Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

CONCLUSION

382 CONCLUSION Communist strength in France and Italy was a pivotal threat to U.S. interests for most of the Cold War. In itself, it warranted attention and carefully crafted strategies in Washington. But, seen in the context of European anti-Americanism, the threat transcended the confines of French and Italian politics. From the point of view of the French and Italian Communists, the challenge of a modernization process largely influenced by the United States signified also a confrontation with the inequities of capitalism. For all their failures, we must keep in mind an important aspect of the French and Italian Communists’ political presence throughout the Cold War: in many respects, the two parties, with their staying power, became vehicles of social justice for the lower classes and disadvantaged groups. While the PCI and PCF aspired to a much more profound social transformation and to the promotion of a Soviet agenda, they did crucially increase the pressure on the ruling parties in both countries to reform the capitalist system—often in cooperation with the United States—through welfare provisions, social policies , and cultural adaptations.1 Their failures, mostly determined by their inability to adapt or finally, in the PCI’s case, by its decision to conform to most modernizing trends at the expense of its ideological identity, also has a deeper significance than the internal mechanisms of the two nations’ politics and society.They testify to the broader issue of Marxism’s confrontation with the forces of modernization and the ethical individualism, values, and sensibilities that characterized these trends in the Western world. Those forces, together, undermined the collective identities so strenuously championed by the Communists. For the United States, this confrontation was not only about French and Italian politics. The appeal of communism in Western Europe compelled U.S. policy and opinion makers to address more general issues about the management of the Western alliance, the American image abroad (not only in Western Europe), and even the value of its “exceptionalist” assumptions. Confronting anti-Americanism in its most articulated form in the Western world, American officials and intellectuals were further encouraged to ask soul-searching questions about America’s identity and world leadership. While overall the record for the United States and its image was successful , it also contained a considerable share of mistakes and shortcomings. It was not simply that militant anticommunism often backfired because of the strong pressures—economic, political, and cultural—that the United States CONCLUSION 383 brought to bear on France and Italy. At crucial times, even measures that seemed to obtain lasting results, such as the superseding of traditional class conflict under Marshall Plan designs, caused problems with the rising expectations of large social groups in France and Italy and their consequent feeling of exclusion when those expectations were delayed or went unfulfilled. Even masterly diplomatic moves, such as the white propaganda initiatives of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, often fed charges of American arrogance and exceptionalism by Europe’s public opinion. The power of the anti-American appeal by Marxists in France and Italy has been widely recognized but not sufficiently analyzed. Being directly exposed to the American political and cultural presence, French and Italian Communists began to articulate a full range of anti-American themes before being directed to do so by Moscow and the Cominform. Turning America into a metaphor for all the worst vices that could beset Western civilization, they conjured an image of a new superpower that was both tough and stupid, a combination of greed, aggressiveness, naiveté, and irresponsibility. American dominion, in their view, posed a twin threat to Europe’s independence and intelligence. In waging their opposition in these terms, they benefited from a vast repertoire of cultural constructs and specific denunciations of American policies or social landscape that other groups in Europe had presented before or were presenting simultaneously. The Communists, at crucial times in the early Cold War, managed to establish a firm connection between economic justice, moral issues, patriotism , and even cultural representation of national thought. For at least the full first decade of the Cold War, both the PCI and the PCF could easily equate capitalist oppression with American “domination,” combining a promise of material improvement with the defense of national independence. The Soviet-dominated world remained at safe distance, and only after the Prague Spring did national independence for the Western Communists (especially the PCI and the PCE) appear more secure within a European integration driven by Western social democracy, or even...