Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (53 page)

Some put the problem down to the effects of the war on family stability. Yet it was around 1954—coinciding with the ending of austerity—that juvenile crime and disorder had suddenly taken an upward turn, with large gangs brawling in cafés and clubs. A sympathetic observer of “rebellious youth” connected these trends with the disintegration of older social norms: on the one hand, the working class was splintering; on the other, the “bourgeois age” of a dominant middle class was being replaced by a broader, mass culture. Some working-class youths could rise socially in this setting; but others were marginalized more than before.

In fact, retrospect suggests that the whole problem was blown up out of all proportion; there was rather
little
youth violence, considering the extent of social disruption during and after the war. Conservatives demonized the
teppisti
, the teddy boys and the
Halbstarken
, and exaggerated their significance. Most countries had long traditions of urban youth riots. But in the stolidly conformist climate of the 1950s and early 1960s even small disturbances and signs of independence threatened the authority of a ruling generation which—just as in eastern Europe—felt increasingly unable to understand its own children. They were disobedient, wore scandalous clothes and hairstyles, and took for granted—when not actually attacking—the achievements that their parents had made through self-sacrifice and hard work since the war.

“My parents, relatives and their friends live like mice in a closed cage … and want us to live the same way,” wrote a girl to the Italian
teenage magazine
Mondo Beat
in 1965. “They want more money and spend it on stupid things: a bigger television, covers for their cars … But they don’t know how to really enjoy themselves.” German student leader Rudi Dutschke fulminated against “aggressive and fascist consumerism.” The children of the consumer revolution were thus turning against it and coming back to politics and protest. What was so enigmatic was the way they combined an anti-consumerist stress on spiritual enjoyment, on love. Flower Power and individual self-fulfilment with older kinds of political visions—of social revolution, class war, strikes and barricades.
⁶⁵

First in West Berlin, later in France and Italy, youthful dissatisfaction with the mainstream Left was expressed in a radical critique of post-war social development. In December 1966, for instance, students demonstrated down the “Ku’damm,” symbol of Berlin’s new shopping culture, just before Christmas. They attacked the “myth of Western democracy” and drew on Marxist critiques of consumerism to decry the emptiness and authoritarianism they saw around them. The Vietnam War had shattered the American dream even—perhaps particularly—in countries like West Germany and Italy, where it had been so strong before.
⁶⁶

The signs of a revival of mass protest were already visible—in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches of the early 1960s, in the violent demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam, against the Greek colonels’ coup in 1967, and the Shah’s tyranny in Iran. TV images of the civil-rights marches in the USA, together with a reawakening interest in the legacy of resistance from the Second World War, fed a growing anti-authoritarianism. In 1968 came the explosion: campus sit-ins, riots, strikes and demonstrations rocked Europe, threatening at one point to topple the de Gaulle government; street fighting returned to the streets of Paris, Berlin and Milan. The scale of the turmoil shocked and delighted those who had observed the apathy and conformism of middle-class youth in the previous decade. For subsequent generations, “68” came to assume the proportions of a myth, a myth fed subsequently by the large number of its participants who as writers, broadcasters, teachers or film-makers found themselves able to provide a public interpretation of what it had all meant. “It would not be unjust,” writes Sunil Khilnani in his
study of the intellectual Left in France, “to see 1968 as an interpretation in search of an event.”
⁶⁷

To a later and perhaps more cynical generation, the turmoil of 1968 looks less impressive than it did to its protagonists, more noise than lasting achievement, a product in many ways of the very prosperity the students were attacking, and an unrepresentative product at that. Despite the rapid expansion of student numbers—itself, of course, an achievement of post-war democracy—only a small proportion of the youthful population was actually involved in the upheavals: in the mid-sixties only 5.5 per cent of twenty-year-olds in the UK were in higher education (8.6 per cent in Italy, 7.7 per cent in West Germany, 16 per cent in France). Their demands too were unclear: stressing the present rather than the future, absolute liberty and freedom of expression, hindered the expression of unified, concrete demands. Indeed, when these finally emerged in an organized shape, they took the form of an extreme Marxist sectarianism—“Stalin, Mao and the ‘great Popular Republic of Albania’ ”—which left many of the original participants cold.

