THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF WEST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS
Starobin, Joseph R.
If a mechanical materialism, a vulgar Marxism, were really operating one might say that France, after 20 years of visible modernization, would by now have produced a very different Communist...
...I had met Claudin several times in Paris—a gentle and bewildered soul, viewing things much in the manner of the Manifesto group in Rome...
...Theirs is a post-Comintern view following from the premise that the problem of communism is how to depart from the Soviet model, which is for them unworkable...
...Domestically, of course, the record has been probed for two decades or more...
...This circumstance is critical to an understanding of the Portuguese dilemma today...
...Perhaps this is one key to the CP identity crisis...
...But they also have in mind the governance of Italy under the difficult circumstance of a still very backward South, of the huge internal migration and unequal development, of a critical weakness in the face of the world economic recession, of a swollen bureaucracy that needs to be lanced—in sum, Italy's modernization...
...The CP perspective for post-Franco Spain stems from the realization that the country has changed basically in the third of a century since the Civil War...
...The CP leadership in the main Italian trade union center, the CGIL, withdrew from the World Federation of Trade Unions to pursue a course of cooperation with European labor movements of every orientation...
...In France, incidentally, President Giscard is evidently sensitive to all his options...
...Portugal is in a different part of Europe...
...Their vote in localities approaches a majority they have over two decades slowly but steadily wrested from the Christian Democrats...
...His basic flaw was exactly his apparent forte within the Communist world—he had been shaped by his Comintern service...
...People whom one wants to see are noticeably away on weekends...
...That the Spanish Right will attempt to inhibit the momentum of change is obvious...
...This is the classic view among Communists, the notion that the bloc is the pivot of policy...
...But their dilemma goes deeper...
...Ten years ago Giorgio Amendola, the leader of Italy's CP, shocked a great many in his own circles by suggesting that the experience of both social democracy and the Leninism in Europe had been shown as inadequate...
...From May 19 until September 1974, the CP was preparing its extraordinary congress, widely expected to ratify the policy of General Secretary Georges Marchais and promising a renewal of cadres and methods...
...The plane trip, one and three-quarter hours, is a distorting experience...
...it eliminates too much history...
...The Italian CP has gone to great pains to distinguish its outlook from that THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF WEST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS 257 of Moscow—on the 1968 events in Prague, on cultural matters, on the conception of a new Europe that would be neither anti-American nor anti-Soviet...
...Friends of Mitterand were accused of playing with the idea of a "third force" in collaboration with Giscard...
...There was a glimmering of this in the futile Communist appeal last autumn for an "union du peuple Francais"—an outstretched hand to the Gaullists discomfited by Giscard—but only a glimmer...
...Many army men expected the Communists to supply the political base that was lacking...
...But in the past 20 years the change in Spain to modernization, to industrialization, to urban development and a profound differentiation of social forces has been (relative to Spain's past) as striking as anything in Western Europe...
...Despite the strikingly French inequalities of salary and living standards, the outlook and way of life for the workers has changed...
...One old friend whose late husband was a Communist Central Committee member tells me, half-defiant, half-abashed, that she considers herself "a Communist sympathizer" now, yet our talk is not of politics...
...The latter, as noted earlier, was a severe critic of the Kremlin during the 1968 tragedy in Czechoslovakia...
...It is about the little place in Brittany she is remodeling, and she shows me the pictures as proudly as the snapshots of her grandson...
...The CP paper L'Humanite (which seems so alien in its strident beating of old drums) carries advertisements for battery-driven grass clippers, electric lawnmowers, and do-it-yourself kits...
...Another equally important question is whether the historic compromise would in fact be accepted by that considerable rank and file of the Italian CP that remains largely unreconstructed, quite totalitarian in its habits of thought, essentially part of what Gunnar Myrdal meant when he once spoke of the Italian Communists as a vast Tammany Hall...
...Who knows what happens to a man after such a trauma...
