Europe's Intellectuals and the Cold War: The European Society of Culture, Post-War Politics and International Relations by Nancy Jachec

Author:Nancy Jachec [Jachec, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Philosophy, European, Diplomacy, Europe, Modern, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, 20th Century, Political Science, World, History, General, History & Surveys
ISBN: 9780857738424
Google: GROJDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26491108
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2015-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

RETURNING TO EUROPE: REFORM COMMUNISM, MARXIST HUMANISM AND THE EARLY HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE IN THE 1960s

Campagnolo had intended the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’ to be a blueprint for an organization that would be more public, more political, and more global in its reach than the SEC had so far been.1 Yet it turned out to be more of a personal turning point for him than for the Society as a whole. As we have seen, the manifesto was generally considered to be unrealistic, and its global aspirations had dire consequences for the relationship between the SEC and many of Francophone Africa’s leading intellectuals. For many members, the Society’s tenth anniversary, for which it had been written, should instead have been an opportunity to reaffirm the SEC’s original purpose of European détente. Consequently, much of the opposition to the manifesto came from the Italian communists in the audience – Aldo Dami, Donini and Terracini, and from members from Europe’s socialist states, Mirko Deanović, Ehrenburg, Vladimir Georgiev, Miroslav Míčko, Jan Parandowski and Michał Rusinek – all of whom called for the Society to renew its original commitment to promoting dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe.2 Apart from enabling the SEC to build on its achievements in the area where it had already been most successful, such a move would have helped it to maintain its position in a field that would soon be crowded with other organizations concerned with East–West dialogue. Throughout the 1960s, initiatives by various Catholic and secular organizations would bring intellectuals from across Europe together on a fairly regular basis. Frequently addressing the question of cultural and human rights in the aftermath of the war, these meetings, no less than the SEC’s, provided opportunities for figures from Europe’s socialist countries to stay involved in the emerging discussion in the West around those issues, to ‘return to Europe’, as the historian Vladimir Kusin has described it, on a cultural and moral basis. With hindsight, these were early steps toward the de-Stalinization and the democratization of those countries’ socialist political systems.3

There was, however, a more pragmatic thread in the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’ that assumed greater importance for the evolution of the Society in the field of East–West exchanges in the 1960s, and it was picked up by the same constituency in the SEC that had been most critical of the manifesto: the idea of democracy as the most suitable vehicle for pursuing the SEC’s aims in the new decade. In the manifesto, Campagnolo had named democracy as the best political system for resolving the international problem. Not only was it the ‘most widespread’ political regime, and one in which public opinion could easily be influenced, it seemed to lend itself, he suggested, to the natural will among peoples against war and toward peace.4 He returned to this theme again in another essay of the same year, ‘Not Everybody can be a Marxist’. As we have already seen, Sartre’s essay had helped him to identify the individual as the maker of history, as the creative agent capable of structuring a socialism based foremost on social justice.

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