by Tony Judt
120 By 1950, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Albania were the only European countries where more than one child in ten died before the age of one. In west Europe the last-placed country was Portugal, where the infant mortality rate in 1950 was 94.1 per thousand.
121 The following year, in March 1956, this right was extended to all French workers. Renault workers obtained a fourth week of paid vacation in 1962, but on this occasion it took seven years before the rest of the country followed suit.
122 With the result that as tourism began to develop towards the end of the Sixties there was actually a shortage of workers in Greece itself, for the most menial jobs.
123 Just fifteen years earlier, in 1958, there had been 25,000 Italians, 4,000 Yugoslavs and not enough Turks to be recorded in official censuses.
124 These draconian restrictions on colonial immigration reflected mainstream opinion in both major parties. However, less than a generation before and in rather different circumstances, the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had written thus, in July 1948: ‘It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom. That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.’
125 The exception was Italy, where in 1971 less than 5 percent of all purchases were made in the country’s 538 supermarkets and almost everyone continued to use local, specialized shops. This was still true twenty years later: in 1991, by which time the number of food outlets in West Germany had fallen to 37,000 and in France to a mere 21,500, there were fully 182,432 food stores in Italy. Per head of the population, only Poland had more.
126 There were ‘cultural’ objections as well. In 1952 the French Communist author Roger Vailland asserted that, ‘[i]n a country like France, where—except for two months a year, and not every year—it is always so cold that a food-box on the window ledge will keep the roast for a weekend, and more, a fridge is a “symbol” an (American) “mystification.’
127 Only in 1963 did Electricité de France begin upgrading their urban power lines to permit the running of multiple appliances—the countryside followed some years later.
128 An exponential increase nicely captured in the opening scene of Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963). Even by Fellini’s own standards, this urban traffic jam would have been bizarrely implausible just a few years earlier.
129 Local response to this innovation followed historical precedent: English motorists, regarding meter charges as a form of unauthorized taxation, withheld payment. The French registered their disapproval by decapitating Parisian meters.
130 The first European hypermarkets, defined as stores with at least 25,000 square feet of space on a single level and typically located at least two miles from a town center, began to appear at the end of the 1960s. By 1973 there were about 750 of these giant stores in Western Europe, 620 of them in France and West Germany alone. In Italy in that same year there were just three. Twenty years later there were fully 8,000 hypermarkets and superstores in France . . . but still just 118 in Italy.
131 Between 1959 and 1973, the number of visitors to Spain rose from 3 million to 34 million. Already in 1966 the number of annual tourists in Spain—17.3 million—far surpassed the totals for France or Italy. In parts of the north-east and Spain’s Mediterranean littoral, the transition from a pre-industrial economy to the age of the credit card was accomplished in half a generation. The aesthetic and psychological impact was not always positive.
132 With the exception of the Iberian peninsula and the southern Balkans, where radio ownership in 1960 was roughly comparable to that of Western Europe thirty-five years earlier, and where people still clustered in cafés to listen to news and music.
133 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics 1943-1988 (1990), p. 240.
134 It is perhaps worth emphasizing the marginality of jazz. Like American folk music in the sixties, jazz was only ever appreciated and bought by a small number of people in western Europe: usually educated, bourgeois or bohemian (or, typically, both) and rather older than the average rock-and-roll enthusiast. The situation in eastern Europe was a little different. There jazz was American (and black), therefore both exotic and subversive, Western yet radical—and carried a charge quite lacking further West.
135 The American writer William Stead published The Americanization of the World in 1902: anticipating his subject, perhaps, but not by much.
136 In 1960 the German economy grew at a rate of 9.0 percent per annum, the British economy by 2.6 percent: the slowest rate in the developed world, except for Ireland—which at this time was still far from ‘developed’.
137 Quoted in Peter Hennessy, Never Again. Britain 1945-1951 (1993), p.117.
138 Liberal parties and thinkers in Germany and Italy, like the small free-market wing of Britain’s Conservative Party, did not join in this consensus. But at the time—and in part for this reason—they wielded little influence.
139 Contrast Italy, which had 13 different governments and 11 different prime ministers in the same period—or France, which had 23 governments and 17 prime ministers between 1945 and 1968. Long-serving party leaders were a Swedish speciality: Erlander’s predecessor as Chairman of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Per Albin Hansson, had held the post from 1926-1946.
140 The Saltsjöbaden Pact resembled in certain respects the Arbeitsfrieden (Labour Peace) reached in Switzerland the previous year, in which employers and workers agreed to establish a system of non-confrontational collective bargaining that was to prove an enduring cornerstone of the country’s future stability and prosperity. However, whereas the Swiss Arbeitsfrieden was intended to keep government out of economic bargaining, the Saltsjöbaden Pact committed the government to working in harmony with owners and employees for the common interest.
