Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War: The European Society of Culture, Post-War Politics and International Relations 9780755621316, 9781350154049

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For SHA, my sweetest absent friend

LIST OF PLATES

Frontispiece. Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses the East–West Dialogue, Venice 1956. To his left: Anthony Babel and Umberto Campagnolo, founder and general secretary of the Society. To his right: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jean-Paul Sartre. Photo: courtesy of the ASEC. Plate 1. Umberto Campagnolo, the SEC’s founder and general secretary, at the Parc du Chaˆteau de Coppet, Switzerland, 1958. Photo: courtesy of Matteo and Cosima Campagnolo. Plate 2. The 1946 RIG Luka´cs-Jaspers debate: Georg Luka´cs addresses the audience while Karl Jaspers (left) waits for his turn to speak. Listening intently on the far right is Denis de Rougemont. Photographer: David E. Scherman. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images. Plate 3. Campagnolo in conversation with Julien Benda at the 1946 RIG. A famous advocate of European federalism, Benda was a keynote speaker both in Geneva and at the SEC’s Constitutive Assembly. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 4. Denis de Rougemont at the 1946 RIG. He founded the CEC and was president of the CCF’s European Committee, as well as a member of its International Committee. Photographer: David E. Scherman. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images. Plate 5. The SEC’s Constitutive Assembly, meeting in the Senate Hall of Venice’s Ducal Palace, May 1950. In the past, the Republic discussed matters of state here. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

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COLD WAR

Plate 6. Opening the Constitutive Assembly. Left to right: Henri de Zie´gler, Angiolo Tursi, General Secretary Umberto Campagnolo, President Giovanni Ponti, Antony Babel, Henri Be´darida and Diego Valeri. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 7. The Wrocław Conference, August 1948. Photo: Marx Memorial Library, London. Plate 8. The CCF’s first congress, Berlin, June 1950. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Plate 9. Wladimir Weidle´, Denis de Rougemont and Roger Caillois at the CCF’s counter-communist propaganda meeting in Andlau, September 1951. They discussed, among other things, what to do about the Appeal. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Plate 10. The SEC’s Executive Council, meeting before the Second General Assembly in Venice 1952, where the fallout from the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World was discussed. Clockwise from top left: Norberto Bobbio, Diego Valeri, Henri de Zie´gler, Jean Amrouche, Father Augustin-Jean Maydieu, Jean Lescure, Giuseppe Ungaretti, unidentified, Umberto Apollonio, stenographer, Gabriele Mucchi, Umberto Morra, Bruna Forlati Tamaro, Cecil Sprigge, Bernard Lehmann, Fernand Mueller. Antony Babel, Umberto Campagnolo, Giovanni Ponti and Jean Wahl were also there. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 11. Umberto Terracini, Arturo Carlo Jemolo and Father Augustin-Jean Maydieu at the Second General Assembly. Terracini was a crucial link between the SEC and intellectuals in Europe’s socialist countries; Maydieu was a bridge to the Pre´sence africaine group in Paris. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 12. SEC members (left to right) Sibilla Aleramo, Franco Antonicelli and Maria Luisa Astaldi between sessions at the Second General Assembly, Venice 1952. Alioune Diop (far right) was still an observer at this point. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 13. The Bandung Conference, April 1955. Bandung was a reference point both for the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists and for Jean-Paul Sartre at the WPC’s World Congress, Helsinki. There

LIST OF PLATES

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he developed his ideas on peaceful coexistence founded not on tolerance, but on active co-operation. Photographer: Howard Sochurek. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images. Plate 14. A typically large WPC congress, Helsinki, June 1955. Photo: World Peace Council, World Assembly for Peace, Helsinki, June 22 – 19, 1955 (Vienna, 1956), plate section II. Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holder. Plate 15. Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians, the ‘Red Queen’, with Campagnolo at the Fifth General Assembly, Brussels, October 1955. Immediately behind them are Pierre Vermeylen, Belgium’s socialist Minister of the Interior and Giovanni Ponti (middle). Further back, in conversation with a young woman, is Pablo Casals. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 16. The East– West Dialogue, March 1956, at the hotel Luna Baglioni, Venice. Clockwise from centre, top: Giovanni Ponti, Umberto Campagnolo, Ignazio Silone, Marko Ristic´, Konstantin Fedin, Irina Dollar (interpreter), Boris Polevoi, Mikhail Alpatov, J. D. Bernal, Vercors, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Jacques Havet, Guido Piovene, Alan Pryce-Jones, Stephen Spender (just outside the picture), Jean-Paul Sartre, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Carlo Levi, and Antony Babel. The empty chair was for Karl Barth, who came late to the meetings. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 17. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, a staunch internationalist whose participation in events like the Dialogue kept him abreast of developments in western thinking. His literary monthly Two´rczos´c´ published Sartre’s critique of Soviet-style Marxism shortly after the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. Here he opens the Wrocław conference with a speech on the need for global solidarity among intellectuals. Photo: Marx Memorial Library, London. Plate 18. Between sessions at the Dialogue: in the centre of the picture are Campagnolo, Silone, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Behind them, on the left-hand side are Bernal and Alpatov. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 19. Marko Ristic´, in the photograph sent in with his SEC membership application. He was the other half of the memorable exchange with Sartre at the Dialogue, which arguably informed the latter’s ‘Questions of Method’. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

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Plate 20. Fung Yu-Lan addresses the Sixth General Assembly, Venice 1956. Campagnolo, Ponti, and Babel and de Zie´gler (left to right) look on. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 21. Ilya Ehrenburg (left) and Claude Roy (middle) at the Sixth General Assembly, Venice, September 1956. Focused on international cultural relations and decolonialization, the resolution from this assembly became a reference point for Pre´sence africaine’s First Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 22. The deputy mayor of Rome Edoardo Lombardi introduces the public lectures of the Cultures of Black Africa and the West colloquium at the Sala della Protomoteca, Campidoglio, Rome, February 1960. Seated behind him (left to right) are Le´opold Se´dar Senghor, Franc¸ois Mauriac and Giovanni Ponti. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 23. The Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium, Rome, February 1960: (front row, left to right) Alioune Diop, Campagnolo, Jacques Rabemananjara, Cheikh Anta Diop, Teobaldo Filesi. Michelle Campagnolo-Bouvier is in the second row, fourth from left. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 24. Executive Council meeting, Prague, April 1965: clockwise from far left to right are: (first name unknown) Bublova, Miroslav Mı´cˇko, Adolf Hoffmeister, Adam Schaff, Babel, the Czechoslovak ViceMinister for Culture Frantisˇek Kahuda, Jan Strˇbı´ny´, Campagnolo, Umberto Terracini, and Jitka Pusˇova. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 25. Executive Council meeting, Prague: Kahuda, Stanislao Ceschi and Campagnolo in conversation. Like Terracini, Ceschi had many contacts in Europe’s socialist countries. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 26. Executive Council Meeting, Leningrad, June 1968: Boris Polevoi addresses the meeting. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 27. Campagnolo, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Guido Calogero (left to right), in conversation at the 1951 RIG. Ungaretti took over as president of the SEC in 1963; the following year Calogero organized the IIP’s Aquila Discussions on ‘The Foundation of the Rights of Man’. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

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Plate 28. Herbert Marcuse at the Free University, Berlin, 1967 or 1968, in the thick of the generation that the SEC had been hoping to interest. Photo: Ullstein Bild-Jung, Berlin. Plate 29. Sartre (centre), in his role as the ‘most intransigent moralist on earth’, as Jean Danie´lou described him, at the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. Simone de Beauvoir is third from the left. Photo: The Bertrand Russell Archives, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada. The photographer is unknown.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The European Society of Culture is still in existence today, and its bureau is still in Venice. When I first went there in May 2008 to begin the archival research for this book, I was lucky to have had the help of Michelle Campagnolo Bouvier in finding my way through its collections. The wife of the Society’s founder, Umberto Campagnolo, and, after his death, its international secretary. She was invaluable to me, answering the many questions I asked her about the Society over the course of several visits. She did not live to see the publication of this book, and had she read it, I know that she would not have agreed with all of its arguments. Nonetheless, I hope she would have found it a fair and rigorous account of the organization to which she was dedicated almost from its inception, and for much of her life. I also hope that it gave her pleasure – and I think it did – to recall in such detail her memories of this first phase of the Society’s history in her conversations with me. Although I take sole responsibility for all of the arguments in it, I would like to thank a number of other people who have also helped me with this book in various ways: Rasheed Araeen, Matteo Campagnolo, Alex Danchev, Nick Fisher, Lubor Jı´lek, Julia Krynke, Christine and Jean-Yves Lehman, Andrea Milde, Piotr Piotrowski, Stein Ringen, Martin Schatzman, Adele Torrance and Bjørn H. Vangen. Special thanks to Cosima Campagnolo, Michael Hatt, Tomasz Hoskins, John Perkins, Allison Walker and Antonio Zanchet. Thanks also to the British Academy, which funded most of the research abroad.

LIST OF ACRONYMS

AMC CCF CEC CFLN CLNAI COMES CPSU CSCE IIIC IIP ISPI MFE OCI PCF

World Association of Culture (Association mondiale de la culture) Congress for Cultural Freedom Centre for European Culture (Centre Europe´en de la Culture) French National Liberation Committee (Comite´ franc
ais de Libe´ration nationale) National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy (Comitato di Liberazione Nationale Alta Italia) European Community of Writers (Communaute´ europe´enne des e´crivains) Communist Party of the Soviet Union Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (Institut International de Coope´ration Intellectuelle) International Institute of Philosophy (Institut international de philosophie) Institute for the Study of International Politics (Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale) European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo) Organization for Intellectual Cooperation (Organisation de Coope´ration Intellectuelle) French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Franc
ais)

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PCI PFA RDR RIG SAC SEC UEF VOKS WPC

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

AND THE

COLD WAR

Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano) Party of African Federation (Parti de la Fe´de´ration Africaine) Revolutionary Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement de´mocratique re´volutionnaire) Geneva International Meetings (Rencontres internationales de Gene`ve) African Society of Culture (Socie´te´ Africaine de Culture) European Society of Culture (Socie´te´ Europe´enne de Culture) European Union of Federalists (Union Europe´enne des Fe´de´ralistes) All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoje Obscestvo Kulturnoj Svjasi s Zagranicej) World Peace Council

FOOTNOTE ABBREVIATIONS

The Papers of the CCF, the full citation for which is: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Papers of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, are referenced as: IACF/series number/ box number/folder number. Citations from the Centre d’archives europe´enne, Coppet, are referenced as: CAE, box number, folder number. Citations from the Archives and Special Collections, Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science are referenced as: LSE/collection name/file reference. Meetings for the executive committees/councils of the CCF and SEC are referenced as CE followed by the date of the meeting. Minutes of the SEC’s meetings published in Comprendre are abbreviated as AC (Constitutive Assembly), CE (Executive Council meeting), and AG (general assembly), followed by the year and month of the event. Correspondence from all archival sources is cited by the names of the correspondents followed by the date.

Other abbreviations ASEC: Archivio della Societa` europea di cultura CANO: Cultures de l’Afrique noire et de l’occident REO: Rencontre(s) Est– Ouest INSP: Iniziative speciali

1946

1945

1944

1943

Year

Brazzaville Declaration

End of World War II in Europe UN Charter adopted at San Francisco Conference UN established; UN Charter comes into force

Inaugural session of UN in London Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ issues in US containment policy Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

Jan

May June

Jan Feb

Mar Sept

Oct

European Federalist Movement (MFE) founded

Historical events

Aug

Month

Campagnolo moots idea for SEC in Geneva

Chronology of SEC

TIMELINE

Hertenstein Conference of European Federalists RIG: ‘The Spirit of Europe’

Other cultural organizations and events

1948

1947

Apr May

Apr

Feb Mar

Oct

Aug Aug Sept

June Aug

March/April

March

Feb

Nov Dec Dec

Sept/Oct

Communist Coup in Czechoslovakia Brussels Treaty signed, creating Western European Union (WEU) Organization of European Economic Cooperation established US Congress approves Marshall Plan Hague Congress

Communists begin consolidating power in Poland Truman Doctrine announced: Cold War begins 1st Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi Marshall Plan announced Communists begin consolidating power in Hungary India becomes independent Montreux Congress of UEF COMINFORM established

European Union of Federalists (UEF) founded

UNESCO comes into force

Campagnolo general secretary of MFE

RIG: ‘Technical Progress and Moral Progress’ Pre´sence africaine founded

TIMELINE xix

1949

Year

Berlin blockade begins Yugoslavia expelled from COMINFORM

June June Aug

COMECON founded Second Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi

Jan Jan

May May Aug Sept Sept Oct Oct

RIG: ‘For a New Humanism’

Partisans of Peace: World Peace Congress, Paris and Prague

Wroclaw Conference; Partisans of Peace movement established RIG: ‘The Debate on Contemporary Art’

Other cultural organizations and events

AND THE

Council of Europe founded Berlin Blockade ends First Soviet A-bomb test Federal Republic of Germany founded NATO established People’s Republic of China proclaimed German Democratic Republic founded

Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by UN

Dec

Executive Committee established, Venice

Campagnolo leaves MFE

Chronology of SEC

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

March April

European Movement founded

Oct Nov

Sept

Historical events

Month

Timeline cont.

xx COLD WAR

1951

1950

Sept

March

Oct Nov

Sept

May June

March

EDC announced European Convention on Human Rights signed

Schumann Declaration proposes ECSC Start of Korean War

Comprendre 3 and 4: ‘Culture and the Iron Curtain’; ‘The Crisis of Art’

Constitutive Assembly, Venice

Comprendre 1 and 2: ‘Universality of Culture’; ‘Culture and the Atom Bomb’

CCF: First Asian Conference on Cultural Freedom, Mumbai CCF Andlau meeting; RIG: ‘Knowledge of Man in the Twentieth Century’

CCF founded at Congress for Cultural Freedom, Berlin; issues ‘Freedom Manifesto’ RIG: ‘The Rights of the Mind and Social Needs’ CEC founded World Peace Congress, Warsaw; Partisans of Peace - now the World Peace Council - issues it’s Appeal to the UN CCF: International Committee meeting, Brussels

Stockholm Appeal issued by Partisans of Peace

TIMELINE xxi

End of Korean War Soviets test hydrogen bomb European Convention on Human Rights comes into force

Death of Stalin Unrest in GDR, Soviet intervention Imre Nagy becomes Hungary’s premier

ECSC comes into force

EDC Treaty signed

Historical events

3rd General Assembly, Paris on the civilization of the universal

Comprendre 7/8 and 9: ‘The Politics of Culture’; ‘The Reality of Europe’ centre in Brussels operational

Second General Assembly, Venice

1st General Assembly, Venice: Appeal to Intellectuals of the World ratified Comprendre 5/6: ‘The Refusal of Dialogue threatens Civilization’ centres in Paris and Rome operational

Chronology of SEC

RIG: ‘The Anguish of the Present Day and the Duties of the Mind’

CCF: ‘Science and Freedom’ conference, Hamburg

RIG: ‘Man before Science’ WPC: World Peace Congress, Vienna

Other cultural organizations and events

AND THE

July Aug Sept

Jan Mar June July

May June July Sept Dec

Nov

Month

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

1953

1952

Year

Timeline cont.

xxii COLD WAR

1955

1954

Bandung Conference West Germany admitted to NATO Warsaw Pact formed

Geneva Four Powers Summit

Apr May May June

July Sept

Oct

Baghdad Pact and CENTO established

End of war in Indochina Vietnam partitioned SEATO established WEU comes into force Start of Algerian War

Feb

Feb July July Sept Oct Nov Dec

5th General Assembly, Brussels on the Idea of Europe

Comprendre 13/14: ‘The British Empire: the Problem of Civilization’

SEC awarded consultative status with Unesco

4th General Assembly, Venice

Comprendre 10/11 and 12: ‘Power and Culture: the New World’; ‘Soviet Power, Communism and Culture’

RIG: ‘Is Culture in Peril?’ CCF: ‘The Future of Freedom’ conference, Milan

WPC: World Assembly for Peace, Helsinki

CCF: Second Asian Conference on Cultural Freedom, Rangoon

European Cultural Convention signed in Paris, formalizing the ‘Idea of Europe’

RIG: ‘The New World and Europe’

Knokke-le-Zoute meeting

TIMELINE xxiii

1956

Year

Start of Vietnam War

CPSU 20th Party CongressKrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ France recognizes independence of Morocco, Tunisia

Nov

Feb

Polish Ocober-Gomułka’s thaw Hungarian Uprising Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt; Suez Crisis

Oct Oct/Nov

Dec

RIG: ‘Tradition and Innovation’ Presence Africaine’s First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Paris; SAC founded CCF Meeting, Zurich

6th General Assembly, Venice

AND THE

Broadcast of Hungarian Writers’ appeal UNESCO launches major project 3 on mutual appreciation of Eastern and Western cultural values

Conference on ‘The Problem of Freedom in the Light of Scientific Socialism’, German Academy of Sciences, Berlin

Other cultural organizations and events

The East-West Dialogue

Comprendre 15 and 16: ‘Humanism Today’ I and II

Chronology of SEC

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

Nov

Poland: riots in Poznan suppressed Nationalization of Suez Canal by Nasser

June July Sept Sept

March

Historical events

Month

Timeline cont.

xxiv COLD WAR

1958

1957

Sept

Aug

Referendum on French Community

EEC becomes operational EURATOM becomes operational Khrushchev becomes Soviet premier

Jan

March June

Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo

Treaty of Rome creates the EEC, EURATOM

Dec

Sept

Apr

March

7th General Assembly, Venice Second East-West Meeting

Comprendre 19: ‘The Rise of China to the Rank of a World Power’ Amsterdam centre operational; formal meetings in London

Comprendre 17/18: ‘Civilizations and Christianity’

UN ‘Atoms for Peace’, Geneva RIG: ‘Man and the Atom’

WPC: meeting, New Delhi Europe-Conversation established, Vienna: ‘The Unity of Europe: Idea and Task’

Mutual Aid Committee for Writers and Editors becomes operational Sartre’s ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ published in Poland WPC: meeting, Colombo Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’ published in France RIG: ‘Europe and the World Today’

TIMELINE xxv

May

March April

De-colonization of French West Africa begins U-2 spyplane shot down over USSR

Party of African Federation founded

European Court of Human Rights founded

Historical events

Comprendre 21/22: ‘The Entrance of Africa into History’ Cultures of Black Africa and the West colloquium Diop resigns

Comprendre 20: ‘India in the Dialogue of Civilizations’ centres in Belgrade, Lubljana and Zagreb operational

Chronology of SEC

Europe-Conversation: ‘The Young Generation and Europe’ RIG: ‘Work and Man’

Second Congress of Black Artists’ and Writers, Rome

Tashkent Conference of Writers from the Countries of Asia and Africa Pasternak Affair

Other cultural organizations and events

AND THE

Feb

Sept

March June

Feb

Jan

Oct

Month

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

1960

1959

Year

Timeline cont.

xxvi COLD WAR

1962

1961

Vatican II opens Cuban Missile Crisis

Algerian independence

July

Sept Oct

End of Algerian War

Construction of Berlin Wall Non-Aligned Movement meets in Belgrade

Bay of Pigs invasion Vienna Summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev

Senghor elected 1st president of Senegal

Mar June

July Aug Sept

April June

March

Sept Nov

June

Comprendre 25: ‘The Cold War’

10 year grant from Italian national government confirmed Comprendre 23/24: ‘The International Question’ 8th General Assembly, Rome: Campagnolo delivers ‘Culturalist Manifesto’

Europe-Conversation: ‘Europe in the Eyes of Others’ WPC: World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, Moscow RIG: ‘Life and Time’

RIG: ‘The Conditions of Happiness’ WPC: meeting, Stockholm

Europe-Conversation: ‘The Foreseeable Future’ Amnesty International founded

Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth published WPC: meeting, New Delhi

Europe-Conversation: ‘The Function of Art in Modern Society’ COMES established RIG: ‘Hunger’

TIMELINE xxvii

Sept

June

Limited Test Ban Treaty signed

Peace on Earth issued by Pope John XXIII

Historical events

9th General Assembly, Rome: AMC launched Comprendre 26/7: ‘Religion and Culture’ Warsaw centre operational

Third East-West Meeting abandoned Dakar colloquium abandoned

Centre in Budapest operational

Chronology of SEC

Morals and Society’ conference, Gramsci Institute, Rome Europe-Conversation: ‘Where Does Europe Stand Today?’ RIG: ‘How to Live Tomorrow?’

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man published

RIG: ‘Dialogue or Violence?’

Europe-Conversation: ‘The European Big City, Light and Ghost Light’

European Centre for Coordination of Research and for Documentation in the Social Sciences, Vienna established by Unesco

Other cultural organizations and events

AND THE

May

Aug Sept Oct

July

April June

Nov/Dec

Month

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

1964

1963

Year

Timeline cont.

xxviii COLD WAR

1966

1965

June

April

Sept Oct

July

June

Apr

Feb

Oct

US bombing of Hanoi

Khrushchev steps down, replaced by Brezhnev as premier China tests its first atomic bomb

10th General Assembly, Venice Comprendre 29/30: ‘Peaceful Coexistence and Dialogue’ Centres in Prague and Leningrad operational

Executive Council meeting, Prague

Comprendre 28: ‘The Problem of a World Political Authority’

World Festival of Black Arts, Dakar Europe-Conversation: ‘The Individual and the Community’

WPC: World Peace Congress, Helsinki Europe-Conversation: ‘Bridges between East and West Europe – Coexistence or Collaboration?’ RIG: ‘Robot, Beast and Man’

Pacem in Terris congress, Centrer for the Study of Democratic Institutions, New York

Aquila Discussions, IIP

TIMELINE xxix

1968

1967

Year

Sept

Summer Aug

Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia, ends Prague Spring

Plans for SALT announced Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed between Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States

11th General Assembly, Venice

Tribune of the Peoples mooted

Europe-Conversation: ‘European Theatre and it’s Public’

Europe-Conversation: ‘Science and Society in Europe’ RIG: ‘Art in Today’s Society’

Foundation for European Intellectual Mutual Aid established

Other cultural organizations and events

AND THE

July July

Executive Council meeting, Leningrad

Comprendre 31/32: ‘The UN, States and Public Opinion’ Campagnolo’s ‘Peace a Revolutionary Idea’ published

Centre in East Berlin operational

Executive Council meeting, Budapest

Chronology of SEC

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

Apr June

Jan

Dubcˇek becomes first secretary of Czechoslovak Communist Party The Prague Spring begins

Arab-Israeli Six-Day War

June

Sept

Russell Tribunal set up

Historical events

Nov

Sept

Month

Timeline cont.

xxx COLD WAR

1975

1973

1969

June Aug

July

Sept Nov

Jan April

Helsinki Final Act signed

Conference on Security & Co-operation opens in Helsinki

SALT talks begin in Helsinki

Self-immolation of Jan Palach in Prague Dubcˇek replaced by Gusta´v Husa´k as first secretary of Czechoslovak Communist Party

Comprendre 33/34: ‘Democracy and Culture’

WPC issues New Stockholm Appeal

RIG: ‘Freedom and Social Order’

TIMELINE xxxi

INTRODUCTION `

THE NOT COLD WAR INTELLECTUALS' 1

In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin described the Ducal Palace as the ‘central building of the world’.2 Bringing together the three dominant architectural styles of its time – the classical, gothic and Islamic – it was by allowing them to correct each other, he maintained, that the building’s harmony as a whole was ensured.3 As the seat of one of the longest republics in history, however, more explicitly political meanings have also been seen in the palace’s form. Having none of the heavy, fortress-like qualities of those of other, more precarious republics, the ‘very openness’ of Venice’s system of governance, the architectural historian Deborah Howard has observed, was discernable in the generous porticos framing the palace’s ground floor public spaces, the shimmering lightness of its lozenge-patterned walls, and its decorative rather than defensive rooftop crenellations.4 Consequently, when on 28 May 1950 the city’s communist-led administration welcomed around 150 of Europe’s intellectuals within the palace’s staterooms to establish the European Society of Culture (Socie´te´ Europe´enne de Culture – SEC), it could not have chosen a better place for such an event. Although the SEC was not a governmental organization, but one by and for intellectuals, its founding members had gathered for a political purpose that, like the interplay of styles within the building itself, sought reconciliation. Their goal was to end both the partitioning of Europe and the Cold War, and to do so peacefully, through culture.

2

EUROPE'S INTELLECTUALS

AND THE

COLD WAR

Measured against its own expectations, the SEC’s actual achievements over the next two decades in pursuit of that goal would be mixed. On the one hand, it succeeded in bringing together a stellar array of intellectuals from Eastern and Western Europe, from Ilya Ehrenburg to Jean-Paul Sartre, to discuss their differences in a period that was decidedly hostile to such an undertaking. Not only did such meetings help to prevent the isolation of many of Europe’s socialist states from the larger international community, they also contributed substantially to the process of de-Stalinization in those countries, not least by exposing socialism as actually practised there to the ethical scrutiny of Eastern and Western intellectuals alike. On the other hand, the Society’s efforts to address the Cold War in the Third World clearly failed; the single meeting it held with the elite of Francophone Africa’s intellectuals having left them with the lasting impression of the SEC as a hopelessly Eurocentric organization. Yet even this failure had a substantial impact, as the Society and its core ideas would serve as a reference point, albeit often a negative one, for leading post-colonial thinkers, including Le´opold Se´dar Senghor and Frantz Fanon, in developing their own expectations of a politically responsible culture in emerging countries. In spite of the uneven outcomes of the SEC’s initiatives, however, what united many participants like Sartre and Fanon at that time was a preoccupation with rights. While initially the Society’s focus was on free cultural expression, this was gradually broadened during the period considered in this book into a defence of human rights. Thus the first phase in the history of the SEC can also be seen as part of the early development one of the most profound sociopolitical movements of the twentieth century, the Society serving as an early locus for human rights discussion, with considerable consequences. Arguably a harbinger of the Helsinki Final Act (1975), which had such important implications for the dismantling of communism in Europe because it committed its signatories to upholding basic human rights in their countries,5 the SEC helped to keep intellectuals from Europe’s socialist countries abreast of the discussions that formed a certain continuity between the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Final Act. The Society also had a formative impact on Unesco’s lexicon in the 1960s, when the latter stepped up its programming commitment to a worldwide ‘civilization of the universal’ based on human solidarity.

INTRODUCTION

3

Why did the Society choose culture as the most suitable medium for such political tasks? Although the SEC’s Executive Committee, and not least its founder, the Italian philosopher of law Umberto Campagnolo, took Europe’s recent partitioning as evidence of its economic, social and political ‘disintegration’,6 they believed the cause of this was ultimately moral. If the sheer scale of the destruction during World War II – around 50 million war deaths, the bulk of them occurring in Europe, and the systematic genocide practised there7 – had made the extent of Europe’s savagery clear to everyone, the development of nuclear weapons now ensured that such mass destruction could be repeated on an even larger scale. Therefore, resolving the ‘European problem’, as they called it, required the construction of new, ethical foundations for the entire continent. It also required a different approach from that of ‘ordinary politics’: the ‘politics of culture’. Unlike the more familiar Kulturpolitik, in which cultural works are vehicles for political ideas, the politics of culture regarded the humanities disciplines – art, literature and philosophy, for example – as uniquely capable of creating the values underpinning any given society. Consequently, the politics of culture was held by the Society to be the only means by which the moral bases of European politics could be recast. That this was believed not only by Campagnolo, but by many intellectuals across Europe, was clear in the remarkable range of adherents the SEC attracted to its cause. Starting out in the late 1940s with an almost exclusively western European, and heavily Franco-Italian promotional committee that included many figures who are still wellknown today, such as Julien Benda, J. D. Bernal, Norberto Bobbio, Andre´ Breton, Jean Cocteau, Andre´ Gide, John Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Marcel, Francois Mauriac, Eugenio Montale, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Jean Wahl, by the 1960s, its membership had swelled to around 1,600. By then, it also involved a substantial number of figures from Europe’s socialist countries, including internationally familiar figures Ivo Andric´, Ernst Bloch, Tibor De´ry, Ilya Ehrenburg, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Georg Luka´cs, Adam Schaff and Anna Seghers, and others who should be more familiar, such as Marko Ristic´ and, while he was not a member, Antonı´n Liehm. As this breadth of support for the SEC suggests, the belief that an ethical crisis lay at the heart of the war and its aftermath was widespread. Yet the Society was not alone in identifying Europe’s post-war condition as one of cultural and moral collapse. By the time of the SEC’s

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Constitutive Assembly in late May 1950, numerous bilateral friendship societies had already been set up between countries on either side of the Iron Curtain; the PEN Club had resumed its activities across Europe, including the formation of a Polish centre; and the Geneva International Meetings (Rencontres internationales de Gene`ve – RIG) had been established in April 1946 with objectives that, at their outset, were similar to those of the SEC.8 Equally, the SEC had what might be loosely referred to as competitors. The openly pro-communist Partisans of Peace movement (later renamed the World Peace Council – WPC), which would share some of its membership with the SEC, had been launched in Paris in April 1949;9 and the American-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was concerned with the unification of Western Europe, and with ending communism altogether in the East, held its founding conference in West Berlin in June 1950.10 Although the number of organizations indicates that the immediate post-war years were remarkably vital ones for Europe’s intelligentsia, so far only the CCF has attracted sustained interest from historians. Except for Claus Ha¨ssig’s study of the RIG, the CCF is the only organization to have received book-length consideration, and at least five monographs have already been written on it.11 Consequently, it remains the reference point in other, broader histories of that period, its clear links with American interests casting a shadow over even those cultural histories that have considered Europe as a participant in, as opposed to simply a site for, a conflict in which the Soviet Union and the United States were the main combatants.12 Within the larger field of Cold War history, however, the idea that Europe was primarily a battleground between the two superpowers for economic, political and cultural domination is being reappraised, and substantial publications dedicated to understanding Europe’s role in it are now appearing. While they have moved Cold War studies on from a preoccupation with the superpower conflict, so far they have largely focused on international relations, meaning official relations between states. As Odd Arne Westad has observed, scholars of history and international relations are beginning to look at the place of culture and ideology within the conflict,13 yet little work has been done in the field of intellectual history on the involvement of Europe’s intelligentsia with either international or transnational – in other words, nongovernmental – relations. Many of the intellectual histories published over the past

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5

decade or so, at least in English, that have dealt with politics have been national studies, often focusing on the role of the intelligentsia in postwar reconstruction;14 those studies looking at the activities of Europe’s intellectuals from either an international or transnational perspective are generally to be found in a small number of published conference proceedings.15 While historians and social scientists working on intellectual movements in Europe’s socialist countries have often taken a comparative, regional approach, they have largely been concerned with the activities of dissidents, dating the emergence of the ‘dissident’ to the mid- to late 1970s, if not later. The 1950s and much of the 1960s are generally seen as a period when anything like dissidence was fatally linked with the reform communist movement, which ended abruptly with the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in the summer of 1968.16 In short, for most historians the 1950s and 1960s remain marked by the European intelligentsia’s failure on either side to make any lasting contribution to ending the Cold War. Against this, it will be argued here that from its beginning, the Cold War elicited a powerful, if generally overlooked, international response from intellectuals because of the global challenge it presented to peace. Nor was it confined to Europe. In addition to the organizations already mentioned – the CCF, the RIG, the SEC and the WPC – other institutions beyond Europe had been formed to address the same, or related problems. The Bandung Conference (April 1955), for example, organized by the governments of India, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), which preceded the Non-Aligned Movement, issued in a set of cultural policies for those post-colonial nations hoping to remain neutral at a time when Europe’s Cold War was becoming increasingly global. Similarly, Unesco, the cultural branch of the United Nations, was also set up in 1946 in direct response to the threat that the Cold War represented, and while it was based in Paris, its interests were worldwide from its foundation. Taken together, what all of this activity indicates is that the first phase of the Cold War was a period marked by international and transnational organizations by and for intellectuals. And if the first phase of the SEC’s existence – 1946 to 1968 – more or less coincides with it, that period also spanned a unique moment in post-war European intellectual history. Formed just after the experience of occupation and, for many of its members, resistance, and before the fragmenting impact

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of the student demonstrations of 1968 and the rise of identity-based social activism, a significant portion of Europe’s intellectuals within the SEC demonstrated a real willingness, in spite of their political and ideological differences, to work together through rational debate to resolve the conflicts underpinning the Cold War. If the SEC’s members held the politics of culture to be genuinely capable of generating the values necessary for the creation of a fairer European and, by extension, world order, they equally embraced a specific understanding of dialogue. This was not dialogue as a form of interlocution, as it so often became at the level of official interstate relations, but rather a dialectical process based on a genuinely shared aspiration between both parties to resolve specific problems, and as the means of rationally determining what those values should be. It also required that both parties be open to changing their positions if necessary as a result of that exchange.17 Consequently, the Society was originally set up to conduct face-to-face discussions between cultural figures on either side of Europe’s ideological and political divide in pursuit of those values, and achieved considerable success in doing so. It regularly convened assemblies and executive council meetings that included substantial representation from Europe’s socialist countries in spite of the hostility and threat of visa restrictions shown by governments on both sides of the iron curtain. It also pioneered one of the earliest encounters between intellectuals from Eastern and Western Europe after the partitioning, and was certainly the first to openly discuss the ideological conflict responsible for it. Because of its success, this meeting, the East– West Dialogue (Dialogue Est– Ouest – March 1956) became a model for subsequent exchanges conducted by the SEC and by other organizations. Yet there were other motives for establishing the SEC, and these gradually changed it from being a catalyst for political engagement by its individual members into an organization that would, by 1968, openly support democracy and human rights. For some of the SEC’s members, above all, Umberto Campagnolo, one of the original objectives of the Society had been to develop a moral argument for a federalized European state, and ultimately a world one, through the concept of what he called the civilization of the universal. While world federalism might sound naive today, it was not seen as nonsense in the late 1940s. A third world war and a nuclear holocaust were considered by many at the time to be serious possibilities, and the movements among

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scientists calling for the creation of a world government as a means of avoiding both has been well-documented, with no less a figure than Einstein mooting such a proposal at least three times.18 Unesco, too, in its earliest and most idealistic phase, had the objective of a world state, and Campagnolo clearly took the same view. Yet if he had consistently seen the creation of such a state as almost exclusively a political problem, by the late 1960s, and largely as a consequence of the discussions within the SEC, he had come to see social factors such as poverty, hunger, inadequate education and the lack of economic opportunities as equally important motives behind the wars now breaking out in decolonizing territories and jeopardizing its realization. Consequently, if the SEC had originally been concerned with protecting free cultural dialogue as the means of finding a political solution to Europe’s Cold War, by the end of the period in question, it had also become a proponent of human rights, as their violation in the social as well as the political sphere was clearly feeding conflicts in Europe and abroad. This transition from defending strictly cultural rights to defending human rights was not an abrupt one, and probably should be seen as more of a development. As Hagen Schulz-Forberg has argued, the concern for ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms’ was the cohesive power among the many movements and institutions in Europe immediately after the war concerned with reconstruction, the framework for those rights having been formulated in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.19 Yet, that cultural and human rights were, to a certain extent, two faces of the same coin was recognized not only by the SEC, but also by Unesco. In 1968, the same year that the Society visibly broadened its remit in that direction, Unesco convened the Cultural Rights as Human Rights conference (Paris, 8 –13 July), as the former cut across many of the other rights in the Universal Declaration.20 Consequently, the ‘rights talk’ of the 1960s that has sometimes been dismissed as a sterile attempt to advance the cause of human rights in, for example, Europe’s socialist countries, and even described as ‘disfavoured’ among Europe’s leftist intellectuals, can be seen instead as an important preliminary phase in the human rights movement there and elsewhere. In fact, the early defence of free cultural expression was a prelude to the defence of other basic human rights.21 The SEC’s increasing awareness of the relationship between the two

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transformed it from an organization dedicated to an idealistic, and highly theoretical, notion of a world federal state into a more practical one, which openly advocated democracy as the only political system enabling peoples to express their demands for all of their rights, and for a social and political order that both permitted and protected them.22 As Nadia Urbinati has argued, a willingness to ‘rethink socialism in its relation to democratic liberalism’ was characteristic of the European left, which was ‘suspicious . . . of state socialism and Atlantic liberalism’. Yet the ‘theoretical richness’ of discussion on the Italian left in particular, which included the participation of liberals having a strong concern for social justice, made Italy an ‘extremely important’ site for ‘rights talk’.23 It will be argued here that the right to free cultural expression was often central to those discussions in the immediate post-war period, and that the SEC was one of the earliest, if not the first forum for such discussions between intellectuals from Western and, crucially, Eastern Europe. There, these rights were being suppressed, and the intelligentsia were leading figures, often within or close to their governments, searching for what can be called a democratic third way between Sovietstyle communism and Western liberalism that could guarantee them. Although it has received little attention from historians so far, the argument mounted by many intellectuals across Europe in defence of socialism in this period, or at least its ethical component, as being compatible with democracy, is traceable back to the atrocities experienced during the war. The formation of the European federalist movement, initially a coalition of liberal and leftist forces that spanned the continent, was just as much a response to those events. It is true that the cultural branches of the Council of Europe and the European Union, although descendants of the Resistance and federalist movements, did ultimately become Atlantic organizations closed to communist participation. Yet the commitment of the union to a fully integrated Europe founded on a similar understanding of rights did not simply ‘evaporate’ with the decision to pursue only Western European integration.24 Equally, it is a mistake to think that Western Europe’s intellectual centre-left abandoned the ‘hope of a renewed dialogue between the Communist movement and the representatives of democratic thought’ as well as their early ambition to ‘become a sort of “bridge” between the Communist world and the West’ when the process of Western European integration began.25 One of the reasons for

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setting up the SEC was to oppose the ‘start with the West’ approach to European unification. To pursue the idea of a fully integrated Europe necessarily required at least an openness to dialogue with communism, and the Society provided just such a forum at a time when louder and better-financed voices, such as that of the CCF, were calling for the intelligentsia to reject any exchange with communist thinkers in the name of intellectual freedom. It is because of this ambition that Umberto Campagnolo, the SEC’s founder, general secretary, and leading light, features in the historical record as a figure capable of strongly dividing opinions. Born in Este, in the Veneto, in 1904, he studied philosophy for his undergraduate degree at the University of Padua; later, while in voluntary exile in Geneva during the 1930s, he took a doctorate in the philosophy of law at the University Institute for Advanced International Studies (Institut Universitaire de Hautes E´tudes Internationales).26 It was only after he returned to Italy in 1940 that he entered political life, and it was because of his activities within the federalist movement that his reputation became problematic. Walter Lipgens, for example, has pointed to Campagnolo’s stewardship of the European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo – MFE) during 1947 and 1948 as nearly fatally splintering the movement, describing his belief in the efficacy of a popular opposition movement on behalf of a federalized Europe, spearheaded by an avant-garde, as ‘radicalism without any realistic policy’.27 Yet it was a vision that Campagnolo held onto, more or less intact, throughout the period covered in this book, with considerable, if not always intended results. Lipgens was not alone in observing Campagnolo’s frequent lack of realism, which attracted blistering personal attacks from some of his contemporaries as well.28 These critics, often from the CCF, attacked him both publicly and privately as a ‘lunatic’ for daring to enter into dialogue with communists, and for playing into their hands.29 There were others, however, who remembered Campagnolo probably more accurately for his intellectual honesty, the intensity of his commitment to the SEC, the prescience with which he grasped current and pending global crises discussed within the society and, above all, his absolute commitment to the cause of understanding and solidarity between people, which earned him nominations on two occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize.30 As the philosopher of law Norberto Bobbio, whose work

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as a democratic theorist is increasingly renowned, put it in 1998, Campagnolo was ‘[a] man of the century, [a] man against the century’ because of his ‘prophetic vision of history’ and his efforts, although often unlikely, to realize it.31 This was not a sentimental or nostalgic observation. Although they never saw eye to eye on the political capacity of culture, throughout his career Bobbio acknowledged the importance of Campagnolo’s thinking and activities, and while Bobbio’s close involvement with the SEC as a member of its Executive Council gave them both plenty of opportunity to disagree, the formative impact of Campagnolo’s work on his own was clear from early on. In the preface to his highly respected Politics and Culture (1955), Bobbio embraced dialogue as defined by the SEC as the intellectual’s responsibility in Europe’s current situation of ideological polarization, and he thanked Campagnolo for his ‘intellectual honesty and for the firmness of the directive ideas that he has constantly offered’ throughout the early 1950s, while Bobbio was writing his book.32 As his relationship with Bobbio suggests, Campagnolo was a catalyst. This is also what he intended the SEC to be. Although his own ideas frequently provided a point of departure for many of the discussions the SEC hosted, he was always careful to dissociate his own views from its workings. ‘The SEC’, he once wrote: is an idea that can be accepted or refused; it is not a paste that can be modelled in one’s own way, nor a portmanteau in which to hang one’s own jacket, but rather a crystal in which is reflected the thought of those who support it . . . It is a philosophical idea . . .33 Although Campagnolo concluded that the SEC’s development did not ‘suffer from my philosophical orientation’, he might have added that it did not reflect the orientation of its members, either. Rather, at the heart of the SEC was the idea of individual intellectual ‘engagement’ that, still a neologism in 1950,34 was one of the things that the SEC meant by the politics of culture. The Society, Campagnolo once observed, could only achieve its aims if it managed to elicit the engagement that it asked of its members.35 Consequently, if the purpose of the Society was to make intellectuals aware of their social and political responsibilities, and of what they should be doing and why, it was never intended to take sides. In spite of the pressure he was often under from the Society’s

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membership for the SEC to take a public position on current events, particularly those that caused the greatest political tension during the period considered here – the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the escalation of the United States’ war in Vietnam – he refused to let it become politicized. Instead, he consistently maintained the SEC as a neutral meeting space where political and ideological differences could be addressed. The discussions it hosted, whether at Executive Council meetings, general assemblies, or at special events, were always intended to be mutually respectful interrogations of a problem based on reasoned analysis, the results of which should enable the Society’s individual members to determine their own political responses. In order to work, however, it required all participants to be willing to be persuaded, something the SEC believed to be impossible for politicians operating within official channels, but not for intellectuals. This raises the question of who was involved in the SEC. Starting with a promotional committee of 300 predominantly Italian and French, but also Swiss, British and West German intellectuals, the international political situation during the early 1950s cost the Society its initial support from Britain, Scandinavia and West Germany, where the CCF was more successful. While recruitment from Europe’s former colonial territories remained persistently weak, the SEC eventually enjoyed considerable success in Eastern Europe. After the Thaw of 1956, and again in the early 1960s, its membership from Europe’s socialist countries diversified considerably. Somewhat less diverse, however, was the type of intellectual it attracted: irrespective of their country of origin, the Society’s members were predominantly writers, historians and philosophers. And while the work of one of its founding members, Jean-Paul Sartre, frequently provided the framework for the discussions undertaken by the SEC, one of the things that enabled the Society to achieve the success that it did was the presence of another type of intellectual within its membership. From the outset, a number of politicians, specialist academics, journalists and cultural functionaries were present not only in the Society’s general membership but within it’s Executive Committee. These less historically durable figures often shaped international cultural relations during the period in question in direct and practical ways, and often in light of the discussions within the Society. An account of the SEC therefore offers a double history, not only of the political and social concerns of Europe’s intelligentsia within the

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abstract sphere of intellectual debate, but also the way in which these concerns entered the political domain. This was largely through the activities of those who are referred to here as ‘politico-intellectuals’ – often politicians from a background in the humanities, but also figures from academia, or from the world of arts and letters who held posts within or advised government ministries (typically for culture, information or foreign affairs) – and who were active within both national and international governmental institutions. For example, throughout this period the SEC had strong links with Unesco. During the 1950s, when it was under American as opposed to French administration, its more idealistic Francophone operatives such as Nadjm Oud-Dine Bammate, Jacques Havet and Jean-Jacques Mayoux brought Unesco’s foundational commitment to the pursuit of human rights on a worldwide scale to the SEC. They helped compel it to expand its concerns from the European problem to what the Society called the ‘international problem’ – the spreading of the Cold War to countries emerging from formerly colonized territories, often due to what they referred to as social issues, such as poverty. In a number of African, and in many of Europe’s communist countries, the politicointellectual was often capable of directly influencing the national and international policies of their governments. The SEC was a place where informal, yet highly political connections could be established through which the exchange of people, publications and ideas could take place across ideological and political divides. Using a methodology that is similar to the network analyses that are beginning to feature in political and economic histories of Cold War Europe,36 this study explores the interplay between these different groups of intellectuals within the SEC in a range of international initiatives addressing an array of problems. One way or another, these problems turned around the challenge that the Cold War presented, not just to European and global reconstruction, but also to the need for social justice at home and in the developing world, all in the shadow of the nuclear threat. Although the numbers of participants at any of the SEC’s forums – at meetings of the Executive Council, at general assemblies, or at special initiatives – were small in comparison to the Society’s overall membership, its journal Comprendre (Understanding – est. 1950) was the means of disseminating the Society’s discussions of these issues more widely. Made up of two parts, one was a

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record of the SEC’s activities, which included the proceedings of all of its meetings, selections of correspondence between its members and the Secretariat, and accounts of the political activities of individual members; the other was a collection of commissioned essays, and many of their themes are still topical today. They included the nuclear threat, the emergence not only of the United States and the Soviet Union, but also China and India as international powers, peaceful coexistence, the importance of dialogue, contemporary humanism, the relationship between religion and culture, and the effectiveness of the UN.37 Consistently recognized in press reviews for the quality of its presentation, and for the intelligence and care of Campagnolo’s editing, Comprendre was variously described as a ‘serious force inserting itself in the fundamental problems of our time’, ‘one of the most intelligent expressions of European ideas today’, and as ‘one of the richest and most passionate reviews of our age’.38 One reviewer even went so far as to describe the journal as a ‘magnificent activity and the intellectuals of Europe owe him (Campagnolo) much recognition for having brought together independent and fraternal minds.’39 The themed essays were also seen as being of particular importance as a catalyst for reflection and debate, and the quality of the contributors assembled to this end – including Ruth Nanda Anshen, Hans Urs van Balthasar, J. D. Bernal, George Boas, Norberto Bobbio, Georges Duhamel, Roger Garaudy, Andre´ Gide, J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Karl Jaspers, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Mann, Hans Morgenthau, Lewis Mumford, Paul Ricoeur, Adam Schaff, Arnold Toynbee, Jean Wahl, to name only a few – was also remarked upon. The SEC and Comprendre were marked by the expansiveness of their approach to the most crucial issues of their time, and by their willingness to do so from a range of different perspectives, and it was not by accident that they were based in Venice. If Campagnolo was thinking of Venice’s long republican history when he noted that it was ‘perhaps, among the cities of Europe, the most immune to acute forms of nationalism’,40 the city had a much more recently established reputation as a laboratory for centre-leftist governance. At least one politically astute observer covering the SEC’s inauguration for La Voce Repubblicana was clear that indeed a ‘limited sector’ of the intelligentsia, that of the centre, and the centre-left, were actively seeking European unity at that time,41 making Venice an ideal host for this new institution. And if Nadia Urbinati has identified Norberto Bobbio as ‘not a Cold War

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intellectual’ because his willingness to explore questions of social justice and human rights through dialogue with his ideological opponents set him apart from that shrill, anti-communist stereotype, then not only Bobbio, but many figures from across Europe – including the roughly 1,600 members of the SEC – were not Cold War intellectuals, either.42 Standing, like Bobbio, at the ‘crossroads of democracy and socialism’,43 the Society provided a forum for figures from a variety of ideological positions, and from different parties, to pursue a dialogue on how Europe should be constituted after the war, and what ethical principles it should embody. Since this process began during the Resistance, that is where this chronological history of the SEC begins. The first chapter surveys the origins of the SEC in the context of the Resistance and of European federalism. It considers the values and expectations the Society absorbed from both of those movements, and why its founders sought to perpetuate them by forming this new institution after the onset of the Cold War. It also looks at the formation of the SEC’s Promotional Committee, and its membership recruitment strategy. Starting with the launch of the SEC at its Constitutive Assembly in May 1950, the second chapter considers the debates around its conceptual lexicon and working methodology during the first few years of its existence. Taking place at a time when at least two other organizations – the CCF and the WPC – were vying for the support of Europe’s intelligentsia, it examines the way in which the SEC sought to distinguish itself from them. At this point the Society was an expressly European phenomenon. Although the statutes were founded in the firm belief that the Cold War and its attendant problems had originated in Europe, and that their solution lay there, too, many of those attending the Constitutive Assembly already recognized the global dimension of the conflict. This recognition was clear in the first initiative undertaken by the Society in light of the discussions at the assembly: the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World (Adresse aux intellectuels de l’Europe et du monde, 1952). Urging intellectuals not only throughout Europe, but across the world to embrace dialogue across all ideological divides, this internationally circulated appeal exhorted them to take a leading role in determining the values that should underpin a new, federal world order. Moving on from the Appeal, the third chapter looks at the SEC’s early overtures toward intellectuals from the Third World, specifically

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through the discussions around Campagnolo’s idea of the civilization of the universal. This concept featured in the SEC’s provisional statutes and was, from the outset, the most controversial idea in them,44 its essentially Eurocentric bias encountering fierce criticism from the Society’s own members, not least from the Senegalese writer, editor and activist Alioune Diop. As the founder of Pre´sence africaine, a Paris-based periodical dedicated to making contemporary African culture known to an international readership, Diop had a number of powerful and influential Francophone African intellectuals within his orbit, as well as strong links with Unesco. The discussions that the SEC, Pre´sence africaine, and Unesco conducted around the idea of the civilization of the universal, against the backdrop of an escalating conflict in Algeria and the challenge to Europe mounted by the Bandung Conference, is considered in this chapter. The SEC’s concerns with the Third World are returned to in Chapter 6, where the Society’s global ambitions toward the civilization of the universal ultimately failed, suffering, among other things, Frantz Fanon’s charge of ‘cultural narcissism’.45 Yet the exchange between European and African intellectuals at the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium (Cultures de l’Afrique noire et de l’occident – Rome 1960), which the SEC cohosted with its sister organization, the African Society of Culture (Socie´te´ Africaine de Culture – SAC), did germinate an ideal for intercultural and interracial relations within the concept of the civilization of the universal. While it would acquire a substantially different meaning from what Campagnolo had intended, this idea would go on to form not only the platform of Unesco’s cultural policy, but also to feature in Francophone West African cultural policy in the 1960s as a result of the exchanges between these groups. It also informed the World Association of Culture (Association mondiale de la culture – AMC), the global organization that the SEC attempted to establish, but which resulted in a more or less permanent breakdown of relations between the SEC and the SAC. Returning to the SEC’s original purpose of healing Europe’s East– West divide, Chapters 4 and 5 consider the SEC’s East–West Meetings (the Rencontres Est– Ouest, 1956–63). A series of discussions between intellectuals from Eastern and Western Europe intended to put the politics of culture into actual practice, the variability of their success largely depended on the international situation at the moment. Initiated

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as soon as the ‘Thaw’ permitted, the first, and most successful of them, the East– West Dialogue, was convened in March 1956, just weeks after the repudiation of Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Chapter 4 considers the debates at that meeting and their arguable influence on Sartre’s thinking, and the meeting’s legacy for similar initiatives by the SEC and other organizations. The fifth chapter looks at the fortunes of the second and third East– West Meetings. Coinciding with the Cold War’s so-called ‘crisis years’ (1958– 63),46 the achievements of the second meeting were comparatively limited, its attendance badly affected by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, and the third one, intended to address the theme of the Cold War, was suspended due to the Soviets’ withdrawal from the event. In spite of this, the crises that affected the East– West Meetings also affected theoretical developments within the SEC. These were predominantly within Campagnolo’s own thinking, which was turning increasingly toward the subject of human rights, not least as a result of his encounter with Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’ (‘Questions de me´thode’, 1956) itself likely to have been an outcome, at least in part, of the Dialogue. Although Campagnolo was preoccupied with the AMC for most of the 1960s, several SEC members from Europe’s socialist countries increasingly sought to use the Society as a means of maintaining links with Western Europe for much of that decade. Chapter 7 examines how their critique of Soviet-style communism during the first phase of de-Stalinization in the East was assisted through their involvement with the SEC and organizations like it. The introduction there of the question of human rights was an important part of this process, and this chapter looks not only at the SEC’s first meetings in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, but also at collaborative as well as independent initiatives undertaken by its members to address that question in Europe’s socialist countries. This included the commissioning of Sartre’s ‘Marxism and Existentialism’. The original, Polish version of the first chapter of ‘Questions of Method’, it provided an early, powerful theoretical impetus for the reform communist movement in the shape of Marxist humanist theory, which challenged the inhumanity of scientific socialism through its defence of the individual as the creator of social change. This chapter also addresses the way in which the SEC, in turn, began to refashion itself as a defender of democracy and human rights, partially in response

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to Sartre’s essay. The eighth and final chapter looks at the impact of the events of 1968 on the SEC, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the student protests prompting it to reassess its purpose and its methods. The magnitude of these crises, and the growing pressure generated by the global protest movements, compelled it to consciously recast itself as a force for democracy and human rights, what Campagnolo called an ‘integral humanism’. Given the calibre of its membership, and what it was able to achieve with limited resources in an international political climate that was generally hostile to what it was trying to do, it is surprising that the SEC has largely escaped historians’ notice. Possibly, this oversight is due to the fact that the SEC was, at least regarding media visibility, a regional phenomenon. The press coverage of its events was typically concentrated in Italy, France and Francophone Switzerland, and most heavily in the Italian leftist press. Furthermore, measuring the influence of ideas on political attitudes and policies is notoriously hard to do, and the politics of culture was never meant to offer quick solutions to international political problems by effecting immediate policy changes. Yet, by tracing the activities of the SEC and of the people it was able to bring together, it becomes clear that the exchanges conducted by the Society and organizations like it did have significant, if mixed, results. Although in West Africa Campagnolo’s insufficient appreciation of why formerly colonized peoples objected to a programme for cultural reconstruction led by Europe actually damaged cultural relations between Africa and Europe, in several of Europe’s socialist countries the exchanges pioneered by the Society provided a crucial impetus to the discrediting of Stalinism on ethical grounds. Additionally, such exchanges helped to keep a number of reform-minded intellectuals in contact with the ideas around rights central to Unesco and to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which issued in the Helsinki Final Act. The SEC can therefore be seen as having helped to pave the way for the fall of communism in Europe, as a number of the act’s signatories were from Warsaw Pact countries. Although the outcome was not always what the SEC intended or desired, its activities were far from having ‘no discernible real-world impact’, a criticism that has been levelled at Europe’s post-war intelligentsia, specifically those concerned with the unification of the continent as a whole.47 Not only does the SEC’s story form part of the

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genesis of the human rights movement in post-war Europe because of the argument it continued to make on behalf of free self-expression, it offers insight into how ideas could and did enter into ordinary politics. This was through those individuals, typically attached to a government body or post, who acted as conduits between the international intelligentsia and its concerns, on the one hand, and the political class of their countries on the other. Within the latter, there were figures who were open to reform, occasionally receptive to new ideas and who, from time to time, enabled some of the demands arising in the cultural sphere to affect political attitudes and policies. In short, these figures enabled their regimes to liberalize themselves. Because of this, the SEC provides a strong case for maintaining international dialogue between willing parties, regardless of the conduct of their national regimes. Finally, a word about some of the terms used in the book: in referring to the SEC’s members, ‘intellectual’ is used as contemporary shorthand for ‘man of culture’. The SEC used the latter, much preferred by Campagnolo, because it was more inclusive than ‘intellectual’, permitting figures from politics and business to be involved.48 Although intelligentsia might therefore be a better translation of Campagnolo’s term, ‘intellectual’ has the advantage of, in its specifically post-war intonation, describing ‘all those professions that developed, manipulated and disseminated knowledge’, and not just the producers of ideas.49 As a clearly singular noun, it also keeps the focus on the individual, and thus is closer to the idea of the engaged intellectual popularized by Sartre and embraced by the SEC. ‘Intellectual’ also avoids the problem of gender discrimination that ‘man of culture’ suggests. Although Campagnolo’s term conveys no gender bias in French or Italian, the Society’s working languages, and the SEC was indeed open to women (it must be said, however, that only a few actually joined at this time),50 it does convey such a bias in English, and is not used here. For the same reason, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man is referred to here under its current title as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Conversely, as no other suitable term is available, ‘Third World’ is used here in its historical sense, to specify non-European countries that were aligned with neither the Soviet Union nor the United States.51 The expression ‘Europe’s socialist countries’ is used as much as possible throughout, rather than ‘the Eastern Bloc’ or ‘Soviet satellite countries’, in order to reflect what is now widely recognized as the distinctiveness of the

INTRODUCTION

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national histories of the countries concerned. The use of the term ‘international relations’ with regard to the SEC, however, needs more justification. As an international nongovernmental organization, a strong argument can be made for referring to the Society’s activities as a form of transnational as opposed to international relations.52 However, during the period under consideration, a number of its key members, for example the executive councillors Ambrogio Donini, Giovanni Ponti, Stanislao Ceschi and Umberto Terracini, were all senators, and involved Italy’s national government regularly in furthering the aims of the SEC. This was through securing funding and travel visas for members between Eastern and Western Europe, and occasionally providing venues for hosting special events. Equally, although the Italian government did provide crucial funding for the SEC, securing this support was never easy, and throughout the period covered here, it depended on its advocates in the government – Giulio Andreotti, Ceschi, Francesco Franceschini, Alcide de Gasperi, Luigi Gui, Edoardo Martino, Giuseppe Medici, Ponti, Paolo Rossi and Terracini – to do so.53 While the Italian national government does not appear to have used the SEC or interfered with its activities during the period considered here – rather, it supported its activities when they coincided with its own objectives, and withheld support when they did not – the Society would have struggled to exist financially, and could not have organized the exchanges that it did without its help.54 The SEC’s secretariat, too, routinely had to work through embassy officials and with ministries of foreign affairs and ministries of culture in organizing its special events, particularly where figures from and venues in Europe’s socialist countries were concerned. Its greatest successes there would not have happened without the co-operation of governments in the East. Consequently, although the SEC was a nongovernmental organization, the term ‘international relations’ is used throughout.

CHAPTER 1 AFTER THE RESISTANCE: THE ORIGINS OF THE SEC IN EUROPEAN FEDERALISM, 1946—9

Although it was founded in Venice, the idea for the SEC actually sparked in Switzerland, at the first of the Geneva International Meetings (RIG). In June 1945, only one month after Germany’s surrender to the Allies, a group of Geneva-based intellectuals decided to host an event in celebration of the city’s contribution to the preservation of European intellectual and cultural life throughout the war.1 The organizational committee, headed by Antony Babel, an historian of economics at the University of Geneva, quickly decided upon the ‘Spirit of Europe’ as its theme, and by December plans were under way for a 12day event including public conferences, discussion groups, and an arts and music festival.2 Financed by the city and canton of Geneva, the event was, however, more than a one-off celebration. From its inception the RIG was intended to be an annual event that would constitute an ‘intellectual crossroad’ between Eastern and Western Europe with the aim of promoting public dialogue between them.3 As this suggests, relations between the Soviet Union and the West had already begun to deteriorate and, while the organizational committee was not able to secure the participation of everyone it had invited, the first RIG, held in September 1946, did succeed in bringing together a formidable selection of speakers from across Europe, including Julien Benda,

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Georges Bernanos, Francesco Flora, Jean Gue´henno, Karl Jaspers, Georg Luka´cs, Denis de Rougemont, Jean-Rodolphe de Salis and Stephen Spender, to discuss the consequences of the war for the validity of the ‘European Spirit’.4 The 1946 RIG can be thought of as a specifically cultural manifestation of a larger movement toward political federalization in Europe at the end of the war. Offering intellectuals an opportunity to assess the role of culture in the moral reconstruction of Europe, its concerns complemented those motivating many politicians advocating Europe’s political unification. Yet, given the personalities who attended the meeting, it can also be seen as a decisive event in the history of the federalist organizations that would be set up by and for many of Europe’s intellectuals over the next four years. It certainly was for Umberto Campagnolo. Although he was there only as a respondent, his intervention ultimately led to his forming of the SEC with the hope of providing an institution within which dialogue between intellectuals of opposing ideologies could be undertaken, and the new moral foundations for a truly integrated Europe could be created. When Campagnolo arrived in Geneva for the meeting, however, he was actually returning to the city where his own interest in federalism had begun. Awarded a doctorate in theoretical philosophy from the University of Padua in 1931, in the early 1930s he had been teaching philosophy and history in his native Italy, at the Liceo Tito Livio, Padua.5 The legislation introduced in 1933 by the Italian government requiring all teaching staff to be members of the Fascist Party, however, compelled his resignation, and that December Campagnolo went into self-imposed exile in Geneva, only returning to Italy when it entered the war. Shortly after arriving in Geneva, Campagnolo developed an interest in the work of the Austrian legal and political philosopher Hans Kelsen. A celebrated specialist in international law, Kelsen is best remembered for his contribution to the establishment and operations of the UN. An adviser to its War Crimes Commission, for which he prepared the ‘legal and technical aspects’ of the Nuremberg Trials, he also wrote The Law of the United Nations (1950), an enduring reference text for the UN’s legal operations.6 Before that, however, he had been a professor at the University of Vienna from 1919 until 1930, when his sympathies with the Social Democrats led to his removal from his post, with

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anti-Semitism costing him subsequent positions at the universities of Cologne and Prague.7 Joining the recently established University Institute for Advanced International Studies in Geneva, a centre for study into the constitutional and economic problems surrounding European federalization in the autumn of 1933,8 by the time he arrived in Switzerland Kelsen was already preoccupied with the creation of an international legal order to ensure global peace. It was during this period in Kelsen’s career that Campagnolo undertook an ambitious programme of doctoral study under his supervision.9 Although this work has been examined in detail by Mario Losano, it is worth briefly summarizing it here, as it reveals some of the issues that would preoccupy Campagnolo for the rest of his life: the relationship between state and international law, particularly the limitations of the latter, and the indispensability of a supranational legal system to world peace. While Kelsen advocated the construction of a universal, federal state to which state law would be secondary, Campagnolo’s work was grounded in his own, personal observations that international law as theoretically constituted did not correspond with actual practice. In reality, state law inevitably took precedence over international law, to the extent that the latter actually existed, constituted as it largely was by agreements between states.10 To resolve this conflict between the two, Campagnolo argued, at least in theory, for the expansion of a single state system of law at the expense of all others.11 This distinguished his work from Kelsen’s, which advocated successive reform of existing international legal systems, Campagnolo and Kelsen’s ‘irremediable’ differences meaning that their relationship was, as Losano described it, like ‘two parallel monologues’ rather than a ‘debate around a common nucleus’.12 Yet, if their approaches differed, it should be noted that both of them ultimately looked to the creation of a world state as the means of ensuring a peaceful international order, and that there was a key similarity in their respective visions of it. Kelsen’s ‘cosmopolitan’ conception of a state where cultural differences were secondary to the needs of an essentially Eurocentric international legal system premised on the universal recognition of ethical and legal norms13 would be discernible in Campagnolo’s controversial but most influential concept, the civilization of the universal, as we shall see further on in this book. Campagnolo would only perceive the need for an organization like the SEC, however, as a consequence of his own, ultimately disillusioning

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involvement with federalist politics in the mid 1940s. By that time, the concept of European federalism, and the importance of culture to it, was hardly a new idea. For many veteran federalists World War I had been a compelling demonstration of the need to replace nation states by a supranational authority, hence the founding in the 1920s of organizations such as the League of Nations, the Pan-European Movement and the Institute of Pacific Relations. Other internationalist initiatives, especially cultural and educational exchange programmes, were also set up in the aftermath of that conflict. Taken together, they marked that decade as a golden age of what Akira Iriye has called ‘cultural internationalism’.14 Yet establishing a culturally united Europe inevitably required an understanding of what ‘Europe’ should be, and Paul Vale´ry’s The Crisis of the Mind (1919) provided a definition for ‘Europeanness’ not only for interwar federalists, but for federalists after World War II, who found themselves at a similar juncture.15 Once again, a worldwide conflagration in which science and technology had been ‘dishonoured by the cruelty of their applications’ had plunged Europe into a state of moral crisis, and put its claim to intellectual pre-eminence in doubt.16 For Vale´ry, what was needed for Europe to retake the lead was not only to discover the source of its genius, which he described as a ‘happy mix of imagination and rigorous logic, an optimistic scepticism’, and an ‘unresigned mysticism’ that had reached its fullest expression in ancient Greece, but to disseminate it as widely as possible.17 If Greek civilization had given rise to modern science, that science, in turn, now enabled the diffusion of Europe’s culture on a mass scale. Comparing the circulation of this culture to a drop of wine suffused in water, like the miracle at Canaan, the European spirit should infuse the world with the benefits of technology, the virtues of democracy and the freedom of individual thought – in other words, to universalize them.18 This understanding of what it meant to be European formed the premise of the 1946 RIG. As his text suggests, Vale´ry understood the idea of ‘Europe’ as, above all, an ethical and cultural imperative. It was an understanding shared by Campagnolo and, when he returned to Italy in the summer of 1940, he immediately became involved in the pursuit of the imperative to refashion Europe’s moral bases on federalist lines. Based in Ivrea, in Piemonte, he was in a hot bed of the Resistance, not least because of the presence of the Olivetti family. In addition to being resisters, the

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Olivettis were also both established industrialists and long-standing socialists,19 and one expression of this was their provision of a library for their factory workers. Campagnolo took on its management, and was also involved in the Olivetti’s publishing activities, which included the reissuing of a selection of texts intended to assist the moral selfexamination the publishers expected the Italian people to undergo after the war.20 Throughout that time Campagnolo also continued to develop the work on federalism that he had begun in Switzerland, publishing The Federal Republic of Europe in the summer of 1945, the latter being informed by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison’s Federalist Papers, which he had translated into Italian during the war.21 He began teaching the history of political theory at the University of Padua in November 1943 and, on 1 May 1945, he was named commissioner of the Institute for International Political Studies (Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale – ISPI), Milan. A private international relations think-tank established in 1934, ISPI underwent radical reformation in August 1943 when it shed much of its fascist-era administration and suspended its operations for the remainder of the war. It was finally taken over by the National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy (Comitato di Liberazione Nationale AltaItalia – CLNAI) and Campagnolo was given the task of re-establishing it not only financially and materially, but also operationally, in the spirit of a postfascist institution seeking a place for Italy in the new Europe emerging from the war.22 By that September he had further deepened his involvement in practical politics by joining the European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo – MFE).23 The MFE had been founded in Milan in August 1943 by the antifascists Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, just one month after the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. Within three years it would become the largest federalist organization in Italy, and an eventual proponent of Western European integration.24 Spinelli, a law student before his arrest for anti-fascist activities in 1927, had been a militant communist at that time. While in prison, however, he became disillusioned with communism as a result of the Moscow Trials (1936–8), turning instead to ‘the future of Europe and on how to avoid a new war’, eventually arriving at federalism.25 He also arrived at the prison island of Ventotene off the coast of Naples, where he was sent in July 1939, and where he met the economics professor, liberal socialist, and fellow

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political prisoner Ernesto Rossi.26 Although the movement they founded upon their release would be decidedly pro-Western, during their confinement, Spinelli and Rossi produced a more visionary, and overtly leftist analysis of Europe’s current predicament. Walter Lipgens has observed that the Resistance’s most enduring legacy was ‘mental’ – the ideas it offered, in the light of the human and civil rights abuses perpetrated across the continent, of ‘what a better future might look like’27 – and Spinelli and Rossi’s Ventotene Manifesto was a particularly powerful document in this vein. Although Matthew D’Auria has described it as flawed by its underestimation of the power of that nationalism would retain in Europe’s states after the war, and by its assumption that the allies would withdraw from them (and it was abandoned, upon the foundation of the MFE, in favour of Spinelli’s more pragmatic Federalist Theses) he has also observed that it has remained the theoretical basis for many of the claims still made by federalist thinkers in Italy and across Europe.28 Its privileging of democracy and human rights, and even its phraseology is arguably still perceptible in the Helsinki Final Act (1975), a watershed both in European human rights legislation and in the history of the demise of Europe’s communist regimes. The Manifesto was also likely to have informed Campagnolo’s expectations of the SEC. In 1941, when the Manifesto was written, Spinelli and Rossi were still imprisoned on Ventotene, along with the socialist Eugenio Colorni and his German wife, Ursula Hirschmann, who also contributed to the discussions informing it.29 Unlike Colorni, who had been sent to the island the previous year for his subversive activities, Hirschmann was not a prisoner. An anti-fascist, she had fled from Berlin to Paris in 1933 in order to escape being sent to a concentration camp in the first wave of Hitler’s repression against political undesirables. She and Colorni met there, and when Colorni returned to Italy with Hirschmann, the Italian authorities did not arrest her. Moreover, she was allowed to remain with Colorni during his incarceration, and was able to travel off the island.30 Soon after Spinelli’s arrival on Ventotene, the four of them fell into discussions on the future for Europe after the war, their considerations based on their reading of classic Marxist texts, the Federalist Papers, Lionel Robbins’ The Economic Causes of War and other English-language texts provided by the editor, economist and soon to be president of the Italian republic, Luigi Einaudi, himself an advocate of American-style

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federalism.31 The Manifesto was drafted by Spinelli and Rossi on the basis of these discussions, their three-part text offering a diagnosis of the conditions leading to the rise of totalitarianism, an analysis of its deforming impact on democratic society, and a prescription for how it could be prevented in the future by replacing the nation state with a genuine federation. Opening with an assertion of man’s non-negotiable freedom, the manifesto initially focused on the propensity of the nation state to develop into an entity existing only for itself and, through the collusion of its political elite with the capitalist class, into one that could only be satisfied by achieving hegemony over all others via territorial expansion and the accumulation of wealth. Looking to the inevitable end of the war, the Manifesto anticipated that the nation state would, however, be challenged by a demand from the masses for a new internationalism. Although its authors expected that it would not be supported by the British, and probably not by the Americans, the Manifesto nonetheless forecast a ‘triumph of democratic beliefs’ in ‘countless shades and nuances, stretching from very conservative liberalism to socialism and anarchy’, all expressed in a constitutive assembly. Mindful, however, of the recent revolutions in Russia, Spain and Germany, each of which had resulted in the breakdown of democratic processes and the rise of nationalist dictatorships, the final part of the Manifesto gave the authors’ reasons for calling for a distinctly socialist revolution to create a truly federal state. Condemning Mussolini’s corporatism, which gave the state and the ruling class exclusive power over workers, only the redistribution of private property, the nationalization of key industries, land and educational reforms, and the creation of a secular state respectful of all religions could redress the injustices committed against the vulnerable. The agents of this new socialist society, who would circulate its ideas and recruit supporters, would be the working class and the intelligentsia, the two ‘most sensitive’ groups in the present situation, and the ‘most decisive for tomorrow’s world’.32 The Manifesto was smuggled off the island by Hirschmann, Rossi’s wife Ada, and two of Spinelli’s sisters in 1941, and was first printed clandestinely in Rome in 1943.33 Colorni, however, did not live to see its ideals realized in any tangible way. Transferred to a prison on the mainland, he escaped and fled to Rome, where he set up a federalist cell and the underground newspaper L’Unita` Europea: Voce del Movimento

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Federalista Europeo. Yet on the eve of that city’s liberation he was captured and shot by the Germans.34 Spinelli and Rossi, however, survived the war and, upon their release from prison, they immediately began to work for the creation of a federalist movement. In late August 1943, while Rossi was in Florence, Spinelli succeeded in organizing a meeting in Milan at which the MFE was created, and its basic premises were established.35 At this point the principal architects of the MFE abandoned the Ventotene Manifesto, since it ‘contained arguments about which its own authors had doubts’,36 and because the Federalist Theses, written by Spinelli as he was awaiting release from prison, was far more pragmatic in its approach to Europe’s post-war political reconstruction. Instead of calling for a socialist revolution led by the intelligentsia, the Theses advocated the creation of a European superstate that would be responsible for arms production, international trade and finance, the adjustment of national boundaries, and the administration of colonial territories ‘not ripe for self-government’.37 While it took no clear position on the extent to which the federation would favour collectivism over capitalism, it did recommend support for the strongest states to emerge after the war in creating the executive, legislative and judicial systems necessary for a federal democracy. Finally, this proposed European federation was intended to be the ‘foundation stone’ of a world federal system.38 Shortly after the Milan meeting, Spinelli, Hirschmann and Rossi went to Geneva in search of international support for the newly founded MFE.39 By that time the city had a substantial number of refugees, and the meetings they convened between November 1943 and May 1944 attracted representatives from the Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish and Yugoslav resistance movements. The result was a draft declaration of the European Resistance that called for the institution of a European federal government at the end of the war, to be followed by a global one.40 Campagnolo joined the MFE in 1945, shortly before Spinelli and Rossi stepped back from it in favour of greater involvement with the liberal/socialist Action Party, which was playing a greater role in Italian national politics.41 Lipgens has suggested that the temporary absence of Rossi and Spinelli, and of other founders from the MFE, enabled Campagnolo to take a significant portion of its members in a different direction from the pragmatic one they had embraced.42 Instead of supporting their plan for European

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integration through a process of political reform as outlined in the Milan Theses, Campagnolo resisted the idea that states could ever relinquish their concerns with sovereignty and material self-interest. Believing that peoples’ solidarity should form the basis of a truly federalist Europe, he instead championed a more radical interpretation of federalism that, closer in spirit to the Ventotene Manifesto, demanded the creation of a new state based on ethics rather than economics. At the Milan and Turin branch meeting of the MFE held in Milan on 9 –10 September 1945, he presented a draft resolution calling for a ‘federalist revolution’ – a nonviolent transformation by the masses – spearheaded by an avant-garde.43 Although his resolution was defeated, it was only by a narrow margin, and Campagnolo was gaining strong support from newer recruits. The following October he was elected as the MFE’s general secretary at its Venice congress, largely through their support.44 Soon after Campagnolo took over as general secretary, however, two factions developed within the MFE, one seeking to encourage federalization through a constructive relationship with the government, the other, grouped around Campagnolo, preferring a revolutionary federalism based on a strategy of mass opposition.45 Lipgens has called the period under Campagnolo, from autumn 1946 to mid-1947, the MFE’s phase of ‘radicalism without any realistic policy’, during which the movement made no headway.46 Even worse, splinter groups also developed, with devastating effect on Italian federalists’ participation in international federalist initiatives. Italian membership of the MFE, which had been the largest federalist group in Europe, was decimated, with Spinelli and Rossi only returning some months after Campagnolo’s departure from the movement.47 In spite of its internal problems, however, the MFE recognized that the number of federalist organizations operating in Europe needed to be co-ordinated if they were to be an effective ‘third force’, independent of both the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus it became a founding member of the European Union of Federalists (Union Europe´enne des Fe´de´ralistes – UEF), an organization established in December 1946 in order to facilitate the co-ordination of the remarkable number of federalist groups and movements that had formed across Europe, typically out of resistance movements, in the early 1940s.48 Initially the UEF based itself on an understanding of Eastern and Western Europe as a ‘single cultural unit’, and had dedicated itself to protecting the rights of

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the individual and of small communities from abuse within individual states and from a ‘pseudo-liberal capitalism that subordinates human values to the power of money’.49 That it would have to abandon its hopes for truly Europe-wide federalization in favour of a ‘beginning in the West’ approach was, however, made clear to all members in August 1947 at the UEF congress at Montreux, Switzerland. The Marshall Plan, which would rebuild the economies of 17 western European countries with US government money, had been announced that June, and while the UEF resolved to remain open to what had just become ‘Eastern Europe’, if its nations were ever in a position to join (the Soviet Union was at the time vetoing this), it nonetheless complied with the Atlantic political agenda set by the Americans and the British at Montreux.50 Consequently, the decisions taken there paved the way for Western European unification alone, and for the formation of the European Movement and the Council of Europe as a means of facilitating it. Closed to communist participation, these organizations would be dedicated exclusively to the cause of Western European integration, and would also be cautious in their dealings with the intelligentsia. With the cultural dimension of the federalist movement beginning to assume less and less importance, efforts toward unification after Montreux quickly became a procedural process exclusive to Western European politicians and functionaries, issuing in the creation not only of the European Movement and the Council of Europe, but also the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Defence Community. This did not mean, however, that the underlying cultural problem of what being European actually meant, and how it should be expressed, had simply ‘evaporated’.51 In spite of the low priority that cultural policy was accorded within Western integrationist organizations, intellectuals continued to organize themselves and to advocate the importance of culture in the process of unification; one of the key figures to defend its role was the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont. Like Campagnolo, he had a long history in the federalist movement, and in 1946 the differences between them appeared to be outweighed by their similarities. Both were pro-federalist and anti-capitalist, both saw cultural figures as having an important institutional role to play in addressing the European problem, and both established independent cultural organizations dedicated to resolving it: de Rougemont founded the Centre for European Culture (Centre Europe´en de la Culture – CEC)

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and Campagnolo, the SEC. Yet their responses to the perceived Soviet threat, and their understanding of what properly constituted ‘Europe’ after its partitioning, soon brought out significant differences between them. While these became evident at the 1946 RIG and left their mark on the two men’s respective institutions, their distinct approaches to federalism arguably originated in their different backgrounds. If Campagnolo’s belief that a federal Europe could only be achieved through a supranational legal authority is traceable to his direct experience of fascism and to his work with Kelsen in Geneva during the 1930s, de Rougemont’s views on federalism developed in a very different intellectual context, that of the French personalist movement of the same decade. Personalism has proved difficult to define, not least because it drew adherents from across a broad ideological spectrum that could accommodate the Catholic left as well as the left-wing admirers of the German National Socialist movement. Yet John Hellman has usefully identified the personalists’ common denominator as a ‘concern for the human person, the human being considered in all his dimensions’, including the spiritual, a ‘third way’ between the dehumanizing propensity of both liberal capitalist individualism and communism.52 Although the personalist response to the1930s crisis of capitalism initially looked to Bergson and Nietzsche as its theoretical sources, de Rougemont drew upon Luther, Kierkegaard and the work of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth.53 Additionally, although he had helped to form the personalist New Order group while living in Paris in the early 1930s, the ‘ambiguous’ attitude of one of its key founders toward the German National Socialist regime caused de Rougemont to distance himself from it, becoming involved with European federalism instead.54 Returning to Switzerland, in June 1940 he helped to found the antiNazi Gothard League that was based on Swiss federalist ideals and was one of the earliest resistance movements in that country. It was also a gesture of defiance against the armistice in France.55 De Rougemont’s commitment to ‘active neutrality’ and to federalism, however, brought him into conflict with the German legation in Bern, and eventually he went into self-imposed exile in New York.56 It has been said that de Rougemont’s six years in the United States were no more than a ‘pause’ in his engagement with the federalist movement.57 Yet, during this time he did become involved in the

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American war effort. When the French section of the Voice of America, itself a branch of the United States’ Office of War Information, was established in May 1942, de Rougemont was taken on as a script writer of daily information bulletins and political commentaries.58 He left the Voice of America in August 1943 when he was offered a five-year creative writing grant from the Bollingen Foundation, the imposition of stylistic restrictions on Voice of America’s writers and impending budget cuts also informing his decision.59 Consequently, de Rougemont still had at least two years of Bollingen funding remaining when he was invited to Geneva to speak at the 1946 RIG. His acceptance brought him back in touch with the federalist project, and he returned to Europe permanently in 1947 to dedicate himself to the cause of European federalization.60 The 1946 RIG was convened at a moment of intense federalist activity in Switzerland, and it was not the only event with which de Rougemont and Campagnolo would be involved. In Geneva, a conference for the Leaders of the Movement for Peace was held at the same time as the RIG, and just after the RIG finished, a conference of European Federalists was convened in Hertenstein, with representatives from 13 European countries attending. This latter conference, which Campagnolo also attended, ratified an ambitious programme that would be adopted by all federalist associations. It called for the partial surrender by all member states of their economic, political and military sovereignty, and a declaration of civil rights and respect for small communities in keeping with the ‘basic ethical attitude of the Resistance movements’. It also demanded a commitment to resolving any conflicts internally within the federation along with the renunciation of power politics, economic cooperation, as well as enshrining a federal Europe within the UN as a model for world federalism.61 That the 1946 RIG should also be seen as part of this broader federalist ethos was implicit in the theme its organizers presented to potential participants. Starting from the position that it ‘is not true that European Thought in its totality should be considered as responsible for the catastrophe’ of World War II, rather, in the words of Vale´ry, it was still ‘the brains of a large body’, the RIG’s organizers nonetheless maintained that the time had come: to ask oneself ‘what is alive, what is valid, what is just in Human and European thought’ . . . without regard to fictitious rivalries to help

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Europe realize what its own object in life had been in the past and what its present mission can be in a world in metamorphosis.62 This question was put to the keynote speakers, with the French philosopher and veteran federalist Julien Benda being the first to address it. Benda had been advocating European federalization for cultural as opposed to economic reasons since the 1920s.63 Like Kelsen, he was an interwar Jewish ‘cosmopolitan’ – a ‘non-Jewish Jew’ who had endorsed the cultivation of the ‘universal idea of a common humanity’ among intellectuals as the way to combat the rise of nationalism and racism that he had signalled in his best known work, Treason of the Intellectuals (1927).64 And he did have some credibility as an engaged intellectual. An anti-fascist, he had supported the Popular Front in France in the 1930s and, during the Resistance, when he was already in his 70s, he was writing for the underground press in defence of democracy.65 Yet, ever critical of what he perceived as the political irresponsibility of the intellectual, Benda did not share the hopefulness of the RIG’s organizers’ regarding the current state of European culture. Holding it ‘perfectly responsible for the catastrophe’, the war’s outbreak, in his view, was due to the fact that an awareness of a common European identity had never been achieved.66 If Europe was to avoid another, potentially nuclear war, he cautioned, it was now the intellectual’s duty to instil a ‘universal culture’ as the basis for European unification.67 Benda’s language resonated in the texts of other participants. Words like decomposition, crisis and disorder – all evoking the need for moral reconstruction – pervaded the speeches by many of the conference speakers. Yet, if there was agreement on Europe’s present condition, recommendations for its treatment contrasted sharply along ideological lines, as was shown most clearly in the debate between Karl Jaspers and Georg Luka´cs. As Claus Ha¨ssig has observed, the 1946 RIG is best remembered for this exchange, as it was an early indicator of the rapid ideological polarization of Eastern and Western Europe that would ‘mark the European intellectual debate’ for the next three decades.68 Jaspers, who had kept a low profile in Germany during Hitler’s regime, not least because his wife was half Jewish, had entered the post-war debate over reconstruction with the publication of his badly received The Question of German Guilt in 1946. It was followed, however, by more successful works on contemporary problems,69 and if, as Richard Wolin

