Dark Continent, page 39
In 1955 the jurist Piero Calamandrei, one of the architects of the post-war Italian constitution, attacked the extent of his country’s recent democratic achievement. The hopes of the resistance had been dashed by conservative obstruction, he argued, the constitution itself remained “unrealized,” and behind the façade of a “formal democracy” lay the reality of continuities and compromises with Fascism and the “police state.” The continued use of the 1931 Law on Public Security was but the most blatant example of democracy’s imperfections in Italy; there was no real freedom of movement or assembly or genuine equality between the sexes.57
In the 1960s, a younger, more urban Europe became conscious of the vast social changes which had taken place since the war, and demanded that politics and the law catch up. The old world of peasants and aristocrats was disappearing through economic growth, where it had not been destroyed by the war, and a more mobile, less deferential society emerged. This wanted real liberty in the Free World, and was no longer prepared to accept that calls for social reform be written off as communist subversion. It was bolstered by changes in Washington, where the elderly Eisenhower was replaced by Kennedy and the Democrats.
As Cold War fears receded in Europe, conservatives in office looked increasingly tainted by the past. There was near-civil war in Italy in 1960 when the Tambroni government took office with the support of neo-Fascists. In France, the war in Algeria spilled over on to the mainland. When police in Paris broke up a demonstration and killed dozens of protesters, hurling them into the Seine in one of the least-publicized and most atrocious acts of mass violence in postwar western Europe, the man in charge was Maurice Papon, who had been a prominent Vichy official. In Greece, the Karamanlis government was rocked by revelations of the wartime collaboration of senior ministers, and clung to power through rigged elections. In West Germany, the 1962 Spiegel affair reawoke memories of the Gestapo, while both Chancellor Kiesinger and President Lübke were haunted by their Nazi past. Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961 brought the whole issue into the spotlight. It seemed increasingly that Cold War normalcy and prosperity had allowed only a partial or even nominal democracy behind which lurked older authoritarian forces.
The political beneficiaries of this new mood were the parties of the centre-left—Harold Wilson in the UK, the SPD in West Germany, the “opening to the Left” in Italy, and George Papandreou with his “unending struggle” in Greece. Labour and social democratic parties returned to power, as managers of a more modern society. Like the conservative Right before them, they were slowly emancipating themselves from class affiliation, and turning themselves into broader catch-all parties which could respond to deep, gradual shifts in popular opinion. These governments were keener than their predecessors to use the state to improve educational and health services, and to legislate for reform in areas of social and civil rights. The real prospect of change, in turn, fed the appetite of movements and lobby groups calling for reform and modernization. Thus the 1960s marked the beginning of a new deepening of democracy in western Europe, the real break with traditional social values and institutions, and—for many—the onset of modernity.
In December 1965, the case of a young Sicilian peasant woman called Franca Viola hit the Italian headlines after she was abducted and raped by a young man whose offer of marriage she had refused. Normally in such situations—by no means uncommon—the woman was expected to yield, so that what the Italian Penal Code defined as matrimonio riparatore could cancel out the man’s offence. For the first time anyone could remember, however, the raped woman refused to get married. As a result, her suitor was arrested and eventually sentenced to jail. It was Viola’s obstinacy which local opinion in her home town regarded as dishonourable. But in the rest of Italy the case caused a sensation, and underlined women’s lack of equal status and dignity in the eyes of the law.58
In the 1960s, the demand for greater democracy was spearheaded by a growing awareness of women’s continuing social and economic subordination. Constitutions might promise equality to all citizens irrespective of gender, but under existing penal codes, men and women were often treated quite differently. Men could commit adultery with impunity while women laid themselves open to punishment. Husbands could prohibit their wives seeking work outside the home, and fathers retained absolute power over the children. In Switzerland women did not even gain the vote until the 1970s; in France many could not open their own bank accounts. Large numbers of women continued to enter the labour market, yet once there they faced discriminatory pay and working prospects.
In many ways, the move for female emancipation had been on the retreat in Europe since the early 1920s; certainly the inter-war years, beset by fears of national decline through falling birth rates and by mass unemployment, had seen women’s rights eroded. Even Soviet Russia, which had given women unprecedented legal equality after 1918, reverted to the ideology of motherhood in the mid-1930s. Now reforms to benefit women, and to increase their autonomy, independence and equality before the law, threatened the basis of the traditional European family as it had been sanctified in the inter-war years and reaffirmed in the conservative 1950s. Demands for sexual liberty were even more frightening. An Italian Catholic sociologist castigated “the exasperated individualism which is carrying the American and North European family to the edge of total disintegration” and warned against “a conception of matrimony as a mere sexual benefit for the individual.”59
Yet the tide was turning in favour of reform, as an army of social commentators and psychiatrists discovered the costs of home-bound isolation, and what the French called the “Madame Bovary syndrome.” In The Captive Wife, sociologist Hannah Gavron stood the 1950s ideal of domesticity on its head, to reveal the depressions and frustrations it bred, as extended family and communal bonds withered, and television and traffic pushed the nuclear family indoors.