...he goes hunting on weekends with Franco's designated successor, Prince Juan de Borbon, while the French police have been told not to hamper the Spanish Communists and the movements of their leader, Santiago Carrillo...
...But she, like others, wonders how the Communists would fare with their own rank and file and with the militancy that stems from the Catholic youth and the working people newly entered into the industrial society...
...The CD General Secretary Amintore 258 JOSEPH R. STAROBIN Fanfani is hard pressed to keep his divided minions in line...
...to attempt via Portugal to change the fundamental relationship of forces is quite another matter...
...It is not only the middle classes for whom France functions better...
...A movement so long inured to quasi-legality, exile, and dispersion, even if "never far from the surface" as the Spanish Communists proudly repeat, is bound to have been deeply imbued by most of the negative aspects of "democratic centralism...
...A mirage at best...
...They are now developing the gambit of holding separate conferences, as in Brussels early in 1974, while participating in the all-European Communist conferences—on strictly defined terms—with the Russians and their cohorts...
...History has foiled Franco...
...I would suggest it is just possible that this orthodoxy cannot last even though its roots are tenacious, as the example of the French Communists testifies...
...Each political movement, perhaps 18 in all, seems to have engaged in an alphabetic competition...
...B IV ut in the largest sense Spains's future is linked with that of Italy...
...It is overwhelming to arrive for the first time at Roissy, the new airport now named Charles de Gaulle, a Gallic fantasy in conception and construction by contrast with which Orly is simply another Idlewild...
...And the one delegate who more or less abstained from the Congress and did a lot of sight-seeing was from among the Portuguese Communists...
...But the very poor did not support Mitterand...
...The irony of history is that the Italian Communists want to recreate the Europe that was dispersed, defeated, and helpless between the two world wars, its leadership shattered by the Nazi adventure and the emergence of both Soviet and American power...
...The fact that Carrillo allowed his book to appear last autumn, during a Moscow visit to patch up relations with the Russians, says a great deal...
...An impressive array of public figures, as well as civil servants and upper-echelon cadres, are striving to make of the party not just an electoral force but also an "activist" movement on a day-to-day basis...
...Will they succeed in their policy of remaining within NATO, negotiating with the United States over the Azores while aligning with Algeria and the African world generally...
...The experience of both Yugoslavia and China suggests how explosive this could be...
...And so the question arises if that would not be precisely their tactic on the morrow of a majority triumph...
...Palmiro Togliatti's last testament, written in Yalta in 1965, was published by his successor, Luigi Longo, despite the dismay of the Russians...
...More exactly, the threat of a fascist revival, of ultimate civil war (a threat that has haunted the Communists since Togliatti's return in 1943) would remain...
...Too late—this vision...
...I am not going along here with cynics who claim that Mitterand needed to involve himself with the CP only to rebuild a Socialist party electorally, or that he and his successors will abandon the game once Communist bargaining power declines...
...Lisbon is the heart of a country whose modernity was clearly arrested...
...Many of the CP cadres endured long imprisonment and torture...
...I kept thinking of one old friend, who fought in Spain and then volunteered in the Second World War, became a navigator and was shot down over Belgium...
...Cunhal was among the few exiles in Prague to uphold Soviet policy—by contrast, the Spanish leader Dolores Ibarruri told the Kremlin leaders face to face of their great disservice to the West European Communists by crushing the Czechoslovak experiment...
...Those who escaped Portugal took refuge in Eastern Europe...
...Somewhere in palaces and barracks there is a group of colonels, those army officers who overthrew the Caetano regime, then ousted the bemonocled Spinola—an amorphous band, said to be very radical, proposing their own "institutionalization," divulging in general terms an economic program that smacks of what the Councils of Resistance put forward in Italy, France, Belgium, and Norway in 1945...
...Yet the political structure in which all these essentially democratic and dirigiste measures must operate (everybody talks of socialism much too promiscuously, for the problem is essentially democratic mobilization and a modicum of planning) does not as yet correspond with the urgency of reconstruction...