The events of 1968 thus created a fragmented and bitterly dogmatic Leftist fringe, tempted by violence and unable or unwilling to comprehend the scale of capitalism’s triumph. It had its own way of life, with endless proclamations, critiques and public theses, and a fondness for intellectual gurus whose pronouncements did not save their followers from a complete misreading of the political situation. This detachment from the realities of power reached its culminating expression in the terrorist Red Army Faction in West Germany, which saw itself as a “city guerrilla force” carrying out an armed “anti-imperial struggle” under the slogan “Victory in the People’s War!” These terrorist groups and the police repression and right-wing counter-terrorism they provoked mostly disappeared by the end of the 1970s. But for a time they raised the spectre of that inter-war political extremism and ideological polarization which most of western Europe hoped had been left behind for good.
⁶⁸

And yet the student radicals did have some real achievements to their credit. First, they drew attention to a vacuum of belief at the heart of post-war politics. Their passionate idealism reminded people of the need for political and ideological debate; not all problems are
reducible to questions of scientific management or interest-group bargaining. Second, their often satirical attack on post-war authoritarianism, if exaggerated, was well aimed, and encouraged a more critical look at the centres of corporate, military and political power. Finally, they acted as a typical interest group, securing resources for the university system and opening it up to more democratic influences.

Effective if less glamorous interest-group action was also being mounted by the organized working class, as student dissatisfaction coincided with an upsurge in labour unrest and inflationary pressures. The protests of 1968 showed that class activism had been written off too quickly: in fact, post-war state-led corporatism was coming under strain as never before. With full employment, the unions pressed for long-delayed wage rises, and used the opportunity provided by the students’ actions to attack the prevailing distribution of wealth. In Italy and France, the result was that the protests of thousands of students were quickly supplemented by a wave of strikes as millions of unionists demanded a fairer share in the growth society.

Yet if the students wanted to do away with capitalism, the workers aimed instead to enjoy more of its profits. Their aims were thus divergent, and it is not surprising that once the unions had achieved most of their demands, hopes of a continued student-worker alliance quickly faded. The working class was no longer revolutionary: its bargaining power was at its height in these last years of the boom, and its most advanced sectors were able to use this to their advantage. As a result, in the early 1970s, union bosses and frightened conservative opponents both fell into the trap of exaggerating labour’s political strength. In fact, the fortunes of western Europe’s workers rose and fell with capitalism itself This was to prove the last victory for the old working class in a century of organized struggle, before recession, mass unemployment and global restructuring wiped it out in little more than a decade.

MIGRATIONS

In 1964 the German magazine
Der Spiegel
devoted its cover to a Portuguese worker called Armando Rodríguez, hailed as the one-millionth
“migrant worker” to enter the country, and greeted at Cologne with an official welcome and the present of a motorbike. This was an era when immigrants were welcomed and regarded as indispensable for continued prosperity.
⁶⁹

Post-war capitalism thirsted for labour, and demanded human mobility. Europe’s nation-states, on the other hand, aimed to patrol their borders and to distinguish between their own citizens, to whom they offered an increasing array of rights and benefits, and foreigners. Thus there was—and remains—an inherent tension between the demands of capitalism and the nation-state where immigration is concerned. After 1950, mass immigration started out as an economic necessity but soon turned into a cultural and political issue which brought to the surface the racism still entrenched in European society. Fascism and communism had between them more or less eliminated many of eastern Europe’s ethnic minorities; now capitalism introduced quite different minorities into the West. The evolution of multiracial societies became as great a challenge to post-war democracy in Europe as the struggle for gender equality.
⁷⁰

