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Two
years ago Carlo Giuliani was shot dead while protesting
against global capitalism during the G8 summit in
Genoa. The period since then has seen the first attack
on the mainland of the United States for nearly two
hundred years and the greatest deployment of US military
power since the end of the Vietnam war. It has also
seen the largest political demonstrations in post-second
world war Europe. Terror struck America and America
is striking back. A multitude rallied for peace, but
it failed.
Under
pressure of imminent war, and prodded by the Pentagon,
ruling elites in the rich world divided. The opinion
columns of newspapers, the airwaves and the ‘blogosphere’
of the internet were the scene of bitter contest.
Struggles between the war party and its opponents
were commonly articulated in national and continental
terms. The bulls of the American right contrasted
a vital, neo-liberal United States with a tired and
decadent Europe. Not only were Americans from Mars,
they were increasing in number and in prosperity.
Gibes about cheese eating and wine drinking were tokens
of protestant America’s worldly asceticism; a
hardness which set its face against the unreformed
concupiscence of the French Venus. Britain and the
newly liberated and liberalized Eastern Europeans
were willing satellites of Mars. The comet Berlusconi
too was drawn into its orbit.
The
coalition of the unwilling often expressed itself
in a familiar anti-American style. Waging war was
naive; an understandable though deplorable response
to grievous injury. A nation in shock, was being led
by its child-president to further, avoidable traumas.
The figure of the frontier served as an alternative
trope. Fired up on the Old Testament, the original
settler nation would wreak vengance on the ingrate
natives. Metropolitan Europe, distant parent to the
frontiersmen, knew better. It had ruled the dark world
for longer. It had learned the lessons of its own
twentieth century darkness. War had been ousted by
culture and law, whose absence was the very defintion
of the frontier. The lacerations of Spring 2003 may
have healed. It is more probable that, merely bandaged,
they remain prone to spasmodic erruption. They are
not simply the wounds of diplomatic skirmish. They
are also the tokens of a cultural struggle between
Europe and America which dates back at least a hundred
years.
For
Antonio Negri the Bush administration has inverted
the old maxim of Clausewitz: politics is now war by
other means. If culture is politics then, it too is
war by other means. As much is borne out in Volker
R Berghahn’s intriguing book, America and
the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton
University Press 2001). This charts the politics of
culture in Western Europe from 1945 to the early 1970s.
It follows the early battles between pro- and anti-Stalinist
intellectuals, through to the rise of the European
New Left in the late 1960s. This history is refracted
through the career of Shepard Stone who worked as
a cultural impressario on behalf of American political
interests in these years. As such our gaze is directed
away from the substance of high cultural debate and
on to the quotidian efforts of the loyal brokers and
networkers who sought to determine this struggle in
America’s favour.
Born
of Russian Jewish parents in New Hampshire in 1908
Shepard Stone graduated from Dartmouth College in
1929. He moved to Berlin and wrote a doctoral thesis
on recent German history and foreign policy at the
University there. Witness to the terminal crisis of
Weimar and the rise of Nazism, Stone nonetheless developed
a deep affinity with German high culture. He remained
a Germanophile throughout his life. The murder of
his European relatives by the Nazis and the perils
faced by his German Jewish in-laws failed to extinguish
his belief in another, ‘decent Germany’
obscured by fascism. Indeed after a stint on the New
York Times he returned with the US Army in 1945
and was charged by the military high command with
remoulding German journalism and newspaper publishing
in the American manner.
Stone
moved to the Ford Foundation in 1952 where he was
in charge of the section on International Affairs
(US and Europe). The Foundation, its coffers swollen
by the post-war consumer boom, was at the time preoccupied
with supporting educational efforts within the United
States. If there was an interest in matters foreign
it was directed toward the decolonizing territories
of Asia and Africa, rather than Europe. Stone’s
great success within Ford lay in channelling tens
of millions of dollars toward European activities.
The chief object of this beneficence was the Congress
for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950, the CCF
was an extensive network of anti-communists including
such luminaries as Raymond Aron, Stephen Spender,
AJ Ayer, Ignzaio Silone and Karl Jaspers. Many of
their number were former communists shocked by the
work of Stalin’s henchmen in Spain and by growing
revelations of murder and persecution in the Soviet
Union. On the whole they can be divided into two groups.
First true Atlanticists who embraced American values
as those of the free world. More commonly British
or American, these intellectuals promoted a post-ideological,
technocratic liberalism in the manner of JK Galbraith
and Daniel Bell. Then conservatives who, while sceptical
of American mass culture, turned to the US as the
only defence against the wanton totalitarianism of
the East. These were more commonly continental Europeans,
such as Aron and Isaiah Berlin, able in their own
minds to see a darker side of the human soul invisible
to the relentlessly optimistic Americans. The CCF
organized regular conferences, initially on themes
in the humanities, with especial emphasis on political
philosophy. Later gatherings were concerned with the
idea of a free science, under the particular influence
of the exiled Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also supported high
brow reviews such as Preuves (Paris), Encounter
(London) and Tempo Presente (Rome). Gramscians
of the right, they sought through a long war of position
to dislodge Soviet Communism from its exalted place
in the minds of many Western European intellectuals.
Jean Paul Sartre was a noted target, but so too was
the more diffuse and organic programme of the Italian
Communist Party.
In
his work with and on behalf of the CCF Shepard Stone
can at a stretch be seen as a Cold War Madame de Stael.
