Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (52 page)

In general, American influences were modified once they came into contact with European traditions and wishes. Coca-Cola might have tasted the same on either side of the Atlantic, but other goods were altered. Cars, for example, looked smaller and more modest: Europeans embraced the VW, the Fiat 500, the Morris Minor and the Mini, not to mention the Vespa and Lambretta, which had no obvious parallel in the USA. Even large cars looked different: an expensive, crafted “European” look—as on the Jaguar XK 140, the Gordon Keeble and the Bristol—was deliberately retained; the Sunbeam Rapiers, Vauxhall Victors and Ford Zephyrs—plebeian “dream cars” with their rocket fins—hardly swept the board. Flashy Crestas and Zodiacs were easily outsold in the UK, for instance, by the resolutely traditional Austin Westminster.

It was the same story in architecture. Modernism came back eastwards out of exile and brought skyscrapers and apartment blocks, American embassy buildings, and corporate HQs. Yet the resultant
skyline was not quite American; the buildings tended to be lower, and blended more deliberately with the existing street frontage. Suburbs never destroyed the life of urban centres as they did in the USA, perhaps because the flight to the suburbs lacked the disturbing racial impetus it had there.
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America was anyway not a homogeneous set of influences; it was an amalgam of different, often contradictory, strands, some real, others mythical. It was as much an idea as a reality, capable of turning into the vehicle for the creative fantasies of Europeans, whether young fashion victims, rock ‘n’ roll stars like “Freddy Quinn” (real name Manfred Nidl-Petz) and Ray Miller (Rainer Müller) or film director Sergio Leone, reinventing the Western as Homeric epic in Spain or Ciné-Città.
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America offered a variety of models for Europeans to draw on in their own social and political struggles. There was, for example, the “national security” state (which of course also built upon respectably indigenous traditions of anti-communism everywhere in western Europe); there was the new consumerism. But then there was also the anti-advertising movement, which benefited from American critics like Vance Packard, whose best-selling
The Hidden Persuaders
appeared just as commercial TV advertising started in the UK. The struggle for civil rights, above all, helped to shape both local protest and national legislation in Europe in the mid-1960s and 1970s.

In retrospect what is striking about the “Americanization” debate is the way it fizzles out some time in the 1960s. It is as though by then most Europeans had lost their feelings of inferiority to their transatlantic protector. Loss of empire had not, it was becoming clearer, led to economic decline; on the contrary, Europe was becoming more and more powerful a force in the international economy, while American power was showing signs of faltering. The old fears of being taken over by American multinationals (expressed most vociferously by Servan-Schreiber in
Le Défi américain
), were allayed by the knowledge that western Europe was now a net investor in the USA. The old nation-state had not disappeared, as many had feared when confronted with the federalist enthusiasm of the Marshall Planners in the late forties. Instead it had survived and grown even stronger. Even TV, originally heralded as the ultimate dissolver of national cultures,
had turned out in fact to have created a
stronger
feeling of nationhood, destroying the sense of allegiance to locality and region. Western Europe had accepted the new consumerism as its own.
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PROTEST IN THE GROWTH SOCIETY

In 1955 the jurist Piero Calamandrei, one of the architects of the post-war Italian constitution, attacked the extent of his country’s recent democratic achievement. The hopes of the resistance had been dashed by conservative obstruction, he argued, the constitution itself remained “unrealized,” and behind the façade of a “formal democracy” lay the reality of continuities and compromises with Fascism and the “police state.” The continued use of the 1931 Law on Public Security was but the most blatant example of democracy’s imperfections in Italy; there was no real freedom of movement or assembly or genuine equality between the sexes.
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In the 1960s, a younger, more urban Europe became conscious of the vast social changes which had taken place since the war, and demanded that politics and the law catch up. The old world of peasants and aristocrats was disappearing through economic growth, where it had not been destroyed by the war, and a more mobile, less deferential society emerged. This wanted real liberty in the Free World, and was no longer prepared to accept that calls for social reform be written off as communist subversion. It was bolstered by changes in Washington, where the elderly Eisenhower was replaced by Kennedy and the Democrats.