Of course western Europe, like the continent as a whole, had long supplied and received vast flows of human beings. The immigration wave after the war—somewhere around ten to fifteen million people in total—was dwarfed by the fifty-five to sixty million who had emigrated from the continent to the Americas before 1921. So far as labour mobility was concerned, German industry and agriculture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had relied heavily upon Polish labour, while the French working class which evolved over the same period included many Belgians, Italians, Poles and Swiss. The use of migrant labour, much of which would become permanent, was nothing new in Europe’s history.
⁷¹

Yet the great post-war immigration was so completely unforeseen that after 1945 a wave of emigration took place from the continent, as governments viewed pessimistically the chances of avoiding long-term mass unemployment: this was why the Dutch, British, Italians and others encouraged overseas settlement. But at the same time, refugees were pouring into West Germany, while other countries accepted some of the millions of DPs who refused to return to eastern Europe. “People were afraid for their jobs,” recalls a Polish man who
settled in the UK after the war. “They still remembered the slack before the war and that was understandable.”

Even at this stage, a link between immigration policy and racism was evident: Whitehall, for example, operated its European Volunteer Workers scheme in the late 1940s on the basis of a racial classification, granting priority to Balts and keeping out Jews. Still haunted by the old fears of population decline, Britain’s post-war Royal Commission on Population—worried about national weakness in the face of Soviet expansionism—recommended that “immigration on a large scale into a fully established society like ours could only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good human stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from inter-marrying with the local population and becoming merged with it.” Immigration and racial issues remained intertwined thereafter.
⁷²

Yet the dynamics of capitalism pushed in quite another direction. From the mid-1950s, sustained economic growth fed an apparently insatiable demand for labour. At first, this was satisfied domestically—either by refugees, as in Germany, or by the rural economy, which supplied hundreds of thousands of workers annually to the urban centres of western Europe. In Italy alone over nine million people moved from one part of the country to another. Between 1950 and 1972 the numbers working in the agricultural sector overall in the West fell from thirty million to 8.4 million, or from one third to one tenth of the total workforce of the original Six. The curtain fell on the centuries-old history of the European peasantry, and only the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy acted as a form of historic preservation of this vanishing species. In the cities, villagers found work, anonymity (from the repressive surveillance of relatives, the gendarme and the state) and new, more modern ways of living.
⁷³

As these sources were exhausted, employers started to look further afield. Switzerland and Sweden had been recruiting Italian labourers from as early as 1945, but the main effort started in the late 1950s. By the 1960s, France, Germany and Switzerland were competing for labour in southern Europe. The state tried, not very successfully, to control this trade: the West German Bundesanstalt für Arbeit set up recruiting offices in six countries round the Mediterreanean; the French, through the Office National d’Immigration, had no fewer
than sixteen, mostly in Africa, operating on the basis of bilateral agreements between host and supplier country. In Britain, the state was less involved, partly because labour requirements could be satisfied by British citizens, and partly because of a traditional reluctance to intervene in, still less encourage, recruitment of workers from the empire. It was thus left to employers, like the National Health Service and London Transport, to arrange their own schemes. Even so, immigrants from Cyprus, the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies soon responded to the needs of the British labour market.

In fact, even in France and West Germany, the state actually had little control over the immigration process, and channelled only a small proportion of incoming workers through its offices. But in the 1960s this seemed scarcely to matter. In 1958, 55,000 foreign workers entered Germany; by 1960 the number had risen to 250,000. In France numbers rose from around 150,000 annually in the late 1950s to 300,000 by 1970. What makes the trend even more remarkable is that both countries had, by British standards, enormous refugee influxes at the same time—three million young men fleeing East Germany by 1961, and one million
pieds noirs
from Algeria. Mass unemployment seemed a figment of the past; modern capitalism’s insatiable demand for labour coped simultaneously with several millions of refugees, the twenty million or so west Europeans who moved from agricultural work to industry or services,
and
with the approximately ten million workers from southern Europe, the Mediterranean fringes or more far-flung colonies. European labour markets were internationalized, as the number of foreigners living in western Europe trebled in three decades.