...Preparations for the Party's congress were enlivened by an extraordinary free-wheeling among Communist leaders...
...The Spanish Communists were probably the only Western party to have been invited to Peking...
...One wonders how many members of the League of the Union for Revolutionary Action there really are...
...If the procedures for the upcoming municipal and legislative election are changed to pure proportional representation (instead of the present system whereby all parties look for alliances in the second round), the leverage this system has given the CP will necessarily weaken...
...While finding a very great deal of importance in China, they have pursued a path for Spain that is independent of both Moscow and Peking...
...Reservations for a fast train to Brussels are now made by computer in a few minutes during the lunch hour, and that meal no longer is preceded by the ceremony whereby the grandmother prepared the repast, and the youngsters scooted downstairs for each egg, each head of lettuce, and each bottle of vin ordinaire...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...It was Mendes-France who also observed, on French TV, that the "melodramatic aspects" in Portuguese life should not be overstated...
...On the heels of a brilliant campaign—which was a victory for the Left despite the loss to Giscard by 300,000 votes—the Communists now have turned on the Socialists...
...Much has been made of their leader Cunhal's attachment to Soviet policy, in the Czechoslovak events, for example...
...It was far away from the homeland that these younger army cadres learned their left-wing ideas from their opponents, acquiring an "instant Marxism" somewhat in the style of many Latin-American army men from Cuba to Peru...
...Ugo La Malfa, the Republican leader, is known to be impressed by the sincerity, the modernity, the imagination of Berlinguer...
...Who knows what the hallucinations of solitary confinement, endurable only by the hallucinations of service to a great ideal, do to a man's sense of reality...
...How it will all go in Spain and how the CP will behave will be determined by events we can only await to see—when the other shoe drops...
...It is unlike the French or Italian or Dutch strength stemming from the anti-Nazi war...
...But the blocage that a one-vote-out-of-four situation gave the French CP—not strong enough to gain anything by itself but strong enough to block a genuine Left—is over...
...they suffer from a profound cultural and political lag...
...And this in turn requires a credibility in the eyes of a very wide spectrum of political forces (in so sophisticated a civilization...
...The working-class movement has found unique and irresistible forms, like the "comisiones obreras," to advance its interests...
...they spoke of him more in sorrow than in anger...
...The Italians announce publicly, as did Longo at the XIVth Congress in Rome at the end of March, their financial support for the Spanish...
...Cunhal is clearly the last of the men of the Comintern in whose ranks he was evidently formed...
...They wanted to give organizational muscle, political sinews, and to cartilage their experiment with unexpected power...
...Its spirit envisages a Spain that takes a fuller part in the life of Western Europe, including membership in the European Community...
...Although he subsequently recoiled a bit from the boldness of this insight, the Italian Communists in fact have not behaved like a party committed to the Leninist view of politics and power...
...The strength of the Communists, as the balloting of April 25 showed, does not come from a prolonged experience in leading working people in action...
...Will pressures of events abroad have their impact: the coming upheaval in Spain, the tutelage of the European Social Democrats over Manuel Soares and the Socialist party, the influence of the Spanish and Italian Communists who are in conflict with Soviet policy...
...The Italian CP does not like this apocalyptic view...
...Yet, in this past year of liberation from the tenacious if decrepit Salazar dictatorship, there is a sense of a certain superficiality...
...In Berlinguer's view, even if the Italian Communists were to continue to increase their vote as steadily as they have, and even if they were to reconstitute their tacit alliance with the Socialists into a formal pact, Italy could not be governed without a wide support among Christian Democratic voters and leaders...
...Pierre Mendes-France, who was invited to make recommendations for economic reform, has emphasized the similarity with the problems of France in 1945...
...If a mechanical materialism, a vulgar Marxism, were really operating one might say that France, after 20 years of visible modernization, would by now have produced a very different Communist party...
