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For those who want to understand the course of contemporary Europe, the primary material is almost too copious and familiar; it takes a gifted historian to shape it into something fresh and coherent without sacrificing the details. A new book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by New York University professor and frequent commentator on European affairs Tony Judt, does just that. The tome weighs in at a doorstopping 878 pages, yet it offers a brilliant and compelling synthesis of the past 60 years — a period we think we know all too well.

The history of the modern era doesn't lend itself to simplification, argues Judt, 57, an Englishman who began his career examining the French left. As he surveys the entire Continent, he is careful to claim that he has "no one overarching theme to expound; no single, all-embracing story to tell." Instead, he draws new insights from the familiar narrative of Europe's destruction and division — the West's rapid revival and the East's long stultification — and the still unfinished reunification of the Continent since 1989. Judt makes deft use of evidence from film and literature, and his eye for the differences among European countries helps enliven the analysis. Critics can argue against his conclusion that "the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe," but readers will find plenty of credible reasons for that view in his trenchant dissection of the second half of the 20th.

Judt takes Europe from its hour of deepest need after the war to today's sometimes complacent prosperity in telling detail. At the signing of the treaty that launched nato in 1949, he notices, the band played "I Got Plenty of Nothing" — roughly what the new alliance offered in terms of boots on the ground. At the time, Soviet forces in Europe outnumbered the Western Allies by a ratio of 12 to 1. Luckily, Judt argues, "for American policymakers, Europe's vulnerability was a problem, not an opportunity" and despite some proud grumbling, Western Europeans recognized that truth as Soviet-backed regimes grabbed power across Eastern Europe. The subsequent struggle between capitalism and communism is the leitmotif of postwar Europe until 1989, and Judt takes some choice shots at Western intellectuals enamored by the experiment in "real existing Socialism" playing out inside the Iron Curtain. "I come from a country where no one laughs any more, where no one sings," French poet Paul Eluard told an audience in Bucharest in 1948. "But you have discovered the sunshine of happiness." At the time, an estimated 1 million Romanians were imprisoned in dire conditions or engaged in often deadly slave labor, digging out the Danube-Black Sea Canal.

But Judt also gives the intellectuals credit when they did get it right. He considers Dec. 28, 1973, to be "a symbolic moment" when "post-war Europe's self-understanding turned." That was the date when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's exposé of communist repression, The Gulag Archipelago, was published. Once that shocking indictment of the Soviet system had worked its way into the general consciousness of Europe, Judt suggests, the West reached a consensus that there is "no way to justify public policies or actions that cause real suffering today in the name of speculative benefits tomorrow." Even Europe's idealists realized, writes Judt, that "you cannot build a better society on broken men."

When he analyzes how the communist regimes of Eastern Europe finally collapsed 16 years later, Judt argues against conventional wisdom: the credit belongs neither to Poland's Solidarity movement nor Ronald Reagan's big defense budgets, but to Mikhail Gorbachev as the true agent of change. The Soviet leader, says Judt, was cognizant of his empire's imploding economy and spooked by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. "If Eastern Europe's crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders 'won the third world war' it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them," Judt writes. And East Europeans reaching for freedom sought not "untrammeled economic competition" — Judt's view of the "American social model" — but the softer welfare economics of Western Europe, where "you could have your socialist cake and eat it in freedom."

Europeans' growing estrangement from their political élites and weary indifference to the proven advantages of the European Union, Judt suggests, haven't altered that preference. "For a long time America had been another time — Europe's future," Judt writes. "Now it was just another place." While China and the U.S. are the economic and military superpowers of the 21st century, Judt believes that neither has "a serviceable model to propose for universal emulation." That, he suggests, is what Europe can do.

• JAMES GRAFF
• Rethinking the familiar, historian Tony Judt offers a fresh, coherent analysis of Europe since 1945