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has argued, Jaspers made ‘a commendable name for himself as a public intellectual’, his ‘conservative liberalism’ that relied on experts rather than investing real political power in the masses meant that he never became a ‘convinced democrat’.70 His arguments at the RIG therefore clashed with those of Luka´cs who, as the sole representative from the socialist states, offered a sharp, multi-pronged, Marxist analysis of Europe’s crisis as ultimately tied to the substitution of collective identity by that of the privatized, spiritually diminished individual. This process, he argued, was driven by liberal democracy’s failure to deliver social equality, its equation of progress with the perfection of the individual, marked by the rise of subjectivist philosophy, being detrimental to society.71 Known by that time as a ‘Western Marxist’, his proposed solution was to renew the alliance between socialism and democracy that had been established in 1941 by the Western Powers and the Soviet Union. Jaspers, in contrast, attributing the European problem to a lack of awareness of European unity, and to a crisis of humanism and of the Church, made a typically conservative appeal for the reinforcement of traditional European humanist values.72 Although Campagnolo and de Rougemont did not come into ideological conflict – the SEC was expressly open to representatives of all ideologies and, throughout its history, it refused to take a position on even the most divisive issues, like the Soviet invasion of Hungary – relations between the institutions they founded would be inflected by Cold War tensions similar to those between Jaspers and Luka´cs. Given his involvement with 1930s personalism, it is interesting that de Rougemont chose to reprise Vale´ry in his analysis of the post-war European condition at the 1946 RIG, and in his own defence of the individual. He may have simply been following the lead of the RIG’s organizers, who had introduced the whole question of European reconstruction in terms taken from the French poet, a figure from the previous generation whose reputation had survived the war, in spite of his early support for Pe´tain.73 A recognized ‘visionary’ for de Rougemont’s generation,74 Vale´ry may have been a safe route back to the personalist themes that suffused de Rougemont’s address at the RIG, and an alternative to Benda, whose understanding of engagement as a rational, disinterested practice de Rougemont had previously rejected, preferring to see it as an ‘existential attitude founded on philosophical and theological principles’.75 Observing that although Hitler had been

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beaten, it was actually Europe that had lost the war, de Rougemont argued that the task of reconstruction was moral as much as material. Not only were its Judeo-Christian ethical traditions and its GrecoRoman legal traditions in ruins, Europe had lost its sense of community and collective responsibility. In their place was a mass secularism vulnerable to the lures of fascism (which he now identified with Leninism), anti-Semitism, the individual criminal proclivities cultivated under occupation (participation in the black market, the denunciations of partisans) and a nationalism expressed in visa barriers, trade tariffs, and huge defence budgets.76 Furthermore, as the capitalist and communist ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union were irrefutably European in origin, this physically and morally weakened Europe, wedged between two world powers, now found itself at the mercy of its own progeny.77 Yet, if Europe currently lacked the progressivist optimism that the Soviet Union and the United States had taken to extremes, its saving grace, the ‘single monopoly’ left to Europe was its culture, its status as the world’s ‘thinker’.78 Able to see the ‘complexities and contradictions’ in both the American and Soviet systems, Europe, de Rougemont advised, ought to exist in a dialectical relationship between them, as it alone was capable of maintaining a ‘certain human equilibrium resulting from innumerable tensions’.79 Here his engagement with personalism came to the fore. To be ‘typically European’, de Rougemont suggested, meant possessing: the will to relate to man, to measure all institutions to suit man . . . And these institutions, built to a human scale, human-sized, which translate into the life of culture, the same fundamental tensions as in political structures, I will call federalist.80 There is a superficial resemblance between de Rougemont’s engaged individual as capable of initiating the institutional reforms necessary for resolving the European problem and Campagnolo’s understanding of the intellectual’s social obligations, which has led to the assertion that Campagnolo’s call at the 1946 RIG for the establishment of a cultural organization to this end animated the CEC.81 But this is not so. It animated the SEC, and Campagnolo’s intervention at there immediately signalled the key difference that would endure between

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him and de Rougemont, and between the SEC’s and the CEC’s understanding of how the individual could help to resolve the European crisis. Although Campagnolo’s intervention, which came at the very end of the meeting, was brief and only touched on this aspect of his thinking, it is clear that its premises derived from a much more pointedly ideological critique, in the same vein as the Ventotene Manifesto, of the conditions leading to the war and the consequent European problem.82 If unbridled free market capitalism, assisted by unprecedented scientific and technological advances and by legal institutions privileging ‘nearly unlimited freedom and private initiative’ had favoured ‘progress in general’, it had also invested a surfeit of power in some at the expense of most others.83 The balance between economic aspiration and social good was out of kilter: . . . the creation of extremely powerful economic organizations have broken this equilibrium and the allegedly free competition has played, like the law of the jungle, nearly entirely in favour of the strongest and has become the tyranny of the market. In effect the market is the veritable dictator of modern life, possessing the monopoly of all values, and including those of culture . . .84 Not only had this situation disempowered many individuals. The requirements for capitalist expansion (space, labour, raw materials), accelerated by technological advance, necessarily led to rivalry between states, which were obliged to obtain these resources for their enterprising citizens. Consequently, the crisis was not due to the deviations of either maniacal dictators, or particularly ambitious individuals. They were the local expressions of a larger, international struggle, upheld by political and social systems that had been designed for a pre-industrial era. While Campagnolo appreciated the importance of material well being, he argued that international institutional reform was crucial if it was to be attained in an equitable way, and without recourse to violence. Given the persistence of nationalism and imperialism within states, this reform had to take place at the federal as opposed to state level. More compellingly, Campagnolo also maintained that this reform needed to reflect the needs of peoples rather than states, and to come from them. It was here that the cultural figure, in his view, had a particular role to play in this process: that of raising the awareness among the peoples of Europe of their ‘actual

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needs’.85 Campagnolo did not say here what these might be. He was, however, clearer about the organization that should promote this awareness. Non-official, an ‘anticipation of the European political society of tomorrow’ based on the Swiss federal model, a ‘European society of culture . . . could be, at once, the symbol of European society, an embryo on the cultural level of the political realization of this society’.86 Although Campagnolo’s intervention focused more on the international political conditions underlying Europe’s current crisis, while de Rougemont aimed to identify the essential characteristics within Europeans that would enable them to resolve it, the crucial and enduring difference between them was their understanding of ‘Europe’ in light of the partitioning. This would determine both their respective relationships with the federalist movement during the important next three years of its history, and the complexions of their respective institutions. Firm in his belief in the fundamental unity of European culture, Campagnolo would never advocate a Europe lacking its eastern states, whereas de Rougemont, whose distaste for Marxism was as longstanding as his advocacy of federalism,87 followed the journey taken by the UEF, however much against its will, from a truly Europe-wide enterprise to one that accepted the ‘beginning in the West’ approach. The opening speaker at the Montreux event, de Rougemont delivered ‘The Federalist Attitude’, which has been described as an effort to ally personalist federalist theory with the antitotalitarian struggle by stressing the importance of the ‘person’ (an individual accepting of social responsibilities, as opposed to existing in isolation) against the rise of collectivist societies in the East.88 While some of the leading figures at Montreux, particularly some of the English delegates, were opposed to personalist federalism,89 it did have powerful advocates among continental leaders such as Paul-Henri Spaak and Maurice Schumann. Both had been involved with the personalist movement in the 1930s, and it was on the strength of ‘The Federalist Attitude’ that de Rougemont was invited as rapporteur ge´ne´ral to the Hague conference on European unification (7 – 10 May 1948).90 The decision to hold this conference was reached by the Co-ordination Committee for the Movement for a United Europe, organized by Winston Churchill and administered by his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys.91 If the Hague Conference, which gave rise to the European Movement, finished off any hopes for the possibility of participation

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from the East,92 it also had lasting implications for the CEC and for the role of culture in pursuit of Western European integration. Although the CEC was originally Sandys’ idea, it was developed and defended by de Rougemont, who was also responsible for obtaining funding for it, and this was not easy.93 In order to secure support from the European Movement, significant modifications had to be made to its original project, both in its function and its understanding of what constituted ‘Europe’ during the Cold War. Although de Rougemont had initially sought to establish the CEC as a ‘lighthouse’ that would ‘guide intellectuals and permit the illumination of the world with their ideas’, the actual organization bore little resemblance to its original conception.94 By 1949, its ambitions had been subjected to ‘constant erosion by ideology’, reducing it to a largely administrative organ liaising between different organizations within the Western European integration movement.95 The years 1948 and 1949 were important ones for Campagnolo, too, regarding his relationship with the federalist movement and his decision to set up the SEC. While it still appealed to some MFE members, Campagnolo’s commitment to ‘revolutionary federalism’ and to the participation of Europe’s socialist states had already cost him a place within the UEF’s Central Committee in the elections in April 1947 and, when the Marshall Plan was announced that June, it confirmed the ‘start with the West’ position on integration that the MFE would take.96 This decision on the part of the MFE had also drawn Spinelli back to the movement, and by June 1948 he had taken over as the MFE’s general secretary, with Campagnolo leaving the movement.97 If Campagnolo had given up hope that the federal Europe he envisaged could be achieved within what he would soon refer to as ordinary politics, by this time he had come to perceive culture as the only sphere where it was still possible to pursue truly Europe-wide federalization.98 Although the documentation that could explain how and when he actually set up the SEC’s Promotional Committee and Executive Committee has not survived, it is clear from the minutes of some of its early meetings that, categorically rejecting the ‘start with the West’ approach, he consciously sought to distinguish his organization from the CEC. It is also clear that he held the participation of figures of different ideological camps, above all, communists, to be essential if the Society was to successfully conduct its own approach to federalization

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through the cultivation of shared, supra-political values. As he explained in one of those meetings in June 1949: The European Movement is not the gathering of all the federalist European movements . . . The ‘Centre’, without realizing it, contains a contradiction with regard to losing sight of the universality of culture, excluding the ideology of the countries of Eastern Europe and speaking, after all, of a western culture and restricting the idea of unity to the West. Between our Society and the ‘Centre’, there may be some resemblances in their intentions, but in fact the two initiatives are very different. We want the two parts of Europe, at least on the cultural level, to maintain their unity. We don’t accept the political division. In contrast, the ‘Centre’ considers such divisions as the basis of its activity . . .99 This openness to communism, indeed to individuals of every ideology, not only distinguished the SEC from the CEC, it was one of the features it shared with the RIG in its early years. The RIG, however, was never intended to resolve the problems it raised, but to debate them in public in an accessible way. Thus the SEC, at least initially, can be seen as an organization committed to tackling the key problems that the 1946 RIG had identified, the closeness between the two institutions being reflected in their administrative councils. A number of figures on the RIG’s Executive Council became members of the SEC’s: Babel was the SEC’s first vice-president; Henri de Zie´gler and Fernand-Lucien Mueller were councillors.100 The SEC, however, was not simply a Swiss institution on Italian soil, and that it was established wholly independently from the RIG is clear when the political situation in Switzerland, and within the RIG’s organizational committee itself, is considered. Both were already beginning to undermine the RIG’s initial commitment to being an ideological ‘crossroad’. While there was a general feeling among some of the members of the organizational committee that ‘the RIG ought to be confrontations and not partisan meetings against polemicists of the left or the right’,101 by 1950 the city and canton of Geneva had begun threatening to discontinue their support over the presence of communists at the meetings.102 Consequently, when the communist representatives finally resigned from the RIG’s organizational committee that December, the remaining members saw it as a mixed

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blessing. While it strengthened the organization’s financial position, Babel, for example, anticipated that it would lead to the refusal of Marxists to participate at all in the meetings.103 Politics also played a determinative part in the SEC’s foundation in Italy, and in Venice in particular, but in the opposite way. If Geneva’s administration was increasingly hostile to communism, Venice would have a distinctly leftist government throughout much of the first phase of the Cold War, and had a communist mayor, Giobatta Gianquinto, at the time when the SEC was set up. As this suggests, although the Italian national government participated in the expulsion of communist parties from coalition governments across Western Europe in 1947 in order to qualify for Marshall aid, there was a broader political culture in Italy that was receptive to communism. It had one of the largest communist parties in Western Europe, second only to France, and when the Marshall Plan was announced, it precipitated a particularly turbulent period there. The Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano – PCI) responded aggressively, organizing paralyzing strikes, sabotaging the railway system, and destroying the offices of opposition parties. The violence peaked in July 1948, when an assassination attempt on the party’s leader, Palmiro Togliatti, was followed by a general strike and three days of violence and unrest across the country.104 The implementation of the Marshall Plan also affected the PCI’s cultural policy, which was aligned with the decisions taken at the Wrocław Conference. Held on 25–28 August 1948, the conference was a largely Franco-Polish initiative led by Polish poet and functionary Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jerzy Borejsza, a commissioner from the Polish government, and sponsored by the communist parties of France, Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union.105 Ostensibly a peace conference, the discussions focused on maintaining peace and European cultural unity, as well as fighting colonialism and racism. While those in attendance were unanimous in their condemnation of another war and ‘verbally supported’ the free development of culture, according to Czesław Madajczyk, consensus was not achieved on the role of intellectuals in resisting the imposition of a cultural Iron Curtain.106 In spite of its stated intentions, Wrocław marked the polarization of Europe’s intelligentsia, the attack by Alexandr Fadeev, the general secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, on Western culture, and on Sartre as ‘a hyena with a fountain pen’, is well-known, as is the defence of Sartre there by many Western intellectuals.107

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In spite of the fissures that had opened up in Poland, the SEC’s openness to dialogue with communists did find unlikely but crucial support at this time among some non-communist Italian politicians. Although some of these were even anti-communist, arguably, what enabled them to support the SEC was their experience in working with the communists during the Resistance or within the MFE. As the Swiss philosopher Fernand-Lucien Mueller, one of the first members of the SEC’s Executive Committee, observed in the press at the time of the Constitutive Assembly, if the Society was analogous ‘on the cultural level, with the recent phenomenon of the Resistance’, it was in no way a potential ‘Trojan horse’ for introducing communism into the West. ‘One could not imagine a more liberal climate, in the true sense of the term’, he maintained, ‘than that where the SEC was born.’108 This liberalism, or what one press observer later described as the SEC’s ‘democratic gathering of all points of view’ enabled it to conduct a ‘great dialogue between democracy and communism’.109 Giovanni Ponti, the commissioner of the Venice Biennale, and one of the SEC’s strongest advocates from its inception until his death in 1961, was a particularly strong example of the enduring ability to collaborate with ideological opponents that the Resistance had inspired in some of its participants. The Biennale, Italy’s most prestigious international cultural manifestation at that time, was a key site in the Italian national government’s struggle against Socialist Realism in the 1950s and, although Ponti was an active participant in that fight,110 the Venetian Christian Democratic senator was also a committed Europeanist. Thus Ponti was a regular presence at the RIG throughout his life, and it was at the 1946 RIG that he met Campagnolo.111 Just over a year and a half before their meeting, Ponti, who had been a prominent member of the local Resistance – he was one of the two Christian Democrat (DC) representatives of the regional CLN – had been captured along with other CLN leaders at a strategy meeting and tortured by the local ‘police’ unit, the Carita`.112 Imprisoned at the Palazzo Giusti in Padua, the city was liberated before he could be deported to a concentration camp.113 A popular local figure and a hero of the Resistance, he was appointed under the CLN as the first mayor of Venice after the Liberation.114 Although redressing the considerable material damage to Venice and the surrounding Porto Marghera was a primary task, Ponti, however, clearly placed great importance on culture as equally a means of rebuilding the city’s morale

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and civic pride. During his year as mayor, he organized several art exhibits celebrating Venetian art of the past and present.115 Although the communist Gianquinto replaced him in the local elections in March 1946, Ponti remained the commissioner of the Venice Biennale.116 It was under his management, during which time the exhibition was transformed from the instrument of the fascist regime into a proponent of a new – although not politically disinterested – shared European cultural identity, that the SEC was placed under its aegis and given an administrative seat within its headquarters. It remained there until 1961.117 Ponti, however, was not the only link between the Resistance and the SEC’s first Executive Council. Egidio Meneghetti, the co-ordinator and director of the local CLN’s military committee, and Angiolo Tursi, the committee’s Liberal Party representative who had been captured by the Carita` shortly after Ponti, were also members.118 Stanislao Ceschi, another DC senator who had been involved with the Resistance and with the reintroduction of democracy in Italy after the war, would play as prominent a role as Ponti within the SEC. Remembered for his careerlong preoccupation with social justice, for his strong sense of solidarity between classes and political parties and for his openness of mind, he was a friend of many of Italy’s leading anti-fascists, and had sat, along with Meneghetti, on the MFE’s honorary committee when Campagnolo was the movement’s general secretary.119 The poet Diego Valeri, whose editorship of the liberal daily Il Gazzettino led to his sentence, in 1943, of 30 years’ imprisonment by a Nazi tribunal in Venice, had gone into exile in Switzerland.120 This group of resisters and dissenters, joined by PCI members Carlo Izzo and Manlio Dazzi, gave the Executive Council its intended diversity since its beginnings in 1948. As its composition also suggests, although the SEC was always meant to be an organization by and for cultural figures, the importance of politicians to its operations should not be underestimated. Ponti and Ceschi would be particularly valuable proponents of the SEC throughout the 1950s because of their positions in the national government, which they used to secure financial support for the SEC.121 They, along with the communist senator Ambrogio Donini, were also able to facilitate the organization of special events in an era when obtaining visas for travel between the West and the East, particularly the Soviet Union, could be a genuine ordeal. Politicians, however, were also very useful in the SEC’s early recruitment efforts, particularly in arranging contacts with figures in

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Europe’s socialist countries. Since the earliest meetings of the Executive Committee, Campagnolo was absolutely clear about two key aspects of the SEC’s recruitment strategy: luminaries must be sought, especially from abroad, and participation from Europe’s socialist countries was essential.122 The latter, in fact, was particularly important not only to the success of the SEC’s project, but also in distinguishing the Society from the other organizations coming together at that time. In December 1948 the Executive Committee learned of de Rougemont’s plans to establish the CEC in Geneva, in which Campagnolo had been invited to participate. Campagnolo, however, understood the CEC to be ‘rising up in the frame of the Western Union’, thus ‘substantially of an anti-communist position’. Reflecting that ‘Venice is further East than Geneva, not only physically, but spiritually’, he declined collaboration.123 Within six months, however, the activities of the CEC were putting the SEC under pressure to go public. As Babel observed, since the CEC had declared its mission as being ‘to awaken and express European consciousness . . . to offer a meeting place for intellectuals who desire the [Western] European union’, the SEC needed to make it publicly known that it was open to all parties and all ideologies, and that its apolitical position meant its objectives were different, yet in no way opposed, to those of the CEC.124 Around the same time, the communist Partisans of Peace movement, formed from the Wrocław Conference, held its first conference in Paris, with the scientists Fre´de´ric Joliot-Curie as president and J. D. Bernal as vicepresident.125 The SEC, keen to not put itself in competition with the Partisans of Peace either, offered membership to them both. While Bernal and Joliot-Curie felt they were too busy with their own organization, Bernal did become a member of the SEC’s Promotional Committee in 1949.126 Joliot-Curie joined in 1953, when the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Francais – PCF) finally allowed its adherents to participate in the SEC.127 As an organization open to individuals of any ideology, the SEC’s early recruitment strategy relied heavily on the contacts of its founding members with both individuals and institutions. Attracting support from the ‘big names’ in Italian cultural and intellectual life appears to have been quite straightforward, and by the time of the second sitting of the Executive Committee in December 1948, the SEC counted Norberto Bobbio, Guido de Ruggiero, Guido Gonella and G. Francesco Malipiero

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among its Promotional Committee members. Benedetto Croce and Gaetano de Sanctis soon followed. Although Campagnolo worried that ‘nothing is obtained’ without celebrated names from abroad,128 the recruitment process, at least in Western Europe, appears to have been equally unproblematic. It was expected that anyone on the SEC’s Promotional Committee, composed of nearly 300 predominantly Western European members, would encourage interest in the SEC among their contacts. In Western Europe, relations between figures could be direct, and negotiated on a one-to-one basis. It was by such means that one of the SEC’s earliest supporters, the French writer and broadcaster Jean Lescure, was able to bring a number of leading French intellectuals to the SEC. An anti-fascist since the early 1930s, he had been involved with the clandestine press throughout the war, through which he made the acquaintance of a range of France’s most celebrated cultural figures.129 With his excellent connections, Lescure was instrumental in securing the membership of, among others, Raymond Aron, Jean Bazaine, Albert Be`guin, Andre´ Breton, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Georges Duhamel, Jacques Jaujard, Fernand Le´ger, Michel Leiris, Rene´ Le Senne, Vercors and Jean Wahl.130 This is not to say, however, that he was always successful. Both Lescure and Campagnolo pursued Gaston Bachelard and Andre´ Malraux, but neither of them joined.131 Yet Lescure was only one of the SEC’s ‘procurers’. Mueller acted in this capacity in Switzerland, and Antonio Banfi, another senator and former resister with close links with the PCI, as well as Umberto Terracini, in Italy and the Soviet Union.132 The RIG was also an important source of members, given the closeness between the two organizations.133 Campagnolo, too, was a tireless recruiter, and when he learned that the PEN Club was to host a congress in Venice in 1949, he immediately saw this influx of ‘many people of the first rank’ as ‘favouring the birth of the SEC’.134 Founded in 1921 in response to World War I, the PEN Club, according to its statutes, was committed from the outset to ‘promoting and maintaining friendly relations and intellectual cooperation among writers of all countries in the interest of the freedom of artistic creation and good international relations’.135 Although many of its national centres suspended their activities during the war, when it ended they quickly resumed their activities. As a non-partisan, ‘humanitarian’ organization, parallel in its aspirations to Unesco and the UN, as R. A. Wilford has observed,136 like the SEC, it never abandoned

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relations with Europe’s socialist countries. By 1949 there were national centres in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, and it held out hope of reconstituting its centres elsewhere in the East.137 There were, however, basic differences in PEN’s and the SEC’s understanding of the relationship between politics and culture: while PEN understood the intellectual’s responsibility to be the promotion of the free exchange of literature regardless of political barriers, the SEC considered the engaged intellectual as obliged to create the conditions for dismantling them; this, moreover, was only the precondition for more sweeping political change. Nonetheless, both organizations did oppose the cultural partitioning of Europe, and saw strong cultural relations as the basis for a deeper human solidarity.138 Meeting with PEN’s secretary in early 1949, Campagnolo and he discussed potential relations between the two organizations, and PEN’s full membership details were given to him.139 Communist participation, especially from the Soviet Union, however, was far more difficult to obtain; this was for a number of reasons. On a practical level, communication with potential Soviet members was seldom made directly. Usually, such contact was only possible if they were already in Western Europe and could be approached informally at social events. Otherwise, all requests for contact with figures within the Soviet Union went through the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoje Obscestvo Kulturnoj Svjasi s Zagranicej – VOKS).140 Although, in spite of censorship, contacting figures directly in other of Europe’s socialist states was still possible, securing their permission to travel abroad was a difficult and lengthy process. Consequently, having members of the Italian government within the SEC was vital to recruitment from those countries, as they could use their positions to re-establish and to make new connections, and to press for travel visas from the Italian and international authorities. Terracini, a communist senator, was particularly suited to the task of contacting figures in the East because of his decades-long involvement with the international communist movement. Having joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1911, ten years later he helped to found the PCI, and that same year he went to the Soviet Union to participate in the Third Communist International.141 Elected to its directorate, he returned to the Soviet Union each year for the next four years in this capacity. This close involvement with the International was only brought to an end when he was arrested in 1925, beginning a 15-year period during which he was in

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and out of Italian prisons.142 Incarceration, however, gave him the time to reflect on his involvement with the International, and his exchanges with Gramsci and Lenin left him firmly committed to the importance of a democratic phase in Italy’s transition from fascism toward socialism, and to the belief, by the late 1930s, that the popular front formation among Italian anti-fascists should be extended to all democratic forces, including Catholic and liberal ones.143 Thus Terracini already possessed the openness to ideological difference that would be the SEC’s defining feature, even though it had brought about his expulsion from the PCI in 1947, when he criticized the party’s position toward the newly formed Cominform (Communist Information Bureau).144 If the moderate nature of his thinking made him an ‘“uncomfortable” communist’, as Aldo Agosti has described him,145 it was, however, the source of his actual political power and, by the mid-1940s, he was already well embedded within Italian national politics. A senior court official in 1945 and 1946, he was elected president of the Constitutive Assembly in February 1947, remaining in that post until the national elections in April 1948.146 Such openness was, however, in short supply within many communist parties across Europe in the late 1940s. If Terracini, still a senator and with a wealth of contacts in Europe’s socialist countries, had little success in securing communist members at that time,147 even in France, where the Communist Party had initially been cautiously receptive to its members participating in the SEC, permission had been withdrawn by spring 1949, its directorate fearing that support for the SEC’s objectives might represent an ideological deviation.148 The SEC was encountering similar attitudes within the parties of the Soviet Union and other of Europe’s communist countries.149 Only the PCI was somewhat less dogmatic, taking a wait-and-see position,150 with Terracini and fellow SEC affiliate Concetto Marchesi probably having done much to encourage this. As PCI members, they were able to debate with its most senior officials, Emilio Sereni and Togliatti, face to face on the SEC’s behalf.151 Terracini was therefore surprised by the PCF’s decision to suspend permission for Louis Aragon, Fre´de´ric Joliot-Curie and Marcel Prenant to join the SEC.152 And while he was unable to give Campagnolo the reason for this decision, Henri Lefebvre could. Although Lefebvre only joined the SEC in January 1957, he had been its champion within the PCF since Campagnolo first told him about it at

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the 1949 RIG.153 According to Lefebvre, his party’s intransigence came down to Sartre’s presence on the Promotional Committee.154 While it would be an overstatement to say that this alone had prohibited communist participation, Sartre certainly did exemplify the problem a third force orientation posed to doctrinaire communists. He had been a lightning rod for Soviet criticism at Wrocław, and although he had officially resigned from France’s Revolutionary Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement de´mocratique re´volutionnaire – RDR), which had advocated European unity on a socialist basis, in October 1949,155 his association with the third force politics the RDR embraced was nonetheless complementary to the orientation of his own work at that time. The reinterpretation of Marxism he offered in ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ (1945) had introduced a new political dimension to Sartre’s earlier work and, as Ian Birchall has observed, the search for a third way between Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism by such an internationally celebrated philosopher would have been seen by the PCF as drawing even more unwanted attention to the divisive developments within the international communist movement recently initiated by Yugoslavia.156 The latter’s opting in June 1948 for selfmanagement socialism and a position of neutrality in international affairs not only caused a rupture between it and the Soviet Union. It set a dangerous precedent, from the CPSU’s perspective, for other Soviet satellite countries. The consequent resistance among the Soviets and their allies to the ideological diversity premising the SEC was ultimately responsible for the late date of the Society’s Constitutive Assembly. In order to fulfil its purpose of bringing together figures of opposing ideologies on what it held to be the neutral terrain of culture, the SEC very much wanted Soviet representation. But it could no more endorse communism, as did the Partisans of Peace movement, than it could the intransigent anticommunism of the newly founded CEC, and the resulting deadlock took several years to resolve. In 1948, the SEC’s Executive Committee was already feeling the pressure of needing to go public with its plans for the Society in light of the emergence of these other organizations, and the date originally set for the Constitutive Assembly was 25 April 1949 – Saint Mark’s Day157 – and also the fourth anniversary of Venice’s liberation. The lack of participation from Europe’s socialist countries, however, prompted its postponement. Although Campagnolo

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was satisfied with the SEC’s ability to attract Italian and Western European participation,158 a ‘major difficulty’ still remained, and would, throughout much of 1949, regarding the communist countries. Friends had been recommending figures to invite from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, yet by September Campagnolo could only confirm the first members from Hungary and Poland; most of them were currently residing in the West.159 It was therefore decided to delay the event in hopes of greater communist participation, as several important factors hung upon it. Not only was it central to the SEC’s identity and purpose, it was the feature that appealed to the local government bodies that were helping to support it.160 For the same reason, the Executive Committee also decided not to convene the Constitutive Assembly in tandem with the Italo-Soviet Congress to be held in Turin that October, but to use the latter as an opportunity to familiarize congress attendees with the SEC.161 October held other possibilities for the SEC in this regard. The Turin meeting was to be followed by a Partisans of Peace event in Rome, and the presence of so many figures from Europe’s socialist countries in Italy that month would enable Campagnolo to contact potential members directly. These first face-to-face conversations, however, made clear to Campagnolo the theoretical and practical problems that would continue to confront the SEC, from the ‘either/or’ mentality that was as much a feature of the hardline communist mentality as it would be of the CCF’s, to the obstructive interventions of official bodies in the East and in Italy to participation in events they considered ideologically inappropriate. For example, Campagnolo noted that the doctrinaire nature of the Italo-Soviet Congress, where he had approached several Bulgarian and Romanian functionaries, meant that they were ideologically ill-disposed to the SEC’s ‘more comprehensive vision of the political and social problems of the moment’.162 His subsequent conversation in Rome with the Soviet Union’s poet and functionary Ilya Ehrenburg, a comparative liberal, was equally disheartening. In spite of the openness to Western culture Ehrenburg had previously demonstrated, he was now highly suspicious of any cultural initiatives originating outside of the Soviet Union, dismissing any dialogue with figures not accepting the ‘fundamental principles of our culture and politics’ as unprofitable.163 Campagnolo also spoke at length with Luka´cs, who shared Ehrenburg’s reservations.164 Taking Luka´cs’ comments as indicative of the

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‘mentality’ forming in the people’s republics, Campagnolo described this as a fear among intellectuals there of ‘being dragged into discussions that could make them assume cultural positions not acceptable to militant communism’.165 This fear was confirmed by Campagnolo’s conversation at the Turin Congress with Alexandr Nikolaevich Nesmeianov, the rector of the University of Moscow. He stressed Soviet unease about Sartre’s membership in particular as an impediment to communist participation in the SEC;166 Lefebvre and Terracini’s most recent feedback confirmed the scale of the problem. Now concentrating their efforts on Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and on the Soviet Union, respectively,167 they too related back the opinion among their contacts there that certain members might be removed from the SEC in order to make membership more appealing in Europe’s socialist countries.168 But there were even more strings attached to Soviet membership regarding the SEC’s orientation. According to Terracini, who had discussed the SEC at length with the Soviet ambassador to Italy Mikhail Kostylev, in order for the SEC to obtain Soviet participation, its ‘attitude should be of open sympathy if not direct support’ for the Partisans of Peace.169 This request came at a time when the Partisans of Peace was facing considerable resistance from Western European governments. As Andrew Brown has recounted, the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, planned for Paris in April 1949, had been undermined by the French government’s refusal to grant entry visas for over 300 delegates, mainly Chinese. They had to be provided for at a parallel event in Prague.170 Likewise, the meeting planned for Sheffield in November 1950 never took place, as the British government also withheld visas, and the event had to be held in Warsaw instead.171 The SEC’s Executive Committee was, however, unwilling to endorse a political movement, and thus refused to express solidarity with the Partisans. The most it would do was acknowledge that both the Partisans and the SEC were dedicated to realizing peace, and to compare this with its position toward the CEC, from which the SEC so consciously differed.172 In a series of reflections that November on his encounters with Eastern Bloc intellectuals, Campagnolo finally reconciled himself to the improbability of Soviet intellectuals joining the SEC without their government’s consent. Moreover, in his view, convinced Marxists believed that ‘the truly cultural character of an activity depends on its

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perfect adhesion to political reality’, and were therefore unable to distinguish a purely cultural from a political organization.173 Thus he concluded that membership from the East would only come when the SEC was seen to be a ‘considerable force’ endorsed by public opinion,174 and that the Constitutive Assembly should go ahead with little representation from Europe’s socialist countries. What confirmed Campagnolo in this conclusion, however, was his belief in the existence of a European culture, upon which ideology was an imposition. Asking himself, after the Turin meeting, ‘whether the abyss dug by politics has also involved culture’, if the political abyss was equally cultural, the world was indeed ‘divided into two parts’. If, however, the cultural division was only ‘personal or psychological’, then it was not, perhaps, insuperable.175 Interpreting the reservations expressed by Ehrenburg and Luka´cs as purely personal apprehension, there was still, in his view, good reason for going ahead with the SEC.

CHAPTER 2 `

THE SEC'S EARLY YEARS: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE' AND THE APPEAL TO THE INTELLECTUALS OF EUROPE AND THE WORLD (1952)

Walter Lipgens has described Campagnolo as guilty of reducing the MFE to a ‘debating society’.1 Yet that is how the SEC really began, not least because the Society’s general secretary saw dialogue as the best means of broaching Europe’s de-partitioning. By the time of the Constitutive Assembly in May 1950, however, it was still uncertain whether the SEC would actually be able to bring cultural figures from Eastern and Western Europe together for the face-to-face discussions that defined the Society’s purpose. While the Promotional Committee had already secured nearly 300 adherents, communist participants remained scarce, with representation of any kind from Europe’s socialist countries coming mainly from figures living in the West.2 Support from Western European countries was also unbalanced. In spite of the committee’s efforts to attract as international a range as possible, the SEC’s initial membership was heavily Italian, nearly 40 per cent, with additional, significant representations coming only from the French and Swiss.3 At the same time, the SEC was also vying with the WPC and the CCF for adherents. All founded within the space of 15 months of each other, these three organizations had distinct objectives. The communistbacked WPC was promoting disarmament and, in theory, co-operation.

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In contrast, the stridently anti-communist CCF, established in response to it, embraced Western Europe’s integration and a strong Atlantic alliance.4 As a non-partisan organization set up in order to bring communists and anti-communists together to discuss their differences, the SEC was willing to accept supporters of either of these organizations into its own membership. Yet for some, joining an organization that included their ideological opponents was unthinkable. Consequently, at the time of the Constitutive Assembly, much of Europe’s intelligentsia was entering a period of ideological self-definition, during which manifestos were published, positions were taken, and allegiances were clarified. In spite of this potentially competitive situation, Campagnolo was optimistic about the prospects for the Society’s membership. Although some of Europe’s best-known figures of the period – Theodor Adorno, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Einstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans Kelsen, Georg Luka´cs, Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, Andre´ Malraux and Bertrand Russell – had all declined SEC membership,5 the reasons typically given were health or work commitments. Only a few had openly expressed doubts regarding the likelihood of achieving useful dialogue between individuals of opposing ideological convictions, or about the composition of the SEC’s Executive Council.6 Given the number of eminent figures who had already joined, and the fact that the Soviet government seemed to be at least interested in the SEC,7 it was decided to go ahead with the Constitutive Assembly. Opening in Venice on 28 May 1950 at the Ducal Palace, an audience of around 150 was welcomed with speeches by several of the SEC’s executive councillors. Although their political affiliations ranged from Christian Democratic to communist, in spite of these differences, or rather because of them, each stressed, in his own way, the fundamental unity of European culture, the natural cultural solidarity among peoples who were now divided by Europe’s partitioning, and the collective social obligation of intellectuals to redress that division. As Diego Valeri observed in his address, if past and recent events had shown that ‘culture has always been the great friend of social and political movements’, serving as ‘the ark in which the essential values of humanity itself have been safe, and protected’, history had also been: charged with demonstrating in its tragic manner, that the romantic dream of absolute individualism remains unrealizable

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and that the other dream of a national individualism is equally absurd, since it refuses the necessary solidarity with the world and tends to substitute the generic and vague responsibility of the tribe for the precise moral responsibility of each.8 If its recent resistance to fascism had reconfirmed the intelligentsia’s historically proven ability to put aside philosophical and ideological differences in order to join forces to ‘rescue the dignity of the human person’, what was required now was an equally politically disinterested culture, as only it could create the solidarity between them on the scale needed to bridge Europe’s current ideological and political divide.9 While Valeri’s speech eloquently summarized the background to the SEC’s statutes pending approval at the assembly, their preamble made the case for why such an organization was needed, and is therefore worth citing in full: The crisis of Europe, already very ancient, is today aggravated to the point of revealing clearly the state of economic, social and political disintegration of our continent. However, in spite of the prophets of doom, one should not conclude the irremediable decadence of our civilization, even if it is gravely compromised: the very violence of the struggle and the importance of the forces engaged prove, on the contrary, that Europe is only suffering from growing pains. But the state of disorder in which we find ourselves risks compromising the renovation of the European organism. From now on it is necessary to be more deeply aware of this crisis and of its significance, in order to arouse the forces capable of overcoming it. Such are the terms in which the ‘European Problem’ should be posed. We must work for the freedom of spiritual exchanges between men. At a time when so many dialogues risk being interrupted, this common will is in itself an engagement. Also we cannot accept an irreparable rupture for ideological or political reasons, however bitter this conflict might be. It falls to men of culture to express this refusal, for they are responsible for the values without which no true social life is conceivable. The fruits of this culture can be used indifferently, to the advantage or to the prejudice of society. It is therefore necessary to

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fight the misuse that men can be led to make of it when at the mercy of interests and passions, too often excited and unleashed in our days by institutions and doctrines. This task, no man of culture can assume from now on in isolation. The SEC therefore puts itself forward as a free association of men who, conscious of their responsibility, desire to combine their efforts to confer on their action the maximum authority and effectiveness. Persuaded that culture should not constitute a private good for anyone, the members of the SEC mean to put their action in the service of Man.10 This basic premise for the SEC was ratified by all but three of those present, and the procedural regulations were also approved without difficulty.11 The Society’s theoretical bases, however, were more debatable, and some of the queries raised about the core concepts identifying its agent as the ‘man of culture’, its method as the ‘politics of culture’, and its objective of creating a ‘culture that aspires to be universal’ as a precondition for European, and eventual global political federation, would be debated within the SEC long after the assembly had ended. Although it was the least contentious of these terms, what the ‘man of culture’ meant was immediately questioned, those assembled being keen to clarify the distinction between it and the term ‘intellectual’.12 The fact that the membership agreed to support Campagnolo’s proposed term on the grounds that it was more inclusive than ‘intellectual’ is significant, as it anticipated the limiting effect that too narrow an understanding of cultural work, who was qualified to undertake it, and who could successfully defend it, would have on the SEC’s ability to translate it into political or social change. This concern is supported by the statistics. In 1950, the main groups comprising the SEC were first of all writers and historians, but also philologists and philosophers.13 In contrast, the figures from the sphere of ordinary politics, to use the SEC’s expression, such as political scientists, politicians and sympathetic benefactors from business and industry, whom Campagnolo’s term included because of their concern for culture, were in some cases almost negligible. For example, at the time of the Constitutive Assembly, only three businessmen, 13 politicians or government functionaries, and three political scientists were members.14 Most surprisingly, there were no economists, nor would their

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representation substantially change throughout the period considered in this study.15 This could help to account for the SEC’s understanding of the European problem as primarily, if not exclusively, an ethico-political one. While it is a surprising oversight if one considers the intimate understanding of Marxism that many of its members had, the division between what the French call the ‘human sciences’ and the social sciences seems to have been largely observed by many cultural organizations like the SEC. Consequently, there appears to have been no place for centre-left economists to meet, whereas the Mont Pe`lerin Society, for example, established in Switzerland in 1947, provided just such a space for their neoliberal peers, and, its biographers have noted, was remarkably successful in producing the ‘different kinds of neoliberalism’ that proliferated across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century.16 If economists had slipped through the net, that Campagnolo was focused instead on the SEC as an active political force was clear in the topic he had chosen for his secretary general’s report for this assembly: the politics of culture. Unlike policy documents, which were drafted jointly with the councillors for ratification at the general assemblies, Campagnolo alone wrote these reports. Addressing topics raised at the annual general assemblies, within the SEC’s secretariat, or at its Executive Council meetings during the intervening months, they provided the basis for further discussion. Given that the very purpose and function of the SEC depended on the validity of the politics of culture, his first address sought to explain how it could bring ‘communists, liberals, socialists and Catholics’ alike into a useful dialogue.17 This, he suggested, was by remaining apolitical. Assuming that the aims of culture were essentially moral and common to all cultural figures irrespective of their political beliefs, he argued that culture could be the grounds for dialogue, beyond politics or ideology.18 Yet this required a clear distinction between the public activities of the intellectual, or ‘man of culture’, and the product of his or her creative activity. To endow works of art with political values or ideas would be making Kulturpolitik, turning them into vehicles for political ideas. As culture always suffered when pressed into the service of politics – Campagnolo cited the condition of Italian culture under fascism as a recent, prime example of this – defending culture and the best conditions for its free, ethical development was an expression of non-partisan, yet inherently political engagement.19 By defending the conditions for free cultural expression, ‘men of culture’

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necessarily defended the only means for creating the values that politics ought to serve. In spite of the care Campagnolo had given to the politics of culture in his address, its definition in the statutes was nonetheless vague, merely committing members to its promotion ‘by any fitting and effective means’.20 The lack of discussion at the Constitutive Assembly of how it might be practised is therefore striking, given the frustration that would grow within its membership in the next few years over the SEC’s slowness in implementing it. The Society’s breakthrough in achieving real face-to-face contact between Eastern and Western European intellectuals only came in March 1956 with the East– West Dialogue. Held in Venice just weeks after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, which had precipitated the first ‘thaw’ in East– West relations, it was only then that it was politically possible to organize such an event. Instead, the most contentious concept by far in the proposed statutes was the idea of the civilization of the universal. Although the term only really crystallized in 1953, when the SEC began to think about the ideological partitioning that had happened in Europe in more global terms, the disagreement over whether European cultural values could make any claim to universality began at the Society’s inception, and continued well into the 1960s. Given the importance of this debate and its ramifications not only for the SEC, but also for its relationships with other organizations, it will be dealt with in a separate chapter. But it is worth noting here that the argument for Europe being the source of a new, universal culture was already contested at the Constitutive Assembly.21 The SEC’s assemblies typically concluded with the drawing up of a resolution, which summarized the discussions and was given to the press. Yet, before agreeing such a statement at the Constitutive Assembly, a special lecture was given by Julien Benda, who had been invited to address problems central to the SEC. The choice of Benda was a poignant one, since the problem his own reputation was facing at that time was so similar to the one that the SEC would confront in the coming years: that of having a communist affiliation. In 1946, in a new preface to Treason of the Intellectuals, Benda, while critical of communism’s dogmatism, had expressed admiration for its commitment to justice. This quickly led, his biographer Louis-Albert Revah has noted, to a relationship, not wholly one-sided, with the PCF in his

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‘senility’, and an association with the Party that he was never able to escape: even at the time of his death, aged 87, the Party’s paper L’Humanite´ claimed him as being on the side of the ‘party of truth’.22 Benda’s address to the SEC’s assembly was largely a repudiation of dialectical materialism, arguing instead that culture always had, and always would transcend economic and social determinants.23 Yet, in the light of the earlier discussions at the assembly around the universality of European culture, his belief in its universalizing mission could have been construed as committing the SEC to a set of Eurocentric assumptions that its membership was ready to disavow. His lecture was delivered in the palace’s nearly empty Sala del Piovego, and whether this was due to the lateness of the lecture, which began at quarter to eight in the evening, or to the audience’s disinclination to listen to a voice so markedly from the inter-war period, is uncertain. But one thing is clear: the formal resolution drawn up for the press at the end of the assembly resonated the unease of those present over the assumed global preeminence of the post-1945 European intellectual. Written largely by Campagnolo and SEC councillor Jean Amrouche, the Paris-based Algerian poet and broadcaster who, until his death in 1962, was an important advocate of Third World representation within the Society, it avoided any reference to the SEC’s potentially universal ambitions. Instead, the focus of this text was firmly on the role of intellectual, ‘irrespective of race, language, religion, nationality or political affiliation’, in resolving the European crisis, and the forces he or she needed to rouse – the press, and the will of the people – ‘to help Europe overcome the crisis into which it has plunged’.24 Although what the politics of culture actually meant was still unclear to many, after the assembly the Executive Council immediately began taking steps to put it into practice. They led to the publication of the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World. Drafted by the Executive Council ‘in the spirit of the resolution of the Constitutive Assembly’,25 and ratified in November 1951 at the SEC’s First General Assembly, it was a definitive act for the SEC. Not only would it enable de´tente with the PCF and the PCI, and the Society’s first collaboration with the Soviet intelligentsia through Ehrenburg. Because of its commitment to bringing intellectuals of all countries and of all political orientations, including communist, into dialogue, it also had important, albeit very different repercussions for the SEC’s relationship with the WPC and the CCF.

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Opening with the observation that the war had not actually ended, but had merely entered into a state of antagonism capable of breaking into violence of unprecedented ferocity, the Appeal asserted that too many people had forgotten too quickly the alliances made during the war. They had accepted the ‘either/or’ mentality, the idea that the world was indeed ‘divided into two armed blocs’.26 Against this ‘politics of either or, with or against, yes or no’, the Appeal advocated ‘yes and yes’: dialogue, and the possibility of change.27 As politicians had proven incapable of initiating the discussions that could bring the structural changes to the international legal system Campagnolo had envisaged since his time with Kelsen, it fell to intellectuals, working in the spirit of freedom and solidarity unique to culture, to prepare the terrain for a dialogue that could bring about the end of Europe’s partitioning. Nothing less than ‘the freedom and dignity of man’ was at stake, and to refuse to do so was ‘neither just, nor wise, nor courageous’.28 The Appeal concluded by presenting the SEC as a locus for activities promoting dialogue, in which it would play a directive role.29 Although the Appeal did not commit the SEC to any specific activities, it was nonetheless an opportunity for the Society to publicly identify itself and to give itself a ‘physiognomy’, as Bobbio described it, which could enhance its visibility and membership.30 As his observations suggest, this appeal was more a rallying cry than a plan of action. At that time there was a serious concern over the SEC’s public image and its implications for recruitment, with Amrouche advising that contact with the popular press be avoided, and Lescure even recommending that the press be avoided entirely until the SEC’s mission was more clearly agreed among its members.31 There was some urgency to do this, given the speed with which both the CCF and the WPC were organizing themselves. Having established itself at the Wrocław Conference in 1948, in mid-March 1950 – before the SEC had even held its Constitutive Assembly – the WPC had already issued its Stockholm Appeal. This high profile petition for a ban on all atomic weapons claimed 500 million signatories from 79 countries,32 and was followed by the Appeal to the UN. Issuing from its 2,065 strong second world congress in Warsaw that November, this sweeping document called for nothing less than the peaceful resolution of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the continued disarmament of Germany and Japan, an end to colonialism and racism, non-interference in the affairs of individual

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states, the banning of all military propaganda, an investigation into US war crimes in Korea, the prohibition of all weapons of mass destruction, and for a prompt reduction of the troops of all the great powers to onethird of their present size.33 The CCF, on the other hand, was founded in West Berlin in June 1950 at the eponymous Congress for Cultural Freedom, and sought to promote intellectual resistance to Soviet expansion and to strengthen the idea of Western European unity.34 Proving to be particularly attractive to the German and American intelligentsia, as Pierre Gre´mion has observed, the CCF’s International Committee had also attracted – at least initially – a number of high-profile federalists, including Henri Brugmans, Denis de Rougemont and Eugen Kogon,35 who had supported the ‘beginning in the West’ approach taken at the UEF congress in Montreux in August 1947. Angered by the WPC’s activities, in mid December 1950 its international committee issued ‘Resolution X’. This widely circulated document, distributed to an array of international newspapers and press agencies, as well as the Ministry of Information, Paris, and, of course, Joliot-Curie himself, denounced the WPC as an element of the ‘Soviet war plan’ and challenged it to a series of public debates.36 The conflict between the CCF and the WPC inevitably affected the way the Appeal was received, with a number of SEC members seeing it as an opportunity, or as an impetus to choose sides. This was already clear in the initial responses to the draft version. Several figures with clearly leftist political orientations within the SEC, for example the Dutch radical socialist philosopher H. J. Pos and his compatriot, the historian Jan Romein, a former communist who, like Terracini, had been excluded from his party in 1927 for his ‘heterodox views’, called for a more forceful assertion of Europe not as the battlefield between the United States and the Soviet Union, but the place where the intelligentsia would resolve the conflict. This would be through a ‘socialist synthesis’ that would abolish capitalist greed and safeguard the rights of the individual.37 The East German philologist Wolfgang Steinitz, a veteran of the socialist and communist movements of the 1920s, and of the Resistance, and one of the SEC’s few Eastern Bloc members at that time, even encouraged the Society to support a strategy of peaceful coexistence, like the WPC.38 On the other hand, several CCF affiliates within the SEC – Hans Paeschke, Franz Josef Schoeningh and Dolf Sternberger, all

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West Germans – felt that the Appeal confronted those living on ideological fault lines such as Germany with an impossible choice. Paeschke was then the editor of Merkur (Mercury), which has been described as the unparalleled ‘journal of ideas’ of its time in Europe,39 and a founding member who was particularly active in the SEC’s recruitment activities in West Germany. As he noted, in the light of current German ‘crisis’ – the loss of five German states to the Soviet administration, a regime where ‘nothing less than the most important rights of man and of the individual are compromised and restrained by force’ – Paeschke maintained that relations between the blocs could not be reduced to an abstraction, and even he himself could not ‘say yes to a communist regime’.40 Furthermore, the use of the ‘double yes formula’, clearly an attack on the CCF, would expose the SEC’s project to ‘misinterpretation’, and he urged it to find an alterative expression.41 As Paeschke’s reservations suggest, German recruitment was a serious concern for the SEC. In 1950, its overall membership was already heavily Italian and French, and in 1951, just over three-quarters of its 114 new members came from France and Italy.42 While recruitment was starting to take off in Switzerland, membership was concentrated among the French-speaking Swiss. In contrast, Austrian involvement was negligible and, after initial flurries, the SEC was generating little interest in West Germany, encountering hostility in Britain, and disinterest in Scandinavia.43 Nor was it making any headway in Europe’s socialist countries. Save for the Yugoslav historian Grga Novak, the six new Eastern European members the SEC could count were actually living in the West.44 Equally, although Campagnolo had envisaged the establishment of national centres in each country where the SEC had members, only France and Italy had managed to do this with any alacrity, with centres being set up in Paris and Rome by 1951, eventually followed by one in Brussels in 1953. Although the SEC’s recruitment strategy had originally targeted international luminaries within literature and the arts, the imbalances in its composition soon led to a liberalization of its membership criteria and, by the end of 1951, three categories of membership had been established.45 In the first were those of ‘great renown in the cultural world’, in the second those who could effectively realize the aims of the SEC through their direct activities in the cultural domain and, in the third, those who, ‘without exercising a cultural function in the strict

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sense of the word, are interested in culture and . . . through their eminent social position, through their relations, their material means’, could serve the aims of the Society.46 This more operational approach to membership was possibly informed by the competition for support that the SEC faced from the CCF and the WPC and, although Campagnolo did not immediately rule out Steinitz’s suggestion for collaboration with the WPC, not least as it could increase support from its adherents for the SEC,47 there were fundamental differences in the two institutions’ understanding of the role of culture within East– West relations. The SEC was committed to the long-term project of recasting the moral bases of an international society in which the role of culture was to provide the values for a framework for building a fairer and more peaceful international order. As Campagnolo observed at the First General Assembly, it was not ‘a politics of the immediate’.48 In contrast, the WPC was concerned with current political problems, and saw culture as a practical medium for promoting peace through the cultivation of international understanding through the organization of conferences and through exchanges of art and literature.49 Nor did the WPC consist exclusively, or even predominantly, of the intelligentsia. The Wrocław Conference was close to being such a manifestation: out of the 360 attendees, the audience was overwhelmingly composed of cultural figures, with writers making up a third of those in attendance, with the next largest group being visual and performing artists, followed by doctors and scientists.50 Yet the WPC would soon pride itself on its diversity. Of the 2,065 in attendance at the Warsaw Congress, only 664 (32 per cent) counted as intelligentsia, if strictly defined as artists, doctors, philosophers, politicians, scientists, writers, university professors, and similar cultural figures. However, the more expansive interpretation within Soviet Marxism of what constituted creative work meant that businessmen, labourers, military officers, peasants, students and white-collar workers could be included with no contradiction of the WPC’s status as a cultural organization.51 The internal correspondence preserved within the CCF’s archives in Chicago suggests that, up until the final months of 1951, the CCF had no plans to challenge the SEC, perhaps seeing it as a neutralist organization that should be persuaded rather than confronted.52 The Appeal, however, finally brought the two organizations into conflict, eliciting the most emotive responses in West Germany, where the German branch of the

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CCF was assiduously pursuing its cultural reorientation objectives.53 While there was little overlap in the CCF’s and the SEC’s West German constituencies – only Karl Jaspers, Thomas Mann, Hans Paeschke, Franz Josef Schoeningh and Dolf Steinberger adhered to both – the reservations of several of them have already been noted, and the draft of the Appeal alone had left Jaspers on the brink of resignation.54 It also prompted a swift reaction from the CCF’s directorate. At the time the draft was being circulated among SEC members, de Rougemont, president of the CCF’s European Committee, and a member of its International Committee, was drawing up a protocol in light of a study week on counter-propaganda that the CCF had convened at Andlau, Alsace in mid-September.55 The SEC must also have been considered there, as letters by de Rougemont indicate that, upon hearing of the Appeal, he cut the Andlau protocol’s section on the SEC, promising a detailed study of it. Clearly aware of the Appeal’s launch date, he stressed that the CCF needed to have a position in advance of its distribution. Given the incompatibility of the SEC’s and CCF’s objectives, joint adherents needed to be informed of the SEC’s intentions.56 Consequently, when the SEC’s 1951 Assembly met in the Ducal Palace that November to approve the Appeal, it was in a highly polemical atmosphere, to which Campagnolo’s secretary general’s report was a contributing factor. On the face of it, his text, ‘Towards an Awareness of the Role of the Politics of Culture’, was an attempt to distinguish the SEC from the other bodies now seeking cultural solutions to the European problem. These were not just the WPC, the CCF and the CEC, but also the ministries of foreign affairs of individual countries, Unesco, and certain international universities, as well as religious initiatives such as the Christian Peace Movement (Mouvement chre´tien pour la Paix) and Moral Rearmament (Re´armement moral). Yet it dwelt at length on what the former, which Campagnolo considered the ‘most important’ organizations operating on the terrain of both politics and culture, were doing. Although Campagnolo was critical of the WPC for seeking to monopolize the idea of peace in the same way that the CCF sought to monopolize the idea of freedom, it was at least dedicated to peace, cooperation and dialogue, and he noted the participation of some SEC members in WPC initiatives.57 The pursuit of peace, in his view, was something to which neither the CCF nor the CEC could make a claim.

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Consequently, no one truly committed to culture could affirm the ‘dangerous principles’ of these two organizations that, acting in a ‘kinship of intentions and of action’, were actually exacerbating Europe’s partitioning by advocating Western European unification alone, and reducing culture to a form of propaganda in the process.58 The ‘yes or no’ option presented by the CCF’s Arthur Koestler, and its ‘dogmatic, a priori exclusion of adverse positions’ therefore ‘constitutes in itself one of the most grave symptoms of the present crisis. It is about, in short, an ideological crusade . . . And that, the politics of culture, such as our Society has conceived, cannot allow.’59 Concluding his report with a discussion of the purely cultural PEN Club and the RIG, which the SEC was closest in spirit to, Campagnolo was also careful to explain how it differed from them too. Describing the PEN Club as unwilling to engage with the current crisis, and the RIG as restricting itself to presenting aspects of it for discussion,60 he stressed dialogue as the SEC’s tool for actually resolving it. As the operative element in the ‘double yes formula’ introduced in the Appeal, dialogue was capable of finding the ‘unity in diversity’ that could create a ‘synthesis’ between participants.61 This substitution of rational dialogue based on shared principles was, for Campagnolo, nothing less than the means of ‘humanizing history’.62 Although Campagnolo acknowledged there were still no concrete plans for pursuing this dialogue, he invited its discussion in regard to the ratification of the Appeal. The Appeal was passed with fairly minor changes, but the tension it would create between the SEC and the CCF was clearly foreseen. As Mueller had justifiably asked: ‘how can one say yes and yes in Venice and yes and no in Berlin?’63 Nonetheless, it was sent to all of the SEC’s members with the intention that they should circulate it among their contacts, particularly within the mass media, to create as much public awareness of the appeal as possible.64 Although the number of countries reporting on the Appeal appears to have been limited, the press coverage being overwhelmingly Italian,65 it did not escape the notice of the CCF’s International Committee. Vowing to send it, and ‘complete documentation’ on the SEC to all CCF national committees, the intention was to instigate the highest number of resignations from the SEC in the most public manner possible.66 Yet the most effective response from the CCF took the form of two published letters. The first

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was by the Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch, a founding member of the executive committees of both the CCF and the RIG, and a proponent of federalism since 1948. Although it is unclear whether Hersch had written her ‘The Politics of Culture and Pacifism’, which appeared in Le Monde, at the behest of the CCF, this first attack on the Appeal was effective, and was used by Albert Camus in support of his resignation from the SEC.67 Then in March 1952 the CCF International Committee member Raymond Aron published a six-page attack on the Appeal in the CCF journal Preuves (Evidence).68 Aron, one of the earliest members of the SEC – he joined its Promotional Committee in 1949 – had resigned in December 1951 over the Appeal.69 His article was critical not only of its contents, but of the assumption by the SEC’s secretariat that its membership necessarily supported it, evidenced by the fact that the document had not been circulated for signatures.70 This criticism was not unfounded: seeing the draft alone had prompted the Swiss historian Werner Kaegi to resign immediately and, in France, the Appeal’s publication had caused not only Aron and Camus, but Daniel Villey and Russian-born Wladimir Weidle` to leave the SEC as well.71 Sensing an opportunity to seriously damage the Society, a copy of Aron’s article was forwarded by the CCF’s Paris office to Giulio Andreotti, who was at that time an adherent of the Italian branch of the CCF. He was also undersecretary of the Council of Ministers, and one of the Italian government officials responsible for agreeing government funding for the SEC.72 Yet the destructive impact of the Appeal was possibly the strongest in West Germany. If in 1951 the SEC had acquired only one new member from that country, in 1952 there were none, and if 1953 brought a few illustrious names to the SEC, among them Walter Gropius and Albert Schweitzer, only one of the new members, the psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, was actually living in the FRG. The situation would only be reversed in 1955. Possibly bolstered by the ending of the Allied occupation of West Germany in May that year, 22 people joined; in 1956, the year of the Thaw, there were ten more members, among them several Christian Democrat politicians.73 This surge in West German membership would only be matched in 1963, which was arguably tied to the fortunes of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the new policy toward the East championed by the then mayor of West Berlin, which, Gottfried Niedhart tells us, was based on ‘peaceful coexistence and political,

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economic and cultural exchange’ with ‘an “open-door policy” with respect to “human and cultural contacts”’.74 Although the Appeal was not received in Europe’s socialist countries with all of the CCF’s negative commentary, it appears to have had little or no influence on recruitment there. Regarding East Germany, although one of the SEC’s vice-presidents was the renowned East German physician Theodor Brugsch, at the time of the Appeal, he, Wolfgang Steinitz and the philosopher Arthur Baumgarten were that country’s only representatives. Brugsch was by far the most active, his role in the SEC complementing the general increase in his own political and cultural activities since the war. Described by his biographer Ju¨rgen Konert as particularly active in East Germany’s cultural reconstruction, the 1950s marked the height of his activities in this area.75 Having translated the Appeal into German, he appears to have actively supported its distribution in East Germany, yet the Appeal appears to have had little immediate impact there.76 There would be no new members from East Germany until 1955, when eight figures, including Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers, joined, followed by seven more in July 1956, Ernst Bloch among them.77 Equally, there were no new members from Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Poland until 1955, Yugoslavia was the only exception – seven people joined in 1953. If it had no immediate benefit for recruitment from Europe’s socialist countries, the publication of the Appeal did, however, open up opportunities for Italian communists to solicit support for the SEC there more rigorously, with eventual success. This was due to the softening of the PCI’s attitude toward the Society as a result of the Appeal, enabling joint SEC-WPC members to use the latter as an opportunity for face-toface contact with figures from the East. Well before the appeal was drafted, when Marchesi and Terracini had been trying to attract support for the SEC from the WPC’s constituency, the latter had pressed Campagnolo and the Executive Council to endorse the WPC.78 Campagnolo was reluctant, however, because it did not embrace a ‘generic pacifism’; it was also a political organization, and at the time the SEC was launched Campagnolo had publicly distanced the Society from it on those grounds.79 The furthest he was willing to go was to note the absence of ‘competition or contrast’ between them in so far as both organizations were dedicated to peace.80 Yet, because the Appeal made clear the SEC’s pursuit of a lasting peace, and its willingness to

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undertake dialogue with the socialist world to do so, it substantially improved the SEC’s relations with both the WPC and the PCI. If previously the PCI had opposed its members’ involvement with the SEC, that June the Italian senator Emilio Sereni, one of its Central Committee, actually invited Campagnolo to help organize the WPC’s Vienna Congress, and the WPC’s secretariat would continue to try and involve Campagnolo, albeit unsuccessfully, in its activities for the rest of the decade.81 Another boost to the Society as a result of this breakthrough with the PCI came in the form of the communist senator, Ambrogio Donini, who would help with regard to recruitment from Europe’s socialist countries. A member of the WPC and of the PCI’s Central Committee, when he joined the SEC in 1952 he brought with him a wealth of connections with Eastern Europe that would enable the Society to be promoted more vigorously there. Like Terracini, he was a long-standing member of the PCI, having joined in 1927. Exiled from Italy the following year for his anti-fascist activities, he went on to direct a number of dissident Italian-language papers in Paris and New York, until his return to Italy in 1945. At that point his career in politics began. Posted as ambassador to Poland (1946 – 8), this was followed by his election as senator in 1953.82 Retaining his deep commitment to communism, he was Director of the Gramsci Institute and vice-director of the PCI’s monthly political and cultural review Rinascita (Rebirth) as well as a member of the Party’s Central Committee, and a member of the WPC.83 Seeing the latter as the ‘ideal base on which to cast the enlargement of the Society’,84 at the WPC’s meeting in Prague 1953 he was able to update Ehrenburg and Fadeev on the SEC’s activities.85 Also sensing that Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland’s efforts to rejoin Unesco (they had withdrawn in 1952 in protest over the Korean War), and their participation, along with Bulgaria, in a recent European Interparliamentary Union meeting meant that the time was right to promote the SEC there, the following year, he managed to introduce the SEC to a number of figures from those countries at the WPC’s Vienna meeting.86 Later, when the SEC was able to organize meetings between figures from Eastern and Western Europe, Donini was instrumental in procuring travel visas for these events.87 The painter and former member of the Resistance Gabriele Mucchi, an equally committed communist, was also an important advocate of the

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SEC within the WPC. Like Donini, he was at the Vienna Congress in 1952 and, soon afterwards, he made contact with a number of figures at the Czech Ministry of Information, including the writer and painter Adolf Hoffmeister and the art critic and university professor Miroslav Mı´cˇko.88 Both men had held official posts in the late 1940s, and had maintained connections with the Czechoslovak government throughout the 1950s and 1960s, frequently acting as delegates to Unesco. They would become important figures in the SEC in the 1960s, when cultural relations with Czechoslovakian figures, in spite of continued practical difficulties, did become more regular. Mı´cˇko, for example, would be central to the organization of the SEC’s first event held in a communist country, the Prague Executive Council meeting in April 1965. While the PCI had a comparatively relaxed approach toward the SEC as a result of the Appeal, the PCF, however, held more tightly on to its reservations. According to one of the SEC’s councillors, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a Resistance veteran who had maintained close links with the PCF,89 the SEC’s pluralism was still a strong deterrent to French communist membership. But if before it had been Sartre, now the membership of French theologian Henri Daniel-Rops was being cited as a disincentive to join.90 Daniel-Rops had been on the staff of the Uriage School, set up by members of the personalist New Order group in Paris faithful to Pe´tain, and thus, in the eyes of some PCF members, had ‘conducted himself badly’ under the occupation.91 Yet Jean Wahl, whose range of contacts in the European intellectual community cannot be overestimated, also maintained links with the WPC, and he enjoyed remarkable success in attracting French communists to the SEC, including Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso and Joliot-Curie himself in 1953.92 Yet, of all the countries from which the SEC was trying to solicit communist members, the greatest difficulty was, and would remain, the Soviet Union. The Soviets never made up a substantial percentage of the Society’s membership, and the first members were only secured after the East–West Dialogue (March 1956) had prompted a change of heart among the Soviet authorities. Nonetheless, before that time the SEC continued to cultivate exchange with Soviet intellectuals in other ways, and its first breakthrough came in late 1952 in the form of an essay commissioned from Ilya Ehrenburg for Comprendre. As Campagnolo had been pursuing Ehrenburg’s involvement with the SEC since their meeting in Rome in 1949, this success was likely to have been a result of

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the resignation of CCF members that the Appeal had prompted.93 Although Ehrenburg’s essay was not entirely conciliatory toward the SEC, it did recognize the importance of the historical unity between Russian and European culture, and it did affirm the principle of dialogue as ‘indispensable’ when ‘participants are really worried about protecting their national cultures and common patrimony that we are right to call, without having to dread the big words, universal culture’.94 While Ehrenburg’s relationship with the SEC would always be difficult, his agreement on how to approach the European problem was nonetheless a step toward fuller Soviet participation in the SEC. Although the Appeal had made the recruitment of communists somewhat easier, the Society was now faced with the question of what it should actually be doing in the light of this development. In response, the Executive Council drew up several discussion points for the forthcoming Second General Assembly: how the politics of culture could be concretely expressed and who qualified as a ‘man of culture’ suitable for pursuing it, and whether mass support for the Society was desirable at this early stage. Yet at the assembly, which attracted 112 of the SEC’s members to the Ducal Palace in June 1952, there was scant agreement on any of these issues, and little of practical use came out of the meeting. Although Ponti’s presidential report made clear that the Appeal had brought positive gains to the SEC – the Italian government’s interest in the SEC and Comprendre had been boosted, and communist membership from France and Italy had finally been realized – the Society’s relationship with the CCF remained a point of contention.95 That it would remain unresolved was equally clear in the position taken by Campagnolo in his own address to the assembly. While he did not name it directly, he criticized the CCF for bringing a totalitarian mentality into international cultural relations by embracing – even if unconsciously – the ‘yes or no’ alternative in the name of cultural freedom.96 Inevitably a debate followed on whether the politics of culture could remain beyond ordinary politics; in particular, Campagnolo’s identification of the CCF and liberal democracy with cultural totalitarianism was challenged in the open discussions, drawing criticism from across the ideological spectrum. The SEC councillor Jean Daniel, for example, argued that it was an indisputably totalitarian regime like Franco’s in Spain against which the SEC needed to take a position; the Belgian philosopher Louis Philippart and councillor

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Fernand Mueller also asked why Campagnolo had excluded communism from his definition of totalitarianism, accusing him of privileging communist over liberal democratic regimes.97 Terracini, too, while he appreciated Campagnolo’s argument for at least the possibility of cultural totalitarianism in the West, suggested that the SEC attempt to move beyond it by examining problems common to both Eastern and Western Europe, in spite of the different conditions in which they were approaching them.98 This would be a central premise of the Dialogue. The SEC’s public profile was also a divisive issue, the desirability of mass support for the Society again tapping into what were clearly pervasive concerns about totalitarianism and the problem of mass manipulation. For example, while Bobbio had suggested greater popularization of the SEC and of Comprendre through the mass media, another member of the Executive Council, the Catholic legal theorist Arturo Carlo Jemolo, cited conformism as the ‘great danger of the epoch’, with the ‘conformist’ mass media being the primary means of its proliferation, irrespective of the regime it served.99 He was not alone in his concern, and several members were divided on the more fundamental question of the relationship of culture, and of the intellectual, to mass society. As we have seen, Campagnolo was, from the outset, comfortable with the idea of culture as a natural expression of the will of the people, and with the intellectual, or ‘man of culture’, being its necessary agent. Yet now at the 1952 assembly the fundamental question of who or what was a manifestation of totalitarianism – the state or the masses, and whether the latter could ever effectively oppose it – dominated the drawing up of the assembly’s final resolution. Although it was intended to commit the SEC to a clear course of action, in the end, it took three meetings to draft and edit the text, not least because the British councillors – the writer Bernard Lehmann and the journalist Cecil Sprigge – feared that the references to bloc politics and ‘totalitarian intransigence’ would be perceived as an attack on their country’s foreign policy.100 Similarly, Ceschi advised that the SEC’s objective should instead be simply to foster contacts and exchanges rather than attempt to identify the causes of current international tensions.101 Campagnolo, however, was adamant that politics could not be excluded, and the final resolution, finished only at midnight, retained its observation that the ‘totalitarian intransigence of certain intellectual elements’ was one of the factors contributing to the wider deterioration of the international

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situation, curtailing the possibilities for dialogue and for understanding across Europe’s ideological divide. It therefore called for the SEC’s membership to ‘develop the action of the Society’ by pursuing dialogue, and for the intelligentsia as a whole to take fuller awareness of its social responsibilities.102 The impression created at the Second General Assembly – and reinforced by its final resolution – was arguably one of an institution that was simply treading water. Failing to give any practical substance to the politics of culture that might make it a more attractive option than the CCF to engaged intellectuals, the discussions actually generated more questions than answers regarding the SEC’s purpose and function. As Bobbio had cautioned, the Society was in danger of being ‘reduced to an academy’ if it did not put its principles into action soon.103 The frustration this caused among its members would only increase over the next three years, before it became politically possible to organize face-to-face exchanges between Western European intellectuals and their counterparts in Europe’s socialist countries. Yet if these years were fallow ones for the SEC as an institution set up to actively promote dialogue, they were also very important ones regarding the development of the Society’s aims, and its understanding of Europe’s place in the international situation. The resolution was therefore striking in its omission of what was actually one of the central debates at the 1952 assembly: the Europeanness of the European problem. While certain members at the Constitutive Assembly had raised the issue of Eurocentrism within the SEC, Alioune Diop, present as a prospective member at the second assembly, reprised their critique far more forcefully. Born in Senegal but educated at the Sorbonne, Diop had been living in Paris for many years, and he founded the review Pre´sence africaine there in 1947. A landmark publication, it had brought together a stellar, interracial patronage committee of Albert Camus, Aime´ Ce´saire, Andre´ Gide, the Institut francais d’Afrique noire’s director Theodore Monod, Jean-Paul Sartre, Le´opold Se´dar Senghor and Richard Wright with the aim of achieving international recognition for the contribution of African to world culture. It was Diop’s belief in the inherent universality of culture that attracted support for his candidacy for the SEC as a representative of a current of African thought that actually shared many of the Society’s views.104 Although Diop was only at the assembly as an observer – his admission to the SEC was confirmed

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the following year – he nonetheless launched a series of questions that, attracting the vigorous support of the assembly, would lead to a substantial reconsideration of the European problem. This was undertaken, not least, by Campagnolo, who found himself quite isolated in his belief that it could only be resolved in the place where it had originated: Europe.105 Its reconsideration of the Cold War as a worldwide problem would inform not only the SEC’s doctrine, but also its membership, its relations with other institutions, and ultimately the exchanges it would soon be organizing, as we shall see next.

CHAPTER 3 `

THE CIVILIZATION OF THE UNIVERSAL': OVERTURES TOWARD THE THIRD WORLD (1953—6)

If the late 1940s and early 1950s were a time when many of Europe’s intellectuals were organizing themselves in response to the European problem, their reaction to the emergence of bloc politics was not unique. At the Executive Council meeting in February 1951, where the draft of the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World was under discussion, Jean Amrouche reminded his fellow councillors that intellectuals in Asia, too, were making ‘extraordinary efforts’ to disengage themselves from this polarized situation.1 He was probably referring to the Asian Relations Conferences that had been held in New Delhi in 1947 and 1949, two early antecedents of the Bandung Conference (April 1955). A landmark, co-operative effort by newly independent African and Asian states to maintain their independence from bloc politics and to ‘discuss the possible futures of the postcolonial world’,2 Bandung is generally held to have at least anticipated, if not to have actually given rise to, the Non-Aligned Movement. The movement, which is still in existence today with a membership of 120 countries, was founded in Belgrade in 1961 in order to ‘promote the security and development’ of the 25 Third World states that had retained their neutrality. Amrouche’s questioning of whether the world really was divided into two, as the Appeal maintained, was therefore well justified.3 At the time

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Campagnolo thought that events in the former colonies were still insufficiently developed to be an ‘essential factor in the current situation’.4 Yet the intensifying challenge to bloc politics from African and Asian countries in the 1950s soon gave substance to the doubts within the SEC as to whether the European problem could be isolated from, and whether European culture could provide a solution to, what was actually a global crisis. These misgivings had been prompted by the Society’s draft statutes, which called for intellectuals to ‘play their part in the European effort needed if our continent is to remain the field for the development of a universal culture’ achievable by improving the ‘conditions necessary for the development of culture in a universal sense as the justification of our civilization’.5 The reluctance, however, of many at the Constitutive Assembly to consider a universal dimension to the ambitions of either the SEC or of contemporary European culture was due in part to the fact that they were unclear as to what Campagnolo meant by ‘universal culture’. At that assembly, he had only vaguely defined it as a culture refusing to ‘accept being exhausted in a system . . . schema . . . [or] fixed frame’, aspiring instead to ‘surpass all concepts’, even that of culture itself. In short, it concerned an e´lan or attitude rather than a specific content.6 But they were also aware, as Diop would put it at the 1952 assembly, that the SEC risked becoming trapped in a world-view in which only ‘Eastern and Western Europe existed’, and becoming an exponent of cultural imperialism if it failed to recognize that non-Europeans actually made up the ‘major part of humanity’, and persisted instead in its ‘mission of managing the world and assuming everyone’s destiny’.7 The strong support that Diop’s arguments received from the membership compelled Campagnolo to return repeatedly in his own work to the question of the universality of European values. This soon gave rise to one of the SEC’s most influential, and most controversial, ideas – the civilization of the universal. Starting from the premise that the role of culture and of civilization was to create values, Campagnolo originally described the civilization of the universal in his essay ‘European Responsibilities’ (1953) as necessarily open and progressive, these features being characteristic of the free creative act. Yet, crucially, it was also historically self-conscious. This feature – a civilization’s ability to understand its own experience, as well as that of others – was what qualified Europe as the sole arbiter of the values that should constitute

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this new, universal civilization in the making.8 Many of the Society’s members, however, particularly those with first-hand experience of life in Europe’s colonies, took issue with Campagnolo’s argument for Europe as necessarily leading the formation of a new ethical order for the post-war world. In this new order, newly emerging states would be demanding recognition of their legitimacy not only on political and economic, but also on cultural and moral grounds, and their belonging to the civilization of the universal would be one of the bases on which they would stake that claim. For example, Le´opold Se´dar Senghor used this term in many of his political essays and speeches while he was president of Senegal, and it was one of the key themes of the international World Festival of Black Arts, held under his government’s auspices in Dakar in 1966. Rene´ Maheu, Unesco’s director general from 1961 to 1974, also made it the foundation for his own organization’s programming. So central was it to Unesco’s mission during his period in office that the collection of his writings published in 1966 in celebration of Unesco’s twentieth anniversary was entitled The Civilization of the Universal. Its meaning, however, had been contested for nearly a decade before it entered such mainstream usage. Because of the considerable influence the idea of the civilization of the universal would have, this chapter considers its origins within the parameters of the SEC’s discussions, which prepared the ground for a much more vigorous debate in the 1960s over Eurafrican cultural relations once the process of decolonization was well under way. That will be looked at in Chapter 6. In the years immediately following the war, the SEC was not, however, the only organization concerned with the relationship between European and other so-called ‘world civilizations’, or with the idea of a universal civilization as a permanent solution to international political conflict. The idea of a universal civilization already had a long history, the origins of which Chloe´ Maurel has traced back to Kant’s Project of Perpetual Peace (1795).9 Yet, as she has observed, institutions dedicated to the creation of a world government grounded in a ‘single world culture’ based on an ‘international moral standard’ of humanist values were a much more recent phenomenon. If the pre-war League of Nations, along with its Organization for Intellectual Co-operation (OCI) and the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IIIC), were the first of such organizations, she has argued that it was only in the

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‘determinative context of the last years of the Second World War and the immediate post-war period that an intense development . . . of the ideal of “world government”, “world civilization”, “world culture”’ could be observed among the intelligentsia internationally.10 The UN and Unesco, heirs of the League of Nations and the OCI, certainly embraced this ideal, with Unesco continuing the universalist ambitions of the latter, not least through the interests of some of their shared personnel.11 There was a similar overlap of constituencies between Unesco and the SEC. Although Unesco’s early enthusiasm for a ‘universal civilization’ was ‘pervaded by a conceptual haziness’ that led to its abandonment as a key objective by the early 1950s,12 several of its functionaries who had supported this concept brought their interests to the SEC. Jean Thomas, the assistant director general of Unesco from 1946 to 1960, was a sympathetic, early contact between the two organizations. Far more active within the Society, however, were Jacques Havet and Jean-Jacques Mayoux. Havet, one of Unesco’s preparatory commissioners, spent his entire career in its Department of Cultural Activities, first in its Philosophy and Humanities division, then in its division of International Cultural Exchange, which had a global remit.13 Mayoux, who was charged in 1945 with the reorganization of the IIIC, had been based in the same department up until sometime in 1952 as a programme specialist in literature.14 In early projects like the ‘Enquiry into the Interrelations of Culture’ (1948), Unesco’s original understanding of universal culture – one that Mayoux, as a participant in this initiative, would have known well – can be seen. Sensitive to the cultural diversity and the ‘cultural stability’ of emerging nations during their inevitable political and economic modernization, Unesco’s concern was to make: the best use of their diversity for the good of mankind; the distinctive character of such enquiries is that they are in principle universal in extent, and not national, bilateral or regional. It implies, moreover, looking upon each culture as a component part of a world civilization.15 While Campagnolo would have certainly supported Unesco’s belief in the existence of ‘universal values shared by the diversity of cultures’ and that they were the means of fostering a universally shared humanism,16

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he would have differed from Unesco about how these values could be identified. Unesco’s advisory committee recommended an ‘associationist’ approach – one respectful of cultural differences – implemented with reference to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, it hoped, could make that globally authored document a ‘force in the world’ by encouraging the interpretation and the development within local contexts of the ideals of ‘freedom, democracy, respect for the individual personality’.17 Campagnolo, on the other hand, subscribed to the ‘assimilationist’ theory of the civilization of the universal that he advocated in ‘European Responsibilities’,18 with the goal of identifying the foundational values for a new world order. His commitment to this as a Europe-led initiative, however, was arguably confirmed by his own lack of first-hand experience of conditions in the colonial territories, and this set him apart from a number of Unesco’s personnel, and from the SEC’s members who were the most persistent critics of his argument. Although it is unclear whether Havet spent any time in France’s territories before he entered Unesco, Mayoux certainly had. He had joined the French Resistance early in 1940, which eventually took him to Algiers, where he became a member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly.19 Set up alongside the French National Liberation Committee (Comite´ francais de Libe´ration nationale – CFLN) in early November 1943 and representing the different political groups within the French Resistance, the establishment of the assembly was the first step on the way to France’s return to a post-Vichy form of governance.20 The irony of France’s organizing its liberation, and its return to democracy, from inside its own occupied territories would not have been lost on Mayoux. Many critics of colonialism at that time saw the Resistance as a larger process of decolonization that should not stop with the liberation of France. Nor was it lost on Amrouche, who played a central role in the discussions that soon enveloped the SEC regarding its relations with Europe’s rapidly decolonizing territories. Given his presence on the Executive Council as an insistent voice on the behalf of the Third World, and his equally determined commitment to maintaining a mutually respectful dialogue between it and Europe, his political biography is worth considering in some detail. An ethnic Berber born in Kabylia, Algeria in 1906, into a Christian, assimilated family, Amrouche had moved to Paris when he was 19 to finish his education.21 Returning to Africa in 1930, he dedicated himself largely

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to teaching and to literary activities, but this was interrupted when he was called to serve in the French Army in September 1939.22 Soon after his demobilization at the end of July 1940 he returned to Tunis, where he had been teaching, and this marked the beginning of his involvement in politics: it was there that he met Andre´ Gide. Amrouche had a longstanding literary interest in Gide – he had been corresponding with him since 1928.23 Evidently his friendship with Gide encouraged both men’s ‘Gaullist fervor’ and, when Gide moved to Algiers after its liberation in November 1942, Amrouche followed him. There they made plans for L’Arche (The Ark) a Gaullist monthly literary review that would eventually be launched in February 1944 in Algiers, at that time the seat of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.24 The magazine was intended, with the general’s blessing, to ‘rally’ the resisters ‘scattered across America, England, North Africa and the colonies’, and eventually France.25 Although the term Eurafricanite´, which originated in the nineteenth century, has now largely disappeared from use, in the immediate postwar period it was an expression of a renegotiated, primarily economic relationship between the two continents. In her study of France’s relations with its African territories, De´sire´e Avit has described it as a return to traditional colonial policies intended by France to bolster its own international power and prestige, while failing to bring the territories into the nascent European Community, or even to entertain granting them the right to self-determination.26 This was in spite of repeated gestures toward increased political participation on the part of the territories, even within the French government in exile.27 De Gaulle’s Brazzaville Declaration (January 1944), given at a conference organized by the CFLN Algiers in order to reassure France’s indigenous African population of the new government’s commitment to mainly political reforms in the territories, including African participation in French political institutions,28 can be seen as an early expression of Eurafricanism. That Amrouche embraced it was clear in his ‘enthusiastic’ coverage of the speech on Algerian radio, and in his writing from that time.29 Although L’Arche was Gide’s review, Amrouche was one of its co-editors, and he wrote the unsigned ‘Manifesto’ for its inaugural issue, published that Feburary.30 Anticipating France’s role in post-war reconstruction, this text passionately affirmed French ‘genius’ as the source of ‘the universal principles of 1789 which remain fully valuable today in their spirit’.31 ‘With regard to the captive French our duty’, it argued:

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is clear. To help France to reassert its compromised freedoms, to become aware again of itself and its mission, to recover and gather its dispersed forces, to rekindle its energies and its hopes; and, by the same, permit the recognition of its figure, the capital importance of its role, its meaning, abroad.32 If the past 150 years had been, for the French, a time for sowing those principles among peoples, now, in the coming period of reconstruction, a new revolution was needed to ‘inscribe the conquests of modern humanism in a new political and social charter’ on a worldwide scale.33 The propagandistic aspect to L’Arche’s manifesto, however, almost certainly obscures a deeper ambivalence on Amrouche’s part about France’s commitment to honouring its principles in its colonies. As Tony Chafer has observed, the Brazzaville Declaration was less clear on French social and cultural policy than on political policy in the African territories, revealing an old tension between assimilation and association in the French government’s approach to its colonies.34 Assimilation meant subscribing to the universalizing, essentially progressive mission of the French nation, which would accord everyone, irrespective of their race, the same level of education, living standards, and political rights. Association, while less equal in the rights it granted, was more respectful of cultural difference. Recognizing traditional society and customs, it also accepted that social differences made it, in Chafer’s words, ‘difficult, if not impossible’, for colonized peoples ‘to follow the same path of development as Europeans.’35 While assimilation was pushed for by African elites because it was a path to equal rights in spite of meaning ‘greater cultural dependence on France’,36 they were reluctant to endorse its cultural implications. This reluctance is clear in Amrouche’s best-known essay, ‘The Eternal Jugurtha: Proposals regarding African Genius’. Although it appeared in L’Arche in February 1946, it was actually written in 1943, less than a year after Algeria’s liberation, during which time Algiers had become the temporary seat of the CFLN.37 Taking the North African king Jugurtha, who in the second century BC tried to liberate his kingdom of Numidia (present day Algeria and Tunisia) from Roman rule as representative of the Berber’s character traits in their ‘most accomplished form’,38 Amrouche’s essay considered what the relationship of North Africa to France might now be. Noting the Berber’s historically proven