As Cold War fears receded in Europe, conservatives in office looked increasingly tainted by the past. There was near-civil war in Italy in 1960 when the Tambroni government took office with the support of neo-Fascists. In France, the war in Algeria spilled over on to the mainland. When police in Paris broke up a demonstration and killed dozens of protesters, hurling them into the Seine in one of the least-publicized and most atrocious acts of mass violence in postwar western Europe, the man in charge was Maurice Papon, who had been a prominent Vichy official. In Greece, the Karamanlis government was rocked by revelations of the wartime collaboration of senior ministers, and clung to power through rigged elections.
In West Germany, the 1962
Spiegel
affair reawoke memories of the Gestapo, while both Chancellor Kiesinger and President Lübke were haunted by their Nazi past. Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961 brought the whole issue into the spotlight. It seemed increasingly that Cold War normalcy and prosperity had allowed only a partial or even nominal democracy behind which lurked older authoritarian forces.

The political beneficiaries of this new mood were the parties of the centre-left—Harold Wilson in the UK, the SPD in West Germany, the “opening to the Left” in Italy, and George Papandreou with his “unending struggle” in Greece. Labour and social democratic parties returned to power, as managers of a more modern society. Like the conservative Right before them, they were slowly emancipating themselves from class affiliation, and turning themselves into broader catch-all parties which could respond to deep, gradual shifts in popular opinion. These governments were keener than their predecessors to use the state to improve educational and health services, and to legislate for reform in areas of social and civil rights. The real prospect of change, in turn, fed the appetite of movements and lobby groups calling for reform and modernization. Thus the 1960s marked the beginning of a new deepening of democracy in western Europe, the real break with traditional social values and institutions, and—for many—the onset of modernity.

In December 1965, the case of a young Sicilian peasant woman called Franca Viola hit the Italian headlines after she was abducted and raped by a young man whose offer of marriage she had refused. Normally in such situations—by no means uncommon—the woman was expected to yield, so that what the Italian Penal Code defined as
matrimonio riparatore
could cancel out the man’s offence. For the first time anyone could remember, however, the raped woman refused to get married. As a result, her suitor was arrested and eventually sentenced to jail. It was Viola’s obstinacy which local opinion in her home town regarded as dishonourable. But in the rest of Italy the case caused a sensation, and underlined women’s lack of equal status and dignity in the eyes of the law.
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In the 1960s, the demand for greater democracy was spearheaded by a growing awareness of women’s continuing social and economic subordination. Constitutions might promise equality to all citizens irrespective of gender, but under existing penal codes, men and women were often treated quite differently. Men could commit adultery with impunity while women laid themselves open to punishment. Husbands could prohibit their wives seeking work outside the home, and fathers retained absolute power over the children. In Switzerland women did not even gain the vote until the 1970s; in France many could not open their own bank accounts. Large numbers of women continued to enter the labour market, yet once there they faced discriminatory pay and working prospects.

In many ways, the move for female emancipation had been on the retreat in Europe since the early 1920s; certainly the inter-war years, beset by fears of national decline through falling birth rates and by mass unemployment, had seen women’s rights eroded. Even Soviet Russia, which had given women unprecedented legal equality after 1918, reverted to the ideology of motherhood in the mid-1930s. Now reforms to benefit women, and to increase their autonomy, independence and equality before the law, threatened the basis of the traditional European family as it had been sanctified in the inter-war years and reaffirmed in the conservative 1950s. Demands for sexual liberty were even more frightening. An Italian Catholic sociologist castigated “the exasperated individualism which is carrying the American and North European family to the edge of total disintegration” and warned against “a conception of matrimony as a mere sexual benefit for the individual.”
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Yet the tide was turning in favour of reform, as an army of social commentators and psychiatrists discovered the costs of home-bound isolation, and what the French called the “Madame Bovary syndrome.” In
The Captive Wife
, sociologist Hannah Gavron stood the 1950s ideal of domesticity on its head, to reveal the depressions and frustrations it bred, as extended family and communal bonds withered, and television and traffic pushed the nuclear family indoors.