Changing sexual practices (chiefly through the pill, which entered western Europe in the early 1960s), and the emergence of a newly independent generation that aimed at higher education and professional autonomy, prefigured the legal reforms which came at the end of the decade. Birth control liberated itself from its pre-war eugenic implications and family-planning clinics spread across Europe. Most Scandinavian countries had legalized abortion very early; Britain followed in 1967. But in Catholic Europe, the battle took longer, mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and led to major political conflicts before decriminalization occurred, chiefly—and very hesitantly—during the 1970s. Even today, abortion is only available in Germany and Portugal on very limited grounds, and illegal abortions continue to be widespread.
Legal changes were more rapid where contraceptives were concerned, no doubt because the baby boom had made the old fears of population decline seem irrational. In 1961 Nazi police ordinances against the sale of contraceptives were finally taken off the books in West Germany, and France relaxed its prohibitions in 1967; Italy repealed Fascist legislation four years later. As for realizing the equal status of women in marriage and the family, the reform of divorce procedures and of family law generally took place in the 1970s, and—in post-dictatorship southern Europe—in the 1980s, more than sixty years after civil divorce by mutual consent was introduced in Sweden and Bolshevik Russia.60
Slowest of all was effective action to secure equal rights in the workplace. Constitutional guarantees and Common Market directives mostly remained empty promises, and although a few countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, France and the Scandinavian north did bring in legislation on equal pay and treatment, too often provisions were unenforced, or realized only through lengthy court battles. In West Germany and Austria, entrenched conservatism made the outlook even bleaker.61
Overall, the battles for female emancipation and equality bore out Calamandrei’s critique of post-war democracy: formal guarantees of constitutional rights had meant little without effective political action for their realization. This applied as much to the post-dictatorial constitutions of southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece) as to the earlier post-1945 models. Constitutions might offer women full political rights; but without equality in private law and commercial practice as well, women remained subordinate to men. In the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle to achieve such equality formed one of the most remarkable and sustained examples of social protest in western Europe. Full equality was not gained, and neither were many of the rights which women claimed were necessary for their protection and well-being; but the paternalist basis of social institutions was exposed and gradually reformed. As so often, the starting point for reform in liberal democracies was exposing the gap between what they promised and what they really provided.
Nothing so revealed the continued authoritarianism in post-war conservative European politics as the generational warfare which broke out during the boom. In 1957 a law was passed in Austria to protect young people from immoral influences, including “dangers in the streets, the indiscriminate visits to restaurants and events, the consumption of alcohol and nicotine, and from all harmful influences from outside.” Such measures, it seemed to those in authority, were urgently needed. When Elvis Presley came to Europe, he turned teenagers into “wild barbarians in ecstasy” or even “haunted medicine men of a jungle tribe governed only by music,” threatened western civilization with African primitivism, and drove young girls into “intoxicating” sexual delinquency.62
Behind the rock ‘n’ roll hysteria of the 1950s and the equally hysterical reaction of the mainstream press and politicians was a very real challenge to post-war conservatism. A new front opened up between the adults who had gone through the war and their children. Post-war economic growth helped fuel this. Generational authority was threatened by the emergence of a separate youth culture, based on the fourfold rise in teenage earnings between 1938 and 1960. Young people—more of them than ever before thanks to the post-war baby boom—were being sought after by employers and retailers. What puzzled and concerned commentators in the late 1950s was the way this growing affluence appeared to be accompanied by a new violence and lawlessness. This was what the Germans, faced with the rock ‘n’ roll cinema riots, called “prosperity criminality” (Wohlstandskriminalität). In 1956 Bavaria’s Interior Minister declared that, as “humanitarian molly-coddling” had failed to make the Halbstarken behave, the authorities would now act “with brutality.” In Italy the activities of the teppisti, gangs of teenage joyriders, pushed an anxious government into passing “regulations for the repression of hooliganism.” (Conservatives in Greece followed suit.) Observers were quick to point out the link between the new vandals’ love of cars and the consumer boom with its spreading auto culture.63 In England—whose Victorian mores had probably been less shaken up by the war than anywhere else—the problem seemed equally serious. “Get rid of that suit and try to become a decent member of society,” an outraged magistrate told one teddy boy. “Dance halls, cinemas, police and public join forces to wage war on the teddy boys,” reported the Sunday Dispatch on 27 June 1955. “Menace in the streets of Britain being cleared up at last.”64
Some put the problem down to the effects of the war on family stability. Yet it was around 1954—coinciding with the ending of austerity—that juvenile crime and disorder had suddenly taken an upward turn, with large gangs brawling in cafés and clubs. A sympathetic observer of “rebellious youth” connected these trends with the disintegration of older social norms: on the one hand, the working class was splintering; on the other, the “bourgeois age” of a dominant middle class was being replaced by a broader, mass culture. Some working-class youths could rise socially in this setting; but others were marginalized more than before.