...As for the Socialists, they had the winds in their sails...
...Whose sea would the Mediterranean become if tomorrow certain things happened in Yugoslavia after Tito's passing that brought Soviet fishing bases to the Yugoslav ports—for example, to Rijeka, which was once Italy's Fiume...
...When pressed in private, it is clear that the Communist leaders are aware of all the questions regarding both their domestic and foreign policy that would arise if they joined in national power...
...others replied in equally popular media, denouncing the Mondo series...
...The pensioners, the shopkeepers, as well as most of the upper classes, voted for Giscard d'Estaing in May 1974...
...What I find important is their attitude toward their own history, which is far more open, critical, and historical than that of any other Communist movement...
...Within this concept, I think, lies the peculiar role- of the Portuguese Communist movement...
...One must ask what motivated Cunhal...
...But without question a struggle of tendencies will take place among the Communists themselves, between opposing conceptions stemming from the same ideological matrix but now outmoded by differing interests...
...In another sense, what they are trying to recreate is the internaTHE IDENTITY CRISIS OF WEST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS 259 tional labor-left solidarity that went smash with World War I and the rise of the Leninist aberration...
...We have distributed this to all our members," he said, giving me a copy...
...who knows what may yet become of Cunhal...
...This theater of the walls is enhanced by posters that suggest International Women's Day was a Chinese invention from Tang dynasty times, that Romania has the last word in ballet, that Hungary is the source of the very best tractor—all of which competes with Last Tango in Paris...
...Each party and movement seems to have striven for a novel combination of initials—there are the familiar PCP, the PSP and then the PPD, but also bizarre formations with ML after their letters, and something called the LUAR, whose activists specialized, it seems, in marking up every railroad overpass and the walls of remote villages...
...Yet it is persuasive to read Carrillo's book 256 JOSEPH R. STAROBIN Demain 1'Espagne in which he responds very openly with autobiographical reflections, rather rare in Communist leaders, to interrogations of Regis Debray (now an adviser to Mitterand) and the hard-headed political scientist Max Gallo...
...she also reports robbery in broad daylight of precious heirlooms...
...he wanted something new, some synthesis of both, some departure from both...
...But it will take a great deal of doing, and the context will have to be all-European...
...One feels the Moorish influence even far to the north, in the castles overlooking the lush contours of a green, undeveloped landscape, the ever-present red tiles, the brick and crumbling mortar of the villages...
...At all the international conferences, the Italian CP has taken pains not to join in Moscow's attempt to excommunicate the Chinese—both unwilling to grant Moscow the hegemony that had done so much damage for generations, or to accept any succession to such hegemony by China...
...But what is significant about the Communists is that they have opted for a democratic junta...
...The attitude of a Communist movement toward its own dissidents is surely one measure whereby one judges the degree of change from the Byzantinism of the Leninist dispensation...
...It is not easy to gauge, upon visiting Italy this time, how the Communists are faring with their new strategic orientation...
...Their real influence, so exaggerated over the past year, has now been shown by the low vote of some 12 percent...
...The Italian Communists are credible as a governing force in wide areas of north-central Italy, as partners with the Socialists in both municipalities and regions...
...All the social forces on whom Franco relied—the church, the army, the post-Republic civil service— are in upheaval...
...Will they become disenchanted with the political 254 JOSEPH R. STAROBIN structure whose electoral contours are now revealed but have a long way to go before becoming genuine structures...
...I also wanted to linger in the Basque country, the Asturias, stronghold of the defiant miners...
...One of them wrote a rather sensational series, entitled "Secrets of the Italian CP," for the mass circulation II Mondo...
...Until political life ceases to be an import or an implant and until experience does its work, this quality will remain and favor the totalitarian element whether among the political forces or the army men themselves...
...None of this in itself necessarily tells us all we would like to know about the Spanish Communists...
...the other wing, drawn from the same humble strata, learned their politics in faraway Mozambique, Angola, and in Guinea-Bissau, fighting the inevitably losing battles...