Changing sexual practices (chiefly through the pill, which entered western Europe in the early 1960s), and the emergence of a newly independent generation that aimed at higher education and professional
autonomy, prefigured the legal reforms which came at the end of the decade. Birth control liberated itself from its pre-war eugenic implications and family-planning clinics spread across Europe. Most Scandinavian countries had legalized abortion very early; Britain followed in 1967. But in Catholic Europe, the battle took longer, mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and led to major political conflicts before decriminalization occurred, chiefly—and very hesitantly—during the 1970s. Even today, abortion is only available in Germany and Portugal on very limited grounds, and illegal abortions continue to be widespread.

Legal changes were more rapid where contraceptives were concerned, no doubt because the baby boom had made the old fears of population decline seem irrational. In 1961 Nazi police ordinances against the sale of contraceptives were finally taken off the books in West Germany, and France relaxed its prohibitions in 1967; Italy repealed Fascist legislation four years later. As for realizing the equal status of women in marriage and the family, the reform of divorce procedures and of family law generally took place in the 1970s, and—in post-dictatorship southern Europe—in the 1980s, more than sixty years after civil divorce by mutual consent was introduced in Sweden and Bolshevik Russia.
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Slowest of all was effective action to secure equal rights in the workplace. Constitutional guarantees and Common Market directives mostly remained empty promises, and although a few countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, France and the Scandinavian north did bring in legislation on equal pay and treatment, too often provisions were unenforced, or realized only through lengthy court battles. In West Germany and Austria, entrenched conservatism made the outlook even bleaker.
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Overall, the battles for female emancipation and equality bore out Calamandrei’s critique of post-war democracy: formal guarantees of constitutional rights had meant little without effective political action for their realization. This applied as much to the post-dictatorial constitutions of southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece) as to the earlier post-1945 models. Constitutions might offer women full
political
rights; but without equality in private law and commercial practice as well, women remained subordinate to men. In the 1960s and
1970s, the struggle to achieve such equality formed one of the most remarkable and sustained examples of social protest in western Europe. Full equality was not gained, and neither were many of the rights which women claimed were necessary for their protection and well-being; but the paternalist basis of social institutions was exposed and gradually reformed. As so often, the starting point for reform in liberal democracies was exposing the gap between what they promised and what they really provided.

Nothing so revealed the continued authoritarianism in post-war conservative European politics as the generational warfare which broke out during the boom. In 1957 a law was passed in Austria to protect young people from immoral influences, including “dangers in the streets, the indiscriminate visits to restaurants and events, the consumption of alcohol and nicotine, and from all harmful influences from outside.” Such measures, it seemed to those in authority, were urgently needed. When Elvis Presley came to Europe, he turned teenagers into “wild barbarians in ecstasy” or even “haunted medicine men of a jungle tribe governed only by music,” threatened western civilization with African primitivism, and drove young girls into “intoxicating” sexual delinquency.
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Behind the rock ‘n’ roll hysteria of the 1950s and the equally hysterical reaction of the mainstream press and politicians was a very real challenge to post-war conservatism. A new front opened up between the adults who had gone through the war and their children. Post-war economic growth helped fuel this. Generational authority was threatened by the emergence of a separate youth culture, based on the fourfold rise in teenage earnings between 1938 and 1960. Young people—more of them than ever before thanks to the post-war baby boom—were being sought after by employers and retailers. What puzzled and concerned commentators in the late 1950s was the way this growing affluence appeared to be accompanied by a new violence and lawlessness. This was what the Germans, faced with the rock ‘n’ roll cinema riots, called “prosperity criminality” (
Wohlstandskriminalität)
. In 1956 Bavaria’s Interior Minister declared that, as “humanitarian molly-coddling” had failed to make the
Halbstarken
behave, the
authorities would now act “with brutality.” In Italy the activities of the
teppisti
, gangs of teenage joyriders, pushed an anxious government into passing “regulations for the repression of hooliganism.” (Conservatives in Greece followed suit.) Observers were quick to point out the link between the new vandals’ love of cars and the consumer boom with its spreading auto culture.
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In England—whose Victorian mores had probably been less shaken up by the war than anywhere else—the problem seemed equally serious. “Get rid of that suit and try to become a decent member of society,” an outraged magistrate told one teddy boy. “Dance halls, cinemas, police and public join forces to wage war on the teddy boys,” reported the
Sunday Dispatch
on 27 June 1955. “Menace in the streets of Britain being cleared up at last.”
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