947 contained a lot of people who were neither Jews nor British imperialists.

William Hitchcock is the son of an American diplomat and was born in 1965. By the time that his own children, or their contemporaries, are old enough to influence American foreign policy, America's world commitments will probably be even more complicated than they already are. Perhaps, then, the difference between right and wrong in international affairs will seem harder to call.

Richard Vinen's 'A History in Fragments: Europe in the 20th century' is published by Abacus