...The Republic's president welcomed the event, and the withdrawal of the Christian Democratic delegation on the second day (when the Portuguese Christian Democrats were banned from participating in the April 25 elections) caused a sour reaction...
...To them the issue is how to elaborate an autonomous, West European Communist perspective taking advantage of the end of the Cold War...
...In launching the "compromesso storico," Enrico Berlinguer, the Italian CP's young general secretary, has attempted to take the experience of Chile out of the realm of the primitive explanation that sees the CIA as the heart of the matter...
...One still feels here the impulse of the oceans that beckoned Magellan and seemed destined to make a power of Portugal before the rise of the Dutch, the panoply of the Spaniards, the victorious guile of the Britons...
...Franco, who seemed to be on the verge of disappearance a year ago, is clearly resisting both time and change...
...Perhaps they expected too much, or got more than was expected...
...What this implies, of course, although it is not spelled out, is an effective independence from Moscow, all the while remaining in that orbit of the international movement in which, the Italians believe, they can influence, moderate, and perhaps ultimately affect the course of Soviet policy as well...
...However benign the image, it has its sinister implications...
...II would have preferred to have driven down through northern Spain and through the length of Portugal to Lisbon...
...It emphasizes democratic restoration rather than anything that suggests socialism...
...The great mass of Portuguese thus have until now been audience, not actors...
...Thousands cheered...
...Thus the party that contributed (uneasily at times) to the Third International is thinking that perhaps the Second-and-a-half International might have been the wiser outcome of the crisis following the First World War...
...It is far from the involvement that is required...
...With the vote of nearly one-fourth of the electorate, larger for the first time than the CP's, the Socialists now have the strength to gain relative independence from the Communists...
...What the army men have sought in these 15 months is an "instant politics...
...It was noticeable that hardly any people took part...
...To needle the West is one thing...
...Mitterand received the vote of the beneficiaries of the consumer society, the industrial workers, civil servants, professionals and modern farmers...
...He has a deeper appreciation of the factors involved than does so much of what we have heard from Henry Kissinger and our own TV reportage...
...In view of the many years of preparing the Union de Gauche and the CP's acceptance of a pluralism of parties in the transition to socialism, one might have expected from it a certain serenity in the face of the transformation of the discredited SFIO into a modem Socialist party...
...On a remote level, almost occult, one knows there is a presiding political power but it is almost invisible and the masses are watching, as though politics were a spectator sport...
...In Barcelona I talked with an old friend now in the publishing world (it is amazing to find such a large variety of left-oriented books in the shops, including a wide sampling of literature from abroad) who summed up the present mood as "waiting for the other shoe to drop...
...they stood by and watched, as army helicopters landed on barracks where plots were alleged of which no one knew the facts, and Spinola made his exit easily, much as the villain in a play...
...Quite suddenly, the CP decided to find fault with its ally...
...Cunhal could have voiced the classical view, not necessarily because he proposes to or can realize the Soviet model for his country, but because the view itself is the consequence of so minimal an experience with Portugal's own reality...
...The ghost of Prague, 1948, which so much energy had been spent exorcising, now rose again...
...Fortunately the Socialists have retained their sang froid...
...It leaves the larger options to a prolonged period of transition in which the various forces within Spain, once the husk of dictatorship is thrown off, have a chance to express themselves...
...Yet this is the stuff that goes into the West European Communist drama...
...A much closer bond has been forged with the CFDT, the second trade union center, with its strong Catholic base...
...The daughter of a onetime Communist senator and mayor of Ivry complains that she and her neighbors were promised "green space" in the new housing project but the greenery did not materialize...
...At the Communist congress—to which, incidentally, all the Western embassies and many nonCommunists from abroad were invited, and many attended—all the Italian political parties sent delegations...
...They have in mind a new role for Western Europe in relation to the Arab world and Africa...