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ability to adapt to, or – although he did not use this word – to assimilate foreign cultures, underlying this was nonetheless a ‘passion for independence which is allied with a lively feeling of personal dignity’, and, above all, an absolute refusal to be dominated.39 Amrouche saw this last quality as particularly admirable – refusing ‘to accept what seems established’, this willingness to ‘make a clean slate and go back to zero’40 enabled change and renewal. If, as Amrouche averred, the Berber believed ‘very deeply in the unity of the human condition’ as something worth fighting for, what was needed to achieve this unity was the ‘grafting’ of the spiritual, contemplative nature of North African culture onto technology-driven Western civilization.41 This would produce a new, ideal humanity that, while appreciating the importance of material wellbeing, understood the primacy of the intellectual and spiritual life.42 Because of its stress on the North African’s burning commitment to revolt as a means of preserving dignity in the face of colonization, ‘The Eternal Jugurtha’ has been read as an early expression of Amrouche’s commitment to the distinctness of North African identity, anticipating why he would dedicate himself so fully to the Algerian struggle for independence in the 1950s.43 This interpretation is certainly supported by events there. Algiers had been central to the French Resistance, where many of the operations for the liberation had been organized, and where the precursors to France’s first post-Vichy government had been set up, and this was important in sharpening Algerians’ awareness of their own oppression. It was, therefore, no coincidence that the independence movement in Algeria began almost immediately after the end of World War II.44 Yet the emphasis in this essay on the relationship between North Africa and the West, on the question of what constituted a truly humanist culture in which all would be equal, and its publication in Paris at the moment when Europe’s intellectuals were just beginning their own assessment of Europe’s moral collapse (the first RIG on the ‘European spirit’ was convened later that year) suggests that it was intended to be a contribution to that discussion as well. And it was one in which Amrouche became directly involved when he moved permanently to Paris in 1945 with the relocation of L’Arche. Consequently, when he joined the SEC’s Executive Committee in 1949, his commitment to active North African participation in creating this ‘unity’ meant that he was particularly well-positioned to

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help guide the Society on the course it would eventually take regarding the civilization of the universal, what it meant, how it was to be achieved, and by whom. Given Amrouche’s clear acknowledgement that the French 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in some ways a precursor to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,45 had failed to be observed in the territories, his involvement in the SEC’s discussions over the civilization of the universal would also help to determine the Society’s eventual preoccupation with human rights. Not only direct experience of life in the colonies, but also experience of the Resistance appears to have been a unifying feature behind Campagnolo’s fiercest critics within the Executive Council with regard to the civilization of the universal. Jean Lescure and Norberto Bobbio both had roots in the Resistance, as did Father Augustin-Jean Maydieu, who appears to have done the most to facilitate the entrance of African intellectuals into the SEC’s discussion of the European problem. Deeply involved in the French Resistance from its very beginning, Maydieu had been head of the anti-fascist journal La Vie intellectuelle (Intellectual Life) until the threat of censorship by the Nazis forced him to shut it down.46 In spite of this, he managed to maintain an intellectual opposition to the Occupation through the circle he gathered around him at the SaintDominique convent in Paris. This group was also a locus for some of the most powerful future proponents of decolonization among the French intelligentsia. It included Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Francois Mauriac, Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as two of the men from the territories who would become major figures in Africa’s decolonization after the war – the politician Jacques Rabemananjara and Alioune Diop, to whom Maydieu was particularly close.47 According to his biographer Philippe Verdin, Diop’s participation in Maydieu’s circle had made it clear to him that Africa would ‘have a role of the first order to play in the reconstruction of the world of thought that should be born after the war’.48 This was not least because Maydieu had encouraged Diop’s critique of ‘bourgeois’, European politics, and, in Diop’s own words, because he was genuinely open to the perspectives of nonEuropeans in helping to ‘make Europe more just, more free – by understanding others, their differences – by nourishing its thought and its faith’.49 And if Diop credited Maydieu with having inspired in him the idea for the magazine Pre´sence africaine, the latter also made an

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enormous practical contribution to it by introducing Diop to several of the men who would feature, along with Maydieu, in its patronage committee: Leiris, Mounier and Sartre.50 Amrouche, Maydieu and Mayoux actively endorsed the recruitment of intellectuals from outside Europe; this was wholly compatible with the SEC’s founding objectives – the Society had been deliberately named the European Society of Culture, not the Society of European Culture.51 Nonetheless, Campagnolo was strongly tested by Diop’s proposed membership. When his name was presented at the Executive Council’s meeting in January 1952, the general secretary queried whether a man ‘truly educated in eastern thought’ could subscribe to the SEC’s idea of a ‘culture with a universal vocation’, as some cultures were simply ‘impermeable’ to each other.52 One of the things that persuaded Campagnolo to invite Diop, at least as an observer, to that year’s general assembly was his ‘remarkable’ essay for Pre´sence africaine’s first issue, ‘Niam n’goura, or Pre´sence africaine’s raison d’eˆtre’.53 As Christopher L. Miller has observed, Pre´sence africaine’s original intentions, as expressed in ‘Niam n’goura’, were surprisingly modest,54 and this probably encouraged his sponsors at the SEC, Maydieu and Mayoux, to see close parallels between the aspirations of that group and their own. In it, Diop had argued that Africa, already ‘mentally crossed’, still required contact with European intellectual life if it were to undertake its own reconstruction, modernity being an inescapable feature of the new Africa.55 These were clearly Eurafrican positions, the result of Diop’s early experiences both as a student in Paris and as a statesman. Born in 1910 and raised in Senegal, he had initially received a traditional Islamic education. At the age of seven, however, he transferred to the French-run educational system and his experience at the lyce´e Faidherbe in Dakar, according to Diop himself, ‘had radically suppressed all my social and religious prejudices’, causing him to abandon ‘the idea of tradition for that of progress’.56 Although he moved to Paris in 1937 to study veterinary medicine, it was there that he made a number of remarkable contacts among both white and black intellectuals within the humanities disciplines that he preferred.57 He and his peers from France’s territories, such as Aime´ Ce´saire, Jacques Rabemananjara and Le´opold Se´dar Senghor, each of whom would be leading figures in the process of decolonization in their home countries, were witnessing in occupied Paris a ‘stricken Europe questioning herself as to the efficacy and genuineness of her values’, and

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had ‘gathered themselves together to study that same situation’.58 Yet Diop also had friendships with an equally impressive array of white intellectuals there who were preoccupied with the same concerns, many of whom he had met through Maydieu.59 This meant that his new periodical would embrace contributions from ‘all men of good will . . . who are willing to help us define the African’s creativity and hasten his integration in the modern world’.60 Although the idea for Pre´sence africaine had originated in 1942 or 1943, the magazine only appeared in 1947. While this delay was largely for financial reasons,61 it was arguably an important period for the development of the journal’s early Eurafrican orientation, coinciding as it did with Diop’s brief political career. His first appointment in spring 1946 as director of the governor’s cabinet in Dakar had reconnected him with the problems of inequality and underdevelopment in his home country, and when he was put forward by the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International (Section francaise de l’internationale ouvrie`re) as one of five candidates to stand in elections for Senegal’s representatives to the National Assembly that December, he did not step aside.62 In spite of his preoccupation with culture and with Pre´sence africaine, such a post was an opportunity to make tangible improvements to peoples’ lives in Senegal, and this is what he did as a senator. While in office, he supported specific laws for the provision of canteens in schools, an institution for invalids, the creation of professional schools, co-operatives and urban construction, for the teaching of Arabic, and for the granting of departmental status to the territories of Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique and Re´union. He also pushed for an increase in bursaries allowing African students to study in France, on the grounds that this exposure to the ‘metropole’ was essential for the African territories’ eventual inclusion on equal terms in a united French republic.63 As his political achievements suggest, Diop did not question the importance of France for reconstruction in the territories during the 1940s; likewise, ‘Niam n’goura’ positioned Pre´sence africaine as a ‘tribune’ for dialogue between Africa and Europe. Yet, by 1952, when he first became involved with the SEC, Diop’s expectations of that relationship were undergoing substantial revision. Fuelled by his growing involvement with the anti-colonial student movement in Paris coalescing around events in Algeria; his darkening attitude toward

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Europe was reflected in an increasing stridency in Pre´sence africaine, and a turning away from its early Eurafrican orientation.64 Although Mayoux assured Campagnolo at the time of his candidacy that Diop believed that the dialogue between African and European civilization was a ‘fact that was impossible to go back on’,65 the general secretary still sensed that Diop’s objectives might not support those of the Society. Consequently, his letter to Diop inviting him to observe the 1952 General Assembly stressed the SEC’s preoccupation with the current situation in Europe and its implications for the ‘freedom and autonomy of culture’.66 Tellingly, Diop’s response was equally cautious: I beg you to consider that European culture can only interest us to the extent that it permits the African personality to be expressed and that it favours our integration into the great human family, albeit at the price of breaking down certain structures of Europe’s cultural life. He concluded: ‘We consider that it is inevitable that men meet and that the new visage of humanity emphasizes the equally active and creative presence of all human groups.’67 Diop’s apprehensions were justified. Even though the 1952 assembly had not been dedicated to the international problem – the Cold War understood as a global rather than a European one – but to the SEC’s relationship with other European organizations for intellectuals, the ferocity of the exchange between Campagnolo and Diop on this issue became the assembly’s defining feature. Furthermore, that exchange, and the strong support Diop found from many in the audience – Jacques Madaule, Jean Amrouche, Claude Aveline and Jacques Havet – had important consequences for the SEC, as it finally dispossessed the general secretary of his Europe-first agenda. Diop’s reminder that the ‘majority of humanity’ was not European, and his warning that the SEC was in danger of becoming trapped in a world-view in which only ‘Eastern and Western Europe existed’ found such strong support from the audience that Campagnolo was quite isolated in his belief that this problem could only be resolved in the place where it had originated – in Europe. But it was arguably Havet who most incisively challenged Campagnolo’s argument for Europe as its source and its solution. Picking up on Diop’s

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comments, he questioned whether culture was indeed universal as the SEC maintained. He also queried whether it was morally or dialectically honest to exclude Africa from the European problem, particularly as many of the problems Africa was facing were a result of its contact with European culture.68 There was a practical reason, too, for Campagnolo’s eventual decision to explore the international problem within the SEC, and it stemmed from its relationship with Unesco. Since early 1949 – before the Society was even founded – the future secretary general had been holding promising discussions with Unesco about various potential collaborations.69 This was not least because its then general director, Jaime Torres Bodet, was a firm advocate of the idea of a universal civilization, and believed that the Society’s principles were supportive of Unesco’s own work of developing an appreciation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights outside of Europe.70 International politics and budget constraints, however, had made it difficult for Unesco to commit any funds to the SEC. The ‘crisis’ at the end of 1952, as Havet described it – Torres Bodet’s resignation in December 1952 when the budget granted at its General Conference for 1953– 4 was substantially less than he had proposed, and insufficient even to maintain current operations71 – meant that these very early expectations for collaboration did not come to pass. In spite of his openness to collaboration with Unesco throughout this time, however, Campagnolo defended the SEC’s primary focus on Europe by arguing that the Society had been created to resolve a particular problem, and was more likely to succeed in its aims if it concentrated its efforts on a single objective. Pointing to organizations like Unesco as being better equipped to address the international problem, he maintained that the SEC could only consider extra-European problems once it had resolved its original one.72 Yet, the challenges currently facing Unesco – the collapse of Torres Bodet’s leadership and the recent withdrawal of Hungary and Poland over Unesco’s position on the Korean War – had only reconfirmed his own doubts about the limitations to what a cultural organization ‘reposing on an intergovernmental agreement’ could achieve.73 This led Campagnolo to the position that the SEC was now obliged to move in this direction. As he observed at the April 1953 meeting of the Executive Council, Unesco’s problems, and the persuasive arguments raised at the SEC’s last assembly against the

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limitations of focusing on Europe in isolation, required the Society to take a global perspective.74 Campagnolo’s decision to use the 1953 General Assembly to address the international problem was also motivated by pragmatic concerns regarding the development of the SEC. Aware that the Society had, until now, been preoccupied with defining its terms, he was hoping that this assembly would be of public interest.75 The decision to hold it in Paris was also in part an effort to increase the Society’s membership. By the end of 1952, the SEC had already increased its original membership by 66 per cent, bringing its total to just over 500. Not only was Paris still regarded as the ‘cultural centre of Europe’, already the location of the second largest constituency of SEC members, it was also a hot spot for intellectuals from France’s territories, and the guest list preserved in the archive suggests that it was hoped they would be attracted to the Society.76 Having committed himself to this theme for the General Assembly, Campagnolo quickly began organizing his thoughts on the role of European culture in resolving the Cold War as a global problem. They took the form of two essays, which would be the most controversial works he would write: ‘European Responsibilities’, which appeared in the September 1953 issue of Comprendre, and ‘Europe in the World and the Politics of Culture’, which was delivered in Paris that same month, at the assembly. These two texts would be largely responsible for the difficult relations with Diop, with other members of the Pre´sence africaine group, and with the soon to be founded African Society of Culture (SAC) – in other words, much of the Europe-based Francophone African intelligentsia. This was because of the perceived Eurocentric strain these essays revealed in Campagnolo’s approach to Europe’s place within broader international cultural relations, above all his theory of the civilization of the universal. The two key criticisms this idea would continue attract from both African and European intellectuals became immediately evident that July, when he presented a draft of his report for the assembly to the Executive Council. Many of those present – among them, Amrouche, Bobbio, Pierre de Lanux, Havet and Mayoux – were quick to point out that he was making a dangerous historical misrepresentation by arguing that Europe’s overseas expansion was not driven by greed but by humane sympathy or curiosity, and that he had idealized Europe as the only civilization that had universalizing

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aspirations.77 Yet Campagnolo took insufficient notice of their warnings, and delivered his report in only slightly modified form at the assembly, with explosive consequences. The absence of a list of attendees from France means that the total composition of the audience in Paris is unclear.78 But when the assembly opened at the Sorbonne on 25 September it was presided over by an impressive, if small, collection of politicians and dignitaries who had high hopes for the SEC’s new undertaking.79 It was Henri Be´darida, professor of Italian literature at the Sorbonne and current president of the SEC’s French Centre, whose address best captured the assembly’s expectations for what was intended to be the SEC’s most ethnically diverse meeting to date. As he noted, the meetings would be held at the Cite´ Universitaire, a crossroads of ‘young people of all nations and of all colours, of every philosophical, religious and political conviction’, and therefore favourable to the workings of an assembly that, understanding the importance of ‘unity in diversity’, sought to heal the divisions imposed on Europe and the world by ordinary politics.80 While it is unclear whether the hoped-for overseas students attended, it appears that none of the non-European participants that Havet had been charged with inviting from among his considerable Unesco contacts did.81 There was, however, sufficient representation not only from outside Europe in Amrouche, Diop and the Chinese philosopher Reverend Francois Houang, but also from European critics of Campagnolo’s civilization of the universal to ignite the sort of debate within the SEC that many councillors had warned of, and which would have such longlasting implications for the Society’s relations with many African intellectuals. Although an internal press release billed the assembly as a pursuit of ‘human solidarity’,82 the proceedings published in Comprendre actually record a battle within the SEC’s membership over the position it should take on Europe’s dialogue with other civilizations. No doubt in response to the councillors’ feedback at the preparatory meetings, Campagnolo’s report for the assembly did offer a much clearer account than the draft proposal on how the European intellectual should take moral responsibility for colonialism. Alongside initiatives in economic and social development, cultural exchanges should be conducted sympathetically, with a view to establishing among the peoples of the world a ‘reciprocal, disinterested knowledge’, and to cultivating an awareness of their common destiny and their moral responsibility to each other in a

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‘democratic’ way.83 Yet it also reprised many of the same arguments that had already been poorly received by the councillors as to why the intelligentsia should do so. These arguments – that Europe’s real motive for expansion was out of humanist sympathy rather than greed; that only because of colonialism had non-Europeans misunderstood this motive, and that this misunderstanding could be corrected by familiarization with the true essence European culture; and, above all, that the contemporary European was qualified to judge what qualities from other civilizations should help to constitute the new, unified world civilization that it was incumbent upon intellectuals to build – instigated the vigorous debates that followed. Lengthy and contested enough to crowd all other discussion points off the agenda, they all turned around one essential question: what Campagnolo actually meant by the civilization of the universal. At no point in his report did he offer a clear definition of this term, leaving many in the audience hard pressed to see the distinction between the civilization of the universal and universal civilization. While the need for an international civilization held together by a shared value system was not contested, all of the respondents without exception, including Bobbio, Diop, Houang, Lacroix, Mayoux and G. A. Raadi (Iran’s delegate to both the UN and Unesco, and a member of the latter’s executive council), were uncomfortable with the argument for Europe as either its parent or its arbiter. As Bobbio put it, Campagnolo’s report had made an ontology out of the universal aspirations of European culture, when the latter should have been treated as a phenomenology, as one manifestation of a much larger and varied phenomenon.84 Or, as the Reverend Houang more vividly described it, universal culture was a rose window to which Europe had contributed only a few panes: ‘Why’, he queried, ‘is Europe prioritized as universal, rather than bestowing these qualities on universality itself?’85 Respondents from the decolonizing territories, however, were much more pointed regarding Europe’s proven inability to live up to its own ideals. Using the current situation in Algeria as an example of what happened when its values were imposed on peoples beyond its borders, ‘European comportment’, Amrouche observed, ‘turns, like the dye of a sunflower, and it turns very quickly’ into fascism and racism.86 The real revolt in Algeria, he concluded, was not of the colonized against the colonizers, but of the colonials and their supporters in France against

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European values. The task facing the SEC was therefore of ‘converting Europeans to Europe’.87 Although the audience vigorously supported Amrouche’s intervention, Diop’s debates with Campagnolo captured the tone the Assembly as a whole. While he accepted the idea of the civilization of the universal, he was firm in his view that Europe, regardless of its past achievements, was now ‘a simple province’ in the world, that Europe had been lucky in what it had been able to accomplish, and that now ‘this luck can fall tomorrow to other peoples’.88 There was also a downside to the ‘rigour’ underlying Europe’s culture, which had enabled those achievements: its predisposition toward violence. As Amrouche had also intimated, Europe was the ‘only aggressive continent for centuries’, the Holocaust and colonialism constituting a double betrayal of its own purported values both within and beyond its borders: ‘I am not the first’, Diop observed, ‘to affirm that Buchenwald and Dachau are monuments of criminality and that, until we learn otherwise, in exotic civilizations, nothing comparable has been known.’89 And while he was careful – and would continue to be in subsequent exchanges with Campagnolo in Comprendre and Pre´sence africaine – to express his confidence in the ‘probity’ of the SEC’s membership at large, he voiced serious reservations about ‘what could be done’ with Campagnolo’s report because of the way it could, and clearly was being interpreted: as a reassertion of Europe’s former cultural hegemony.90 In light of its stormy reception, Campagnolo’s civilization of the universal did not feature in the resolution issued at the end of the assembly. Instead, the theme of that text was contrition. Recognizing the relationship between Europe’s internal political problems and those between Europe and non-European countries, it indicated the former’s need to respect what are now considered as human rights – the ‘principles that have animated [its own] great revolutions’ – not only within Europe, but also in Europe’s dealings with other peoples and civilizations.91 Yet, because ‘only culture is in a position to excite and develop the moral forces capable of creating institutions conforming to the needs of people, European as well as non-European’, it therefore appealed to intellectuals to denounce and resist ‘all forms of oppression and slavery (political, economic, financial, military or cultural) in the relations between peoples’, and to intensify cultural exchanges between them toward a ‘better reciprocal understanding, an understanding

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on which will be founded the collaboration and friendship that are the substance of a truly human society the culture of which aspires to be universal’.92 Maybe because of the lively debates it had provoked, the 1953 General Assembly received fairly strong press coverage. Although some of it, for example, the pieces in France’s leftist newpapers Franc Tireur and Combat, noted the ‘raising of shields’ that Campagnolo’s report had provoked,93 the resolution’s call for an intensification of exchanges between European and overseas intellectuals was warmly received by many commentators. The SEC’s non-European membership also increased in the months that followed.94 Yet neither Diop nor Campagnolo let the debate over the civilization of the universal end there. Campagnolo continued to work on the idea and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, would reintroduce it with devastating consequences for the SEC’s relations with numerous African intellectuals at the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium (1960). Diop, however, would use Campagnolo’s arguments at the assembly, and also in ‘European Responsibilities’, more immediately as a reference point when developing his own arguments in support of African participation on a full and equal footing with other world civilizations in the process of global post-war cultural reconstruction. Unhappy with the resolution that issued from the 1953 assembly, which Diop had described as ‘anodyne enough and vague enough’, considering that Europe never even tried to apply the principles that had inspired its own great revolutions in its colonies,95 he soon wrote to Campagnolo regarding what he perceived as the latter’s ‘releasing Europeans from responsibility for their crimes’ and of ‘diminishing their seriousness’.96 What can be gathered from this partially preserved correspondence is that Diop had requested that Comprendre publish, in place of the transcripts of his interventions in the debates from the 1953 assembly, a letter responding to Campagnolo’s report. While Campagnolo declined this on the grounds that it would be impossible to disentangle Diop’s interventions from the larger discussion, he did agree to publish his letter, followed by his own response.97 This marked the beginning of what is probably best described as a love/hate relationship between the two men that more or less mirrored relations between Africa and Europe at that time. As Jean Fremigacci has noted, the years 1953– 7 marked the acceleration of the ‘dissolution

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of the colonial tie’ between France and its African territories, the negotiations around the Common Market making it clear that the French African territories would not be included as equal partners in this new federation.98 It was also the period in which Diop and the Pre´sence africaine group were becoming increasingly sensitive to events in Algeria, marking a turning away from that magazine’s initial Eurafricanism and its preoccupation with the European ideal of a universal humanism. Bernard Mouralis and Christopher L. Miller have both pointed out that by the 1950s it was focusing instead on the ‘social and political realities of the day’.99 Stridently anti-colonialist and antiracist, it now took an openly Africanist perspective. In spite of their shared belief in culture as having a primary role to play in the process of global post-war reconstruction, the differences between Campagnolo and Diop – the former’s trenchant defence, and the latter’s increasingly embittered detraction of Europe as morally qualified to lead this process - were also evident by that time. While Diop’s joining the SEC in 1953 confirmed his commitment for the foreseeable future to maintaining at least a critical presence within the Society, his reservations were already evident in an essay that he had written that year for the SEC’s forthcoming issue of Comprendre. Dedicated to the theme ‘The Reality of Europe’ – what Europe had represented in the world, what it currently represented, and what it could or should represent. Diop was one of the special contributors to it, and his essay, ‘Europe seen by an African’, offered a valuable introduction to the main critical lines of attack against Europe that he and many other non-western intellectuals would take during the widespread process of decolonization of Africa and Asia between the end of the war and 1960. He had moved far from the position taken in ‘Niam n’goura’, where he described Europe’s cultural relationship with Africa as an ‘intellectual collaboration’ necessary for the integration of the ‘black man in western civilization’.100 Now, five years later, he was denouncing Europe not only as morally bankrupt, evidenced by its concentration camps and the development of nuclear weapons, but as assimilationist in its attitude towards other cultures. Because of its blind pride, it was incapable of the sort of collaboration being asked of it.101 Although it was clearly on the road to recovery, Europe’s cultural and institutional revival, not least with regard to its concerns for social justice, was suited to it alone. What it now needed

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was a spirit of ‘generosity’ and a will to genuine collaboration on a world scale.102 Although Diop did not use this expression in ‘Europe seen by an African’, ‘entering history’ was essentially what he meant by participating in the global process of post-war reconstruction. When Africa entered history, it would be marked by a full and equal involvement in resolving the range of economic, military, political, technological, and ethical problems defining, to use Havet’s expression, the ‘modern condition’.103 It is therefore striking that his essay appeared in the same collection as ‘European Responsibilities’. Campagnolo’s essay, which included many of the arguments presented at the Paris assembly, was distinguished from the assembly report by its identification of historical awareness as the defining feature of the civilization of the universal. For Campagnolo, it was fundamental to any civilization with universal aspirations, because it enabled that civilization to have not only a ‘general vision of man’, but also an awareness of differences between civilizations, which enabled it to determine what was most valuable in them.104 Furthermore, historical consciousness was distinctly European. Not only had it developed in Europe, it had uniquely equipped that continent to understand even its most recent mistakes, thereby providing the insight necessary for reforming its own institutions world wide.105 Diop and Campagnolo were far from being the only ones thinking in terms of a new historical order. In his observations about Diop’s interventions at the SEC’s 1952 General Assembly, Havet had already described ‘entering history’ as the challenge facing non-European peoples of having ‘to integrate themselves into the movement of contemporary history’.106 Yet, even if this expression was not always used, the mid-1950s were peppered by events hosted by both European and, increasingly, non-European organizations, all addressing the place of non-western peoples in the emerging post-war international order and the institutions meant to shape it. From early on, the WPC had a truly global following, its second World Peace Congress in Warsaw 1950 attracting delegates from China, Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and from black Africa. The CCF had also taken an early interest in the post-colonial world. It hosted two Asian Conferences on Cultural Freedom, in Mumbai in March 1951 and in Rangoon in February 1955, followed in September 1955 by its landmark

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‘The Future of Freedom’ congress in Milan. Considering the Cold War from a global perspective, the Milan congress flagged poverty and political instability as the primary threats to democracy in newly emerging states. According to Giles Scott-Smith, this event marked the CCF’s turning from its founding commitment to intellectual freedom toward a concern with socio-economic and development issues.107 The most influential of all such activities at mid-decade, however, was the Bandung Conference. Organized by the governments of India, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and convened in Bandung, Indonesia on 18 – 24 April 1955, it had resulted in the Panch Shila, or the ‘Five Principles’ for conducting international relations among non-aligned nations. Three of them – namely respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other nations, noninterference in their affairs, and the renunciation of the use of force in interstate relations – would bear a strong resemblance to the principle of peaceful coexistence outlined by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress the following year,108 and the WPC’s Helsinki Congress held in June 1955 was pointing in a similar direction. Although Joliot-Curie, in his opening address to that congress, had missed the potential of Bandung as an actual model for European relations – while it had successfully provided a ‘real charter for peaceful coexistence’, apparently it only pertained, in his view, to Africa and Asia’s problems109 – Sartre, also present in Helsinki, did not. He understood Bandung’s conception of coexistence not as tolerance but as co-operation, based on solidarity and ‘the positive construction . . . of new bonds between nations’.110 As we shall see in the following chapters, these ideals informed his explorations, after his final break with communism, of direct democracy and human rights. The importance of the Bandung Conference, and of its co-operative approach to international relations was not lost on Diop, either. This was in spite of the fact that his own understanding of the relationship between politics and culture was markedly different from the one expressed there. Cultural policy did not feature largely at the Bandung Conference, and the approach taken to it was functionalist. Seeing the creation of a role for newly emerging states in the post-war international order as the responsibility of ordinary politics, culture was understood as a tool for increasing international understanding among unaligned states, and bilateral exchange agreements were recommended to that

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end.111 Nonetheless, the impact of the proceedings in Indonesia on Diop and Pre´sence africaine was immediate, inspiring him to organize the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 19 – 22 September 1956). Intended to be a cultural Bandung, after the event, Diop described it as marking the will of ‘the black world’ to take its place in ‘History’,112 and largely, but not entirely, on its own terms. Although Diop had contacted Campagnolo that summer for support in its realization for practical reasons – the SEC could help in obtaining assistance from Unesco, as well as ‘smoothing over’ relations with other cultural organizations that might be opposed to the congress113 – the Society would also serve as a largely critical reference point at it. This was not least because of Diop’s debate with Campagnolo over the Society’s attitude toward non-Western cultures, which was still going on while he was making plans for the event. While Diop clearly valued the SEC’s originality and importance in maintaining dialogue between communists and non-communists,114 at the same time, he was affronted by its belief in the primacy of European culture, his irritation being revived by the appearance of the ‘British’ issue of Comprendre that summer, which was dedicated to the legacy of the British Empire for the culture of other civilizations. His review in Pre´sence africaine in autumn 1955 was not only critical of that issue of Comprendre, it also reprised Diop’s attack on the civilization of the universal. Denouncing the idea that ‘the vocation of the universal is a virtue inseparable from Europe, the only continent the culture of which is capable of creating history, philosophy, science, Christianity’ as essentially the same set of Eurocentric assumptions that Hitler subscribed to, he recommended that Europe simply accept its new situation. Overtaken militarily and economically by China, Russia, and the United States, now it was merely ‘a province of the world among others’, and should not confuse ‘the rights and privileges of culture with the politico-economic privileges held long ago by Europe’.115 Yet it was another essay by Diop, ‘Cultural Colonialism and Cultural Nationalism’ that, appearing in this same issue of Pre´sence africaine, brought his conflict with Campagnolo to a head. In it Diop had used Campagnolo’s work in particular as a foil when sketching out his own journal’s expectations of culture in creating Africa’s presence in the new world order that he had glimpsed at Bandung. Starting with the lesson of the French Resistance as the only effective response by many French intellectuals to Germany’s ‘assimilationist’ approach to their culture, he

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argued that Europe’s intelligentsia now had the ‘greatest moral responsibility’ to promote the values of truth, beauty and justice through ‘free dialogue’ with the intellectuals of equally oppressed, colonized civilizations.116 As this suggests, Diop saw these values as universal, and while he was careful to point out that Europe’s intelligentsia embodied the highest of those ideals, and that the intellectual power and sensibility of the ‘great minds in Europe . . . truly merited’ admiration,117 ‘The Civilization of the Universal’ threw their cultural self-absorption into high relief. Quoting at length from Campagnolo’s Paris assembly report, what bothered him the most was the fact that it ‘provoked no immediate emotion among the greatest men of culture present there’. Although, he conceded, ‘after two or three hours of debate, this text was entirely disparaged’, the discussions indicated that Europeans had still not unanimously ‘rethought and redeveloped their beliefs on this question’.118 Having failed to critically reassess the assumption of their own cultural superiority, or acknowledge the intellectual and creative capacities of other peoples who were fully capable of contributing to the ‘Civilization of the Universal’, Diop sensed an unconscious ‘will to assimilation, if not racism’ among them.119 Campagnolo responded to ‘Cultural Colonialism and Cultural Nationalism’ with restrained fury. Writing to Diop, he expressed his anger at being presented, albeit not by name, as a ‘nationalist, colonialist, even a racist’, and issued a renewed defence of his definition of the civilization of the universal: that only by thinking historically could the essential unity of humanity be understood, and, while it did not give Europeans any moral, intellectual or creative superiority, it was they who as the inventors of history had apprehended this universality.120 Diop’s response to Campagnolo, in contrast, was cool, even dismissive. Having ‘glanced through it rather than read’ Campagnolo’s letter, he observed that while he did not believe Campagnolo to be a racist or a colonialist, in which case he ‘would cease to take part in the SEC’, and while he had ‘the greatest esteem’ for all the members of the SEC he knew, such texts suggested to him that ‘Europe is still far from having made a correct and objective realization’ of its cultural position in the world.121 It was still assuming its own ‘grandeur and the servitude of other peoples’, and Campagnolo should instead be denouncing colonialism for undermining the ‘freedom [and] the authenticity of European culture’.122

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If this exchange in January/February 1956 suggested that Diop was washing his hands of the SEC, this was not the case. In spite of his reservations, he fully recognized the importance of maintaining a dialogue with the European intelligentsia, among whom he had many friends and colleagues. Consequently his congress, although convened out of ‘frustration with western culture’, was in large part about improving Africa’s current situation in relation to Europe, and working with the latter largely within Europe’s, and the SEC’s terms. Much of the Society’s lexicon (the ‘man of culture’, ‘dialogue’, ‘ordinary politics’) was used there, and the civilization of the universal was a key theme. In his opening address, Diop even mentioned the SEC by name both in acknowledging the importance of its foundational vocation – that of finding a third way between the positions of the two superpowers at a particularly difficult moment in the Cold War – and its reliance on dialogue between figures of truly disparate ideological and aesthetic positions as the way to correct the ‘insufficiencies’ in the position of each participant.123 He did, however, in what was most likely a tacit reference to Campagnolo, question the claims by ‘the most eminent men of [European] culture’ for the universal vocation of their culture,124 and presented one of the aims of the congress as addressing the alleged universal vocation of European civilization. Such a universal culture should, in fact, arise from a dialogue beginning with the disagreements between European intellectuals and their formerly colonized counterparts ‘at the level of our deepest reasons for living’.125 It would give rise to ‘new values . . . new universes borne of the meeting of peoples’ that should be explored together.126 Diop’s conference attracted 600 delegates from 24 countries to the Sorbonne in order to, as he later described it, ‘indicate, by means of a solemn demonstration, the black world’s will fully to accept all its responsibilities, to play its own role and resolutely to occupy its place on the great stage of History’.127 It should not, however, be seen as a repudiation of Europe or of European culture, but as an attempt to establish a relationship with it on an equal footing. While it had been convened specifically to consider the ‘past and future of black culture’, and ‘negritude’ – the idea that ‘all people of negro descent shared certain inalienable essential characteristics’128 – was central to the discussions, to ‘enter history’ necessarily meant engaging in global international

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relations. President Sukarno of Indonesia had argued in his opening speech at Bandung that the ‘affairs of all the world are our affairs, and our future depends upon the solutions found to all international problems’;129 equally, the resolution of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists recognized Africa’s irrevocable connectedness with the rest of the world, inviting black intellectuals to: unite their efforts in securing effective respect for the rights of Man, whatever his colour may be, and for all peoples and nations whatsoever . . . We recommend that artists, writers, scholars, theologians, thinkers and technicians participate in the historic task of unearthing, rehabilitating and developing those cultures so as to facilitate their being integrated into the general body of World culture.130 As one of the participants, the writer Daniel Maximin, who later would go on to be Pre´sence africaine’s literary editor, recalled, what actually came out of the congress was a commitment to pursuing a ‘culture of dialogue and of discovery’, a ‘dream of a reconciled humanity, curious about each other, not so much mixed . . . as composite’.131 And, in spite of the differences between Diop and Campagnolo, the issue of Pre´sence africaine in which the proceedings of the congress were published concluded with a quotation from the resolution of the SEC’s 1956 assembly. This passage, which asserted culture as a common good of all peoples, and that any hindrance to their right to emancipate themselves constituted a threat to the development of a universal civilization, was presented optimistically by Diop as a ‘sign of the times’.132 As this suggests, the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists did not mark the end of Diop’s engagement with the SEC; the Society served there, and would remain a critical reference point for further initiatives within the Pre´sence africaine group. Although Diop was unable to secure the SEC’s involvement with the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists,133 they eventually collaborated, jointly hosting the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium in 1960 with the SAC. It included many of the luminaries at the 1956 Pre´sence africaine congress as participants – Aime´e Ce´saire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Rabemananjara and Le´opold Se´dar Senghor. Before that, however, the events of 1956 would take

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Campagnolo and Diop in different directions for a few years. If Diop was preoccupied first with his congress, and then with the SAC that grew out of it, the Thaw that February finally offered Campagnolo and the SEC the possibility of realizing face-to-face dialogue with Soviet and other figures from Europe’s socialist countries, temporarily pushing the international problem to one side.

CHAPTER 4 `

THE WILL TO DIALOGUE': THE FIRST EAST—WEST MEETING, MARCH 1956

By the mid 1950s, the civilization of the universal had opened up a seemingly unsolvable debate within the SEC. Yet, in spite of this, those years saw the greatest number of new recruits to the Society during the period covered in this book. 1953 marked a high tide, with 160 people joining, including some highly eminent Western figures – Isaiah Berlin, Van Wyck Brooks, Pablo Casals, Fre´de´ric Joliot-Curie, Michel Leiris, Jacques Maritain, Lewis Mumford, Pierre Naville, Pablo Picasso, Paul Ricoeur and Albert Schweitzer among them. Yet the influx of members from Europe’s socialist countries was also notable. That same year, seven Yugoslavs had joined, followed in 1954 by five more new members from Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland, and in 1955, by seven East German and four new Czech members.1 This rise in members from the East was no doubt due to the death of Stalin in March 1953, which quickly enabled the renewal of contact between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe. From what can be gathered from the correspondence between Campagnolo and various SEC members, there was strong interest in the Society among intellectuals in Europe’s socialist countries.2 According to Jean Lacroix, reporting back from a recent conference trip to Poland, he found a ‘desire for cultural relations’ among intellectuals there at least as intense as in the West.3 It was indeed in a spirit of de´tente that the East–West Dialogue, the first of the SEC’s East– West Meetings, was held in Venice on 25–31

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March 1956, and it was by far the most successful of the meetings. The second one (Venice, August 1958) was severely affected by the international backlash surrounding the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the third, intended for the autumn of 1963 on the Cold War, was cancelled after the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The Dialogue, however, took place only weeks after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Best remembered as the event at which Khrushchev denounced the cult of Stalin, his admissions there about the true nature of Stalinism issued in the ‘Thaw’, a period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and in the countries directly under its control. But particularly important for the SEC were the two new approaches to foreign policy introduced at that congress. Firstly, Khrushchev had revived the idea of ‘national roads to socialism’ that, Maud Bracke tells us, ‘implied the acceptance of different strategies for, and paths towards, socialist revolution for communist parties in different national contexts’, tacitly acknowledging that such differences already existed in Eastern Europe.4 Secondly, he embraced the strategy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ that, Bracke explains, sought to avoid military confrontation between communist and capitalist states, replacing it instead with ideological and economic competition.5 The avidity for contact Lacroix had observed among intellectuals in the East was certainly matched by their Western counterparts, including those in the SEC. From the beginning, the Society had intended to play a direct part in resolving the European problem by harnessing what it took to be the intelligentsia’s capacity for moral leadership. Yet the six years between its inception and the Thaw had been marked by an escalating concern among the Society’s members about how to bring about face-to-face meetings. In spite of the generally positive press reports of its assemblies, two contrasting criticisms continued to hang over the SEC: either that it was a ‘congress of philosophers’, or that it ‘glided too often on to the terrain of politics’.6 While the Society accepted that it needed to become visibly active in some way, to date the only real initiative it was toying with was the establishment of an International Centre of Art and Culture for the Isola di San Giorgio.7 At the 1954 General Assembly (October, Venice) it was also clear that the few opportunities presented to the Society to intervene in practical politics had only resulted in further frustration for its members. Dedicated to the political obligations of the intellectual, it had been

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intended to clarify the SEC’s aims and methods, yet the assembly was wracked by debates over the SEC’s refusal to take a formal position on key social issues. The Society had not, for example, spoken out against the recent instances of censorship by the French government. It had refused entry by the Ballets russes into France, and had banned Chris Marker’s film Statues also Die (1953) that, commissioned by Pre´sence africaine, was withdrawn for promoting anti-colonialism.8 More worrying, for many members, was the SEC’s failure to take a position on such a basic moral issue as racism. Campagnolo’s invitation to speak at the UN-sponsored conference on Racism, Anti-Semitism and Peace in Geneva that spring was a clear opportunity for the SEC to denounce racism in principle, which he did, but his refusal to participate in the vote against racism, or to endorse the resolution at the end of the conference on the grounds that it hindered free intellectual exchange, was poorly received by many members.9 Consequently, the atmosphere at the assembly was fractious. Of the 173 members present, those from the SEC’s French Centre were particularly sensitive to the Society’s refusal to take a position on these issues, and the following summer it submitted an angry resolution of its own to the SEC’s secretariat demanding that, during the next assembly, the Society clarify its activities and what, exactly, the SEC represented.10 Another area of concern for its membership at large was the Society’s reluctance to collaborate with other, like-minded organizations. When one of the new Yugoslav members, the Surrealist writer and president of the Association of Serbian Writers, Dusˇan Matic´, recommended collaboration, he seems to have been generally supported by the Executive Council, which was prescient on this point.11 Within ten years the SEC would indeed be competing with numerous other organizations established in the pursuit of East– West de´tente. Given the orientation toward democracy and human rights that it was acquiring by then, it might have fruitfully collaborated with some of these other bodies. Yet, working with another organization at this early juncture might well have diminished the success of the East– West Dialogue, the SEC’s most important achievement during the first 20 years of its existence. The strength of this initiative would be its openness, almost formlessness, which permitted genuinely critical discussions about the ideological differences among the participants, unimpeded by political concerns.

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Nonetheless, Matic´’s recommendation was certainly timely: 1955 would be a red-letter year for Europe-wide exchanges, further increasing the pressure on, but also the opportunities for, the SEC’s secretariat to put the politics of culture into practice. For example, the Geneva Summit held that July between Germany’s four occupying powers – Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States – has been described as a ‘respite’ from the Cold War.12 All participants hoped the summit would be an ‘opportunity to reduce East– West tensions, and cultural contacts and exchanges were on the agenda as part of this larger effort toward de´tente.13 The WPC also convened its own world congress in Helsinki that June. Openly critical of the West’s approach so far to the ‘German problem’ – its support for the Federal Republic’s remilitarization and incorporation into NATO – and the creation of the Western European Union, the Helsinki conference aimed to mobilize public opinion in support of disarmament, peaceful coexistence and the easing of international tensions. And, like the Geneva Summit, which the WPC hoped would restore the UN as a true representative of world public opinion,14 it too had a cultural strand, convening three subcommittees from its Commission on Cultural Exchanges in support of the objectives of the congress. 1955 was also a key year for proponents of the integration of West Europe, marking the beginning of what Antonio Varsori has described as the ‘re-launching’ of the ‘idea of European identity’.15 Although it was largely an economic initiative issuing in the creation of EURATOM and the EEC, it did have a cultural element, the Council of Europe’s ‘Idea of Europe’ campaign. Introduced, in the council’s own words, in order to ‘strengthen cultural relations with a view to developing European culture, to make Europe a single cultural entity without thereby sacrificing its remarkable variety, to disseminate the idea of European unity and to foster the European spirit in this and future generations’,16 this intergovernmental initiative would work largely through bilateral and multilateral exchanges. Although the rising level of interest among official and nongovernmental organizations in cultural exchanges brought the SEC several offers of collaboration on various projects, Campagnolo responded to them much in the same way that he had in 1952, when he had used the Society’s Appeal to distinguish the SEC’s objectives from those of other organizations. And, given his commitment to a fully integrated Europe, he was particularly cautious

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about Western integrationist bodies. For example, when he was approached by the Belgian senator and SEC member Baron Pierre Nothomb, who as head of an international senatorial committee was trying to set up a larger European Community of Culture within the framework of the WEU, Campagnolo rejected it as ‘a type of cultural European Coal and Steel Community that has nothing in common with our Society’.17 While Campagnolo was actually willing to assist the Council of Europe’s study ‘Awareness and Presentation in Europe of the European Idea’, he was careful to point out to its secretary, too, that the Council of Europe’s commitment to Western Europe’s integration alone meant that its understanding of ‘Europe’ was fundamentally opposed to that of the SEC.18 Drawing the secretary’s attention to the paper he had delivered at the SEC’s general assembly that year, ‘The European Idea and the Politics of Culture’, this report, and the location of the assembly – the Palais des Acade´mies, Brussels – had been chosen in order to bring out this difference as distinctly as possible. As Campagnolo put it, Brussels was the key site for ‘European institutions in Belgium, and of the personalities who are occupied with the European problem’.19 There, he suggested, ‘Europeanist’ and ‘anti-communist’ were becoming coextensive, which in his view – one shared by several of the Society’s executive councillors – amounted to ‘a brilliant negation of Europe’.20 Contrasting starkly with the ‘start with the West’ ethos in that city, the SEC’s Brussels Assembly opened in the presence of a small but stellar array of ‘alternative’ Belgian dignitaries: Le´o Collard, Belgium’s Minister of Public Instruction and Pierre Vermeylen, Minister of the Interior, both socialists, and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, known as the ‘Red Queen’ for, among other things, her trips to Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and China in the 1950s and 1960s.21 But if there was also a hint of de´tente to the proceedings – Paul-Henri Spaak, a key figure in Western Europe’s integration, had also contributed to the assembly’s realization22 – Campagnolo’s report gave the meeting its orientation. Offering a synopsis of how Europe was currently conceived of – by Western European ‘enthusiasts’ as a union modelled on the United States; by politicians as a ‘rampart’ against Soviet and, occasionally, American power; by sceptics as a utopia; and by communists as an ‘anti-communist coalition’ – the real European idea, for Campagnolo, was an ethical and intellectual one, which should be built on new institutional foundations beyond the confines of the nation state.23

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Campagnolo’s report was based on many of the assumptions characteristic of his thinking: that the ‘people’ necessarily wanted a fully united Europe, that the latter was inevitably the ‘foyer’ of the next world war should its ideological disputes remain unresolved, and that the only way of avoiding such a conflict was to create a universal state.24 And if it typically fell to the intellectual to ‘create the cultural and moral substance of the new European’,25 this was because Europe itself was born out of ‘cultural need and not out of the abstract economic reason’ that ‘economic reality [necessarily] consists in market forces’. Taking aim at the underlying premise of the nascent Common Market, ‘on the contrary’, he argued, ‘it is cultural and moral need which determines new economic conditions’.26 The press statement given at the conclusion of the Brussels Assembly described the meeting as convened in the ‘spirit of Geneva’ – the fourpower summit that July – as proof that intellectuals from across Europe could meet in ‘perfect harmony’ in support of the SEC’s ideals.27 But this was not entirely true. While it had managed to bring communists and liberals together, the audience still came overwhelmingly from Western Europe. A real face-to-face encounter with figures from Europe’s communist countries in any significant number still eluded the SEC, and Campagnolo’s sensitivity to this would only have been heightened by the documentation he had recently received from Alfredo Varela, the secretary of the WPC’s Commission on Cultural Exchanges, about the WPC’s congress in Helsinki. Although Campagnolo had declined the WPC’s invitation to the Congress, Varela still sent him the WPC’s recent bulletins so he would be informed about preparations for it. Pointing out in a cover letter that ‘numerous men of culture from the East and West’ would be present, Varela anticipated that it was ‘possible to foresee from now that writers, artists and other intellectuals’ would be examining, in special sections, the problems of cultural exchanges and ‘relations between men of culture’.28 Only when Campagnolo saw the press coverage of the actual congress, however, did he contact Varela, requesting ‘all the documentation that you deem useful on the Helsinki manifestation: lists of participants, texts of interventions, resolutions’.29 Varela, who had recently joined the SEC, responded enthusiastically, sending him a complete collection of the WPC’s journal, which had published extracts from the workings of the organization’s plenary sessions and commissions, as well as press

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communique´s.30 Assuming that he read them, Campagnolo would have seen that the Declaration by Writers and Artists had taken clear positions on censorship and racism, similar to those the membership of his own organization had wanted the SEC to take.31 He would also have seen that the WPC had formed a Commission on Cultural Exchanges, the orientation and purpose of which bore a striking resemblance to that of the SEC.32 Moreover, the final communique´ issuing from that commission sought the mass appeal that the SEC was hoping for with its politics of culture. It called on all intellectuals and artists to ‘act on behalf of their people, to contribute, through their cultural activity and their activity as citizens, to the establishment of an international climate of comprehension and understanding’, and for the ‘fruitful interchange of people, works, ideas for the free development of the creative faculties, for the cultural progress of peoples and for the full development of the human personality’.33 Campagnolo received these reports when he had only just begun planning the Dialogue in any detail. The previous summer, Vercors and Carlo Levi, two of the SEC’s executive councillors, had approached him about the possibility of the Society hosting a meeting between writers from Eastern and Western Europe, the origins of which can be traced to the WPC’s 1952 Vienna Congress.34 There the communist writer Elsa Triolet had first suggested a ‘vast, global’ writers’ congress,35 which eventually took the form of a small, preliminary meeting, held in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, in February 1954. This meeting, hosted by the Belgian artist and pacifist Baron Antoine Allard, again with the support of the ‘Red Queen’, brought together Louis Aragon, Bertold Brecht, Constant Burniaux, Ilya Ehrenburg, Konstantin Fedin, Daniel Gilles, Frans Hellens, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Levi, Sartre, Anna Seghers, Triolet and Vercors, and possibly others, to discuss the programme for the intended conference.36 As little documentation survives from the Knokke-le-Zoute meeting, it is unclear why it did not lead to the much larger writers’ congress that it had planned.37 Presumably this failure led Vercors to approach Campagnolo about the SEC holding it instead. While Campagnolo was keen to ensure that any event sponsored by the SEC furthered the principles of the Society, he nonetheless seized the opportunity for the SEC to get involved. He wrote immediately to Sartre who, as a result of contacts made at Knokke-le-Zoute, had travelled to the Soviet Union

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that May and had met with Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov and others, to see whether he knew under what conditions Soviet writers would be willing to participate in such an event.38 Without that information, Campagnolo felt it would be difficult to determine the viability of the project. Although the SEC’s October 1954 assembly had been marred by discontent over the Society’s lack of practical activity, it was there, during discussions outside of the formal meetings, that plans for the Dialogue began to crystallize.39 By December Campagnolo had drawn up a list of conditions under which the SEC would agree to sponsor the meeting: the theme must adhere to the SEC’s principles, the participants must agree any press communique´ unanimously, and the meeting was not to be used for propagandistic purposes. Finally, a reciprocal exchange must be organized by the Soviets, in which an equal number of SEC members would travel to Russia to further the aims of the Society.40 It appears that he took these demands to a preparatory meeting in Paris in January 195541 and, although Campagnolo had charged Vercors and Sartre with approaching some of the Knokke-le-Zoute participants for the SEC meeting, his correspondence with Vercors indicates that Sartre was unhappy with the SEC’s terms for hosting the event. When Vercors also took the position that he and Sartre would have to stand aside if the connection between the SEC and the Knokke-le-Zoute meetings was not made explicit, Campagnolo, reminding him that the Society had been envisaging such an event since its inception, reaffirmed that it must include branches of cultural activity other than writing, and the topics addressed must be firmly within the ‘perspectives’ of the SEC.42 Apparently won over by Campagnolo’s arguments, Vercors was charged with approaching Western participants, while Sartre was to advise about Soviet participation.43 These arrangements having been agreed, the SEC embarked on what would be the first of its East– West Meetings. The premises of the Dialogue, also finalized in Paris, were as follows. The event would be organized by the SEC and held in Venice; it would be unpublicized in the first instance, with the release of a press communique´ only at the end of the meeting; and the discussions would be in the spirit of the SEC’s objectives. Furthermore, the Dialogue would include a range of cultural figures, and, ideally, Unesco would support it.44 All that remained was to agree the programme and to invite the participants. Campagnolo’s correspondence indicates that he had

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established the programme with Sartre and Vercors probably during January,45 and it is clear from an early draft in the archives that, as Campagnolo intended, the programme bore little resemblance to the one prepared at Knokke-le-Zoute. The Belgian meeting had meant to pursue a range of questions, including whether the current state of exchanges between eastern and western European countries was harmful to culture; how social conditions and literary creation differed between those countries; the moral and material conditions in which writers were working in their respective countries, and their relationship with their readers; as well as to critically consider the actual creative process in the East and the West in comparison with that of the nineteenth century.46 The draft programme for the Dialogue, in contrast, was clearly in service of the SEC’s own aims. ‘The object of this first meeting’, it stated: is to prepare for a subsequent, larger meeting, [with the help of Unesco] that will have for its aim the study of the exchanges of works and persons between nations, and the actual obstacles to these exchanges. The participants will be invited to examine this problem in the spirit of the SEC, considering cultural exchanges not for propagandistic or competitive ends, but according to the perspective of the politics of culture, of dialogue and of the universality of culture. From this point of view, the fundamental idea of the SEC is that political antagonisms don’t breach in the least the solidarity of culture.47 The programme concluded with the hopes that the larger meeting, supported by Unesco, would follow, and that participants, above all, the Soviets, who were still unrepresented in the SEC, would finally join it. Stapled to this draft is an agenda, in Campagnolo’s handwriting, simply noting what appear to be his own hopes for the meeting: that it be premised on sincerity, dialogue and cultural solidarity. Although the Executive Council had wanted to be more involved,48 Campagnolo and the SEC’s Secretariat did much of the organization for the Dialogue; surviving records show the considerable difficulties he and the Secretariat faced in securing participants. Although the many undated lists in the archives of people to be invited do not say if and when various individuals were actually contacted, they do show that at

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some point a decision had been taken to restrict participation to European and American figures only.49 Furthermore, the absence of Soviets on any of the lists also shows that the Secretariat knew from the outset how difficult securing their participation would be. In order to achieve it, Campagnolo, like anyone else wanting to arrange for the travel of Soviet citizens abroad, had to go through VOKS. After the war, this agency had been charged with restoring cultural contacts with western countries and, as Natalia Yegorova has observed, the relaxation in international tension following Stalin’s death enabled it to bolster its activities in Western Europe.50 While VOKS’ director, Andrei Denisov, appears to have genuinely seen the Dialogue as an opportunity to ‘develop and deepen international cultural exchanges’, and to have helped to secure appropriate participants for it, larger organizational problems cost the SEC some of the people it originally wanted.51 While the first round of invitations to figures in the West – who could be approached directly – was sent out that October,52 the difficulties encountered in agreeing the final list of participants was, to a certain extent, exacerbated by having to change the date of the meeting. Originally planned for the first ten days in January 1956, which VOKS had agreed to, the unavailability of certain unnamed Western figures necessitated moving the event to the last week in March. This change cost the participation of Ehrenburg and Aleksandr Korneichuk, who were due to appear at a meeting on disarmament on the 29th of that month, and the final list of Soviet participants was only communicated to the SEC on 14 March, just 11 days before the start of the Dialogue.53 If the programme had sufficiently convinced Denisov of the Dialogue’s importance, Unesco, however, was not as confident. Although Campagnolo was generally reluctant to collaborate with other institutions, he typically made exceptions for it and the RIG. Yet when he wrote to Unesco’s new, American director Luther Evans about support for the East–West Meetings, Evans refused to be involved on the grounds that their composition, programme and working methods were still unclear.54 Consequently, all Unesco would commit to was Havet’s presence at them as an observer. The Dialogue did, however, benefit from the co-operation of the Italian government, without which the event would not have been possible. Liaising with his contacts in Rome was one of the first things Campagnolo did when assessing the Dialogue’s viability, and the SEC’s members within the government – Ponti and

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Donini – were essential to the arranging of visas through the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.55 Consequently, when its inaugural session opened on Sunday, 25 March at the hotel Luna Baglioni, just off St Mark’s Square, it brought together an impressive array of figures from across eastern and western Europe. In addition to Babel, Campagnolo and Ponti, who hosted the meeting, and an audience of senator Stanislao Ceschi, Mayoux, and Diego Valeri, were the physicist and vice-president of the WPC Bernal; the writer, journalist, and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones, the writer and co-editor of Encounter Stephen Spender from Britain; Jacques Havet, the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and the writer Vercors from France; the writers Carlo Levi and Guido Piovene, the writer and soon to be founding editor of Tempo presente, Ignazio Silone, and the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti from Italy; the writer and editor in chief of the literary magazine Two´rczos´c´ (Creativity) Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz from Poland; the art historian Mikhail Alpatov, the writer and president of the Soviet Writers’ Union Konstantin Fedin, the writer Boris Polevoi and the diplomat and essayist, and head of the West European section of VOKS Viktor Volodin from the Soviet Union;56 the Swiss theologian Karl Barth; and, from Yugoslavia, the surrealist writer, former ambassador to Paris, and currently the director of Cultural Relations Abroad, Marko Ristic´. This group represented the diversity of Western ideological positions that the SEC had always wanted to bring together, including the CCF’s liberalism (Silone and Spender), revisionist Marxism (Sartre) and communism (Levi and Vercors). Yet the representatives from the East also fell into distinct aesthetic as well as ideological camps. On the one hand, each of the Soviet delegates upheld realism as the appropriate aesthetic for a socialist society, which they defended as a natural extension of Russia’s realist literary heritage of the nineteenth century, rather than as a construction of contemporary Soviet ideology. Iwaszkiewicz and Ristic´, on the other hand, were at least receptive to, if not practitioners of aesthetic modernism. Although Iwaszkiewicz had rejected his experiments with expressionism as a young man in favour of a poetry committed to everyday life, he had always disliked nationalism in literature. His longstanding belief in the ‘cultural interdependence’ of Europe, in spite of the antagonisms that continued to exist between European states after World War I, can be seen in his own involvement

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in the activities of the PEN Club and the European Intellectual Union during the interwar period.57 And after World War II, he was quick to renew such institutional contacts with the West. A member of the SEC (briefly in 1950, and then, from spring 1955 until his death in 1980), he also resumed his relationship with the PEN Club, and helped to found the WPC.58 In 1955, he used the latter as a platform to advocate an increase in international cultural exchanges, calling for coexistence and co-operation between different cultures as a means of promoting international understanding and peace and a sincere appreciation of Europe’s and the world’s cultural patrimony.59 No longer a modernist, but not a social realist, either, Iwaszkiewicz described himself at the Dialogue as a ‘thoroughly bourgeois’ writer living and working in a socialist state.60 It is important to note, however, that Iwaszkiewicz’s commitment to pan-European cultural relations also expressed itself politically. Born into an aristocratic family and married into one of wealthy industrialists, he had been a member of Poland’s political establishment before the war. Having held the post of head of Poland’s section of art propaganda in the Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1927 to 1932, from 1932 to 1936 he had been the secretary of the Polish legation to Copenhagen and later to Brussels.61 During the communist era, he continued to receive political appointments. Not only did he serve as a member of the Polish parliament from 1952 until the end of his life, in 1955 he was appointed editor of Two´rczos´c´, one of Poland’s leading, staterun literary monthlies.62 This was a characteristic of many eastern European ‘politico-intellectuals’ involved in international intellectual exchanges in the 1950s and 1960s. Typically having a presence on a government advisory board or representing the government within official organs, this gave them the potential for having political influence during the era of reform communism (1956– 68), which will be considered in greater detail in Chapter 7. Like Iwaszkiewicz, Marko Ristic´ was also a somewhat compromised modernist. A creative writer who helped to found the Surrealist movement in Yugoslavia before the war, he, too, was a political survivor who, evidently at the cost of his ‘personal and intellectual integrity’, adapted to the communist regime: he only resumed his support for artistic modernism after 1952, at the end of the period of High Stalinism.63 Equally, there were parallels between his and Iwaszkiewicz’s

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political activities. Like his Polish colleague, Ristic´ had extensive contacts both with the West and with his country’s political class. Having served between 1945 and 1951 as Yugoslavia’s ambassador to France, this was followed by his appointment as director of the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.64 He also represented his country at Unesco’s General Conference in 1952. A delegate from the only European socialist state still in Unesco at a time when, according to the Yugoslav delegation’s head, Vladislav Ribnikar, either the isolationist or anti-democratic natures of other socialist countries had driven them away from the organization, the Yugoslav delegation fervently embraced the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promoted there.65 Introduced to the SEC by Louis Guilloux and Mayoux, Ristic´ became a member in the summer of 1953;66 like Iwaszkiewicz, he too, believed in the fundamental unity and universality of contemporary culture. And he came to the Dialogue with an already formulated position, based on recent Yugoslav experience, on how peaceful coexistence could be seen as a phase in the fundamentally democratic process necessary for the creation of a truly global culture. The previous year, he had written, upon request, an article entitled ‘Yugoslav and Western Culture’ for Comprendre, which examined how cultural exchanges could be used as a means of promoting international understanding in support of peace. Arguing that both European and world culture were now working toward a synthesis, or ‘humanist integration’ based on their deep unity, what enabled the multinational Yugoslavia to co-operate effectively with other countries in furthering this process was not only its intimate understanding of the pluralist nature of this culture in the making, but its autonomy from bloc politics.67 In Ristic´’s view, Yugoslavia stood for the cultural, political and ideological autonomy that was possible under socialism,68 the idea of the existence of Marxisms tacitly informing his contributions at the Dialogue. It arguably had important theoretical implications for the development of the reform communist movement that was beginning to coalesce in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. While Iwaszkiewicz and Ristic´ , both of whom responded enthusiastically to their invitations to the Dialogue as being of ‘particularly acute interest’ and of ‘exceptional importance’,69 were committed Europeanists, the Soviet figures put forward by VOKS do not appear to have been such consistent advocates of pan-European dialogue.

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Operating within the Soviet Union’s own cultural system, Fedin has been remembered as a ‘typical figure of the years of stagnation’, and Volodin as a dramatist, the quotidian subject matter of his works being ‘characteristic of the post-Thaw period’.70 Polevoi appears to have been the only Soviet delegate with a Europhile reputation, and he had extensive political connections. Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, he was also a deputy to the Supreme Soviet from 1951 to 1966, as well as a government representative, and he would be on the Soviet commission for the CSCE.71 In spite of this, the substitution of Fedin and Polevoi for Ehrenburg and Korneichuk arguably contributed to the moderate Soviet profile at the Dialogue: the speeches of the latter two at the WPC’s recent Helsinki Congress had passionately denounced the United States’ response to the new developments in Soviet international policy.72 The Dialogue began its work on Monday morning, 26 March. Given the diversity of positions held by those around the table, Campagnolo had come to the opening session without a fixed agenda, only with a restatement of the aims of the event given in the letter of invitation. Setting out to determine whether or not there was still a will to dialogue in light of Europe’s partitioning, if so, they would work toward agreeing a programme for a second, much larger meeting to further the SEC’s key objectives.73 While these aims were fulfilled over the course of nine meetings, they were achieved primarily in the last four sessions, during which the programme for the second East– West Meeting was agreed and a press communique´ was drawn up. These more collectively spirited efforts, however, had been preceded by what Merleau-Ponty described as four days of ‘truly disagreeable exchanges’.74 Although Silone in particular actively set out to challenge the Soviet participants, it was out of these confrontations that the larger, unforeseen contribution of the Dialogue to the first phase of de-Stalinization in Europe’s socialist countries came about. Not only did they demonstrate to Silone and Spender the usefulness of an intimate, small group approach to East– West exchange, the Dialogue becoming the model for their own, CCFrelated activities dedicated to undermining communism in Europe’s socialist states. More qualitatively, as will be seen in Chapter 7, the substance of the debates in Venice, particularly those between Ristic´ and Sartre, also had a perceptible impact on the latter, and were likely to have informed his ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ (the first chapter of ‘Questions of Method’). This essay, originally commissioned for

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Iwaszkiewicz’s Two´rczos´c´, would be fundamental to the development of Marxist humanism, the first new strain of revisionist Marxism to appear in several of Europe’s socialist countries in the post-war period. In spite of the absence of a programme, a definitive outline of the discussions quickly took shape, thanks to an early attack by Silone. Confronting the Soviets with the argument that the very idea of the Thaw was an acknowledgement of the repressive nature of their own regime, he immediately broached the question of what the Thaw actually meant for cultural practice and exchange.75 One of the assumptions informing Silone’s argument was the existence of a universally valid and, for some, implicitly Western culture from which the Soviets had deviated, and needed to find a way back to. Rather than checkmating the Soviets, however, the discussions Silone’s challenge elicited enabled the Dialogue to become a constructive consideration of the nature and validity of the idea of a universal culture, and of how this universality could be achieved through cultures. Merleau-Ponty, in a lengthy speech that opened the debates of the second meeting, initially agreed with Silone that the intellectual was ‘obliged’ to give the Thaw ‘a coherent interpretation’. He therefore queried how Soviet cultural policy must change in order to permit the emergence of an autonomous culture, one adhering to more internal, or formalist, as opposed to externally imposed criteria, such as the geographical, social or economic contents that Social Realism relied on.76 Aware of the need to address Campagnolo’s and the SEC’s core concerns with engagement and the political responsibilities of the intellectual, he defended autonomous – in other words, modernist – art as engaged on the grounds that it issued from their creator’s own values. It need not have explicit political content, but only ‘political capacity’, which could teach ‘those who read a certain way of situating oneself in the world, and consequently a certain way of being political’.77 The Thaw could therefore unite the intelligentsia of the East and the West in making a ‘new universalism’ in a ‘single vase’, but it would require ‘a very deep and consubstantial changing in the Soviet regime’.78 The desirability of creating a universal culture appears to have been shared by all of the participants, including Sartre. He nonetheless challenged Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that it could only come about through Soviet reform, and in so doing he opened up a more fruitful exchange with the participants from the East. Arguing that in order to

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truly have a thaw in East–West relations, the West was required to ‘defrost’ itself, Sartre took issue with the assumption that there was only one ideology – Marxist – to overcome en route to the achievement of a universal culture. That could only be achieved dialectically, through a rational dialogue between consciously held ideological positions on both sides.79 He explained: We are getting here to the bottom of the cultural problem: it is that cultures are also ideologies. It is what has not been noticed here; and I see there one of the proofs that in the West, we ourselves are not thawed. We do not reckon that we are living in a period of bourgeois ideology; that our ideas, one way or another, are conditioned by bourgeois ideology, exactly like the Soviets’ ideas are conditioned by Soviet ideology . . . for me, the true problem is not searching for a universal, in the sense that it’s about ideas that will be valuable in one or another system; but rather of asking for a discussion of ideas. . .Thus it will not be about a universality without opposition, but on the contrary about a universality through opposition, of a universality that progresses. I believe we ought to start a movement of rapprochement going on from discussions; but not hope to find a common content in some idea or other.80 Stressing that this needed to be a reciprocal process, he concluded that it was: all we can ask for, and it’s already a lot. . .I don’t want to be pessimistic, I want simply to limit what in my view we can hope for. We certainly cannot hope that a third ideology, a synthesis, comes out of our meeting. We can hope, on certain points, for the possibility of integration.81 This exchange between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty took place early in the Dialogue, during the second meeting. But it was only at the start the fourth meeting, again launched by another of Silone’s provocations, that the points of agreement Sartre had hoped for became perceptible. It was now Tuesday, and that morning’s session had been a comparatively lacklustre, if consistent, defence by the Soviets of the fidelity of Soviet

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culture to Russia’s nineteenth-century realist literary tradition as the means of ensuring an art that was both engaged and widely accessible. Silone challenged them for betraying that tradition, specifically its non-conformism, its daring to speak on behalf of the ‘material and moral suffering’ of Russia’s people. Instead, Socialist Realism perpetuated a culture that ‘vows a voluntary ignorance of certain realities’ – the liquidations, deportations, the ‘arbitrary policing of unbelievable forms’ – which were wholly absent from contemporary Soviet literature.82 Their response to him was unconvincing. Fedin, for example, could only reply that ‘Russian writers resign themselves to a great part of these sufferings, in the hope, in the desire, of affirming the positive sides of the revolution, and of spreading them in the thought of the people.’83 Sartre’s exchange with Silone, in contrast, was not only more robust, but gave rise to the most significant outcome of the Dialogue. Not only capable of bringing Merleau-Ponty round to Sartre’s point of view, which was considerable given that the two philosophers had not spoken since 1953 when they took opposite sides over the conflict in Korea,84 it also elicited the exchange between Sartre and Ristic´ the following afternoon. And that would have important implications not only for Campagnolo and the SEC, but arguably, for Sartre’s own work, which would prove to be so important for the reform communist movement in the East over the next ten years. Critical of Sartre for overlooking the fact that Marxism and socialism were not, and need not be the same thing, Silone had accused him at that fourth meeting of perpetuating a Cold War mentality that polarized the world into two camps by failing to make that distinction.85 Sartre, on the other hand, irritated by Silone’s sweeping assertions like ‘man is bigger than ideology’ and ‘socialism is more vast than Marxism’, argued that he was ignoring the actual circumstances in which ideologies were developed and expressed: ‘you attain universalism’, Sartre countered, ‘by reducing to pulp all the barriers and structures that could make universality a little more difficult to conquer.’86 Against this, he reminded Silone that cultural values, or ‘truths’, as he called them, developed in different contexts, and not all of them translated successfully within different cultures. Consequently, it was ‘better to emphasize . . . cultural differences with the intention of overcoming them’.87 Sartre’s emphasis here on difference, and on the possibility for finding shared values between cultures in spite of it, was developed more

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critically by Ristic´ the next day. Rejecting Sartre’s argument that culture was necessarily perceived through ideology, he maintained that the potential for cultural integration offered by the Thaw was even greater than Sartre had suggested. This was because Marxism, as Silone had indicated, was not as monolithic as Sartre supposed.88 For Ristic´, the existence of different Marxisms was a clear demonstration that one ideology could give rise to different politics and different cultures. The Thaw was therefore a golden opportunity for a genuine convergence between cultures, based on an exchange that, more than ‘of post cards, nor even of books and publications, or of ballets or of theatre ensembles . . . will consist truly of an exchange of ideas.’89 That Western culture could be accepted in the East ‘only as a sort of foreign body, some element susceptible only to being submitted to a Marxist explanation’ as Sartre had argued, was a distortion, the Twentieth Congress was a clear demonstration of Marxism’s being a ‘living thing’, a ‘method’ open to development and change. As such, Marxism ‘presupposes, to be sure, certain fundamental principles, which are very simply the principles of dialectical materialism and historical materialism that absolutely do not force a Marxist to have the same opinion.’90 Ristic´’s understanding of Marxism as a method rather than a science clearly struck Sartre: I have never seen a Marxist define Marxism as a method. I have seen Camus, on the contrary, define Marxism thus, but never a true Marxist. He defines it as a science, in a strict sense, or as an ideology, meaning by that the cultural ensemble that it represents; but the idea of method that loosens up and softens its object is a notion that comes from our own idealist [non-Marxist] knowledge.91 While he quickly dismissed this observation as nothing more than a detail, it arguably had substantial consequences for him later on. In eight months’ time, Sartre would be writing ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ that, challenging the validity of scientific socialism, argued for its replacement with a ‘living’ Marxism, with Marxism understood as a heuristic method, testing theory against lived experience.92 The career of this essay and its guiding ideas in the East will be examined more closely in Chapter 7. Yet it is worth noting here that this essay was an early,

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highly influential confrontation with scientific socialism for having ‘stopped’ Marxism in communist countries, and in communist parties, by subordinating it to rigid principles, and by refusing such external criticism as Sartre was offering.93 But where there was ‘living Marxism’ – and clearly ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ was written with attention to the experience of real socialism in the East, above all in Hungary – Sartre had even glimpsed the possible emergence of democratic institutions within such self-critical Marxist regimes. This interest in democracy would slowly develop in his work over the next 15 years or so.94 Given its timing, it is likely that his exchange with Ristic´ enabled Sartre’s own critique of Soviet-style Marxism, and his argument for a truly living Marxism as both democratic and socialist to crystallize when it did.95 Campagnolo, too, found Ristic´’s intervention invaluable. The latter’s defining of Marxism as a method – something, he and Silone agreed, was widely accepted in Italy – gave both Marxists a tool for critical self-reflection, and anti-Marxists a reason to expect that dialogue and change could be possible.96 The remaining sessions of the Dialogue were therefore given to defining the themes for the planned second meeting, which was to be called ‘Cultures and the Future of Culture’. As the plural ‘cultures’ suggests, although the achievement of a universal culture was held out only as a future possibility, the position the round table finally arrived at was, in Campagnolo’s words, not about ‘bringing ideologies closer together’. Rather: beyond these ideological positions, we have recognized the existence of a common will. Personally, I have felt not my ideas coming closer to the ideas of others, but my will to agree with those of others. And it is this feeling that we ought to highlight.97 The communique´ drawn up for the press at the end of the Dialogue was simple. Announcing that the meeting had taken place, and that plans had been agreed there for a second East –West Meeting, it urged ‘men of culture of all nations’ to take advantage of the possibility for exchanges that the easing of international tensions now offered.98 Because of the good will reached by the end of the meeting, it was also agreed that the participants were free to go to the press about the Dialogue. Spender, who wanted to give an individual account of it to

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the BBC, had raised this last issue, and while Bernal, Piovene and Ristic´ supported him, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Vercors urged the publication of a press communique´ instead.99 As Sartre and Silone cautioned, individual, ‘anecdotal’ accounts would be likely to give a partial impression of the Dialogue. This, Sartre concluded, could lead to ‘unhelpful polemics’.100 In spite of the generally appreciative press coverage the Dialogue appears to have received, their reservations about the publication of personal accounts would be well founded in some cases. Polevoi, for example, interviewed for Literaturnaia Gazeta, noted the commitment among all participants toward increased and sustained contact and ‘reciprocal understanding’, and praised the lively, ‘open’ and ‘creative’ nature of the discussions. 101 Ristic´, also interviewed just days after the event by the Yugoslav magazine NIN-u, equally saw the lack of an agenda and the intimate size of the meeting as enabling free, spontaneous discussion. He identified the discussions among Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and above all, Silone as having resulted in a healthy confrontation of the Soviet position, thus offering the ‘best hope’ for ‘man regaining his whole humanity’ beyond the ‘psychosis of bloc politics’. 102 Alan Pryce-Jones, making similar observations about the unstructured nature of the debates in an article for the Times Literary Supplement, astutely took the Dialogue as evidence that ‘the smaller countries of eastern Europe hoped to discharge a new and most important role: that of helping to build the bridge which might make an exchange of ideas between the great Powers ideologically possible,’ not least because of the understanding of people like Iwaszkiewicz and Ristic´ of the ‘western point of view’.103 The coverage by Silone and Spender in their respective magazines Tempo presente and Encounter, was, however, more confrontational. Silone’s account of the Dialogue that August focused on what he perceived as the logical flaws in the positions taken by Bernal at the meetings,104 while Spender’s account, published earlier that summer, led to a heated dispute within the SEC, and to the Englishman’s resignation from the Society. While his article appreciated the meeting’s ‘promise of more for the future’, and did acknowledge the value of Ristic´’s confrontation of Sartre as showing that Titoism ‘might be the real midway between East and West’, it was critical of Bernal, and also described Iwaszkiewicz as making the ‘saddest impression’ by saying ‘nothing that was not

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conformist’.105 Writing to Spender on behalf of the Executive Council, Campagnolo indicated to him that this was a violation of the agreement made by the Dialogue’s participants to say ‘nothing that could be disagreeable to any of the members of this conference’, and requested that he justify his attitude at the next Council meeting.106 Affronted, Spender resigned from the Executive Council and the Society, but not before lambasting Campagnolo for the tone and the lateness of his letter, and for overlooking the fact that his article had in fact ended with a clear affirmation of the value of such meetings as the Dialogue.107 Although Campagnolo tried to persuade him to suspend his resignation until the Executive Council could discuss his letter, Spender, pointing out that the only agreement made at the meeting was simply to uphold the principle of East– West dialogue, took this final letter to Campagnolo as an opportunity to reaffirm his assessment of Bernal as an apologist for Stalinism.108 As his ‘last act’ in the SEC, he denounced the Executive Council’s position on his free expression of views as a form of ‘voluntary censorship’.109 In spite of their bad feeling about aspects of the Dialogue, however, both Silone and Spender clearly saw the importance of such a meeting. As the latter had pointed out to Campagnolo, his Encounter essay had concluded with the assertion that they ‘ought to go on meeting’ as – and here he shared the views of Silone and Ristic´ – such constant confrontations of different points of view were the essence of democracy.110 That the CCF’s directorate was also persuaded of this was clear in the events following the Dialogue. Although it had originally advised Silone and Spender against going to the SEC’s ‘little cabaret’,111 it soon came to see meetings like the Dialogue as an opportunity to confront the Soviets directly about the repressive conditions in their country. It reached this conclusion through its discussions with the two of them, as well as on the basis of a report on the meeting by Konstantin Jelenski. Jelenski, a CCF International Executive Committee member who would be its chief operative in Eastern Europe, had held daily meetings with Silone and Spender throughout the Dialogue, as well as discussions with them and Iwaszkiewicz.112 His account to the CCF’s decision makers helped to convince them of the benefits of such small, intimate meetings. As Jelenski indicated, such an event was important both in furthering contacts useful to advancing the CCF’s interests there, and in exposing Western

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communist sympathizers – above all, Sartre – to the reality of intellectual life under Soviet-style communism.113 Discussions with Spender confirmed this; Sartre’s exchange with Ristic´ in particular was agreed to have encouraged his increasing disillusionment with communism.114 Yet, because Sartre was considered unlikely to support a similar initiative by another organization, the East– West Meetings were left in the SEC’s hands, in spite of Silone’s protestations that they should be ‘entrusted’ to the CEC instead.115 Silone’s resistance to the SEC came largely from his distrust of Campagnolo. It was shared by Spender, who regarded him as ‘a lunatic’, as ‘a danger . . . because they [the communists] know exactly how useful he can be to them’.116 Yet, in spite of their criticism of Campagnolo’s handling of the Dialogue, their appreciation of the effectiveness of such a small, ‘private’ meeting in establishing relationships, and thus increasing the possibility for the exchange of ideas and publications meant that their own East– West meeting in Zurich for literary magazine editors would be based on its format.117 This meeting, which also involved Jelenski, would have considerable implications for the circulation of ideas between literary publications in Eastern and Western Europe. Although ‘nothing concrete had been elaborated’ in Zurich, Jelenski, soon after the meeting, nonetheless speculated that informal arrangements for such exchanges between reviews still might come about.118 More concrete relations did, in fact, come to pass, both through private agreements and through the creation of the Mutual Aid Committee for Writers and Editors (Comite´ d’entraide des e´crivains et des e´diteurs – CEEE). The latter would be the CCF’s chief unattributed organization in Eastern Europe until 1966, when the more social science-oriented Foundation for European Intellectual Mutual Aid (Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle europe´enne – FEIE) was established.119 The Dialogue was also a considerable boost to the SEC’s confidence, which was immediately expressed in its preparations for the second East–West Meeting. Campagnolo’s report to the 1956 assembly held that September at the Ducal Palace, Venice, showed that he was heartened by the possibility of a true exchange of ideas between figures from both sides of Europe. Yet if he had also formed the impression that the Soviet participants had not fully grasped the idea of culture as responsible for generating social and political values, his report, ‘The

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Essence of Culture’, was an attempt to clarify, for them and for everyone else, what the SEC should be doing in this regard. Although it did not offer any clear examples, past or present, of how culture could intervene effectively in politics, this lecture is really of interest as a theoretical tract, as it marked the point where Campagnolo began to speak of the politics of culture as a dialectical process and, albeit less consciously, as a proponent of human rights. Reaffirming culture’s unique capacity to create values, he now positioned it in a ‘purely dialectical’ relationship with politics. If the instinctive tendency of the latter was toward sclerosis, expressed most fully in totalitarianism, the creative act, ‘historically inspired by freedom, justice, progress’, was its moral corrective.120 Furthermore, if society was the total of the ‘values it has created’, it was the creative individual who, apprehending society’s moral will, gave it concrete form in his or her work. Culture, therefore, was the ‘foundation of human solidarity’.121 And in times of political crisis, it fell more than ever to the intellectual, whose works always bore a ‘moral ferment’ within them, to understand and intervene in that crisis through direct engagement, albeit of a particular kind.122 Campagnolo was mindful never to subordinate culture to politics, even out of tactical necessity, something the engaged intellectual did as a matter of course when practising ordinary politics. The defence of cultural autonomy instead by the engaged intellectual practising the politics of culture was necessarily a defence of both ethical and political values in the same stroke.123 In this way, Campagnolo argued for the intellectual as the defender of ‘freedom, justice, progress’, all of which the reform communist movement would soon demand, and which took Campagnolo and the SEC one step closer to what would eventually become human rights advocacy. The influence pushing Campagnolo’s thought in this direction is uncertain. Clearly he was attentive to Sartre, and would be reading his work very closely in the coming months, specifically ‘Questions of Method’. But Sartre, too, had always been drawn to Italy. As he himself later observed, ‘France never had a left as intelligent as Italy’s’,124 and his presence there would increase in the coming years, particularly through the Gramsci Institute’s colloquia, which deliberately brought French and Italian Marxists together in its interrogation of the ethical bases for a renewed, post-Stalinist socialism. Yet Sartre was not the only one of Campagnolo’s interlocutors to exchange views with Italy’s communists

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on the relationship between ideology and ethics: Bobbio did, too. And if Nadia Urbinati has described Bobbio as a liberal socialist whose conception of democracy was marked by a strong concern for social justice, the formulation of which came out of his open dialogue with Marxism,125 the SEC can be seen as a regular and much larger forum for this same inquiry. It, however, took in participants from a much broader ideological spectrum. Increasingly, their shared concern at that time was with the balance between what Urbinati has referred to as positive and negative liberty. The former, in rough terms, referred to freedom to – in other words, minimal state intervention in the affairs and pursuits of the individual – and the latter to freedom from – the protection of individuals, especially minorities, from civil and human rights abuses that prevented them from potentially enjoying those same liberal ‘freedoms to’ on an equal footing.126 Yet the debate over that balance, as Urbinati observes, was not restricted to Bobbio and the Italian communists, nor only the Italian left. It was a distinctive characteristic of the European liberal left’s – above all, Italy’s – concern at that time for ‘socialism in its relation to democratic liberalism’, and for developing ‘an autonomous model of constitutional democracy that incorporated social justice within the classical framework of civil and political rights’.127 Campagnolo’s work was, in this regard, in the vanguard. If ‘The Essence of Culture’ generally found patchy support at the assembly, many deeming it too abstract, the presence in the audience of around 25 participants from across Europe’s socialist countries meant that Campagnolo’s argument would be heard by at least several who would have been receptive to it.128 They would be, if they were not already, involved in the reform communist movements coalescing in their own countries: people such as the East German Ernst Bloch, and the Czechs Adolf Hoffmeister and Ladislav Rieger. While few of those at the assembly from Europe’s socialist countries appear to have contributed to the discussions, it is interesting to compare the contributions from those who did – Bloch and Rieger – to Ehrenburg’s. While Ehrenburg did support intellectual collaboration, it was under the banner of the Soviet policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’, and prefaced by a typically irascible account of the West’s hostility to socialism, and the detrimental effect this had on its ability to help create a universal culture.129 Bloch, in contrast, while he was absolutely clear about his commitment to

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building socialism in the GDR, emphasized that it, too, spoke the ‘humanist language of culture and civilization’ and thus could form a ‘bridge between East and West’.130 Rieger, even more than Bloch, stressed his country’s belonging to a larger community that went beyond ideology. ‘Beneath the class struggle’, he averred, ‘there is a common interest, the interest of humanity, and this common interest demands that a global catastrophe be avoided.’131 Thus he endorsed the politics of culture as the thing that united them against ordinary politics, which he equated with violence.132 Far more receptive than Ehrenburg to finding common ground with western intellectuals, Bloch and Rieger’s identification of themselves as humanists before anything else was particularly telling. If both cited the SEC as a force for promoting common ethical values in Eastern and Western Europe, this intimated their own commitment to finding a contemporary, Marxist humanism, what will be seen in Chapter 7 was a larger, international effort to reconcile contemporary Marxism with a broader European humanist tradition by giving the individual a creative role in the historical process.133 Already evident earlier that year at the Berlin conference The Problem of Freedom in the Light of Scientific Socialism (Das Problem der Freiheit im Lichte des Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus), to which Bloch was central, such efforts toward a socialist humanism accelerated in the 1960s. This is not to say, however, that it was uniquely an Eastern European phenomenon. Not only was Campagnolo thinking along these lines, but other Western philosophers, as well, at least two of whom were also at the assembly: Richard McKeon and Galvano Della Volpe, both of whom had an established interest in human rights. McKeon had been involved in the founding of Unesco and in the drafting of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.134 Della Volpe, a western Marxist whom Urbinati has described as ‘the most representative political philosopher’ of the PCI, was a keen proponent of a democracy that was sensitive to the social needs of individuals in all their diversity, and by the mid-1950s he was still holding out hope that the communist project in Eastern Europe was set to achieve a democracy premised on humanist ideals.135 As will be seen in Chapter 7, in the 1960s both men would be involved in colloquia that, while based in Western Europe, brought together thinkers from the East and West to interrogate the problem of the rights of the individual within different

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social systems. Thus the SEC served in 1956 as one of the earliest meeting points for such figures to address the issues that would be so central to the search for a socialist humanism in the coming decade. Before that movement really got under way, however, real political events would soon remind Campagnolo, and the SEC, how much the putting of the politics of culture into practice still depended, in large part, on ordinary politics.

