(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)
    Winter 2001/2
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Issue 42    

Cold War stories 2

Boundaries to Freedom: the cultural cold war in Western Europe 1945-1960
A conference at the Roosevelt Study Centre,
Middelburg, The Netherlands, 18-19 October 2001.

Giles Scott-Smith (1)

The impulse for this event came from Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and the media coverage that it received after its publication in 1999. The intention of the conference was to give as broad a consideration as possible of the effects of the Cold War on Western European societies; and to look at some of the organisations that were actively seeking to influence both public and elite opinion. Within such a broad approach to culture, socio-economic transformations were as important as intellectual positions or developments in the arts. The lack of good paper proposals dealing with the Soviet influence in Western societies, left the content skewed towards the 'American effect' in Western Europe. I will give here an overview of some of the papers in a way that I hope conveys the overall aim of the conference and its content.

Beginning with issues of socio-economic change and 'modernisation', the tone was set by Tony Carew and David Ellwood who outlined the effects of the American effort to reorganise European business via the Marshall Plan. With the emphasis on transforming the labour process and 'professionalising' management, between 1950-54 900 American 'productivity consultants' came to Europe while 7,000 European workers and managers visited the US in order to solidify the ideology of free trade and the necessity of 'perpetual change' in the workplace. However, the idea that extra productivity would be linked to increased wages, thereby securing the labour force's allegiance to free market capitalism, was not supported by everyone. When the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) replaced the European Recovery Program (ERP) in 1954, the idea that there should be an equal share-out of the gains of higher productivity between employers and employees was rejected, a move that had the support of the European managerial class. This ERP-MSA approach caused a split within the American labour movement itself: the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) dismissed the productivity drive as a 'speed-up program' and recommended to their French and Italian affiliates that they withdraw from the whole scheme; while the CIO was pushing for European unions to get out of politics and concentrate on demanding tough plant-specific deals with management, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) dismissed the idea that filling people's bellies would undermine their support for communism. For AFL leaders like Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, the battle had to be fought overtly and covertly on all fronts: economic, political, cultural.

Yet despite labour resistance to the American-led productivity drive across Western Europe, it was not as if there was an alternative that could command enough widespread support. As Ellwood described in the case of Italy, the site of the biggest ERP propaganda effort, the diffidence of the population and resistance from government and management was not enough to derail the process. The key question for the ERP in Italy was not foremost the defeat of communism but the establishment of a viable, stable Italian capitalism, from which all else would follow. Through the organisation of mass production and the co-ordination of the mass media, the post-war mass democratic society was highly susceptible to what ERP official Harlan Cleveland referred to as 'the revolution of rising expectations'. Vital for this to occur was the effect of the cinema. One CIA study from Bologna in 1953 claimed 95% of public opinion on the US was based on 'the American paradise' as seen in the movies. Even though the monetarist emphasis of the ERP led to considerable unemployment and an increase in poverty in the late 1940s, the Italian Communist Party was unable to translate considerable pressure for action from below into an anti-ERP campaign that could energise a large enough cross-section of the population. The ERP's slogan, 'You Too Can Be Like Us', with its perfect dramatisation in the form of a factory worker arriving at work in his own car, was very difficult to oppose other than from a defensive position. Whether or not Ellwood's comment (from someone else) that 'the American myths kept their promises and won through' should be accepted, there is no doubting the power of the myths the US projected and the difficulty there was in opposing them from the left.

French and Italian Communist Parties

These issues were taken up in more detail by Marc Lazar in his paper on the influence and outlook of the French and Italian Communist Parties. Both CPs were broadly similar in outlook: anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, defenders of national independence in the face of American militaristic domination, and supportive of the Soviet-led 'world peace' effort. Both also offered a total view of the past, present and future, attempting to give a meaning to every aspect of daily life. However, the Cold War only added an extra dimension to what were already-existing divisions within the societies of both countries, so that the East-West confrontation became transplanted into the struggles of domestic politics. In the case of France, its strategic value (and the importance of its empire) meant that Soviet control over the CP was more evident. The comment of Secretary-General of the French Communist Party Thorez after meeting Stalin in Moscow in November 1947, 'I am a French citizen but my soul is Soviet', was clearly an attempt to overcome the problems related to this subservient position. But while the denunciation of American culture and influence had widespread support, it was limited in its political use because of the CP's determination to be against the enemy as the official opposition. While there was a great deal of allegiance to the left within the intelligentsia, the CP did little more than use the intellectual elite as a source of prestige. Again referring to the power of the 'American myth', Lazar gave the telling example of workers in the communist stronghold of Lorraine who downed tools for a two-minute silence after the death of Stalin in 1953. While this apparently demonstrated a political hard-line, it has to be balanced with the fact that in the 1950s the same workers also held a two-minute silence following the death of both Humphrey Bogart and a famous French Tour de France cyclist. Lazar emphasised that interest in American films was especially strong within communist neighbourhoods. While the limitations to the influence of both the French and Italian CPs were therefore partly 'in-built', the power of the American myth as projected by the cinema, and its influence across European society, is undeniable.

