Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (97 page)

Hall himself would in later years concede that his Centre was ‘for a time, over-preoccupied with these difficult theoretical issues.’ But in fact this narcissistic obscurantism was very much of its time, its detachment from daily reality bearing unconscious witness to the exhaustion of an intellectual tradition. Moreover, it was by no means the only symptom of cultural depletion in these years. Even the sparkling originality of 1960s French cinema declined into self-conscious artistry. In 1974 Jacques Rivette, the witty and original director of
Paris Nous Appartient
(1960) and
La Religieuse
(1966), directed
Céline et Julie vont en bateau
(‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’). At 193 minutes in length, a plot-less, stylized parody (albeit unintended) of the French New Wave,
Céline et Julie
marked the end of an age. Artistic theorizing was displacing art.

If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk’ rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural’ it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. .But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to
shock
. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’ Musical subversion now consisted of angry songs decrying ‘hegemony’, their counterfeit political content masking the steady evisceration of musical form.
²⁰⁵

However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s
cynicism
at least was real, and honestly come by. They were the sour and mostly untalented end of a growing spectrum of disrespect: for the past, for authority, for public figures and public affairs. In its wittier incarnations, this scorn for pomposity and tradition took its cue from the disabused young British political satirists who had first surfaced nearly two decades earlier: the theatre review
Beyond the Fringe
; the BBC late-night show
That Was the Week That Was
; and the weekly magazine
Private Eye
. Exploiting the rapidly growing television audience and the steady retreat of state censorship,
Monty Python
and its successors and imitators blended broad slap-stick, ribald social commentary and sardonic political mockery—a mixture last seen in the trenchant political cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank. The close interplay between rock music and the new burlesque is nicely illustrated in the financial backing for two of the Python films,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1974) and
Life of Brian
(1979): underwritten respectively by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and by George Harrison of the Beatles.

The low standing of public figures offered rich pickings to weekly television shows like
Spitting Image
or France’s
Bebête Show
, where leading politicians were routinely held up to a degree of ridicule and scorn that would have been unthinkable a few years before (and still is in the United States). Satirists and political comedians replaced writers and artists as the intellectual heroes of the hour: when French students were asked in the early Eighties which public figures they most admired, older commentators were shocked to learn that the late Jean-Paul Sartre had been replaced by Coluche, a ribald and occasionally licentious television comedian who sardonically acknowledged his newfound standing by running for President of his country.

Yet the same public television channels that broadcast pointed and irreverent parodies of popular and middlebrow culture also provided humorists with copious raw material. Perhaps the most widely celebrated object of ridicule was the ‘Eurovision Song Contest’, an annual television competition first broadcast in 1970. A commercial exercise glossed as a celebration of the new technology of simultaneous television transmission to multiple countries, the show claimed hundreds of millions of spectators by the mid-Seventies. The Eurovision Song Contest—in which B-league crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged—was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. It would have been out of date fifteen years earlier. But for just that reason it heralded something new.

The enthusiasm with which the Eurovision Song Contest promoted and celebrated a hopelessly dated format and a stream of inept performers reflected a growing culture of nostalgia, at once wistful and disabused. If punk, post-modern and parody were one response to the confusions of a disillusioned decade, ‘retro’ was another. The French pop group
Il Était Une Fois
(‘Once Upon a Time’) sported 1930s clothing, one of many short-lived sartorial revivals from ‘granny skirts’ to the neo-Edwardian hairstyles of the ‘New Romantics’—the latter reprised for the second time in three decades. In clothing and music (and buildings) the temptation to recycle old styles—mixing and matching with little self-confidence—substituted for innovation. The Seventies, a self-questioning time of troubles, looked backward, not forward. The Age of Aquarius had left in its wake a season of pastiche.

XV

Politics in a New Key

‘Je déclare avoir avorté’ (“I have had an abortion’).
Simone de Beauvoir (and 342 other women), April 5th 1971

‘Within a generation at most, the French and Italian Communist parties
will either break their ties with Moscow or shrivel into insignificance’.
Denis Healey (1957)

‘With this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been
gambled away’.
Chancellor Willy Brandt, August 1970

‘When two states wish to establish better relations they often reach for the
highest common platitude’.
Timothy Garton Ash

In the 1970s the political landscape of western Europe started to fracture and fragment. Since the end of the First World War, mainstream politics had been divided between two political ‘families’, Left and Right, themselves internally split between ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’. Since 1945 the two sides had drawn ever closer, but the pattern had not radically altered. The spectrum of political options available to European voters in 1970 would not have been unfamiliar to their grandparents.

The longevity of Europe’s political parties derived from a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate. The choice between Labour and Conservatives in Britain, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in West Germany, no longer reflected deep divisions over particular policies, much less profound ‘lifestyle’ preferences as they would come to be known. In most places it was an echo of longstanding, trans-generational voting habits, determined by the class, religion or locality of the voter rather than by the party’s program. Men and women voted as their parents had voted, depending on where they lived, where they worked and what they earned.

But beneath the surface continuity a tectonic shift was taking place in the political sociology of European voters. The block vote of the white, male, employed working class—the universal bedrock of Communist and Socialist party support—was contracting and splitting. In much the same way, the ‘ideal-typical’ conservative voter—older, female, churchgoing—could no longer be counted upon to furnish the core electorate of Christian Democrat or Conservative parties. To the extent that they persisted, such traditional voters were no longer the majority. Why?