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Marked by the Dialogue and the Sixth General Assembly, 1956 was clearly a red-letter year for the SEC regarding East–West exchanges. The momentum generated by these events, however, was short-lived. On 23 October, less than three weeks after the assembly, the Hungarian Uprising began, and it would demonstrate how much the success of the SEC’s East– West initiatives depended on the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Starting as a student demonstration for reform and as a gesture of support for Poland’s recently rehabilitated leader Władysław Gomułka, who was now taking his country down a ‘Polish road to socialism’, events in Hungary soon escalated into a ‘national war of independence’.1 And initially it was successful. After five days of resisting the Soviet Union’s efforts to suppress the protests, the Hungarians’ demand for the reinstatement of their comparatively liberal Prime Minister Imre Nagy, whom the Soviets had replaced with the hardline communist Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi in early 1955, was met. Nagy’s new government initiated what the journalist and eyewitness Paul Lendvai has described as an ‘actual breakthrough toward democracy’, including, in addition to a return to the liberalizing New Course policies that had cost Nagy his post the previous year, the demand for the withdrawal of Soviet troops and plans for the reintroduction of a multiparty political system with free elections.2 The Soviet Union, however, only briefly tolerated these proposals. By the end of the month, Khrushchev, fearing that a withdrawal would

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decisively undermine the integrity of Soviet power internationally, had a change of heart. Early in the morning on 4 November, following consultations with leaders in Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and finally with Tito at an all-night meeting at the latter’s villa in the Brioni islands, the second Soviet intervention began.3 After five days of fighting, which left 2,500 Hungarians dead and 20,000 wounded,4 a Soviet puppet regime was instated, headed by the pre-war communist Ja´nos Ka´da´r, Nagy’s former Minister of State. The Yugoslavstyle workers’ councils, formed at the time of the insurrection, were dismantled, labour leaders and intellectuals were subject to mass arrest, summary courts were established, and martial law was imposed.5 As the mass arrest of intellectuals indicates, this popular insurrection had a strong cultural dimension, too, and one of the casualties of the crackdown was the Hungarian Writers’ Union. Emboldened by the possibilities for liberalization offered by the prospect of a national road to socialism, the Union had requested of the Hungarian Party’s Central Committee that it stop administering the country’s cultural life. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the National Council of Trade Unions during the Uprising, it had also publicly demanded an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, an amnesty for participants in the uprising, the formation of an independent national government, and the establishment of the workers’ councils.6 When the Soviet intervention began, the union even organized its own resistance in the form of an appeal on Radio Free Kossuth for support from the international intelligentsia for Hungary, its people, and its intellectual workers. Composed by the writer Gyula Ha´y and read out by him and his wife in Hungarian, English, German and Russian, it was broadcast from 7:57 until 8:07 a.m., when the station went off the air.7 This first appeal was followed on 12 November by a published one that called, among other things, for the withdrawal of Soviet troops,8 and on the 17th of that month the Union issued the ‘Hungarian Intellectuals’ Manifesto’. Supported by 110 artists, writers and intellectuals, it affirmed the signatories as guilty of the crimes of which the Soviets accused them: of being fighters for a free, independent Hungary that, far from returning to its pre-communist social order, would remain under a socialist form of governance.9 Finally, on 28 December, a fully attended assembly of the Union, in the words of Lendvai, ‘expressly committed itself to the goals of the revolution

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and condemned the Soviet intervention as a “historic mistake”’; it was there that writer Tibor De´ry endorsed the Uprising as ‘the “greatest, purest and most unified revolution” in Hungarian history’.10 He was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison (Ha´y received a six-year sentence) and on 17 January the Union was disbanded for upholding the goals of the revolution.11 What happened to the Union had serious repercussions for the SEC. As ‘The Presence of Culture: the political options of the man of culture’, the section of Comprendre that documented the political interventions of intellectuals, showed, the November appeals had attracted an immediate response across and beyond Europe.12 While the vast majority of intellectuals expressed solidarity with the Hungarian people and denounced the violence, there was, however, less agreement among them as to whether dialogue should be maintained with Soviet intellectuals. The CCF’s de Rougemont implored all its adherents to denounce it as a ‘trap’ and as a betrayal of ‘martyred writers’,13 and some SEC members, too – Jules-Albert Jaeger, Karl Kere´nyi and Hans Paeschke – drew parallels between the conduct of the Soviets and that of the Nazis, using them as a justification for breaking off contact.14 Aware that this same issue was putting severe pressure on the PEN Club (around 80 members of Dutch PEN were resigning because their demand that all communist members be expelled was not met) and that the WPC and France’s National Writers’ Committee (Comite´ national des e´crivains – CNE) were experiencing internal divisions over the question of responsibility for the atrocities,15 Campagnolo dedicated the Executive Council meeting due to be held in early January to clarifying the SEC’s position on Hungary. Although the majority of its members did uphold dialogue as one of the Society’s founding principles, whether or not it should take a formal position on the current plight of the Hungarian intellectuals rekindled the debate within the SEC over whether it could ever be allowed to take sides. The actions of the SEC’s president, Giovanni Ponti, in fact, justified this renewed concern about the Society’s politicization. On 14 November, he had uncharacteristically sent a declaration to the Italian news agency ANSA that expressed the SEC’s full solidarity with Hungary’s intellectuals on the grounds of its commitment to the freedom and autonomy of culture, and its wish for Hungary’s peaceful achievement of independence. It also committed the Executive Council

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to examining at its next meeting whether or not the Society would take a formal position on events there.16 This statement, combined with the sheer number of members writing to the Secretariat demanding that the SEC take such a position on their behalf compelled Campagnolo to issue a circular. While diplomatically affirming that the events in Hungary were indeed deplorable, it placed responsibility for taking any political or moral position squarely on the shoulders of individual members, who should uphold the principles of the SEC – the autonomy of culture and dialogue – in their actions, be they protests, petitions or essays.17 This was not enough to satisfy some members. There were even more letters to the Secretariat, as well as several resignations. By the time of the January meeting, nothing less than the loss of the entire Norwegian membership was at stake, should the SEC fail to expel its Soviet members who supported their government’s actions.18 Yet, given that so many of the letters pointed to analogous events in Algeria and Suez – a comparison that a number of councillors, Bobbio, Dominique Dubarle, and above all, Amrouche, had also made19 – the declaration drawn up by the Executive Council opened with a blanket condemnation of all violence borne of the struggle between regimes and peoples ‘aspiring to freedom’ as categorically harmful to culture. However, it followed this, and its reaffirmation of the Society’s principles, with an uncharacteristic commitment to action regarding events in Hungary. Declaring the oppression there as ‘humanly intolerable’, the SEC was ‘obliged’ to respond to the Hungarian intellectuals’ appeal. In the first instance, it would seek to establish a dialogue with those experiencing repression, and envisaged a subsequent meeting between Hungarian and Soviet intellectuals in order to examine the situation.20 The January declaration received strong international press coverage, appearing in its entirety in The Manchester Guardian, Le Monde, FranceObservateur, Relazioni Internazionali and The Times.21 Given this level of publicity, the second East– West Meeting should have been the ideal forum to address the most topical situation in Europe. Not only would it have been a high-profile event, the buoyant recruitment figures from the East indicated that it should have also been comparatively easy to organize. In 1956, the year of the Thaw, the SEC had already attracted ten new members from Europe’s socialist countries, mainly from the GDR, and in 1957 this figure had nearly tripled to 26 new members from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet

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Union and Yugoslavia. Although the Executive Council seems to have always intended that the meeting would pursue at least some of the themes proposed at the Dialogue, by July 1957 it had been decided that Hungary was to serve only as a ‘preliminary’ test, as Campagnolo described it, of the participants’ will to dialogue, and not as the main purpose of the event.22 This was because at an organizational meeting Campagnolo had held with Bernal and Sartre, the former, having just returned from the Soviet Union, confirmed that while the Soviets were willing to attend the meetings, they were not prepared to discuss anything of a political nature, effectively taking Hungary off the agenda. Yet Sartre had also made it clear that addressing the situation in Hungary was, in his view, not only the priority of the meeting, but a precondition for his own participation.23 When the proposed themes were circulated among the membership for feedback, the response also indicated that a poor turnout from the East, and from many of the Dialogue’s participants, was set to jeopardize the event.24 In light of these combined difficulties, the Executive Council agreed to postpone the event from the originally planned December/January until late August 1958.25 It did, however, issue an appeal to the Hungarian authorities in November on behalf of the writers currently imprisoned there; this was at the suggestion of the recently joined Hungarian e´migre´ writer Paul Ignotus, who himself had been imprisoned by Ra´kosi for seven years.26 Yet the following months were marked by the SEC’s inability to either reach an agreement regarding what would constitute an East– West dialogue that the whole of the membership was comfortable supporting, or to secure sufficient participation from Eastern Europe. Although Campagnolo had been quick to open negotiations with VOKS – in July 1957, he contacted it on behalf of the East–West Meeting as well as the Seventh General Assembly, and it had immediately assured him that it was in touch with appropriate figures27 – his letter to Bernal the following month indicated that no progress had been made in confirming Soviet participants. Requesting a meeting with him to discuss the problem, it was clear that Campagnolo saw the Soviet presence at the meeting as determining the calibre of the Western participants.28 While Bernal assured Campagnolo that he was confident, on the strength of his discussions with Ehrenburg and others in Moscow, that there was ‘ample time’ to pursue negotiations and that he would do so over the next

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year,29 the Secretariat’s own negotiations with VOKS over the next nine months were far less encouraging. In late November, Campagnolo contacted it again requesting, no later than February 1958, the names of ten Soviet writers, artists and scientists of renown who could be invited to Venice, along with a list (now lost) of Soviet members and prospective members of the SEC who should also be invited to the meetings.30 While VOKS assured him that the invitations had been sent out as requested, by the following March it was clear that negotiations were breaking down. In response to a desperate cable sent by Campagnolo on the fourth of that month asking for clarification,31 the response from VOKS was non-committal: having had discussions with many figures, none of them were certain whether they would ‘be free from their other obligations in the month of August’, and deferred a final decision until May.32 At this point, Campagnolo began taking extraordinary steps to save the meeting, which was now threatened by several things. Firstly, the SEC was facing serious financial difficulties. Since its inception, it had been receiving a subvention from the national government that was negotiated annually, usually between Ceschi, Ponti and Giulio Andreotti, in his various ministerial roles.33 Although Andreotti apparently had promised continued funding for 1957 – 8, this arrangement was now troubled by the instability surrounding the fall of the Segni government that April. It was followed by a shift to the right in the form of an interim ‘monocolore’ government in charge until the May 1958 elections.34 This meant that Ceschi and Ponti were now struggling to make contact with figures in the new cabinet who would be sympathetic to the SEC, and the problem with the subvention would only be resolved in spring 1958.35 In light of the uncertainty around the SEC’s funding, securing financial support from Unesco became even more crucial, but this was likely to depend on the event’s attracting the participation of high-calibre figures from both Eastern and Western Europe, and upon its having fixed themes for discussion in advance.36 Given the Soviet aversion to addressing any political issue, including Hungary, this was another big sticking point, and it ultimately provided the grounds for the Soviets’ withdrawal from the event. Consequently, when Campagnolo received news of this latest delay from VOKS he made a change of course, calling upon the cultural attache´ at the Soviet Embassy in Rome to issue the names of the Soviet participants.37 His

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efforts with the Soviet Embassy meant that when VOKS finally invited him, along with Babel and Ponti, to come to Moscow to discuss potential participants and arrangements for the meeting, Campagnolo was in a position to approach, with the support of the embassy, the Soviet Minister of Culture for his personal support.38 One of the enticements Campagnolo had offered when pressing various Soviet contacts for the names of participants was the likelihood of Unesco involvement in the East–West Meetings.39 While he did not conceal the fact that Unesco’s financial support was still unconfirmed – its involvement at that point might only take the form of an observer40 – he was in close touch with one of the SEC’s executive councillors, Nadjm Oud-Dine Bammate, who was now head of Unesco’s Humanities Division. Bammate appears to have been invaluable to the SEC, sending letters of recommendation to facilitate the arrangement of meetings with the right people in the Soviet Union. He seems to have made every effort to connect Campagnolo with the figures within the Soviet Ministry of Culture that he knew through his long career at Unesco – the Minister Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mikhajlov and the Vice-Minister Vladimir Semenovich Kemenov.41 Bammate also hinted at Unesco’s financial support for the meetings. Yet that money was only ever intended to cover travel fares, and as far back as spring 1957, Campagnolo had already been exploring funding possibilities for the SEC much more widely. It was at that point that his path finally crossed with Lewis Mumford’s, who was in Rome on a research trip;42 their conversation would send him to the United States in search of support for the SEC’s activities. Since 1949, Campagnolo had been trying to get Mumford involved with the Society. Although he finally joined in 1953, and helped the SEC to obtain several other high-profile American members – Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank among them – for much of the decade he politely declined all offers of closer collaboration.43 This changed, however, as a result of his face-to-face meeting with Campagnolo that May. A ‘red letter day’, as Mumford described it, their conversation led not only to an intense friendship that lasted well into the 1960s, but also to Campagnolo’s trip to the United States.44 The nearly month-long journey, from late September to mid October 1957, sponsored by the Lausanne industrialist and founding SEC member Charles Veillon,45 was Campagnolo’s first real gesture of

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commitment to American involvement in the SEC. He, and the Executive Council, had always wanted to attract more members from there, not least because of the influence the United States now had on Europe economically, militarily and politically. Campagnolo had also been worried enough by its ‘neglect’ of culture to explore these concerns in the ‘Power and Culture: the New World’ issue of Comprendre (1954).46 The Executive Council was mindful, however, that in the anticommunist climate in the United States, invitations to join had so far been received there with ‘hesitation’.47 It was therefore ironic that although the primary reason for the trip was for fund-raising, it was actually more successful in attracting new members to the SEC. Mumford had brought Campagnolo into contact with a number of largely university-based intellectuals in the United States and Canada,48 with the result that 23 new US-based members joined over the following year, including Erich Fromm, David Riesman, Hans Morgenthau and Eugen Rabinowitch, with Rabinowitch agreeing to participate at the second East–West Meeting. Campagnolo’s visit to Harvard also raised the possibility of a Cambridge, Massachusetts branch of the SEC,49 the only disappointment arising from his time there being the bitter encounter with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was on the history faculty at the time. Schlesinger was an original supporter of the CCF, and soon after his meeting with Campagnolo wrote to John Luther Adams, his colleague at the Harvard Divinity School, with his views on the SEC. While he affirmed his belief in dialogue, he also stated his preference for an organization that allowed ‘for the assertion of what we believe’, and that he was ‘more suited tempermentally [sic] for polemics than for polite exchange.’50 Campagnolo’s time fund raising in New York also came to nothing. Based in an office provided by the Olivetti Corporation, he was able meet with representatives of the Carnegie Endowment, and of the Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller foundations, in an effort to raise support for its activities, but none of them were willing to support the SEC.51 Because of the financial difficulties facing the Society, yet also in order to ensure maximum attendance at both the East– West Meeting and the general assembly, the Executive Council agreed to run the events concurrently.52 And while both of the meetings, held in late August 1958 at the Cini Foundation, had their themes established in advance, the discussions lacked both the incision and the eventual coherence of

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the Dialogue. For example, the problem of disarmament had long been agreed as the main focus of the assembly, and provided the topic for Campagnolo’s report, ‘Reasons of state and human reason faced with the problem of atomic weapons’. Yet it was let down by the fact that none of the many internationally renown scientists invited to participate, including the Society’s own J. D. Bernal, attended.53 The invitations had only been sent in mid-June, just eight weeks before the assembly, and the SEC was competing with a number of other highprofile congresses planned for that summer and autumn on the problems posed by nuclear technology. Not only would the WPC be holding its Congress for Disarmament and International Cooperation that July, on 3 September, only one week after the conclusion of the SEC’s assembly, the RIG was set to convene its Unesco-sponsored ‘Mankind and the Atom’, a reflection on the implications of nuclear technology for the future of humanity.54 The RIG event, in turn, was planned to coincide with the UN’s conference for specialists, ‘Atoms for Peace’ (1 – 13 September 1958), which attracted 5,000 scientists, government figures and observers from across Europe to Geneva to discuss the peaceful uses of atomic energy.55 And, in the middle of the month, the Pugwash Movement, a leading forum for the world’s scientists to address the questions of peace and international security, was holding its third congress in Austria on the theme ‘Dangers of the Atomic Age and what Scientists Can Do About Them’.56 The poor turnout of scientists for the SEC’s event was therefore unsurprising, and Campagnolo’s report was only discussed by those members who attended, with no external input from specialists in the field. Even then, it was received with tactfully phrased scepticism, most of the respondents seeing Campagnolo’s argument for ridding the world of the atomic threat by getting rid of the nation state as totally unrealistic.57 Nor did the assembly discussions build on Campagnolo’s report. Rather, they were geared toward the various initiatives developing between the SEC and Unesco, including an introduction by Vittorio Veronese and Havet of Unesco’s ‘Major Project Three’ on the mutual appreciation of Eastern and Western cultural values, to which the SEC had just been invited to contribute, and a special presentation by Edgar Morin on the social and ethical importance of cinema in light of its status as both a mass art and as the inheritor of the classical literary tradition.

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The heavy presence of Unesco at the opening session in the form of Veronese, president of its Executive Council and soon to be its director general; Egidio Reale, president of its Italian Commission; and Havet indicates that the organization had considerable expectations of the twin events. Their speeches were peppered with references to the closeness between Unesco’s and the SEC’s mission to foster dialogue and peaceful co-operation between peoples living and working under different ideological systems. Ideally, Havet intimated, this would extend to relations between peoples in societies beyond Europe through Unesco and the SEC’s deepening collaboration on ‘Major Project Three’, which he was heading, and to a possible joint project on world cinema.58 Yet when the assembly began its work at Venice’s Giorgio Cini Foundation, on the Isola di San Giorgio on 23 August, it was marred by absenteeism. Although more than 200 were in attendance,59 the failure of so many key figures from the Dialogue to appear, and the weakness of participation from figures from Eastern Europe had undermined it. Ponti’s month-long battle with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to obtain visas for participants from Eastern Europe and China, which he was still fighting just three days before the start of the East– West Meeting, was largely in vain: of the 29 people from Europe’s socialist countries for whom visas had been requested, only five were able to attend.60 According to one press report in L’Unita`, visas were deliberately issued to Yugoslavian applicants, those issued to the Poles Stanisław Dygat and Jerzy Zawieyski, and the Czech Micˇko, had been given ‘almost by accident’, as they had been requested for other reasons.61 And, as Campagnolo had feared, ten days before the meeting was due to start, a telegram signed by the Soviets Alpatov, Ehrenburg and Polevoi arrived in Venice. Announcing their withdrawal from both the meeting and the assembly, it cited the failure of Babel, Campagnolo and Ponti to come to Moscow that July to agree the topics to be discussed in Venice as the basis for their decision.62 The fact that the second East–West Meeting enjoyed very little support from the participants in the original Dialogue, including many of those from the West, was just as disappointing for Campagnolo.63 While several had agreed to come, only Babel, Havet, Ponti, Piovene, Pryce-Jones and Ungaretti actually showed up; several withdrew with little warning. Ristic´ pulled out on 4 August on grounds of health and, less than two weeks before the start, Vercors and Bernal declined on the

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grounds of family reasons and other commitments. Iwaszkiewicz cabled his apologies to Campagnolo while the event was already in progress, giving no reason at all.64 Perhaps most disturbing, given his insistence on the discussion of Hungary as a precondition for his participation, was Sartre’s seeming disappearance that summer. Only on 29 July could Vercors confirm that he would be abroad until October.65 What Vercors didn’t tell Campagnolo – or maybe he did not know – was that Sartre was actually in Italy the entire time.66 Given the comparatively weak turn out, the second East– West Meeting did little to build on the achievements of the Dialogue. Broken into three commissions (literature; music and the plastic arts; the sciences) that reported to the assembly’s plenary meetings, the literature commission flagged the emergence of multiple audiences as responsible for the alienation of ‘serious’ writers in the West, yet could comment little on the situation in Eastern Europe.67 The sciences commission, also hampered by poor representation from the East, merely noted that while the working conditions for those in the exact sciences were generally the same in the East and West, this was not the case for social scientists. It also expressed the wish for more contact between scholars, and between disciplines, and that they address social issues.68 The plastic arts commission, although it had the SEC’s most desired range of participants, including figures from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia, missed the point of the exercise, choosing to draft the guidelines for a more comprehensive enquiry on the question it had been posed.69 Although the press release following the events described them as fruitful, the resolution issuing from the assembly reflected none of its work. Recapping the discussion of the general secretary’s report on the politics of culture and the nuclear threat, it was, for the most part, an appeal to cultural figures worldwide to resist war as its ultimate source through promoting dialogue between individuals, peoples and societies.70 Although nearly 130 notices of the assembly appeared in the press, they were largely in local Italian papers, with limited coverage abroad.71 As the Italian socialist paper Avanti! pointed out, none of the big national dailies in Italy covered the events, choosing instead to follow the current government line with regard to East–West dialogue.72 Internationally, the only major papers to acknowledge either of the meetings appear to have been Le Monde (Paris), Le Soir (Brussels), and The

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Observer and the Times Literary Supplement (London). Their general absence from mainstream publications even in those few countries that normally reported SEC events – France, Italy and, to a lesser extent, Switzerland – was likely to have been due to the poor attendance from the East. While Donini, in a frank account for Rinascita, described the events as of the ‘second order’ because of this, he did not blame the SEC. Like Avanti!, he blamed the national government instead.73 He did note, however, that debates within the SEC were also damaging its chances to maintain the lead in pioneering genuine dialogue between East and West. If the Society’s leadership was already heavily Christian Democratic through the presence of Ceschi and Ponti, it was being hijacked, in his view, by the polemics stirred up by a ‘small and pretentious group’.74 Headed by Silone, who from the beginning had wanted to ‘transform dialogue into a series of provocations’, such a meeting should instead be carried out among ‘people who believe in the arising of a new cultural awareness . . . an awareness of a new human reality’ forgeable through East–West dialogue.75 It is worth recalling, however, that Silone’s provocative behaviour was seen by Ristic´, who had first-hand experience of living under a communist regime, as the great strength of the SEC meetings. The Yugoslav valued the asking of hard questions as the way to generate frank and genuinely critical discussions about ideological differences as the best way of effecting changes in attitudes among the participants. As Donini again pointed out to the Executive Council, the SEC was no longer the only organization in the West cultivating East– West dialogue. A successful pilot meeting for the organization that would become the European Community of Writers (Communaute´ europe´enne des e´crivains – COMES) had taken place in Naples that August. While Babel and de Zie´gler, who attended the meeting, felt that its initiatives could not be compared to the SEC’s, when COMES was formally established in June 1960, it attracted adherents from across Western Europe as well as from Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It also attracted a number of SEC members, including Babel, Emilie Carner-Noulet, Iwaszkiewicz, John Lehmann and Piovene to its managerial council.76 Such joint adherents seemed keen to play down any competition between the two organizations. Remarking upon the ‘blood tie’ between them through their overlapping membership, and the SEC’s groundbreaking contribution to the renewal of East– West

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relations, Francesco Cataluccio, the SEC’s representative within this new organization, sought to distinguish COMES from the SEC as a professional body that, lacking the Society’s ‘revolutionary objective’, worked within the expanding boundaries of ordinary politics.77 It is clear from his discussion with Donini, however, that Campagnolo recognized that because of its purely literary concerns, COMES would be able to organize exchanges much more easily than the Society, and it appears that the secretary general mooted plans for a third East–West Meeting shortly after this exchange.78 Yet if the political fallout from Hungary had badly compromised the second one, the SEC would be attempting to organize the third in what was becoming one of the most turbulent phases of Cold War. The years 1958–63 – within which the third meeting was agreed, planned, and eventually abandoned – have been described as the early Cold War’s ‘crisis years’.79 Punctuated by a number of events, among them the building of the Berlin Wall, the U-2 incident, and the Cuban Missile crisis, and characterized by what James G. Hershberg has described as an ‘unmatched concentration of (frequently acrimonious) summitry’,80 these international tensions inevitably affected the event’s negotiations. But Campagnolo was never one to avoid controversy and, fittingly, it was a cultural crisis, one that cut to the heart of the SEC, which gave rise to its theme on the meaning of the Cold War: the awarding on 23 October of the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature to the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak. Four days after the award had been announced, the Presidium of the Soviet Writers’ Union expelled Pasternak on the grounds that he should have declined it (which he eventually did, once his expulsion from the Soviet Union became a real possibility).81 The Writers’ Union concluded that his actions: were incompatible with the calling of a Soviet writer, were aimed against the traditions of Russian literature, against the people, against peace and socialism. Having once started by declaring for pure art, Pasternak ended by becoming a tool of bourgeois propaganda, a profitable object for the speculation of those circles who organise the cold war, who endeavour to slander all progressive and revolutionary movements.82 The expulsion from the Writers’ Union, however, was more than simply a humiliation. It had serious practical consequences for Pasternak, as

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non-membership blocked his access to a pension.83 And while letters poured into the Secretariat demanding, as they so often did, that the SEC take a position, the Pasternak affair was not just another divisive issue. If the Society had so far refrained from taking a public position on all other international political events over the past decade in favour of maintaining the possibility of dialogue, now there were other considerations in the case of Pasternak. Not only was he an SEC member, one of the 14 in the Presidium that decided to expel him from the Union was Polevoi, whose own support for the politics of culture was now called into question. Campagnolo criticized the attack by the Soviet Writers’ Union as corrosive of the ‘solidarity that intellectuals should feel’, and a politicization of culture that was antithetical to the politics of culture.84 While the Executive Council’s consideration of the Pasternak affair that January in Lie`ge concluded that any censure by the SEC of the Soviet Union’s authorities would endanger its chances of maintaining dialogue with intellectuals there, it did circulate the following statement to the Society’s membership: The Executive Council, after debating the question at length, and considering that it would be highly desirable for the conduct of dialogue that the freedom of expression and of publication should be protected as much as possible, declares that it is deplorable that manoeuvres, indeed even provocations of a political character, from whatever side they come, put the notion of autonomy and of the creative spirit in danger and falsify the methods and style of dialogue. Dialogue should remain fully open and, beyond divergences of opinions, respecting the person of others and the exigencies of solidarity that unite men of culture across ideological frontiers.85 This taking of position was not without consequences. Bobbio, on the one hand, was outraged by the suggestion that the actions of the Nobel Foundation were politically provocative, and in any way comparable with those of the Soviet regime; Donini, on the other, called Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago an ‘act of war against the socialist world’.86 Nonetheless, the importance of maintaining dialogue was something that all councillors agreed on, and arguably the Lie`ge declaration’s reiteration of that commitment made the preparations for the third

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East–West Meeting possible, the Soviets even taking the lead in selecting its topic. Polevoi, writing to the Secretariat that February, suggested an examination of the Cold War as the proposed theme for the upcoming assembly;87 Ehrenburg, in a letter to the Secretariat the following month, posed a similar problem in a more thought-provoking way. Because the Society tended to discuss the consequences of the Cold War for culture, he observed, it was not always ‘achieving the desired result’ with regard to East– West dialogue. What was needed, in his view, was a consideration of the very nature of the Cold War, so that intellectuals could learn how to combat it.88 Ehrenburg’s proposal became the theme for the third meeting. As Piovene pointed out, it had not simply condemned the Cold War, but called for a struggle against it,89 thus offering the possibility for real co-operation. But no sooner had this topic been agreed than plans for its realization ran into trouble. Ehrenburg, now a councillor, was very particular about the event’s organization. Keen for it to take place as soon as possible, he insisted on the careful selection of participants who had accepted in advance the ‘aims and methods’ of the meeting: to ‘replace the “Cold War” with negotiation and co-operation’ and to work toward more intensive collaboration.90 Such agreement was crucial, in Ehrenburg’s view, given the understanding of ‘dialogue’ that had informed Silone and Spender’s presentation of the first East–West Meeting in their publications.91 His reservations were not unfounded: although Spender had washed his hands of the SEC, Campagnolo was engaged that autumn in yet another heated exchange of letters with Silone, this time concerning an article in the August issue of Tempo presente. In it, Silone had roundly criticized the Society for negotiating directly with the Soviet authorities in its effort to secure Soviet participation at the second East–West Meeting, and accused the SEC of being run by communists and fellow travellers.92 While Campagnolo defended the Society’s commitment to dialogue, Silone countered that it was bringing the wrong people together. If the Society was effective in attracting ‘non-conformist’ intellectuals in the West, Campagnolo’s willingness to co-operate with the Soviet authorities, in his view, inevitably led to the selection of figures who were not their equals, but who merely toed the Party’s line.93 Silone’s articles were clearly intended to discredit the SEC. Yet his stated preference in ‘With Whom to be in Dialogue?’ for discussion with ‘free men’ did, albeit obliquely, point to the opportunity that

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Campagnolo was missing by focusing so single-mindedly on Soviet participation as the precondition for the success of the Society’s East– West exchanges. This criticism was not ungrounded. While Soviet recruitment was reasonable during the period covered in this study (in 1956–68, 37 joined the SEC), this was matched by recruitment from Poland (39 over the same period), and exceeded by Hungary and Yugoslavia (42 and 54 new recruits, respectively). In fact, the rise in membership from Europe’s socialist countries was considerable enough to alter the composition of the Executive Council: in October 1963, the year that the influx of new members from those countries peaked, it proposed Iva´n Boldizsa´r, Mirko Nova´k, Anna Seghers, Jan Szczepan´ski and Stefan Z˙olkiewski for the council, bringing the proportion of councillors from Europe’s socialist countries to just under 19 per cent.94 Finally, some of the strongest support for the third East –West Meeting had come from those countries.95 The SEC’s relentless focus on Soviet involvement, however, actually contributed substantially to the third meeting’s failure. From the outset, Ehrenburg was highly critical of how it was being organized, above all about the lack of Soviet participation in the proceedings.96 Yet his own absence from several organizational meetings due to unspecified ‘hold ups’, most likely visa problems, did not help matters.97 As this suggests, the council was trying to organize the event at a time when international tensions were incredibly high. At the time of the Eighth General Assembly (March 1961) the meeting was still, in Campagnolo’s words, ‘held in their hearts’, and he was hoping to hold it the following year.98 Yet that year had begun with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating defeat for American policy in Cuba, and the Vienna meeting between the American and Soviet leaders Kennedy and Khrushchev in June had concluded with the announcement of the Soviet’s intention to build the Berlin Wall; its construction began that August. Campagnolo and Ehrenburg only managed to meet in Rome the following January. This was after the Executive Council had already agreed the overall size and nature of the event, a list of those to be invited, and the text of the invitation, which had met with an enthusiastic reception.99 According to the extracts from letters reproduced in Comprendre, an impressive array of figures from across the social sciences and humanities had provisionally confirmed their participation; equally, an international range of scientists including

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Bernal, Patrick M. S. Blackett, Hans Erni, Vladimir Georgiev, Walther Gerlach, Alfred Marchionini, Robert Oppenheimer, Francois Perroux, Michael Polanyi, Hans Thirring and Aleksandr Pavolovitch Vinogradov endorsed the event.100 In spite of this promising reception, Ehrenburg raised an important query over the third meeting’s timing. If it were held in the first half of September 1962, as the Executive Council intended, it would follow on too closely from the WPC’s World Congress for Disarmament and Peace to be held in Moscow that July. Furthermore, as the Moscow congress would ‘certainly look at role of culture in the liquidation of the Cold War, disarmament and peaceful co-operation between peoples’, there would be an undesirable overlap between the two events.101 He therefore recommended its rescheduling for 1963. Both in the light of Ehrenburg’s observation, and for financial reasons, the Executive Council seriously considered postponing the meeting until October 1963, and holding it alongside the Ninth General Assembly. Not only was the Society faced with a limited budget for that year, it was already committed to holding a general assembly as well as a second Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium in Dakar, and it could not afford a third event.102 As Ceschi and Terracini had not yet managed to obtain an additional subsidy from the government for the meeting, holding it in conjunction with the assembly was the best way to afford it. In the end, however, the events of 1963 put an end to the meeting’s realization. That year marked a turning point in the Cold War, ushering in a period of comparative international stability, and the imminent signing of the Limited Test-Ban Treaty between the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain suggested to the Executive Council that the subject of the Cold War had ‘lost its currency’.103 Because the Soviets were still at that point struggling to confirm a list of participants, the Executive Council finally decided that summer to suspend the meeting indefinitely.104 Given the level and calibre of support for the event, the importance of the topic, and the novelty of the approach – trying to understand the causes of the Cold War, rather than addressing its symptoms from established political or ideological positions from the outset – the council’s decision not to pursue the third East– West Meeting arguably denied the SEC of what would have been its greatest achievement of the period considered here, even without Soviet representation.

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The abandonment of the third East– West Meeting, and the softening in international relations that prompted it, now left the SEC facing a number of challenges about its purpose. But it was not the only organization to be confronted with this question in the light of the relaxation of tensions between East and West. The breakdown of what Bernal later described as the ‘harsh rigidities of the worst cold war period’ meant to him that the WPC had to come to terms with the fact that there was now ‘a return to the healthy diversity of ideas and policies that is normal in a world made up of so many different countries, civilizations and cultures’, and that it was ‘essential to realize that this is an inevitable, irreversible development’.105 It also meant to Bernal that the WPC should fundamentally reconsider its approach of leading, or trying to lead, the international peace movement from the front. If it had so far eschewed collaboration, particularly with ‘sections of the population who have not up till now been willing to come into our Movement’, Bernal recommended that his organization instead make common cause with what had become a genuinely diverse, and genuinely worldwide development.106 That Bernal also recognized and valued the importance of cultural exchanges, and of the intellectual, in creating the conditions for such cooperation in these new circumstances was clear in his ‘Culture and the Cold War’ (1962). Inspired by Sartre’s address to the WPC’s Moscow congress that July, he called for greater action on behalf of intellectuals to end the Cold War and, on the surface, both his and Sartre’s texts showed a clear debt to the SEC. Sartre’s address, according to one internal WPC report, clearly identified the ‘man of culture’ – the writer in particular – as responsible for global cultural disarmament, to be effected by, among other things, meetings of intercontinental writers’ organizations, the global circulation of literature and ‘frequent roundtable discussions among writers, artists, critics and art critics, (and) individual contacts’107 – essentially the same strategy as the Dialogue’s. Bernal, in his own summary of the Moscow meeting, attributed its success to what he described as its inviting the ‘expression of divergent views, which, contrary to some expectations, resulted in mutual understanding and a feeling of unity’,108 not unlike the SEC’s own approach to dialogue. As Campagnolo himself remarked, after hearing accounts of the congress from various SEC members who had attended, too many of them had a ‘short memory’ regarding the ‘formula’ – and he

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might have added ‘lexicon’ and ‘methodology’ of the SEC – that was clearly in evidence in Moscow.109 Yet ‘Culture and the Cold War’ also made criticisms about the limitations Bernal now perceived in the SEC in the changing international climate. For him, its problem lay in its inability to grapple with issues in a popular and effective way. In spite of the Society’s dedication, ‘month after month and year after year to get the intellectuals of the world together to discuss their common problems and to break down their mutual isolation’,110 the exchanges it had organized were not progressing quickly enough. Intellectuals were also still generally reluctant to address the larger, practical problems threatening global culture, preferring to discuss issues intrinsic to their own fields of practice. What was now needed, in his view, was a something missing up until now – the shaping of a ‘world public opinion’.111 It is unclear whether or not Bernal’s growing impatience with the SEC actually motivated Campagnolo. But even while the East– West Meetings were still running their course, he, like Bernal, was beginning to explore ways of increasing his organization’s effectiveness on a world scale. This eventually determined the direction the SEC would take during the 1960s: toward attempts at de´tente with the African intelligentsia, and at establishing the World Association of Culture (Association Mondiale de Culture – AMC). This expansion of the SEC’s project coincided with the clarification of Campagnolo’s own view of the role of the intellectual as a genuine political force, and his close reading of Sartre at this time appears to have led him to, or at least confirmed for him, an awareness of the global dimensions of the intellectual’s responsibility, which was becoming increasingly central to Sartre’s own work by that time. This was becoming evident in Campagnolo’s report for the SEC’s 1958 General Assembly, ‘The Reason of State and Human Reason faced with the Problem of Atomic Weapons’. In many ways, it was an elaboration of his now familiar views on how the current international legal structure not only made disarmament impossible because the world was already divided into two blocs, but also divided the West with regard to disarmament. The ‘realists’, including intellectuals such as Oppenheimer, privileged ‘freedom’ at any price against communism, whereas the ‘idealists’ – Croce, Einstein, Niemoeller, Russell, Schweitzer – put human life before all else.112 What was new in it, however, was his focus on moral philosophy as

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having a practical role in leading the majority of humanity, who wanted disarmament, out of this impasse. Unsurprisingly, he conceptualized this philosophy as the politics of culture, as it, for him, was the only thing capable of conducting that crucial ethical dialogue between the state and legal system, on the one hand, and ‘human needs’ on the other.113 Yet, while he recognized that the idealists were agreed that philosophy was now the thing ‘on which the destiny of man depends’, Campagnolo invoked Sartre, and his ‘Questions of Method’ in particular for having understood the ‘fundamental political value of philosophy’, above all its ability to surpass and create social institutions. Thus it could ‘transform’ as opposed to merely ‘describe’ the world.114 Although Campagnolo’s report did not develop an argument for how this ‘living praxis’, as Sartre would have it, actually worked, he was clear that its eventual goal was the creation of ‘universal solidarity’.115 This was a theme that would preoccupy him for the next decade, and his commitment to it was sharpened by another, closer reading of Sartre’s text, which he offered in an essay of 1961, ‘Not Everybody can be a Marxist: Notes on Questions of Method by Jean-Paul Sartre’. Describing Sartre’s essay as having ‘value and importance’ for the politics of culture in its elucidation of the normally hidden relationship between ‘philosophical speculation and political action’, what was of paramount interest for Campagnolo in its tracing of Marxism and Existentialism back to their ‘social roots’ was Sartre’s concept of the ‘project’.116 If project meant, for Sartre, a deliberate way of being or acting by an individual or group toward a particular social end, Campagnolo transformed it into a subjective ‘act of creation, a moment of freedom that introduces in the world something new out of which the future will be different from the present and from the past’. By putting ‘the creative freedom of man at its origin’ Campagnolo was able to equate Sartre’s project to his own politics of culture, as this creative power allowed the individual to make history: ‘history is the work of man because it is “projected” by man’.117 Yet, in Campagnolo’s view, the idea that history was necessarily moral, driven by a ‘truly human’ will, and a collective one at that, was tacitly assumed by both Sartre and Marx.118 Consequently, Campagnolo’s own project through the politics of culture was to build solidarity between peoples through agreement on common ideals, above all, that of justice.119 Attributing current conflicts to the existence of nation states, their resolution, for Campagnolo, was neither

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‘a simple question of method’ nor ‘simply a critique of Marxism’.120 It required the establishment of a ‘new philosophy’, something Campagnolo acknowledged that Sartre himself had arrived at, albeit ‘obscurely’, in ‘Questions of Method’.121 Campagnolo expanded on this ‘new philosophy’ in the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’, the enormous ambition of which is clear in the reference to Marx. Presented at the SEC’s Eighth General Assembly, held in Rome in March 1961, it was Campagnolo’s stocktaking of the Society after ten years of existence, and its blueprint for the new decade. As such, it would be a turning point for the SEC, marking the beginning of a phase that, in Campagnolo’s words, would be ‘more public and . . . more political than before’, hence the status of his report as a ‘manifesto’.122 Opening with a brief history of the SEC, and affirming its by now well-known commitment to the creation of a universal state, and to Campagnolo’s dialectical understanding of the historical process, what was new in this report was a much more forceful articulation than ‘Not Everybody can be a Marxist’ of human solidarity as the force for achieving a universal state. It also presented a newly defined role for the intellectual, now called the ‘culturalist’, in making the greatest number of people possible aware of the ideals Campagnolo believed they all held in common. So far only private organizations such as the RIG, the WPC and the International Movement of Catholic Intellectuals, or intergovernmental ones such as the UN or Unesco, had seen that bringing an end to divisions between peoples was the only way of fulfilling what elsewhere he referred to as the ‘social will’. Yet, since ‘everyone’, he observed, ‘wants peace, wellbeing, disarmament, entente’ – the culturalist needed to raise this awareness on a global scale.123 The solidarity this would create, he concluded, would be a ‘feeling of human citizenship that knows neither ethnic nor social nor political frontiers.’ And, echoing his earlier argument for the civilization of the universal, he maintained that it should form the basis of a society ‘capable of revealing the complementary character of all the authentic values of the societies that it intends to replace’.124 As such, it provided substantial scope for the ‘so-called “third world”’: because the situation was still fluid there, it was the place where different futures for a global society could be imagined.125 Within this culturalist enterprise, the SEC would be a centre for its promotion either through its own activities, or through collaboration with other organizations.126

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As the list of people to be invited as observers at the Eighth General Assembly indicates, Campagnolo was hoping for support for this initiative to come from Africa, Brazil, China and India, as well as from Europe.127 Although an attendance list has not been preserved, the list in Comprendre of those who participated in the discussions shows that no one from beyond Europe contributed to them. Moreover, in spite of being a meeting that appears to have been attended primarily by those most dedicated to the Society, the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’ received little support from any quarter. Most of those present found the idea of a world state completely unrealistic. As Ehrenburg acidly observed, Campagnolo had no little chance of succeeding where Einstein had failed, and many, not least the apparently substantial number of Communists present, advised that the SEC stick to what it did best – organizing meetings and enabling dialogue.128 The ‘Culturalist Manifesto’ did, in fact, lead the Society up a blind alley, as we will see next. But in certain ways it was a document of its time, touching upon a number of key issues facing the intelligentsia in the 1960s that had been arrived at through the intertwined experiences of deStalinization and decolonization. As Paige Arthur has observed, Sartre’s own involvement in ‘Third Worldism . . . was related to his engagement with communism’,129 the connection between the experiences in Europe’s socialist countries and post-colonial ones, and the similarity of the moral problem at the heart of them – the violation of civil and political rights – was one to which Sartre was clearly attentive. For example, in his address to the WPC’s Helsinki Congress in June 1955, he immediately employed the principles of peaceful coexistence unveiled at Bandung only two months earlier as a model for how Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States might move beyond the stalemate imposed by bloc politics.130 Furthermore, if, by the early 1960s, as Arthur has rightly argued, Sartre and others were developing ‘a global understanding of personal responsibility’ against a larger background of the left’s opposition to imperialism and colonialism,131 Sartre’s work from this period, which was evolving from his consideration of the problem individual agency in Eastern Europe, clearly resonated with proponents of decolonization like Fanon and Senghor.132 They understood very well that, in the words of Robert Young, recent European experience – fascism and the Holocaust – ‘was simply colonialism brought home to Europe’;133 Sartre’s similar recognition of this crisis of humanism being clear in ‘Questions of

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Method’ and his 1964 lecture at the Gramsci Institute, Rome. Arthur has argued that the latter was a key moment in the development of Sartre’s ‘understanding of justice that was not confined to national communities’, and that his ability to elaborate ‘an ethics that prioritized the needs of the “least favoured” among humans, no matter where they exist’, grew out of his critique of colonialism.134 Yet the theory of social justice that he would apply to the problem of colonialism equally grew out of his revisionist Marxism. The failure of socialism in Eastern Europe remained at the core of his understanding of human freedom and agency at this time, and the problem that an occupying power posed to it could easily be applied, and was by Sartre, to the oppressed in Europe’s colonies, as his 1964 Rome lecture made clear.135 This slippage between the European and international problems, however – what Arthur calls the ‘profound decentering of the European grounds of history, knowledge, and conceptions of the self’ – was not just evident to Sartre. As she points out, he was a ‘very famous symptom’ of a larger process that was evident in the activities of many more European intellectuals: 1962– 8 was a period that ‘served to firm up left-wing commitments against imperialism and colonialism in all its forms’ and not just the ‘quiet before the storm’.136 They, too, were seeing human rights as a common denominator between these problems, and as a way beyond them. Yet, whereas Sartre was particularly effective in providing support that was acceptable to non-European intellectuals involved in the decolonization movement – his extensive travels, and reception in former territories gave him enhanced credibility on this point – the Society would prove to be far less so. For Campagnolo, Europe remained at the centre of the Society’s dealings with nonEuropean intellectuals: contemporary experience had taught its intellectuals, uniquely equipped with historical understanding, to discern what was most valuable among all cultures for a universally valid one. As the SEC was the first organization to arrange a dialogue between European and African intellectuals on this subject, its position soon brought the unresolved dispute between Campagnolo and Diop about the civilization of the universal into discussion among some of francophone Africa’s most renowned intellectuals of the period, with unfortunate consequences for Eurafrican cultural relations.

CHAPTER 6 THE CULTURES OF BLACK AFRICA AND OF THE WEST COLLOQUIUM (1960), THE WORLD ASSOCIATION OF CULTURE (1962) AND THEIR AFTERMATH

The SEC’s preoccupation during the late 1950s with the East– West Meetings did not mean that it had lost sight of the international problem during that time. As we have seen, discussions within the Executive Council and at the general assemblies were leading the Society back to a global understanding of the Cold War through its effort to define it; this only reinforced a long existing feeling among many members that the Cold War should not be seen as a predominantly European problem. For example, since 1954, Comprendre’s ‘The Presence of Culture’, which catalogued the interventions of intellectuals within ordinary politics, was filled with statements on events in Guatemala, Indochina and Tunisia, Iran, Suez and, above all, Algeria as manifestations of the conflict beyond Europe. The SEC, however, was not the only Europe-based organization for intellectuals concerned with the problem of decolonization. While its substantial Africa programme did not reach its full dimensions until the mid-1960s, as early as 1955 the CCF was already experimenting with similar themes at its fifth international Future of Freedom conference in

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Milan; the Soviets, for their part, had organized the first Conference of Writers from the Countries of Asia and Africa in Tashkent in October 1958, based on the principles of Bandung.1 The WPC, in contrast, had been a worldwide movement since its second congress in Warsaw in 1950. Most of these organizations and events, however, worked within certain restrictions. The CCF’s activities, geared toward development issues, focused on dialogue within the social sciences – between economists, politicians and sociologists – whereas the Tashkent conference limited participation to representatives from post-colonial states, as well as a delegation from the Soviet Union’s republics.2 Equally, only black speakers participated in Pre´sence africaine’s landmark first and second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held in Paris and in Rome in 1956 and 1959, respectively. When the SEC and the SAC collaborated on the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium (Rome, February 1960), it was therefore likely to have been the first faceto-face, broad-based inquiry by African and European cultural figures into colonialism, decolonization, and their implications for contemporary Eurafrican cultural relations. Up until this collaboration, however, the SEC’s experience with nonEuropean intellectuals and extra-European issues had been minimal. Beyond the theoretical debates it had intermittently hosted on the civilization of the universal and, as we shall see in a moment, a discussion about culture and colonialism at its Sixth General Assembly (September 1956), the Society’s only practical involvement in non-European cultural relations had been fostered through its collaboration with Unesco. This, however, was a fairly weak relationship. Awarded consultative status by that organization in 1954, the few projects it had undertaken for it dealt with European themes,3 and its contribution to Unesco’s ‘Major Project Three, the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values’, does not appear to have been substantial. The Society’s involvement seems to have been largely restricted to Mayoux and Houang’s representation at a conference on the project, and to the establishment of the section ‘Peace through Culture’ in Comprendre, which reported on it and other of Unesco’s activities.4 Consequently, when the SEC accepted the SAC’s invitation to jointly host the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium, it was against a background of almost no experience of working directly with intellectuals from Europe’s rapidly decolonizing territories and of the

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particular problems they faced. Furthermore, Campagnolo would be working with an African intellectual with whom he had a very fragile relationship: Alioune Diop. As we have already seen, Diop had been the engine behind the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Although his disagreement with Campagnolo over the civilization of the universal had been provocative enough to feature as a topic of discussion at that groundbreaking congress, they were, however, still managing to maintain a working relationship. For example, the problems that Diop had encountered in organizing the congress had made him realize that the creation of a body like the SEC would facilitate the arranging of future ones, and the correspondence between the two men indicates that the SEC did serve as a guide for the SAC’s administrative procedures.5 In addition, a certain likeness of mind about the political function of culture would also have helped them to work together. Describing tolerance as an ‘indulgence’ (Campagnolo) and as a ‘weakness of mind’ (Diop), both men rejected it for not even trying to resolve differences between peoples, politics and ideologies; rather, it simply put up with them. Instead, they embraced what Diop described as the ‘virtues of disagreement’, and they both understood dialogue as essentially a dialectical process through which differences could be confronted and rationally debated, and a new, intellectually defensible position could be mutually determined.6 This was an important point of agreement between them, as, at the very least, it enabled peoples to solve the problems stopping them from living together in mutual respect and in peace. At its best, it would enable them to work together to create something new on agreed moral principles, in spite of the unpleasantness of the debates. This was something that tolerance, a conservative value in the literal sense of the word, was incapable of doing, as it required no change on either side. Unafraid of undertaking such discussions, both men were remarkably resilient in the face of each other’s criticisms and, when Diop saw the proceedings of the SEC’s 1956 assembly, they encouraged him to seek collaboration with the SEC. Buoyed by the Dialogue’s success, Campagnolo had been intending to use that assembly to consider the ‘link between culture and political reality’ with special emphasis on the situations in China and the Soviet Union.7 Yet, at the behest of several members of the SEC’s Executive Council, it also featured an auxiliary theme on the rise of nationalism as a global phenomenon and the

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challenge it presented to the formation of an international humanism.8 While we have seen that this event was a breakthrough for Eastern European participation, there was also limited but important representation from outside Europe, too. For the first time, China, during its Hundred Flowers Campaign that briefly relaxed government restrictions on intellectual freedom of expression, permitted observers to attend. It sent two men, one of whom was Fung Yu-Lan, the comparatively liberal, Western-educated philosopher, to both the SEC’s assembly and the 1956 RIG.9 Afghanistan’s Nadjim oud-Dine Bammate, a longstanding Unesco official who would soon become head of Unesco’s division of Cultural Relations with Africa and the Third World was also there, along with the Vietnamese-born writer Pham Van Ky. Both men had joined the SEC earlier that year. Although Campagnolo’s report, as we have also seen, was not particularly well received, those by Amrouche, Mayoux, and the French writer Claude Roy generated enthusiastic discussion. Asked to comment on the theme of culture and colonialism, all three of them were united in their condemnation of the latter as a betrayal of Europe’s own humanist values; likewise they agreed that the nationalist movements appearing in decolonizing countries were almost reflexive responses to that betrayal. Intellectuals therefore had an important role to play in both Europe’s own ethical redemption and in fashioning what Amrouche referred to as the ‘man to come’ through the discovery of universally shared values.10 Although Campagnolo was disappointed with the reports because they dwelt on the negative aspects of colonialism rather than on the positive role that intellectuals could play within newly emerging countries,11 the audience responded enthusiastically. While the discussion was varied and inconclusive, it nonetheless showed a readiness among those present to address these issues; moreover, the assembly’s support for the rapporteurs’ arguments for cultural diversity and the right to self-determination of formerly colonized peoples was clear in its final resolution. Adhering to the principle of the politics of culture by asserting that culture was more than the ‘conservation and transmission of . . . traditional values’, but rather ‘consists essentially in the process of creating new values’: any hinderance, of whatever nature, opposed to the right of peoples to emancipate themselves and to freely develop their own culture constitutes a danger for the development of universal civilization.

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Consequently, the SEC launches an appeal to men of culture of all countries and asks them to take more clear awareness of their solidarity and of their political and social responsibilities. It asks them to redouble their vigilance and the effort to establish, through an open and confident dialogue, an ever closer cooperation between all peoples.12 The resolution immediately captured the attention of both Diop and those involved with setting up the SAC. Although Diop had not attended the assembly, he wrote to Campagnolo within days of it. According to him, the resolution had ‘provoked so much emotion among us’ that it was lost in the process of its widespread circulation, and he requested any further documentation from the assembly that was available.13 Clearly it had been warmly received. Perceiving the assembly as ‘precisely complementary’ to the theme of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Diop even reproduced its final resolution on the last page of the issue of Pre´sence africaine that contained the proceedings of his own congress.14 Although the formal decision to establish the SAC had only been taken earlier that month at the closure of the congress,15 the SEC’s resolution immediately encouraged them to explore the possibility of working together while their new organization was still finding its feet. This initial zeal did not result in any immediate collaboration. Campagnolo was soon preoccupied with the second East– West Meeting, while Diop was busy organizing the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, albeit without the input from Campagnolo that he had hoped for.16 Within two years, however, plans were under way for the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium. In the autumn of 1958 Diop approached Campagnolo about organizing a roundtable on the politics of culture, and they met in Paris in January 1959 for further face-to-face discussion.17 There Diop put forward a number of black participants to be invited, and they agreed the choice of Francois Mauriac and Senghor as the two keynote speakers.18 While the choice of Senghor was obvious – a poet and a statesman, he was the embodiment of the politically engaged intellectual – Campagnolo had chosen Mauriac not because he was capable of representing ‘France’, or ‘Europe’, but because of his clear renown as a writer, and his very public reputation, since 1953, as an opponent of France’s human rights abuses

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in North Africa, not least through his weekly column ‘Bloc-notes’ for the leftist paper L’Express.19 Amrouche and Aveline, however, raised doubts about inviting politicians to the event, as they might have too established a position on the issues discussed to effectively undertake dialogue.20 Ehrenburg, too, was uneasy about the political complexion of the event, and his concern over a lack of representation across a range of ideologies was not unfounded: the difficulties the Soviets had recently encountered when organizing the 1958 Tashkent writers’ conference with Diop was clearly fresh in his memory.21 According to the historian Constantin Katsakioris, the Tashkent conference had been intended to mark a new stage in Soviet cultural policy, encouraging the participation of writers within decolonizing states in the development of national consciousness, as well as promoting the Bandung Conference’s principles of international solidarity and co-operation.22 Diop and Senghor’s longstanding hostility to communism, reflected in Diop’s insistence that there be no Soviet delegation at the Tashkent conference, led to the SAC representatives’ dismissal from the organizing committee, accused of being ‘bourgeois nationalists’.23 On the surface, the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium had much more modest aims than the Tashkent conference. According to the letter of invitation, the purpose of the event was simply to ‘contribute to an understanding and toward a more fruitful collaboration between the peoples of two civilizations’.24 Its ambition, however, was clear in the number and calibre of figures invited to participate.25 Although not all of the invitees were able to come, in the end, 36 figures, predominantly writers and politicians, agreed to take part: Sylvia Sprigge from Britain; Wilfred C. Smith from Canada; Mirko Nova´k from Czechoslovakia; Jean Amrouche, Francois Mauriac and Pe`re Jean Danielou from France; K. A. Busia and William Demby from Ghana; Umberto Campagnolo, Stanislao Ceschi, Aldo Ferrabino, Teobaldo Filesi, Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Giorgio La Pira, Carlo Levi, Angelo Monteverdi, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Morra, Giovanni Ponti, Giuseppe Ungaretti from Italy; Marcus James from Jamaica; Jacques Rabemananjara from Madagascar; Aime´ Ce´saire and Edouard Glissant from Martinique; T. O. Elias and Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria; Alioune Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop and Le´opold Se´dar Senghor from Senegal; Gabit Musrepov, Boris Polevoi and I. I. Potekhin from the Soviet Union;

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Antony Babel and Charles Veillon from Switzerland; Ge´rard Sekoto from South Africa; and Mercer Cook from the United States. The Brazilian Josue´ de Castro, the nutritionist specializing in problems of social inequality and author of the groundbreaking Geopolitics of Hunger (1951), the importance of which is only now coming under re-consideration, was a leading participant.26 Vittorio Veronese was also there as director general of Unesco; for reasons that are unclear, Frantz Fanon, while also present, is not recorded in any of the press releases or in Comprendre as an official participant. Although Paris was initially considered as a venue for the colloquium, the situation in Algeria meant that it was too politically charged, and it was quickly decided that Rome would be a preferable location. Not only had Italy been a colonial power for a much shorter time, decolonization was now one of its key post-war foreign policy interests. As soon as it lost its few territories through a UN action in 1949, Elena Calandri tells us, ‘Rome abandoned colonial ambitions and embraced the cause of decolonization and of dialogue with the newly independent regimes.’27 By the 1960s, its role had transformed into that of an advocate of a politics of ‘international co-operation’ that was particularly visible in its Mediterranean policies. As Luciano Tosi has argued, given the Italian government’s lack of a clear strategy for assisting countries emerging from colonization, it turned instead to involvement with international and nongovernmental organizations oriented toward the provision of technical and cultural assistance to new states.28 Although Tosi mentions Italy’s intensive involvement in Unesco and the activities of the Catholic Church as evidence of this,29 cultural initiatives such as Giorgio La Pira’s Mediterranean Colloquia (Colloques me´diterrane´ens), the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists and the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium also fitted comfortably within the interests of contemporary Italian foreign policy.30 This last one clearly benefited from it, finding strong institutional support in Rome. For example, Ceschi had negotiated, under the auspices of the Dante Alighieri Society, the use of the Palazzo Firenze for the event’s five private discussion sessions, and the use of the prestigious Sala della Protomoteca on the Capitoline Hill for the public lectures by Mauriac and Senghor.31 In official recognition of the importance of the event, which the Italian government appears to have substantially financed, lunch on the final day was with the president of the Italian Senate, Cesare

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Merzagora, and various government figures, at the president’s official residence at the Palazzo Giustiniani.32 The colloquium began its work at the Palazzo Firenze on 22 February 1960. Over three days it convened, along with the two public evening lectures by Mauriac and Senghor, five closed discussion sessions. Possibly inspired by the success of the approach taken at the Dialogue, Campagnolo explained at the opening session that the meetings would proceed without an agreed agenda in hand. Rather, the participants’ task would be something very much in keeping with the purpose of the SEC: ‘on both sides, to guide, by dialogue, our partner to the discovery of the universal under the particular forms of civilization to which we belong’.33 While he recognized the double political function of the intellectual who, obligated to ordinary politics like any other citizen, was also in the service of the politics of culture, the colloquium, he cautioned, was exclusively concerned with the latter. The discussions were not to be used to defend the non-aligned movement, any nationalist movements, Pan-Africanism, free market capitalism or communism. Nor should they be used to make an historical assessment of colonialism, which they all deplored. In service to the politics of culture, the colloquium was to ‘transcend’ these concerns in its quest for universality and solidarity.34 It is unclear how or why so little preparatory work for the discussions was done in conjunction with either Diop or with anyone else in the SAC, and the participants were frustrated by Campagnolo’s approach. Diop immediately intervened, calling for a suspension to the meeting in order to give the Africans time to come up with a proposal for how to proceed;35 he was not initially heeded. But by the end of the day, which featured some interesting but unstructured discussions, it was agreed that a working party made up of Campagnolo, Ce´saire, de Castro, Alioune Diop, Potekhin and Smith should define the colloquium’s objectives.36 They found their inspiration that evening, at Mauriac’s public lecture ‘The White Man’s Calling’ (‘La Vocation de l’homme blanc’). This address opened with certain stereotypes about race – the black African was closer to nature, or like an adolescent who has just discovered the limitations of his ageing father, whereas the white European was a sophisticated contradiction between reason and the madness that gave rise to his ‘genius’. Nevertheless, it offered a rigorous critique of Western civilization. Cataloguing Europe’s betrayals of its Christian vocation – the slave trade,

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colonialism and hollow evangelism – he placed the blame squarely on Europe’s shoulders for having treated Africa and its peoples as means to an end, and he firmly endorsed independence for France’s colonies.37 He also concluded that the West was now impoverished by its technological civilization, and that it needed to find again the spirituality that Africa had never lost. Mauriac nonetheless queried, however, whether the two races were likely to mutually corrupt each other, morally and politically, should the Eurafrica set to emerge from the political and economic relationships now being negotiated between the two continents actually give rise to the ‘Eurafrican’.38 Disturbed by Mauriac’s forecast, the working party proposed that the remainder of the colloquium be dedicated to exploring how such contact could be mutually enriching. Otherwise, as de Castro rightly observed, there was no point in continuing with it.39 There were points of disagreement among them, the Soviet and African participants in particular tending to reject Campagnolo’s argument that culture could be treated independently of politics.40 However, they all unanimously embraced the challenge of finding, as de Castro put it, the means for non-violent cross-fertilization. If Western colonialism had meant that, historically, contact between civilizations had resulted in violent, or what the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant would shortly refer to as ‘bad’ hybridization, the colloquium offered the opportunity to move on from the past and, based on mutual respect, to, in de Castro’s words, ‘build something more positive than the segregation of cultures’.41 As Senghor optimistically summarized on the morning of the second day: These approbations show that we are at the heart of the problem and of the discussion. In this way, I thank Mauriac for having spoken of the mutual corruption of cultures [. . .] I think, in effect, that we want, in this colloquium, to see if there has been corruption in the past, because – it must be said – of the colonial system, and if now, on new bases, there can be a fertilization of cultures. It only remains for me to hope that we arrive, tomorrow afternoon, at conclusions that continue in the way traced this morning.42 Although he did not speak about colonialism directly, Senghor’s own hard-hitting keynote lecture that evening nonetheless focused on violence, which he saw as endemic in Europe’s view of the world. Singling

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out Denis de Rougemont’s ‘The Direction of Our Lives or Europe’, which had appeared in Preuves in 1952, and Campagnolo’s ‘European Responsibilities’ (1953), as presenting idealized visions of Europe, he argued that among the qualities they ascribed to it – freedom, passion, originality, progressiveness – there was also discursive reason.43 Distinct from the innate faculty of reason, which all of humanity shared, discursive reason reduced the world’s contents – including colonized peoples – first into objects ready for analysis, then into something to be assimilated and used as an instrument. This ‘bird of prey’ mentality was responsible for the moral crisis Europe was now in, evidenced by the development of atomic weapons and the Holocaust, which had applied mass production techniques to genocide.44 These atrocious developments were ‘not’, Senghor pointed out, ‘the works of black Africa’, and had proven once and for all Europe’s godlessness. They also demonstrated that Europe was ready for, even desperately needed, revitalization from the essential religiosity of other world civilizations.45 What black Africa in particular could offer this ethically bankrupt continent was reason of a different kind: a sympathetic one, derived from the knowledge of how to live with others, in ‘symbiosis’.46 Defining this as a relationship that was mutually assimilating, the black African, rather than thinking about the world as a set of external objects, instead felt them, empathetically, and integrated them without losing his or her own self.47 Regarding Africa’s relationship with Europe, he presented this in horticultural terms, as a ‘graft’ that could ‘obtain fruits that are succulent because they are mixed’.48 Senghor’s argument for a symbiotic or hybridizing approach to Europe’s post-war moral reconstruction, however, also had a clear political analogue that ran throughout his lecture: Eurafricanism. The results of the recent referendum (September 1958) on the structure of the French Community, he argued, had made clear Francophone Africa’s desire for Eurafrican co-operation and its wish to be part of ‘a renewed Community, a multinational Confederation of free peoples, in solidarity’ with France.49 Europe, however, was so closely associated by other civilizations with racism and fascism that it needed to be re-humanized through contact with the wider international community. This was for the ‘health’ of that community and of the world.50 Thus he concluded his lecture by endorsing the civilization of the universal as a ‘new humanism’ not to be determined by Europe, but through ‘fertile collaboration’ with other world civilizations.51 While Europe’s

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technological superiority meant that for the moment it had to conduct the civilization of the universal, which Senghor imagined here as an orchestra of many parts, the ensemble would literally be grounded by Africa, the percussionist with its foot firmly against the earth, providing the base rhythm.52 In spite of its severity, or maybe because of it, Senghor’s lecture catalysed the most productive discussions of the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium. It was not his indictment of Europe that was most provocative; rather, many were uncomfortable with his endorsement of the civilization of the universal. In the discussion session the following morning, Rabemanajara described their consideration of it as ‘truncated’ without, for example, Asiatic peoples present, Ce´saire suggested that the Europeans felt that it was a highly abstract concept exclusive to themselves, and Fanon warned against ‘cultural narcissism’, the universalizing of one individual’s or group’s subjective, limited experience.53 Gabit Musrepov, of Kazakhstan, which he described as an ancient colony of the former Russian empire (he did not comment on its current status within the Soviet Union), also contested Senghor’s identification of Europe as a ‘conductor’, arguing forcefully for greater pluralism within the universal.54 It was Glissant, however, building on Senghor’s ‘symbiosis’ with his own ‘good hybridity’, who steered the colloquium toward a promising conclusion. Although Glissant is known primarily as a writer, his biographer J. Michael Dash has suggested that his often overlooked work as a theorist was distinct from the ideas central to the SAC and Pre´sence africaine, and in many ways ahead of its time; Celia Britton has also indicated that Glissant’s ‘relation’ theory, which respects diversity but stresses contact between cultures, is traceable back to the late 1950s and early 1960s.55 Although Glissant was based in Paris and a member of the SAC, he was, according to Dash, frustrated by the preoccupation there with colonialism; instead, me´tissage, or hybridity, a defining feature of his relation theory, was already for him a way of moving beyond it.56 And his intervention at the colloquium demonstrated how it could. Returning to Busia’s observations on the first morning of the colloquium, in which the Ghanian had queried whether ‘difference’ constituted a permanent division between peoples, or whether ‘harmonious relations’ could exist between them,57 Glissant now posited ‘agreed difference’ – the recognition of both sides as different and equal – as enabling the participants to identify some

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universally shared principles among them.58 Such a dialogue would result in ‘good hybridity’ (‘bon me´tissage’) – a mixing of ideas and values without the ‘debasement’ of those from either party.59 In order to ensure this, Glissant proposed three rules: to ‘accept difference’, to ‘dignify the other’, and to ‘not consider one’s own principles as the only essential ones’.60 If Glissant had just identified the conditions needed to assure the success of this and future dialogues between Africa and Europe, Diop immediately understood the importance of the moment. Moving in quickly to support him, ‘[I]f the Africans have kept accenting this difference’, he maintained: it has not been without reason. It is because, in particular, the notion of the universal is a little linked, in our minds, to the notion of cultural imperialism . . . we have the feeling that, on the one hand, there is not a community of peoples and of races for which will be reserved exclusively the advantage of knowing a vocation of universality and of being animated by it and that, on the other hand, a certain technical, economic and military power, can confer the advantage to certain peoples of diffusing much more widely, across the world, not the universal values by which all the world lives, but a particular way of expressing the universal; a particular way presented with such authority and such force that the foreigner is tempted to submit himself and that the creator of this form of expression is tempted, him too, faced with the powerlessness of others, to consider that effectively he embodies the universal.61 Consequently for Diop, dignity was the factor that would determine the success of any future collaboration and, in order to preserve it, all peoples needed the freedom to express what was universally valuable in their own, different ways.62 Provided that this right was respected, he concluded, they were set ‘to meet and to build together a truly fraternal world’.63 In spite of the fact that its definition was still disputed, the civilization of the universal would remain at the heart of the SAC and SEC’s future projects. After drawing up a ‘conflicting inventory’ of European and African cultural characteristics, the press communique´

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agreed at the colloquium’s closing session nonetheless anticipated that this work would serve as the basis for further collaborations intended to ‘realize the values of a civilization of the universal, where all cultures will fully play their role, with respect for their originality and their dignity’.64 If this held out hope that an agreement could be reached over the civilization of the universal, that it would be built on values that needed to be discovered and agreed through dialogue, correspondence between Campagnolo and Senghor soon after the colloquium indicated that its realization would be unlikely. At first, their exchange was cordial enough. Writing to Campagnolo just a few weeks after the colloquium, Senghor was having second thoughts about equating Campagnolo’s and de Rougemont’s arguments, and they agreed that references to Campagnolo’s ‘European Responsibilities’ would be omitted by Senghor from the version of his lecture that would appear in the forthcoming African issue of Comprendre.65 And while he still bridled at Campagnolo’s definition of the civilization of the universal, it was ‘because of our differences’, Senghor reassured him, that ‘we must pursue dialogue’, suggesting a second colloquium to be held in Dakar during the next two years.66 On the same day that Campagnolo wrote to Senghor in support of this proposal, however, he also wrote a letter to Diop, accepting the latter’s resignation from the SEC. Although Diop’s reason for resigning was, ostensibly, to find a more effective means of collaboration between their two organizations, it was clear that he, like Senghor, found Campagnolo’s idea of the civilization of the universal insupportable. While he was still receptive at this point to the projected Dakar colloquium, African intellectuals, he explained, needed to put themselves ‘back in our social context, and from there consider European culture (which is not the universal culture) a little from outside rather than by integrating ourselves, isolated and so fragile, in the western context’.67 Campagnolo accepted Diop’s decision graciously.68 Yet his own reservations about their discussions surfaced much more publicly in the special African issue of Comprendre. Containing the proceedings of the colloquium, it also published commissioned essays on the theme of ‘Africa enters history’ – in other words, Africa’s participation in the international community, in its economic, political and cultural

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institutions. Yet, as his editor’s preface revealed, the rise of nationalist movements in Africa had made Campagnolo question whether African intellectuals were ready to participate in the world federalist aims of the SEC of surpassing the nation state.69 At a time when numerous African intellectuals were now urging their peers to ‘study their past and to become aware of being the bearers of a universally valid culture’, he also wondered whether the idea of negritude, still popular, did in fact constitute ‘the basis of a black cultural patrimony . . . destined to remain juxtaposed with western civilization’, or whether a ‘vital relation’ could be found between African and Western culture.70 Although so much of the Rome colloquium had been dedicated to the idea of hybridity as just such a relationship – negritude was scarcely mentioned, in spite of the presence there of two of its original proponents, Ce´saire and Senghor – it was clear in this preface that Campagnolo was resistant to it. Certain that the brightest future for Eurafrican relations lay in the peoples of Africa understanding the ‘real meaning’ of Western civilization, for him, their only way of accessing it was through dialogue with the West. This required their acceptance of man as ‘historical reason’, and, working through rational discussion toward the shared values that would make up the new civilization of the universal.71 Given Campagnolo’s commitment to the dialectical method, or ‘dialectical attitude’, as he called it,72 it is surprising that he should have missed the complementary interest that he shared with Senghor in Marxism, historical reasoning par excellence, and specifically Sartrean Marxism, as pointing the way toward the new humanist social order they both sought. A few days after the Rome colloquium, Senghor had sent him documentation from the Constitutive Congress of the Party of the African Federation (Parti de la Fe´de´ration Africaine – PFA).73 Having met in July 1959 in anticipation of Francophone Africa’s independence, (the territories were granted full independence in 1960, after the failure of the short-lived French Community), the PFA was looking for an indigenous socialism that could provide solutions to the problems facing its impending states. As an experienced statesman, Senghor was fully aware of the economic importance of confederation with France, and he saw a better future for Africa as depending upon its relationship with Europe. The economic bond made possible by belonging to the Common Market was absolutely necessary for solving the problems of hunger, malnutrition and poverty facing his native Senegal and

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developing countries as a whole.74 The report he delivered at that congress, ‘Nationhood: Report on the Doctrine and Program of the Party of the African Federation’, therefore took that economic relationship as a given, and instead focused on the question of Africa’s moral reconstruction, how it could rebuild itself on a politico-cultural ‘philosophy of humanism’ within an economic framework inspired by Europe, but thinking for itself.75 And this is no doubt why he sent Campagnolo a copy of the report. As his accompanying letter explained, ‘we don’t have a negative attitude toward Europe’, rather, Africa intended to ‘use European cultural values’ to effect its own renaissance, the results of which would constitute its own contribution to the ‘Civilization of the Universal’.76 While Senghor’s long, intricate essay took in many aspects of socialist thought from many thinkers, the most striking thing about it was its stress on the moral dimension of socialism as Europe’s most important legacy for contemporary Africa. Rejecting scientific socialism,77 Senghor, like so many revisionist thinkers at that time, including Sartre in ‘Questions of Method’, was instead attracted to the young Marx’s understanding of man as ‘essentially a producing artist’, and thus as the creator of civilization.78 In Senghor’s view, this ‘new humanism’, with its ‘profound insight into human needs’, was ‘the basic character and positive contribution of Marxian thought’, not economic theory.79 Yet it had one substantial shortcoming: Marx’s humanism, while implicitly ethical, failed to engage with metaphysics, religion or ethics, the latter only appearing like ‘fine threads in his writing’.80 In order to fully benefit from Marx’s ‘most fruitful contribution’, Senghor, like Campagnolo, found inspiration in Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’, its introduction of the active, moral subject within Marx’s determinist understanding of both nature and society.81 If this led Senghor to a ‘middle course . . . a democratic socialism, which goes so far as to integrate spiritual values’ found historically in French socialism, then, he averred, ‘[h]istorically and culturally we belong to this current’. And if this was because it met ‘the requirements of the Negro African soul’, it also met the requirements of ‘men of all races and countries’, Senghor being fully aware that this same need was behind current efforts in Europe’s socialist countries toward de-Stalinization.82 Campagnolo, however, did not see their shared interest in Marxist humanism, in spite of its burgeoning popularity in Europe’s socialist

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countries, and within the SEC. Although he would soon start work, if he had not already, on his ‘Culturalist Manifesto’, what Campagnolo took from Senghor’s ‘Nationhood’ essay was simply the Europeanness of his thought.83 This attitude would soon be responsible for the unravelling of the relationship between the two men. Although Senghor had clearly embraced the Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium as a ‘first positive contribution to the realization of the Civilization of the Universal’, in the letter accompanying his PFA address he had cautioned Campagnolo that for Africans, this new civilization ‘can only be a meeting point for the giving and receiving of all civilizations.’84 Yet this was a premise that Campagnolo insisted on qualifying. For him, to ‘enter history’ meant to become a conscious, active element ‘in the system of forces on which the course of history has principally depended up to now’.85 If Africa’s ‘entrance into history requires deliberate co-operation, in the realization of universal civilization’, he maintained that ‘[w]hat should not be admitted nor imagined, is that this civilization could be the result of the juxtaposition of different civilizations, their interpenetration or their osmosis, by making a sort of mosaic civilization.’86 It also required letting go of ‘mysterious “negritude”’ as well. Presumably because of its deep connection with the past, and its racial essentialism, it could not be part of this future in the making.87 Campagnolo, however, had either underestimated or disregarded the extent to which Europe’s claim to moral leadership in the process of postwar reconstruction had been undermined not only by its colonial past, but also by its recent history. While Senghor had suppressed such references in the published version of his address at the Rome colloquium, other contributors to Comprendre’s Africa issue did not shrink from mentioning not only the Holocaust and the development of atomic weapons, but also the physical and psychological trauma that Europe had inflicted on its subjects through colonization as having completely ruined Europe’s reputation.88 It was therefore with mounting reservations on both sides that plans for a second colloquium to be held in Dakar in April 1963 were agreed. Even though the SAC’s choice of theme was ‘Negritude and the Civilization of the Universal’, Campagnolo embraced the proposed event as an opportunity to compare and elaborate the two concepts, and also to clarify the relationship between the SEC and the SAC.89 This was now a pressing issue for

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him, as his own preparations for the SEC’s Eighth General Assembly, where he would deliver his manifesto, were under way. As we have already seen, this report, which set out the SEC’s plans for pursuing world peace and world federalization in the 1960s, was intended for a worldwide audience. The Society’s expanding remit also appears to have appealed to the Italian government, which was demonstrating a more generous attitude toward it at that time. Francesco Franceschini, a long-standing SEC member and currently a deputy in parliament, had recently proposed a law committing the government to providing the SEC with 20 million lire per year until 1970 – 1 to pursue its increasingly global activities. It was unanimously passed on 22 November 1960.90 The Eighth General Assembly also received strong material support from the national government, which allowed the use of prestigious venues in Rome, including once again the Sala della Protomoteca. While Ce´saire, Mercer Cook, Cyrus Eaton, Rabemananjara and Senghor, who had been invited as observers, do not appear to have attended this well-appointed event,91 the aspect of the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’ that later raised the SAC’s ire was its presentation of the SEC as the vanguard of the co-ordinated global movement that the manifesto anticipated. While it was aware that the Third World could be an ‘inappreciable factor of peace’, this depended, the manifesto asserted, on its not repeating Europe’s ‘little game of nation-states’, which would delay peace ‘for thousands of years’.92 Given that the political situation in the developing world was still ‘fluid’, however, there were various unspecified movements that represented possible futures for humanity. ‘The time has come’, the manifesto concluded, for the Society to ‘instigate and guide a vast and deep culturalist movement’ in the form of a ‘world association of culture’ to co-ordinate all of these activities on behalf of world peace.93 Most non-Western readers would see this as presumptuous. Like his colleagues at the SAC, Diop did not attend the 1961 assembly. Yet, as a letter from him to Campagnolo the previous month confirms, at that point he still perceived the relationship between their two organizations as one of ‘affectionate friendship’ grounded in a ‘common ideal’.94 He wrote, ‘we haven’t concealed what the SAC owes to the SEC’, and noted its commitment to working with the Society in pursuing its aims of making Africans aware of the ‘ideal of a universal

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civilization in the modern world’ and conducting an ‘authentic dialogue between the West and Africa’.95 It was not until 1963 that the relationship between the SAC and the SEC began to seriously fracture, with Campagnolo’s unveiling of his plans for the AMC. While it had been just a suggestion in the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’, in July 1962 he presented the SEC’s Executive Council with a letter proposing its establishment. Premised, like the SEC, on intellectuals working in collaboration with the peoples of the world to create the ‘conditions of a universal coexistence’, in certain ways the AMC was intended to forward the political objectives that the SEC had defined but not yet managed to realize.96 Nor had they been realized by other organizations. While Campagnolo had been heartened by the SEC’s leadership in organizing some of the earliest cultural exchanges in Europe across the Iron Curtain, he was now frustrated by the amount of what he perceived as fruitless dialogue being conducted by numerous other bodies.97 What now gave him some cause for optimism was the international spread of socialism, the ‘greatest historical event’ capable of turning ‘simple solidarity into a conscious and organized force’.98 He therefore called for the development of a new movement that, while he stopped short of identifying it as socialist, ‘could even be considered as a new stage through which socialism ought to pass in order to achieve the realization of the work that it has begun.’99 It is more than likely that he meant for that movement to be the AMC. The SEC’s Executive Council was deeply sceptical of this new direction in Campagnolo’s thinking. Rejecting it largely on the same grounds that they had rejected the ‘Culturalist Manifesto’, Terracini in particular foresaw that it would jeopardize the Dakar event.100 Yet, inexplicably, it agreed that the Secretariat should produce a proposal for the AMC for consideration at the Ninth General Assembly, to be held in Rome in mid-October 1963.101 The assembly was opened by Veronese, until recently Unesco’s general director, and now president of the Bank of Rome, which had allowed the use of the Palazzo Barberini for the opening event; Egypt-born Ungaretti, the president of the SEC’s Rome Centre and a longstanding proponent of Third World issues; and Luigi Gui, a founding SEC member and currently Italy’s Minister for Public Instruction; and their global expectations of it were clear. They welcomed the SEC’s new impetus toward a truly international dialogue

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under the aegis of the UN Charter and also, in the case of Veronese and Ungaretti, in the spirit of Pope John XXIII’s recent encyclical, Peace on Earth (Pacem in Terris) (April 1963), which had called for a world government based on human rights.102 Campagnolo’s report, ‘For a World Association of Men of Culture’, was indeed a watershed for the Society, not least because it launched the AMC. But what was truly controversial about it was not the idea for such an organization, rather, it was the vehemence with which Campagnolo argued for Western culture as the arbiter of what constituted a world culture that could embody this universal solidarity. For him, European civilization remained the only one capable of identifying the universal aspects of other world civilizations. Those others would only ‘enter history’ when they decided to: take part in global political and economic decisions . . . sit in international assemblies, the deliberations of which influence the evolution of the world; when their ruling classes are instructed in western sciences and technologies and learn two of the western languages; when they look into their past in order to construct their history; when they take western institutions for the model of their political, economic and social systems.103 The assembly concluded by agreeing to establish the new organization, with predominantly Western centres left to circulate the AMC’s proposal.104 Doubts were voiced, however, about the association’s being, in the words of Endre Sik, an ‘apology for colonialism’.105 Until recently Hungary’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, it was from years of practical experience that he stressed, along with others, the more ‘social’ problems of poverty, underdevelopment and, above all, hunger as fundamental to the international threat to peace.106 But had the SEC’s Executive Council taken to heart the observations of Georges Ngango, one of apparently only two Africans in the audience, the rapid deterioration of the relationship between the SEC and the SAC might have been avoided. Ngango was standing in for Diop, who was abroad, as the SAC’s representative.107 Although he was still a student, he delivered a long, confident critique of Campagnolo’s report and of Terracini’s on ideological conflict and the politics of culture, which in both cases hinged on their lack of first-hand familiarity with the actual conditions

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in Europe’s former colonies. If for Terracini, the Cold War was now a war of ideas, the conflagrations in Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba, not to mention Berlin, were anything but an intellectual debate. Furthermore, any disputes between the European powers over terrain could easily escalate into a hot war, since they were living manifestations of a larger ideological conflict.108 More pointedly, Ngango also questioned Campagnolo’s criteria by which other civilizations could ‘enter history’. Taking exception to Campagnolo’s identification of the SEC as a global organization, and the SAC as merely regional and therefore unable to see the larger issues, Ngango described this relationship between the SEC and the SAC as a vertical one ‘of master and slave’.109 Yet the dynamic between them, he argued, was otherwise: given that dialogue was driven by cultural differences, the intimate familiarity African participants had with Western culture as well as their own made them even more qualified than most Europeans to identify the values they shared. He therefore urged a summit meeting between the two societies, so that they could set up the AMC together.110 By the time Ngango made this proposal, however, the SAC had already begun drifting away from the SEC, developing a joint ‘Africa– West’ project with Unesco instead that intended to take the Dakar colloquium within its remit.111 While Diop evidently remained open to the SEC’s collaboration,112 Senghor rescheduled it several times, without consulting the SEC, before eventually deciding to hold the colloquium in collaboration with Unesco in conjunction with an African cultural festival planned for December 1965.113 There was a certain amount of back pedalling by the SAC on the extent to which it had excluded the SEC from the proceedings: for example, Jean Mazel, an expert adviser for the festival, explained that the colloquium would be on the theme of ‘the contribution of negritude to universal civilization’, and therefore did not preclude a subsequent event with the SEC on the themes explored in Rome.114 Yet it was clear to many SEC councillors that a fight was brewing between the Society and the SAC over the idea of the civilization of the universal. At the 1963 assembly, Ngango had warned that Senghor, while he had ‘come round’ to Campagnolo’s term, was adamant that this civilization was ‘not yet constructed; it is to be constructed’.115 Campagnolo certainly would have agreed with this. But, that his equally adamant defence of Europe as its ‘common measure’ was the primary cause for the breakdown in relations between the