...Special editions of Berlinguer's collected speeches and writings, especially the important Central Committee report of December 1974, circulated widely...
...This was announced in the week of Franco's first hospitalization, in the summer of 1974, and therefore gained a special resonance...
...It requires national union...
...Less than ten years later, he was utterly discredited, even among the Russians with whom he spent his solitary last years...
...the story goes that he made his way on foot through France and into Spain again, and then through Portugal with Spanish and Yiddish as his salvo conducto...
...Years ago, Ignazio Silone (himself not a novice in the matter) envisaged that the "final conflict" would come between the Communists and the ex-Communists...
...Half a dozen years ago, a grouping on the "Left," headed by Fernando Claudin, had separated from the To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...Mitterand has gained stature, even among Communist voters as the polls show: the SP continues to gain support, even though it is far from becoming a decisive force in the working class...
...THE EDITORS Spanish CP...
...Such tolerance is not too customary among "Bolsheviks...
...It is granted by rigorous but not unsympathetic observers (for example, Claire Sterling in the Atlantic Monthly) that the Communists are an able, serious, and constructive stratum of Italy's political elite and cannot indefinitely be kept from participation on the national level...
...Everybody was talking of the "compromesso storico...
...He too had spent some 17 years in a dungeon alongside the Danube, a terrible cell that appalls the visitor for its mercilessness...
...Most everything about Paris bespeaks this change—in levels of production, in small amenities, in the mores so picturesque in the past but so backward...
...Of course, neither the Communists nor the Socialists have been eliminated, although what their precise weight will be, in a country where the Civil War was such a trauma and 30 years of a dictatorship has intervened, remains to be seen...
...One feels expectancy in Spain and a sense of preparedness by all the political forces...
...After all, the Italian CP had made it plain that it did not approve of the behavior of the Portuguese CP...
...It is the outlook of a man with a dozen years of solitary confinement behind him and almost a dozen years in that most confining and restrictive of circumstances—exile in the East...
...But none of this change that has given 251 France a new level of industrial power has basically altered the Communist party...
...Incidentally, she and her husband (he works in the government manpower office) go off every weekend to their cabin in the Jura...
...We wonder whether our Soviet comrades will do the same for their audience," he added...
...I could not help feeling that much in Lisbon is on the surface...
...The Communists have long cultivated ties with the German and Scandinavian Social Democracy and sought them with the British Labourites, all the while urging some independence, some imagination, some real politics on the Communist parties of those countries...
...Despite isolated instances of selfless heroism there was no general resistance to the Salazar dictatorship...
...One meets the older ones in the Solidarity Committee that functions quite openly in Paris and is impressed with their toughness, even fanaticism—all understandable...
...Portugal thus faces post-Liberation problems not too dissimilar from what antifascist Europe faced in 1945, for after all the changeover in Portugal is part of the delayed antifascist revolution in Western Europe...
...I bought my set on the Via Veneto...
...By not breaking with Moscow, the Italian Communists remain a powerful thorn for the Russians...
...But the problem of France—and here both the Socialists and the Communists have a long intellectual path to travel—is that a modem industrial society cannot be governed by a 51 percent majority...
...They have in mind dealing with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to make the most of the East's desperate requirements for high technology instead of letting the fruits go to the United States...
...Will the army officers, now having "institutionalized" their power for three to five years, remain a cohesive group...
...They have in mind an ultimate new configuration embracing the entire Mediterranean world, including Yugoslavia, working in concert with West Germany and Scandinvaia to create in effect an autonomous European bloc...
...All these vital questions remain...
...One of my friends in the leadership of the Socialist party, an economist-financier (himself a one-time Resistance leader and one-time Communist) spoke of the CP's dilemma as an "identity crisis...
...This too the Communists feel could not be done by them alone or with a 51 percent control...
...Within this framework it is not surprising that all political structures are formed by the arrival of exiles from abroad...
...None of which is meant to suggest that further evolution is not 252 JOSEPH R. STAROBIN possible...