141 The suicide rate in western Europe by 1973 was indeed highest in the most developed and prosperous countries: Denmark, Austria, Finland and West Germany. It was lowest at the poorer fringes: per head of population, the Danish suicide rate was six times that of Italy, fourteen times that of Ireland. What this suggests about the depressant effect of prosperity, climate, latitude, diet, religion, family structures or the welfare state was obscure to contemporaries and remains unclear today.
142 Ironically, it was the Swedish Social Democrats who for a long time showed more interest in Vienna’s early-twentieth-century ‘Austro-Marxist’ theorists Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding. Their Austrian successors, by contrast, were typically happy to put all that behind them—save for the occasional echo, as in the Austrian Socialist Party’s 1958 program, where it was opaquely asserted that ‘democratic socialism occupies a position between capitalism and dictatorship’ . . .
143 For this translation, see Bark & Gress, From Shadow to Substance. A History of West Germany, Volume 1 (1992), Chapter 16.
144 The destruction of the selective state schools of England merely drove more of the middle class to the private sector, thus improving the prospects and profits of the fee-charging ‘public schools’ that Labour’s radicals so despised. Meanwhile selection continued, but by income rather than merit: parents who could afford it bought a home in a ‘good’ school district, leaving the children of the poor at the mercy of the weakest schools and the worst teachers, and with much reduced prospect of upward educational mobility. The ‘comprehensivisation’ of British secondary education was the most socially retrograde piece of legislation in post-war Britain.
145 With the demise of clerical politics, political anti-clericalism lost its raison d’être—ending a cycle of quarrels and obsessions that had endured for nearly two centuries.
146 In Ireland, however, the authority of the Church and its involvement in daily politics was sustained rather longer—well into the nineties.
147 In a representative outburst, Osborne writes of British royalty as ‘the gold filling in
a mouthful of decay’.
148 Godard in particular had decidedly eclectic tastes. He is reported to have been ‘mesmerized’ by Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford.
149 Italians could certainly design cars, as any motor racing enthusiast would confirm. It was Italian coach-builders who first removed mudguards, running boards and other redundant excrescences from small family cars—much as Milanese tailors in the same years were eliminating trouser turn-ups and inventing the sharp, clean lines and cut of the modern Italian suit. What Italian car manufacturers appeared unable to do with any consistency was build the cars that their draughtsmen had imagined.
150 In the admiring commentary of one Parisian critic the thousands of identical apartments squeezed into the new grands ensembles were ‘veritable tiny houses incorporated into a vertical structure, like so many different bottles in the same wine rack.’ See Pierre Agard, ‘L’Unité de résidence’ in Esprit, October-November 1953. I am grateful to Dr Nicole Rudolph for the reference.
151 But contrast Rotterdam: gutted by German bombs and rebuilt in stages through the following decades, the Dutch port was a consciously and genuinely ‘designed’ city.
152 Obviously this did not apply to small, élite academies like France’s École Polytechnique, or École Normale Supérieure, which admitted their few students by a rigorous selective exam and then taught them very well indeed. But these were unusual and highly atypical.
153 In the mid-1960s only 44 percent of Italian university students graduated; these figures were to deteriorate still further in the course of the 1970s.
154 In the Communist bloc ‘the Sixties’ as pop culture were of necessity experienced at second-hand. But this difference should not be exaggerated. To apply the Ur-reference of the age: everyone in Eastern Europe knew who the Beatles were and many people had heard their music. And not just the Beatles: when the French rock star Johnny Hallyday performed in the small town of Košice in Slovakia, in 1966, 24,000 people turned out to hear him.
155 The Beatles came from the Liverpool working class—or, in the case of Paul McCartney, from a notch or two above. The other iconic rock band of the Sixties, the Rolling Stones, was more conventionally bohemian in its subject matter, as befitted its members’ middle-class London background. This handicap was overcome by a calculated roughness of style and by the Stones’ well-publicized and ostentatiously raunchy private lives.
156 Note, though, that for most of the Sixties it was still forbidden in many parts of Western and Eastern Europe alike to dispense information about contraception. Britain was exceptional in approving the contraceptive pill for use in 1961—across the Channel the singer Antoine sold a million records in 1966 plaintively imagining a France where the Pill would one day ‘be sold in Monoprix stores’.
157 There was a time lag in the farther-flung provinces, however, where black berets, cloth caps and even women’s bonnets were still in daily use. For a little while longer, headgear remained a reliable traditional indicator of regional origin and social class.
158 It was also to evolve with little difficulty into the skinhead attire of the following decade.
159 By 1960 ‘existentialism’ (like ‘structuralism’ a few years later) had become a general-purpose catchword, roughly approximating to ‘bohemian’ in earlier decades: the unemployed art students who came to hear the Beatles on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg all called themselves ‘Exis’.