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two organizations would have been clear to anyone aware of the intensity of the exchanges between him and Ngango at the assembly. Far from blowing over after the event, those debates became a focus of interest for the SAC. A few weeks later, it requested 15 copies of the documentation concerning the assembly, as well as a copy of the letter proposing the AMC that had been approved at the assembly.116 A period of tense relations between the SAC and the SEC followed the receipt of those documents, ending in a permanent rupture in 1966. Although Diop had generally maintained a gentler, flexible approach toward Campagnolo throughout the debates leading up to it, he was away when the documents arrived, and his brother-in-law, Iwiye´ KalaLobe´, was covering for him in his absence. A ‘tireless promoter’ of Pre´sence africaine since its inception,117 Kala-Lobe´ quickly condemned the SEC as guilty of the ‘assimilation’ and ‘balkanization’ of Africa, and insisted that the AMC include participants from the Third World. Anything less than full inclusion on an ‘equal footing’, he argued, was an attempt to ‘Westernize’ African consciousness.118 In a robust reply, Campagnolo defended the SEC’s search for ‘terrain where collaboration can happen with mutual respect’ as inherently opposed to balkanization. Then, more caustically, he asked why the SAC feared assimilation when: on the one hand, the African leading classes don’t hesitate to borrow their languages from the West, its economic, political and legal institutions, its technology, sciences, didactic systems, religions, values, and that, on the other hand, it’s often westerners who (I bring this up with regret) show themselves inclined to maintain some differentiations, going as far as advocating segregation.119 Disregarding the advice he had received at the 1963 assembly that the SEC start to attend more assiduously to the ‘social questions’ that concerned the SAC – underdevelopment, decolonization, western domination – he averred that these were fundamentally different from the concerns of the SEC. As his own organization sought a new humanism capable of transcending ordinary politics, Campagnolo maintained that there was not really scope for the SAC’s collaboration on the AMC.120 As Kala-Lobe´ and Campagnolo could not reconcile their differences,121 Diop finally entered the debate. Warning Campagnolo

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that Ngango would be publishing an account of the Rome assembly in Pre´sence africaine that he would find upsetting, and suggesting that the defensive tone of Campagnolo’s letters was unfitting of so cultivated a man, at the heart of the SAC’s complaint, he observed, was the institutional affiliation that Campagnolo seemed to intend between the SEC and AMC.122 Noting the SEC’s lack of consultation with other cultural organizations, Diop, presumably referring to the SAC’s rapidly developing relationship with Unesco, concluded that this was all the more regrettable given that ‘other western organizations, further from us than the SEC, have the wisdom to proceed with these consultations that you haven’t made, for objectives comparable to yours.’123 Although Ngango’s published comments were far harsher, dismissing the SEC’s refusal to collaborate in its setting up of the AMC as signs of the ‘psychosis of European self-contemplation’ demonstrated in Campagnolo’s report, he, like Diop, still held out the possibility for collaboration with the SEC, that ‘all hope of bridging the gap is not lost’.124 Possibly, the SAC sought to maintain relations with the SEC because, on the face of it, the idea of a civilization of the universal was not a source of controversy between them. On the contrary, a range of those who had been present at the Rome colloquium, from Senghor to Fanon, had embraced it. The sticking point was the criteria that should be used in determining its values. Yet it was while the SAC was still attempting to meet with Campagnolo and resolve their differences that the SEC pressed ahead with the launching of the AMC.125 Shortly after the conclusion of the 1963 assembly, the Secretariat embarked on a multipronged effort to obtain support for the new organization, including an approach, in writing, to around 30 peace organizations as well as a number of ‘esteemed personalities’ for their endorsement of the AMC;126 and the sending of a similar survey to 700 other individuals in 76 countries worldwide; and of reports of the assembly to the heads of major periodicals in 40 countries.127 Two press conferences were also held in April 1964 to announce the new organization,128 and there were plans for an ‘are´opage’, a ‘learned assembly’ of intellectuals who, ‘by reason of the exemplary character of their life and their thought’, and by their possession of the ‘essential traits of the man who ought to be the model of the society to come’, would be designated by the AMC as the ‘Mirror of Human Solidarity’.129 Surprisingly, given the tension between their two organizations, Diop was receptive to this idea, seeing

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it as a genuine means of ‘giving the impetus towards the universal solution that we desire’.130 He was therefore determined that the SAC should have the responsibility of nominating eminent Africans for the proposed are´opage.131 Arguably, one of the reasons that the SEC had resumed negotiations with the SAC over the AMC concerned money, and the SEC was certainly having financial difficulties at this time. Although it did not come out of 1964 in debt, and Gui had promised to increase the SEC’s annual state subsidy in line with inflation, the budget for 1965 indicated that it had ‘insufficient resources’ to continue developing its activities.132 While Campagnolo was still vehement that the aims of the two societies did not permit collaboration on the AMC – many others did not share his view – at the SEC’s Tenth General Assembly (Venice, October 1965) Diop committed the SAC to it, on the condition that the AMC was not presented within the framework of the SEC’s ‘doctrine’. Above all, there should be no hint of ‘assimilation’, instead there should be ‘integration’, which he understood here as solidarity.133 That December, Kala-Lobe´ and Ngango arrived in Venice for a meeting to resume discussions about financing the AMC that Campagnolo later described as difficult.134 Both men still had substantial doubts that their organization would be on an equal footing with the SEC; equally, Campagnolo found their demands that the Society renounce any direct contact with African intellectuals and omit its doctrine from the AMC’s documents as ‘inadmissible’ and ‘inconceivable’.135 The meeting therefore proved to be the breaking point in relations between the two organizations, as it exposed the irresolvable difference that Kala-Lobe´, in a long, impassioned letter to Campagnolo, described as the ‘cultural racism called assimilation’.136 About their discussions in Venice, he summed up the position that, he averred, most Africans who had been involved with the SEC had taken toward it: that it was ‘too late’ for the peoples of the Third World to accept the unilateral imposition of Europe’s ‘thought structures and the values of its culture such as it sees them and wants them’, and that Campagnolo’s understanding of the civilization of the universal was ‘imperialist’.137 Not only had Campagnolo misunderstood the current situation in Africa, he was out of step with the rest of Europe regarding current cultural relations between the two continents. While admiring what he had sought to achieve with the SEC over the past 15 years, his ‘doctrine of the

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universal’ was conceived ‘in a closed vase, so to speak’, without the benefit of any direct contact with the experience of non-European peoples: ‘allow us to say to you frankly, amicably, sincerely, you are too western to be able to interpret correctly their thought or to think for them, in their place’.138 Campagnolo’s reply, while muted, essentially marked the end of relations between the SEC and the SAC.139 It also coincided with the beginning of the end of the AMC. While the new organization had already been given a seat in Venice by its current mayor Giovanni Favaretto Fisca,140 that, and a few recruitment appeals were really the only concrete steps taken towards its realization. Although Campagnolo would continue, over the next two years, to approach supporters for the AMC, the entire project was suspended in the summer of 1968 due to a lack of funds.141 That same period, 1966 to 1968, was also marked, however, by a particularly bitter exchange between Senghor and Campagnolo over the parentage of the concept of the civilization of the universal, which the former was now taking in a very different direction from that originally intended by Campagnolo. Senghor had been drawn to the concept ever since he encountered it at the 1960 colloquium, even admitting to Campagnolo that he had borrowed and was using this term in his own work.142 According to SEC councillor Sylvia Sprigge, he had been ‘helping himself’ to many of Campagnolo’s terms at a conference on it in London in 1964.143 By spring 1966 their relationship had turned confrontational, Senghor challenging Campagnolo’s understanding of his own lexicon in a way that was very public, and very close to home. On 30 March, the World Festival of Black Arts, a three-week long festival of black African dance, music, literature, theatre and visual arts, had opened in Dakar. In ‘Africa’s Contribution to Universal Civilization’, an essay Senghor had written for a special African issue of the Italian journal Il Nuovo Osservatore to mark the opening of the event, he sought to wrest this concept from Campagnolo once and for all. This essay reprised much of ‘The Voices and Path of Black Africa’, the paper from the Rome colloquium he had published in Comprendre, reproducing verbatim the sections in which it characterized the differences between the African and European personality. What was different about the Il Nuovo Osservatore essay was the extent to which he now rejected the idea of cultural hybridity or symbiosis as having any value for newly liberated Africa. Although he reaffirmed the necessity of

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close economic and political relations between the two continents, it was the argument in Campagnolo’s essay ‘European Responsibilities’ that now provided the basis for his denial of the existence of a cultural Eurafrica. Rejecting Campagnolo’s claim that contemporary Europe was the civilization of the universal as both neocolonialist and racist, a cultural Eurafrica required a symbiosis that would only be possible if the relationship between the civilizations of both continents was one of genuine co-operation founded on ‘a basis of independence and equality’.144 It was a relationship that was needed far more by Europe than by Africa, he cautioned. Although it was crucial to the modern world, he argued, oddly, given his assessment of the European character as intrinsically violent, that Europe itself was in mortal danger of losing its natural role as ‘peaceful mediator in world affairs’ if it did not change the way it related to other civilizations to one of ‘integration, active and reciprocal assimilation, symbiosis’.145 Although Campagnolo made his final response to Senghor in Comprendre,146 this did not mean that the debate over the civilization of the universal was over. Rather, it marked the point at which the term entered the institutional mainstream, and took on meanings that Campagnolo had not intended. Senghor, for example, was embedding his own interpretation of it in Senegal’s cultural policy at the World Festival of Black Arts and, that same year, Rene´ Maheu, Unesco’s current director general, was also enshrining it at the heart of his own institution’s philosophy. Most of Maheu’s professional life had been spent in Unesco: joining in September 1946 as the head of its division of information, in December 1948 he entered into the upper ranks of its administration, and he remained there until his retirement in 1974.147 Yet, like many of his French colleagues within it and the SEC, before joining Unesco he had had direct experience of living in the Third World. Having taught at the Franco-Muslim College at Fez in1940–2, in 1943–4 he served as the head of the France-Afrique press agency in Algiers, then entered the cabinet of the French administration in Rabat, where he was involved with the reform of Morocco’s educational system.148 These experiences left him with an abiding interest in Third World, and especially African, affairs, Jean Thomas crediting Maheu as responsible for Unesco’s truly global character.149 Maheu was also particularly sensitive to cultural and intellectual exchanges as being of equal importance to economic and technological

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relations in the field of development, and his commitment to accelerating Unesco’s activities in newly emerging countries was inflected by this belief.150 This was evident in The Civilization of the Universal, a volume of his speeches and writings published for Unesco’s 20th anniversary in 1966. While it did not offer any sustained discussion of what Maheu meant by the civilization of the universal, it is clear that he believed humanity was set to develop a ‘planetary civilization’, that it should be based on the goal of ‘human unity’, and that it was Unesco’s duty to act on its behalf.151 He also maintained, with equal consistency, that all contributions to this civilization must be on a basis of equality, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his preface to The History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development (1962). A six-volume work initiated by Unesco, the purpose of this project, as described in Maheu’s preface, ‘The Universal in History’, was to write a ‘universal history’ that, distinct from those written from traditional political, economic or military perspectives, saw culture and science as arguably more determinative of relations between peoples.152 This ‘corrective’ history would instead give: The history of what is called, by assuredly too simple a word, the cultural and scientific development of humanity, is actually the story of the way in which men – individuals and societies – have, throughout the ages, conceived of humanity – or rather, to be absolutely precise, their humanity, that’s to say the universal aspect of their experience. In fact, this history has the object of becoming, in its most expressive manifestations, the conscience of the human universal.153 He was careful to point out, however, that while cultural diversity, intercultural relations and historical memory were the primary points of interest in this study, the project’s ‘decisive discovery’ was the existence of the universal consciousness that they revealed, underscoring Unesco’s foundational commitment to human solidarity.154 If the publication of The Civilization of the Universal marked the point at which Unesco began to take ownership of this concept, it did not go unremarked by Campagnolo. Maheu was a member of the SEC, and as a recipient of Comprendre, he would have had ready access to the transcripts

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from the Rome colloquium, as well as to the debates between Campagnolo and various members of the SAC. Upon reading a review of Maheu’s book in Die Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung, Campagnolo wrote to him, thanking him for ‘deepening’ the meaning of the civilization of the universal and at the same time rendering it ‘more accessible’ to popular thinking in a way not entirely unlike Senghor was doing.155 While Maheu responded by noting the closeness of the ideals inspiring Unesco and the SEC, he nonetheless stood by his own use of the term as implicitly recognizing that this new civilization was to be based on absolute equality. It offered Europe the opportunity to ‘retake the lead of the movement of History’ only by abandoning all prejudice and ‘will to universal domination’ and accepting instead the ‘coming of a humanity universally aware and free from its destiny’.156 Although Campagnolo was unable to accept Europe as anything less than the leader of this effort toward a new international order, clearly his obduracy did not stop the civilization of the universal from serving as a reference point for organizations like the SAC and Unesco, which were seeking to define a new humanism for a post-colonial world order.157 However, the debates between the SEC and the SAC, not least those at the Rome colloquium, had a very different effect on one of the most prominent figures in the history of the post-war decolonization movement, and a key figure in early postcolonial theory: Frantz Fanon. As we have seen, Fanon’s contribution at the colloquium had been minimal, something regretted by the other participants at the time, 158 and he seems to have immediately distanced himself from it, failing even to appear in the published list of participants. Yet it is likely that the colloquium served as a negative reference point when developing his expectations of a revolutionary culture. In many ways, Fanon fitted the profile of many of Europe’s intellectuals in the ambit of the SEC and Unesco. Having joined the Resistance in his home country Martinique, he escaped the island in 1943 and joined the Free French first in North Africa, then, in 1944, in France where, Fanon’s biographers all point out, he became acquainted with racism. In spite of this, he remained in Europe, completing his training as a psychiatrist there. Although racism was his consistent concern, as his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) indicates, his posting to Algiers as the head of the Blida-Joinville Hospital in 1953 radicalized him. His direct experience of the atrocities committed there under French

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occupation quickly deflected him from the literary, philosophical approach to racism characterizing his early work toward one that was much more polemical, and which at points drew on the techniques of the social sciences to make its arguments. This was the case in his bestknown work, The Wretched of the Earth. The book, Robert Young has argued, that ‘initiated’ the writing of a new, radically restructured European history in order ‘to decolonize European thought’, marked nothing less than ‘that fundamental shift and cultural crisis currently characterized as postmodernism’.159 The Wretched of the Earth, an unflinching account of the horrors of colonization, decolonization, and of why armed struggle was necessary, was written between March and May 1961. These were the final months of Fanon’s life – he died that December. He had been planning to write a book about the relationship between the Algerian revolution and Africa’s liberation as a whole. But the prognosis for his leukaemia, diagnosed in late 1960, compelled him to write a more general consideration of decolonization as a process ultimately destined to create a ‘new humanity’.160 As Robert Bernasconi has recently observed, Fanon’s call for a ‘new humanism’, the point at which The Wretched of the Earth arrives, has given rise to misunderstandings; not least because Fanon was deliberately silent about what it might be like.161 Yet, as he has also observed, it is clear in Fanon’s text that this new humanism was actually to be the result of a liberation of the colonizer as well as the colonized.162 Consequently, in spite of Fanon’s consistent rejection of Europe, discredited as it was by colonization and by its own recent war – ‘(l)eave this Europe’, he wrote, ‘where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe’163 – he recognized its importance within the new world order that it now fell to newly emerging countries to build. The Third World should therefore expect that Europe: help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all. But it is clear that we are not so naı¨ve as to think that this will come about with the co-operation and the good will of the European governments. This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help of

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the European peoples, who themselves must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned. To achieve this, the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty.164 For Fanon, culture played a crucial role in this process, and while he certainly saw Europeans’ unity with other peoples as a sign of their rehumanization, this was not an argument in defence of a universal civilization. Rather, one of the main arguments of The Wretched of the Earth was the centrality of the specific historical situation to the emergence of any given national culture. The process of decolonization, which was piecemeal, would inevitably produce different cultures, and the debate between the SEC and the SAC was therefore an illustration of why the idea of a universal civilization had led the two institutions into a sterile exchange, irrelevant to a truly revolutionary process. If the aim of the SAC had been to ‘affirm the existence of an African culture’ and to consider how Africa’s national cultures fit into it, this had been deflected by the SEC’s ambition to ‘transform itself into a Universal Cultural Society’ – no doubt a reference to the AMC. 165 This drove the SAC ‘up a blind alley’ such as the idea of negritude, its search for a unified African culture amounting, in Fanon’s view, to nothing more than ‘comparisons between coins and sarcophagi’.166 As a result, the SAC was mired in what Fanon saw as a pointless academic, even antiquarian struggle to prove that Africa indeed had a culture, rather than attending to the more important task facing intellectuals: that of nation building. Scathing about cultural congresses – here he was almost certainly referring to the Rome colloquium – as gatherings of ‘well-meaning souls’ who sought through ‘dialogue’ with colonized intellectuals to preserve Western values in colonial countries, these values were inherently colonizing. Because they were based on abstractions, they were also irrelevant to the struggle of most colonized peoples for a dignified existence.167 For Fanon, it was the creation of a wholly new, revolutionary culture, one that was free of the past and served the present will of the people, that mattered. It was the only way to eventually achieve a truly universal civilization.168 ‘If man is known by his acts’, he concluded:

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then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalizing values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.169 Clearly the debates over the civilization of the universal had a powerful and wide-ranging impact, shaping the views of Fanon, Maheu and Senghor, albeit in different ways. But what these figures shared, and had in common with Campagnolo, was an interest in the current work of Sartre, which increasingly looked at the respective challenges facing the individual agent in Europe’s socialist countries and the former colonies as parts of a single problem.170 This human rights turning in Sartre’s work was, as we have seen, already perceptible in ‘Questions of Method’, and was much clearer in his 1964 lecture at the Gramsci Institute.171 The clashes between Campagnolo and the SAC, however, meant that their common cultural objectives that Sartre’s current work was elucidating were not pursued; Glissant, who was not enthralled to Sartre, arguably had the stronger theoretical influence on the SAC in the aftermath of the Rome colloquium.172 It was therefore a missed opportunity for the SEC to build on the achievements of the Rome colloquium, the concepts of hybridity and even universality that featured there having offered a rich theoretical basis for further collaboration toward those objectives. If the civilization of the universal had driven a wedge between African and European intellectuals, this would not be the case, however, in Campagnolo’s and the SEC’s dealings with intellectuals from Europe’s socialist countries. Although not all of them prioritized the civilization of the universal, they too saw themselves as emerging from a colonial ordeal. But rather than distancing themselves from Europe, they sought the cultural values that could reunite them with it as a larger entity, not least through a presence within international

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organizations based in the West like the UN, Unesco and, later, the CSCE.173 As part of this return to Europe, they also sought out critiques of Soviet-style communism, Sartre’s being by far the most influential one from the West in helping them to reassert the humanist values entrenched in those organizations within their own countries. His critique would find its way there, with help from the informal networks set up by the SEC and by organizations like it.

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 de´tente. 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 Deanovic´, Ehrenburg, Vladimir Georgiev, Miroslav Mı´cˇko, 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

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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. While his argument for democracy as the vehicle for this renewed socialism remained undeveloped in ‘Not Everybody can be a Marxist’ – Campagnolo was, at that point, only ‘dreaming between parentheses’ about what it could achieve – he did show a greater appreciation of why it was important as a foundation for an ethically grounded society. If the individual was free to create a ‘self-managed’ history through an inner dialogue with his or her situation, this, he suggested, was the ‘foundation of the concept of democracy . . . the method through which individuals come to recognize their universal will’.5 The positive

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development of history was now, for Campagnolo, ‘always the result of democracy’.6 ‘Questions of Method’, however, was proving to be a real catalyst not just for Campagnolo, but for intellectuals in several of Europe’s socialist countries, facilitating the first sustained effort to morally discredit scientific socialism there. His preoccupation with the AMC in spite of the calls within the Society to return to the practice of East–West dialogue indicates that Campagnolo, although certainly aware of and supportive of it, had underestimated how important the idea of democratic socialism was becoming for at least one of his core constituencies, and the one with which the Society would have the greatest success. In Chapter 4, we noted that the first signs of an East– West discussion around a new Marxist humanism were already discernible at the SEC’s 1956 assembly. Now, five years later, there were strident calls for the Society to renew its commitment to its foundational purpose, but in this new political context that offered possibilities for a genuine exchange of ideas, and with an organization that was increasingly better equipped to successfully fulfil it. Throughout the 1960s, roughly a quarter of the SEC’s annual recruitment came from Europe’s socialist countries, with 1963 being an exceptional year in which 26 Hungarians and 21 Poles joined. In addition, between 1963 and 1967 regional centres were set up in Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, Leningrad and East Berlin7 and, crucially, members from the East were becoming increasingly active in the Executive Council. Ivan Boldizsa´r, Mirko Deanovic´, Tibor Kardos, Miroslav Mı´cˇko, Mirko Nova´k, Boris Polevoi and, to a certain extent, Adam Schaff now participated regularly in its meetings.8 They initiated the Executive Council meetings held in Prague (April 1965), in Budapest (September 1966) and in Leningrad (June 1968). Unlike the council meetings and assemblies held in Western Europe, and in Prague, for reasons we will look at shortly, those held in Budapest and Leningrad were media events, receiving not just press, but radio and television coverage. If the intensity of this coverage indicates the scale of interest in the Society in at least some of Europe’s socialist countries, it also suggests the tolerance, if not the support of their governments for the SEC. The upsurge in membership and the organization of SEC events there, however, were not due solely to the tenacity of the Secretariat, but to ideological changes in the East, marked by the emergence of ‘reform

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communism’. Developing in the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress in a number of Europe’s socialist countries, particularly Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, which had had stronger pre-war democratic traditions than other so-called satellite states, reform communism is understood here as the ensemble of piecemeal efforts undertaken in those countries with some experience of democracy to de-Stalinize themselves. They did this through what Kusin has described as ‘more independent ideological, economic, political and cultural development’, reform communism placing a strong emphasis on ‘humanizing, democratizing and liberalizing existing structures’9 when the changeable political climate permitted. As this suggests, reform communism had more limited aims than the dissident movements that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, seeking instead to modify current socialist structures and practices rather than attempting to end communism entirely. This process of reform continued in those countries until mid 1968, when the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that August showed the world that such comparatively limited efforts toward ideological revision, institutional reform, and toward the introduction of civil and human rights reforms could, and would trigger military suppression.10 The Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring led to a 20-year period of repression in Czechoslovakia, with repercussions for Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union.11 And, because the efforts of the reform communists, by definition, did not bring about the end of communism in Europe, their activities are usually dismissed as short-lived, fruitless efforts toward that larger end.12 The real undermining of Soviet-style communism is generally seen as having begun with the signing of the Helsinki Final Act (1975). This multi-stranded agreement, which covered aspects of national sovereignty and non-interference in national affairs, security, territorial integrity, the peaceful resolution of disputes, international co-operation and the observance of international law, also contained a substantial component on rights. Based on the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it included equal rights between peoples and their right to self-determination, as well as ‘respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’.13 Since it morally committed all signatories, including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to upholding the rights of the individual, the Helsinki Final Act is widely seen as a crucial

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step toward the fall of communism in Europe.14 While the signing of the Act was the point when human rights gained traction in the Soviet satellite countries, not least because of the emergence of what Sarah B. Snyder has described as a transnational advocacy network that eventually brought international pressure to bear on their regimes, the UN Declaration was not a complete failure in Europe’s socialist countries, as others have argued.15 Although the declaration lacked a legal or diplomatic framework that would assist its implementation, its ‘tremendous philosophical and moral power’, as Johannes Morsink has described it, is indicated in the sheer number of human rights instruments that have been based on that document since its adoption at the UN General Conference in December 1948, including the human rights section of the Helsinki Final Act.16 If the Helsinki Final Act was preceded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the dissident networks around it were also preceded by another network of intellectuals active during the period of reform communism. The change in political climate between February 1956 and August 1968 provided an opportunity for the intelligentsia to pose the question of human rights, above all that of freedom of expression, within the communist regimes of Czechslovakia, Hungary and Poland, and they often used the declaration as their reference point. During this earliest period of de-Stalinization, however, the term ‘network’ needs to be used loosely, as the critique of scientific socialism came from many different intellectuals and groups. They did, however, come together under the auspices of different organizations that were aiming not so much to dismantle communism but to promote peace and human rights worldwide. Among them was a certain type of intellectual, the politicointellectual, understood here as a member of the intelligentsia who often had been part of a government ministry (typically for culture, information or foreign affairs) before 1956, and was still part of the government’s formal activities abroad (through embassies, or membership of international bodies like the UN or Unesco) or acting in an advisory capacity within the Party. They were important in encouraging de-Stalinization within the countries under consideration here, as they were well placed to exploit the ‘internal tensions and contradictions’ that Timothy Garton Ash has observed within apparently monolithic totalitarian regimes,17 enabling the latter to change. Yet they often formed part of a larger, far less politically connected group, which is

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referred to in this study as ‘Marxist humanist’. Little work has been done on the phenomenon of Marxist humanism, and in his pioneering study, James Satterwhite has defined as ‘Marxist humanist’ those intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia who ‘developed the critical use of Marxist thought as a basis for a rejection of the official ideology’ in a way that emphasized ‘the creative role humans play in actively shaping their reality, in opposition to the view that humans are mere objects of external forces or “laws”’.18 In other words, they attempted to replace scientific socialism with a theory of history that gave the individual the central role in driving historical change. Yet they were by no means confined to the East. There were Marxist humanists in the West as well. Equally, revisionist Marxism was referred to in a number of ways in both the East and the West: as ‘living Marxism’ (Sartre, Ristic´) ‘open Marxism’ (Adam Schaff) and ‘socialist humanism’ (Erich Fromm). For some, Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’ was a leading force behind this return to Marx’s early work, and to its recuperation as primarily a humanist philosophy, with the development of the individual at the centre of its concerns, and its defence of individual and of collective praxis as the makers of history. At this point, the importance not only of the SEC, but of other international organizations – in particular, the PEN Club, Unesco, and the UN – becomes evident, as they provided the opportunities for Marxist humanists, including the politico-intellectuals among them, to meet across Europe’s divide and to develop the discussion around the rights and freedoms of the individual. While initially, the meetings held by the SEC were ostensibly about the freedom of cultural expression, cultural rights often acted as a synecdoche for broader human and civil ones, for which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a reference point. Although Campagnolo was always careful to ensure that the SEC’s lexicon framed its own discussions, he, too, was supportive of the UN Declaration, which had been motivated by the same concerns as the SEC itself: the atrocities of World War II, above all, the Holocaust. Ultimately a condemnation of Nazism and of fascism, the declaration, drafted by representatives from Australia, Belgium, Britain, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Chile, China, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Lebanon, Panama, the Philippine Republic, the United States, the USSR, Uruguay and Yugoslavia, was a truly global moral response across national and ideological boundaries to contemporary European

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experience.19 It was also an attempt to formulate universal ethical principles to be observed by states worldwide, so that such events would never be repeated. If the UN Declaration was grounded in war trauma, as George Weigel observed in relation to Poland – and his observation easily applies to other of Europe’s socialist countries – the institution of a Stalinist regime meant that these countries had lost the war twice.20 Doubly traumatized, the intellectuals advocating de-Stalinization in some of them saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as providing a way back to this morally reconstructed Europe. As several commentators have observed, many eastern European intellectuals, in spite of the partitioning, clearly still regarded themselves culturally as ‘Europeans’ in a broader sense, as ‘part of a cosmopolitan tradition of humanistic values with roots in the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment’.21 And they used the Society in the way that it was originally meant to be used: as a place where individuals could make contacts and further initiatives aimed at ending the partitioning of Europe. For them, this meant maintaining a presence within international bodies in order to prevent their countries’ political isolation, and reforming the communist regimes in their countries along democratic socialist lines. Still committed, if only ostensibly, in some cases, to Marxism, they all agreed that it needed to be humanized; this would be initiated largely through the introduction of what we now refer to as human rights. One of the first steps toward this goal was ensuring the right to self-expression, as it enabled the demand for other rights. Although the SEC’s membership from Europe’s socialist countries contained many ‘types’ of intellectuals, the ones most active in the SEC were, unsurprisingly, those figures on its Executive Council. While several of them were reform communists, there were others, including those from the generation born in the late nineteenth century, who embraced an understanding of European humanism as the legacy of the continent’s classical and Judeo-Christian tradition. They were particularly keen to re-establish contact with the West through any number of organizations.22 In this way, figures like Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Tibor Kardos, Jan Parandowski and Ilya Ehrenburg, who were more traditional humanists than Marxists, made contributions to the reform of Soviet-style communism in 1960s. Parandowski, who has been described as a humanist and a ‘passionate defender of culture and the personal freedom of writers’, had been the president of Polish

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PEN since 1933.23 Kardos, a philologist, had been head of the Hungarian Institute in Rome from 1946 to 1950, and in the 1960s was vice-president of the International Association for the Study of Italian Language and Literature, becoming its president in 1970.24 As we have already seen, Iwaszkiewicz, the self-proclaimed ‘thoroughly bourgeois’ writer, maintained as many institutional memberships that would take him to the West as he could, belonging to the PEN Club and the WPC as well as the SEC and COMES. Described by one of his peers as a ‘court writer’ and as a member of the elite of any regime, it is possible that, because the Party considered him ‘among the unproblematic ones’,25 he was able to publish controversial work in his journal Two´rczos´c´, not least, ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ (which Sartre reworked into the first chapter of ‘Questions of Method’), as we shall see further on. Ehrenburg has been similarly described by one of his biographers, Joshua Rubenstein, as no dissident, but rather, a ‘longtime member of the Supreme Soviet, an honoured writer, a frequent traveller to Europe on official assignments’ who used his standing in the WPC to ‘escape to Europe for weeks or even months at a time.’26 Yet, because of his special position, like Iwaszkiewicz, he was able to undertake some reformist initiatives. For example, he has been remembered by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the memoirist and widow of the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin’s purges, as an ‘antifascist’ and as something of a non-conformist who ‘may well have . . . first roused people into reading samizdat’ – literature that, banned by the government, was published and circulated clandestinely.27 Rubenstein has also pointed to the help Eherenburg gave to a number of dissidents in the 1960s that, he argued, helped to inspire the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.28 Iwaszkiewicz and Ehrenburg were clearly politico-intellectuals. Yet it would be a mistake to refer to them as reform communists since they were never part of the party apparatus, nor did they concern themselves with Marxist theory. That term is more comfortably applied to another group within the SEC’s Executive Council who clearly had been, and in some cases still were, closer to party politics, and it was they who were most active in bringing the Society to their home countries: Adolf Hoffmeister and Miroslav Mı´cˇko from Czechoslovakia; Iva´n Boldizsa´r from Hungary; and Adam Schaff from Poland. During the late 1940s and 1950s they had close, direct contact with the party apparatus of their countries, either as post holders within official institutions such as

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ministries or unions, or as advisors to the central committee that determined the party’s policies. After the thaw of 1956, they typically became government representatives within international bodies such as the UN and Unesco, with some taking on ambassadorial functions. Unlike the revisionists featured in Satterwhite’s study, they usually remained in their home countries throughout the cycle of thaws and repressions characterizing the crucial period of reform of 1956 to 1968. The introduction of new ideas among party elites was crucial to beginning the process of de-Stalinization and, arguably, such intellectuals, close to or within the party were a conduit for them, not least of the concept of Marxist humanism. Equally, they provided a vital link between their regimes and Western-based organizations, above all Unesco, which sought to protect and promote human rights. Their presence within these Western-based international institutions helped to re-establish the relationship, broken off by the war and, in the case of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, also by the period of high Stalinism, with Europe in a larger sense, as a cultural and moral ideal. As Vladimir Kusin has pointed out in his case study of the Czechoslovakian intelligentsia, the direct, sustained experience of a Stalinist regime, and its political and cultural implications, had demonstrated for many that: the basic quality underlying the transition from Stalinism to democratic socialism was seen in a ‘return to Europe’ in the general cultural sense. Practically, this was taken to mean that socialism should be coupled with the best of world culture in the field of economy and technology, in the democratism of the political system and in spiritual culture.29 Adolf Hoffmeister of Czechoslovakia was one of the SEC’s council members who fit very closely the profile of the politico-intellectual who assisted their country’s ‘return to Europe’ in this way. Born, like Boldizsa´r, Mı´cˇko and Schaff, in the early years of the twentieth century, he spent considerable time in the West between the wars working as a journalist.30 A visual artist as well as a writer, during this time he was also a member of several ‘progressive’ art associations, and in the 1930s became involved in more political cultural organizations such as the Left Front, the Association for Economic and Cultural Relations with the

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Soviet Union, and the anti-fascist Community of Czechoslovak Writers.31 He was also involved with the Spanish Republican cause. When his own country fell to Germany in 1939 he immigrated to Paris, only to be arrested after the outbreak of the war. Held there at La Sante´ prison for seven months, then in a number of internment camps around France, he eventually reached New York in January 1941.32 It was in the United States that Hoffmeister began his career in official Czechoslovakian institutions abroad, working for the Czechoslovak Information Centre, as well as for the Voice of America’s Czechoslovak section.33 He returned to his native country in August 1945, where five months later he was appointed as the head of cultural relations with foreign countries within the post-war coalition government’s Ministry of Information. He held that post until June 1948, his period in office spanning the transformation of his country’s government from a democratic coalition into a fully-fledged communist one, the communists taking over in February 1948.34 Although he was not in the government during the period of high Stalinism, he was not entirely out of political favour, either. He was posted to Paris as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to France (1948– 50), during which time he edited the Franco-Czechoslovak weekly Paralle`le 50. Published by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information (1947– 52), this originally modernist, Europeanist journal, Francoise Noirant tells us, was eventually censored and Hoffmeister, ‘reduced to silence’, was recalled to Prague.35 Hoffmeister also acted as one of his country’s delegates to the UN from 1948 to 1950, and he was involved with Unesco from 1948 to 1951, becoming a member of the Czechoslovak committee for that organization in 1956.36 He appears to have held this post at least through 1968, and was therefore part of the government’s ‘active European policy’ that, under Dubcˇek, ‘sought more active participation in international organizations, especially the UN and its bodies’, in order to ‘prevent Czechoslovakia’s isolation’.37 Yet Hoffmeister was also highly active in cultural organizations beyond, or not entirely within the grasp of, the state. A member of the Czechoslovak PEN Club (he was elected as its chairman in 1968),38 in 1955 he joined the SEC, held the presidency of its Prague Centre, and became active on its council in 1967. Closer to home, Hoffmeister’s election in 1965 as head of Czechoslovakia’s Congress of the Union of Graphic Artists has been remembered explicitly as a liberalizing step

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for that organization, not least for its openness to modernism.39 As Antonı´n Liehm explained in his first-hand account of Czech cultural policy during the period of reform communism, while the cultural unions were formed in 1948 according to a Soviet model and run by the Central Committee, such comparative autonomy enabled them to become a force for political change,40 and it proved to be considerable. Liehm, the former head of the press section of Czechoslovakia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1956 – 60), was also a writer, critic, and editor of Litera´rnı´ noviny (Literary Gazette), the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union’s weekly that was a chief outlet for proponents of the Prague Spring.41 A leading reformer, his speech at the Fourth Writers’ Congress of June 1967, and those of several other high-profile reformists, Ivan Klı´ma, Pavel Kohout, Milan Kundera and Ludvı´k Vaculı´k, prompted the ‘transformation of the entire cultural and scientific community into opponents of the communist party leadership’, according to Jaromı´r Navra´til, providing a powerful impetus for the government reforms leading to the Prague Spring.42 The reforms included the decentralization of power, democratization of the economy through the introduction of a limited private sector, as well as steps toward full civil rights and liberties in the form of freedom speech, assembly and travel.43 It was through the Writers’ Union that Hoffmeister, we shall see further on, in collaboration with Liehm, undertook his most important reformist activities in the run up to the Prague Spring. Although considerably less biographical material is available on Miroslav Mı´cˇko, he appears to have had a similar profile to Hoffmeister. First, he was a committed internationalist. An art critic and historian educated at Charles University, Prague and at the Sorbonne (1945–6),44 throughout his career he was intensely active both in the government, where he was head of the Arts Section within the Ministry of Education and Public Instruction sometime between 1948 and 1955,45 and in numerous international organizations. His efforts toward international de´tente took the form of participation on juries at various international exhibitions, on numerous experts’ committees, and in the co-founding of the Unesco-affiliated International Association of Art Critics.46 He would be one of the key figures in organizing the SEC’s Executive Council meeting in Prague in April 1965, the first of the Society’s events to be held in one of Europe’s socialist countries.

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Like Hoffmeister, the Hungarian writer and editor Iva´n Boldizsa´r was a proponent of Marxist humanism in the 1960s. Like his Czech peers, he became a reformist after having served in the Stalin-era government, during which time he acquired a chequered reputation. Although a member of the Peasant Party, he had served under the hardline communist leader Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi as undersecretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1947 to 1951.47 He was therefore responsible for presenting the former Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs La´zlo´ Rajk to the international press as having been guilty of ‘Titoism’ – supporting Yugoslavia’s opting, in 1948, for selfmanagement socialism.48 Rajk had been executed in 1949 after an internationally condemned show trial had found him guilty of treason. Consequently, according to one obituary in Le Monde, he is remembered in the East as a man who ‘had sold his soul to the devil’.49 Vercors, however, defended Boldizsa´r against these charges, replying in Le Monde that he was actually a key proponent of glasnost (political transparency or openness) and the person with the greatest influence on Ra´kosi’s more liberal successor, Ka´da´r, in the 1960s.50 As Ma´te´ Szabo´ has observed, during that time, Ka´da´r’s regime ‘grew gradually more open to critical intellectuals’. Their amnesty enabled the former representatives of revisionism ‘to achieve increasing influence in academic and cultural life’, with 1968 marking the ‘transition from revisionism to non communist dissidence and opposition’.51 This included promoting the idea of democratic socialism, and another obituary, published in The New Hungarian Quarterly, the review Bolidzsa´r had edited from 1960 until his death in 1988, remembered him as actually having stood, since the early 1960s, for the rebirth of socialism.52 Near the end of his life he would have the opportunity to press for reforms directly through his membership of Hungary’s parliament. As this biography suggests, it was only during the 1960s that Bolidzsa´r’s career accelerated in that direction. At the end of the war, he had been particularly active in international peace organizations, helping to found the Hungarian chapter of the WPC in 1948, and he was also a member of the Hungarian commission assisting the establishment of Unesco.53 After being purged from the government in 195154 these activities appeared to have abated, and he returned to his journalistic and literary career for the remainder of that decade. In 1960, however, he was appointed editor in chief of The New Hungarian Quarterly. This English-

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language cultural review was the successor of The Hungarian Quarterly, which had been suspended in 1944 after the fascists murdered its editor.55 Revived by Ka´da´r as a diplomatic tool, its goal was to promote ‘mutual knowledge and deeper understanding among nations’ in the fields of economics, science and culture throughout an international readership.56 Boldizsa´r’s appointment as its head coincided with his selection for the Hungarian national commission to Unesco, and during the 1960s he acted as a consultant to it in the areas of cultural cooperation and international exchange.57 In 1960 he also became the president of the Hungarian PEN Club, vice-president of both the International PEN Club and the Hungarian Peace Council.58 He joined the SEC and its Executive Council in 1963. Of this group of reform communists on the SEC’s council, Adam Schaff has left the richest published legacy of his engagement with Marxist humanism. His relationship with Marxism began with his membership of the Polish Socialist Party while still a student in Lvov, and came full circle when, following his expulsion from the Polish Communist Party, he joined the Spanish Socialist Party in 1984.59 Although, later in life, he was keen to stress his engagement with Marxism rather than communism – in an interview published the early 1990s he stated ‘I was and I am a Marxist’60 – for much of his adult life he had been a member of the Communist Party (1932–84). A member of the Central Committee from 1959 to 1968, he had also been regarded as the Party’s premier Marxist theoretician.61 Yet the transformation in Schaff’s own work in light of his increasing involvement with an international network of proponents of Marxist humanism, combined with activities abroad, above all with Unesco, marked him as one of its most internationally visible advocates in the 1960s. Although some accounts have presented him as a party apparatchik62 – like Ehrenburg and Iwaszkiewicz, he was remarkably adaptable to changes within the regime – his encounter with Sartre’s ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ (1957) eventually got him into trouble with it. Initially, Schaff had set out to discredit Sartre’s essay because of the enthusiastic response that it was receiving among Poland’s intellectuals. His own essay, ‘On Marxism and Existentialism’ (1959), first appeared in the literary journal Nowa Kultura (New Culture), an outlet for some of the reformist essays and literature that appeared during the Thaw. Abridged versions were later published in the

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internationally-distributed journal Polish Perspectives, and in Les Temps modernes, having been sent to the editors by Schaff himself.63 In this essay, Schaff did not deny the legitimacy of Sartre’s questioning of the place of the individual within Marxist society, and he even accepted that Sartre had indeed identified the key deficiency with current Marxist theory. In the three books he went on to write between 1961 and 1965, however, he gradually came to accept Sartre’s remedy. In the last of them, Marxism and the Individual, he even argued that if socialism was to succeed, the individual needed to be cultivated gradually within the framework of democratic institutions and with the assurance of what can be described as his or her human rights (which Schaff referred to as personal freedoms).64 The book caused immediate controversy, leading to Schaff’s dismissal from a number of posts, including his directorship of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, and to the blacklisting of his publications.65 Although he had been a longstanding delegate on Unesco’s Polish commission, as well as its vice-president (1956–62 and 1964–6, respectively), that, too, came to an end. By that time, however, Schaff had already helped to found the Unesco-affiliated European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in the Social Sciences in Vienna (1963). Based on the ‘voluntary co-operation of European countries’, it was, as he later described it, ‘a tangible manifestation of that striving for European co-operation and unity which is manifested in the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference’.66 Because the Centre, of which he was president, was an independent organization, Schaff had this post to fall back on after his blacklisting. Thereafter, he divided his time between Vienna and Warsaw.67 What is clear from their profiles is that each of these reformist intellectuals were passionate internationalists, and were looking for closer contact between Eastern and Western Europe, and between ideas, people and institutions. This was not only to resist political isolation; it was also a means of furthering their own search for a humanist socialism, one that recognized the rights of the individual and their capacity for agency. Unesco, for example, became an important international venue in the 1960s where representatives from Europe’s socialist countries – particularly Czechslovakia, Hungary and Poland, which were the quickest to attempt de-Stalinization – argued for the doctrine of peaceful coexistence and for the fullest exploitation possible of the opportunities for intellectual exchanges it presented on a global scale.68

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The SEC, however, was a far more intimate forum for such activities, and it is significant that it was through these reformists’ initiatives that each of the council meetings held in Europe’s socialist countries came to pass. Campagnolo, for example, had been unreceptive to Ehrenburg’s suggestion back in 1959, during the latter’s first session as a councillor, that the SEC hold an event in Prague. This was on the grounds that previous efforts to organize assemblies either there, or in Warsaw or Moscow, had proven ‘too difficult’.69 Later, when Donini pressed the matter, he said that it was too expensive.70 Instead, it was Mı´cˇko who, nearly three years later, finally convinced him, and then the Czech authorities, to organize an Executive Council meeting for Prague.71 It was the first SEC event to be convened in a socialist country. Opening in April 1965 at the Club for Education and Culture, the meeting had been organized largely by Mı´cˇko as well as Jan Strˇbı´ny´, another SEC member, working under the authority of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture.72 There appears to be no record in the SEC’s archives of the discussions that Campagnolo held with figures at the ministry when he went to Prague for preliminary meetings the previous November. Yet it is clear that he discussed the SEC’s foundational ideas with several important figures. These included the Vice-Minister for Culture, Frantisˇek Kahuda, and the Director of Cultural Relations, Jan Rabas, as well as the academics Jirˇı´ Kotalı´k and Jan Mukarovski, the latter also president of Czechoslovakia’s Peace Movement.73 Given the Society’s original purpose, the event could have been expected to stress the importance of East– West dialogue. Equally, given that the SEC was at that time exploring the problem of dialogue as currently deployed within state-level international relations as one of the benefits of peaceful coexistence, it, too, would have been an ideal topic for discussion. The issue of Comprendre in which the proceedings of the Prague meeting appeared was, in fact, dedicated to the function of dialogue within the framework of peaceful coexistence. There Campagnolo was highly critical of the dialogue being conducted between states in this new climate as a manifestation of power politics, and as conservative of the status quo. This, in his view, reduced political discussion to interlocution, when it should be a dialectical process premised upon a genuinely shared aspiration between both parties to resolve specific problems.74 Given the lively ideological mix of SEC councillors assembled in Prague, including Boldizsa´r, Mı´cˇko, Nova´k and Schaff,

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their Western counterparts Donini and Terracini, and liberal critics Bobbio and Ignotus, among others,75 it was the perfect occasion to pursue dialogue in the way that the SEC had originally envisaged it: as this dialectical process. However, although the first session opened with a brief discussion of dialogue and its relationship to democracy,76 the Prague meeting was largely dedicated to the AMC, a topic that fitted with Czechoslovakia’s current cultural policy concerns. At that time the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture was intensifying its cultural exchange programmes with countries worldwide under the aegis of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence.77 Consequently, the meeting did little to feed the interest in the Marxist humanist movement among the Czechoslovak intellectuals there. Campagnolo, however, in spite of his own preoccupation with the AMC at that time, was now clearly aware of the importance and topicality of Marxist humanism through his own activities, and also through his discussions with others, such as Erich Fromm and Sartre. He had been in contact with Fromm since 1957, when James Luther Adams suggested, during Campagnolo’s visit to the United States, that he invite Fromm to join the SEC. Seeing strong parallels in their beliefs and interests, Fromm accepted immediately.78 In time, the points of contact between them would include an interest in recuperating Marx’s early work for the socialist humanist movement the German was hoping to initiate, Fromm’s own exploration of it being elucidated in his Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). This book argued passionately for Marx’s thinking as a form of ‘humanist existentialism’ that, with its concerns for the values of ‘justice, equality and universality’, gave Fromm hope for the experiments in what he called the ‘Marxist humanist socialism’ going on in various European socialist and Third World countries.79 In 1963, he tried to set up a movement to encourage it, and, seeing the SEC as a locus for socialist humanist thinkers, he turned to Campagnolo for help and advice.80 Equally, at a one-to-one meeting in Venice the previous September, Campagnolo had been reminded by Sartre that the real developments in reform Marxism were happening outside the Soviet Union.81 This observation was no doubt prompted by Sartre’s visit to Prague in November 1963 for a week of discussions with reformist Czechoslovak intellectuals, courtesy of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. According to Liehm, Hoffmeister had been responsible for bringing a copy of Sartre’s address at the Moscow Congress for Peace

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and Disarmament ( July 1962) to Czechoslovakia. As Liehm recounted, these were ‘exceedingly explosive words’ as they were delivered at a time when cultural de-Stalinization was far from assured.82 By calling for the subjection of all cultural works to competing ideological interpretations with an aim to discovering which one was ‘best’, Sartre’s Moscow address had treated Marxism as simply one (albeit the one he favoured to win) method of interpretation.83 When Sartre came to Prague, Liehm and Hoffmeister were closely involved in the organization of his visit, acting as his guides and translators.84 Keen to promote dialogue between Marxist and ‘progressive’ thinkers in Eastern and Western Europe, Sartre used this opportunity to discreetly discuss Marxism as a method for understanding history and the societies produced by it, which scientific socialism was incapable of doing.85 According to the accounts of these meetings in the Czech press, his addresses had met a lively and generally positive reception.86 It was therefore fitting that, on the one occasion Campagnolo had in Prague to instigate such a discussion, he chose to introduce the idea of Marxism as a method. The second session of the meeting had begun with a discussion about Campagnolo’s intended report for the SEC’s next general assembly, which was to consider ways of deepening the Society’s understanding of dialogue and of the politics of culture, and how they could contribute to furthering human solidarity. Campagnolo distilled this into seven points, one of which singled out Marxism for prioritizing social issues over international relations. Maintaining, pace Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’, that although Marx had ‘imposed the terrain of debate’, Marxism, ‘born more than a century ago in historical conditions very different from ours today’ now potentially found itself at an impasse.87 Suggesting that a distinction had to be made between its two strands – the one preserving the status quo of scientific socialism, and the other more usefully understanding Marxism as a method – Campagnolo made it clear that he had wanted to discuss this in Prague, because the audience there was ‘particularly sensitive to it’.88 Schaff, however, while he agreed that such a discussion of Marxism needed to happen, apparently judged it politically inopportune, and suffocated it, and Campagnolo’s effort came to nothing.89 Had Marxism as a method featured as a theme in its own right, the Prague Executive Council meeting might not have been the muted event that the apparently limited press coverage suggests it was. At the press

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conference the following morning, Liehm, present as a journalist, had also tried to push the discussion in that direction. At that time, his collection, Interviews (1966), was probably close to publication. Composed of conversations with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Brod, Peter Brook, Michel Butor, Ernst Fischer, Renato Guttuso, Stefan Heym, Jan Kott, Luka´cs, Robert Merle, Laco Novomesky´, Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon, and Vercors, it made clear the extent of dialogue already possible between Czechoslovak intellectuals and their Western European counterparts. And, although Interviews’ political intention was discreet – only at the end of the introduction did Liehm observe that the book intended to explore a form of humanism that was ‘overwhelmingly . . . Marxist . . . or in close connection with Marxism’ in order to broaden Czechoslovak readers’ understanding of Marxism as a form of humanist thinking, it also gave a glimpse of the expectations he now had of East– West dialogue.90 Opening the press conference, while Liehm was mindful that the SEC had been ‘one of the rare foyers where contacts . . . were possible between East and West’, he nonetheless asked the hard question of what new role it now envisaged for itself in a situation where cultural contacts across Europe were clearly ‘multiplying on all levels’.91 Campagnolo did not have a satisfactory answer. He merely stressed the centrality of politics to the SEC’s understanding of culture, and its willingness to collaborate.92 Equally, the question from another journalist, Va´ross, gave the impression that the SEC was somewhat out of date in its objectives, raising the question of the Society’s exclusively European secretariat as a form of cultural imperialism with regard to the AMC.93 In the end, only Litera´rnı´ noviny appears to have covered the Prague meeting in any depth, the themes discussed by its correspondent, Igor Ha´yek, indicating what reformists had been looking for from the event. Ignoring the AMC, the topics of interest he sifted out for his readers focused on the political autonomy of culture and the importance of its international circulation, and Terracini’s and above all Jean Lacroix’s arguments for humanism as the key to international solidarity. If, as the former argued, humanism was an intrinsic feature of culture, the latter, Ha´yek observed, ‘emphasized foremost the necessity for a belief in humanism as making sure that all people are equal members of human society’.94 Tying the struggle for cultural freedom to the struggle for human rights, Lacroix, Ha´yek also noted, had rejected state

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violence as oppressive to dialogue, yet saw violent struggle by the worker and the colonized as legitimate, ‘since their goal is to eliminate state violence, which prevents dialogue’.95 The argument by Lacroix that Ha´yek cited had not, however, been presented at the press conference, but was taken from a work Lacroix had published in Switzerland in 1944.96 Clearly, the journalist had used the Frenchman’s presence in Prague as an opportunity to address pressing concerns for Czechoslovakia’s own dissidents – the legitimacy of armed struggle against state oppression, and the need to identify internationally valid humanist values – even if it meant resorting to a text published more than two decades earlier, and using the shared experience of the European Resistance as a source for the moral authority to do so.97 The difficulty that Ha´yek had in extracting useful themes for his readership confirms that the discussions at the Prague meeting had been inconclusive, and not even Boldizsa´r’s announcement that Luka´cs had finally joined the SEC was able to buoy the atmosphere of apparent disappointment at the press conference over what the Society was currently trying to do.98 The SEC’s next international meeting, six months later, was its Tenth General Assembly, on the theme of peaceful coexistence. Convened in Venice at the Cini Foundation in early October 1965, this gathering of 105 members included strong representation from Europe’s socialist countries, which accounted for nearly a quarter of the audience.99 Although the SEC’s financial problems were ongoing, as Ungaretti noted in his president’s report, generous support was coming not only from the Belgian and French, but also the SEC’s Hungarian, Polish and Yugoslav centres,100 all hotspots for revisionist Marxism. It was therefore no coincidence that Mayor Giovanni Favaretto Fisca’s opening speech so closely mirrored what many Marxist humanists in both the East and the West were coming to expect from the relationship between the citizen and the state. Observing that the mass media had made peoples more and more aware of democratic values, and that they, in turn, were increasingly bringing this to bear on their respective governments, culture could also be ‘decisive’ in finding ‘new shared roads’ leading to the evolution of a single ‘human family’. This was something the ‘great moral and religious forces of the world’ were already doing.101 Favaretto Fisca’s observations set the tone for Campagnolo’s report, ‘Awareness of the World’, which speculated on the possibilities that

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could be presented by intellectuals’ taking on of the role of the politician. Yet, far from being a pragmatic assessment of what had been done, for example, in the East, where the intelligentsia was playing a significant role in the process of de-Stalinization, instead Campagnolo offered a theoretical argument for the emergence of a ‘world consciousness’ of human solidarity that the SEC could best support through the AMC, focusing on that organization as an ‘embryo of future society’, and on the planned are´opage.102 Many of those responding to Campagnolo’s report questioned both the possibility and the desirability of finding a single philosophy that could unite the entire international community. Instead, they renewed their call for the SEC to concentrate on practical activities such as East– West dialogue, and to become involved in the international peace and human rights movements, not least because of the struggles now taking place in former colonial territories, above all Vietnam.103 Several of those present had also ardently supported other types of engagement, such as petitions and appeals, as an important form of political activity. Sparked by Bobbio’s ‘melancholic’, as Kardos described it, special report for the assembly on the political value of petitions, it was argued that they were particularly effective when directed against political authorities with regard to specific cases.104 Georges Aronstein, the Belgian lawyer, activist, and head of Belgium’s League for the Defence of the Rights of Man, and Sylvia Sprigge also cited the petition’s effectiveness in the burgeoning struggle for human rights. This was being demonstrated by the ‘landmark’ human rights organization Amnesty International’s ‘Prisoners of Conscience’ programme; they both urged the SEC to support it.105 The enthusiasm with which these recommendations were made contrasted starkly, however, with the pessimism pervading the communique´ issued at the end of the assembly. Although it committed the SEC to setting up the AMC, it also stated that the Society presently had neither the money nor the degree of political commitment needed from intellectuals to pursue its own chosen means of engagement, that of ‘true dialogue’.106 Although Campagnolo had put a question mark over the SEC’s current effectiveness, that it was still seen in the East as an important international meeting point was clear in Boldizsa´r’s and Deanovic´’s offers to host council meetings in 1966 and 1967 in their own cities of Budapest and Zagreb.107 In Boldizsa´r’s case, this was in spite of the fact

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that his own perception of the SEC by that time was probably very similar to the one expressed by Liehm at the Prague press conference. Boldizsa´r had covered the Society’s Tenth General Assembly in The New Hungarian Quarterly, along with several other meetings he had attended in the past year and a half – two international PEN Club conferences in Budapest (October 1964) and Bled (June 1965) and the Europe-Conversation (Europa-Gespra¨ch) held in Vienna in July 1965. In his article, he stressed the SEC’s historical importance as one of the first forums for intellectuals from across Europe at the onset of the Cold War, and also credited it for introducing the concept of ‘dialogue’ into international exchanges when ‘angry and spiteful monologues were mostly the order of the day’.108 Describing it as the ‘most important’ of these organizations, ‘unique and comprehensive in its influence’, if the first day of the event was ‘thoroughly uninspiring’, ‘[w]hat really mattered’ was that: thinking, and therefore always a little sceptical, minds from both sides of Europe should get acquainted with one another, and through this relationship acquire a reasonable, or at least a better, picture of science, art and literature on the other side of Europe, in other words, of the mental climate and atmosphere in which people ‘over there’ are living.109 This loyalty to the SEC was, however, offset by his clear enthusiasm for the Vienna meeting, ‘Bridges between East and West Europe – Coexistence or Collaboration?’ The Viennese Europe-Conversation meetings had been set up in 1958 in order to popularize the idea of European integration among the public and to promote understanding and ‘peaceful coexistence’ among peoples.110 The 1965 edition was, however, the first of this annual series to include representation from Europe’s socialist countries, and Boldizsa´r described it as ‘the most comprehensive, thorough and successful’ of all the meetings he attended: ‘frank and thought-provoking’, it was clear evidence that the West was genuinely ready for dialogue.111 While the Zagreb Executive Council meeting never came to pass, the one proposed for Budapest did, at a time when the SEC’s activities in the East were continuing to accelerate. In June 1966 the Society had welcomed 16 new members from Europe’s socialist countries, including

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12 from the Soviet Union, had formally recognized the constitution of national centres in that country as well as in Czechoslovakia, and had received news that plans were under way for a Romanian centre.112 Furthermore, the Budapest meeting was strikingly different from the one in Prague in that it hosted much more political discussions. This possibly explains why members from Europe’s socialist countries continued to support the SEC as rigorously as they did at a time when the Society seemed to be losing its way. As in Prague, the meeting in Budapest required considerable involvement on the part of Hungary’s government officials, and the discussions sat comfortably within Hungary’s own cultural relations policy at that time. This appears to have been encouraging critical and comparatively open contact with the West. According to a 1974 Unesco publication compiled for the Hungarian government that gave an overview of its policy since 1948, it observed that over this period it had encouraged tolerance of nonMarxist-Leninist cultural values as long as they were ‘humanist’ and not ‘hostile to socialism’, the intensification of exchanges with non-socialist countries, and the ‘critical assimilation’ of both ‘domestic and foreign humanist values through critical analysis with socialist humanism’.113 Given the Hungarian government’s openness to Marxist humanism as a means of bringing progressive changes to what it perceived as its own experiment in democracy, this is probably why Boldizsa´r was keen to bring an SEC event to Budapest. There, the Society, represented by 22 councillors, was warmly received in late September 1966 with a reception at the Institute for Cultural Relations and a well-attended press conference.114 Opening its first meeting at one of Budapest’s premier venues, the Hotel Gelle´rt Sza´llo´, the council was welcomed by Ja´nos Hantos, a representative for Budapest, and Endre Sik, who had recently retired from a long career in Hungary’s Foreign Ministry (1949– 61) and was now the president of the SEC’s Hungarian Centre.115 If Hantos presented the meeting as an expression of international rapprochement and the possibilities it held out for friendship,116 Sik gave a clear idea of where it might lead. While he supported the SEC’s key objectives of bringing intellectuals together to confront the atomic threat and to defend peace, he also reminded the Society of its foundational commitment to the ‘principle of European unity’.117 Mindful of how ideas within intellectual circles could and did expand into others – here he cited the East– West roundtables now being

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convened by politicians as well as clergy and businessmen on behalf of Europe’s common concerns118 – what constituted appropriate forms of political expression for the intellectual was very much a topic for consideration in Budapest. The first two sessions of the meeting were given to an intense but uncontroversial discussion of this issue in the light of Sartre’s editorial published in Les Temps modernes the previous month, ‘Capitulation or Counter-escalation’. Instigated by the United States’ bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong that summer, in it Sartre had argued that the ‘socialist powers’ should oppose the escalation of the United States’ quantifiably brutal war in Vietnam with commensurate force.119 While not all of the councillors were willing to condemn the use of violence in all situations – Terracini, for example, reminded them that armed resistance had been the only tenable response to fascism in Europe, Kardos seconding this – the meeting seems to have agreed that it was not for the intellectual to decide when violence was necessary. Rather, he or she should try to surpass it by seeking shared understanding through cultural dialogue.120 While signing petitions, participating in protests, and issuing ‘denunciations’ of political acts were deemed acceptable forms of engagement, the intellectual, it cautioned, should be wary of the ‘irreducible oppositions of ordinary politics’ that such acts could lead to. It recommended that political engagement be approached through the politics of culture instead.121 The suggested avoidance of ordinary politics raised the other central theme of the meeting: how to make the SEC a real force in world affairs. At this point the discussion became politically uncomfortable, at least for Boldizsa´r. Although the councillors were agreed that the SEC needed to mobilize public opinion in order to have any real importance in resolving international conflicts, Terracini launched an argument on behalf of democracy as the only vehicle capable of giving ‘the people’ the capacity to determine the action of their governments, and that the Society should support democratic forces inside states.122 Campagnolo resisted this argument on the grounds that democracies existed quite comfortably within the juridical parameters of states, and therefore would not necessarily resist the temptation of war that interstate conflicts could engender.123 Boldizsa´r, however, quickly warned against turning the SEC into any kind of practical ‘movement’. Reminding the meeting that the Society’s ideas had fallen on ‘very fertile ground’ in Hungary, evidenced by the high level of media interest around the event,

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he urged them to stick to its original principles, rooted in the common values of ‘our dear old Europe’.124 Nor was Boldizsa´r exaggerating about the press interest in the SEC. Not only had he himself appeared on a prime time, Saturday evening television broadcast on its behalf,125 the printed press reports that appeared in numerous dailies were, as a summary compiled for the SEC’s Secretariat described them: numerous, to the point, and at the same time accessible to the widest public . . . One really gets the impression that the SEC exerted on the Hungarian that ‘fascination of the West’ that has always fed Hungarian culture like an ‘umbilical cord’ and has wanted to stay connected (with regard to Europe and to Hungary).126 In the weeks following the event, Kardos wrote to Campagnolo, happy to inform him that as a result of the meeting, Hungary’s Ministry of Public Instruction had decided to incorporate the SEC’s Budapest Centre into its section of Cultural Exchanges Abroad, transforming the group into a national centre.127 Clearly, Boldizsa´r and Sik were both advocating Hungary’s ‘return to Europe’, but through cultural exchanges, where Hungary could expose itself to new, liberalizing ideas, but without compromising its commitment to socialism in any substantive way. And it is clear from Comprendre that the SEC’s national centres in other of Europe’s socialist countries were also concerned with the possibilities for culture as a force for de´tente, the Zagreb Centre convening with Donini a conference on peaceful coexistence from a cultural perspective in April 1962, and the Czech Centre making plans for an international inquiry into the role of small nations in international relations.128 Numerous, less formal visits by SEC members between these centres also took place, and if Comprendre’s ‘News from the Centres’129 section is an accurate guide, they appear to have been by far the most active of the SEC’s centres at this time in organizing public events. The only Western centre to be energetic in this regard was the Belgian one. In February 1962 it brought Adam Schaff to Brussels originally to speak on Marxism and the individual, but he ended up addressing an audience of around 30 people on the theme of peaceful coexistence.130 In 1963 the Brussels Centre then launched an interrogation of the relationship between Marxist humanism and the Catholic peace

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movement, culminating in its Charleroi colloquium (Brussels, 4 February 1965). This public event, which attracted an audience of 700, brought together Roger Garaudy of the Centre for Marxist Studies and Research, Paris (Centre d’E´tudes et de Recherches marxistes de Paris); Dubarle, in his capacity as professor of the philosophy of sciences at the Catholic Institute, Paris; and Henri Janne, Minister for National Education and professor on the Faculty of Social, Political and Economic Sciences at the Free University, Brussels and at the College of Europe, to discuss the theme ‘Toward a Humanism for Our Times’. Presenting the case for an authentic democracy residing within Marxist theory (Garaudy), for recognition of the existence of different forms of humanism (Dubarle), and for its disinterested evaluation (Janne), their collective search for a new humanism concluded with a unanimous affirmation of the importance of tolerance and dialogue toward this effort.131 All three of these speakers contributed to the ‘Culture and Religion’ issue of Comprendre (1964) and, as this suggests, the growing dialogue between Marxists and Christians was now also of interest to the SEC. Campagnolo had long been aware that there were some points of contact between the concerns of the SEC and Christian peace movements. Yet, in one of his earliest secretary general’s reports, ‘Towards an Awareness of the Role of the Politics of Culture’ (1951), he had been strongly critical of these movements for their ‘mistrust toward every radical political movement’ that, in his view, encouraged their hesitant, reformist approach. He was equally critical of leading Christian groups such as the ‘moralizing, pedagogic’ Christian Movement for Peace and Moral ReArmament for their failure to address the social dimensions of Europe’s ethical crisis.132 While he recognized the contribution of Christian, alongside Marxist, humanists to the search for a ‘new humanism’,133 what finally confirmed Campagnolo’s belief in the Christian movements, and the Catholic Church in particular as being liberal, open to collaboration, and ‘capable of leading to a world community’134 was the appearance of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Peace on Earth (April 1963). It had been issued at the time of Vatican II (1962– 5), the convocation that radically reappraised the cultural foundations of the Catholic Church and which, to enhance its ecumenism, included bishops from Europe’s socialist countries among the more than 2,000 gathered in Rome for that purpose.135 Likewise, Peace on Earth has been described by

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Weigel as the Pope’s ‘most important substantive contribution to the reorientation of the Church’s Ostpolitik’, as its ‘preference for dialogue rather than confrontation’ was a clear departure from the anti-communist position taken by his immediate predecessors.136 Calling for a world government for the protection of human rights, and supporting the UN as the closest thing yet to such a government, it also supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a ‘step toward the creation of a legal and political system for the world as a whole, inasmuch as it enshrines a recognition of the dignity of the human person.’137 Campagnolo embraced Peace on Earth and, given that the Brussels Centre had already been considering the affinities between the Pope’s and the SEC’s positions, he nominated the Belgian writer Fernand Desonay to prepare the report on it for that year’s general assembly.138 At that time, however, Campagnolo still hoped that the politics of culture would be the force behind the creation of the global ‘public authority’ for which the encyclical called.139 Only later, in 1967, did he see that, given the widespread support for both the Catholic peace movement as a result of Peace on Earth and of Vatican II on the one hand, and the sheer numbers of people living under apparently reformist Marxist regimes on the other, it was better for the SEC to explore how the two could join forces in addressing the world’s problems.140 The important role that the Catholic Church played in helping to bring about the end of communism in Europe is well known, and although the Vatican did recognize the value of the SEC’s activities in a general sense, the Society cannot be seen as having pioneered the dialogue between Christians and Marxists.141 In a typically clear essay for Comprendre, the English philosopher, professor of political science, and SEC councillor Maurice Cranston immediately marked Peace on Earth as ‘one of the most remarkable documents of social theory’, and ‘one of the most revolutionary’ to be published in the history of the Church. This was not least because it dealt with ethical questions within their contemporary context, and advocated dialogue across ideological divisions in pursuit of their resolution.142 Although Cranston discussed at length the ‘remarkable convergence’ between Pope John XXIII’s thinking and that of the SEC, at the October 1965 assembly, more than a year after the appearance of this essay, Boldizsa´r, Ignotus and Jacques Madaule still remarked harshly upon the Society’s lack of attention to the dialogue between Christianity and Marxism in Europe’s socialist countries.143

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In contrast, other organizations had already been fostering this dialogue, and one of the earliest of these initiatives appears to have been the series of conferences launched by the Pauline Society (Paulus Gesellschaft). Set up in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 in order to bring about dialogue between theologians and scientists, in early 1964 it began to initiate discussion between Catholics and Marxists, including figures from Europe’s socialist countries.144 While the conferences were criticized by Peter Hebblethwaite, a journalist who was present at the meetings, for having attracted Marxists – including Schaff – who were ‘revisionists and heretics who had no power’,145 he also credited them as being the ‘first effort to put some intellectual stiffening into the notion of “ideological coexistence”’.146 Furthermore, as Hebblethwaite observed, these conferences were part of a larger process toward the humanization of socialism – ‘it did not spring from nowhere’.147 A more clearly political manifestation of this Christian– Marxist dialogue was the Pacem in Terris congress, held at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in New York City, 18 –22 February 1965. Attracting the participation of SEC members Schaff and Arnold Toynbee alongside a stellar grouping of figures from academia and the world of international diplomacy, including George Kennan, Pietro Nenni, Linus Pauling, Georg Schmid, Paul-Henri Spaak, U Thant and Paul Tillich, the dominant theme was peaceful coexistence.148 Clearly, by the mid 1960s, the SEC was only one of several organizations pursuing international dialogue between Catholics and Marxists. Yet what had made it an icebreaker in the broader field of European de´tente was, arguably, not so much its doctrine, which bore a family resemblance to that of the early Unesco, and now to Peace on Earth, but its approach to dialogue. This concerned both its approach to and the content of the discussions it hosted. In order to take stock of what the SEC actually achieved, it is necessary to return to the Dialogue, the first of the SEC’s East–West Meetings, and to briefly compare it with other contemporary meetings of its kind. Although the Dialogue was convened in March 1956, less than two weeks after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, a critique of contemporary Marxism had taken place even before that, in the East, at The Problem of Freedom in the Light of Scientific Socialism conference (German Academy of Science, Berlin, 8 – 10 March 1956). Opening only days after the revelations of the Twentieth Congress, it was, in contrast with the Dialogue, a strictly

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communist, and almost exclusively Eastern European event. Firm in the belief that scientific socialism still held the answer to the problem of freedom posed by contemporary ‘bourgeois philosophy’,149 it brought together around 300 scholars from Europe’s socialist countries, the Soviet Union and West Germany (as well as Roger Garaudy and Henri Lefebvre from France) to undertake a consideration of the idea of freedom, the ‘unscientific critical conceptions of freedom in contemporary bourgeois philosophy’, and the scientific solution to the problem of freedom to be found in Marxism-Leninism.150 The closing remarks of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch observed that the conference had been held in a spirit of openness (he noted a general willingness to enter into discussion with existentialist, pragmatist, and certain strains of Christian thought), and that socialists did recognize that socialism was still under construction. Yet he also indicated a certain disappointment that this conversation had not gone far enough into the East’s relationship with Western conceptions of freedom, or about the limits on freedom currently experienced in the East.151 As this suggests, not only were similar issues of concern in the East as within the SEC, the lack of dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe was perceived as a problem there, too. More productive exchanges did in fact result from discussions across ideological borders, and although the CCF would not officially engage in dialogue with communists,152 its ostensibly private Zurich meeting for literary magazine editors in Eastern and Western Europe (September 1956) did, with lasting results. Modelled on the Dialogue that, as we have seen, had shown the CCF the usefulness of bringing a small number of individuals together for one-toone discussion, its Zurich meeting issued in the CCF-affiliated CEEE and later, the FEIE. These organizations did not engage with ideas through organized discussion like the SEC did, but rather, as Lubor Jı´lek has explained, supported the activities initiated by the ‘nonconformist’ intellectuals with whom they were involved.153 Nonetheless, both were important to the circulation of literature and of people between Eastern and Western Europe through their bilateral exchange programmes. The WPC also benefited from the example set by the Dialogue, in spite of the increasingly critical view Bernal had taken of the SEC in the 1960s. While he acknowledged its groundbreaking importance in establishing and maintaining East– West dialogue, as we have seen, by 1962 he had come to see the SEC as hampered by the intelligentsia’s

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typical preoccupation with its own fields of expertise. It was therefore too slow in responding to the demand for a ‘new world consciousness’ in a politically effective way.154 As we have also seen, he turned to Sartre’s lecture at the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace (Moscow 1962) for inspiration on how intellectuals could play a leading role in ending the Cold War. Yet even here he, and Sartre, were still in the shadow of the Dialogue. When in Moscow Sartre advised intellectuals on what to do and how to do it, the project he recommended was strikingly similar to the one envisaged in Venice. Intellectuals should come together in small working parties to seek, through competitive but constructive analysis of a range of cultural works, a single, universally valuable culture.155 Bernal made essentially the same recommendation in his own speech ‘Culture and the Cold War’ seven months later.156 While the Dialogue served as an inspiration for the activities of these other organizations, its own, considerable contribution to the actual process of de-Stalinization and to the development of reform communism in the 1960s also needs to be mentioned. Although it was criticized by some at the time for its lack of structure, the Dialogue’s openness to communist participation and the free, critical discussions it allowed between communist and non-communist participants had important implications. As we have seen, Ristic´’s argument at that meeting for Marxism as a method was likely to have had a direct impact on Sartre’s ‘Marxism and Existentialism’ – even as hostile a critic of the Society as the CCF recognized the importance of their exchange157 – and that essay gave many reformists in the East the argument they needed to make the case against scientific socialism and for Marxism as the basis for a form of democratic socialism. But this was only possible because of the connections that the SEC and organizations like it had maintained between figures in the East and the West. It was through such contacts, for example, that the special, French issue of Two´rczos´c´ (April 1957), for which Sartre’s essay was commissioned, was able to come about. Its chief editor Iwaszkiewicz would have known Vercors for nearly a decade through their involvement with the WPC and the SEC and, in summer 1956, not long after the Dialogue, the Frenchman was asked to help with the organization of that special issue.158 Ostensibly a consideration of current French literature, Iwaszkiewicz and his co-editor Jerzy Lisowski later noted that the issue was looking for a fresh perspective on

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what they referred to as ‘European problems’,159 and, as the editorial preface made clear, the final publication actually had distinct political concerns. The Soviet intervention in Hungary had taken place during its preparation, and there were useful lessons, it observed, for the Poles in the current ‘tragic break in the French left’ it had instigated. With the proviso that coexistence did not require the abandoning of socialism, a dialogue with the French – Sartre, Camus, Nadeau – while it might reveal ‘things often unpleasant, at times painful’, would also address those ‘that matter to us the most. In being Marxist’, the editors concluded, ‘there’s at least one thing we should not be afraid of: free exchange of thoughts, honest, decent discussion’ with the French left, with communist and non-communist alike.160 As a participant at the Dialogue, Iwaszkiewicz had actually witnessed the exchange between Sartre and Ristic´; moreover, although she did not name many of them, Simone de Beauvoir noted that Sartre had a number of discussions with certain ‘Polish intellectuals’ prior to writing ‘Marxism and Existentialism’. At least one of them was Jan Kott, a literary historian and translator of Sartre’s early work who was regularly involved with Two´rczos´´c, and almost certainly Lisowski, who also translated Sartre’s early work. They directly commissioned the essay from Sartre at a meeting at the Polish Embassy in Paris.161 These influential, well-connected Poles, including Iwaszkiewicz, were fully abreast of developments in Sartre’s Marxism and, according to de Beauvoir, this clandestine yet official commission was Gomułka’s ‘attempting to allow liberty its rightful place, without weakening socialism . . . Sartre’s independent attitude toward the Communist Party meant that to the writers of Poland his words seemed specially intended for them.’162 The impact of the essay he wrote for them was unmistakable: the Polish intelligentsia’s response to it was enthusiastic and sustained and, as we have seen, Schaff eventually succumbed to its arguments, his own work in the 1960s coming to defend democracy and human rights as necessary for the future of socialism.163 The reception of this line in Sartre’s thinking was similar in Czechoslovakia. We have seen that Sartre spoke about Marxism as a method there, and as Jirˇı´ Ha´jek observed in Plamen (The Flame), Sartre’s trip to Czechoslovakia, which offered insight into current problems in the French left, also helped receptive Czechoslovak intellectuals to ‘think through our own problems’.164

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Liehm also noted that Sartre’s influence contributed to ‘the relaxation of pressure on Czech intellectuals’.165 The moral question that Sartre had asked of contemporary Marxism for Poland in 1957 would be asked by many others over the next ten years, in both Eastern and Western Europe. Furthermore, it would form the basis of several joint inquiries aimed at resolving the question of what should constitute the ethical foundations of any given society. One of the first of these appraisals was undertaken at the international conference Morals and Society (Morale e societa`). Held in Rome at the Gramsci Institute (22– 25 May 1964), it brought together figures from Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United States and Yugoslavia, including Roger Garaudy, Karel Kosı´k, Cesare Luporini, Mikhail Markovic´, Howard Parsons, Jean-Paul Sartre, Adam Schaff and Galvano della Volpe, to consider what can be described as the theme of ‘living morality’. What united most of the speakers was their belief that a society’s morality resided in the individual, and in the capacity of the individual to take responsibility for their society. Four months later, the less explicitly Marxist Aquila Discussions (Entretiens de l’Aquila) (Aquila, 14 –19 September 1964) also met in Italy, organized by the International Institute of Philosophy (Institut international de philosophie – IIP) and overseen by SEC member Guido Calogero. The current president of the IIP and of its Italian Committee, Calogero was a liberal socialist with a political background similar to Bobbio’s: close to the Justice and Freedom movement in the 1930s, then one of the animators of the Action Party, he was one of the classic Italian liberals described by Urbinati. Marked by his strong concern with social justice, he promoted dialogue between liberals and leftists to this end.166 His colloquium brought together 17 scholars – Norberto Bobbio, A. Boyce Gibson, Julius Ebbinghaus, A. C. Ewing, Augusto Guzzo, Jean Hyppolite, Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Karl Lo¨with, K. Kuypers, Richard McKeon, A. G. M. van Melsen, Andre´ Mercier, Joseph Moreau, Mirko Nova´k, Chaim Perelman, Nathan Rotenstreich and L. J. Russell, from 12 different European countries and the United States – to discuss the theme ‘The Foundation of the Rights of Man’. Specifically, they were concerned with whether the criteria for certain fundamental rights could be found within different ideologies, philosophies and religions.167 Although the meeting concluded that while human rights, due to their changing, historically contingent

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nature, could not be written in stone, intellectuals could agree some universal principles for their determination, just as they had done when drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.168 As McKeon summed up in his concluding remarks, a decade and a half after the drafting of that declaration, it was time for intellectuals to undertake that moral consideration again.169 Paige Arthur has described Sartre’s 1964 lecture at the Gramsci Institute, Rome as a significant moment in the ‘new discourse on responsibility’ emerging among Europe’s intelligentsia, marking the point at which Sartre’s own concern with ‘justice and ethics’ evolved.170 The Aquila event, too, can be seen as a more ideologically diverse manifestation of the Rome colloquium. Yet, what is important in both instances is that this appraisal of human rights was being undertaken by intellectuals from both Eastern and Western Europe, and by socialist as well as liberal thinkers, together. If concerns had been raised in Aquila as to whether the IIP intended to conduct an ‘indefinite dialogue’ or would find the means of implementing the results of its discussions,171 such exchanges, pioneered by the SEC and conducted by various institutions throughout the 1960s, were the sites where this moral questioning took place. And they had practical outcomes. If the 1960s are generally held to have been a failure on the part of the intelligentsia to make a lasting contribution to the fall of communism, even a figure as central to that event as Va´clav Havel, back in 1968, was making the case for a ‘democratic and humanistic’ politics. Finding its vehicle in a new, democratic socialist party, it would ‘place human individuality once more at the centre of its concern’, just as the SEC and other organizations were arguing.172 Crucially, Havel also identified this as a moral undertaking, and if dictatorship had brought Czechoslovakia ‘to the brink of a moral crisis’, the way to its ethical restoration lay in the pursuit not of abstract ideas but of ‘particular human rights’.173 The dialogue between reformists from the East and Western figures who were either concerned with developing a Marxism that was ethically fit for purpose (for example Sartre), or were searching for a democratic theory that had a strong social justice component (for example Bobbio, Calogero) kept reformers from the East in touch with the idea of rights that they wanted to cultivate in their home countries. Several of those same reformists, through their presence within international organizations, also helped to prevent the political isolation of their countries.

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The Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring ended in diaspora for many of Czechoslovakia’s leading reformist intellectuals. Their words, gathered and published from their exile in Western Europe, were likened by Sartre to ‘the light that comes to us from dead stars’, separated as they were, at least physically, from a living political struggle.174 Nor was their experience unique. Hungary and Poland also had its share of intellectuals going to the West. Yet some, typically the politicointellectuals identified in this chapter, stayed. They attempted to maintain the East– West dialogue, which the SEC also struggled to uphold in the increasingly repressive atmosphere. Although the plans that Mı´cˇko had for a ‘Prague dialogue’ on the role of small countries in international relations were permanently disrupted by the Soviet invasion,175 elsewhere, SEC initiatives continued to be pursued. Boldizsa´r, for example, was particularly active in supporting the SEC not only in Hungary, where it was well covered in the Hungarian press and on the radio, but also internationally, encouraging links with Austria and Bulgaria. In July 1977 he appeared on prime time television in Hungary with several other commentators to discuss human rights from a range of perspectives.176 Although it was by no means clear in the report published in Le Monde whether Boldizsa´r openly supported the Hungarian dissident movement, it did note that Hungary was the most ‘liberal’ of the communist regimes.177 Boldizsa´r was clearly one if its international spokespersons, being highly active in Unesco as a consultant, in the PEN Club, and eventually becoming one of the SEC’s vice-presidents.178 In Poland, the SEC’s centre was also active, with Iwaszkiewicz defending the model for dialogue developed within the Society until the end of his life. Shortly before his death in 1980, he reminded the SEC’s Secretariat of the importance of small national working groups meeting ‘every two or three months’ to remain familiar with each other’s cultures, and to help the Society’s national centres, as well as the individuals involved with them, to be active proponents of European integration.179 Nor was this wishful thinking: in the 1980s, the Polish Centre was organizing exchanges and, importantly, public meetings, in order to popularize the Society’s ideals.180 Schaff, too, was also described in Le Monde as a ‘living example of East–West cooperation’, and his Vienna centre as a beneficiary of the ‘wind of Helsinki’, which permitted it the opportunity to finally realize many of its exchange projects.181 These figures had often been close to, and

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sometimes actually were still part of the communist party apparatus. More often than not, they acquired compromised reputations as a result. Yet they were uniquely positioned to bring the values that they had defended in cultural exchanges into the sphere where policy was actually made, and did manage to maintain a vital Eastern presence in governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the West. The lines of communication they helped to open and maintain with organizations like Unesco and the CSCE, for which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a reference point, also provided continuity between their struggle for the reform and the eventual dismantling of communism.