...She also wonders how these leaders would behave if the West European autonomy they envisage found itself threatened by a Soviet overreach, by what is implied in Moscow's ventures in In Our Fall Issue: Peter Jenkins THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC DILEMMA the Arab world, and in the western Mediterranean via Portugal...
...In Italy that means a willingness of the Christian Democrats to govern with them...
...Lisbon is a surprise, with its magnificent heights over an enormous port, a city on the scale of San Francisco, or better yet, Rio de Janeiro...
...So much of the year's experience seems to have been expressed in graffiti that literally deface every wall of every main building...
...I had hoped to cross the Pyrenees somewhat as the men of the Abraham Lincoln battalion had to do or the refugees from the Vernet camp of Vichy France...
...What emerges, however, is the ambitious reach of their perspective...
...For the reality of Portugal's position in the West—as well as the experience yet to be undergone in modernizing and democratizing the country, together with the impact of what will be Communist strength in Italy and Spain—may make this orthodoxy transitional...
...they refused a tit for tat, a political Donnybrook...
...In countries where important elements of the Right do not give up the threat of civil war when the ballots go against them, a much deeper and wider consensus will be required for the Left to govern and accomplish the structural change it promises...
...But little attention has been paid to the sense in which the Portuguese Communists reflect a primitive contact with their own reality...
...Much of the politics is still melodrama...
...Stronger than their rivals the Socialists, who had a certain quasi-legality and hence political experience "near the surface," the Communists nevertheless were able to entrench themselves in the trade unions, the media, and the embryonic governmental structure...
...260 JOSEPH R. STAROBIN...
...The "identity crisis" among the Communists reveals how uncertain if not unreliable they still are about transitions to socialism that must be wholly different in spirit and fact from the Leninist hallucinations...
...There are reasons— not the least of which is the Communist strength in the labor movement and the power and agility of the Right—that a long-term alliance with the CP be maintained...
...What the Italian Communists appear to want is a consensus that would preclude or greatly minimize the threat of civil war...
...Watching Cunhal in Lisbon, I was reminded of that strange, tragic apparatchik Matyas Rakosi of Hungary, whom I first came to know in his prime, in 1948, when he seemed to be attuned to the national characteristics of his homeland...
...But it didn't work out that way...
...By contrast the Spanish Communists, like the Italians and many other of the lesser European parties, take Soviet power for granted but deny that in the Czechoslovak case it was endangered...
...The junta's program, which prominent figures from Communists to monarchists have endorsed, projects a national union rather than anything that smacks of civil war or upheaval...
...But these army men are remote...
...on skiing trips, or visits to Morocco, Greece, Israel...
...I remember him strolling at the head of a parade in honor of the Lajos Kossuth anniversary...
...There were unspoken reasons that perhaps only those of my own generation will understand...
...The city in its insides is surprisingly traditional—the old seamen's area, the magnificent castle rising up from irregular and winding lanes, the heavy-hipped buildings with their iron filigree surrounding the Rossio, the main square, in contrast to the modernity of the huge Lisnave shipyards, their brontosaurian cranes against the immense crucifix on the summit of the opposite shore...
...THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF WEST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS 255 III If I turn to the Spanish Communists as a major element in the new constellation of Western Europe—and they may soon rival in importance their friends, the Italian Communists— it is, first, because Moscow has been at loggerheads with the Spanish CP for many years, probably more so or more openly than with any other nonruling party...
...This political effervescence also contrasts with the normality of everyday functions—banks are open, as are the fashionable hotels, the street excavations, and the shops—although some of these bear announcements that the employees are occupying them because the boss would not settle with the union...
...The editing of the Angelo Tasca papers, for example, under the party's aegis is as though the American Communists were prepared to establish, by detached criticism, what Jay Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe or, for that matter, James Cannon and Max Shachtman signified in the late '20s...
