The “Golden Age of Social Mobility” in Postwar Europe: Class Relations, Educational Expansion, and Political Stability in East and West

Abstract This article seeks to shed fresh light on the “golden age of social mobility,” which lasted roughly from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, in postwar Eastern and Western Europe. While much mythologized as a lost era of steadily increasing life chances and equality of opportunity in present-day Europe, historical research into social mobility in the postwar decades has only gotten off the ground in recent years. This article aims to formulate some general hypotheses for this budding research field by taking a pan-European approach, integrating the histories of social mobility in the communist East and the capitalist West. It focuses on three central dimensions of the golden age of social mobility. First, it analyzes how the golden age affected class relations, observing middle-class resilience and peasant advancement at the expense of the working class. Second, it explores how postwar educational expansion mostly benefited the same groups, while undercutting traditional working-class forms of training. Third, it questions the links between social mobility and postwar political stability, pointing to the dislocating effects that the golden age had even on some of its main beneficiaries. In doing so, the article challenges conventional wisdom on the consequences of the “drying up” of social mobility in Europe from the 1970s onwards.