CHAPTER 8 `

1968: TOWARD SOLIDARITY, THE SUBSTANCE OF TRUE DEMOCRACY'

Given the hopes that Campagnolo originally had for the SEC, 1968 was a breakthrough year for the Society. That June it held its first event in the Soviet Union, an Executive Council meeting in Leningrad. Opening in Moscow with a reception at the Congressional Palace in the Kremlin under intense media coverage, this gathering of 29 councillors was meant to be a milestone in other ways, too.1 The SEC’s executives had gone into the meeting fully aware not only of the Society’s need to enter a ‘new phase of its existence’ in which it would have a greater influence on public opinion, but also of the need to find ‘the new instruments necessary for the SEC to exercise an increasing influence on the current crisis’.2 They could have said ‘crises’, as the discussions at Leningrad took place in the shadow of a number of challenges to international dialogue that the SEC and organizations like it were facing that year: the Arab– Israeli conflict, the war in Vietnam, and the disquiet already being felt in Moscow over the Prague Spring. 1968 was also a year of internal challenges for the Society, as it was facing financial uncertainty. Since 1958 the SEC had been trying to convene assemblies biennially as opposed to annually and, more recently, council meetings only twice a year in order to keep costs down. Yet its government subvention was due to expire in 1970 and, given the collapse of the Centre-Left government in Rome after the general elections that May, it was by no means certain that it would be renewed.3 It was therefore clear to everyone there that

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the Society needed to demonstrate clearer practical outcomes to its activities in order to secure continued government funding. Yet June 1968 was also a propitious time for an organization wanting to inject itself into mass politics. Up to that point, the Society had more or less passively relied on democracy as the only likely vehicle for the popular political participation it wanted to elicit. The international student protests, however, which had broken out the previous month, now provided an opportunity for its membership not only to reconsider its understanding of the intellectual as a political agent, but also the role of the intellectual within what was looking like an experiment in direct democracy. While the discussions at Leningrad were inconclusive, they did issue in the decision to commission national reports on the student protests for consideration at the next General Assembly, due to be held that September.4 Campagnolo had gone to Leningrad fully committed to the idea for the are´opage, now called the ‘Witnesses of Human Solidarity’, and to his belief that intellectuals were necessarily the people best equipped to instigate the process of ethical political reform needed for the creation of a new international order.5 While he had expressed frustration not only over the impatience of the protesters, but also what he perceived as their weak and outdated understanding of revolutionary theory,6 what became clearer in the reports prepared for the assembly was that the protests were apparently effective, yet taking place with little or no intellectual leadership. As Mayoux put it, what the students wanted ‘is not “to be intellectuals”, it is to learn how to think, and to learn how to act, to acquire the elements of a praxis, to become capable of modifying the human situation they find themselves in’.7 Consequently, the SEC’s consideration of the student protests at the September assembly turned into a more sweeping consideration of its own purpose, premised as it was on absolute confidence in the intellectual as the leader of social and political change. Yet, in spite of the popular nature of the protests, one intellectual did feature within them as a mouthpiece of sorts: Herbert Marcuse. The national reports for the assembly had made it clear that, while the specific circumstances fuelling the protests differed from country to country, the protesters more or less shared Marcuse’s concerns. Anti-capitalist and anticonsumerist in orientation, they embraced Third World solidarity, social justice and the effective implementation of human rights in their

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demand for a new, fairer, and more integrated international order.8 While the councillors did not consider it as an impetus for the protests, they did see Marcuse’s book One-Dimensional Man (1964) as a justification for the protesters’ demands, and it was also clear that they had not anticipated the importance this book would have for the protests. Thus it became a reference point for many of them in the assembly’s discussions.9 In relation to this, while many of the councillors had been sympathetic to the protesters in their discussions at Leningrad, at least one seeing the latter’s demands for social justice and equality as a renewal of the ‘ethical critical thinking that is an integral part of our intellectual legacy’, a genuine fear was also discernible among some of them that the youth movement might slip into ‘irrationalism’ without appropriate guidance.10 This could leave it vulnerable, some speculated, to manipulation by fascist demagogues, with others dreading its transformation into something like the Hitler Youth or the Red Guard.11 As we will see in a moment, Campagnolo was particularly critical of Marcuse’s advocacy of ‘absolute social liberation’, which he saw as advocating a complete departure from contemporary society, including the established ethical reference points from which to build a new one. Yet he was less concerned with this bringing about a return to international fascism than with fashioning a new role for the SEC in leading the way toward a new, united world civilization by providing those points of reference. For more than a decade the Society had followed an essentially Sartrean line regarding the creative individual not only as the agent of social and political change, but as determining a society’s moral climate, and it would not deviate from this because of the challenge that Marcuse currently presented. Yet Marcuse’s international stature, and what he was now saying directly to European audiences, could not be ignored. Marcuse had moved to the United States in 1934, following the Institute of Social Research into its exile from Frankfurt to New York,12 and he had spent the bulk of his career in the United States. While his support for the civil rights movement and his early participation in the anti-Vietnam War protests meant that he was already recognized as a public intellectual there,13 by the latter half of the 1960s he was also becoming unavoidable in Europe. Making appearances in Prague, London and Berlin between the autumn of 1966 and the summer 1967, he was in Paris in May 1968 for a roundtable convened at Unesco in celebration of Marx’s the 150th anniversary of

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Marx’s birth. He also gave addresses at the Sorbonne and the E´cole des Beaux-Arts, another tour then took him back to Berlin, and to Oslo, Amsterdam, Salzburg and Korcˇula.14 And he would remain visible in the coming year. After lecturing in Italy during the summer of 1969, that September he was also one of the keynote speakers at the RIG, which was dedicated to the theme of ‘Freedom and Social Order’. Like many intellectuals across Europe at that time, including many members of the SEC, he saw himself as looking for a ‘true socialism’ based on ‘solidarity and co-operation’.15 Marcuse’s ubiquitous presence in Europe no doubt encouraged Campagnolo’s further reflections on his work that, while critical, were not hostile to it. By 1969, when Campagnolo was drafting his own contribution to the Comprendre issue, ‘Protest within the Bounds of Reason’16 on the student protests, he had already accepted OneDimensional Man’s thesis. This, in a nutshell, was that the ‘repressive function of the affluent society’, with its technology-driven economic system that required the manufacture of ‘false needs’, overproduction and waste, was stripping people in both capitalist and socialist societies of their ‘real needs’: the capacity for creative self-expression, critical thinking, personal development, and the ability to determine their own needs.17 Not only was this life-limiting for individuals, it also rendered them incapable of mounting any significant challenge to this repressive society. What he thoroughly opposed, however, was Marcuse’s advocacy of ‘absolute refusal’ – the complete rejection of ‘dominant modes of thinking and behaviour’ – as the way to achieve a ‘happy and just society’.18 While Campagnolo did not contest the reason behind this refusal – ‘we understand and share the feeling of revolt that the spectacle of a society dominated by an egotistical and crude hedonism arouses’ – any plans premised on such a blanket refusal could only be destructive, not least because it failed to recognize the necessity of history to the creation of a new society.19 Focusing on Marcuse’s latest work, The End of Utopia, which argued that ‘true history’ would only begin with the complete overturning of the established order, Campagnolo countered that this was a ‘rupture of the historical continuum’ that left the protesters with the problem of having to build a new society with no reference points.20 Yet clearly they had relied on historical and ethical precedents in order to mount their opposition in the first place. Had Marcuse considered the ‘moral reasons for the

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protest’, he would have ‘recognized that the “new society” was present in the moral impulsion of the former’.21 Against Marcuse, the radical agency that Campagnolo advocated in ‘Protest within the Bounds of Reason’ was essentially Sartrean. Starting from the position that ‘man is value’, and made that value through each of his or her decisions and acts of will, according to his or her conscience,22 it was essential that these acts were in good faith. This was because they were intrinsically social: ‘(m)an is . . . a social being par excellence’, and ‘willing himself, he wills the society of which he is a member’. The intrinsic solidarity between people, based on a mutual respect for their rights, needed to be honoured.23 Arguing, albeit rather impressionistically, that all ‘great philosophies’ were based on a ‘fundamental ethico-political intuition’, what made them ‘great’, however, was their roots in life. Far from being a set of abstract concepts, philosophy, for Campagnolo, was a living thing, ‘necessary and contingent’, the meeting point between thought and action. It was therefore essential to politics: it was how ethics could assume concrete form.24 Yet, like the protesters, he was pessimistic about the likelihood of these values being realized within either liberal or socialist societies as currently constituted. Liberalism, in his view, used ‘wealth as the measure of all values’ and therefore hindered the development of solidarity between people, while socialism had yet to yield ‘the expected fruits’, the so-called democracies it had produced being no better than those in the West.25 The politics of culture therefore offered the only way beyond liberalism and socialism. Because it invested in the power of peoples, acting in solidarity, to push for the structural changes that their consciences demanded, it was a positive dialectic capable of creating the ‘world of tomorrow’.26 Yet this ‘new order’ required certain conditions in order to become a practical force, which he outlined in ‘Peace, a Revolutionary Idea’ (1968). This was a landmark essay in so far as it signalled Campagnolo’s ambitions for the SEC as an organization that would promote democracy and human rights. In large part a criticism of the UN’s limitations that were imposed by its being an intergovernmental organization serving state interests, it offered instead an argument for how the politics of culture could provide an alternative institutional framework for a new, ethically grounded international order. Like Sartre, he too was now exhausted with socialism, his own

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reason being that, because of its preoccupation with class struggle it overlooked the problem of the nation state as the ultimate cause of war. Campagnolo nonetheless acknowledged the importance of MarxismLeninism to his own politics of culture, and here he showed his own debt to the Marxist humanist movement. Its importance, for him, was due to its ‘integral humanism’, its commitment to ‘absolute solidarity’ that demanded the end of all enmity between peoples and the institution of the ideals of peace and justice worldwide.27 What the failure of socialism in practice had shown was that the ideals of Marxism-Leninism required the right political context in order for its values to be fulfilled. That context was democracy, but of a particular kind. More than simply a medium that permitted individuals to express themselves politically through the principle of a majority vote, democracy, for Campagnolo, existed where ‘the moral will of men succeeds in being translated into legal institutions . . . expressing the deep needs of peoples’.28 This process of translation was one within which the intellectual should play a central role. Calling for a ‘tribune of the peoples’ as the mechanism for instigating world juridical unification, these chosen intellectuals, because of the ‘deep humanity of their action’ and because their work transcended all national and class divides, had the moral authority to determine the nature and function of these new structures in consultation with the ‘people’.29 If this argument had been a standard feature in Campagnolo’s work over the past 20 years, what made this essay a milestone was its stress on the importance of democracy as the only political context in which the intellectual could instigate these new institutions. Campagnolo’s allying the SEC with the pursuit of a democratic humanism in 1968 was an arrival point for the Society. As seen in the previous chapter, its commitment to democratic humanism was very much in step with the broader reconsideration across the European left of the moral inadequacies of socialism as practised in Europe’s socialist countries, and of Western-style, liberal democracy in the 1960s; it was a discussion that the Society had done much to initiate. It also marked a shift in the SEC’s understanding of the engaged intellectual, one that was arguably shaped by Campagnolo’s sustained dialogue with Sartre. If the protests against the Vietnam War and the mass agitation in Czechoslovakia now signalled the importance of the involvement of peoples in demanding change, the question of exactly how to involve

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them had already been creating difficulties between the two men. In 1966, Campagnolo had been publicly critical of the latter’s presidency of the International War Crimes Tribunal. Better known as the Russell Tribunal, it had been set up in 1966 by the British philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell not only in order to put the US government on trial over a number of counts of crimes against humanity in its war in Vietnam, but also to make Europeans and North Americans aware of the true nature of colonial imperialism and to create ‘mass resistance’ against it.30 Sartre had been appointed as its president that November and, in an interview given to Le Nouvel Observateur, he described the tribunal as an effort to provide citizens internationally with the evidence from the war in Vietnam in order to judge for themselves whether or not American actions there constituted war crimes as defined by existing international legislation.31 As Paige Arthur has observed, Sartre’s presidency of the tribunal enabled him to popularize the ideas he had recently developed on human rights and the ethical responsibilities of the intellectual, and to put them into practice.32 Yet it also signalled that the political function of the intellectual, at least for Sartre, had shifted from working primarily in a study, and occasionally joining a parade or giving a public speech, to putting ‘oneself bodily in opposition to the system’, as he later described it.33 Maybe surprisingly, given that the distinction Sartre would soon be making between the intellectual’s creative activity and his or her work as an activist/‘non-inellectual’ encapsulated Campagnolo’s early definition of the ‘man of culture’ – something Campagnolo readily acknowledged34 – the Italian’s initial reaction to Sartre’s presidency was highly critical. In an opinion piece for Le Monde, he not only questioned Sartre’s claims for the tribunal’s legal legitimacy – its tasks, he argued, were more suitable for a study committee – but also the parallels that Sartre and other members of the tribunal had drawn between it and the Nuremberg Trials. For Campagnolo, the Nuremberg Tribunal had been a clear manifestation of the demand of people worldwide for justice in the face of staggering human rights atrocities, proving that the people’s will could be the source of international law. The Russell Tribunal, in contrast, was a wholly private affair, premised on a particular ideological understanding of the ‘people’ that ignored the actual diversity in world public opinion. Instead, it depended ‘exclusively on the personal authority of its members’.35 The Russell Tribunal had failed, in

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Campagnolo’s opinion, to surpass the limits of propaganda, which presented the intellectual with a mixture of pride and naivety that was ‘very negative for the development of the politics of culture’.36 Campagnolo’s response to Sartre therefore contradicted one of the central premises of the SEC, and the one that he held onto most tenaciously: that cultural figures of international renown could, and should, shape public opinion and morality outside of the constraints of ordinary politics. If it indicated that he was struggling at this point to identify a clearly defined role for the intellectual in living politics, others, too, saw paradoxes in this new form of political engagement that went beyond protest. As Jean Danie´lou pointed out, Sartre’s appearance at the head of the tribunal was nothing less than a contradiction of his own philosophy. For decades, it had located morality within the spontaneous and subjective action of the individual. Yet now, his ability to deliberately ‘send the heads of state of our times to heaven or hell’ had turned him into ‘one of the most intransigent moralists in the world today’.37 But for others, this form of engagement was what the SEC desperately needed, and Campagnolo’s criticism in Le Monde solicited the resignation of one of the SEC’s longstanding and more active councillors, Claude Roy.38 Although Campagnolo had intended that his views be published as those of a private individual, Le Monde’s editors had mistakenly represented him in his capacity as the SEC’s general secretary.39 Twelve days later, that same paper featured the headline ‘Claude Roy Resigns from the SEC’. In his lengthy resignation letter, which Le Monde reproduced in full, Roy blasted Campagnolo for attacking the intellectuals trying to reach a moral position on the atrocities in Vietnam rather than the perpetrators of the crimes, as well as for ignoring the immediate realities of the conflict that had prompted the establishment of the tribunal in the first place. If the crisis was approached through the politics of culture, these abuses could only be stopped through the long-term strategy of restructuring the international legal relations that currently allowed such conflicts to occur. Given its scale and urgency, this was an impossibly slow response; it was also an unforgivable transformation of a human rights atrocity into a legal problem.40 Roy resigned, in spite of appeals by the Executive Council, only rejoining the SEC in 1992.41 The Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring, however, was the event that finally prompted Campagnolo to take a clear position on human

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rights abuses. Although the SEC had issued statements in the past deploring violence in a general way, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia was the first time since the Society’s inception that Campagnolo spoke about a political event on the Society’s behalf. On 16 January 1969 Jan Palach, a history student at Charles University and impassioned supporter of reform socialism, immolated himself in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in protest against the Czechoslovak peoples’ passivity in the aftermath of the Soviet intervention. Four days later, Campagnolo sent the following telegram to Adolf Hoffmeister, president of the SEC’s Czech Centre: . . . our Society takes a deep part in your nation’s mourning, which is also humanity’s mourning. At the roots of the heroic madness of those who want to make of their young life a weight to incline history towards more justice and freedom and peace we recognize an international political system that has become incompatible with the new conscience of the world. We also consider that the way to render him the best homage and to contribute to the fertility [of his act] is by intensifying our effort to show men that, in spite of appearances, the end of the reign of inexorable power that divides them and tears them apart is approaching, and that it is in their power to hasten it through the firm will to unite themselves and to form across the earth a sole and single people: an immense aim and worthy of the universal value of his sacrifice.42 What emboldened Campagnolo to make this claim on behalf of the political will of ‘the people’ was his growing commitment to democracy as the medium that made its expression possible. And it brought him back into contact with Sartre and his political trajectory at that time, in spite of the differences in their understanding of the role of the intellectual in bringing about this new democracy. By 1968 Sartre had come to see direct democracy as the only context in which a truly ethical society could be created,43 and he advised intellectuals, if they were to be of any practical use, to renounce their status as such. It was only as ‘nonintellectuals’ that they could act as servants to a revolution that the masses alone were capable of conceiving and carrying out. For Campagnolo, in contrast, the intellectual would always remain the driving force of the revolution, ‘proposing’ it to the masses.44

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Nonetheless, Campagnolo continued to use Sartre as a reference point throughout this period. Meeting with him in the summer of 1968 to solicit support for his ‘Tribune of the Peoples’, which was still in its formative stages,45 Campagnolo is almost certain to have sent him ‘Peace, a Revolutionary Idea’.46 Reporting the outcome of this meeting to the Executive Council, Campagnolo averred that Sartre was so interested in the activities of the SEC that ‘more active collaboration’ should be solicited from him,47 and the 1971 issue of Comprendre that examined the distinction between the intellectual and the man of culture was, in fact, a response to an interview with Sartre on this issue that had recently appeared in the French independent paper established in the aftermath of May 1968, L’Idiot international.48 It is arguable that Campagnolo’s and Sartre’s burgeoning interest in democracy helped to bring to light an important oversight within the SEC’s founding principles. If the Society had always professed a position of absolute political neutrality, it could only be held in a political system that would permit the existence of such an organization in the first place. Whether liberal or socialist, that system was democracy. Consequently, if the SEC was now turning its attention to human rights, which necessarily entailed taking a position when they were being violated, it also needed to be more openly supportive of the medium that enabled it to do so. If events in Czechoslovakia had made Campagnolo aware of the need for the SEC to take an openly pro-democratic stance, developments within socialist theory – the reconsideration of socialism as a form of humanism that had preoccupied so many leftist thinkers in the late 1950s and for much of the 1960s – gave his expectations of that democracy its form. Its outlines became clearer in May, when Campagnolo presented his proposal, ‘Should the SEC envisage specific action with regard to the Czech crisis?’ to the Executive Council. Clearly, he had been moved by Antonı´n Liehm’s Generations, an anthology of conversations between Liehm and leading reformists undertaken between 1966 and 1968, and a passionate affirmation of their commitment to democratic socialism.49 Liehm’s foreword explained why, historically, intellectuals and cultural figures had played such an extraordinarily important role in Czechoslovak politics, and why they continued to do so. He wrote: whenever people are deprived of political rights, whenever a society lacks a functioning political system commensurate with its

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level of development, then culture takes over the role normally played by politics. And culture continues to perform political tasks until normal political processes are restored.50 Liehm’s account had already persuaded Campagnolo to see Czechoslovakia as the place where the politics of culture was assuming its full potential in political practice, and he urged the Executive Council to endorse a proposal prevailing upon the SEC’s Czech Centre to instigate a first – still unspecified – step by Czechoslovakia’s people toward unification on a global scale.51 Based on human solidarity, it was to be the ‘substance of true democracy’.52 The SEC’s councillors, especially those from Europe’s socialist countries, received the proposal with considerable caution. Apprehensive about the implications it could have for the activities of the SEC in their countries, it was decided that any publication of this nature should be made under a personal title.53 While this particular initiative failed, the nature of Campagnolo’s interest in the Czechoslovak situation nonetheless signalled the direction that the SEC would take in the future. Although his interest in socialism as a progressive political force appears to have been exhausted, Europe’s socialist countries were still of vital interest for the SEC, but now as the site of its newly clarified struggle for democracy and human rights, as well as for peace. One of the first expressions of this turning was the SEC’s tentative involvement, after nearly two decades of declining to collaborate with most other organizations, with the preparations for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This event issued in the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which committed its signatories to upholding a number of basic human rights and freedoms. Among the signatories were many of Europe’s socialist states, consequently its signing is widely held to have been a crucial step toward ending communism in Europe. As Boris Polevoi was a member of the Soviet Committee for European Security, he was well placed to help with the preparatory commissions, and he and the Belgian Henri Janne, the socialist former politician with experience of international governmental organizations, and now SEC councillor, were nominated by Campagnolo to represent the SEC at a public opinion forum on the CSCE.54 Although Campagnolo was typically cautious about state organizations – as he stressed to Janne, ‘the SEC cannot engage itself organically in a

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committee for European security’ – he was clear that the SEC should not miss the opportunity to be present at the meeting.55 In his correspondence with Janne, it is clear that Campagnolo believed that the state political concerns of the CSCE were beyond the competence of the SEC. Nonetheless, what the Helsinki process was hoping to achieve in the areas of international peace and co-operation, as well as its approach to this goal, bore a striking resemblance to what the SEC had been working toward since its inception. This is probably why the CSCE had wanted the SEC to participate. According to one CSCE document circulated among the national committees and groups ahead of its Public Opinion Assembly, Europe was entering a new stage in international relations, and a new phase in its historical evolution.56 As a range of social movements had all expressed the need for a lasting peace built not on the absence of war but on ‘authentic co-operation’, the assembly, planned for June 1972, intended to conduct an open, ‘democratic and constructive’ dialogue on the ‘future of Europe and its destinies’ in order to assist diplomats in its construction.57 If this echoed Campagnolo’s original call for a mass peace movement spearheaded by an intellectual avant-garde, his selection of Janne and Polevoi, both political figures, seems to acknowledge that the CSCE was the beginning of the realization of the politics of culture as a living political force, and it required a point of entry into the field of ordinary politics. Campagnolo did not live to see the outcomes of the CSCE. He died, after a period of illness, in September 1976. Yet, even if he had been fully active at the time of the conference, it is unlikely that his commitment to the SEC’s retaining absolute autonomy would have been tested in relation to the Helsinki Final Act.58 While the SEC did endorse the CSCE and the resolutions of the European Cultural Forum (Budapest 1985) that followed it, and supported the cultural resolutions of the Helsinki Final Act, there is little evidence that it had significant practical involvement in the ‘Helsinki process’ – the steps taken to encourage its observance59 – even after Campagnolo’s death. This is in spite of the fact that some of its members appear to have been active in the cultural exchanges under its aegis.60 It was also clear, even to the SEC’s greatest supporters, that the Society was competing with a number of other international organizations in this area – the European Community, the Council of Europe, the European Cultural Foundation, even Unesco, all of which were better funded.61 Clearly, the SEC would

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have helped with the implementation of the Helsinki process if it had collaborated with these other organizations. But what made the SEC unique was its unwavering focus on the political and moral responsibility of the engaged intellectual as the primary agent of change. Even when the end of the Cold War was plainly visible, the Society did not relinquish its founding objective of motivating intellectuals to take individual responsibility for the international political situation, and to practically intervene in resolving conflicts that were destructive to peace and to human solidarity. As Janne confided in 1982 to Campagnolo’s widow, Michelle Campagnolo Bouvier, now the SEC’s international secretary: . . . I believe more than ever that the future of humanity is of a ‘cultural order’, for the ‘economic order’ . . . has failed to realize a society that expresses the true nature of man: his freedom of individual and collective creation of original works incompatible with the phenomenon of war and of physical or institutional violence.62 He also noted that this belief informed his activities within the Council of Europe and Unesco, for which he was a consultant. This was exactly what the SEC had set out to encourage: the feeding of cultural values directly into the political sphere. The function of the politically effective intellectual, as the Society understood it, was to conduct an ethical dialogue with politicians and their institutions, to ask moral questions. And the Society itself would continue to promote this in the run-up to the fall of communism in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. In spite of its limited means, it pursued its agenda not only in Italy at its assemblies (on ‘The Meaning of Freedom Today’ in Bergamo, 1982 and ‘Europe: the Reality of a Utopia’ in Mantua, 1984, which explored the relationship between human freedom and solidarity within the framework of peace and human rights; and ‘Europe of Culture in the New East– West Climate’ in Bari, 1988, which reappraised and affirmed the SEC’s foundational purposes) but also in Europe’s socialist countries. For example, in 1984 it held an Executive Council meeting in Darmstadt on the need for global dialogue based on mutual understanding; in 1986 it held an assembly in Belgrade on the theme of ‘Cultural Pluralism, Social Cohesion and the Civilization of the

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Universal’, embracing freedom, democracy and solidarity as the foundational values for the future of world civilization. It also held Executive Council meetings in Warsaw (1975 and 1987) on the themes of ‘Globalism and Universality’, ‘Ethics and Peace’, and ‘Tolerance between Theory and Reality Today’; as well as in Yerevan (1985). This last meeting, timed to coincide with US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s summit meeting in Geneva, was dedicated to renewing the SEC’s commitment to European dialogue in the context of the arms race, and the ‘natural solidarity’ of intellectuals.63 The Cold War is now in the past. Yet, as Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs have observed, political and economic instability and social inequalities persist, and democracy remains fragile in many parts of the world. Such problems have prompted them, in their comparative regional study of the fall of communism in Europe, to ask whether the ‘seemingly marginal phenomenon of intellectual dissidence and political opposition’ should factor more seriously in our efforts to understand how civil societies can protect themselves from authoritarianism.64 The definition of dissent they use is refreshingly elastic, including: all discourses and activities critical of the regime that constituted, or wished to constitute, an autonomous sphere of public, political and cultural communication outside of the official institutions of the party state and which in so doing openly denied the claim of the regime to full control of public life.65 While the focus of their study is on the 1970s and 1980s, they readily acknowledge that the revisionist critique carried out in the late 1950s and 1960s mainly by intellectuals who themselves were members of or sympathizers with the Communist Party marked ‘the most important turning point in the history of Eastern European dissidence’.66 As this book has argued, these people contributed to de-Stalinization, the necessary first step to ending communism, in a number of ways. Not only did they enable the circulation of ideas from others outside of the official ideology of their governments and even from abroad, as the case study of Sartre’s ‘Questions of Method’ shows, they also kept their regimes in touch with international organizations such as Unesco and the UN. This not only helped to prevent the political isolation of their

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countries, but also maintained an awareness among the political elites of those countries of the key human rights values still central to these organizations today, and to their member states, including those of Europe. Looking at this relationship from the other side, however, what this study has also indicated is that by allowing intellectuals to be in direct contact with the political class, the latter let itself be renewed, and changed, by giving itself access to new ideas. The SEC and organizations like it, insisting on exchanges, and entering into direct discussion with government authorities, created early and important opportunities for contacts to be made, and for the discussion of ideas to happen. The outcome of the exchange between intellectuals, and between the intelligentsia and the political class, however, did not always bring the expected or desired results, at least from the SEC’s perspective. As its dialogue with African francophone intellectuals shows, the latter, some of whom were the original proponents of postcolonial theory, used their encounter with the SEC as a negative reference point when developing their own approaches to cultural identity and to international cultural relations. In the case of Europe’s socialist countries, however, it is clear that intellectuals there had the political impact that the Society desired. Yet it was not an instance of cause and immediate effect. If intellectuals were only gradually, as Pollack and Wielgohs put it, able to ‘undermine the reliability’ of their regimes,67 the ethical questions informing key documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had to be asked by them repeatedly, over a number of years. This moral questioning – what Campagnolo understood as the politics of culture – however, never offered a quick solution to whatever problem was under consideration; it was a lengthy dialectical process, even when it took place within the heart of a government. As he observed back in the early 1950s, ‘it is not a politics of the immediate. It’s about seeing far and wide.’68 Intellectuals had to keep asking the questions, and someone in their government needed to be listening.

GLOSSARY OF NAMES

Adams, James Luther (1901– 94): US American theologian, social ethicist. Alpatov, Mikhail (1902– 86): Soviet art historian. Amrouche, Jean (1906 – 62): Algerian writer, poet and journalist. Andreotti, Giulio (1919 –2013): Christian Democrat politician within Italy’s national government, seven times prime minister. Aron, Raymond (1905 – 83): French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist, member of CCF’s executive. Babel, Antony (1888– 1979): Swiss historian of economics, one of the founders of the RIG. Bammate, Nadjm oud-Dine (1922– 85): Franco-Afghani philosopher, Unesco official. Barth, Karl (1886 – 1968): Swiss Protestant theologian. Benda, Julien (1867 –1956): French writer, journalist, best known for The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927). Bernal, J. D. (1901–71): British scientist, vice-president, later president, of WPC. Bloch, Ernst (1885– 1977): East German Marxist philosopher. Bobbio, Norberto (1909– 2004): Italian philosopher of politics and law. Boldizsar, Iva´n (1912– 88): Hungarian writer and editor, undersecretary to Hungary’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1947 – 51). Campagnolo, Umberto (1904 –76): Italian philosopher of law, founder and general secretary of SEC. Ce´saire, Aime´ (1913 –2008): Caribbean writer, politician, including mayor of Fortde-France, deputy to French National Assembly (1946– 56, 1958– 93). Ceschi, Stanislao (1903 – 83): Italian Christian Democrat politician, senator (1948 – 68). Danie´lou, Jean (1905 – 74): French Jesuit theologian, historian. Della Volpe, Galvano (1895 – 1968): Italian Marxist philosopher. Desonay, Fernand (1899– 1973): Belgian historian of literature, writer. Diop, Alouine (1910 – 80): Senegalese writer, editor, founder of Pre´sence africaine and the SAC. Diop, Cheikh Anta (1923 – 86): Senegalese anthropologist, historian.

GLOSSARY

OF NAMES

227

Donini, Ambrogio (1903– 91): Italian, ambassador to Poland (1946 – 8), communist senator (1953– 63). Dubarle, Dominique (1907– 87): French Dominican theologian, philosopher. Duhamel, Georges (1884– 1966): French writer. Ehrenburg, Ilya (1891 – 1967): Soviet writer, journalist. Fadeev, Alexandr (1901 – 56): Soviet writer, general secretary of Soviet Writers’ Union (1946– 54). Fanon, Frantz (1925 – 61): Martinician psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary. Favaretto Fisca, Giovanni (1902–86): Christian Democrat politician, mayor of Venice. Fromm, Erich (1900– 80): German psychoanalyst, philosopher, involved with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s; proponent of socialist humanism in the 1960s. Gide, Andre´ (1869 – 1951): French writer. Havet, Jacques (1919– 2000): French philosopher, Unesco official. Hoffmeister, Adolf (1902– 73): Czechoslovak writer, artist and diplomat to France (1948 – 50), intermittent Unesco representative. Ignotus, Paul (1901– 78): Hungarian (later British) journalist. Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław (1884– 1980): Polish writer, editor of Two´rczos´c´. Janne, Henri (1908– 91): Belgian socialist politician. Jaspers, Karl (1883– 1969): West German philosopher. Jemolo, Arturo Carlo (1891 – 1981): Italian jurist, historian. Joliot-Curie, Fre´de´ric (1900 – 58): French chemist, president of WPC. Kardos, Tibor (1908– 73): Hungarian historian of literature. Kelsen, Hans (1881 – 1973): Austrian (later American) legal and political philosopher and jurist, best known for his involvement with the Nuremberg Trials and with drafting the UN’s legislation. Lacroix, Jean (1900– 86): French philosopher. Lefebvre, Henri (1901– 91): French philosopher, sociologist. Lescure, Jean (1912 – 2005): French writer, journalist. Levi, Carlo (1902 – 75): Italian painter, writer, physician. Liehm, Antonı´n (1924): Czech writer, editor, journalist, critic and reform communist. Luka´cs, Georg (1885 – 1971): Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Madaule, Jacques (1898– 1993): French Catholic writer. Maheu, Rene (1905 – 75): French philosopher, Director General of Unesco (1961 – 74). Marchesi, Concetto (1878– 1957): Italian communist politician. Marcuse, Herbert (1898– 1979): German (later American) philosopher, sociologist. Mauriac, Franc
ois (1885– 1970): French writer. Maydieu, Jean-Augustin (1900–55): French Dominican theologian. Mayoux, Jean-Jacques (1901 – 87): French historian of literature. Mı´cˇko, Miroslav (1912– 70): Czech art critic and historian. Mueller, Fernand-Lucien (1903– 78): Swiss philosopher, general secretary of the RIG (1948 – 76). Mumford, Lewis (1895 –1990): American historian, sociologist and critic. Musrepov, Gabit (1902 – 85): Kazakh Soviet writer. Nova´k, Mirko (1901 –81): Czech philosopher. Paeschke, Hans (1911 – 91): West German writer, editor of Merkur. Piovene, Guido (1907 – 74): Italian writer, journalist.

228

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

AND THE

COLD WAR

Polevoi, Boris (1908 – 81): Soviet writer, journalist. Ponti, Giovanni (1896– 1961): Italian Christian Democrat senator, intermittent commissioner of the Venice Biennale 1958– 61. Pryce-Jones, Alan (1908 – 2000): British writer and journalist, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Rabemananjara, Jacques (1913– 2005): Malagasy politician, playwright and poet. Served as Madagascar’s Minister of Economic Affairs (1960– 5), Minister of Agriculture (1965 – 7) and as Foreign Minister (1967 – 72). Ristic´, Marko (1902– 84): Yugoslavian writer, artist and political operative. Ambassador to France (1945 –51); later head of Commission for Cultural Relations Abroad; member of Commission for International Relations. De Rougemont, Denis (1906 – 85): Swiss writer, federalist, executive of the CCF and CEC. Roy, Claude (1915 – 97): French writer. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905 – 80): French existentialist philosopher, writer. Schaff, Adam (1913– 2006): Polish Marxist philosopher, sociologist. Seghers, Anna (1900– 83): East German writer. Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar (1906– 2001): Senegalese poet, writer and politician. Served as deputy to the French National Assembly (1946 – 58), and president of Senegal and the Republic of Mali (1960– 80). Sereni, Emilio (1907 – 77): Italian Marxist theorist, communist, senator (1948– 71). Sik, Endre (1891 –1978): Hungarian jurist, historian and politician, in Foreign Ministry (1949– 61). Silone, Ignacio (1900 –78): Italian writer, co-founder and co-editor of Tempo presente. Spaak, Paul-Henri (1899–1972): Belgian socialist statesman. Prime minister of Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s, he became a leading figure in Western European integrationist movement, involved in the Council of Europe, the ECSC and NATO. Spender, Stephen (1909– 95): British poet, co-editor of Encounter. Spinelli, Altiero (1907–86): Italian political theorist, leading European federalist. Sprigge, Sylvia (1903 – 66): British writer, journalist. Terracini, Umberto (1895 –1983): Italian communist politician. President of Italy’s Constitutive Assembly (1947 –8), he was also a longstanding senator, and president of the communist parliamentary group (1958– 73). Ungaretti, Giuseppe (1888 – 1970): Italian poet, writer. Valeri, Diego (1887– 1976): Italian poet, critic, historian of literature. Veillon, Charles (1900 – 71): Swiss industrialist. Vercors (Bruller, Jean) (1902– 91): French writer. Veronese, Vittorino (1910 – 86): Italian jurist, businessman, active within Unesco, was Director General (1958 – 61). Wahl, Jean (1888– 1974): French philosopher, founder of the Colle`ge philosophique. De Zie´gler, Henri (1885 – 1970): Swiss philologist, writer.

NOTES

Introduction

The Not ‘Cold War Intellectuals’

1. This is in contrast to the stereotype of the ‘Cold War intellectual’ as defined by Nadia Urbinati in ‘Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the dialogue with the PCI’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8:4 (2003), pp. 578 – 9. 2. Ruskin, John, The Stones of Venice (London, 2001), p. 21. 3. Ibid. 4. Howard, Deborah, The Architectural History of Venice (London, 1987), pp. 81, 85. 5. The act committed all signatories to, among other things, recognizing and upholding ‘the rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.’ Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, Helsinki Final Act, 1 VI, http://www.hri.org/docs/Helsinki75.html#H4.7. Accessed 17.07.2009. 6. ‘Draft Statute of the European Society of Culture’, Comprendre 1 (1950), p. 49. 7. Estimates from Keegan, John, The Second World War (New York, 2005), pp. 289, 590– 1. 8. Ha¨ssig, Claus, 1945– 1995: Cinquante ans des Rencontres internationales de Gene`ve (Geneva, 1995), p. 12. 9. Brown, Andrew, J. D. Bernal: the Sage of Science (Oxford, 2005), pp. 328, 336. 10. Scott-Smith, Giles, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London, 2002), p. 3. 11. Coleman, Peter The Liberal Conspiracy: the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: 1989); Gre´mion, Pierre, Intelligence de l’Anticommunisme: Le Congre`s pour la liberte´ de la culture a` Paris 1950–1975 (Paris: 1995); Hochgeschwender, Michael, Freiheit in der Offensiv? Der Kongreß fu¨r kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (Munich, 1998); StonorSaunders, Frances, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999); Scott-Smith: The Politics of Apolitical Culture.

230

NOTES

TO PAGES

5 –7

12. See, for example, Caute, David, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); ch. 7 of Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2007), especially pp. 221– 5. 13. Caution has even been advised in undertaking such studies, as its terms are still insufficiently theorized. Terms like ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’ ‘take up an increasing part of the scholarly vocabulary; often, it is clear, without much thought being given to how they are used and which implications their use is having for our studies in general.’ Westad, Odd Arne (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War (London, 2000), p. 9. 14. See, for example, Clark, Mark W., Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal after World War II, 1945– 1955 (Lanham, MD, 2006); Drake, David, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Basingstoke, 2002); Kelly, Michael, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2004). 15. See, for example, Feldner, Heiko, Gorrara, Claire and Passmore, Kevin, The Lost Decade? The 1950s in European History, Politics and Society (Newcastle, 2011); Fleury, Antoine and Jı´lek, Lubor (eds), Une Europe malgre´ tout 1945 – 90. Les e´changes culturels, intellectuels et scientifiques entre Europe´ens dans la guerre froide (Bern/Paris, 2006); Autio-Sarasmo, Sari and Humphreys, Brendan (eds), Winter Kept Us Warm: Cold War Interactions Reconsidered (Helsinki, 2010). 16. See, for example, Bolton, Jonathan, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 4–5; Falk, Barbara J., The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe (Budapest, 2003), pp. xxv–xxvi; Judt, Tony, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe’, Eastern European Politics and Societies 2:2 (1988), pp. 185–240, especially 188–91; Judt: Postwar, p. 566; Klimke, Martin, Pekelder, Jacco and Scharloth, Joachim (eds), Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980 (Oxford, 2011), p. 2; and Pollack, Detlef and Wielgohs, Jan (eds), Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition (Aldershot, 2004), pp. xii–xiii. Janusz Bugajski and Maxine Pollack, while they recognize the importance of the intellectual as dissident in 1956–68, and suggest some continuity between that period and the dissident movements after 1968, ultimately regard it as one of reform, with no real achievements in the domain of human rights. See Bugajski and Pollock, East European Fault Lines: Dissent, Opposition, and Social Activism (London, 1989), pp. 33–8, 56–61. Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Stra˚th, in The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention within and among Nations (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1–3, challenge this neat division with their argument for a ‘long 1960s’. 17. CE 1965– 4, Comprendre 29/30, p. 203. 18. Wittner, Lawrence, The Struggle Against the Bomb: One World or None – A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953, vol. 1 (Stanford, 1993), pp. 51, 66, 176.

NOTES

TO PAGES

7 –10

231

19. Schulz-Forberg, Hagen, ‘Before Integration: Human Rights and Post-War Europe’, in Spiering, Menno and Wintle, Michael (eds), European Identity and the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 38 – 40, 44, 51. In this anthology Wintle has argued that the war was actually ‘the gestation period’ for human rights in Europe’. See Wintle: ‘Ideals, Identity and War’, ibid., p. 6. Other studies, however, have downplayed ‘rights talk’ as a bridge between the struggle for democratic socialism in the 1960s and the fall of communism. See, for example, Bolton: Worlds of Dissent, pp. 26 – 7; Joppke, Christian, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (Basingstoke, 1995), p. xi; Judt, Postwar, pp. 565– 6; Pollack and Wielgohs, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Dissent and Opposition to Communist Rule’, in Pollack and Wielgohs: Dissent and Opposition, p. 242. 20. Unesco, Cultural Rights as Human Rights (Paris, 1970), pp. 9 – 10. 21. See Judt: Postwar, pp. 565–6. As Aryeh Neier has observed, the ‘idea of individual autonomy’ – something that the SEC so valued – was always in reference to what today we would call ‘“civil” and “political” rights’, including freedom of expression, the Universal Declaration being the nexus for these ideas. Neier, Aryeh, The International Human Rights Movement (Princeton, 2012), pp. 57, 58. 22. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘La paix, une ide´e re´volutionnaire’, Comprendre 31/2 (1968), pp. 117– 18. 23. Urbinati, Nadia, ‘Introduction: The Cold War in the Italian Left’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8:4 (2003), pp. 528– 9; Urbinati: ‘Liberalism in the Cold War’, pp. 578– 9. 24. Deering, Mary Jo, Combats acharne´s: Denis de Rougemont et les fondements de l’unite´ europe´enne (Lausanne,1991), p. 334; Burban, Jean-Louis, Le Conseil de l’Europe (Paris, 1985), p. 7; Lipgens, Walter, A History of European Integration 1945–1947 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 24–5. 25. Varsori: Failure of Peace, pp. 6 –7. 26. Losano, Mario (ed.), Hans Kelsen-Umberto Campagnolo: Diritto internazionle e Stato sovrano (Milan, 1999), p. 51. 27. Lipgens: History of European Integration, pp. 277– 8. 28. For caricatures of Campagnolo, see, for example, anon., ‘“Rabula” culturale’, Il Borghese 15.10.1953, pp. 624– 5; Stephen Spender, ‘Engaged in Writing’, Encounter 9:1/2 (1957), pp. 36 – 70 and 42 – 67. 29. IACF/II/4/2, CCF, ‘CE 24.04.1956’, pp. 3 – 4. 30. For colleagues’ appraisals of Campagnolo, see, for example, ASEC, Miklo´s Hubay Papers, f. 1963–95, Hubay, Miklo´s: ‘SEC Assemble´e ge´ne´rale a` l’Universite´ populaire de Kolarac, Belgrade 1986: hommage a` Umberto Campagnolo’; ‘En me´moire d’Umberto Campagnolo’, Comprendre 43/4 (1977– 8), especially the contributions by Norberto Bobbio, Jean Lacroix, Boris Polevoi and Wojciech Natanson, pp. 262, 271, 277, 289. Campagnolo was nominated by colleagues for the peace prize in 1961 and 1973. 31. Bobbio, Norberto, ‘Un Uomo del secolo: Umberto Campagnolo’, Nuova Antologia 133 (1998), pp. 37, 41.

232

NOTES

TO PAGES

10 –19

32. Ibid., Politica e cultura (Rome, 1955), p. 10. 33. ASEC, Georges Aronstein Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Aronstein 25.09.1970’. 34. Denis de Rougemont claimed to have established the concept of intellectual engagement in the 1930s and that Sartre plagiarized it in 1946. Deering: Combats acharne´s, pp. 159– 65, 201. 35. Umberto Campagnolo, ‘Le Devoir politique de l’homme de culture’, AG 1954– 10, Comprendre 13/14 (1955), p. 234. 36. See, for example, the introduction to Kaiser, Wolfram, Leucht, Brigitte and Rasmussen, Morten (eds), The History of the European Union: Origins of a transand supranational polity 1950– 1972 (London, 2009), pp. 1 – 11, which offers an incisive argument on behalf of network analysis and institutional history as a means of obtaining a more nuanced understanding of the origins, purpose and operations of many of Europe’s post-war institutions. 37. Ibid., issues 2, 5/6, 10/11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 26/7 and 29/30. 38. See ASEC, Rass stampa 2 f. recensioni a Comprendre 3 –24, Relazioni Internazionali (Milan) 27.10.1951, 09.05.1953 and 25.09.1954; Rass stampa 4 A. A., ‘La Revue Comprendre’, Marginales 1954, p. 72. 39. ASEC, Rass stampa 2 f. recensioni a Comprendre 3 – 24 Edm. P., ‘Comprendre’, L’Essor 24 – 12 – 1954. 40. Ibid., Norberto Bobbio Papers, f. 1960, ‘Bobbio-Campagnolo 01.01.1949’. 41. Ibid., Rass stampa 1 f. 1, A. Steno, ‘La Societa` europea di cultura e il suo annuario’, La Voce Repubblicana, 30.07.1950. 42. Urbinati: ‘Liberalism in the Cold War’, pp. 578– 603. 43. Ibid., p. 581. 44. SEC, ‘Projet des statuts de la Socie´te´ europe´enne de culture’, Comprendre 1, pp. 49, 51. 45. ‘Cultures de l’Afrique noire et de l’occident’, Comprendre 21/2 (1960), p. 228. 46. See Hershberg, James G., ‘The Crisis Years, 1958– 1963’, in Westad: Reviewing the Cold War, pp. 303– 25; Hanhima¨ki, Jussi M., ‘De´tente in Europe, 1962– 1975’, in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. II: Crises and De´tente (Cambridge, 2010), p. 201. 47. Judt, Tony, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (London, 1997), pp. 4 – 5. 48. AC 1950– 5, Comprendre 2 (1950), pp. 38 –9. The Italians have a better but untranslatable term for these figures: responsabili. 49. Fleck, Christian, Hess, Andreas and Lyon, E. Stina (eds), Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Farnham, 2009), p. 4. 50. There were never more than 7 per cent throughout the period in question. Having said that, several sat on the SEC’s Executive Council, and some, such as Emilie Carner-Noulet, Magda van Emde Boas and Marianne OrgelsStoumon, played important organizational roles in the SEC’s Belgian and Dutch centres. If the proceedings of the Executive Council meetings reproduced in Comprendre are comprehensive records of the actual meetings, women did not feature largely in the Society’s primary theoretical and policy-making discussions.

NOTES

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233

51. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London, 2002), p. 231. 52. In her essay for a special 50th anniversary volume of Comprendre, Laura Forlati Picchio has in fact treated the SEC as a transnational organization on these grounds. (Picchio,‘L’incidenza delle ONG sui rapporti interstatuali’, Comprendre 1999, pp. 139– 49). 53. For a discussion of the SEC’s financing throughout its first 20 years, see AG 1971– 9, Comprendre 37/8 (1971 –2), p. 236. 54. Cosima Campagnolo, daughter of the SEC’s founder, has pointed out to me that governmental support for the Society came from the ‘arco costituzionale’, i.e. all parties save the fascists and the MSI.

Chapter 1 After the Resistance: the Origins of the SEC in European Federalism, 1946 –9 1. Ha¨ssig: 1945– 1995, pp. 3, 6. 2. The committee was composed of Philippe Albert, Ernest Ansermet, Samuel Baud-Bovy, Henri Gagnebin, Victor Martin, Marcel Raymond and Henri de Zie´gler. Ibid., pp. 6 – 7, 12. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. Figures on earlier lists included T. S. Eliot, Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Euge`ne Tarle. Ibid., pp. 10 – 11. 5. Losano: Hans Kelsen, p. 51. 6. Nicoletta Bersier Ladavac, ‘Hans Kelsen (1881– 1973) Bibliographical Note and Biography’, European Journal of International Law 9:2 (1998), p. 393. 7. Kelsen was removed from his Cologne post in 1933 with the Nazi’s rise to power; he left his post in Prague in part because of racist abuse from students. Ladavac: ‘Hans Kelsen’, pp. 392– 3. 8. The Institut was founded in 1927. Walpen, Bernhard, Die offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft: Eine hegemonietheoretische Studie zur Mont Pe`lerin Society (Hamburg, 2004), p. 86. 9. Losano, Mario, ‘Kelsen e Campagnolo: una controversia di diritto internazionale’, in Cedroni, Lorella and Polito, Pietro (eds), Saggi su Umberto Campagnolo (Rome, 2000), pp. 44 – 5. 10. Ibid. Hans Kelsen, pp. 56 – 7; Losano: ‘Kelsen e Campagnolo’, pp. 55 – 9. 11. Ibid. ‘Kelsen e Campagnolo’, pp. 61 – 2. 12. Ibid. Hans Kelsen, p. 70. 13. Zolo, Danilo, ‘Hans Kelsen: International Peace through International Law’, European Journal of International Law 9:2 (1998), pp. 319– 22, 323– 4. 14. Iriye, Akira, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 3–5. 15. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 19. 16. Vale´ry, Paul, La crise de l’esprit (1919) http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/ Valery_paul/crise_de_lesprit/crise_de_lesprit.html, accessed 16.10.2008, pp. 6, 9– 10.

234 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

NOTES

TO PAGES

24 –30

Ibid., pp. 10 – 11. Ibid., pp. 12 – 13. Ochetto, Valerio, Adriano Olivetti (Milan, 1985), p. 24. Ibid., pp. 106–9; Zorzi, Renzo, ‘Umberto Campagnolo e Adriano Olivetti’, Comprendre 1999, pp. 63 – 71. Cedroni, Lorella, ‘L’idea di repubblica federale nel pensiero politico di Umberto Campagnolo’, in Cedroni and Polito, Pietro, Saggi, pp. 23 –5. Campagnolo’s appointment was upon the recommendation of the Allied Military Government. Lovisetti, Giovanni, ‘All’ISPI’, Comprendre 1999, pp. 91–5. ‘En me´moire’, Comprendre 43/4, p. 298. Lipgens: History of European Integration, pp. 108– 11, 277. Paolini, Edmondo, Altiero Spinelli: Appunti per una biografia (Bologna, 1988), pp. 11 – 15. Ibid., p. 17. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 46. D’Auria, Matthew, ‘The Ventotene Manifesto: the Crisis of the Nation State and the Political Identity of Europe’, in Spiering and Wintle: European Identity, pp. 154 –5. Paolini: Altiero Spinelli, p. 17. Ibid., pp. 20 – 1. Ibid., pp. 16 – 17. http://www.federalunion.org.uk/archives/ventotene.shtml#, accessed 07.11.2008. Paolini: Altiero Spinelli, p. 20. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 109, n. 39. Paolini: Altiero Spinelli, pp. 31 – 3. Ibid., p. 32. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 111. Ibid., pp. 112, 113. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 56 – 7. The Action Party, founded in 1942, was the successor of Giustizia e Liberta`. Spinelli was a member of its secretariat in 1945. Paolini: Altiero Spinelli, pp. 45 – 6. Lipgens: History of European Integration, pp. 275– 6. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 275– 7. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid. Ibid., p. 629. Ibid., p. 362. Ibid., p. 381. Ibid., pp. 32 – 3, 596– 7. Ibid., p. 25. Lipgens dated the disappearance of the ‘European spirit’ to 1950, Judt dated it to the early 1950s. Judt: Grand Illusion, pp. 4 – 5.

NOTES

TO PAGES

30 –34

235

52. Hellman, John, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930– 1950 (London, 1981), pp. 5, 79. 53. Ackermann, Bruno, Denis de Rougemont: Une biographie intellectuelle: Combats pour la liberte´, le Journal d’une Epoque, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1996), p. 261; Hellman: Emmanuel Mounier, pp. 5– 6, 79, 85. 54. Ibid.: Denis de Rougemont vol. 2, p. 635. 55. Ibid., pp. 635, 648. 56. Ibid., pp. 661. 57. Deering: Combats acharne´s, p. 189. 58. Ibid., p. 193. 59. Ibid., pp. 193– 4; Ackermann: Denis de Rougemont, pp. 750– 1.The Bollingen Foundation had been set up in the early 1940s by Paul and Mary Mellon in order to popularize the work of Carl Jung. It was named for a village in Switzerland where Jung had a retreat. ‘Bollingen Series’, http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/ series/bs.html. Accessed 26.11.2009. 60. Deering: Combats acharne´s, p. 209. 61. Lipgens: History of European Integration, pp. 304– 7. 62. Institut Europe´en de l’Universite´ de Gene`ve, CAE, AA 1, RIG 1, Comite´ d’organisation, ‘Statement: The International Meetings of Geneva 02 – 14.09.1946, the European Spirit’. 63. Frank, Robert, ‘The Meanings of Europe in French National Discourse: A French Europe or a Europeanized France?’, in af Malmborg and Stra˚th: Meaning of Europe, pp. 316– 17. 64. Danielsson, Sarah K., ‘The intellectual as architect and legitimizer of genocide: Julien Benda Redux’, Journal of Genocide Research 7:3 (2005), pp. 398, 402. The definition of cosmopolitan in this context is cited in Shore, Marci, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (London: 2013), p. 233. 65. Nichols, Ray, Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse (Lawrence, Kansas, 1978), pp. 143– 8. 66. RIG: L’Esprit Europe´en, pp. 9 –11. 67. Ibid., p. 30. 68. Ha¨ssig: 1945– 1995, p. 19. 69. Wolin, Richard, The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society (London, 2006), pp. 140, 143–4. 70. Ibid.: Frankfurt School, p. 144. 71. Ha¨ssig: 1945– 1995, p. 16. 72. Ibid., p.17. 73. Vale´ry, Francois, ‘Vale´ry et la politique’, Revue des Sciences Morales et Politiques 137:1, pp. 138– 9. 74. On de Rougemont and Vale´ry, see Ackermann: Denis de Rougemont, vol. 1, pp. 29, 154. 75. Deering: Combats acharne´s, pp. 156, 158. 76. RIG: L’Esprit Europe´en, pp. 144– 7. 77. Ibid., pp. 149– 50.

236 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

NOTES

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34 –38

Ibid., p. 151. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 155– 6. Deering: Combats acharne´s, p. 206. See D’Auria: ‘Ventotene Manifesto’, pp. 149– 52, for a clear discussion of Spinelli and Rossi’s views on the nation state as the root cause of war. The parallels with Campagnolo’s position are striking. RIG: L’Esprit Europe´en, p. 344. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., pp. 344– 7. Ibid., p. 347. Deering: Combats acharne´s, p. 242. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 573. Lipgens cites here a passage from UEF, Rapport du premier congre`s annuel de l’U.E.F., 27– 31.08.1947, Montreux (Geneva, [1947]), pp. 8– 16. Deering: Combats acharne´s, p. 217. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., pp. 83 – 5. Ibid., pp. 114– 21. Deering has described this as the UEF’s ‘tacit renunciation of its revolutionary aspirations’. Ibid., pp. 276– 9, 342. Ibid., p. 342. Citation from ‘Projet pour un Centre europe´en’, EX/P/20 (1948), p. 4. On de Rougemont’s struggle to establish the CEC, see pp. 334–66. Ibid., pp. 342, 346. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 629. Ibid., p. 632. Bobbio, Norberto, ‘Testimonianza su Umberto Campagnolo’, in Cedroni and Polito: Saggi su Umberto Campagnolo, p. 21. ASEC, A. FOND. 1, ‘Riunione del Comitato di preparazione del Congresso, 13.06.1949’, p. 2. CAE, AA1, RIG 8, Comite´ d’organisation, ‘Commission des Conferences 25.10.[1946]’. At the time of the Constitutive Assembly, Ponti was president of the SEC, with Antony Babel, Theodor Brugsch and Andre´ Siegfried vice-presidents, and Campagnolo as secretary general. The Executive Council included Jean Amrouche, Umbro Apollonio, J. D. Bernal, Jose´ Carner, Stanislao Ceschi, Robert de Traz, Henri de Zie´gler, Pierre Emmanuel, Paul Fierens, Bruna Forlati Tamaro, Hans Eberhard Friedrich, Jean Grenier, Louis Guilloux, Jacques-Louis Havet, Jean Lescure, Wilhelm Loeffler, Gino Luzzatto, Concetto Marchesi, Egidio Meneghetti, Umberto Morra, Gabriele Mucchi, Fernand Lucien Mueller, H. Oldewelt, Hans Paeschke, Rodolfo Palluchini, H. J. Pos, Axel Romdahl, Jan Romein, John Rothenstein, Stephen Spender, Angiolo Tursi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Fritz von Unruh, Diego Valeri, Arcangelo Vespignani, Elio Vittorini, Jean Wahl and Emil Zilliacus.

NOTES

TO PAGES

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237

101. Ibid. RIG 8, Comite´ d’organisation, ‘Se´ance du Grand Comite´ du 02.12.1947’, unpaginated. See also RIG 13, Comite´ d’Organisation, ‘Grand Comite´ du 26.10.1948’, p. 2. 102. Ibid. RIG 22, ‘Re´union de la Commission des Confe´rences 02.11.1950’, unpaginated; Comite´ d’Organisation, ‘Assemble´e ge´ne´rale 21.12.1950’, pp. 1–2. 103. Comite´ d’Organisation: ‘Assemble´e ge´ne´rale 21.12.1950’, pp. 1, 2. See also Ha¨ssig, Claus, ‘Deux protagonistes genevois face a` l’e´clatement de l’Europe: les Rencontres internationales de Gene`ve et le Centre europe´en de la culture’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 113– 15. 104. Ledeen, Michael A., West European Communism and American Foreign Policy (Oxford, 1987), pp. 42 – 3. 105. Madajczyk, Czesław, ‘En rang serre´, les intellectuels d’Europe? La function des Congre´s Mondiaux d’Intellectuels’, Acta Poloniae Historica 72 (1995), pp. 99 – 100. See also Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: a Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918– 1968 (New Haven, 2006), pp. 270– 3. 106. Ibid., pp. 106– 7. 107. For a short but vivid account of the congress and the attack on Sartre, see Shore: Caviar and Ashes, pp. 270– 3. 108. ASEC, Rass stampa 1 f. 1, Fernand-L. Mueller, ‘A Venise “De´fense et illustration” de la culture europe´enne’, Tribune de Gene`ve 09.06.1950. 109. Ibid. Rass stampa 2 f. AG1952–53, ‘I lavori della SEC si concludono oggi a Padova’, L’Avvenire d’Italia 12.06.1952. This file contains many similar accounts of the SEC’s early assemblies in predominantly Italian and Swiss papers. 110. See Jachec, Nancy, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948– 1964: Italy and the ‘European Idea’ (Manchester, 2007), pp. 18 – 63. 111. AC 1950 –5, p. 10. 112. Tramontin, Silvio, Giovanni Ponti (1896 – 1961): una vita per la democrazia e per Venezia (Venice, 1983), pp. 37 – 8. 113. Ibid., p. 38. 114. Brunetta, Ernesto, ‘Introduzione’, in Istituto Storico della Resistenza nel Veneto, Il governo dei CLN nel Veneto: verbali del Comitato di Liberazione nazionale Regionale Veneto 6 gennaio 1945 – 4 dicembre 1946 (Vicenza, 1984), p. 32. 115. This seems to have been consonant with the DC approach to post-fascist governance as a whole, which ‘put the emphasis on the moral reconstruction of the country’, leaving the maintenance of the country’s economy to ‘private initiative’. Ibid., p. 17. 116. He was the Biennale’s commissioner from 1946– 54 and from 1957– 61. Tramontin: Giovanni Ponti, pp. 49 – 59. 117. On the transformation of the Biennale into a Europeanist institution in the late 1940s, see Jachec: Politics, pp. 3–6, 36–44. Although the commune had offered the SEC accommodation, Ponti established the SEC within the Biennale. See ASEC, A. FOND. 1, ‘II Seduta del CE 12.12.1948’, p. 5; and Umberto Campagnolo, ‘Origines de la Socie´te´ Europe´enne de culture’, Comprendre 1, p. 10. 118. Brunetta: ‘Introduzione’, p. 15.

238

NOTES

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41 – 44

119. ASEC, Stanislao Ceschi Papers, f. 2, Luigi Gui, La Lezione politica e umana di Stanislao Ceschi (Venice: 1985), pp. 5 – 6, 8; LSE/F. L. Josephy Papers/ 9/4, ‘Mouvement pour un gouvernement fe´de´ral mondial’, Etats unis du monde, (Geneva/Paris: 1947), p. 13. Here Meneghetti is mistakenly referred to as ‘Ermenegildo’, not ‘Egidio’. 120. Nappo, Tommaso, Indice biografico italiano (Munich, 2007) (hereafter IBI), IV:471 Valeri 387. 121. The personal dossiers of Ceschi and Ponti in the SEC’s archive in Venice are filled with letters exchanged between them and, most often, Giulio Andreotti and Nicola De Pirro regarding government financing of the SEC in the early 1950s. See, for example, the preventivi (estimates) in ASEC, Giovanni Ponti Papers, f. 1, ‘Ponti-De Pirro 07.08.1951, 28.01.1952, 31.01.1952’, ‘PontiAndreotti, 15.03. 1950, 12.01.1952, 01.12.1952’; also ASEC, Ceschi Papers, f. 1, ‘Ceschi-Campagnolo 02.03.1950, 23.05.1950, 05.07.1951, 12.07.1951’. 122. ‘CE 12.12.1948’, pp. 1 – 2, 5– 7. 123. Ibid., p. 2. 124. ‘Comitato di preparazione 13.06.1949’, p. 2. 125. Brown: J. D. Bernal, p. 328. 126. ASEC, J. D. Bernal Papers, ‘Bernal-Campagnolo 29.04.1949’; ASEC, A. FOND. 2, ‘Relazione di Umberto Campagnolo relativa alla partecipazione al Congresso Italia-URSS’, undated, p. 6. 127. ‘Rapport presidential de M. Giovanni Ponti’, AG 1952– 6, Comprendre 7/8, p. 19. 128. ‘CE 12.12.1948’, p. 2. 129. ASEC, Jean Lescure Papers, f. 2, Paulhan, Claire, ‘Jean Lescure’, Le Monde, 20.10.2005, unpaginated. 130. Ibid., Lescure Papers, f. 2, ‘Lescure-Campagnolo 25.04.1949’, ‘LescureCampagnolo 24.05.1949’, ‘Campagnolo-Lescure 10.05.[1949]’, ‘LescureCampagnolo 04.05.1949’. 131. ‘Campagnolo-Lescure 10.05.[1949]’. 132. ASEC, A. FOND. 1, ‘IV seduta del CE 10.04.1949’, pp. 3, 5. ‘Antonio Banfi’, http://www.filosofico.net/banfi.htm accessed 24.10.2008. 133. Ibid. 2, ‘CE 15.10.1950’, p. 12. 134. ‘CE 12.12.1948’, p. 7. 135. ASEC, Associazioni esteri 1, Statuo della Federazione Internazionale PEN, p. 7. 136. Ibid., p. 9; Wilford, R. A., ‘The PEN Club, 1930– 50’, Contemporary History 14:1 (1979), pp. 107– 9, 111. 137. Statuo PEN, p. 9. 138. Ibid., pp. 7 – 8. 139. ‘CE 10.04.1949’, p. 2. 140. David-Fox, Michael, ‘From Illusory “Society” to “Public Intellectual”: VOKS, International Travel and Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period’, Contemporary European History 11:1 (2002), p. 11. According to Natalia Yegorova, VOKS was set up in 1925 as a public, but not state organization for

NOTES

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165.

TO PAGES

44 – 48

239

‘assistance in the establishment and development of cultural and scientific links between Soviet public organizations or individuals and their counterparts’ abroad. Yegorova, Natalia: ‘The All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) and the Early de´tente, 1953– 1955’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 93 – 4. IBI III: 409 Umberto Terracini 287. Ibid., 301– 5. Ibid., 288: 304– 5. Agosti, Aldo, ‘Umberto Terracini’, http://www.nuvole.it/arretrati/Numero15/ Nuova%20cartella/16%20-%20Agosti%20-%20Umberto%20Terracini.pdf, 2. Accessed 16.03.2013. Ibid. IBI III: 409 Terracini 307. Proportional representation was observed in the Assembly, with the PCI making up just under 19 per cent of the new cabinet. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 248. ‘Relazione di Campagnolo’, p. 4. ‘V Seduta della SEC [1949]’, p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid.; ASEC, A. FOND. 1, ‘Reunione del 06.11.1949’, pp. 5 – 6. ‘Reunione del 06.11.1949’, p. 6. ‘V Seduta della SEC [1949]’, p. 2. ASEC, Umberto Terracini Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Terracini 24.09.1949’. Lefebvre also helped with recruitment in Eastern Europe. ASEC, A. FOND. 2, ‘CE 02.04.1950’, p. 1. Pierre Cot, approached at the Turin Conference, was another SEC ally in the PCF. ‘Relazione di Campagnolo’, p. 3. ‘CE 02.04.1950’, pp. 1 – 2. Birchall, Ian H., ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow? The Rise and Fall of the Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire’, Journal of European Studies 29:4 (1999), p. 377. Ibid., p. 373. ‘CE 12.12.1948’, p. 8. ‘V Seduta della SEC [1949]’, p. 1. ‘Campagnolo-Terracini 07.07.1949’ and ‘24.09.1949’. ‘V Seduta della SEC [1949]’, p. 5. ‘Riunione del Comitato di preparazione del Congresso 13.06.1949’, pp. 4 – 5. ‘Relazione di Umberto Campagnolo’, p. 8. ‘Riunione del 06.11.1949’, p. 4. ‘Relazione di Umberto Campagnolo’, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Campagnolo had overlooked, or underestimated, Luka´cs’ difficult circumstances at that time. Since spring 1949 he had been subjected to an ‘anti-Luka´cs campaign’ organized by the Hungarian party chief Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi, and that summer he had to undertake a self-criticism. Kadarkay, Arpad, Georg Luka´cs: Life, Thought, and Politics (Oxford, 1991), pp. 402 – 10.

240

NOTES

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48 –53

166. ‘Reunione del 06.11.1949’, pp. 1, 3. Although the document records a conversation with ‘Mesmianoff’, it is certain to refer to the eminent chemist Alexandr Nikolaevich Nesmeianov, the rector of Moscow State University (1948 – 51) and later the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1951 – 61). He was also active in Stalin’s peace campaigns. Vronskaya, Jeanne, ‘Alexandr Nikolaevich Nesmeianov’, in Vronskaya Jeanne, with Chuguev, Vladimir, A Biographical Dictionary of the Soviet Union 1917– 1988 (London: 1989), p. 291. 167. ‘Seduta del 02.04.1950 del CE ’, p. 1; ‘III Riunione’, p. 10. 168. ASEC, A. FOND. 2, ‘Estratto dai verbali della seduta del CE 22.01.1950 (2)’, p. 3; ASEC, Henri Lefebvre Papers, ‘Lefebvre-Campagnolo 09.12.1949’. 169. ‘Terracini-Campagnolo 02.01.1950’. 170. Brown: J. D. Bernal, p. 328. 171. Ibid., pp. 332– 6. 172. Terracini Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Terracini 14.01.1950’ and ‘28.01.1950’; ASEC, A. FOND. 2, ‘Seduta del CE 22.01.1950 (1)’, unpaginated. 173. ‘Reunione del 06.11.1949’,p. 5. 174. Ibid, p. 4; CAE, AP14, Antony Babel Papers, f. B1, ‘Campagnolo-Babel 28.11.1949’. 175. ‘Relazione di Umberto Campagnolo’, p. 6.

Chapter 2 The SEC’s Early Years: the ‘Politics of Culture’ and the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World (1952) 1. Lipgens: History of European Integration, p. 629. 2. There were a few exceptions, such as Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jan Parandowski from Poland, Ladislav Rieger from Czechoslovakia, and Arthur Baumgarten, Theodor Brugsch and Wolfgang Steinitz from East Germany. 3. French and Swiss representation was 17.5 per cent and 16 per cent respectively. 4. Wittner: Struggle, pp. 177– 80; Scott-Smith: Politics of Apolitical Culture, pp. 2 – 3. 5. Adorno and Luka´cs would only join in 1955 and 1965, respectively. 6. ASEC, Assemblea Constituente, box 1, ‘Prima Seduta del Comitato Veneziano degli amici della SEC’, 24.04.1950, pp. 1– 2. 7. ‘Prima Seduta’, 24.04.1950, pp. 1 – 2. 8. AC 1950 –5, pp. 17– 18. 9. Ibid., pp. 18 – 19. 10. SEC, Statuts de la SEC (Venice, 1998), pp. 8– 9. 11. AC 1950– 5, pp. 38, 53 – 61. The statutes had been drawn up by Jean Amrouche, Antony Babel, Jean Lescure, A. J. Maydieu, Basil Munteano, Fernand Mueller, Axel Romdahl, Robert De Traz, Henri De Zie´gler, and Campagnolo. Ibid., p. 31. 12. Ibid., pp. 38 – 41.

NOTES

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53 –58

241

13. Writers and historians made up 19 per cent each of the SEC’s starting membership, followed by philologists (13 per cent), philosophers (13 per cent), visual and performing artists (11 per cent), doctors and scientists (7 per cent) and editors and publishers (6 per cent). 14. They came to just over 5.5 per cent of the SEC’s total membership. 15. Economists would never make up more than 1.5 per cent of the overall membership; politicians would never make up more than 2.5 per cent of that membership. 16. The largely Euro-American Mont Pe`lerin Society had been established in 1947 with an initial membership of 39, increasing to 172 by 1951. Although it too was set up in response to the moral crisis posed by World War II, it identified lawlessness, combined with a ‘decline of belief in private property and the competitive market’, as responsible for the crisis. Missing from its foundational documents was, as Plehwe has observed, ‘the range of human and political rights traditionally embraced by liberals’. Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter (eds), The Road from Mont Pe`lerin: the Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge MA, 2009), pp. 16 – 17, 24 – 5, 26, 34. 17. AC 1950 –5, p. 28. 18. Ibid., pp. 28 – 9. 19. Ibid. 20. Statuts, p. 10. 21. AC 1950 –5, pp. 42– 3. 22. Revah, Louis-Albert, Julien Benda: Un misanthrope juif dans la France de Maurras (Paris, 1991), pp. 250– 3. 23. AC 1950 –5, p. 66. 24. SEC: Statuts, pp. 19 – 20. 25. Campagnolo, ‘Avant-propos’, Comprendre 3, p. 5. 26. AG 1951– 11, Comprendre 5/6, p. 78. 27. Ibid., p. 78. 28. Ibid., pp. 78 – 9. 29. Ibid. 30. CE 1951– 2, Comprendre 3, p. 19. 31. Ibid., p. 15. 32. Wittner: One World, p. 183. 33. Carlyle, Margaret (ed.), Documents on International Affairs 1949 – 1950 (London, 1953), pp. 145 – 8. 34. IACF/III/1/1, Part I: Proceedings of the CCF, pp. 1 –2. 35. Germany and the United States contributed approximately 22 per cent each of the overall number of conference goers in 1950. Gre´mion: Intelligence, pp. 422– 4. Gre´mion points out that Brugmans, Kogon and Spinelli’s engagement with the CCF was brief. 36. IACF/II/2/8, ‘Re´union du Comite´ International, Bruxelles 27/30.11.1950’, p. 35. These included the Agence France Press, Combat, Le Figaro, Le Monde,

242

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

NOTES

TO PAGES

58 – 61

the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the United Press. IACF/ II/187/1. ‘Comite´ international a` Joliot-Curie, Gene`ve 17.12.1950’. Douglas, Allen R., ‘Marx and Huizinga: Jan Romein as Historian’, Virginia Quarterly Review winter (1980), p. 152; CE 1951– 2, pp. 20 – 1. Baumgartner, Gabriele, and Hebig, Dieter, Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ/ DDR (Munich, 1996/7), 891; CE 1951– 2, p. 23. Anderson, Perry ‘A New Germany?’, New Left Review 57 (2009), p. 29, www. newleftreview.org/?view¼2778. Accessed 29.06.2009. CE 1951– 2, p. 25. Ibid., pp. 25 – 6. 38 per cent were French and 39 per cent Italian. In 1950 there were three Austrian members; two more joined the following year. Also in 1950, West Germans made up 4.1 per cent of the SEC’s membership. In 1951, recruitment from the FRG fell to 1.8 per cent. The SEC’s 2 per cent of its initial membership from Britain was maintained in 1951, a year that saw no new recruits from Scandinavia, down from only 3.4 per cent in 1950. From Belgium there were only three new members (2.6 per cent); from Holland, two (1.75 per cent). They were Elias Canetti, Georges Gurvitch, Marie Romain Rolland and Boris Mirkine Guetzevitch (from Russia); Andre´ De Maday (from Romania), a nongovernmental representative at the UN’s International League for the Rights of Man. CE 1951– 2, p. 51; CE 1951– 11, Comprendre 4, p. 34. Ibid. – 11, p. 34. Ibid. – 2, p. 23. AG 1951– 11, p. 31. See, for example, ‘Resolution adopted by the Partisans of Peace in Warsaw, November 1950’, in Carlyle: Documents, p. 148. It was reproduced from Soviet News, 24.11.1950. Writers made up 33 per cent of attendees, 19 per cent were visual and performing artists, followed by doctors and scientists (11 per cent). 14 per cent identified themselves simply as ‘academics’. At the Wrocław Conference there were no representatives from the world of business, from the military, or from the working classes. There were also 62 journalists present, who were not regarded as delegates. Marx Memorial Library, London (hereafter MML), Bernal Peace Collection, International Conferences 1938– 1948, WPC (1949) Congre`s Mondial des Intellectuels pour la Paix, Wrocław, Pologne, Warsaw, pp. 213 –19. According to Wittner, the WPC was urged by Moscow to expand its support as broadly as possible in 1949. Wittner: One World, vol. 1, pp. 180– 1. IACF/II/280/1, ‘De Rougemont-Bondy 24.10.1951’; ‘De Rougemont-Bondy 19.12.1951. Hochgeschwender: Freiheit, pp. 360– 74. CE 1951– 2, pp. 27 – 8.

NOTES

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243

55. IACF/II/3/2, ‘Programme de Travail du Secretariat International du Congres pour la Liberte´ de la Culture 01.08.1951 –1.08.1952: Annex 1’, p. 2. The invited participants were Roger Caillois, Guido Calogero, Nicola Chariomonte, Alsoph H. Corwin, Paul S. Epstein, Sidney Hook, Jules Margoline, Pater Mauer, Czeslaw Milosz, Jules Monnerot, Theodor Plievier, Denis de Rougemont, Inge Scholl, Ignazio Silone, and Wladimir Weidle´. According to a subsequent publication, all of these, except Maurer, Plievier and Scholl attended, along with Francois Bondy and Boris Souvarine, who were not among the original invitees. IACF/II/1A/2, The Congress for Cultural Freedom (Paris: n. d.), unpaginated. 56. IACF/II/280/1, ‘de Rougemont-Bondy 24.10.1951’, pp. 1 –2. 57. AG 1951– 11, p. 28. 58. Ibid., p. 28. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., pp. 28 – 9. 61. Ibid., pp. 29 – 30. 62. Ibid., p. 30. 63. CE 1952– 1, Comprendre 5/6, p. 101. 64. Ibid., p. 95. 65. 73 per cent of the press articles recorded in Comprendre appeared in Italian papers. Five articles were published in Switzerland, with single articles appearing in Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Britain and the Vatican. Two appeared in the Brazilian press, and three in France. CE 1952–4, Comprendre 5/6, p. 112. 66. IACF/ II/3/1, ‘Re´union du Comite´ Exe´cutif, Paris 15.12.1951’, pp. 7 – 8. See also Guinnard, Sylvie, ‘La Socie´te´ europe´enne de culture et le dialogue EstOuest jusqu’en 1956’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 101– 2. 67. ‘Camus-Campagnolo 06.03.1952’, Comprendre 5/6, 135. The exchanges between Campagnolo and Camus, Hersch and Aron are all reproduced in the section ‘Correspondences’ of this issue of Comprendre. 68. Aron, Raymond, ‘A propos de la Socie´te´ Europe´enne de Culture’, Preuves 13 (1952), pp. 31 – 6. 69. CE 1952– 1, p. 91. 70. Aron: ‘A propos’, p. 31. 71. CE 1951– 2, p. 26, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 5/6, pp. 131– 5. 72. IACF/II/171/6, ‘Bondy-Andreotti 18.04.1952’. 73. They were Ferdinand Friedensburg, one of the founders of the CDU in 1945, and at the time a member of the Bundestag, who would be a minister in the European Parliament (1958 – 65); and Otto Friedrich, a government advisor on economic and social issues. 74. Niedhart, Gottfried, ‘The East –West Problem as Seen from Berlin: Willy Brandt’s Early Ostpolitik’, in Loth, Wilfried (ed.), Europe, Cold War and Coexistence 1953– 1965 (London, 2004), pp. 286, 287. The wave of new recruits again included several politicians, one of them, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the CDU’s leader who would become chancellor in 1966. (Ibid., p. 285.)

244

NOTES

TO PAGES

64 –67

75. For an account of Brugsch’s activities after the war, see Konert, Ju¨rgen, Theodor Brugsch: Internist und Politiker (Leipzig, 1988), pp. 140–2, 148–54. 76. ASEC, Theodor Brugsch Papers, ‘Brugsch-Campagnolo 26.12.1951’; ‘Campagnolo-Brugsch 01.03.1952’. 77. Participation from the GDR and the FRG plummeted as of 1957, presumably due to tensions over the Hungarian crisis. While in the FRG, there was a revival of interest in 1963, during what Gottfried Niedhart has described as the gestation of Ostpolitik, recruitment in the GDR only recovered in any significant way in 1967. That year 23 Germans joined, nine of them from the GDR. See Niedhart: ‘East – West Problem’, pp. 285– 7, where he dates the emergence of Ostpolitik to the 1950s. 78. ASEC, Terracini Papers, ‘Terracini-Campagnolo 02.01.1950’. 79. Umberto Campagnolo, ‘Origines de la Socie´te´ Europe´enne de culture’, p. 13; ‘Confe´rence de presse tenue a` Berne le 14 Avril 1950. Expose´ de Umberto Campagnolo’, Comprendre 1, p. 78. 80. ASEC, Terracini Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Terracini 14.01.1950’, ‘28.01.1950’. 81. Ibid., Conseil Mondial de la Paix Papers, ‘Sereni-Campagnolo 20.06.1952’. This file also holds numerous invitations to Campagnolo to attend as an observer at, or to send observers to a range of WPC organizational meetings and congresses throughout the 1950s. 82. IBI III: 160 Donini 28 – 31. 83. ASEC, Ambrogio Donini Papers, biographical sheet; IBI III: 160 Donini 30. He was a member of the WPC from 1949– 54. 84. Donini Papers, ‘Donini-Campagnolo 24.11.1952’. 85. Ibid. 20.03.1953’. 86. Unesco, ‘Consequences of the Withdrawal of a Member State’, 14.10.1985, 4 – 5; http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000668/066890eo.pdf, accessed 19.03.2013; Donini Papers, ‘Donini-Campagnolo 14.09.1954’. 87. See Donini Papers, ‘Donini-Campagnolo 06.08.1958’, ‘Donini-Campagnolo 05.10.1958’, ‘Typed Memorandum [1958 – 9]’. 88. IBI III: 292 Donini 63; CE 1953– 1, Comprendre 9, p. 18. 89. Mayoux joined the Resistance in Lyon in 1940. He became head of the movement in the Lorraine region until, having escaped during an arrest by the Gestapo in 1943, he transferred to London. Unesco Archives, AG8 Secretariat Records, Biographical Files: Mayoux, Unesco/Biographies/Secretariat JeanJacques Mayoux, Paris, October 1947. 90. ASEC, Jean-Jacques Mayoux Papers, ‘Mayoux-Campagnolo 31.10.1951’. 91. Ibid. On the Uriage School, see Hellman: Emmanuel Mounier, 175– 6. 92. ASEC, Jean Wahl Papers, ‘Wahl-Campagnolo 14.05.1952’. Vercors also joined that year. 93. Just before the circulation of the Appeal, Ehrenburg had declined Campagnolo’s request on the grounds that the SEC’s membership did not reflect the real range of political opinions in the West, and also contained figures hostile to the causes

NOTES

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

TO PAGES

67 – 74

245

of peace. ASEC, Ilya Ehrenburg Papers, ‘Ehrenburg-Campagnolo’ undated [c. Jan. 1952]. Ehrenburg, Ilya, ‘Les intellectuels sovie´tiques aux intellectuels de l’occident’, Comprendre 7 – 8, pp. 133, 134. AG 1952– 6, Comprendre 7/8, p. 19. Ibid., p. 28. The CCF, for its part, would come to see the SEC as a communistfront organization. IACF/II/243/12, ‘Nicolas Nabokov-Mike Josselson 26.05. [1954]’. AG 1952– 6, pp. 44, 48. Ibid., pp. 41 – 2. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., pp. 62, 66. Ibid., pp. 57 – 8. Ibid., pp. 71, 72. Ibid., p. 33. CE 1952– 1, p. 103. AG 1952– 6, pp. 34, 35.

Chapter 3

The ‘Civilization of the Universal’: Overtures toward the Third World (1953 –6)

1. CE 1951– 2, p. 33. 2. Lee, Christopher, ‘Introduction’, in Lee, Christopher (ed.), Making a World After Empire: the Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH, 2010), p. 3. There were others: Lee has identified two meetings between the ‘Colombo Powers’ in 1954 as the ‘immediate backdrop’ to Bandung. Ibid., p. 10. 3. CE 1951– 2, p. 33. 4. Ibid. 5. ‘Draft Statute of the European Society of Culture’, Comprendre 1, p. 51. Maydieu, Munteano, Sternberger, de Traz, Ungaretti and Wahl strongly questioned the implied relationship between European and world cultures. Ungaretti successfully pressed for the suppression of the word ‘universal’ from the statutes. AC 1950– 5, pp. 41 – 3. 6. AC 1950 –5, p. 42. 7. AG 1952– 6, p. 34. 8. Campagnolo: ‘Responsabilite´s europe´ennes’, Comprendre 9, pp. 78 – 9. 9. Maurel, Chloe´, ‘Le Reˆve d’un “Gouvernement mondial” des anne´es 1920 aux anne´es 1950. L’exemple de l’Unesco’, Histoire/Politique 10 (2010), p. 2. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., pp. 2 – 3. 12. Ibid., pp. 12 – 13. 13. Unesco Archives, AG8, Biographical File, Jacques Havet, ‘Au revoir de Jacques Havet’, 18.11.1980.