...Claudin is not satisfied with the way Carrillo treats him in Demain 1' Espagne, but Carrillo and his friends seem now to be making every effort to reinclude the Claudin group in the CP and in post-Franco politics...
...More exactly, despite an influx of new, young members, many of them gauchistes in 1968, and despite the new strategic objectives that led to the Union de la Gauche with the renovated Socialists and Radicals, the Communists appear to suffer from a split personality...
...They are part of that double migration so typical of Portugal over the past decade: one wing consisted of the 2 million Portuguese who streamed into the factories of Western Europe THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF WEST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS 253 and Canada, acquiring skills and political experience and sustaining the economy by remittances from abroad...
...The Red Belt around Paris has not been able to withstand the plethora of construction and suburbanization that has given France new problems, new gripes...
...It is striking, too, to take the new highways to the area alongside the Bois de Boulogne where highrise office buildings overshadow, not without sacrilege, the Arc de Triomphe...
...The ticket-takers in the metro, good CGT [union] members who did nothing all day but clip your billets, have at last been replaced by electronic gadgets...
...I found it interesting that the Spanish leaders with whom I talked were not terribly wrought up against General Lister (whom the Russians had placed at the head of their factional adventure...
...Earlier this year, in talking with Jean Daniel, the perceptive editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, Cunhal explained that his support for Moscow in 1968 stemmed from the conviction that the integrity of the Soviet-led bloc was at stake, that Soviet security was endangered...
...The Russians openly instigated a splinter movement, headed by the one-time hero Enrique Lister, in the hopes of rallying Spanish Communists against Santiago Carrillo and La Pasionaria...
...Azcarate has since made a detailed rebuttal to the Soviet critique, and the Spanish Communists have published, in brochure form, their own original view of the way forward for the West European Left, alongside of the Soviet critique, together with Azcarate's rebuttal...
...Important Catholic Democrats are known to favor a new departure...
...Whereas he wanted not only to extirpate every variety of Marxism and set the workers' movement back half a century, he wanted also a return to a precapitalist Spain, a return to Ferdinand and Isabella...
...Nor do they conceal their chagrin at the vacillations, the betises of the French Communists whom the Italian CP leaders have tried hard to steer away from the sterilities of an ill-concealed Stalinism...
...The Communists had a tightly knit, clandestine movement, a small cadre that, to be sure, had its roster of men and women who defied the police and its tortures...
...It is here that the Communists have been most autonomous for a generation, very ambitious in their projections of an independent West European development, and most innovative in facing the problems of a departure from their own heritage, notably with their concept of the "compremesso storico"—the historic compromise...
...A satirical booklet in which Berlinguer is a Machiavellian hero has been a best-seller...
...I left Lisbon the evening before the March 11 countercoup, and perhaps that was just as well since what happened was more readily comprehended from Barcelona and Rome...
...No final conflicts are envisaged...
...One might call it not merely a vestige of the Cold War but the Comintern view...
...Perhaps...
...the entire Catholic youth leadership, for example, was recently ousted...
...Everything that happened came from outside, had been brought from the external migration...
...In a long, friendly discussion I was equally impressed with Manuel Azcarate, perhaps the chief ideological leader of the Spanish CP, whose report of September 1973 to his party's central committee aroused a denunciation in Partinyaya Zhizn for February 1974...
...At one stroke, the Communists called into question the modesty of their election behavior and their credibility as a loyal partner...
...Their control of Bologna since the war is more than a showpiece operation, as their opponents concede...
...The Communist leaders, in private discussion, either face such questions frankly, or consider them alarmist...
...One further word on the Portuguese Communists...
...For all this suggests the grip of the Soviet hallucination on the Portuguese Communists, detente does not give Moscow any durable remote control on the shores of the Atlantic...
...he has stressed above all agrarian reform, measures of nationalization, programs of austerity to overcome the gap between failing productivity on the land, the need for imports of food, the weakening of foreign exchange...
Vol. 22 • July 1975 • No. 3