160 In which case it might seem odd that the fashionable psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan should have been popularly assimilated to the category. But Lacan was a special case. Even by the lax standards of Sixties-era Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in medicine, biology and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or reputation.
161 The SPGB continues to the time of writing. Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely.
162 Like Gramsci’s near-contemporary the German Marxist Karl Korsch, or the Austro-Marxist writers Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding.
163 Althusser’s claim rested on a bizarre structuralist account of Marx, whose contemporary appeal to youthful seekers after Theory was directly proportional to its Jesuitical opacity (older scholars were unimpressed). But the assertion of authority was clear enough: there is only one proper way to think about Marx, he insisted, and it is mine. In France, Althusser’s star waned with the fall of the Party whose cause he espoused; today his obscurantist appeal is confined to the outer fringes of Anglo-Saxon academia.
164 They had a point. Thus Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian Situationist, writing in 1967: ‘With a world of ecstatic pleasures to gain, we have nothing to lose but our boredom.’ It is hard to be sure, in retrospect, whether such slogans were witty, innocent or merely cynical. In any event, they did little to imperil the status quo.
165 This was a longstanding source of friction. In January 1966, after months of dispute at a student dormitory complex in Antony, in southern Paris, a newly appointed director had introduced what was then a radical regime. Girls and boys over twenty one could henceforth entertain members of the opposite sex in their dormitory rooms. Those under twenty one could do so with written permission from their parents. No such liberalizations were introduced anywhere else.
166 The Minister for Youth, one François Missoffe, had come to Nanterre to open a new sports facility. Cohn-Bendit, a local student enragé, asked why the Education Ministry was doing nothing to address the dormitory disputes (or ‘sexual problems’, as he put it). The Minister, rising to the provocation, suggested that if Cohn-Bendit had sexual problems he should jump in the splendid new swimming pool. ‘That’, replied the part-German Cohn-Bendit, ‘is what the Hitler Youth used to say.’
167 To visit the French Army in Germany, as it transpired, and assure himself of its loyalty and availability were it to be called upon. But this was not known at the time.
168 This was palpably untrue. The French Communist Party had no coherent strategy in 1968, beyond pouring scorn on the student radicals and trying to preserve its influence in the labor movement. Seizing political power was quite beyond its ability or imagination.
169 There were no women among the student leaders. In contemporary photographs and newsreels girls can be seen prominently perched on the shoulders of their boyfriends, but they were at best the auxiliary foot soldiers of the student army. The youth revolt of 1968 talked a lot about sex, but was quite unconcerned with inequalities of gender.
170 Quoted in Robert Lumley, States of Emergency. Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London, 1990), p.96
171 West Berlin itself had taken on something of a counter-cultural tone in these years. Fossilized by its peculiar isolation at the heart of international political tensions, dependant on handouts from Bonn and Washington, its future lastingly impermanent, the city was suspended in time and space. This made it rather appealing to dissidents, radicals and others who sought out the political and cultural fringe. The irony of West Berlin’s situation—that its survival as a bohemian outpost of the West depended entirely on the presence of American soldiers—was lost on many of its youthful residents.
172 Echoes of this inversion were to be heard again at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, when its German opponents did not hesitate to cast America as the twentieth century’s leading war criminal . . . and Germany as its first victim.
173 Though it was replaced by a newly mythologized version in which Stalin himself—and his crimes—passed half unacknowledged.
174 The credibility of the Soviet system rested to a quite extraordinary extent upon its capacity to get results from the land. For most of its eighty-year life, agriculture was on an emergency footing in one way or another. This would not have struck an eighteenth-century European or even a twentieth-century African observer as especially unusual; but the Soviet Union was held to rather higher standards of performance.
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sp; 175 A year after his release, Sinyavsky emigrated to France and took up a post teaching Russian literature at the Sorbonne. Daniel stayed in Russia, where he died in 1988.
176 Although the best-known reform economist of the Sixties was a Czech, Ota Sik, it was the Hungarian school that had the broadest influence and the most practical impact.
177 Djilas was imprisoned for four years when The New Class appeared in the West, and re-incarcerated for a further four years shortly after his release.
178 Richard Nixon was by no means the last American to be seduced by the Romanian dictator. Impressed by Nicolae Ceauşescu during a visit to Romania in 1978, Senator George McGovern praised him as “among the world’s leading proponents of arms control”; and as late as September 1983, when the awful truth about Ceauşescu’s regime was already widely known, Vice President George Bush memorably described him as “one of Europe’s good Communists.”
179 The French translation of the Open Letter that circulated in Paris the following year was distributed by Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organization.
180 Of the approximately 30,000 Jews in mid-Sixties Poland, less than 7,500 belonged to the official Jewish organizations.