246

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14. Unesco Archives, AG8, Biographical File, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, ‘Unesco/ Biographies/Secretariat, ‘Jean-Jacques Mayoux’, Le Monde, 23.12.1987 (press cutting, obituary). 15. Ibid., Registry Files 003.3008 (100), International Cultural Relations – part III, ‘Report of the Meeting of the Committee on the Comparative Study of Cultures 14 – 18.11.1949’, UNESCO/PEC/Conf 6/3, p. 1. It must be pointed out that the committee, far from wishing to limit the cultural development of these countries, recommended that they be encouraged to develop new values on their own terms, as befitted their new economic and political circumstances. Ibid., p. 4. Unesco Archives, AG8, Registry Files 003.3008 (100), International Cultural Relations – part III, Unesco, ‘Enquiry into the Interrelations of Cultures: Basic Document, Paris, 20.06.1948’, UNESCO/ PHS/4, p. 1. 16. ‘Report 14 – 18.11.1949’, pp. 5 – 6. 17. Ibid., p. 7. 18. Campagnolo: ‘Responsibilite´s europe´ennes’, p. 79. ‘The civilization of the universal’, he wrote, ‘is the only one, in effect, that seeks to enter into contact with others for reasons that are not of immediate necessity or of a purely egoistic and occasional interest; the only one that desires to know them, whether they be past or present; that aspires to understand them; which should be ready to appreciate them . . . It penetrates them with its spirit and it assimilates them in overcoming the contingent limits of its own particularity and of theirs. It discovers them and reveals them to themselves in disposing them to open themselves to an exigency of universality; it makes itself mediator between one and the other, in so far as they are finite forms of the infinite spirit, they are integrated in the unity of human civilization.’ 19. ‘Jean-Jacques Mayoux’, Le Monde 23.12.1987. 20. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Annie, Aux origines de la guerre d’alge´rie 1940– 1945 (Paris, 2002), pp. 134– 8; Cantier, Jacques, ‘1939 – 1945: une me´tropole colonial en guerre’, in Jordi, Jean-Jacques and Perville´, Guy (eds), Alger 1940– 1962: Une ville en guerres (Paris, 1999), pp. 56 – 7. 21. Le Baut, Rejane, Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche: Alge´rien universel (Chaˆtenay Malabry, 2003), pp. 20, 52. He studied at the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure de Saint-Cloud from 1926 to 1928. 22. Ibid., pp. 59, 68 – 9. 23. Ibid., pp. 58, 68 – 9. 24. Ibid., pp. 184– 8; Van Tuyl, Jocelyn, Andre´ Gide and the Second World War: A Novelist’s Occupation (Albany, 2006), pp. 107, 110. Even before his collaboration with Gide on L’Arche, Amrouche was predisposed to support the French republic as presently constituted. This is evident in his essay ‘L’unite´ spirituelle de l’Empire’ [1941]. 25. Van Tuyl: Andre´ Gide, p. 110. 26. Avit, De´sire´e, ‘La question de l’Eurafrique dans la construction de l’Europe de 1950 a` 1957’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 77 (2005), pp. 18, 21. Tony

NOTES

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

TO PAGES

76 –79

247

Chafer, while he does not use this term, also argues for the successful maintenance of France’s economic and political presence in West Africa as due to the way it repackaged its ‘vocation colonial’. Connected with ‘ideas of French universalism and the superiority of French culture’, this was ‘a notion widely held on both the right and left. At the same time, they served, on the right, to sustain myths of French grandeur, particularly in the military and diplomatic fields, while on the left, they served to legitimize the notion that French colonialism was modernizing and progressive through the export of the republican values of liberty and equality and the promotion of economic development.’ Chafer, Tony, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonisation? (Oxford, 2002), p. 3. Avit: ‘Question’, p. 18. Chafer: End of Empire, pp. 55 – 7. Le Baut: Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, p. 189. Ibid., pp. 185– 8. [Amrouche, Jean], ‘Manifeste’, L’Arche 1 [Feb 1944], p. 11. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 10 – 11. Chafer: End of Empire, pp. 29, 57. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 98. See also Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonisation and the Politics of Culture’, in Lee: Making a World, pp. 46 – 7. L’Arche had been relocated in Paris in 1945. Its first issue in France appeared that August. Le Baut: Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, pp. 195, 200. As Phillip C. Naylor has observed, Amrouche believed ‘ultimately in a pluralist and tolerant Algeria and France’, and that he ‘viewed decolonization as an opportunity for France to “return to her self”, the France emblematic of the universal mission of the Enlightenment, to “incarnate its own myth”’. Naylor, Phillip C., France and Algeria: a History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville, FLA, 2000), p. 290. Amrouche, Jean, ‘L’eternel Jugurtha: Propositions sur le genie africain’, L’Arche 13 (1946), p. 58. Ibid., pp. 63, 65. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., pp. 63, 68. Ibid., p. 69. Arnaud, Jacqueline, ‘Jean Amrouche, Le Precurseur’, in Jean Amrouche: L’e´ternel Jugurtha (Marseille, 1985), pp. 42 – 4; Le Baut: Jean El-Mouhoub Amrouche, pp. 282 –3. Cantier: ‘1939 – 1945’, pp. 57 – 61. This observation is one of the premises of Rey-Goldzeiguer’s excellent, exhaustive study, Aux origines de la guerre d’alge´rie 1940– 1945. Morsink, Johannes, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 281.

248

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79 –83

46. La Vie intellectuelle had published work by Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Maurice de Gandillac, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Schumann. It resumed publication after the war. Michelet, Edmond, ‘La Re´sistance’, in ‘Le Pe`re Maydieu’, La Vie Intellectuelle 27 (1956), p. 61; Verdin, Philippe, Alioune Diop, le Socrate noir (Paris, 2010), pp. 75, 138. Maydieu’s involvement in the Resistance went beyond the printed page, however. Involved with Resistance groups in Switzerland, he was arrested along with P-L-D Dubarle on the Swiss border in March 1944, tortured, and imprisoned for five months at Annecy. ‘La Re´sistance’, p. 61. 47. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 75 – 6. 48. Ibid., p. 77. 49. Alioune Diop, ‘L’Afrique’, in the special issue ‘Le pe`re Maydieu’, La Vie intellectuelle 27 (1956), p. 153. 50. Verdin: Alioune Diop, p. 76. 51. AC 1950 –5, p. 41. 52. CE 1952– 1, p. 103. 53. Ibid. The expression ‘niam n’gora vana mpaya’, Diop noted, is a Toucouleur proverb, ‘Eating in order to live is not eating in order to get fat’. Alioune Diop, ‘Niam n’goura, ou les raisons d’eˆtre de Pre´sence africaine’, Pre´sence africaine 1 [1947], note, p. 185. 54. Miller, Christopher L., ‘Alioune Diop and the Unfinished Temple of Knowledge’, in Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (ed.), The Surreptitious Speech: Pre´sence africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947 –1987 (Chicago, 1992), p. 428. 55. Diop: ‘Niam n’goura’, pp. 185– 7, 191– 2. 56. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 26 – 8. Diop, Alioune, ‘Histoire d’un e´colier noir (par lui-meˆme)’, in Bulletin de l’enseignement de l’AOF, no. 76, July 1932, quoted in Verdin: Alioune Diop, p. 28. 57. Ibid., pp. 50 – 1. 58. Diop: ‘Niam n’goura’, p. 186. 59. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 71, 76, 113–14. 60. Diop: ‘Niam n’goura’, p. 185. 61. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 138– 9. 62. Ibid., pp. 116– 17, 127– 9. 63. Ibid., pp. 127– 9. 64. Miller: ‘Alioune Diop’, p. 428. 65. CE 1952– 1, p. 103. 66. CE 1952– 4, p. 124. 67. Ibid., p. 124. 68. AG 1952– 6, p. 49. 69. Comitato di preparazione 13.06.1949, p. 3; CE 10.04.1949, p. 3. 70. CE 1951– 9, Comprendre 4, p. 21; CE 1951– 2, pp. 14 – 15. Havet also confirmed that Unesco was seriously considering making a subvention to the SEC ‘sometime in 1952’ for a meeting to be organized by the SEC, of Western

NOTES

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

TO PAGES

83 –86

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and East Asian intellectuals. ASEC, Jacques Havet Papers, ‘HavetCampagnolo 07.02.1951’, p. 1. Another possible collaboration being considered for 1953/4 would have examined intellectual and moral links between Europe and the Americas, the SEC being in charge of investigating the European perspective. ‘Havet-Campagnolo 19.10.1951’, p. 1. By 1952, Unesco’s commitment to the concept of a world government had declined, opposed, on the one hand, by the United States as a form of socialism, and on the other, by various Eastern Bloc states as potentially a tool for the ‘cultural Americanization of the planet’, as Maurel has described it. Maurel: ‘Reˆve’, p. 16. The support Unesco had intended to direct to the SEC for the Europe-Americas project was, in the end, to be given to the RIG. ASEC, Centre francais Papers, ‘Quatrie`me se´ance 01.07.[1951]’, p. 4. AG 1952– 6, p. 54. CE 1953 –4, Comprendre 9, p. 40; Valderrama, Fernando, History of UNESCO (Paris, 1995), p. 86, 91, n. 2. Hungary and Poland withdrew in December 1952, Czechoslovakia in January 1953. Ibid., pp. 40 – 1. Ibid., p. 40. CE 1953– 1, p. 12. ASEC, AG3 – 1953, f. ‘Invitati come Osservatori’. Hamdi Ragip Atademir, Turkey; Abdorrahman Badaoui, Taha Hussein and Ibrahim B. Madkour, Egypt; G. A. Raadi, Iran; Constantin K. Zurayck, Lebanon; Gilberto Freyre, Brazil; T. Haguiwara, Japan; Humayun Kabir, Bhikhan Lal Atreya, N. C. Mehta, P. T. Raju and Swami Siddheswarananda, India; A. B. A. Haleem, Pakistan were all invited as observers. It appears that only two of them actually attended. Ibid. – 7, Comprendre 7, pp. 56 –60. See ASEC AG3 – 1953, f. ‘membri partecipanti, Troisie`me assemble´e ge´ne´rale ordinaire del a` SEC, membres venus de l’Etranger’, pp. 1– 2. From the lists in this file, it is clear that 52 members came from abroad, primarily from Italy (38.5 per cent) and Switzerland (31 per cent). Records are not preserved for attendees from France, or for non-members who may have attended. They were Andre´ Cornu, the Secretary of State for the Fine Arts and representative of the Ministry for National Education; Georges Davy, representing Unesco; Georges Duhamel of the Acade´mie francaise; Edouard Herriot, president of the National Assembly; and Pietro Quaroni, Italy’s ambassador to France. AG 1953– 9, Comprendre 10/11, p. 14. CE 1953– 7, p. 50. ASEC, AG3 – 1953, f. presse, ‘Compte-rendu du rapport pre´sente´ par le Se´nateur Giovanni Ponti’. AG 1953– 9, p. 24. Ibid., p. 71. See also p. 26, 29, 35, 46, 52 – 3, 59, 70 – 1, 75, 78. Ibid., p. 52. Houang, born in China, and trained in philosophy, had participated in the French Resistance. Afterwards, he was a professor at the

250

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

NOTES

TO PAGES

86 – 92

Ecole Normale Supe´rieure Paris. ASEC, Rass stampa 6, Francesco Semi, ‘Francois Houang’, Meridiano 12 (1957). AG 1953– 9, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid. ASEC, Rass stampa 3 f. 2, ‘A l’Assemble´e ge´ne´rale de la Socie´te´ Europe´enne de culture philosophes, savants et poe`tes ont confronte´ leurs vues sur les proble`mes du colonialisme’, Franc Tireur 01.10.1953. See also Euge`ne Mannoni, ‘La Socie´te´ Europe´enne de Culture confronte en discussions courtoises Europe et pays d’outremer’, Combat 28.09.1953. At least 48 articles appeared in the press, 27 in French publications. Le Monde was by far the most attentive, publishing five pieces on it. Charles Daoud Ammoun, Lebanon’s permanent delegate to Unesco, and its UN delegate from 1948 to 1951, joined in 1953; Houang and Raadi joined in 1954. 14 figures from Latin and South America also joined in 1953– 4, making up 13.5 per cent of new recruits during that period. AG 1953– 9, p. 92. ASEC, Alioune Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 11.02.1954’. Ibid. Fremigacci, Jean, ‘Les parlementaires africains face a` la construction europe´enne, 1953–1957’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 77 (2005), p. 16. Mouralis, Bernard, ‘Pre´sence africaine: Geography of an “Ideology,”’ in Mudimbe: Surreptitious Speech, pp. 7–8; Miller: ‘Alioune Diop’, p. 428. Diop: ‘Niam n’goura’, pp. 192, 185. Ibid.: ‘L’Europe vue par un africain’, Comprendre 9, pp. 89, 90. Ibid., pp. 89, 90. AG 1952– 6, p. 49. Campagnolo, ‘Responsabilite´s europe´ennes’, p. 78. Ibid., pp. 80 – 2. AG 1952– 6, p. 49. Scott-Smith: Politics, pp. 145– 53. Bracke, Maud, Which Socialism? Whose De´tente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis, 1968 (Budapest, 2007), p. 52. WPC, World Assembly for Peace, Helsinki (Vienna, 1956), p. 26. Ibid., pp. 220, 221. McTurnan Kahin, George, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (London, 1972), pp. 34, 80. Editorial [Diop, Alioune], ‘Apre`s le Congre`s’, Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 11 (1956/57), p. 3. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Diop-Campagnolo 20.07, 1955’; ‘Pre´sence africaineCampagnolo 25.07.1955’. Campagnolo in turn offered to meet with Diop and

NOTES

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

TO PAGES

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to designate a commission within the SEC to assist in their organization, and to raise support for them among its Unesco contacts. Ibid., ‘Campagnolo-Diop 28.07.1955’. Diop, Alioune, ‘Revue des revues: Revue Comprendre no. 14’, Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 4 (1955), p. 93. Ibid., p. 94. See also Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 268– 71 for another account of the exchange between Diop and Campagnolo. Ibid., ‘Colonialisme et nationalisme culturels’, Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 4 (1955), pp. 6 – 7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 9 – 11, p. 11 n. 2. Ibid., p. 11. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 21.01.1956’, pp. 1, 2. Ibid., ‘Diop-Campagnolo 01.02.1956’. Ibid. Diop credited Maydieu with this definition of the function of dialogue. Diop, Alioune, ‘Discours d’ouverture’, Pre´sence africaine, n. s. 8 – 10 (1956), pp. 9, 13. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid. Editorial, ‘Apre`s le Congre`s’, Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 11 (1956/57), p. 3. Ashcroft: Post-Colonial Studies, p. 145. ‘Sukarno’s Opening Speech, April 18, 1955’, in McTurnan Kahin: AsianAfrican Conference, p. 47. ‘Final Resolutions’, Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 8 –10, pp. 364, 363. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 258– 9. Pre´sence africaine, n.s. 8 – 10, p. 408. Campagnolo did send a message to be read out at the event. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 16.03.1959’.

Chapter 4 The ‘Will to Dialogue’: the First East– West Meeting, March 1956 1. These figures do not include East European nationals residing in the West. 2. This interest was reflected in the comparatively high levels of Eastern participation at the general assemblies from this time, no less than ten figures from East Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia were present at the 1954 assembly in Venice. ASEC, AG4 – 1954, Subfascicolo: adesioni. In comparison, only two people from Europe’s socialist countries attended the 1951 and 1953 assemblies; none attended the 1952 assembly. 3. CE 1955– 4, Comprendre 15, p. 209. 4. Bracke: Which Socialism?, p. 52. 5. Ibid. 6. CE 1953– 4, p. 11.

252

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98 –101

7. Ibid. – 1, Comprendre 9, pp. 16 –17. Although the Centre would be separate from the SEC, it was to be inspired by its principles. 8. Statues also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi) was banned in France in August 1953 for its anti-colonialist position. The ban was only lifted in the 1960s. Cooper, Sarah, Chris Marker (Manchester, 2008), p. 12. The SEC’s French Centre intervened with the French authorities to enable the film’s screening in Venice at Ponti’s invitation, in conjunction with a conference being held there on the state of African film. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Ponti-Diop 11.01.1954’; CE 1954– 7, Comprendre 12, p. 30. 9. CE 1955– 4, Comprendre 15, p. 187, CE 1955– 7, Comprendre 15, p. 222. 10. Ibid. – 7, p. 222. 11. Ibid. – 4, p. 194. On Matic´, see Jugoslovenski Savremenici, Ko je Ko u Jugoslaviji (Belgrade, 1970), p. 623. 12. Bischof, Gu¨nter and Dockrill, Saki, ‘Introduction: Geneva: The Fleeting Opportunity for De´tente’, in Bischof, Gu¨nter and Dockrill, Saki (eds), Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955 (Baton Rouge, 2000), p. 14. 13. On cultural relations at Geneva, see Young, John W., ‘The Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers, October-November 1955: The Acid Test of De´tente’, in Bischof and Dockrill (eds), Cold War Respite, pp. 271– 91. 14. WPC: World Assembly, pp. 33 – 4. 15. Varsori, Antonio, ‘Italy’s Policy towards European Integration (1947 – 58)’, in Duggan, Christopher and Wagstaff, Christopher (eds), Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948– 1958 (Oxford, 1995), p. 65. 16. Council of Europe, Directorate of Information, European Culture and the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 1955), p. 15. 17. Ibid., Pierre Nothomb Papers, ‘Nothomb-Campagnolo 16.06.1955’; Emilie Carner-Noulet Papers, ‘Carner-Noulet-Campagnolo, 01.10.1956’; ‘CampagnoloCarner-Noulet 20.01.1956’. See also Grand-Duche´ de Luxembourg, Ministe`re d’E´tat, Bulletin de Documentation 1:1/2 (1956), p. 14, http://www.gouvernement. lu/1824692/BID_1956_1–2. Accessed 17.02.2014. 18. ASEC, Associazioni 1, f. Consiglio d’Europa 1955– 63, ‘Le´on Marchal (Secretary General of the Council of Europe)-Campagnolo 24.11.1955’; Campagnolo-Marchal 29.11.1955’. 19. ‘Campagnolo-Marchal 29.11.1955’; CE 1955– 4, p. 196. 20. CE 1955–4, p. 196. The negation Campagnolo referred to was an article by George Boas (‘Re´alite´ de l’Europe’, Comprendre 13/14, pp. 153–60), which argued that European unification was impossible because of its geographic, economic, religious and cultural heterogeneity. Campagnolo saw such arguments as feeding the idea of a divided Europe, in which politically irreconcilable views could flourish. 21. Morelli, Anna, ‘La reine E´lisabeth de Belgique et la promotion des e´changes culturels avec le monde communiste’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 329 –45. 22. AG 1955– 10, Comprendre 16, p. 306.

NOTES 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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Ibid., pp. 314– 15. Ibid., pp. 315– 16. Ibid., p. 324. Ibid. ASEC, AG5 – 1955, Subfascicolo: Comunicati, SEC, Ufficio Stampa, ‘Comunicato 1: Assemblea della SEC a Bruxelles, Venezia 14.10.1955: Conclusa a Bruxelles l’Assemblea della SEC’, p. 2. Ibid., CMP Papers, ‘Jean Laffitte, WPC Secretariat-Campagnolo 03.05.1955’; ‘Campagnolo-Laffitte 17.05.1955’; ‘Varela-Campagnolo 31.05.1955’. Ibid., Alfredo Varela Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Varela 02.07.1955’. Ibid., Varela Papers, ‘Varela-Campagnolo 13.07.1955’. Varela joined the SEC in 1954. ‘Report of the Commission on Cultural Exchange: B. Declaration of Writers and Artists’, in WPC: World Assembly, pp. 608– 9. WPC: World Assembly, pp. 570– 2, 607– 8. Ibid., p. 608. ASEC, Vercors Papers, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 31.05.1954’, ‘CampagnoloVercors 22.07.1954’. Mayoux appears to have first apprised him of Vercors’ plans back in May. ‘Campagnolo-Vercors 31.05.1954’. Ibid., Vercors Papers, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 05.06.1954’. Je´roˆme Adant, noting the absence of any records from Allard’s archive on the Knokke-le-Zoute meeting, records the names reproduced here, taken from Allard’s own publication Antoine Allard. Correspondant de Paix. Croquis de Voyage. Adant, Je´roˆme, ‘La paix du Christ sous l’oeil de Moscou: les activite´s pacifists d’Antoine Allard entre 1945 et 1965’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe, malgre´ tout, p. 235, n. 46. Vercors’ list of participants sent to Campagnolo differs from Allard’s, additionally citing Charles-Louis Paron and Robert Vivier from Belgium and ‘Madame Kamenova’ and ‘Monsieur Karaslov’ from Bulgaria. ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, f. Corrispondenza, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 06.12.1954’. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, in Podro´z˙e do Włoch (Warsaw, 1977), p. 122, also notes Helena Weigel and Karasławow. Adant: ‘Paix du Christ’, p. 235, n. 46. De Beauvoir, Simone, Force of Circumstance, (tran.) Richard Howard (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 200, 303; ASEC, Jean-Paul Sartre Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Sartre 13.08.1954’. CE 1955– 4, p. 186. ASEC, AG4 1954, Sub fascicolo: Ecrivains Sovietiques, ‘Pro-memoria dettato dal Prof. UC ai primi del dic 1954 sull’incontro con gli scrittori sovietici’. CE 1955– 4, p. 187. ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo’ 10.01.1955’; ‘Campagnolo-Vercors 17.01.1955’; ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 22.01.1955’; ‘VercorsCampagnolo 22.01.1955’, ‘Campagnolo-Vercors 28.01.1955’. Ibid., Vercors Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Vercors 22.07.1955’.

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105 –106

44. Ibid., Jean-Paul Sartre Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Sartre 27.01.1955’. 45. Ibid., IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, f. Corrispondenza, ‘CampagnoloAlberto Carocci (Nuovi argomenti) 14.05.1955’. 46. Ibid. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, f. Corrispondenza, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 10.01.1955: The`mes e´tablis a` Knokke-Le-Zoute pour une rencontre d’e´crivains’. 47. Ibid. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, f. Programma, ‘Les Re´unions de Venise pour l’affirmation de l’esprit du dialogue (Re´union du 25 au 31 mars 1956): Programme’, unpaginated. 48. CE 1956– 4, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 160– 2. 49. An early list (ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, ‘Invite´s e´ventuels a` la rencontre avec des e´crivains sovie´tiques’, list clipped on ‘pro-memoria Dec 1954’) contains, from France: Mauriac, Sartre, Vercors, Andre´ Maur(ois?), Claude Roy, Aragon, Jean Vilar; Germany: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Von Salmon, Heinrich Bo¨ll; Switzerland: Karl Barth, Andre´ Bonnard; Belgium: Franz Hellens; Finland: Pier Lagervist; England: T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Rosamund Lehmann, James Alldridge, Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene, Cyril Conolly; Czechoslovakia: Nezval; Poland: Iwaszkiewicz; United States: Lewis Mumford, Richard McKeon, Waldo Frank, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin; Italy: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Carlo Levi, Pratolini, Moravia; Israel: Martin Buber; Guatemala: Miguel-Angel Asturias; Venezuela: Romolo Galleogs, Neruda (sic). Two subsequent ones, (ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre est-ouest programma, ‘Les Re´unions de Venice pour l’affirmation de l’esprit du dialogue, reunion du 25–31 mars 1956’, and ‘Liste de quelques personnalite´s occientales invitees a` la Rencontre d’artistes, d’ecrivains, de savants, de l’est et de l’ouest de l’Europe, prevue a` Venise pour le mois de janvier’) include Karl Barth, Bernal, Brecht, Louis de Broglie, Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, Otto Dibelius, T. S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Iwaszkiewicz, Giorgio La Pira, Carlo Levi, Henry Moore, Charles Morgan, Lewis Mumford, Guido Piovene, Marko Ristic´, Sartre, Spender, Ungaretti, Vercors, Jean Vilar, Elio Vittorini, (handwritten in the margins are: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Braque, Trevelyan, Toynbee, Graham Greene, Faulkner, Hindemann, Stravinsky, Malraux, Paulhan, plus five that are illegible). 50. Yegorova has also noted VOKS’ contribution to the peace movement, since it brought together people of different political views. Yegorova: ‘All-Union Society’, p. 93. 51. ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, ‘Denisov-Campagnolo 15.10.1955’. 52. Among those who did not attend were Adorno, Isaac Babel, Georges Braque, Berthold Brecht, Andre´ Breton, Martin Buber, Camus, Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Ilya Ehrenburg, T. S. Eliot, Aleksandr Gerasimov, Graham Greene, Hermann Hesse, Luka´cs, Triofim Dennisovitch Lyssenko, Andre´ Malraux, Francois Mauriac, Andre´ Maurois, Henry Moore, Lewis Mumford, Boris Pasternak, Jean Paulhan, Pablo Picasso, Bertrand Russell, Mikhail Sholokov, Albert Schweitzer, Dmitri Shostakovich, Konstantin

NOTES

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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106 –109

255

Simeonov, Igor Stravinsky and Elio Vittorini. It is clear from the lists preserved in the ASEC that in some cases, participation was only decided weeks before the event. Pierre Gre´mion has argued that the Soviets used the SEC as a channel for conducting cultural relations ‘at the highest level’. Gre´mion: Intelligence, p. 475. The clear difficulties Campagnolo had in securing Soviet participation in the SEC throughout the period in question demonstrates that this was not the case. ASEC, IN. SP. 2, Rencontre Est-Ouest, f. VOKS, ‘Campagnolo-Denisov’ 07.12.1955, 22.02.1956’; ‘Kislova-Campagnolo 05.03.1956, 14.03.1956’. Ibid., Rencontre Est-Ouest, ‘Evans-Campagnolo 28.09.1955’. Evans succeeded Torres Bodet in 1953. Valderrama: History of UNESCO, p. 91. ASEC, Vercors Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Vercors 22.07.1954’; Ponti Papers, ‘Promemoria per il presidente Ponti 11.02.1955’; Donini Papers, ‘DoniniCampagnolo 25.09.1954’, ‘Donini-Campagnolo 10.09.1955’. Guinnard: ‘La SEC’, p. 135. Ritz, German, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: Ein grenzga¨nger der Moderne (Bern, 1996), pp. 38, 51; Matuszewski, Ryszard, Iwaszkiewicz, (tran.) Marsha Brochwicz (Warsaw, 1972), pp. 13 – 15. A founding member, he resigned two months later, only to rejoin again in April 1955. ASEC, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz Papers, ‘Iwaszkiewicz-Campagnolo 05.08.1950’, ‘Campagnolo-Iwaszkiewicz, 30.04.1955’. He was also on the organizational committee for the Wrocław Conference. (Madajczyk: ‘Rang serre’, p. 100). He remained active in the WPC, becoming the head of the arts and literature subcommittee of its Commission on Cultural Exchanges. WPC: World Assembly, p. 607. WPC, World Assembly, pp. 446– 8. Rencontre Est-Ouest (REO 1), Comprendre 16, p. 222. Wos´, Jan Władysław, ‘Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz e l’Italia’, in Platania, Gaetano (ed.), Da Est ad Ovest, da Ovest ad Est: Viaggiatori per le strade del mondo ([Viterbo], 2008), p. 347. Ibid. Jugoslovenski Savremenici: Ko je Ko, p. 902; Miller, Nick, The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle, 1944–1991 (Budapest/New York, 2007), pp. 2, 5, 55. Miller notes the eulogizing essays Ristic´ published in the periodical Politika as marking him as a communist intellectual. Ibid.; ASEC, Marko Ristic´ Papers, ‘SEC notice biographique pour l’annuaire 1953’. Unesco, Records of the General Conference of the UNESCO Seventh Session Paris 1952, vol. 1 Proceedings (Paris, 1953), pp. 136– 8. ASEC, Ristic´ Papers, ‘Ristic´-Campagnolo 21.08.1953’. Ristic´, Marko, ‘Culture et coexistence’, Comprendre 13/14, pp. 133, 134, 136, 139. Ibid., p. 137. ASEC, Iwaszkiewicz Papers, ‘Iwaszkiewicz-Campagnolo 02.12.1955’; Ristic´ Papers, ‘Ristic´-Campagnolo 10.11.1955’.

256

NOTES

TO PAGES

110 –115

70. Vronskaya Jeanne, with Chuguev, Vladimir, A Biographical Dictionary of the Soviet Union 1917– 1988 (London, 1989), p. 100; Banham, Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1050– 1. 71. ASEC, Boris Polevoi Papers, Biographical fact sheet, 02.04.1956. 72. WPC: World Assembly, pp. 96 – 7, 203. Korneichuk, a playwright, has been remembered as a ‘particularly odious Stalinist figure’, a propagandist, member of the CPSU’s Central Committee and chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. Vronskaya: Biographical Dictionary, p. 196. 73. REO 1: pp. 201, 203. 74. Ibid., p. 286. 75. Ibid., p. 209. 76. Ibid., pp. 210, 211. 77. Ibid., pp. 211– 13. 78. Ibid., p. 213. 79. Ibid., pp. 215– 16. 80. Ibid., p. 216. 81. Ibid., pp. 219– 20. 82. Ibid., pp. 240– 1. 83. Ibid., p. 244. 84. See Stewart, Jon, ‘Introduction’, in Stewart, Jon (ed.), The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, IL, 1998), pp. xxii – xxv for a concise account of the breakdown between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty over an editorial dispute at Les Temps modernes. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka have drawn attention to Sartre’s touching account in Situations VI (p. 280) of how the Society organized his reunion with Merleau-Ponty. Contat and Rybalka, Les E´crits de Sartre: chronologie, bibliographie commente´e (Paris, 1970), p. 299. 85. REO 1: p. 243. 86. Ibid., pp. 243, 246. 87. Ibid., p. 248. 88. Ibid., pp. 257– 8. 89. Ibid., p. 257. 90. Ibid., pp. 255, 256. 91. Ibid., p. 262. 92. Sartre, Jean-Paul,‘Marksizm i egzystencjalizm’, Two´rczos´c´ 14:4 (1957), pp. 34, 47 – 8. 93. Ibid., pp. 41 – 2. 94. Sartre made this point more forcefully in the reworked French version of the essay that later appeared in Les Temps modernes. 95. Ronald Hayman has pointed out that Sartre had already expressed an interest in ‘living Marxism’ in February in his defence of Pierre Herve´, who had been expelled from the PCF that month for criticizing its rigidity and lack of democratic procedures. The exchange with Ristic´ therefore came at the right time in shaping Sartre’s ideas on how to get Marxism moving again. Hayman, Ronald, Writing Against: a Biography of Sartre (London, 1986), pp. 321– 2.

NOTES 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

TO PAGES

115 –118

257

REO 1: p. 264. Ibid., pp. 292, 294. Ibid., pp. 294– 5. Ibid., pp. 284– 6. Ibid., p. 284. ASEC, Rass stampa 6 f. 2, Rassegna Sovietica, Rome, March/April 1956, press cutting. Ristic´, Marko, ‘Razgovor sa D. Adamovic´em’, reprinted in Ristic´, Marko, Politicˇka Knijizˇevnost (za ovu jugoslaviju) 1944– 1958 (Sarajevo, 1977), pp. 276– 7, 282. The interview originally appeared in NIN-u IV:275 (1956) under the title ‘Literarna koegzistencija’. It included excerpts of Ristic´’s interventions at the Dialogue taken from Comprendre. ASEC, Rass stampa 6 f. 2, (Alan Pryce-Jones) ‘Highbrows Confer: When the Iron Curtain Rose a Few Inches’, Times Literary Supplement 28.04.1956, press cutting. Silone, Ignazio, ‘Agenda’, Tempo presente 5 (1956), pp. 358 –9. Spender, Stephen, ‘Notes from a Diary’, Encounter 6:6 (1956), pp. 64, 65. This appraisal conflicts with his fictionalized account of the meeting in his novella Engaged in Writing, published in Encounter in the summer of 1957. It was appreciatively reviewed by the TLS. See Burns Singer, James, ‘Brief Encounters’, Times Literary Supplement 2893, 09.08.1957, p. 482. CE 1956– 9, Comprendre 17/18, p. 277; ASEC, Stephen Spender Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Spender 17.12.1956’. ASEC, Spender Papers, ‘Spender-Campagnolo 23.12.1956’. Ibid., ‘Campagnolo-Spender, 27.12.1956’; ‘Spender-Campagnolo 31.12.1956’, pp. 1–2. ‘Spender-Campagnolo 31.12.1956’, p. 2. Spender, ‘Notes’, p. 65. IACF/II/280/5, ‘Josselson-de Rougemont 15.11.1955’. Gre´mion: Intelligence, pp. 391, 494. IACF/II/4/2, Jelenski, Konstantin, ‘Report on a Meeting with Soviet Intellectuals Organized by the Socie´te´ Europe´enne de Culture, Venice’, p. 1. Jelenski: ‘Report’, p. 4. IACF/II/4/2, ‘CE 24.04.1956’, pp. 3 – 6. Ibid., p. 7; Jelenski: ‘Report’, p. 6. CCF: ‘CE 24.04.1956’, pp. 4, 7. This meeting, although not publicly under the auspices of the CCF, was approved by its committee. Ibid., p. 3. IACF/II/4/2, ‘CE 03.10.1956’, p. 2. The FEIE was dedicated to the pursuit of what Pierre Gre´mion has named as four ‘ide´es-forces’ – the free circulation of people and ideas across Europe, assisting non-conformist artists in the East in breaking with Socialist Realism, encouraging ‘ideological disquiet’ in the East by fomenting anti-communist ‘politico-intellectual’ analyses and East– West meetings, and disabusing

258

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135.

NOTES

TO PAGES

119 –121

Western leftists, the Parisian left in particular, about the nature of Soviet-style communism. Gre´mion: Intelligence, pp. 475– 83, 493– 4. AG 1956– 9, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 309, 310. Ibid., pp. 307– 8. Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 314. Gerassi, John (ed., tran.), Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven, 2009), p. 167. The quotation is from an interview with Sartre from March 1972. Urbinati: ‘Liberalism’, pp. 585– 7. Ibid., p. 597. Urbinati: ‘Introduction: The Cold War’, p. 528. AG 1956– 9, pp. 316– 28. While it is difficult to verify that the lists in the archive record who actually attended as opposed to who agreed to come, Campagnolo’s comments after the meeting confirm that participation from Europe’s socialist countries was indeed high at the assembly. See CE 1956– 9, p. 377. The lists name Erich Arendt, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Brugsch, Paul Dessau, Heinrich Ehmsen, Arnold von Golssenau, Waldemar Grzimek, Stephan Hermlin, Peter Huchel, Herbert Jhering, Max Lingner, Gustav Seitz, and Arnold Zweig as committed to attending. Additionally, Mirko Deanovic´, Fran Kogoj, Grga Novak, and Marin Tartaglia from Yugoslavia appear to have come; from Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hoffmeister and Ladislav Rieger; from Hungary, Mate´ Major; from Poland Julius Starzyn´ski; and from the USSR, Alpatov, Ehrenburg, Fedin and Polevoi. ASEC, AG 1956, subfolder visiti, ‘Partecipanti stranieri alla VIa Assemblea Generale Ordinaria’, lists 1 and 2. We do know that both lists were sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) for visas. ASEC, AG 1956, subfolder 14 ‘visti’, ‘Ponti-Migone, Ministro Plenipotenziario, MAE Rome 10.09.1956’. Ibid., pp. 355– 61. Instead of peaceful coexistence, Ehrenburg offered ‘cocreation’ as a neologism best describing the relationship that should exist between intellectuals internationally. Ibid., p. 347. Ibid., p. 317. Ibid. Satterwhite, James H., Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, 1992), p. 4. http://www.richardmckeon.org/content/h-Responses/McK-SelectedWritings V1_GenIntro.pdf. He also collaborated with Havet on CIPSH’s ‘Study on the Origins of Fascism’. See Unesco Archives, Central Registry Collection, 329.18A53 CIPSH Study on the Origins of Fascism – part IV, ‘HavetMcKeon 28.06.[1949]’. Sympathetic to the idea of world federalism, McKeon also helped to draft the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution for the University of Chicago in March 1948. Wittner: One World or None, p. 67. Urbinati: ‘Liberalism’, pp. 590– 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 123 –126

259

Chapter 5 The Cold War ‘Crisis Years’ and the East– West Meetings 1958 –63 1. Be´ke´s, Csaba, Byrne, Malcolm, Rainer, Ja´nos M. (eds), The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: a History in Documents (Budapest, 2002), p. 13; Lendvai, Paul, One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its Legacy (tran.) Ann Major (Princeton, 2008), p. 21. 2. Lendvai: One Day, p. 89. The New Course, which had led to Nagy’s removal from power in 1955, had five policy strands: economically, an emphasis on consumer goods, housing and agriculture replacing the emphasis on heavy industry; the ending of forced collectivization in agriculture; reducing state bureaucracy and raising the nation’s standard of living; curbing the excesses of the police state; and creating the organizational framework for these policies to be introduced, including the independence of government institutions from the party. Be´ke´s: 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 5 –7, 13. 3. Ibid., pp. 121– 4; Be´ke´s: 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 213– 16. Egypt had been attacked in a co-ordinated Franco-British-Israeli assault on 30 October, initiating the Suez crisis. A withdrawal from Hungary could therefore be seen as Soviet weakness at a time when Western imperialism was on the march. 4. Ibid., p. 151. 5. Ibid., p. 180. 6. Ibid., p. 70; Be´ke´s: 1956 Hungarian Revolution, p. 170, n. 221. 7. Ibid., p. 154. ‘L’Appel des E´crivains hongrois’, in ‘Presence de la Culture: A propos des e´ve´nements de Hongrie’, Comprendre 17/18, p. 186. 8. Ibid., p. 183. 9. ‘Un Manifeste des Intellectuels Hongrois’, in ‘Presence de la culture: A propos des e´ve´nements de Hongrie’, Comprendre 17/18, p. 186. 10. Lendvai: One Day, p. 183. 11. Ibid. 12. ‘Pre´sence de la culture: options politiques de l’homme de culture’, Comprendre 12, pp. 167–75. 13. ‘Denis de Rougemont aux Membres du Mouvement pour la Liberte´ de la culture’, ‘Pre´sence de culture’, Comprendre 17/18, p. 193. 14. ‘Correspondences’, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 448, 461, 464. 15. ‘Jan Romein-Campagnolo’, 28.11.1956, in Ibid., p. 450. On the turbulence within the PEN Club, the CNE, and the WPC, see ‘Pre´sence de culture’, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 196, 197– 201. 16. ‘Declaration de Giovanni Ponti’, ‘Pre´sence de culture’, Comprendre 17/18, p. 191. 17. ‘Lettre du Secretaire ge´ne´ral aux membres de la Socie´te´, 18.11.1956’, ‘Correspondence’, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 440– 1. 18. Membres norve´giens, Oslo, 30.11.1956, ‘Correspondences’, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 452 –3.

260

NOTES

TO PAGES

126 –128

19. CE 1957– 1, Comprendre 17/18, p. 430. The councillors attending the Paris meeting were Amrouche, Aveline, Babel, Be´darida, Bobbio, Buchanan, Carner, Cranston, Desonay, de Zie´gler, Dubarle, Ferrari-Toniolo, Forlati Tamaro Havet, Lescure, Mayoux, Mucchi, Mueller, Paeschke, Philippart, Ponti, Pryce-Jones, Roy, Sprigge, Ungaretti and Wahl. 20. Ibid., pp. 431–2. The Norwegians, finding the declaration ‘too neutral’, sent in their group resignation that March. ‘Deuxie`me letter des membres norve´giens, Oslo, 14.03.1957’, ‘Pre´sence de la culture’, Comprendre 17/18, p. 476. 21. CE 1957– 7, Comprendre 19, p. 297. 22. Ibid., p. 307; CE 1957– 11, Comprendre 19, pp. 318– 19. The chosen themes were the social and personal conditions of literary and artistic creation and the passage of a work from one cultural context to another (for example, Dostoyevsky in France; Matisse or Picasso in Russia). 23. CE 1957– 11, pp. 317– 18. 24. Ibid., p. 311. 25. Ibid., p. 325. 26. Ibid., pp. 326– 7, 333; Ignotus, Paul, Political Prisoner (London, 1959), unpaginated. 27. ASEC, Rapporti esterni 2, ‘Campagnolo-Leone Kapalet, VOKS, Western European Section, Moscow, 25.07.1957’; ‘Kapalet-Campagnolo 09.08.1957’. 28. Ibid., Bernal Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Bernal 03.12.1957’. 29. Ibid. ‘Bernal-Campangolo 12.12.1957’. 30. ASEC, AG7 – 1958, f. 6, ‘Inviti Incontro Est-Ovest’, ‘Campagnolo-Ivan Maksimovski [assistant head of VOKS] 28.11.1957’. 31. Ibid., ‘Inviti Incontro Est-Ovest’, ‘Maksimovski-Campagnolo 21.12.1958’; ‘Campagnolo-Maksimovski 15.02.1958’; ‘Campagnolo-Maksimovski 04.03.1958’. 32. ‘Maksimovski-Campagnolo 14.03.1958’. 33. From January 1950 through January 1954, Andreotti was an undersecretary to the President of the Council of Ministers, locating him, as Donald Sassoon has described it, ‘at the centre of government activities’. (Sassoon, Donald, ‘Obituaries: Giulio Andreotti’, The Guardian 07.05.2013, p. 40.) After one month as Minister of Interior, he re-entered the cabinet in July 1955 as Finance Minister, moving to the Treasury under Fanfani’s government of July 1958. http://www.governo.it/Governo/Governi/governi.html. Accessed 01.10.2011. 34. ASEC, Ceschi Papers, f. 1, ‘Campagnolo-Ceschi 15.01.1957’; Mammarella, Giuseppe, L’Italia Contemporanea 1943–1998 (Bologna, 1998), pp. 239, 245–9. 35. Ibid., ‘Campagnolo-Ceschi 05.06.1957 and 15.06.1957’; ‘Ceschi-Campagnolo 17.06.1957’. In 1958, Aldo Moro and Nicola De Pirro seem to have weighed in on the Society’s behalf. ASEC, Ponti Papers, ‘Ceschi-Ponti 02.05.1958’. 36. ASEC, Havet Papers, ‘Havet-Campagnolo 02.09.1958’, p. 1. 37. ASEC, AG7 – 1958, f. 6, ‘Inviti Incontro Est-Ovest’, ‘Campagnolo-Ivan Morozov 16.04.1958’.

NOTES

TO PAGES

129 –131

261

38. Ibid., ‘Inviti Incontro Est-Ovest’, ‘Campagnolo- Michajlov 21.04.1958’; ‘Campagnolo-Maksimovski 30.04.1958’. 39. Ibid., ‘Campagnolo-Morozov 16.04.1958’, ‘Campagnolo-Michajlov 21.04.1958’, p. 2. 40. ‘Campagnolo-Michajlov 21.04.1958’, p. 2. 41. ASEC, Nadjm Oud-Dine Bammate Papers, ‘Pro-memoria sulla conversazione avuta con il Sig. Bammate April 1958’; ‘Bammate-Campagnolo 27.06.1958’. 42. Ibid. Lewis Mumford Papers, f. 1949–67, ‘Mumford-Campagnolo 29.04.1957’. 43. Ibid. Mumford Papers, f. 1949– 67, ‘Mumford-Campagnolo 25.07.1949, 05.08.1953’; ‘Campagnolo-Mumford 24.06.1952, 05.08.1953, 23.06.1954’. 44. ASEC, Mumford Papers, f. 1949– 67, ‘Mumford-Campagnolo 31.05.1957’. 45. ‘Campagnolo-Mumford 15.06.1957’. 46. CE 1953– 1, pp. 12, 15 – 16. 47. Ibid., p. 16, CE 1953 –4, p. 25. The council’s interpretation is borne out by the statistics. US Americans only made up a total of just under 4.5 per cent of the SEC’s overall membership during the period covered in this study. The largest recruitment from the United States came in the years 1957 and 1958, after Campagnolo’s trip. In those years, it attracted 11 and 10 new members, respectively. 48. Campagnolo visited the universities of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard and McGill. CE 1957– 11, p. 312. 49. CE 1958– 4, Comprendre 19, p. 337. 50. ASEC, John Luther Adams Papers, ‘Adams-Campagnolo 08.10.1957’. 51. Mumford was central to the organization of these meetings. ASEC, Mumford Papers, f.1949–67, ‘Campagnolo-Mumford 20.09.1957, 15.10.1957’; ‘Mumford-Campagnolo 02.07.1957, 18.08.1957, 13.09.1957; 03.11.1957’. 52. ‘Lettre aux members de la Socie´te´ 22.07.1957’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 19, p. 353. 53. For a list of those invited, see ASEC, IN. SP. 3, ‘II Incontro Est-Ovest: Personnalite´s invitees dont la presence est particulierement souhaite´e et qui n’ont pas encore confirme leur venue’ and the untitled document ‘sciences – ouest’, and ‘Uomini di cultura invitati al II8 Incontro Est-Ouest che si terra` a Venezia del 22 al 29 agosto 1958’. Those who declined outright were Max Born, Maurice Bowra, Jacob Bronowski, Cyrus Eaton, Walther Gerlach, Graham Greene, Romano Guardini, Trevor Huddleston, Aldous Huxley, Gyo¨rgy Luka´cs, Louis Leprince-Ringuet, Robert Oppenheimer, Boris Pasternak, Francis Perrin, V. S. Pritchett, Bertrand Russell, Martiros Sarjan and Aleksandr Topchiev. IN. SP. 3, ‘II Incontro Est-Ovest’. 54. RIG, L’Homme et l’atome (Neuchaˆtel, 1958), pp. 9– 10. 55. Griffith, Sabina, ‘Two Weeks in September, 1958: Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva’, Iter Newsline 47, 0109.2008, http://www.iter.org/newsline/47/ 680. Accessed 24.03.2013. 56. Rotblat, Joseph: Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conferences (Cambridge MA, 1972), pp. xvii– xviii.

262

NOTES TO PAGES 131 –133

57. AG 1958– 8, Comprendre 20, pp. 270–81, 291, 308. 58. Ibid., pp. 249– 50. In the end, Unesco did support the meeting. ‘CampagnoloHavet 11.06.1958’. 59. SEC, Bureau de Presse, ‘Conclusion des travaux de la VIIe Assemble´e ge´ne´rale et de la IIe Rencontre Est-Ouest a` Venice’, p. 1. 60. Applications were made for the following people, from a shortlist of 84: Adolf Hoffmeister and Miroslav Micˇko (Czechoslovakia); Theodor Brugsch, Paul Dessau, Heinrich Ehmsen, Waldemar Grzimek, Stephan Hermlin, Wolfgang Steinitz and Arnold Zweig (East Germany); Tibor Kardos, Maurizio Korach, Mate´ Major, Michele Andrea Ronai and Szabo (Hungary); Stanislas Dygat, Alexander Gieysztor, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jan Parandowski, Michał Rusinek and Jerzy Zawieyski (Poland); Mihail Ralea (Romania); Mikhail Alpatov, Nikolai (?) Nekrassov and Boris Polevoi (Soviet Union). Mirko Deanovic´, Fran Kogoj, Grga Novak, Marko Ristic´ and Marino Tartaglia (Yugoslavia). A visa was also requested for Sao-Feng Wu (China). ASEC, AG7 – 1958, Incontro Est-Ovest inviti f. 11: Visas, ‘Lista degli invitati appartenenti a paesi dell’Est Europeo (16.07)’; ‘Lista dei partecipanti per i quali e` richiesta la concessione del visto’; CE 1958– 8, p. 232. 61. ASEC, Rass stampa 8 f. 4, press cutting, Tedeschi, Rubens, ‘Impedito l’incontro Est-Ovest degli intellettuali Sequestrata una lettera dei parlamentari del PCI’, L’Unita` (Milan) 26.08.1958. 62. ‘Telegram: Ehrenbourg, Alpatov, Polevoi-Campagnolo 13.08.1958’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 20, p. 368. Visa problems were behind the trip’s failure. ASEC, AG7 – 1958, f. 6: Incontro Est-Ovest inviti, ‘CampagnoloLeonid Morosov [attache´, USSR Embassy, Rome] 16.06.1958’; ASEC, Ceschi Papers, f. 2, ‘Campagnolo-Ceschi 31.07.1958’. A further communication from Ehrenburg indicates that Hungary was also a strong, albeit unacknowledged impetus behind the Soviet withdrawal. ‘Ehrenburg-Campagnolo 02.09.1958’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 20, pp. 369– 70. 63. CE 1959– 1, Comprendre 20, p. 351. 64. ASEC, Ristic´ Papers, ‘Ristic´-Campagnolo 04.08.1958’; Vercors Papers, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 11.08.1958’; Bernal Papers, ‘Bernal-Campagnolo 12.08.1958’; Iwaszkiewicz Papers, ‘Iwaszkiewicz-Campagnolo 25.08.1958’. 65. Ibid., Vercors Papers, ‘Vercors-Campagnolo 29.07.1958’. 66. de Beauvoir: Force of Circumstance, pp. 435– 6. A regular visitor to Venice, Sartre was there for the second half of June. Clearly he did not meet with Campagnolo. Ibid., p. 415. 67. AG 1958– 8, pp. 323– 4. 68. Ibid., pp. 325– 6. 69. Ibid., pp. 324– 5. 70. Ibid., pp. 346– 7. 71. ASEC, Rass stampa 8 f. 4, untitled list of press coverage. The list in the archive notes only two pieces on the assembly appearing in Britain, seven in France, one in Germany, two in Holland, two in Belgium, one in Spain

NOTES

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

TO PAGES

133 –138

263

and four in Switzerland. Coverage of the East – West Meeting was far worse. According to the list for it, 12 Italian papers, three French and one Swiss paper covered it. ASEC, Rass stampa 8 f. 4, ‘II8 Convegno Est-Ovest 1958’. Ibid., anon., ‘Censura per intellettuali’, L’Unita` (Milan), 30.08.1958. Ibid., Donini, Ambrogio, ‘Il Congresso della SEC: Le vere ragioni di un dialogo mancato’, Rinascita 08.1958. Ibid. Ibid. CE 1959– 1, p. 350; IACF/II/172/5, ‘G. B. Angioletti-CCF 03.11.1960’; G. B. Angioletti, Pour une Union des Ecrivains europe´ens, Naples, Oct. 1958, pp. 1 – 2. Cataluccio, Francesco, ‘Pre´sence de culture: La SEC et la “COMES”, Comprendre 25, p. 154. CE 1959– 1, p. 350. Hershberg: ‘Crisis Years’, p. 303; Hanhima¨ki: ‘De´tente in Europe’, p. 201. Ibid., p. 303. Conquest, Robert, Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair: a documentary report on its literary and political significance (London, 1961), pp. 90 – 3. Appendix IV, ‘Text of the Resolution of the Union of Soviet Writers, expelling Pasternak’, in ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 91. CE 1959– 1, pp. 355– 6. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Lettre addresse´e aux Membres de la Socie´te´ a` l’issue de la session du Conseil exe´cutif de janvier 1959, Venise, 22.01.1959’, Comprendre 20, p. 378. The text was drawn up by Campagnolo, Desonay, Donini and Mayoux. CE 1959–1, p. 362. ‘Bobbio-Campagnolo 25.01.1959’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 20, p. 379; CE 1959– 1, p. 354. ‘Polevoi-Secretariat 17.02.1959’, ‘Polevoi-Secretariat 16.03.1959’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 21/2, p. 387. ‘Ehrenburg-Secretariat 17.03.1959’, ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 21/2, p. 389. CE 1959– 3, Comprendre 21/2, pp. 356– 7. Ibid. – 11, Comprendre 21/2, pp. 377, 380. Ibid., pp. 376– 7. Silone, Ignazio, ‘Agenda: Il dialogo difficile’, Tempo presente IV:8 (1959), pp. 594 –5. Ibid., ‘Discussione: Con chi dialogare?’, Tempo presente IV:9 –10 (1959), pp. 758 –9. CE 1963 – 10, Comprendre 26/7, p. 247. From the West, Angelos Angelopoulos, Armand Lunel, Nathaniel Tarn and Georges Te´ne´kide`s were also elected. At the Ninth General Assembly, the Executive Council was as follows: James Luther Adams, Alpatov, Ivo Andric´, Angelos Angelopoulos,

264

95.

96.

97. 98. 99.

NOTES TO PAGE 138 Maria Luisa Astaldi, Claude Aveline, Babel, oud-Dine Bammate, Bernal, Bobbio, Axel Boethius, Ivan Boldizsa´r, Leendert P. J. Braat, George Buchanan, Campagnolo, Jose´ Carner, Ceschi, Maurice Cranston, Franz Theodor Csokor, Deanovic´, Fernand Desonay, de Zie´gler, Donini, Dominique Dubarle, Ehrenburg, Ferrari-Toniolo, Erich Feldmann, Forlati Tamaro, Francesco Franceshini, Gerhard Funke, Alessandro Galante Garrone, Havet, Ignotus, Iwaszkiewicz, Vladimir Iankelevich, Jemolo, Kardos, Lacroix, Viktor Lazarev, Lescure, Armand Lunel, Gino Luzzato, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Alfred Marchionini, Mauriac, Mayoux, McKeon, Mı´cˇko, Angelo Monteverdi, Morra, Mucchi, Mueller, Mumford, Gabit Musrepov, Jacques Nantet, Mirko Nova´k, Marianne Orgels-Stoumon, Jan Parandowski, Simone Pe´rier, Louis Philippart, Piovene, Polevoi, Adolf Portmann, Pryce-Jones, Hans Redeker, Hans Rheinfelder, Claude Roy, W. J. H. B. Sandberg, Adam Schaff, Herbert Schneider, Seghers, John Smith, Sylvia Sprigge, Jan Szczepan´ski, Nathaniel Tarn, Georges Te´ne´kide`s, Terracini, Arnold Toynbee, Tursi, Ungaretti, Valeri, Magda van Emde Boas, Veillon, Fernand Verhesen, Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, Wahl, Bernard Wall, Leopoldo Zea, Stefan Z˙o´lkiewski and Georges Zongolopoulos. AG 1963– 10, Comprendre 26/7, pp. 339– 40. Vladimir Georgiev, Zolta´n Horva´th, Iwaszkiewicz, Jorgu Jordan, Marijan Matkovic´, Erik Molna´r, Mirko Nova´k, Ristic´, Jerzy Sawicki, Schaff, Endre Sik and Ludvı´k Svoboda all endorsed the event. ‘Correspondences’, Comprendre 25, pp. 224 –35. CE 1961– 7, Comprendre 23/4, p. 342. As Campagnolo pointed out, this was not true: Ehrenburg had been asked to, and did draw up a list of Soviet nonSEC members to be invited, and the Soviet state had already agreed to pay the costs for its national participants. AG 1961– 3, Comprendre 23/4, p. 301. CE 1960– 7, Comprendre 23/4, p. 217; CE 1961– 7, p. 342. AG 1961– 3, p. 300. ‘Correspondance’, Comprendre 25, pp. 224– 5. It was envisaged as having between 60 and 80 participants, two-thirds of them should come from the West, and one-third from the East. CE 1962– 1, Comprendre 25, p. 190. The agreed list was as follows: from Austria, Ernst Fischer, Robert Jungk and Hans Thirring; from Belgium, J. Aronstein, Ze´non Bacq, Jean Brachet, Paul Brien, Julien Kuypers and Jacques Leclercq; from Brazil, Paulo E. De Berreˆdo Carneiro, Josue´ de Castro and Candido Portinari; from Britain, Isaiah Berlin, J. D. Bernal, Patrick M. S. Blackett, Benjamin Britten, Edward Hallet Carr, T. S. Eliot, Dennis Gabor, Julian Huxley, Rosamund Lehmann, Henry Moore, Michael Polanyi, Joseph Rotblatt, Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee; from Bulgaria, Vladimir Georgiev; from Canada, Wilfred C. Smith; from Chile, Pablo Neruda; from Czechoslovakia, Lumir Cˇivrny, Hoffmeister, Jirı´ Kotalı´k, Nova´k and Ludvik Svoboda; from Denmark, Niels Bohr and Bernard Peters; from Finland, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, Emil Zilliacus; from France, Claude Autant-Lara, Hubert Beuve-Me´ry, Jean Cassou, Louis de Broglie, Georges Friedmann, Bertrand Goldschmidt, Jean Hyppolite, Alfred Kastler, Antoine

NOTES

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

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139 –140

265

M. B. Lacassagne, Charles Lapicque, Andre´ Lichnerowicz, Jean Lurcat, Mauriac, Daniel Mayer, Andre´ Mazon, Francis Perrin, Francois Perroux, Sartre, Laurent Schwartz; from Germany (East and West): Adorno, Heinrich Bo¨ll, Ernst Bloch, Joseph Bochenski, Brugsch, Emil Dovifat, Walter Gerlach, Stephan Hermlin, Alfred Marchionini, Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Rosbaud, Alexander Ru¨stow, Carl Schmid, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker and F. Weckert; from Greece, Angelos Angelopoulos, Konstantinos Tsatsos and A. Tsirintanes; from Holland, G. J. P. Cammelbeek, Anton Levien Constandse, B. M. Delfgauw, M. F. Flothuis, Bart Landheer, W. H. Nagel, B. V. A. Roeling, and W. F. Wertheim; from Hungary, Aure´l Berna´th, Zolta´n Horva´th, Gyula Illye´s, Lajos Ja´nossy, Louis Kassa´k and Luka´cs; from Italy, Edoardo Amaldi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Gilberto Bernardini, Carlo Bo, Daniel Bovet, Guido Calogero, Aldo Capitini, Giacomo Devoto, Francesco Flora, Igino Giordani, Renato Guttuso, Jemolo, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Ettore Pancini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giovanni Polvani, Salvatore Quasidmodo, Luigi Salvatorelli, Beniamino Segre, Ungaretti, Luchino Visconti, Cesare Zavattini; from Mexico, Alfaro David Siqueiros and Leopoldo Zea; from Norway, Johannes Galtung and Alf Sommerfelt; from Poland, Jan Blonsky, Iwaszkiewicz, Jan Parandowski, Jerzy Sawicki and Adam Schaff; from Portugal, Ferreira de Castro and Vieira da Silva; from Romania, Jorgu Jordan, Mihail Ralea, Alexandru Rosetti and Tudor Vianu; from the Soviet Union, Alpatov, Nikolai Baian, Viktor Chlovski, Ilya Ehrenburg, Evgeni Evtushenko, A. Gontcharov, Sergei Iutkevich, Tikhon Khrennikov, Viktor Lazarev, Vera Panova, Polevoi, Feododrev Sedov, Nikolaı¨ Semenov, Aleksandr Smirnov, Gregori Chukhrai and A. P. Vinogradov; from Spain, Pablo Casals, J. Corominas, Julia´n Marı´as and Pablo Picasso; from Sweden, Axel Bothius, Torsten Gustafson and Alf Lombard; from Switzerland, Karl Barth, Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt, Hans Erni, Max Frisch, Carola Gide´on-Welcker, Fernand Gonseth, Le Corbusier, Frank Martin, Max Petitpierre, Adolf Portmann and Leopold Ruzicka; from Turkey, Nazim Hikmet; from the United States, James Luther Adams, Hans Bethe, Donald Brennan, Paul Doty, B. T. Feld, Lewis Mumford, Robert Oppenheimer, Isidor I. Rabi, Euge`ne Rabinowitch, Ben Shahn, Louis B. Sohn, J. Wigner and C. Wright Mills; from Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric´, Miroslav Krleza, Ristic´, Josip Vidmar and Josip Vilfan. Ibid., pp. 225– 35. CE 1962– 7, Comprendre 25, pp. 197–8. Ibid., pp. 198– 9. Hershberg: ‘Crisis Years’, p. 319; CE 1963– 7, Comprendre 26/7, p. 235. CE 1963– 7, p. 235. London, Marx Memorial Library, J. D. Bernal Peace Collection, J. D. Bernal WPC Speeches Statements Articles, 1958– 65: Bernal, J. D.: ‘Memorandum on the Structure, Organisation and Working Methods of the World Council of Peace’, 1965, pp. 2 – 3. Ibid., pp. 1 – 4. He referred here specifically to the peace movements in the ‘imperialist countries’ Britain, the United States and West Germany.

266

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140 –144

107. LSE/CND/2008/22/8/1, ‘Proposals made in the Commissions of the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace’ (undated typescript), p. 4. 108. LSE/Bernal/WCP Bulletins 1961– 3 (uncatalogued), Bernal, J. D., ‘Lessons of the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace’, Bulletin of the World Council of Peace 9 (1962), p. 1. 109. CE 1962– 7, p. 199; CE 1963– 1, Comprendre 26/7, p. 219. 110. London, Marx Memorial Library, J. D. Bernal Peace Collection, J. D. Bernal WPC Speeches Statements Articles, 1958– 1965: Bernal, J. D., ‘Culture and the Cold War’ 04.12.1962 [handwritten date], p. 18. 111. Ibid., pp. 18 – 20. 112. AG 1958– 8/REO 2, pp. 256– 7. 113. Ibid., p. 265. 114. Ibid., p. 266. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Questions de me´thode (I)’, Les Temps modernes 139 (1957), 340, pp. 348– 9. Here Campagnolo directly quoted ‘Questions de me´thode’, where Sartre warned that a monolithic philosophy (or, to use Sartre’s terms, a totalized philosophy, such as scientific socialism) that, representing the interests of only ‘one or a group of men’ was incapable of sustaining a living praxis that served the multiple interests of all those who actually lived Marxism equally. 115. AG 1958– 8/REO 2, pp. 268– 9. 116. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘N’est pas marxiste qui veut: Notes a` une lecture de Question (sic) de Me´thode de Jean-Paul Sartre’, Comprendre 23 – 4, p. 201. 117. Ibid., p. 203. Importantly, Sartre’s discussion of the project in ‘Questions de me´thode’ focused on the capacity of the individual, more broadly conceived, for self-determination (he merely described this at one point as an instance of ‘human creativity’, and as a basic human faculty, within everyone’s reach). For Campagnolo, creativity was a key feature of this dialectical process, best suited to men of culture. Sartre: ‘Questions de me´thode (I)’, pp. 402–17, especially p. 408. 118. Ibid., p. 206. 119. Ibid., pp. 206, 207. 120. Ibid., p. 203. 121. Ibid. 122. AG 1961– 3, Comprendre 23/4, p. 259. 123. Ibid., pp. 265– 6. 124. Ibid., p. 270. 125. Ibid., p. 275. 126. Ibid., pp. 278– 9. 127. Ce´saire, Mercer Cook, Cyrus Eaton, Rabemananjara, Senghor were all invited, the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations Abroad, Peking, was also contacted for Chinese observers. See ASEC, AG8 1961, f. 1, Convocazione. For the intended Brazilian and Indian participation, see f. 2, Organizzazione, ‘Promemoria per il Professore [Campagnolo] 25.01.1961’. 128. AG 1961– 3, p. 288. See, for example, AG 1961– 3, Donini, pp. 282– 3; Frumkin, pp. 284– 5; Ehrenburg, p. 288; Mayoux, p. 289; Ruyssen, p. 290;

NOTES

129.

130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135.

136.

TO PAGES

144 –147

267

Clancier, pp. 291– 2; Terracini, pp. 293– 4; Parandowski, p. 295; Rusinek, Zbinden, Mı´cˇko, p. 297. They got their way: the final communique´ rejected the manifesto’s vision of the SEC’s future, affirming that ‘the pursuit of dialogue between men of culture of all countries of the world should remain at the centre of [the SEC’s] preoccupations’. Assemblies and special initiatives such as the East-West meetings and the African colloquium should therefore be held when ‘the situation demands it.’ AG 1961– 3, p. 336. Arthur, Paige, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London, 2010), p. xv. She suggests that his engagement with them was sequential (ibid., p. 241), yet it is argued here that his discussion of colonialism and communism were closely connected since the 1940s. WPC: World Assembly, p. 221. Arthur: Unfinished Projects, p. xxii. See Sonia Kruks on the symmetry between Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason in ‘Fanon, Sartre and Identity Politics’, in Gordon, Lewis R. T., Sharpley-Whiting, Denean and White, Rene´e T. (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1999), esp. pp. 132–3. It is well-known that Fanon was a passionate if critical adherent of Sartre, demanding further attention from him to the Algerian cause. See de Beauvoir: Force of Circumstance, p. 596. On Senghor’s engagement with ‘Questions de me´thode’, see Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar, Nationhood and the African Road to Socalism, (tran.) Mercer Cook (Paris, 1964), pp. 55 – 6. Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 2004), p. 164. Arthur: Unfinished Projects, p. xxii. See Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics: from Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago, 1993), pp. 112– 28. The symmetry between the struggles in Eastern Europe and the Third World was also noted in ‘Questions de me´thode (I)’, pp. 405 –6. Arthur: Unfinished Projects, pp. xix, xxii.

Chapter 6 The Cultures of Black Africa and of the West Colloquium (1960), the World Association of Culture (1962) and their Aftermath 1. Katsakioris, Constantin, ‘L’Union sovie´tique et les intellectuels africains: Internationalisme, panafricanisme et negritude pendant les anne´es de la decolonisation, 1954–1964’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 47:1–2 (2006), pp. 19, 21. 2. Ibid., p. 22. 3. Unesco Archives, AG8, X07–23, Relations with NGOs – part XIV, Executive Board, Fiftieth Session, ‘Review of the List of Non-Governmental Organisations admitted to consultative arrangements and evaluation of their relations with Unesco’, 28.03.1958, 50 EX/24 – Annex III Appendix 98, pp. 1–2.

268

NOTES

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147 –151

4. Ibid., p. 3; Unesco Archives, Registry files 008 (44) MP3 – part VI, ‘HavetCampagnolo 24.06.1958’, p. 1. The SEC participated in one of Unesco’s preparatory commissions for a study of cultural relations between the ‘old and new world’ in 1953, in 1955 it received a subvention from it to undertake a study of the classical humanist heritage in contemporary civilization. The results were published in ‘La paix par la culture’, Comprendre 16, pp. 129– 200. 5. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 20.07.1955’; ‘Campagnolo-Diop 28.07.1955’; ‘F. Roptin (Pre´sence africaine)-Campagnolo 12.12.1957’; ‘Campagnolo-Roptin 16.12.1957’. 6. Diop quoted the recently deceased Maydieu here. Diop, ‘L’Afrique’, in ‘Le Pe`re Maydieu’, La Vie Intellectuelle 27:1956, p. 151; AG 1954– 10, Comprendre 13/14, pp. 234– 5. 7. CE 1956– 4, p. 270. 8. The request was made by Amrouche, Aveline, Bobbio, Mayoux and Roy. CE 1956– 4, pp. 270– 81. 9. AG 1956–9, p. 300. On Fung’s intellectual background, his work and his relationship with the Party, see Lee, Robert H. G., ‘Fung Yu-Lan: a Biographical Portrait’, The China Quarterly 14 (1963), pp. 141–52. The ‘hundred flowers’ campaign, beginning in May 1956, lasted less than a year. 10. See their respective essays in ‘Accords et de´saccords’, Comprendre 17/18, pp. 100 –13. 11. AG 1956– 9, p. 340. 12. Ibid., p. 373. 13. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Congre`s des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, Pre´sence africaine-Campagnolo 11.10.1956’. 14. Pre´sence africaine, n. s. 8 – 10 (1956), p. 408. 15. Editorial, ‘Apre`s le Congre`s’, Pre´sence africaine, n. s. 11 (1956/57), p. 4. 16. While Campagnolo was too busy to be involved in the second Black Writers and Artists Congress, the theme of which was ‘The Unity and Responsibilities of Black Culture’, he did send a message of support. In it he acknowledged the SEC’s solidarity with their project, and reinforced the need for respect and intercultural understanding, if humanity as a whole were to ‘pursue its creative work’. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 16.03.1959 and 23.03.1959’. 17. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Diop-Campagnolo 16.09.1958 and 17.11.1958’; ‘Campagnolo-Diop 18.09.1958 and 10.11.1958’. 18. Diop had also proposed K. A. Busia, S. O. Biobaku, Onwunka Dike, Danquah, Edouard Glissant, George Lamming, T. O. Elias, Mercer Cook, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes as participants. CE 1959– 3, pp. 353, 355. 19. On Mauriac’s opposition to French conduct in North Africa, see Welch, Edward, Francois Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (New York, 1994), pp. 93 – 132; Chalaye, Ge´rard, ‘Vers un empire spiritual. Le Bloc-notes en dialogue avec le Tiers-Monde (1952 – 1962)’, in Durand, Jean-Francois and Dye´, Michel (eds), Mauriac dans les combats du sie`cle (Paris, 2010), pp. 45 – 75. 20. CE 1959– 3, p. 354.

NOTES

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269

21. Ibid. – 11, p. 381. 22. Katsakioris: ‘L’Union sovie´tique’, pp. 19, 21. 23. Ibid., p. 22. On Diop and Senghor’s anti-communism, see Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 59 – 61. 24. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, Incontro Occidente-Africa, f. 4, ‘Lettre d’invitation 13.01.1960’. 25. The invitees were: Peter Abrahams, Louis Achille, Edouard Adriantsilianarivo, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jean Amrouche, Louis Aragon, V. Arangio Ruiz, [illegible] Ball, Karl Barth, O. Bassir, Pierce Beaver, Mongo Beti, Hubert Beuve-Me´ry, A. Beville, S. O. Biobaku, M. Biyidi, Ernst Bloch, Desmond Buckle, K. A. Busia, Ferreira de Castro, Josue´ de Castro, Emilio Cecchi, Aime´ Ce´saire, Mercer Cook, Maurice Cranston, Bernard Dadie, Jean Danielou, Gabriel d’Arboussier, [J. B.] Danquah, Nicol Davidson, William Demby, Alois Dempf, Henri De Lubac, Fernand Desonay, Abdoulaye Diallo, Onwuka Dike, Cheikh Anta Diop, David Diop, Thomas Diop, Jean Domenach, St. Clair Drake, Pe`re Dubarle, W. E. B. du Bois, Georges Duhamel, Ilya Ehrenburg, T. O. Elias, T. S. Eliot, Ben Enwonwu, Aldo Ferrabino, Keita Fodeba, F. Frazier, Georges Friedmann, Edouard Glissant, Graham Greene, Petar Guberina, Abbas Gueye, Renato Guttuso, S. Hampate Ba, F. Houphoue¨t Boigny, Trevor Huddleston, Langston Hughes, Julian Huxley, Rolf Italiaander, Marcus James, Arturo Carlo Jemolo, J. C. de Graft Johnson, Seydou Kouyate, George Lamming, Giorgio La Pira, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss, Carlo Levi, Walter Lippmann, Andre´ Malraux, Rene´ Maran, Gregorio Maran˜on y Posadillo, Louis Martin-Chauffier, Louis Massignon, Francois Mauriac, Andre´ Maurois, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Antonio Messineo, Alberto Moravia, Ezekiel Mphalele, Lewis Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Niemoller, Nkrumah, Ferdinand Oyono, Mirko Nova´k, Alan Paton, Guido Piovene, I. I. Potekhin, Jean Price Mars, J. B. Priestley, Salvatore Quasimodo, Jacques Rabemananjara, Razakarivony, Claude Roy, Le´onard Sainville, Luigi Salvatorelli, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Schweitzer, Ge´rard Sekoto, Serwan-Schreiber, Wilfred C. Smith, Sylvia Sprigge, Paul Tillich, Jaime Torres Bodet, Se´kou Toure´, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Bernard Wall, W. F. Wertheim, Richard Wright, Vittorino Veronese and Arnold Zweig. These names are taken from the four undated lists held in the ASEC, IN. SP. 4‘ Incontro Occidente-Africa’, f. 3. 26. De Castro was president of the FAO (the UN’s body for Agriculture and Alimentation) from 1952 to 1956. He founded the Centre for International Development in Paris in 1965. Magda Zanoni, ‘Josue´ de Castro: actualite´ d’une pense´e’, Natures Sciences Socie´te´s 18, 2010, pp. 37, 40. 27. Calandri, Elena, ‘Europa e mediterraneo tra giustappisizione e integrazione’, in de Leonardis, Massimo (ed.), Il Mediterraneo nella politica estera italiana del second dopoguerra (Bologna, 2003), p. 48. 28. Ibid., p. 55; Tosi, Luciano: ‘L’Italia e la cooperazione internazionale nel mediterraneo: aspirazioni, interessi nazionali e realta` internazionale’, in Leonardis: Il Mediterraneo, pp. 174– 5, 201.

270

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152 –155

29. Tosi: ‘L’Italia e la cooperazione’, pp. 202–3. 30. According to La Pira, the colloquia were dedicated to the pursuit of a ‘united historical destiny’ that would include all of Africa on the grounds that there was an internal economic, political, cultural, social and religious ‘graft’ between it and the Mediterranean. ASEC, Giorgio La Pira Papers, Invitation au troise`me colloque me´diterrane´en (Florence, 1961), pp. 6 – 8. It should be noted that Tosi and Varsori have both located this new orientation toward the Mediterranean within the larger development of Neo-atlantic politics in Italy. Not only did it carve out a unique role for Italy in Europe, it also strengthened Italy’s bilateral relationship with the United States, which was intent on inhibiting the growth of communism in Africa and the Middle East. Varsori: ‘Europeismo mediterraneita`’, pp. 30 – 2; Tosi: ‘L’Italia e la cooperazione’, p. 179. 31. ASEC, IN. SP. 4,‘ Incontro Occidente-Africa’, f. 1, ‘Sindaco, Roma-Ceschi 30.01.1960’. The Societa` Dante Alighieri is an international organization dedicated to promoting Italian language and culture abroad. http://www. dantealighieri-roma.it/gb/chisiamo.htm. Accessed 05.12.2011. 32. Ibid., f. 2, SEC 04.03.1960. In a letter to Charles Veillon, the Swiss industrialist, and member and patron of the SEC, Campagnolo noted that he, Ceschi and Ponti had undertaken meetings with Merzagora; Pella, at the time the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; as well as the private sponsors Cini and Olivetti. While none had indicated at that point how much they would contribute, Campagnolo concluded that ‘we can assume that the Italian government will cover the deficit’, and decided to go ahead with the colloquium. ASEC, Charles Veillon Papers, f. 1, ‘CampagnoloVeillon 30.01.1960’. 33. CANO, Comprendre 21/2, p. 172. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., pp. 174– 5. 36. Ibid., p. 189. De Castro was president of the FAO (the UN’s body for Agriculture and Alimentation) from 1952 to 1956. Zanoni, Magda: ‘Josue´ de Castro: actualite´ d’une pense´e’, Natures Sciences Socie´te´s 18 (2010), pp. 37, 40. 37. CANO: pp. 192, 193, 194, 195– 7. 38. Ibid., pp. 198– 9. 39. Ibid., p. 211. 40. See interventions by Potekhin, Senghor, Elias, Rabemananjara and Cheik Anta Diop. CANO: pp. 204– 5; 206; 208; 227; 228– 9 respectively. 41. Ibid., p. 212. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., pp. 215– 18. The original title of de Rougemont’s essay in French is ‘Le sens de nos vies ou l’Europe’. 44. Ibid., pp. 218– 19. The references to the camps were suppressed by Senghor in the published version. See IN. SP. 4, Incontro Occidente-Africa, f. 6, ‘L’Idealisation de l’europe’, p. 11.

NOTES 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

TO PAGES

155 –159

271

CANO: p. 217. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 216. He also pointed to the emergence of the British Commonwealth as a demonstration of a ‘spirit of cooperation’ throughout Africa. (ibid., p. 217). Ibid., pp. 223, 224. Ibid., pp. 224, 225. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., pp. 226– 7, 228, 230– 1. Ibid., pp. 236– 7. Dash, J. Michael, Edouard Glissant (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1 – 3, 10. For an analysis of relation theory, and how it evolved out of the break-up of the West’s universalizing project, see Britton, Celia M., Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (London, 1999), pp. 8, 11 – 34. She suggests that the 1960s were an important, early phase in this process. Glissant would be seminal to it, and the basic shape of his ideas, she argues, was already discernible in the 1950s. Ibid.: Edouard Glissant, p. 10. CANO: p. 186. Ibid., pp. 233– 4. Ibid., p. 234. Debasement, he later explained, came from hybridization as a conscious process, rather than the natural one that it had been in the past. Ibid., pp. 234, 253. Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid. Ibid., p. 170. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, Incontro Occidente-Africa, f. 4, ‘Campagnolo-Senghor 11.03.1960’; ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 15.03.1960’. ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 15.03.1960’. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Diop-Campagnolo 15.03.1960’. A subsequent letter by Kala-Lobe´ suggests that Diop was encouraged by Ce´saire, Fanon, Glissant, Rabemananjara and Senghor to resign in order to ensure co-operation between the SEC and the SAC. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 02.12.1963’, p. 3. Ibid., Diop Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 22.03.1960’. ‘Avant-propos’, Comprendre 21/2, pp. 7 –8. Ibid., pp. 7, 8 – 9. Ibid., pp. 9, 10. He defined ‘entering history’ in his own essay for this issue as becoming conscious, ‘active elements in the system of forces on which the course of history has principally depended up to now.’ Campagnolo, ‘L’Afrique entre dans l’histoire’, Comprendre 21/2, p. 152.

272 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

NOTES

TO PAGES

159 –164

‘Avant-propos’: p. 10. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, f. 4, ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 29.02.1960’. Senghor: ‘Nationhood’, pp. 28, 31 –4. Ibid., p. 50. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, f. 1, ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 29.02.1960’. Senghor: ‘Nationhood’, pp. 63 – 4. Ibid., pp. 45 – 6. Ibid., pp. 50 – 1. Ibid., pp. 52 – 3. Ibid., pp. 42, 59 – 60. Ibid., p. 64. Campagnolo: ‘L’Afrique entre dans l’histoire’, Comprendre 21/2, p. 153. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, f. 4, ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 29.02.1960’. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘L’Afrique entre dans l’histoire’, Comprendre 21/2, p. 152. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 165. See in particular the contributions from Cl(aude) Basebya, Rolf Italiaander, E. S. Sachs, Ulli Beier, and Marcel Willems, ‘Les enqueˆtes de la politique de la culture: Entre´e de l’Afrique dans l’histoire’, Comprendre 21/2 pp. 44 – 5; 89; 107– 8, 111; 132; 148, respectively. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 05.05.1962’; CE 1962– 7, Comprendre 25, p. 200. See ‘Proposition de Loi en faveur de la Socie´te´ europe´enne de culture’, Comprendre 23/4, pp. 222– 7. For a list of invitations, see ASEC, AG 8 –1961, f. 1. A list of attendees has not been preserved in the archives, nor was an attendance figure issued to the press. AG 1961– 3, p. 306. Ibid., pp. 275, 278– 9. This was not the first time Campagnolo had broached such an idea. He floated a suggestion for a world association of culture at the Executive Council meeting of November 1959. CE 1959– 11, p. 370. ASEC, Diop Papers, ‘Diop-Campagnolo 17.02.1961’. Ibid. ‘Lettre pour la constitution de l’Association mondiale de la culture’, Comprendre 26/7, pp. 351– 2. CE 1962– 7, p. 202. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid. CE 1963– 1, p. 222. CE 1962– 7, pp. 205– 16, 225– 8. AG 1963– 10, pp. 249, 250, 253– 5. Ibid., pp. 270– 1. Ibid., pp. 335– 6. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., pp. 319– 20, 326– 7. Sik and Philippart were proponents of this view.

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164 –167

273

107. Ngango was a student of economics and sociology. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 09.10.1963’. 108. AG 1963– 10, p. 314. 109. Ibid., p. 315. 110. Ibid., pp. 315, 317. 111. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 09.01.1963’. It had been approved at Unesco’s twelfth general conference in December 1962. 112. Ibid. Campagnolo declined SEC involvement on the grounds that the aims of the SAC/Unesco project were fundamentally different from the SEC’s. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 26.01.1963’. 113. CE 1962 – 7, pp. 198, 200; ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Diop 06.11.1962’, CE 1963– 7, p. 234. 114. ASEC, Jacques Nantet Papers, ‘Mazel-Lunel 17.12.1963’. 115. AG 1963– 10, p. 317. 116. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Campagnolo-SAC 05.12.1963’. 117. Verdin: Alioune Diop, pp. 140, 153. 118. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 02.12.1963’, pp. 1 – 2. 119. Ibid., ‘Campagnolo-Diop 11.12.1963’, p. 1. 120. Ibid., pp. 1 – 2. 121. Ibid., ‘Kala-Lobe´ -Campagnolo 16.12.1963’; ‘Campagnolo-Kala-Lobe´ 18.12.1963’. 122. Ibid., ‘Diop-Campagnolo 09.01.1964’, p. 1. 123. Ibid., p. 2. 124. [Ngango, Georges], ‘The New Strategy of the Society of European Culture’, Pre´sence africaine, n. s. 20:48 (1963), pp. 205– 6; ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘KalaLobe´-Campagnolo 31.01.1964’. 125. The SAC tried to arrange a meeting with Campagnolo in Paris for early January 1964. He declined on health grounds. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´Campagnolo 31.01.1964’; ‘Campagnolo-Diop 14.02.1964’. 126. For a list of organizations and individuals contacted, see CE 1964– 4, pp. 226– 7; ASEC, AMC Papers, f. lettera a istituzioni e personalita`, ‘Allegato D: compilato per la riunione del Consiglio del 01 – 3– 4.1964’. 127. ASEC, AMC Papers, f. documenti memoranda: ‘Allegato B: Piano spedizione sondaggio settecento lettere AMC’. 128. CE 1964– 4, Comprendre 28, pp. 240–52. 129. AG 1965– 10, Comprendre 29/30, p. 229. The list proposed by the Executive Council included: Albert Schweitzer, Lewis Mumford, Taha Hussein, Karl Barth, Pierre Emmanuel, Louis Martin-Chauffier (?), Martin Niemo¨ller, Cardinal Suenens, Erich Fromm, Linus Pauling (?), R. P. Pire, Lester B. Pearson (??), A. J. Luthuli, Martin Luther King (??), R. P. Congar, R. P. H. De Lubac (??), and Arturo Carlo Jemolo. James Luther Adams had been crossed off the list. The question marks are queries in the actual document, and the names appear in their original order in the document. The following Nobel Peace Prize winners were also listed: Lord John Boyd Orr, Ralph

274

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142.

143. 144. 145. 146.

NOTES

TO PAGES

168 –170

Bunche, Le´on Jouhaux, Albert Schweitzer, George Catlett Marshall, Lester Bowles Pearson, Georges Pire, Philip J. Noel-Baker, Albert John Luthuli. ASEC, Consiglio Esecutivo Praga 13 – 15.04.1965, ‘Areopago della AMC’. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Conversation avec M. Alioune Diop, le 7 oct 1965 a` la SEC (typed memo)’. Ibid. CE 1965– 2, Comprendre 29/30, pp. 178, 182. CE 1964– 4, pp. 224– 5; AG 1965 –10, pp. 301– 3. CE 1966– 6, Comprendre 31/2, p. 264. Ibid. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Kala-Lobe´-Campagnolo 18.02.1966’, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. ASEC, SAC Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Kala-Lobe 04.03.1966’. CE 1964–4, p. 239; CE 1965– 1, Comprendre 29/30, p. 179; ASEC, Consiglio Esecutivo Praga 13 – 15.04.1965, ‘Punto 6 dell’ordine del giorno’. Initially, space was offered in the prestigious Palazzo Fortuny; it was later decided that the Palazzo Ariana was more affordable. CE 1968– 6, Comprendre 33/4, p. 166. ASEC, IN. SP. 4, f. 1, ‘Senghor-Campagnolo 15.03.1960’, p. 2. Although a growing body of research has shown the importance of the work of the Christian philosopher/theologian Teilhard de Chardin to Senghor’s understanding of the civilization of the universal, it is interesting to note that Senghor did not mention him as a progenitor of this term. See Edmund J. Campion, ‘Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Importance in the Development of Le´opold Se´dar Senghor’s Concept of the “Civilisation de l’universel”’, paper for the conference Language and the Scientific Imagination, Helsinki 2008, https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/15209/73_Campion.pdf? sequence¼1, accessed 16.10.2013. On Senghor and Teilhard, see also Denis Ghislain, ‘Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor on the civilization of the universal’. Universite´ de Yaounde´ 1 – Maitrise en philosophie 2007, http:// www.memoireonline.com/04/08/1003/m_teilhard-de-chardin-senghor-civili zation-of-the-universal1.html, accessed 16.10.2013; and Kahiudi C. Mabana, in ‘Le´opold Se´dar Senghor et la civilisation de l’universel’, Diogene, 2011/3 – 4, pp. 3 – 13. Both firmly attribute Senghor’s understanding of the civilization of the universal to Teilhard’s influence, and also see it as inextricable from his theory of Negritude. CE 1964– 4, p. 224. Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar, ‘Il contributo dell’Africa alla civilta` universale’, Il Nuovo Osservatore 49 (1966), pp. 267– 71, especially 268– 9. Ibid., p. 270. See Campagnolo, ‘La “Civilisation de l’universel” a propos d’un article de Le´opold Se´dar Senghor’, Comprendre 31/2, pp. 136–8. In spite of the ferocity, and the personal nature of this exchange, he nonetheless still believed that

NOTES

147. 148. 149. 150.