In fact, retrospect suggests that the whole problem was blown up out of all proportion; there was rather little youth violence, considering the extent of social disruption during and after the war. Conservatives demonized the teppisti, the teddy boys and the Halbstarken, and exaggerated their significance. Most countries had long traditions of urban youth riots. But in the stolidly conformist climate of the 1950s and early 1960s even small disturbances and signs of independence threatened the authority of a ruling generation which—just as in eastern Europe—felt increasingly unable to understand its own children. They were disobedient, wore scandalous clothes and hairstyles, and took for granted—when not actually attacking—the achievements that their parents had made through self-sacrifice and hard work since the war.
“My parents, relatives and their friends live like mice in a closed cage … and want us to live the same way,” wrote a girl to the Italian teenage magazine Mondo Beat in 1965. “They want more money and spend it on stupid things: a bigger television, covers for their cars … But they don’t know how to really enjoy themselves.” German student leader Rudi Dutschke fulminated against “aggressive and fascist consumerism.” The children of the consumer revolution were thus turning against it and coming back to politics and protest. What was so enigmatic was the way they combined an anti-consumerist stress on spiritual enjoyment, on love. Flower Power and individual self-fulfilment with older kinds of political visions—of social revolution, class war, strikes and barricades.65
First in West Berlin, later in France and Italy, youthful dissatisfaction with the mainstream Left was expressed in a radical critique of post-war social development. In December 1966, for instance, students demonstrated down the “Ku’damm,” symbol of Berlin’s new shopping culture, just before Christmas. They attacked the “myth of Western democracy” and drew on Marxist critiques of consumerism to decry the emptiness and authoritarianism they saw around them. The Vietnam War had shattered the American dream even—perhaps particularly—in countries like West Germany and Italy, where it had been so strong before.66
The signs of a revival of mass protest were already visible—in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches of the early 1960s, in the violent demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam, against the Greek colonels’ coup in 1967, and the Shah’s tyranny in Iran. TV images of the civil-rights marches in the USA, together with a reawakening interest in the legacy of resistance from the Second World War, fed a growing anti-authoritarianism. In 1968 came the explosion: campus sit-ins, riots, strikes and demonstrations rocked Europe, threatening at one point to topple the de Gaulle government; street fighting returned to the streets of Paris, Berlin and Milan. The scale of the turmoil shocked and delighted those who had observed the apathy and conformism of middle-class youth in the previous decade. For subsequent generations, “68” came to assume the proportions of a myth, a myth fed subsequently by the large number of its participants who as writers, broadcasters, teachers or film-makers found themselves able to provide a public interpretation of what it had all meant. “It would not be unjust,” writes Sunil Khilnani in his study of the intellectual Left in France, “to see 1968 as an interpretation in search of an event.”67
To a later and perhaps more cynical generation, the turmoil of 1968 looks less impressive than it did to its protagonists, more noise than lasting achievement, a product in many ways of the very prosperity the students were attacking, and an unrepresentative product at that. Despite the rapid expansion of student numbers—itself, of course, an achievement of post-war democracy—only a small proportion of the youthful population was actually involved in the upheavals: in the mid-sixties only 5.5 per cent of twenty-year-olds in the UK were in higher education (8.6 per cent in Italy, 7.7 per cent in West Germany, 16 per cent in France). Their demands too were unclear: stressing the present rather than the future, absolute liberty and freedom of expression, hindered the expression of unified, concrete demands. Indeed, when these finally emerged in an organized shape, they took the form of an extreme Marxist sectarianism—“Stalin, Mao and the ‘great Popular Republic of Albania’ ”—which left many of the original participants cold.
The events of 1968 thus created a fragmented and bitterly dogmatic Leftist fringe, tempted by violence and unable or unwilling to comprehend the scale of capitalism’s triumph. It had its own way of life, with endless proclamations, critiques and public theses, and a fondness for intellectual gurus whose pronouncements did not save their followers from a complete misreading of the political situation. This detachment from the realities of power reached its culminating expression in the terrorist Red Army Faction in West Germany, which saw itself as a “city guerrilla force” carrying out an armed “anti-imperial struggle” under the slogan “Victory in the People’s War!” These terrorist groups and the police repression and right-wing counter-terrorism they provoked mostly disappeared by the end of the 1970s. But for a time they raised the spectre of that inter-war political extremism and ideological polarization which most of western Europe hoped had been left behind for good.68
And yet the student radicals did have some real achievements to their credit. First, they drew attention to a vacuum of belief at the heart of post-war politics. Their passionate idealism reminded people of the need for political and ideological debate; not all problems are reducible to questions of scientific management or interest-group bargaining. Second, their often satirical attack on post-war authoritarianism, if exaggerated, was well aimed, and encouraged a more critical look at the centres of corporate, military and political power. Finally, they acted as a typical interest group, securing resources for the university system and opening it up to more democratic influences.
Effective if less glamorous interest-group action was also being mounted by the organized working class, as student dissatisfaction coincided with an upsurge in labour unrest and inflationary pressures. The protests of 1968 showed that class activism had been written off too quickly: in fact, post-war state-led corporatism was coming under strain as never before. With full employment, the unions pressed for long-delayed wage rises, and used the opportunity provided by the students’ actions to attack the prevailing distribution of wealth. In Italy and France, the result was that the protests of thousands of students were quickly supplemented by a wave of strikes as millions of unionists demanded a fairer share in the growth society.
