Over most of the past century, the liberal democracies of the west were distinguished from totalitarian regimes in eastern and central Europe - communist, but also at one time fascist and National Socialist - by representative government and a rule of law. But the democracies themselves were increasingly divided by the Atlantic. The countries that now form the core of the European Union developed elaborate systems of public health care, education and welfare funded by taxation and directed by the state (as indeed did those dictatorships). The United States did not.
During the astonishing three decades after 1945 - with the German Wirtschaftswunder and what the French called les Trente Glorieuses - Europeans believed that they could indefinitely combine rapid growth with public welfare. This was what the historian Tony Judt has called the "social-democratic moment", although it was in many ways also the work of Christian Democratic leaders and governments, as most European politicians on all sides accepted a Keynesian-interventionist consensus. In 1956, Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism, making the egalitarian case while deriding the puritanical-bureaucratic traditions of "total abstinence and a good filing system", but also assuming that rapid growth and widening prosperity would continue in any foreseeable future.
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