151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

TO PAGES

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co-operation between the SEC and the SAC was possible. See CE 1966– 6, pp. 264 –5. Unesco Archives, AG8, Biographical Files, Rene´ Maheu, ‘Le “Roi Re´ne”, un intellectuel dans l’histoire’, Le Monde 25.06.1974. ‘Le “Roi Re´ne”’. Unesco Archives, AG8, Biographical files, Rene´ Maheu, Thomas, Jean, ‘Vies et portraits: Rene´ Maheu’, undated, unpaginated. At one point, he even described such exchanges as the ‘keystone, the backcloth’ of all Unesco’s activities. Unesco, ‘Twenty-second Plenary Meeting’, Records of the General Conference, eleventh session, Paris 1960: Proceedings (Paris, 1960), p. 344. See, for example, Maheu, Rene´, ‘Raisons d’agir’, 22.10.1964, in La Civilisation de l’universel, pp. 28 – 30. It was a speech on Unesco’s orientation, addressed to its 13th General Conference. Maheu: ‘L’Universel dans l’histoire’, in La Civilisation de l’universel, p. 228. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., pp. 230– 1. ‘Campagnolo-Maheu 08.03.1967’, Comprendre 31/2, p. 354. ‘Maheu-Campagnolo 09.05.1967’, Comprendre 31/2, p. 354. Relations between the SAC and Unesco under Maheu’s leadership did indeed intensify. Unesco had granted the SAC consultative status in late 1958, and continued to build on this relationship in the 1960s, sponsoring the Dakar colloquium and including the SAC in its major East– West project. Unesco Archives, AG8, X07– 23, Relations with NGOs – part XIV, appendix 10, annex 1, p. 2; Executive Board, 52nd Session, 52 EX/7, Paris, 28.10.1958, ‘Report of the External Relations Commission’, p. 3. CANO: p. 245. Young: White Mythologies, pp. 158– 9. Nigel C. Gibson, in a new anthology, also describes Fanon as ‘the “father” of postcolonial studies’, in addition to his more radical legacy. See Gibson, Nigel C. (ed.), Living Fanon: Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: 2011), p. 3. Geismar, Peter, Fanon (New York, 1971), p. 179; Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 2001), pp. 28, 198. Bernasconi, Robert, ‘Casting the Slough: Fanon’s New Humanism for a New Humanity’, in Gordon et al: Fanon, p. 113. Ibid., pp. 116, 120– 1. Fanon: Wretched of the Earth, p. 251. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 172– 3. In the original French version, he did not use the proper title AMC, but ‘Socie´te´ Universelle de Culture’. See Frantz Fanon, Les Damne´s de la terre (Paris, 1961), p. 161. Fanon: Wretched of the Earth, pp. 172– 3, 188. Ibid., pp. 33 – 4, 36.

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168. Ibid., pp. 188–9. Fanon also made a veiled reference to Pre´sence africaine’s congress, and a direct one to the SAC, in their search for an African cultural unity as historically irrelevant enterprises. Fanon: Wretched of the Earth, pp. 188–9. 169. Ibid., p. 199. 170. For an excellent overview of Sartre’s influence on the origins of postcolonial theory, see Robert J. C. Young’s preface ‘Sartre: the “African Philosopher”’, in Sartre, Jean-Paul, Colonialism and Neocolonialism (tran.) Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London, 2006), ix – xxviii. Maheu’s debt to Sartre is openly acknowledged in La Civilisation de l’universel (p. 16), and their longstanding friendship, which began in their schooldays, is well known. 171. For a discussion of Sartre’s Rome lecture, see Anderson, Thomas C., Sartre’s Two Ethics: from Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago, 1993), pp. 112– 17. 172. Dash: Edouard Glissant, pp. 9 – 10. 173. As Caroline Brossat’s study of the Council of Europe has shown, there was a general ‘Eurocentrist’ slippage between European and Western culture, and the terms ‘European culture’ and ‘Western culture’ were used interchangeably. Brossat, Caroline, ‘Vers une Europe de la culture?’, European Review of History 1 (1994), p. 182.

Chapter 7 Returning to Europe: Reform Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Early Human Rights Movement in Eastern Europe in the 1960s 1. Campagnolo: ‘Manifeste’, p. 259. 2. They were successful: the final resolution issuing from the assembly confirmed the pursuit of dialogue and the third East– West Meeting as still at the centre of the SEC’s concerns. AG 1961– 3, p. 336. 3. Kusin, Vladimir V., The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: the Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956– 1967 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 100. 4. Campagnolo: ‘Manifeste’, p. 274. 5. Ibid., ‘N’est pas marxiste’, p. 205. 6. Ibid. 7. National centres were founded in Budapest in 1963; in Warsaw in 1964; in Prague and Leningrad in 1966; and in East Berlin in 1967. Centres had already been constituted in Belgrade, Lubljana and Zagreb in 1959. 8. By the time of the 1963 General Assembly, nearly 18 per cent of the councillors ratified there were from Europe’s socialist countries. For a list of the entire Executive Council at this time, see AG 1963–10, pp. 339– 40. 9. Kusin, Vladimir V., ‘An Overview of East European Reformism’, Soviet Studies XXVIII:3 (1976), p. 340. 10. Navra´til, Jaromı´r (ed.), The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest, 2006), pp. 83 – 91. 11. Skilling, H. Gordon, ‘Foreword’, in Navra´til (ed.), Prague Spring, pp. xx– xxi.

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12. For example, Weigel has noted in the dissident literature of the 1970s and the 1980s, and not of the 1960s, the commitment to ‘moral and cultural revolution’ as ‘the essential precondition . . . to any possible political revolution’. Weigel, George, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York, 1992), pp. 38 – 9. 13. http://www.osce.org/mc/39501?download¼true, p. 6. Accessed 19.04.2012. Snyder, Sarah B., Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 4 – 5. 14. Snyder: Human Rights Activism, p. 5; Thomas, Daniel C., The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, 2001), pp. 221– 2. 15. Ibid., p. 8. According to Thomas, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ‘neither well-known to people living under Communist rule nor taken seriously by the Communist authorities’ and lacked ‘politically significant’ support from the small human rights groups. Thomas, Daniel C., ‘Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies 7:2 (2005), p. 117. According to Weigel, it was ‘promptly signed, and just as promptly ignored by the regimes within Stalin’s empire’. Weigel: Final Revolution, pp. 29 –30. 16. Morsink: Universal Declaration, pp. xi, 295 – 6. Snyder: Human Rights Activism, p. 7; http://www.osce.org/mc/39501?download¼true, p. 7. Accessed 19.04.2012. As Snyder has argued, the Helsinki Final Act was more influential than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because it was ‘uniquely formulated to give rise to a transnational network because the terms of the agreement established that CSCE states could exchange views on implementation of the Helsinki Final Act, meaning human rights abuses would now be subject to international diplomacy’. Snyder: Human Rights Activism, p. 7. 17. Garton Ash, Timothy, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (London, 1999), p. 8. Karl-Heniz Gra¨fe has made a similar argument for reformers within the governments of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland as having initiated the changes enabling de-Stalinization to take place between 1956 and 1968. He does not, however, argue for any continuity between this period of reform communism and the struggle to finally end communism in 1989. See Gra¨fe, Karl-Heinz, ‘Reformcommunismus in Osteuropa’, Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 42:4 (2000), pp. 40 – 3. 18. Satterwhite: Varieties, p. 4. 19. Morsink: Universal Declaration, pp. 4, 23 – 4, 28, 37. 20. Weigel: Final Revolution, p. 96. 21. Falk: Dilemmas, p.xvii. Falk quotes Jeffrey Isaac here. In her critical assessment of his argument, this was a point with which she agreed. See Isaacs, ‘The Strange Silence of Political Theory’, Political Theory 23:4 (1995), p. 639. 22. For example, Ivo Andric´ (b.1892); Ilya Ehrenburg (b.1891); Iwaszkiewicz (1894); Viktor Lazarev (1897); Parandowski (b. 1895).

278

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183 –187

23. Harjan, George, Jan Parandowski (New York, 1971), pp. 40, 97. 24. As a scholar, the importance of his contribution to early modern intellectual history, specifically his work on European humanism, has recently been noted. See Trencse´nyi, Bala´zs, ‘Writing the nation and reframing early modern intellectual history in Hungary’, Studies in East European Thought 62:2 (2010), pp. 140 –1. 25. Shore: Caviar and Ashes, pp. 308, 320. 26. Rubenstein, Joshua, Tangled Loyalites: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (London, 1996), pp. 370, 246. 27. Mandelstam, Nadezhda, Hope Abandoned (London, 2011), p. 16. 28. Rubenstein: Tangled Loyalties, pp. 370– 9. 29. Kusin: Intellectual Origins, p. 100. 30. Hoffmeister spent 1921 in Germany and 1922 in Paris, as well as visiting much of the rest of Europe, including a term of study at Cambridge. Then, in 1931, he made his first visit to the Soviet Union, and in 1936 he travelled to the United States. Forst, Vladimı´r (ed.), Lexikon Cˇeske´ Literatury, osobnosti, dı´la, instituce, vol. 2 (Prague, 1993), p. 221. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., pp. 221– 2. 33. Ibid. 34. Bugajski and Pollack: East European Fault Lines, p. 9; Forst: Lexikon, p. 222. 35. Francoise Noirant, ‘Paralle`le 50: un pe´riodique tche´coslovaque, communiste et parisien contre la division de l’Europe’, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 383, 387, 397. 36. Forst: Lexikon, p. 222. 37. Navra´til: Prague Spring, p. 84. 38. http://www.czechlit.cz/news2/czech-pen-club-celebrates-its-85th-anniversary/. Accessed 16.03.12. 39. Chvatik, Kvestoslav, ‘Czechoslovakia’s cultural policy 1945– 1980’, Research Project ‘The Experience of the Prague Spring 1968’ working study 24 (1982), p. 17. 40. Liehm, Antonı´n, ‘From Culture to Politics’, Research Project ‘The Experience of the Prague Spring 1968’ working study 22 (1981), pp. 4, 9 – 13. See also Neumannova, Jana, ‘The Cultural Policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1956’, Research Project ‘The Experience of the Prague Spring 1968’ working study 18 (1981), p. 1. 41. He was first appointed to the Ministry in 1948. Liehm, Antonı´n J. and Schmidt, Roman, ‘Encyclopaedist of the international: a conversation with Antonı´n J. Liehm’, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008 – 9 – 23-liehm-en. html. Accessed 06.02.2013. Mlynar, Zdenek, ‘Antonin J. Liehm (born 1924)’, in Liehm, Antonı´n, ‘From Culture to Politics’, Research Project 22, unpaginated. Liehm was a CPCz member from 1945 to 1967, when he was expelled for ‘anti-party activities’, but rehabilitated in 1968. 42. Navra´til: Prague Spring, p. 5.

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43. Ibid., p. 83 – 4. Dubcˇek was appointed first secretary in January 1968. Ibid., p. 27. Liehm’s own preface to Generations (Generace), published after his exile to Paris, and illustrated by Hoffmeister, made the reform movement’s commitment to democratic socialism absolutely clear: We are inspired now by the doctrine of democracy . . . we are inspired to endeavour to define what democracy should in fact be . . . there is not a ready example, neither in the East, where tradition, history, intellectual worlds are so different, nor in the West, from the economic disposition of which we have definitively broken. Liehm, Antonı´n, Generace (Prague, 1988), p. 11. 44. Kotalı´k, Jirˇı´, ‘Hommage a` Miroslav Micˇko’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 76:140 (1970), p. 31. 45. Ibid., p. 32. Mı´cˇko was deliberately vague about the dates of his ministerial post, which appear to have fallen within the period of high Stalinism. His biographical sheet preserved in the SEC’s archive dated 20.07.1955 reads: ‘since 1948/For a certain time I led the Fine Arts section of the Ministry of Culture’. ASEC, Miroslav Mı´cˇko Papers, ‘Notice biographique’. 46. Ibid., p. 9; Kotalı´k: ‘Hommage’, p. 32. 47. Fekete, Ma´rton (ed.), Prominent Hungarians Home and Abroad (London, 1985), p. 75; ‘Obituary, Ivan Boldizsa´r, 76, Hungarian PEN Chief’, http://www. nytimes.com/1988/12/24/obituaries/ivan-boldizsar-76-hungarian-pen-chief. html. Accessed 15.03.2012. 48. ASEC, Iva´n Boldizsa´r Papers, f. 1977 – 88, Planchais, Jean, ‘La mort d’Yvan Boldiszar [sic] “Sur les chaises et entre les chaises”’, Le Monde, 14.02.1989. 49. Planchais: ‘La mort d’Yvan Boldiszar’. 50. ASEC, Boldizsa´r Papers, f. 1977– 88, Vercors, ‘La mort d’Ivan Boldizsar’, Le Monde, 25.02.1989. 51. Szabo´: Human Rights, pp. 93, 95. 52. Ibid., pp. 93, 95; Ko¨peczi, Be´la, ‘Iva˚n Boldizsa´r’s Lifework’, The New Hungarian Quarterly 30:114 (1989), pp. 72 – 3. 53. ASEC, Boldizsa´r Papers, f. 1977– 88, ‘Boldizsa´r-Michelle CampagnoloBouvier, 01.07.1984’. 54. Fekete: Prominent Hungarians, p. 75; ‘Obituary, Ivan Boldizsa´r, 76, Hungarian PEN Chief’. 55. The journal assumed its original name in 1993 after the restoration of democracy in Hungary. ‘The Hungarian Quarterly’, Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe, http://www.pecob.eu/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/ EN/IDPagina/2202. Accessed 09.03.2013. 56. A reincarnation of The Hungarian Quarterly, its reappearance in 1960 marked a deliberate return to international cultural diplomacy. Published, like its predecessor, in English, it had the aim of ‘promoting mutual knowledge and deeper understanding among the nations’ in an age overshadowed by the

280

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

NOTES

TO PAGES

189 –190

threat of nuclear war. The Editor, ‘The New Hungarian Quarterly’, The New Hungarian Quarterly 1:1 (1960), pp. 3 – 4. ‘Obituary’, New York Times. See also Unesco, Cultural Policy: a preliminary study (Paris, 1969), pp. 8 – 9. This was the published outcome of a roundtable convened in Monaco in 1967 on how governments could develop policies making culture accessible to the largest number of people possible without those policies becoming ‘authoritarian’. ASEC, Boldizsa´r Papers, ‘Boldizsa´rCampagnolo, 4.12.1967’. Fekete: Prominent Hungarians, p. 75. Schaff, Adam, Nie te˛dy droga!, w rozmowie z Tadeuszem Kras´ko (Warsaw, c.1991), p. 6. Ibid. Czosnyka, Helena, The Polish Challenge: Foundations for Dialogue in the Works of Adam Schaff and Jo´zef Tischner (Atlanta, 1995), pp. 37 – 8; Becala, Lidia et al., Who’s Who in Poland (Zurich, 1982), p. 761. Two of the more salient examples of this were first, his part in the government’s suppression of the Crooked Circle Club, a group of revisionist writers, formed in 1955, that was closed permanently in 1962 following an incident at a lecture on humanism that Schaff gave there. The second was his response to the ‘Letter of the 34’. See Raina, Peter, Political Opposition in Poland 1954– 1977 (London, 1978), pp. 70 – 1, 76. Widely disseminated, it first appeared in three parts in Nowa Kultura, an abridged version was then published under the title ‘Stocktaking in Philosophy’ in Polish Perspectives in November 1959. The essay was also reproduced in Les Temps modernes in the summer of 1960. Schaff, Adam, ‘Sur le marxisme et l’existentialisme’, Les Temps modernes 173/4 (1960), p. 394. Schaff, Adam, Marxism and the Human Individual (London, 1970), pp. 212– 14, 216. Schaff: Nie te˛dy droga!, pp. 40 –1. Ibid.: Nie te˛dy droga!, p. 40. Ibid., Adam, ‘The foundations of the Vienna Centre: their development and prospects’, in Charva´t, F., Stamatiou, W., Villain-Gandossi, Ch. (eds), International Cooperation in the Social Sciences: Twenty-five Years of Vienna Centre Experience (Vienna, 1988), pp. 18, 23, 33. Schaff noted that Unesco eventually withdrew its subvention, but did not say when. ASEC, Adam Schaff Papers, ‘Le “Centre de Vienne”: un exemple de coope´ration Est-Ouest’, Le Monde 20.08.1977, p. 17. Schaff held the centre’s presidency from 1963 to 1988. See, for example, Schaff’s address at the 1956 conference on Unesco’s forthcoming programme, where he argued that his delegation ‘considered that the problem of peaceful coexistence was, at the moment, of vital importance and that a closer understanding between countries with differing social and economic systems was an essential element in the solution of that problem. In particular, the delegation was anxious for closer cultural ties between the capitalist countries and the peoples’ democracies’. Records of the General

NOTES

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

TO PAGES

191 –192

281

Conference of the Unesco Ninth Session New Delhi 1956 Proceedings (Paris, 1956), p. 360. At Unesco’s 11th General Conference, in a prolonged brainstorming session over the future of Unesco’s activities in the area of intellectual and cultural exchanges for the coming decade, the representatives from Europe’s socialist countries repeatedly made the case for the virtues of peaceful coexistence as facilitating these exchanges. See the interventions by Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (including a speech by Hoffmeister), the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics and Romania, Records of the General Conference of the UNESCO Eleventh Session Paris 1960 Proceedings (Paris, 1960), pp. 354, 358, 364– 5, 371– 2, 380, 388– 90, 402, 406. He did, however, hope that in the future it would be otherwise. CE 1959– 11, pp. 370, 380. CE 1961– 7, p. 342. Originally, Micˇko had been pressing for a general assembly in 1965, but the chosen dates clashed with plans to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s liberation. CE 1962– 7, p. 197; CE 1963– 1, p. 229; CE 1964– 4, p. 237. ASEC, Consiglio esecutivo, Praga, f. 1, ‘Strbı´ny´-Campagnolo 17.02.1965’, pp. 1 – 2; Mı´cˇko Papers, ‘Mı´cˇko-Campagnolo 14.09.1964’. CE 1965– 1, p. 178. A rough itinerary was sent to him by Mı´cˇko. See ASEC, Consiglio esecutivo, Praga, f. 3, ‘Mı´cˇko-Campagnolo 23.10.1964’. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Les enqueˆtes de la politique de la culture’, Comprendre 29/30, p. 9; Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘La Coexistence pacifique, la politique de la culture et la paix’, Comprendre 29/30, pp. 77, 83. In contrast, most of the essays from a range of commentators looked to peaceful coexistence as a stepping-stone toward the identification of shared humanist values and as the basis for dialogue, in spite of difference. See Schaff, Adam, ‘La Coexistence pacifique, l’ideologie et le dialogue’, pp. 15 – 17; Zea, Leopoldo, ‘Reconside´rer la paix perpe´tuelle’, pp. 45, 49; Parsons, Howard L., ‘Signification humaine de la coexistence pacifique’, pp. 51, 55, 56; Comprendre 29/30. It should be pointed out that the Soviet contributors, V. Troukhanovsky and Boris Leontiev, avoided this line of enquiry, using the publication as an opportunity to attack Western, particularly American, aggression abroad. CE 1965 – 4, Comprendre 29/30, p. 186. Those in attendance were: Babel, Ceschi, Hoffmeister, Campagnolo, Maria Luisa Astaldi, Aveline, Simone Pe´rier, Bobbio, Buchanan, Boldizsa´r, Desonay, Donini, Ferrari-Toniolo, Ignotus, Jemolo, Lacroix, Lunel, Mı´cˇko, Morra, Nantet, Nova´k, OrgelsStoumon, Parandowski, Philippart, Schaff, Tarn and Terracini, van Emde Boas, and, as observers, Andrea Brugsch, Rudolf Engel, Erika Lingner and Wasily Mazov. Ibid., pp. 188– 9.

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192 –195

77. This was Hoffmeister’s description at Unesco’s 1960 general conference. Records of the General Conference of the UNESCO Eleventh Session Paris 1960 Proceedings (Paris, 1960), pp. 379– 80. 78. ASEC, Erich Fromm Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Fromm 22.10.1957’; ‘FrommCampagnlo 31.10.1957’. 79. Fromm, Erich, Marx’s Concept of Man, (tran.) T. B. Bottomore (New York, 2004), pp. vi–vii. The countries he mentioned were Poland, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Burma and Indonesia. 80. ASEC, Fromm Papers, ‘Fromm-Campagnolo 23.03.1963’. Campagnolo sent him a membership list. ‘Campagnolo-Fromm 28.03.1963’. 81. Ibid., Sartre Papers, memorandum, ‘Conversazione con Sartre 28.09.1964’, p. 1. 82. Liehm, Antonı´n J.: ‘Franz Kafka in Eastern Europe’, Telos, 23 (1975), pp. 54 – 5. 83. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘La demilitarisation de la culture’, Situations VII (Paris, 1965), p. 328. 84. Liehm, Antonı´n, ‘Franz Kafka dix ans apre`s’, Les Temps modernes 323 bis: 1973, p. 2259; Hayman: Writing Against, p. 369. 85. See Sartre in ‘Entretien a` Prague sur la notion de “decadence”, La Nouvelle critique, 156– 7 (1964), p. 73; ‘J. P. Sartre Ernst Fischer a ti Druzı´: Mirova´ Koexistence a boj idejı´’, Plamen, 6: 1 (1964), pp. 3– 4. 86. Ha´jek, Jirˇı´, ‘Pozna´mky ze zapisnı´cˇku’, Plamen 6: 1 (1964), p. 161. 87. CE 1965–4, p. 195. In ‘Questions de me´thode’ Sartre had made the same argument that Marxism was the philosophy of the age that had yet to be surpassed by any other philosophy. 88. Ibid., pp. 191, 196. 89. Ibid., pp. 193– 8. He also succeeded, with Ignotus, Lacroix, Nantet and Terracini’s support, in getting this discussion dropped from Campagnolo’s proposed report for that October’s assembly. 90. Liehm, Antonı´n, Rozhovor (Prague, 1966), p. 13. 91. CE 1965– 4, p. 200. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., p. 201. 94. ASEC, Consiglio esecutivo Praga, rass stampa 10 f. 1, Ha´yek, Igor, ‘Co mu˚zˇe kultura aneb Podmı´nky dialogu?’, Litera´rnı´ Noviny 24.04.1965, press cutting. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. The work Ha´yek referred to was Le sens du dialogue, which Lacroix first published in 1944 or 1945. 97. Ibid. 98. CE 1965– 4, p. 200. 99. 22 per cent of those attending came from Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The largest constituencies were from Hungary (6, or 5.5 per cent) and Yugoslavia (9, or 8 per cent). Statistics from ASEC, AG10 ‘Liste des participants’.

NOTES 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

TO PAGES

195 –198

283

AG 1965– 10, p. 220. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., pp. 228– 9. Ibid., pp. 233– 49. Ibid., pp. 269– 70, 293– 6. Ibid., pp. 269, 270. AG 1965– 10, p. 309. Ibid., p. 308. Boldizsa´r, Ivan, ‘East-West Meetings of Intellectuals’, The New Hungarian Quarterly 7:22 (1966), p. 22. Ibid., pp. 21, 22. Europa-Gespra¨ch 1964: Wo Steht Europa Heute? (Vienna, 1964), pp. 7 – 8. Boldizsa´r: ‘East – West Meetings’, pp. 13 – 14. CE 1966– 6, pp. 265, 271, 272. It continued: ‘. . . the immediate aim of our cultural policy today is not to secure exclusiveness for Marx-Leninist ideology but to strengthen its hegemony, predominance and leading role. It follows that Hungarian cultural policy gives a certain scope and even a certain amount of State support to the creation, the diffusion and the recognition of non-Marxist, non-socialist Hungarian cultural values – books, periodicals, plays, films, paintings, etc. – that are not hostile to socialism. This principle and its concomitant in practice prevail also internationally. Creations relying on non-Marx-Leninist ideology, humanistic cultural values committed to the people, to labour, to peace, to reason are also given a respectable place in the integrity of Hungarian cultural intellectual life. . .especially under the improving conditions of peaceful coexistence – Hungarian cultural policy encourages the establishment and intensification of cultural relations with countries having a different social system, and is ready to exchange experiences promoting the intellectual and material prosperity of the peoples and growing confidence in one another. At the same time cultural policy ensures, encourages and assists Marxist thinking in all walks of cultural life to confront domestic and foreign humanist values through critical analysis with socialist humanism and to contribute, by criticism and by initiating debates, to a critical assimilation of these values.’ UNESCO, Cultural Policy in Hungary (Paris, 1974), pp. 17 – 18. The attending councillors were Angelos Angelopoulos, Maria Luisa Astaldi, Babel, Boldizsa´r, Leendert Braat, Campagnolo, Fernand Desonay, Andrea Ferrari-Toniolo, Bruna Forlati-Tamaro, Gerhard Funke, Ignotus, Kardos, Lunel, Morra, Marianne Orgels-Stoumon, Simone Pe´rier, Louis Philippart, Polevoi, Willem Sandberg, Sik, Terracini, Magdalena van Emde Boas, plus four observers – Andre´e Brugsch, Erika Lingner, Wasily Mazov and Jaroslav Strˇı´brny´. Kramme, Ulrike, and Urra Muena, Zˇelmı´ra, Ungarischer Biographischer Index (Munich, 2005), Sik, 534:304.

284 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

NOTES

TO PAGES

198 –202

CE 1966– 9, Comprendre 31/2, pp. 274– 5. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., pp. 275– 6. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Capitulation ou contre-escalade’, Les Temps modernes 243 (1966), pp. 193– 6. CE 1966– 9, pp. 278– 83. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., pp. 290– 1. Ibid., pp. 291– 2. Ibid. ASEC, Rass stampa 10 f. 1, Consiglio esecutivo Budapest, ‘Dei Resoconti della stampa ungherese sui lavori del CE SEC a Budapest in settembre 66’, p. 1. Ibid., Tibor Kardos Papers, ‘Kardos-Campagnolo 05.12.1966’, p. 1. CE 1963– 1, p. 230; CE 1966– 9, p. 283. This appears as ‘Chronique des centres’. ASEC, Fernand Desonay Papers, f. 1 1955– 63, ‘Desonay-Campagnolo 16.02.1962’. Schaff also spoke at the SEC’s Amsterdam centre. ‘DesonayCampagnolo 01.02.1962’. Stoumon, Marianne, ‘La vie de la SEC’, Le Flambeau 48:1 (1965), pp. 64 – 70. AG 1951– 11, p. 27. This sentiment did not seem to be shared by the Church. Noting similarities between organizations like the SEC and Pax romana, which was ‘relighting the torch of Christian thought’, the Vatican City’s paper L’Osservatore romano nonetheless observed that there was room for all such ‘initiatives of good will’. ASEC, Rass stampa 1 f. 1, ‘Orientamenti conclusive della Societa` Europea di cultura’, L’Osservatore romano, 16.11.1951. See also where it described Comprendre as a meeting point for eminent scholars of all political and religious convictions to consider the most pressing issues of the time. (‘La prima assemblea generale della Societa` europea di cultura’, L’Osservatore Romano, 09.11.1951). The 15th issue of Comprendre, ‘L’Humanisme aujourd’hui’, was dedicated to the results of this study commissioned by Unesco. ‘Avant-propos’, Comprendre 15, p. 5. AG 1961– 3, p. 274. James, Theodore Earle, The Heart of Catholicism, Essential Writings of the Church from St. Paul to John Paul II (Baltimore, 1997), p. 648. Weigel: Final Revolution, p. 69. Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, (tran.) Waterhouse, Henry (London, 1980), pp. 38 – 9 paras 137– 9; pp. 40 – 1, paras 142– 5. CE 1963– 7, p. 236. Issue 5 of the Brussels Centre’s own publication, Dialogue, had been dedicated to Pacem in Terris, and Desonay had already published an article in Brussels’ daily Le Soir on the relationship between the ideas in the encyclical and the SEC’s doctrine.

NOTES

TO PAGES

202 –205

285

139. AG 1963– 10, p. 266. 140. CE 1967– 3, Comprendre 31/2, p. 298. 141. There was to be an audience with the Pope during the Twelfth General Assembly in Rome to mark the SEC’s 20th anniversary. It clashed with a Bishops’ Synod. AG 1971–9, Comprendre 37/8, p. 264. 142. Cranston, Maurice, ‘Le Pape Jean XXIII, la paix et les droits de l’homme’, Comprendre 26/7, pp. 93, 97, 99. 143. AG 1965–10, pp. 291– 2, 293, 298. Jemolo’s report for the assembly on the ‘difficulties’ of this dialogue perhaps indicates the SEC’s position on it. 144. This issued in a series of meetings (in Munich and Cologne 1964; in Salzburg 1965; in Herrenchiemsee in 1966; and in Marienbad in 1967). McGovern, Arthur F., Marxism: an American Christian Perspective (Maryknoll, New York, 1980), pp. 113– 15. They ended with the suppression of the Prague Spring, and were temporarily ‘revived’ in 1975 –7. Ibid., p. 114. 145. Ibid., p. 130, n. 92. He is citing the comments of Peter Hebblethwaite, who was a journalist at the conferences, from the latter’s The Christian-Marxist Dialogue: Beginnings, Present Status, and Beyond (London, 1977), pp. 30, 37. ‘Institutional Marxists’, he added, those within actual power structures, ‘never shared their doubts and questioning’. 146. Hebblethwaite: Christian-Marxist Dialogue, p. 17. 147. Ibid., p. 34. 148. ‘Presence de la culture’, Comprendre 28, pp. 182– 3. 149. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenscahften zu Berlin, Das Problem der Freiheit im Lichte des Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus (Berlin, 1956), p. 9. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid., pp. 344– 6. Some of those present who were, or would be members of the SEC were Steinitz (vice-president of the Academy), Bloch and Ralea (joined in 1956), Georg Mende (joined 1964), Leszek Kołakowski (joined in the 1970s), Lefebvre (joined 1957), and Ladislav Rieger. 152. Archival reports indicate that by 1964 the CCF was forced to reconsider what it should actually stand for in the light of its failure to attract the ‘“great minds” of the present generation’ of Europe’s intellectuals as other organizations, in particular the SEC, had done, due to the CCF’s intolerance and its moral shrillness. IACF/II/5/5, CCF, ‘CE 15–16.10.1964’, 2–3, 10. These conclusions were in response to Pierre Emmanuel’s report ‘Le Role du congre`s en Europe’, 1964 (IACF/II/9/4). 153. Jı´lek, Lubor, ‘La Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle europe´enne et le soutien aux antecedents de Solidarite´, in Fleury and Jı´lek: Europe malgre´ tout, pp. 167– 76. See IACF/II/4/4, ‘International Executive Committee Meeting Paris 12 – 13.01.1957’, p. 10, for the importance the CCF would place on relationships between individuals as opposed to working through official cultural organizations. 154. Bernal: ‘Culture and the Cold War’, pp. 18 – 20, 24. 155. Sartre: ‘La demilitarisation de la culture’, pp. 327– 8, 330– 1.

286 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179.

NOTES

TO PAGES

205 –209

Bernal: ‘Culture and the Cold War’, p. 24. IACF/II/4/2, ‘CE 24.04.1956’, pp. 3 – 6. Bruller, Jean, For the Time Being, (tran.) Griffin, Jonathan (London, 1960), p. 77. IACF/III/12/12, ‘Rapport sur la conference tenue a` Zurich re´unissant des re´dacteurs de revues orientales et occidentals Zurich 24 – 27 Septembre 1956’, pp. 6 – 7. Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, and Lisowski, Jerzy, Od Redakcji’ Two´rczos´c´ 13:4 (1957), pp. 7, 8. de Beauvoir: Force, pp. 363, 372; Geremek, Bronisław and Frybes, Marcin, Kale´idoscope franco-polonais (Warsaw, 2006), p. 166. Ibid., p. 363. Bednarz, Irena, ‘Na temat Sartre’a w Polsce latach 1948– 1969’ Przegla˛d Filozoficzny 14:4 (2005), pp. 97 – 121. This study provides a selection of appreciative Polish responses to aspects of Sartre’s work in Poland, primarily between 1957 and 1969. While not all of the excerpts were about ‘Marxism and Existentialism’, its argument for the rehumanization of socialism clearly suffused their interest in his work. Ha´jek: ‘Pozna´mky ze zapisnı´cˇku’, p. 161; ‘Entretien a` Prague’, pp. 72– 3; and ‘60 Jeanu Paulu Sartrovi’, Milan Pru˚cha, and ‘filosofie Sartrova’ Plamen 6 (1965), pp. 12 – 14, 16 –17, respectively. Hayman: Writing Against, p. 369. ‘Guido Calogero’, IBI IV 96, frame 352. Institut International de Philosophie (IIP), Le Fondement des droits de l’homme: actes des entretiens de l’Aquila 14 – 19 septembre 1964 (Florence, 1966), p. 141. Ibid., pp. 142, 397– 8, pp. 399–400. Ibid., p. 400. Arthur: Unfinished Projects, pp. 130– 1. IIP: Le Fondement, pp. 357, 365. This concern was voiced by Perelman and Ayer. Havel, Va´clav, ‘On the Theme of an Opposition’ (originally published 04.04.1968 in Litera´rnı´ listy), reproduced in Havel, Va´clav, Open Letters: Selected writings 1965– 1990, (ed.) Paul Wilson (New York, 1992), pp. 30 – 1. Ibid.: ‘On the Theme of an Opposition’, pp. 31, 32. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Socialism That Came in from the Cold’, in Liehm: Politics of Culture, p. 4. ASEC, Mı´cˇko Papers, ‘Mı´cˇko-Campagnolo 26.08.1968’, p. 2. Ibid., Boldizsa´r Papers, ‘Boldizsa´r-Campagnolo 25.06.1970’; Jean Schwoebel, ‘Hongrie: pour la premie`re fois a` l’Est la te´le´vision de Budapest a pre´sente´ un grand de´bat sur les droits de l’homme’, Le Monde 14.07.1977, p. 2. Schwoebel: ‘Hongrie’, p. 2. Ko¨peczi, Be´la: ‘Iva˚n Boldizsa´r’s Lifework’, p. 73. ASEC, Iwaszkiewicz Papers, ‘Iwaszkiewicz-Adriano Buzzati Treviso 10.1.1979’, pp. 1, 2.

NOTES

TO PAGES

209 –213

287

180. Ibid., Michał Rusinek Papers, ‘Wojciech Natanson and Michał RusinekMichelle Campagnolo Bouvier 14.01.1981’, pp. 1 – 2. 181. Ibid., Schaff Papers, Anita Rind, ‘Le “Centre de Vienne”: un exemple de coope´ration Est – Ouest’, Le Monde, 30.08.1977, p. 17.

Chapter 8

1968: Toward Solidarity, the ‘Substance of True Democracy’

1. CE 1968– 6, pp. 161– 2. The 29 councillors present were Babel, Ceschi, Gerhard Funke, Polevoi, Campagnolo, Maria-Luisa Astaldi, Erika Lingner, Marianne Orgels-Stoumon, Magda van Emde Boas, Boldizsa´r, Leendert Braat, George Buchanan, Desonay, Andrea Ferrari-Toniolo, Franceschini, Kardos, Lazarev, Jan Le Witt, Mı´cˇko, Morra, Mueller, Mousrepov, Philippart, Hans Redeker, Will Sandberg, Jose´ Solas Garcı´a, Nathaniel Tarn, Terracini and Fritz Joachim von Rintelen, accompanied by seven observers: Andrea Brugsch, Hermann Budzislawski, Gheorghe Gorchkov, Miklo´s Hubay, Bart Landheer, Wasily Mazov, Boris Piotrovsky, Ralph B. Potter, Strˇı´brny, Gheorghe Vladescu-Racoassa and George Williams. Delatte, Madaule and Nantet were absent because of the events in France. 2. ASEC, Leningrad Executive Council Papers, f. 1, circular ‘Aux membres de la Socie´te´ europe´enne de culture, 21.12.1967’, p. 1. 3. The 1968 elections issued in a period of what Donald Sassoon has described as ‘crisis governments’, a ‘succession of centrist and centre-left coalitions’ that would only end in 1976. Sassoon, Donald, Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society and Politics since 1945 (London, 1997), p. 196. In spite of this turbulence, the SEC managed to hang on to its government subvention. 4. CE 1968– 6, pp. 177, 181. 5. Ibid., pp. 166– 7. Campagnolo had organized a meeting at the SEC’s offices with students for a discussion on the protests; this encounter probably informed his observations at Leningrad (p. 162). 6. Ibid., pp. 174– 5. 7. AG 1968– 9, p. 288. 8. Ibid., pp. 258 – 86. It should be noted that in Czechoslovakia the preoccupation was with democratization. The studies were published in Comprendre 33/4. 9. Ibid., pp. 239, 265, 267, 271–2, 275–6, 291. Richard Wolin has argued that, ironically, the French student left actually embraced Sartre as a ‘formative influence’. Quoting Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, ‘None of us had read Marcuse. Some had read Marx, of course, and maybe Bakunin, and among contemporary thinkers, Althusser, Mao, Guevara, [Henri] Lefebvre. But the political militants of the March 22 Movement had all read Sartre”.’ Wolin, Richard, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, 2010), p. 193.

288

NOTES

TO PAGES

213 –217

10. CE 1968– 6, pp. 180– 1; Funke, Gerhard, ‘Un nouveau bellum omnium contra omnes? Notre socie´te´ et ses e´tudiants’, p. 47; Campagnolo, ‘La contestation dans les limites de la raison’, p. 104, Comprendre 35/6, 1970. 11. Schaff, Adam, ‘La Politique de la culture et la contestation des e´tudiants’, p. 16; Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, ‘L’homme de culture devant la contestation’, p. 95; Comprendre 35/6, 1970. 12. Ka¯tz, Barry, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (London, 1982), pp. 86–7. 13. Kellner, Douglas, ‘Introduction: Radical Politics, Marcuse, and the New Left’, in Kellner, Douglas (ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Herbert Marcuse (London, 2005), p. 17; Ka¯tz: Herbert Marcuse, pp. 173– 6. 14. Ka¯tz: Herbert Marcuse, pp. 183– 6. 15. ASEC, Rass stampa 11 f. SEC 1963 –78, P. Viansson-Ponte, ‘Intervistato a Parigi il filosofo Marcuse’, La Stampa 12.05.1968. This interview also appeared in Le Monde. 16. ‘La contestation dans les limites de la raison’, in the original French. 17. Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (London, 1964), pp. 19, 22 – 7. 18. Campagnolo: ‘La contestation’, p. 104. 19. Ibid., pp. 104, 106, 118. 20. The idea of total refusal had been, for Marcuse, the richest legacy of OneDimensional Man. Heartened enough by the protests to abandon its negative dialectic, he reworked it instead in his more recent work, The End of Utopia, as the means of instituting the radical changes necessary for the formation of a new society. He delivered the latter as a lecture in Berlin in July 1967 at the Free University, organized by the German Socialist Student Union. Campagnolo apparently read the subsequently published version. Kellner: ‘Introduction’, pp. 17, 57, note 1. Campagnolo: ‘La contestation’, pp. 106, 111–13. 21. Campagnolo: ‘La contestation’, p. 114. 22. Ibid., p. 107. 23. Ibid., pp. 115, 110. 24. Ibid., p. 109. 25. Ibid., pp. 116, 117. 26. Ibid., pp. 118, 119. 27. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘La paix, une ide´e re´volutionnaire: l’O.N.U. et le Congre`s mondial des peuples’, Comprendre 31/2, p. 109. 28. Ibid., p. 118. 29. Ibid., pp. 117, 118. 30. Russell, quoted by Noam Chomsky, ‘Foreword’, in Limqueco, Peter and Weiss, Peter (eds), Prevent the Crime of Silence: Reports from the sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell (London, 1971), p. 9. 31. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Le Crime’, Le Nouvel Observateur 30.11.1966, reprinted in Sartre, Jean-Paul, Situations VIII (Paris, 1972), pp. 28, 35, 38 – 41. 32. Arthur: Unfinished Projects, pp. 153, 155– 6. 33. Aronson, Ronald, Jean-Paul Sartre – Philosophy in the World (London, 1980), p. 317.

NOTES

TO PAGES

217 –220

289

34. Ibid., p. 310; Campagnolo, Umberto,‘Le “non-intellectuel” sartrien et “l’homme de culture”’, Comprendre 35/6, p. 164. 35. Sartre, in his inaugural address at the start of the first session in Stockholm, also pointed to the limitations of Nuremberg as a procedural precedent. See Limqueco and Weiss: Prevent, pp. 63 – 4; Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Libres opinions: Le tribunal de Nuremberg et celui de Bertrand Russell’, Le Monde, 02.01.1967, pp. 2 – 3. 36. Campagnolo: ‘Libres opinions’, p. 3. 37. AG 1968– 6, p. 241. 38. Roy has been remembered as a man of ‘political extremes’. Mobilized in September 1939 and taken prisoner in 1940, after escaping he worked for two years for the Vichy radio service before joining both the Communist Party and the Resistance. He would be excluded from the PCF for his opposition to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and would be a strong advocate of both de-Stalinization and decolonization. Nappo, Tommaso, Index biographique francais (Munich, 2004), IIS 568 Claude Roy 57; III 401 Claude Roy 107. 39. CE 1967– 3, Comprendre 31/2, p. 320. 40. ASEC, Rass stampa 10 f. 2, ‘Claude Roy donne sa de´mission de la Socie´te´ europe´enne de culture’, Le Monde 14.01.1967; CE 1967– 3, p. 320; ‘Presence de la culture’, Comprendre 29/30, pp. 159– 60. 41. CE 1967– 3, p. 320. 42. ASEC, Adolf Hoffmeister Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Hoffmeister, 20.01.1969’. Campagnolo later explained to the Executive Council that the telegram was neither a petition nor a condemnation, but the Society’s ‘participation . . . in the universal emotion raised by these events’. An apparently abridged version was published in the Czech press. ASEC, Rass stampa 11 f. 1963– 78, ‘L’Article paru sur l’hebdomadaire l’Universite´ Charles le 05.03.1969’. He also sent a similar communication to the Greek head of state over the death of Alexos Panagoulis. CE 1969– 5, Comprendre 35/6, p. 208. 43. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘The Socialism That Came in from the Cold’ (1970), in Liehm: Politics of Culture, pp. 33–4. See also Anderson: Sartre’s Two Ethics, pp. 129–34; Sartre, ‘L’ide´e neuve de Mai 1968’, Le Nouvel Observateur 26.06.1968, cited in McBride: Sartre’s Political Theory, p. 189. See also Wolin: Wind from the East, pp. 179–228 who’s reading of Sartre’s Maoist phase in the context of French politics explains how this alliance aided his passage from communism to direct democracy. 44. Campagnolo: ‘Le “non-intellectuel” sartrien’, p. 164. The citation by Campagnolo is from an interview with Sartre in The International Idiot (no. 10, Sept 1970). 45. In a letter to Sartre he proposed that the Tribune take the form of a journal steered by a small but select committee of SEC members (see ASEC, Sartre Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Sartre 22.07.1968’); the previous month it appears that he was considering an actual forum to rival the UN as a place where the voice of the people could be directly expressed. (CE 1968– 6, p. 167.)

290

NOTES

TO PAGES

220 –222

46. The letter to Sartre on 22 July makes it clear that an essay was attached, which was likely to be ‘Peace, a Revolutionary Idea’, as it directly addressed the idea of the Tribune. 47. CE 1968– 9, p. 185. 48. ASEC, Boldizsa´r Papers, f. 1963– 76, ‘Campagnolo-Boldizsa´r 19.11.1970’. Campagnolo would, however, be much harsher toward Sartre on this and other issues when the latter published On a raison de se re´volter (1974). See Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Gavi, Sartre, Victor: On a raison de se re´volter, Paris, Gallimard, 1974’, Comprendre 41/2, pp. 231–7. 49. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Antonin Liehm: Trois ge´ne´rations: Entretiens sur le phe´nome`ne culturel tche´coslovaque’, Comprendre 35/6, pp. 175– 6; Liehm: Generace, p. 11. 50. Liehm, Antonı´n J., ‘Author’s Foreword: On Culture, Politics, Recent History, the Generations – and also on Conversations’, in Liehm: Politics of Culture, p. 42. 51. CE 1969– 5, pp. 208– 9. 52. Campagnolo, Umberto, ‘Project de document concernant la situation en Tche´coslovaquie’, CE 1969–5, p. 211. 53. CE 1969– 5, pp. 226– 8. 54. ASEC, Henri Janne Papers, ‘Polevoi-Henri Janne 10.04.1972’, pp. 1 – 2. Janne had a long career in politics: from 1949 to 1951 he was president of NATO’s Defence Production Board; in 1954, head of the Belgian delegation to the UN’s Economic and Social Council. A senator in 1961; he was Minister of National Education 1963– 65. Delzenne, Yves-William and Houyoux, Jean, Le nouveau Dictionnaire des Belges (Brussels, 1998), p. 14; Comprendre 16, p. 416. 55. Ibid., Janne Papers, ‘Campagnolo-Janne 05.05.1972’. 56. Ibid., Polevoi Papers, brochure, Se´curite´ et cooperation europe´ennes: invitation au dialogue [1972], unpaginated. 57. It cited youth, women’s and Christian organizations, the peace movement, parliamentarians, scientists, cultural personalities, journalists and businessmen, the European workers’ movement, different socialist parties, the session of the Council of the International Socialist in Helsinki 1971 and of the communists in Moscow 1969 as all having made this demand. Ibid. 58. Formal support for the CSCE process was discussed at the SEC’s Twelfth General Assembly (Rome, September 1971). It was agreed that the Society, while endorsing the idea of European security, would not extend its support in any way that would compromise its autonomy, but that this position would be kept under review. AG 1971– 9, Comprendre 27/8, pp. 284, 310. 59. Snyder: Human Rights Activism, p. 7. 60. ASEC, Consiglio esecutiva, ‘Compte rendu de la session du Conseil exe´cutif, Varsovie, 06 – 8.10.1975’, p. 5; ASEC, Consiglio Esecutiva Erevan, ‘Comunicato e dichiarazione finale sessione di Erevan 19 –22.11.1985’, p. 2. The SEC apparently participated in the Paris sitting of the CSCE on ‘the human dimension’ in 1989. ASEC, Autorita` Ministero degli affari esteri,

NOTES

61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

TO PAGES

222 –225

291

‘Michelle Campagnolo Bouvier-Ministero degli affari esteri 24.05.1989’. Another communication with the SEC’s Czech centre notes some past involvement with the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly. ASEC, Premi box 3, f. 1989– 91, ‘Campagnolo Bouvier-Josef Polisensky 16.07.1993’. See SEC: Statuts, p. 75, and AG 1971– 9, p. 285, both of which note the support for the Helsinki Final Act by the Society’s members. Ibid., Janne Papers, ‘Janne-Campagnolo Bouvier 07.07.1988’ p. 2; Boldizsa´r Papers, f. 1977– 1988, ‘La socie´te´ du dialogue’ 1980 (typescript), p. 2; Jean Morand Papers, f. 1983– 7, ‘Lettre circulaire aux Membres du Centre belge’, Brussels Aug. 1987, p. 2. Ibid., Janne Papers, ‘Janne-Campagnolo Bouvier 07.12.1982’, p. 1. Consiglio esecutiva Erevan, ‘Comunicato e dichiarazione finale’, p. 2. The Yerevan meeting sent a telegram to Gorbachev and Reagan, expressing its hopes that their mutual will to reduce the danger and tensions in the international situation would issue in ‘significant results’, and confirming the SEC’s commitment on behalf of rapprochement between individuals and peoples in favour of the same ends. See also the final declaration of the meeting reproduced in SEC: Statuts, pp. 73 – 5. Pollack and Wielgohs: Dissent, pp. ix – x. Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid., p. xii. They note Joppke’s work in this regard; Bugajski and Pollack also make a similar point in East European Fault Lines, p. 37. Ibid., p. xiv. AG 1951– 11, Comprendre 5/6, pp. 30, 31.

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www.memoireonline.com/04/08/1003/m_teilhard-de-chardin-senghor-civili zation-of-the-universal1.html. Governo italiano, http://www.governo.it/Governo/Governi/governi.html. Grand-Duche´ de Luxembourg, Ministe`re d’E´tat, Bulletin de Documentation 1:1/2 (1956), http://www.gouvernement.lu/1824692/BID_1956_1 – 2. Griffith, Sabina, ‘Two Weeks in September, 1958: Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva’, Iter Newsline 47, 0109.2008, http://www.iter.org/newsline/47/680. The Hungarian Quarterly, Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe, http:// www.pecob.eu/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/EN/IDPagina/2202. Liehm, Antonı´n J. and Schmidt, Roman, ‘Encyclopaedist of the international: a conversation with Antonı´n J. Liehm’, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/ 2008– 09 –23-liehm-en.html. ‘Manifesto di Ventotene’, http://www.federalunion.org.uk/archives/ventotene.shtml#. McKeon, Zahava K., ‘General Introduction’, http://www.richardmckeon.org/ content/h-Responses/McK-SelectedWritingsV1_GenIntro.pdf. Obituary, Ivan Boldizsa´r, 76, Hungarian PEN Chief’, http://www.nytimes.com/ 1988/12/24/obituaries/ivan-boldizsar-76-hungarian-pen-chief.html. Societa` Dante Alighieri, http://www.dantealighieri-roma.it/gb/chisiamo.htm.

INDEX

Action Party, 27, 207, 234 n. 41 African Society of Culture (SAC), 15, 84, 147, 148, 151, 156, 157, 161, 162– 9, 172, 174, 175, 275 n. 157 Algeria, 77, 78, 81 – 2, 86 –7, 89 Allard, Antoine, 103 Alpatov, Mikhail, 107, 132 Amnesty International, 196 Amrouche, Jean, 56, 57, 71, 75 – 9, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86 – 7, 126, 149, 151, 247 n.37 Andreotti, Giulio, 19, 63, 128, 260 n. 33 Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World, 14, 56 –67, 71, 100 Aquila Discussions, 207, 208 are´opage, the, 167–8, 196, 212, 273 n. 129 Aron, Raymond, 43, 63 Aronstein, Georges, 196 Arthur, Paige, 144, 145, 208, 217 Atoms for Peace (UN), 131 Babel, Antony, 20, 38, 42, 129, 132, 134, 152 Bammate, Nadjm Oud-Dine, 12, 129, 149 Bandung Conference, the, 5, 15, 71, 91 – 2, 95, 144, 147, 151 Banfi, Antonio, 43

Beauvoir, Simone de, 51, 194, 206 Benda, Julien, 3, 20, 32, 33, 55 – 6 Bernal, J. D., 3, 13, 42, 107, 116– 17, 127, 131, 132, 139, 140– 1, 204–5 Bloch, Ernst, 3, 64, 120– 1, 204, 285 n. 151 Bobbio, Norberto, 3, 9, 10, 13 – 14, 42, 57, 68, 69, 79, 84, 86, 120, 126, 136, 192, 196, 207, 208 Boldizsa´r, Iva´n, 138, 184, 185, 188– 9, 191, 195, 196– 7, 198, 199– 200, 202, 209 Brazzaville Declaration, 76, 77 Brugsch, Theodor, 64 Busia, K. A., 151, 156 Calogero, Guido, 207, 208 Campagnolo, Umberto at 1946 RIG, 34 – 6 appraisals of, 9 – 10, 118 biography of, 3, 9, 21 – 2 ‘Culturalist Manifesto’, 143, 144, 161, 162, 163, 177, 178 on democracy, 178– 9, 199, 216, 219, 220 and Diop, Alioune, 72, 82 – 3, 87, 88 – 90, 92– 3, 145, 148– 50, 153, 158, 162, 166 –8

INDEX on Europe, 36 – 8, 101– 2 ‘European Responsibilities’, 72, 75, 84, 88, 90, 155, 158, 170, 246 n. 18 and federalism, 9, 22 – 3, 24, 27, 28, 35, 37, 38, 41, 164 on history, 62, 72, 93, 142, 158–9, 161, 164, 214, 271 n. 71 and Marcuse, 213– 15 Nobel Peace Prize nominations, 9, 231 n. 30 ‘Peace, a Revolutionary Idea’, 215– 16, 220, 290 n. 46 and Sartre, 119, 141–3, 175, 178–9, 192–3, 213, 215, 216–18, 219–20, 266 n. 114 and 117, 289 n. 45 on solidarity, 28, 142, 143, 164, 212, 215, 216 on the Third World, 72, 75, 80, 84 –6, 143, 145, 158, 162– 4 thought of, 16, 22, 28, 35 – 6, 61 –2, 67 –8, 70, 72, 75, 82, 83, 84 – 6, 90, 101– 2, 119– 21, 141– 3, 148, 163, 195– 6, 202, 213– 16, 219– 20 trip to the United States, 129 – 30, 192 Camus, Albert, 43, 63, 69, 114 Castro, Josue´ de, 152, 153, 154, 269 n. 26 Catholic Church, 201–3 Centre for European Culture (CEC), 29, 34 – 5, 37, 38, 42, 46, 48, 61 Ce´saire, Aime´, 69, 80, 95, 151, 153, 156, 159, 162 Ceschi, Stanislao, 19, 41, 68, 107, 128, 134, 139, 151, 152 Charleroi colloquium, Brussels, 200– 1 Christian Peace Movement, 61, 201 Cini Foundation, the, 130, 132, 195 civilization of the universal, 2, 6, 15, 55, 72 –3, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 145, 147, 148,

303

155–60, 161, 165, 167, 168– 9, 170–2, 175 Colorni, Eugenio, 25, 26 – 7 communism, end of, 17, 180–1, 202, 208, 209, 221, 224 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 16, 46, 55, 98 Comprendre, 12 – 13, 125, 146, 147 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 17, 110, 176, 210, 221 – 2, 290 n. 57 Conference of Writers from the Countries of Asia and Africa, Tashkent, 147, 151 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 4, 9, 11, 47, 50 – 1, 58, 60 – 1, 62– 3, 67, 90 – 1, 110, 117–18, 125, 130, 146, 204, 205, 243 n. 55, 285 n. 152 Constitutive Assembly (SEC), 4, 14, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51 – 6, 69, 72 Council of Europe, 8, 29, 100, 101, 222, 223 Cranston, Maurice, 202 cultural rights, 2, 7 – 8, 18, 54 – 5, 178, 181, 182, 183, 194– 5 Cultural Rights as Human Rights conference (UNESCO), 7 culture, moral function of, 3, 54, 119, 218, 220– 1, 223 Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium, Dakar, 139, 158, 161–2 Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium, Rome, 15, 88, 95, 147, 174 organization of, 150– 2, 269 n. 25 participants, 151– 2 purpose of, 151, 153 sessions of, 153– 8 Czechoslovakia, cultural policy, 187, 192

304

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

Daniel-Rops, Henri, 66 decolonization, 7, 75, 79, 81 – 2, 89, 144– 5, 146– 7, 174 democratic socialism, 160, 178– 9, 183, 185, 205, 208 De´ry, Tibor, 3, 125 de-Stalinization, 2, 16, 17, 98, 110, 144, 160, 178, 180, 181, 182– 185, 190, 193, 196, 205, 224 dialectic, the, 6, 119, 191– 2, 225 dialogue, 6, 14, 54, 62, 94, 140, 148, 163, 178, 191, 192, 197, 199, 201, 206, 222, 223 difference, 75, 77, 113– 14, 156– 7 Diop, Alioune, 15, 69, 72, 79– 81, 85, 86, 88 – 90, 91 – 6, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 158, 162, 166– 7, 271 n. 67 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 95, 151 dissidents, 5, 180, 224 diversity, 74,149, 156, 171 Donini, Ambrogio, 19, 41, 65, 107, 134, 135, 136, 177, 191, 192, 200 Dubarle, Dominique, 126, 201 Ducal Palace, Venice, 1, 51, 61, 67, 118 East–West Dialogue, the (SEC), 6, 16, 55, 66, 68, 97–8, 99, 107, 256 n. 84 influence of, 117– 18, 140, 203– 6, 285 n. 153 organization of, 103– 6, 254 n 29, 254– 5 n. 52 participants, 107 press coverage of, 115– 16, 137 purpose of, 104, 105 sessions, 110– 15 East–West Meetings, the (SEC), 15–16, 98 second meeting, 115, 118, 127– 9, 130, 132– 4, 137, 260 n. 22, 261 n. 53, 262 n. 60 and 62, 262– 3 n. 71 third meeting, 135, 136– 9, 264– 5 n. 99

AND THE

COLD WAR

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 2, 3, 47 – 8, 49, 56, 65, 66– 7, 103, 104, 106, 110, 120, 121, 127, 132, 137, 138, 139, 144, 151, 177, 183, 184, 189, 191, 244– 5 n. 93, 258 n. 129 Einstein, Albert, 7, 51, 141, 144 Elizabeth of Belgium, Queen, 101, 103 Eurafricanism, 76, 155– 6, 170, 246–7 n. 26 Europe: and colonization, 27 idea of, 23, 31 – 2, 36, 100, 101 integration of, 8, 21, 27 – 8, 29, 37, 58, 100, 101 moral crisis of, 3, 21, 23, 32, 78, 80 – 1, 155, 161 relationship with Africa, 81, 88 – 9 relationship with the Third World, 92, 147– 8 Europe-Conversation, 197 European Community of Writers (COMES), 134– 5 European Federalist Movement (MFE), 9, 24, 27 –8, 37, 50 European Movement, 29, 36, 37 European problem, the, 3, 12, 29, 33, 34, 52, 54, 61, 67, 69, 72, 79, 83, 98, 101, 145 European Recovery Act: see Marshall Plan European Society of Culture (SEC) achievements of, 2, 6, 17 – 18, 224–5 centres of, 59, 179, 186, 195, 198, 200, 209, 221 and communism, 37 – 8, 40, 47, 55, 56, 64 – 7, 68, 137– 8 Constitutive Assembly: see separate entry Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium: see separate entry development of, 6, 7– 8, 16 – 18, 69, 79, 83, 119, 141, 162, 199, 215, 216, 221 East – West Dialogue: see separate entry

INDEX East– West Meetings: see separate entry Eurocentrism of, 2, 15, 56, 69 financial difficulties of, 128, 130, 168, 195, 196 financing of, 19, 41, 63, 128, 129, 139, 152– 3, 162, 195, 211– 12, 270 n. 32, 287 n. 3 founding of, 1, 14, 20, 21, 34– 5, 36, 37 –8 General Assemblies: see separate entry human rights, 79, 87, 144–5, 180–1, 182, 207–8, 220 lexicon of, 6, 14, 53 – 5, 94, 140– 1 media coverage of, 17, 57, 62, 88, 98, 126, 133– 4, 179, 193– 4, 197, 199– 200, 211 membership (see also recruitment), 3, 11, 18, 41 – 2, 47, 50 – 1, 53 – 4, 59 –60, 63, 64, 84, 88, 97, 126– 7, 138, 197– 8, 240 n. 2, 241 n. 13, 14, 250 n. 94, 261 n. 47 a politicism of, 11, 40, 42, 54, 99, 125– 6, 220 Promotional Committee, 3, 11, 14, 37, 43, 46, 50, 63 purpose of, 1, 6, 8, 9, 10 – 11, 36, 39, 42, 52 – 3, 60, 68 – 9, 80, 83 – 4, 140, 143, 177– 8, 179, 183, 194, 196, 198, 199– 200, 211, 212, 223 recruitment, 37, 42–9, 50–1, 59–60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 80, 84, 129, 130, 166, 179, 243 n. 73, 74, 244 n. 77 relations with Africa, 17, 79 relations with Italian government, 19, 67, 106, 128, 132, 152– 3 relations with the masses, 67, 68 relations with other cultural organizations, 38, 41, 43–4, 56, 60–7, 69, 83–4, 95, 99, 100–1, 106, 131–2, 134–5, 143, 157–8, 162–9, 201, 203, 221–3, 268 n. 4, 275 n. 157, 290 n. 58 and 60

305

relations with socialist countries, 16, 41 – 2, 44 – 8, 50 European Union 8 European Union of Federalists (UEF), 28– 9, 36, 58 Executive Council (know as Executive Committee, before 1950) (SEC), 37, 41, 46 – 7, 56, 67, 78, 80, 84– 5, 99, 105– 6, 117, 125–6, 127, 136– 7, 138, 139, 163, 179, 183, 184, 189, 221, 223– 4, 236 n. 100, 260 n. 19, 263 –4 n. 94 Budapest meeting, 179, 196, 197– 200, 283 n. 114 Leningrad meeting, 179, 211– 12, 213, 287 n. 1 Prague meeting, 66, 179, 187, 191– 5, 281 n. 75 Fadeev, Alexandr, 39, 65 Fanon, Frantz, 2, 15, 95, 144, 152, 156, 167, 172– 5 Favaretto Fisca, Giovanni, 169, 195 federalism European, 6, 7, 8, 14, 21, 23, 24 – 7, 31 world, 6, 7 –8, 27, 162 Fedin, Konstantin, 103, 110, 113 First Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Paris, 92, 94 – 5, 147, 148, 150 Foundation for European Intellectual Mutual Aid (FEIE), 118, 204, 257–8 n. 119 France, relationship with Africa, 75, 76– 7, 78, 155– 6, 159– 60 Franceschini, Francesco, 19, 162 freedom of expression: see cultural rights French Communist Party (PCF), 42, 45– 6, 55 – 6 French National Liberation Committee (CFLN), 75, 76, 77 Fromm, Erich, 130, 182, 192 Fung Yu-Lan, 149

306

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

Garaudy, Roger, 201, 204, 207 General Assemblies (SEC), 223– 4 First (1951), 60, 61 – 2 Second (1952), 67 – 9, 72, 82 – 3 Third (1953), 84 – 8, 249 n. 76, 78 Fourth (1954), 98 – 9, 104 Fifth (1955), 101– 2 Sixth (1956), 95, 118– 19, 120– 2, 147, 148– 50, 258 n. 128 Seventh (1958), 130– 2, 141–2 Eighth (1961), 138, 143– 4, 162, 266– 7 n. 128 Ninth (1963), 139, 163– 6 Tenth (1965), 168, 195– 6, 197, 282 n. 99 Eleventh (1968), 212– 13 Geneva, 20, 27, 31, 38 – 9, 42 Geneva International Meetings (RIG), 4, 20, 31 – 6, 38 – 9, 62, 78, 131, 214 Geneva Summit, 100, 102 Gianquinto, Giobatta, 39, 41 Gide, Andre´, 3, 13, 69, 76 Glissant, Edouard, 95, 151, 154, 156–7, 175, 271 n. 55 Gomułka, Władysław, 123, 206 Gramsci Institute, 65, 119, 145, 175, 207, 208 Gui, Luigi, 19, 163, 168 Hague conference, 36 – 7 Havet, Jacques, 12, 74, 75, 82 – 3, 84, 85, 90, 106, 107, 131, 132 Ha´y, Gyula, 124, 125 Ha´yek, Igor, 194– 5 Ha´yek, Jirˇı´, 206 Helsinki Final Act, 2, 17, 25, 180– 1, 190, 221– 2 Hersch, Jeanne, 63 Hirschmann, Ursula, 25, 26, 27 history, entering, 90, 94 – 5, 158–9, 161, 164– 5 Hoffmeister, Adolf, 66, 120, 184, 185 – 7, 192 – 3, 219, 278 n. 30

AND THE

COLD WAR

Houang, Reverend Franc
ois, 85, 86, 147, 249– 50 n. 85 human rights, 2, 7 – 8, 16 –18, 25, 87, 119, 145, 180– 1, 183, 196, 202, 206–8, 231 n. 19 Hungarian Uprising, Soviet suppression of, 123– 6 Hungarian Writers’ Union, 124– 5 Hungary, cultural policy of, 198, 283 n. 113 hybridity, 95, 154, 155, 156– 7, 159, 169, 170, 175 Ignotus, Paul, 127, 192, 202 Institute for International Political Studies, 24 intellectual(s) (see also politicointellectual) definition of, 18, 53 organization of, 4, 5, 29, 51, 54, 71, 90 relationship with the masses, 26, 143, 163, 215 –16 role of, 4 – 5,10, 26, 28, 32, 35, 37, 54 – 5, 56, 57, 68 – 9, 72, 87 – 8, 93, 94, 102, 103, 119, 141– 5, 149– 50, 163, 196, 199, 212, 216– 18, 219– 20, 223, 225 types of, 11 – 12, 13 – 14, 18, 41, 181, 183– 90 International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IIIC), 73, 74 International Institute of Philosophy (IIP), 207, 208 international problem, the, 12, 69, 82, 84, 145, 146 International War Crimes Tribunal: see Russell Tribunal Italian Communist Party (PCI), 39, 45, 64– 5, 66, 67 Italo-Soviet Congress, Turin, 47 – 8, 49 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 3, 39, 103, 107– 8, 109, 116, 117, 132, 134, 183, 184, 189, 205–6, 209, 255 n. 58

INDEX Janne, Henri, 201, 221 – 2, 223, 290 n. 54 Jaspers, Karl, 3, 13, 21, 32– 3, 61 Jelenski, Konstantin, 117– 18 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, 68, 151 John XXIII, Pope, 164, 201 Joliot-Curie, Fre´de´ric, 42, 45, 58, 66, 91, 97 Ka´da´r, Ja´nos, 188, 189 Kahuda, Frantisˇek, 191 Kala-Lobe´, Iwiye´, 166– 7, 168– 9 Kardos, Tibor, 183– 4, 196, 199, 200 Kelsen, Hans, 21–2, 30, 32, 51, 233 n. 7 Kemenov, Vladimir Semenovich, 129 Khruschchev, Nikita, 91, 98, 123, 138 Knokke-le-Zoute meeting, 103– 5, 253 n. 36 Korneichuk, Aleksandr, 106, 110, 256 n. 72 Kostylev, Mikhail, 48 Kott, Jan, 194, 206 Kulturpolitik, 3, 54 Kusin, Vladimir, 178, 180, 185 L’Arche, 76 – 7, 78, 247 n. 37 Lacroix, Jean, 86, 97, 98, 194– 5 La Pira, Giorgio, 151, 152 League of Nations, the, 23, 73, 74 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 45 – 6, 48, 204, 285 n. 151 Lehmann, Bernard, 68 Leiris, Michel, 43, 79, 80 Lescure, Jean, 43, 57, 79 Levi, Carlo, 103, 107, 151 Liehm, Antonı´n, 3, 187, 192– 3, 194, 207, 220– 1, 279 n. 43 Lipgens, Walter, 9, 25, 27, 28, 50 Lisowski, Jerzy, 205– 6 living Marxism: see Marxist humanism Luka´cs, Georg, 3, 21, 32 – 3, 47 – 8, 49, 51, 194, 195

307

Madaule, Jacques, 82, 202 Maheu, Rene´, 73, 170– 2, 175 Marchesi, Concetto, 45, 64 Marcuse, Herbert, 212– 15, 288 n. 20 Marshall Plan, 29, 37, 39 Marxism, 54, 109, 114– 15, 159, 193, 194, 208 Marxist humanism, 16, 111, 121, 145, 159, 160– 1, 179, 182, 184, 192, 194, 195, 198, 200– 1 Matic´, Dusˇan, 99, 100 Mauriac, Franc
ois, 3, 79, 150– 1, 153–4 Maydieu, Father Augustin-Jean, 79, 80, 81, 248 n. 46 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 12, 66, 74, 75, 80, 82, 84, 86, 107, 109, 147, 149, 212, 244 n. 89 McKeon, Richard, 121, 207, 208, 258 n. 134 Mediterranean Colloquia, 270 n. 30 Meneghetti, Egidio, 41 Merkur, 59 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 107, 110, 111, 116 Mı´cˇko, Miroslav, 66, 177, 184, 185, 187, 191, 209, 279 n. 45 Mikhajlov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 129 Mont Pe`lerin Society, the, 54, 241 n. 16 Moral Rearmament, 61, 201 Morals and Society conference, Rome, 207 Mucchi, Gabriele, 65 Mueller, Fernand Lucien, 38, 40, 43, 62, 68 Mumford, Lewis, 129 Musrepov, Gabit, 151, 156 Mutual Aid Committee for Writers and Editors (CEEE), 118, 204 Nagy, Imre, 123, 259 n. 2 negritude, 94, 159, 161, 165, 174 New Hungarian Quarterly, The, 188– 9, 279–80 n. 56

308

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

New Order group, 30, 66 Ngango, Georges, 164– 6, 167, 168 Non-Aligned Movement, the, 5, 71 Northomb, Pierre, 101 Nova´k, Mirko, 138, 151, 191, 207 Nuremberg Trials, 21, 217 Olivetti family, 23 – 4, 130 open Marxism: see Marxist humanism Organization for Intellectual Co-operation (OCI), 73, 74 Ostpolitik, 63 – 4 Pacem in Terris congress, New York, 203 Paeschke, Hans, 58, 61, 125 Palach, Jan, 219 Parandowski, Jan, 177, 183– 4, 278 n. 24 Partisans of Peace, 4, 42, 46, 47, 48 Party of the African Federation (PFA), 159– 60, 161 Pasternak, Boris, 135– 6 Pauline Society, 203 peace movements, 39, 181, 201 Peace on Earth, 164, 201– 2 peaceful coexistence, 63 – 4, 91, 98, 144, 190, 191, 195, 197, 200, 203, 280– 1 n. 68, 281 n.74 PEN Club, the, 4, 43 – 4, 62, 125, 182, 186, 189, 197, 209 personalism, 30, 34, 36 Pe´tain, Philippe, 33, 66 Piovene, Guido, 107, 116, 132, 134, 137 pluralism: see diversity Polevoi, Boris, 107, 110, 116, 132, 136, 137, 151, 221, 222 politico-intellectual, 12, 18, 108, 181, 182, 184, 185, 209 politics of culture, 3, 6, 10, 17, 54– 5, 56 – 7, 119, 142, 149– 50, 199, 202, 215– 16, 222, 225 Pollack, Detlef, 224, 225

AND THE

COLD WAR

Ponti, Giovanni, 19, 40 – 1, 67, 106, 107, 125, 128, 129, 132, 134, 151 Pos, H. J., 58 Potekhin, I. I., 151, 153 Prague Spring, 187 Soviet suppression of, 5, 17, 180, 209, 211, 218 –19 praxis, 142, 182 Pre´sence africaine, 15, 69, 79 – 80, 81, 82, 89, 92 Problem of Freedom in the Light of Scientific Socialism, the, 121, 203–4 Pryce-Jones, Alan, 107, 116, 132 Pugwash Movement, 131 Raadi, G. A., 86 Rabemananjara, Jacques, 79, 80, 95, 151, 156, 162 reconstruction, 3, 5, 7, 14, 21, 23, 27, 33– 4, 90, 160, 183 reform communism, 5, 108, 109, 119, 120–1, 179– 80, 181, 184–90, 205–7 relation theory, 156, 271 n. 55 Resistance, the, 25, 27, 40, 41, 75, 78, 79, 92 –3, 195 revisionist Marxism: see Marxist humanism Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, 46 Rieger, Ladislav, 120– 1, 285 n. 151 Rinascita, 65 Ristic´, Marko, 3, 107, 108– 9, 110, 113–15, 116, 117, 118, 132, 134, 182, 205, 206, 255 n. 63 Romein, Jan, 58 Rossi, Ernesto, 24 – 8 Rougemont, Denis de, 29 – 31, 33– 4, 36 – 7, 42, 58, 61, 125, 155, 158 Roy, Claude, 149, 218, 289 n. 38 Russell, Bertrand, 51, 141, 217 Russell Tribunal, 217– 18

INDEX Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 3, 11, 16, 18, 39, 46, 48, 66, 69, 79, 80, 91, 103–4, 105, 107, 110, 111– 15, 116, 118, 119– 20, 127, 133, 140, 141–3, 144– 5, 159, 175, 176, 182, 184, 190, 192– 3, 194, 199, 205, 206– 7, 208, 209, 217, 219, 256 n. 95, 287 n. 9 ‘Marxism and Existentialism’, 16, 110– 11, 114– 15, 184, 189, 205– 7 ‘Questions of Method’, 16, 110, 119, 142– 3, 144–5, 160, 175, 179, 182, 184, 189, 193, 224 Schaff, Adam, 3, 13, 182, 184, 185, 189– 90, 191, 193, 200, 203, 206, 207, 209, 280 n. 62, 280– 1 n. 68 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 130 Schumann, Maurice, 36 scientific socialism, 16, 114– 15, 121, 160, 179, 181, 182 Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Rome, 95, 147, 150, 152, 268 n. 16 Seghers, Anna, 3, 64, 103, 138 Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar, 2, 69, 73, 80, 95, 144, 150, 151, 154– 6, 158, 159– 62, 165, 167, 169– 70, 175 Sereni, Emilio, 45, 65 Sik, Endre, 164, 198, 200 Silone, Ignazio, 107, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 116, 118, 134, 137–8 Smith, Wilfred C., 151, 153 social justice, 8, 12, 14, 120, 142, 145, 178, 207– 8 socialist humanism: see Marxist humanism solidarity, 142, 143, 163, 164, 168, 215– 16 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 36, 101 Spender, Stephen, 21, 107, 110, 115– 17, 118, 137 Spinelli, Altiero, 24 – 8, Federalist Theses 25, 27, 28, 37

309

Sprigge, Cecil, 68 Sprigge, Sylvia, 151, 169, 196 Steinitz, Wolfgang, 58, 60, 64, 285 n. 151 Strˇbı´ny´, Jan, 191 student protests, 6, 17, 212– 13 symbiosis: see hybridity Terracini, Umberto, 19, 43, 44 – 5, 48, 64, 65, 68, 139, 163, 164– 5, 177, 192, 194, 199 Thaw, the, 98, 111 Third World, 18 Thomas, Jean, 74, 170 Togliatti, Palmiro, 39, 45 tolerance, 148, 201 Torres Bodet, Jaime, 83 Tribune of the Peoples, 216, 220, 289 n. 45 Triolet, Elsa, 103 Tursi, Angiolo, 41 Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union, 16, 55, 91, 98, 114, 180, 204 Two´rczos´c´, 107, 108, 205– 6 Unesco, 2, 5, 7, 12, 15, 16, 61, 65, 66, 73, 74 –5, 83, 92, 104, 105, 106, 109, 121, 128, 129, 131– 2, 143, 147, 149, 152, 163, 165, 167, 170–2, 176, 181, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 198, 203, 209, 213–14, 222, 223, 224, 249 n. 71, 275 n. 157 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 3, 107, 132, 151, 163–4, 195 United Nations, 2, 31, 74, 131, 143, 176, 181, 182, 184, 186, 202, 224 United Nations Charter, 7, 163– 4 universal civilization, 32, 69, 72, 73, 86, 94, 95, 111– 12, 115, 120, 145, 149, 157, 164, 165, 174 universal culture: see universal civilization

310

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUALS

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 2, 7, 18, 75, 79, 83, 121, 180– 1, 182– 3, 202, 208, 209, 225, 277 n. 15 and 16 Urbinati, Nadia, 8, 13, 120, 121, 207 Valeri, Diego, 41, 51 – 2, 107 Vale´ry, Paul, 23, 31 – 2, 33 Varela, Alfredo, 102 Vatican II, 201, 202 Veillon, Charles, 129, 152, 270 n. 32 Venice, 13, 39, 42, 47 Venice Biennale, 40, 41 Ventotene Manifesto, 25 – 7, 28, 35 Vercors (Bruller, Jean) 43, 103, 104, 105, 107, 116, 132, 133, 188, 194, 205 Verdin, Philippe, 79 Veronese, Vittorio, 131– 2, 152, 163– 4 Vietnam War, 17, 196, 199, 211, 217– 18 VOKS, 44, 106, 107, 109, 127– 9, 238– 9, n. 140 Volpe, Galvano della, 121, 207

AND THE

COLD WAR

Wahl, Jean, 3, 13, 43, 66 Wielgohs, Jan, 224, 225 World Association of Culture (AMC), 15, 141, 162 – 9, 174, 196, 272 n. 93 World Festival of Black Arts, Dakar, 73, 163, 165, 169, 170 World Peace Council (WPC), 4, 50 – 1, 58, 60, 61, 64 – 6, 125, 140, 188, 204 Appeal to the UN, 57 Congress for Disarmament and International Cooperation, Moscow, 131, 139, 140– 1, 205 Helsinki Congress, 91, 100, 102– 3, 108, 144 Stockholm Appeal, 57 Vienna Congress, 65, 66, 103 Warsaw Congress, 48, 57, 60, 90, 147 Wrocław Conference, 39, 42, 46, 57, 60 Zie´gler, Henri de, 38, 134 Zurich Meeting of Editors of Eastern and Western Reviews, 118, 204

Plate 1 Umberto Campagnolo, the SEC’s founder and general secretary, at the Parc du Chaˆteau de Coppet, Switzerland, 1958. Photo: courtesy of Matteo and Cosima Campagnolo.

Plate 2 The 1946 RIG Luka´cs-Jaspers debate: Georg Luka´cs addresses the audience while Karl Jaspers (left) waits for his turn to speak. Listening intently on the far right is Denis de Rougemont. Photographer: David E. Scherman. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Plate 3 Campagnolo in conversation with Julien Benda at the 1946 RIG. A famous advocate of European federalism, Benda was a keynote speaker both in Geneva and at the SEC’s Constitutive Assembly. Photo: ASEC, Venice. Plate 4 Denis de Rougemont at the 1946 RIG. He founded the CEC and was president of the CCF’s European Committee, as well as a member of its International Committee. Photographer: David E. Scherman. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Plate 5 The SEC’s Constitutive Assembly, meeting in the Senate Hall of Venice’s Ducal Palace, May 1950. In the past, the Republic discussed matters of state here. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 6 Opening the Constitutive Assembly. Left to right: Henri de Zie´gler, Angiolo Tursi, General Secretary Umberto Campagnolo, President Giovanni Ponti, Antony Babel, Henri Be´darida and Diego Valeri. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 7 The Wrocław Conference, August 1948. Photo: Marx Memorial Library, London.

Plate 8 The CCF’s first congress, Berlin, June 1950. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Plate 9 Wladimir Weidle´, Denis de Rougemont and Roger Caillois at the CCF’s counter-communist propaganda meeting in Andlau, September 1951. They discussed, among other things, what to do about the Appeal. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Plate 10 The SEC’s Executive Council, meeting before the Second General Assembly in Venice 1952, where the fallout from the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World was discussed. Clockwise from top left: Norberto Bobbio, Diego Valeri, Henri de Zie´gler, Jean Amrouche, Father Augustin-Jean Maydieu, Jean Lescure, Giuseppe Ungaretti, unidentified, Umberto Apollonio, stenographer, Gabriele Mucchi, Umberto Morra, Bruna Forlati Tamaro, Cecil Sprigge, Bernard Lehmann, Fernand Mueller. Antony Babel, Umberto Campagnolo, Giovanni Ponti and Jean Wahl were also there. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 11 Umberto Terracini, Arturo Carlo Jemolo and Father AugustinJean Maydieu at the Second General Assembly. Terracini was a crucial link between the SEC and intellectuals in Europe’s socialist countries; Maydieu was a bridge to the Pre´sence africaine group in Paris. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 12 SEC members (left to right) Sibilla Aleramo, Franco Antonicelli and Maria Luisa Astaldi between sessions at the Second General Assembly, Venice 1952. Alioune Diop (far right) was still an observer at this point. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 13 The Bandung Conference, April 1955. Bandung was a reference point both for the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists and for Jean-Paul Sartre at the WPC’s World Congress, Helsinki. There he developed his ideas on peaceful coexistence founded not on tolerance, but on active co-operation. Photographer: Howard Sochurek. Photo: Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Plate 14 A typically large WPC congress, Helsinki, June 1955. Photo: World Peace Council, World Assembly for Peace, Helsinki, June 22 –19, 1955 (Vienna, 1956), plate section II. Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holder.

Plate 15 Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians, the ‘Red Queen’, with Campagnolo at the Fifth General Assembly, Brussels, October 1955. Immediately behind them are Pierre Vermeylen, Belgium’s socialist Minister of the Interior and Giovanni Ponti (middle). Further back, in conversation with a young woman, is Pablo Casals. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 16 The East–West Dialogue, March 1956, at the hotel Luna Baglioni, Venice. Clockwise from centre, top: Giovanni Ponti, Umberto Campagnolo, Ignazio Silone, Marko Ristic´, Konstantin Fedin, Irina Dollar (interpreter), Boris Polevoi, Mikhail Alpatov, J. D. Bernal, Vercors, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Jacques Havet, Guido Piovene, Alan Pryce-Jones, Stephen Spender (just outside the picture), Jean-Paul Sartre, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Carlo Levi, and Antony Babel. The empty chair was for Karl Barth, who came late to the meetings. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 17 Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, a staunch internationalist whose participation in events like the Dialogue kept him abreast of developments in western thinking. His literary monthly Two´rczos´c´ published Sartre’s critique of Soviet-style Marxism shortly after the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. Here he opens the Wrocław conference with a speech on the need for global solidarity among intellectuals. Photo: Marx Memorial Library, London.

Plate 18 Between sessions at the Dialogue: in the centre of the picture are Campagnolo, Silone, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Behind them, on the lefthand side are Bernal and Alpatov. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 19 Marko Ristic´, in the photograph sent in with his SEC membership application. He was the other half of the memorable exchange with Sartre at the Dialogue, which arguably informed the latter’s ‘Questions of Method’. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 20 Fung Yu-Lan addresses the Sixth General Assembly, Venice 1956. Campagnolo, Ponti, and Babel and de Zie´gler (left to right) look on. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 21 Ilya Ehrenburg (left) and Claude Roy (middle) at the Sixth General Assembly, Venice, September 1956. Focused on international cultural relations and decolonialization, the resolution from this assembly became a reference point for Pre´sence africaine’s First Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 22 The deputy mayor of Rome Edoardo Lombardi introduces the public lectures of the Cultures of Black Africa and the West colloquium at the Sala della Protomoteca, Campidoglio, Rome, February 1960. Seated behind him (left to right) are Le´opold Se´dar Senghor, Franc¸ois Mauriac and Giovanni Ponti. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 23 The Cultures of Black Africa and of the West colloquium, Rome, February 1960: (front row, left to right) Alioune Diop, Campagnolo, Jacques Rabemananjara, Cheikh Anta Diop, Teobaldo Filesi. Michelle CampagnoloBouvier is in the second row, fourth from left. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 24 Executive Council meeting, Prague, April 1965: clockwise from far left to right are: (first name unknown) Bublova, Miroslav Mı´cˇko, Adolf Hoffmeister, Adam Schaff, Babel, the Czechoslovak Vice-Minister for Culture Frantisˇek Kahuda, Jan Strˇbı´ny´, Campagnolo, Umberto Terracini, and Jitka Pusˇova. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 25 Executive Council meeting, Prague: Kahuda, Stanislao Ceschi and Campagnolo in conversation. Like Terracini, Ceschi had many contacts in Europe’s socialist countries. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 26 Executive Council Meeting, Leningrad, June 1968: Boris Polevoi addresses the meeting. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 27 Campagnolo, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Guido Calogero (left to right), in conversation at the 1951 RIG. Ungaretti took over as president of the SEC in 1963; the following year Calogero organized the IIP’s Aquila Discussions on ‘The Foundation of the Rights of Man’. Photo: ASEC, Venice.

Plate 28 Herbert Marcuse at the Free University, Berlin, 1967 or 1968, in the thick of the generation that the SEC had been hoping to interest. Photo: Ullstein Bild-Jung, Berlin.

Plate 29 Sartre (centre), in his role as the ‘most intransigent moralist on earth’, as Jean Danie´lou described him, at the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. Simone de Beauvoir is third from the left. Photo: The Bertrand Russell Archives, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada. The photographer is unknown.