Confronting America. The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

Abstract

This study seeks to explore how the French and Italian communist parties responded to the role of the United States in (West) European reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War and during the Cold War, from the mid-1940s to the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s. Alessandro Brogi’s study is not, however, a history of French and Italian communism from the perspective of political and social history. Instead, Brogi is interested in delineating intellectual responses in the context of international history. It is an extremely rich and learned survey of forty years of transatlantic relations. It is therefore an important contribution to post-1945 French history and one of the few studies that seek explicitly to explore France’s position in the comparative and transnational context of Cold War politics. This important book, therefore, adds to the studies on attitudes towards the United States in France and other West European countries during the Cold War, such as Rob Kroes’s and Philippe Roger’s work. But it does so on a more pronouncedly diplomatic and intellectual history (as opposed to social and cultural history) footing. Moreover, the comparative perspective helps us understand French developments in the context of broader West European patterns. Brogi argues that, after a more aggressive posture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States followed a more liberal and tolerant path towards dealing with what it regarded as a key threat to the stability of Western Europe: its strategy became one of undermining the appeal of communism by highlighting the soft power of capitalism and modernity. Brogi’s argument is therefore a more positive and affirmative take on what Victoria de Grazia, arguing from the perspective of a socio-cultural historian, has called the United States’s ‘irresistible empire’. Rather problematically, however, this means that the book’s key argument essentially rehashes those of the New Deal liberals on both sides of the Atlantic: namely that the models of society and culture promoted by the United States were, because of their flexibility and tolerance for difference, infinitely better equipped to deal with the problems of modernity – consumer culture, the politics of identity, political representation beyond party political organisation – than the equivalent communist model. We also learn unfortunately little on the processes of policy making within the parties and within the United States, especially about the parties’ relationships to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, this important and comprehensive study will serve as a standard work not only for those interested in the impact of the Cold War on French politics in a West European and transatlantic context as well as for those keen to learn more about the role of ‘soft power’ during the Cold War.