Freedom had to be organised

But political economy cannot tell the whole story. Richard Aldrich began his paper by emphasising the fact that creating the right environment for 'freedom' was not enough; 'freedom' had to be organised in civil society if it was going to win, particularly as communist-affiliated groups were attempting to take the initiative on this soon after WWII. As Stephen Dorril has stressed in his book on MI6, the British involvement in these activities was ahead of the Americans in many respects. Aldrich related how the Cultural Relations Department, a forerunner to the more familiar Information Research Department in the Foreign Office, was already operating in 1946-47. Concentrating on the communist-supported World Federation of Democratic Youth, the CRD first tried to 'turn' it, and then decided to create oppositional alternatives to it. The result was the World Assembly of Youth, which came out of the International Youth Conference held in London in 1948. The aim was to set it up with covert funding, then pass it on to 'independent' authorities who would continue it as a self-financing operation via donations and fund-raising. But, as was the case with similar CIA ventures, CRD was obliged to maintain financial support due to a lack of viable alternatives. Typically, since there was no wish to have control of WAY pass to either the CIA or European Federalist groups, the funding had to continue in order to keep this 'sphere of influence' under British direction.

Valerie Aubourg illustrated how the informal networks of the US-European elite produced influential forums for idea-sharing such as the Atlantic Institute and Bilderberg. Bilderberg had a major Benelux input, with Josef Retinger utilising his contacts with the Dutch and Belgian political and economic elite (Rijkens, van Zeeland, van Kleffens) to get the plan off the ground. Auborg emphasised the pivotal role of Prince Bernhard in the early stages, since it was he who set up the initial framework meeting between Retinger, van Zeeland, Averell Harriman, and Walter Bedell Smith in December 1952. But American interest was slight in the beginning and it was only at the third meeting in West Germany, September 1955, that the value of Bilderberg as a private forum for transatlantic exchange began to emerge. The collapse of the European Defence Community the following year at the hands of the French parliament illustrated the need to solidify the future of the European security system, and Bilderberg offered the perfect informal setting in which to work on better transatlantic communication.

Bilderberg, and the NATO offspring, the Atlantic Institute, had some success in integrating key groups from continental Europe (such as the German SPD and the Italian economic elite) within the transatlantic consensus - a crucial development in relation to the 'non-integrateable' problem of Gaullist France from the late 1950s onwards. What is also interesting is how both these institutions represented a shift in the mid-1950s away from an oppositional politics against the USSR and towards a more 'constructive' approach to transatlantic issues and concerns. This fits with similar developments such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Milan conference in September 1955 that sought to redefine the discourse of social science around the 'end of ideology' theme - a more sophisticated standpoint than the proclamations against totalitarianism that were issued at the CCF's opening conference in Berlin five years before.

The second day of the conference focused more on the politics of intellectuals and specific aspects of the cultural realm, in order (ideally) to complement the broader analyses of the day before. It was here that we suffered a hole in the programme, as Frances Stonor Saunders unfortunately ran into travel difficulties and was unable to make it. However, we were lucky to have a strong line-up of papers to cover her absence. Hugh Wilford began with a paper on British intellectuals in the context of CIA efforts to influence opinion in Europe. The influence of covert operations by the Americans seems to have been mixed at best, since the general British response was that they did not need the Americans to fight communism. For instance, in the labour movement the links between the TUC and IRD ensured a limited impact for any American contribution. Amongst the intellectuals there was also a reluctance to support American-backed schemes, with the lacklustre response of Trevor-Roper, Ayer, and Russell towards the Congress for Cultural Freedom being a case in point. (Russell may have been a 'figurehead' as Honorary Chairman of the CCF but he eventually resigned at the fourth attempt.) Bilderberg did at least provide a network for the Labour Party's revisionist elite to gain an international profile, but Wilford's conclusion was one of mixed results for the Americans and another demonstration that the British felt they were quite capable of taking care of their own business in the anti-communism field.

Two papers followed, demonstrating the complexities of 'intellectual politics' and the organising of consensus in Western Europe. Ingeborg Philipsen spoke of the Danish Society for Freedom and Culture, established in January 1953 by the former resistance fighter Arne Sejr. Sejr operated a private intelligence group called The Firm, formed in 1948 to conduct psychological warfare in Denmark in connection with the Danish Intelligence Service and the CIA. But Sejr's interest in covert activities went against what the CCF in Paris were trying to achieve, and in 1956 the journalist Jorgen Schleimann was given the task of recreating the Congress's Danish office. A more cultural agenda was set up, involving visits such as the lecture tour by American author Richard Wright in 1957. But efforts in Scandinavia were always hampered by an inability to break out of 'preaching to the converted' and by a great deal of scepticism that this was a worthwhile activity.

A similar narrative was given by Tity de Vries, who focused on the surprising lack of Dutch participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom and used this point to expand on the Cold War politics of certain important Dutch intellectuals. The CCF certainly tried to create something in the Netherlands, but it never came together due to a lack of willingness to engage or organise politically. When the journal Critical Bulletin asked several writers to comment on the speeches given at the CCF's 1950 Berlin conference, none of them supported the kind of politicisation of culture in the Cold War that the CCF was advocating at that time. Meanwhile, the Communist Party was never more than a marginal player, gaining no more than 10% of the vote at its peak and going rapidly into decline after 1950. While there was some Dutch concern over the dominance of American interests in European culture and society, there was always a solid consensus behind membership of NATO. For the Dutch, the American ability to adapt its economic system and society to the needs of the moment represented a failure on the part of the inflexible Europeans to do the same. This explains why the Dutch elites were so supportive of efforts to overcome post-war European stagnation, through the Marshall Plan and then through European integration.

Overall, the conference was deemed a success by many. The attempt to cross disciplinary boundaries and look at both covert and overt, political economy and cultural aspects to the Cold War in one programme seems to have worked. The papers will be published as a special issue of Intelligence and National Security hopefully some time next year, with the addition of two chapters on the youth/student movements and covert activities by both East and West, written by Joel Kotek and Karen Paget.

Papers presented

Notes

1 The author's essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom appeared in Lobster 36 and 38.

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