The main key to understanding the tension between establishment and antiestablishment pressures within the French and Italian Communist parties lies in their perceptions of and interactions with U.S. influence. The U.S. response was also significant. Throughout the Cold War, the United States only gradually evolved toward exhibiting the necessary flexibility in confronting left-wing anti-Americanism.83 After placing much confidence in economic determinism during the early phases of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. foreign policy establishment reached the conclusion that communism in the West did not thrive only in poverty. An Intelligence Report of December 1952 described the situation of the previous years in France, where the living standards were relatively high while the social gaps did not appear to diminish, but to widen. The study pointed out that “only a rough correlation exists between poverty and adherence to the French Communist Party. What is true, rather, is that the party rallies those who are discontented with their present living standards, which may not necessarily be the lowest in the country, that they are convinced that only thoroughgoing changes in the social and economic order could possibly improve things for them.”84
The resilience of both the PCI and PCF, despite their strong identification with the Soviet Union and in face of the two nations’ economic growth, induced the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to refine their own instruments of psychological warfare and also to wage a “cultural cold war” to defuse many of the Western Europeans’ assumptions about the United States’ cultural shallowness. Psywar consisted above all of repressive actions geared to reduce the institutional power and mass appeal of the two Communist parties. Those actions yielded only short-term results. The U.S. cultural cold war institutional framework also had relative success in the 1950s and 1960s, but in 1967 was discredited by revelations of CIA backing.85
All the refinement of these propaganda battles are rather significant for the gradual, long-term effects they had on U.S. leadership itself. In 1949, George F. Kennan was in a relative minority as he observed that in the West, the Communist appeal was “emotional” more than economic. This induced the architect of containment to stigmatize some “fundamental flaws” within the “complicated civilization” of the West. He regretted the disappearance of the sense of organic community in modern U.S. society. Instead, he noted, the individual found solace in a culture of media, consumerism, and hedonism. The result of all this was “a gradual paralysis of the sense of responsibility and initiative in people….” “Not being the masters of our own soul,” Kennan concluded, “are we justified in regarding ourselves as fit for the leadership of others? All our ideas of ‘world leadership,’ ‘the American century,’ ‘aggressive democracy’, etc. stand or fall with the answer to that question.” Almost ten years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower also mused over the insecurities of the Western man and the conditions of atomized passivity and confided to his speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes that he felt “the need to assert American purposes, before all the world, in terms more proud, and in measures less mean, than sheer material might.”86
At the onset of the youth rebellion and anti-Vietnam protest in both Europe and the United States, most U.S. officials feared that the most insidious forms of left-wing anti-Americanism on both sides of the Atlantic could be mutually nurtured.87 This did happen, but in the end, as we have seen, to the detriment of Communist orthodoxy and even power in France and Italy. It is no accident that Senator J. William Fulbright, who best grasped the importance of U.S. soft power, during the Vietnam war argued that the “selfcritical, generous America,” should eventually prevail over the “egotistical… self-righteous” one. As late as 1977, at the peak of the Eurocommunist experiment, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reflected that “the spread of Marxism” in Western Europe “[could] be one of the profound problems of the modern period, namely the alienation of the population from the modern industrial state, that in the modern industrial state no matter how it is governed the people feel that they have no influence over the real decisions, and if you couple that with certain left wing traditions in Italy and France you can see why it spreads.”88 Analyses such as these deeply informed the U.S. response to pluralism in the West and to Eurocommunism: they had the peculiar quality of synthesizing realism, a cultural understanding of certain exceptions in Western European politics, and an understanding of the limits of traditional Marxism in those contexts.89
Washington’s response to the Communist threat in France and Italy, and even the effects of Americanization altogether, were strongest when the United States married its own “psychological warfare” to a subtle use of diplomatic actions that only indirectly helped modify the political balance within each of the two allied countries. Making diplomatic concessions to the French and Italian governments throughout the Cold War helped raise their profile against the Communist opposition. Moderately accommodating President de Gaulle on certain international issues helped muffle the anti-Americans on the left in France. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace campaign won over important sectors of public opinion in France and Italy and in only a few other countries. The diplomacy of détente, both in the late 1950s and in the Nixon-Kissinger era helped not only harness the voices of pacifism and protest in the Western world, but also check Communist pressures within NATO. U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East from the mid-1950s, allowing indirectly a U.S. dialogue with the center-left in Italy, helped isolate that country’s extreme Left.
The years 1975 to 1977 proved to be crucial in this particular respect: facing the threat of reformed Western communism, U.S. diplomacy renounced direct confrontation and instead adopted its most subtle approach to date, drawing, through the emerging G-7 summits, a concert of powers aimed at forging a socioeconomic consensus around the restoration of laissezfaire principles. This included the cooption of social democratic forces in France, Germany, and Italy. Both the French and the Italian Communists for the most part continued to rely on neo-Keynesian recipes. While this confirmed their cultural and economic adaptation to neocapitalism, it also showed their detachment from the realities of international economics and diplomacy that took shape under the influence of Kissinger and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt.90 A restored laissez-faire policy, while temporary, was the dream of neither the Prague nor the Paris rebels. Most of Italy’s Communists, converging into the establishment of the new Party of the Democratic Left at the end of the Cold War, at best strove for a capitalism with a human face.
NOTES
1. Gianfranco Corsini, “Marilyn tra mito e verità,” Rinascita, 11 August 1962; JeanMarc Aucuy, “Hommage a Marilyn Monroe ou le decolonisation par l’erotisme,” Nouvelle Critique 140 (November 1962); Gianfranco Corsini, “Marilyn e gli intellettuali,” Rinascita, 8 September 1962; see also “‘Miller: Mia moglie è geniale; Marilyn: mio marito è matto’: Intervista con i due,” Vie Nuove, 23 April 1960.
2. For background, see especially Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Always Blame the Americans: Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (October 2006): 1067–91; Herbet J. Spiro, “Anti-Americanism in Western Europe,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 497 (May 1988): 120–32; David W. Ellwood, ‘The American Challenge Renewed: U.S. Cultural Power and Europe’s Identity Debates,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Winter/Spring 1997; Federico Romero, “Americanization and National Identity: The Case of Postwar Italy,” in Europe, Its Borders and the Others, ed. Luciano Tosi (Napoli: ESI, 2000); David Strauss, Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978); Nemici per la pelle. Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Pier Paolo D’Attorre (Milan: F. Angeli, 1991).