He helped to establish a cultural space in which creators
and thinkers could flourish without interference from
the state. As such it was intended to mimic the bourgeois
cultural sphere of the eighteenth century English
coffee houses or the salons of nineteenth century
Paris. In form as well as content the CCF was a standing
reproach to Soviet cultural tyranny. It served to
protect the intellectual from the state. But it also
insulated him from the iron law of the market and
the demands of the despised masses. There was one
significant and fatal difference however. Stone dispensed
not his own bounty, but that of the US government
and the wealthy private foundations which supported
its cold war objectives.
These
sources of CCF patronage went unquestioned in the
fervid atmosphere of the early 1950s. By the mid-1960s,
however, the contradiction between government money
and the free artist which it was meant to support
became unsupportable. Revelations in the American
press in 1966 and 1967 showed that the CCF and its
associated publications had been supported not only
by the Ford Foundation, but also by the CIA. Many
formerly willing writers and artists felt compromised
by these revelations. Ford itself feared that it would
become known as a front for the CIA’s clandestine
cultural programmes. The Congress was wound up in
1967 and replaced by the International Association
for Cultural Freedom with Stone at its head. That
organization also failed to prosper. European conservatives
could not agree with Anglo-American liberals. Funding
dried up. By 1974 at the invitation of the Willy Brandt
and other German politicians, Stone had moved to take
up directorship of the Aspen Institute in Berlin.
Funded by American philanthropy and the German taxpayer
this was a similar, if more modest forum for intellectual
exchange. Stone seems to have seen out his career
happily in Berlin, his zweiter Heimat. Indeed
towards the end of the book Professor Berghahn reproduces
a jolly picture of Stone and his wife with Dr Henry
Kissinger at an Aspen Institute dinner in 1978; reminding
us perhaps of the role of hard as well as soft power
in Cold War politics.
As
the book makes clear the intellectual Cold War with
the Soviets was won by the mid-1950s. The true and
enduring Cold War was that between pro-and anti-American
intellectuals in Western Europe. Professor Berghahn
provides a useful genealogy of this conflict which,
as we have seen above, continues to this day. Many
European intellectuals of left and right in the post
war period shared a view of America as almost wholly
lacking in culture. At the time, of course, culture
was taken to mean high culture, of the sort reproduced
and transmitted by the educated classes in Germany
and France. This snobbery was reflected in a sense
of cultural inferiority widespread among the East
Coast elite of the United States itself. America was
identified with trashy, mass produced, low culture:
Hollywood, Elvis, bubble gum. To the European right,
America was identified with the crass and ungovernable
masses. Fordist patterns of production and consumption
created an uncultured mob easily incited to take power
and trample the cultural achievement of centuries.
To the left, Hollywood bred an apolitical false consciousness,
robbing the European proletariat of its revolutionary
potential.
Stone’s
Ivy League education and his experiences in Germany
bred in him a firm belief in the value of American
ways. He was supported in this by scholars such as
Bell and Galbraith. The United States, they held,
could be ranked without qualification alongside the
‘older’ cultures of Western Europe. Stone’s
work with Ford and the CCF/ IACF was also devoted
to promoting a different vision of America as a land
of freedom, enterprise and artistic achievement. American
music, literature and painting were promoted in Europe
through concerts, exhibitions and readings. The Amerika
Haeuser in Germany offered a point of contact
for locals interested in American culture.
The
book’s conclusion, however, is that Stone and
his allies largely failed in this task of cultural
‘rebranding’. As has been noted his dream
of a pan-Atlantic cultural sphere, based on shared
values and devoted to free expression, failed to reach
eastwards across the English Channel. European conservatives
never embraced Stone’s vision of America. At
the same time, in the 1960s the European left was
reborn in the student protest movement. The US was
no longer seen as saviour of Europe, but as oppressor
of the poor world. It must have been a bitter irony
for Stone that one of the opening moments in the campaign
of the German SDS was a march to the Amerika Haus
in Berlin to protest against the Vietnam war. The
rise of the new left and the countercultural movement
of the 1960s and 70s was as much to blame for the
demise of Stone’s projects as the withdrawal
of funding by Ford and other philanthropic bodies.
And yet…
In
truth Shepard Stone’ struggle with European anti-Americans
was not so much defeated as superseded. Growing prosperity
and the rise of the Western European consumer were
the material determinants of a broad shift in consciousness
and a realignment of cultural preferences. As Professor
Berghahn rightly points out the great revolt of 1968
can be interpreted as a cry for the emancipation of
self-determining individuals in the face of a social
authoritarianism which had survived the defeat of
fascism. It is arguable that the enduring effect of
new left radicalism was to complete the Americanization
of Europe. With time many of the protagonists of the
1968 settled into tenured contemplation. Their critical
efforts were important in capsizing the distinction
between high and low culture: ‘Madonna studies’
joined the curriculum of several European universities
in the 1990s.
The
rhetoric, songs and the iconography of protest movements
in Western Europe in the 1960s and subsequently, have
been extensively borrowed frp, on those of its American
peers. To list Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X is not merely superficial incantation.
It also testifies to a shared weave of subaltern protest
culture which bound both sides of the Atlantic more
closely than the openly elitist strategies of Stone
and his colleagues, and which dates back to the career
of Tom Paine at least. Protestors on the streets of
Europe in February 2003 in their turn drew on American
idioms to express their discontent with US intentions.
Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore furnish not only
arguments but also effective modes of expression.
The lesson, if there is one, is that Americanization
is an ambivalent, uncontrollable force. Polarization
of elites, US neo-cons versus French anti-Americans,
is not reflected on the street. When the European
multitude wishes to speak truth to power it does so
in an American idiom.
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