In the first place, social and geographical mobility over the course of the postwar decades had diluted fixed social categories almost beyond recognition. The Christian voting bloc in rural western France or the small towns of the Veneto, the proletarian industrial strongholds of southern Belgium or northern England, were now fissured and fragmented. Men and women no longer lived in the same places as their parents and often did very different jobs. Unsurprisingly, they saw the world rather differently as well; their political preferences began to reflect these changes, though slowly at first.

Secondly, the prosperity and social reforms of the Sixties and early Seventies had effectively exhausted the programs and vision of the traditional parties. Their very success had deprived politicians of moderate Left and Right alike of a credible agenda, especially after the spate of liberal reforms of the Sixties. The institutions of the state itself were not in dispute, nor were the general objectives of economic policy. What remained was the fine-tuning of labour relations, legislation against discrimination in housing and employment, the expansion of educational facilities and the like: serious public business, but hardly the stuff of great political debate.

Thirdly, there were now alternative denominators of political allegiance. Ethnic minorities, often unwelcome in the white working-class communities of Europe where they had arrived, were not always invited into local political or labour organizations and their politics reflected this exclusion. And lastly, the generational politics of the Sixties had introduced into public discussion concerns utterly unfamiliar to an older political culture. The ‘New Left’ might have lacked a program, but it was not short of themes. Above all, it introduced new constituencies. The fascination with sex and sexuality led naturally to sexual politics; women and homosexuals, respectively subordinate and invisible in traditional radical parties, now surfaced as legitimate historical subjects, with rights and claims. Youth, and the enthusiasms of youth, moved to center stage, especially as the voting age fell to eighteen in many places.

The prosperity of the time had encouraged a shift in people’s attention from production to consumption, from the necessities of existence to the quality of life. In the heat of the Sixties few troubled themselves much over the moral dilemmas of prosperity—its beneficiaries were too busy enjoying the fruits of their good fortune. But within a few years, many—notably among the educated young adults of north-west Europe—came to look upon the commercialism and material well-being of the Fifties and Sixties as a burdensome inheritance, bringing tawdry commodities and false values. The price of modernity, at least to its main beneficiaries, was starting to look rather high; the ‘lost world’ of their parents and grandparents rather appealing.

The politicization of these cultural discontents was typically the work of activists familiar with the tactics of more traditional parties in which they or their families had once been active. The logic of politics thus changed relatively little: the point was still to mobilize like-minded persons around a program of legislation to be enacted by the state. What was new was the organizing premise. Hitherto—in Europe—political constituencies had emerged from the elective affinities of large groups of voters defined by class or occupation, bound by a common, inherited, and often rather abstract set of principles and objectives. Policies had mattered less than allegiances.

But in the Seventies
policies
moved to the forefront. ‘Single-issue’ parties and movements emerged, their constituencies shaped by a variable geometry of common concerns: often narrowly focused, occasionally whimsical. Britain’s remarkably successful Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) is a representative instance: founded in 1971 to reverse the trend to gaseous, homogenized ‘lager’ beer (and the similarly homogenized, ‘modernized’ pubs where it was sold), this middle-class pressure group rested its case upon a neo-Marxist account of the take-over of artisanal beer manufacture by mass-producing monopolists who manipulated beer-drinkers for corporate profit—alienating consumers from their own taste buds by meretricious substitution.

In its rather effective mix of economic analysis, environmental concern, aesthetic discrimination and plain nostalgia, CAMRA foreshadowed many of the single-issue activist networks of years to come, as well as the coming fashion among well-heeled bourgeois-bohemians for the expensively ‘authentic’.
²⁰⁶
But its slightly archaic charm, not to mention the disproportion between the intensity of its activists’ engagement and the tepid object of their passion, made this particular single-issue movement necessarily somewhat quaint.

But there was nothing whimsical or quaint about other single-issue political networks, most of them—like CAMRA—organized by and for the middle class. In Scandinavia a variety of protest parties emerged in the early seventies, notably the Rural Party (later the Real Finn Party) in Finland; Morgens Glistrup’s Danish Progress Party and Anders Lange’s Norwegian Progress Party. All of them were energetically and at first uniquely devoted to the cause of tax reduction—the founding title for the Norwegian party in 1973 had been ‘Anders Lange’s Party for a Drastic Reduction in Taxes, Rates and State Intervention’, its program a single sheet of paper reiterating the demands of its name.

The Scandinavian experience was perhaps distinctive—nowhere else were tax rates so high nor public services so extensive—and certainly no single-issue parties outside the region ever did as well as Glistrup’s party, which won 15.9 percent of the Danish national vote in 1973. But anti-tax parties were not new. Their model was Pierre Poujade’s
Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans
(UDCA), founded in 1953 to protect small shopkeepers against taxes and supermarkets and which won brief fame by securing 12 percent of the vote in the French elections of 1956. But Poujade’s movement was singular. Most of the protest parties that emerged after 1970 proved enduring—the Norwegian Progress Party achieved its strongest vote to date (15.3 percent) a quarter of a century later, in 1997.