Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

Correlated with these fears were other concerns. Once the PCF found full reconciliation with Moscow, the Italian Communists worried about their own isolation in the Western Communist movement. 34Concerns about grassroots connections also haunted the leadership of both parties; steeped in Soviet myths, the parties’ rank and file had more trouble than their leaders with estrangement from Moscow. But above all, the political advantages of the emerging détente seemed to command a moderate response to the Soviet Union. Even the PCI in the end informally recognized normalization, in part out of fear that the forces of radicalism or Chinese intransigence would freeze détente in Europe and leave no room for maneuvering for the party’s possible rapprochement with social democratic forces in the West. Maintaining détente meant keeping close relations with Moscow. 35

In 1968, however, French and Italian Communists were still excluded from domestic politics. So they aimed at regaining some exposure by giving priority to foreign policy issues. The two parties’ internationalism was, in part, predicated on their belief that they could preserve a role in the West if they could act as mediators in the East. This had been the case since the Moscow meeting of the eighty-one Communist parties in November–December 1961. On that occasion, both the French and the Italian parties sought to revive their international credentials by trying to cushion the impact of the Sino-Soviet split. Throughout the following decade, the PCI was quieter than the PCF on this issue. But its own concern about balancing détente with Sino-Soviet reconciliation was finally emphasized in the meeting Giancarlo Pajetta and Carlo Galluzzi held in Moscow with Andrei Kirilenko and Mikhail Suslov in July 1968.

More importantly, by the mid-1960s, the two parties practiced a “new internationalism,” as the Italian Communists called it. The core elements of this policy were the virtually unconditional support of North Vietnam in its fight against “imperialism” and the effort to reestablish relations with the European Left—as the PCI did at the end of the decade by endorsing Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik .

Protesting the Vietnam War gave the parties control of the streets and the propaganda battle. It also established their strongest connection with the youth movement. During the summer of 1968, the PCF’s political bureau decided to increase aid to North Vietnam and to create various committees supporting not just peace, as before, but victory for the Vietminh and Vietcong forces. Even more so now, the political bureau argued in August 1968, given the bourgeois attacks on socialism following the Czech events, the party needed to call the public’s attention to the “struggle for freedom” in Vietnam. The constant parallel between Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, under the rubric of “freedom and independence,” PCF’s Roland Leroy told the leader of the Mouvement de la Jeunesse Communiste Française Roland Favaro, drowned the anti-American tradition into anti-Soviet animosity. 36

But it was through a reevaluation of Western European integration that French and Italian Communists could get recognition and more control in parliament. For the PCI especially, this “Europeanism” reflected its effort to transform détente into a vehicle for European emancipation from both superpowers.

During the development of events in Prague, the PCF in July first proposed a meeting of the European Communist parties aimed at averting the Soviet action. It was a way for the PCF to establish its mediation role, but also to reassert the status of the Western parties. Moscow ignored that proposal. Indeed, for both Italian and French Communists, the main goal was to coalesce the Left in the West to better combat Western (U.S.) imperialism more than Moscow’s control. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia gave them the pretext to further their attempt to overcome the “politics of the two blocs.” For the PCI’s main champion of an acceptance of the European Economic Community (EEC), Giorgio Amendola, the Prague events would help prompt a campaign for the “withdrawal of [both] imperialist forces from occupied Europe… and the achievement of a real “European unity.” 37This position, prevalent in the PCI, actually favored utter condemnation of the Czech invasion, setting the tone against those who feared that an ideological domino effect would follow the party’s reprobation of Soviet conduct. Denouncing Moscow, this argument went, could, in fact, give the party more power within the Socialist movement. Also, if Moscow’s interference in the East was not rejected, the West could justify counter-coups against socialism in the West. 38That was how the PCI saw the events in Chile five years later, or the so-called strategy of tension at home, which started with Fascist terrorist bombings in December 1969.

The risk of an escalating aggression from both superpowers in Europe was highlighted in a Mediterranean conference in April 1968, the first Cold War general Western Communist gathering to be organized separately from Moscow. The meeting, held in Rome, discussed geopolitical scenarios in the region after the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967. The delegates concluded that the situation “created the threat of ‘aggressive Atlantic-American imperialism’ and threatened to transform the Mediterranean into a potentially explosive new front or scene of dangerous confrontation between the U.S. Sixth Fleet and the newly introduced Soviet naval units.” 39

Just as the impact of the Hungarian events in 1956 was mitigated by the imperialist venture at Suez and the follow-up of the Eisenhower Doctrine, so the repression in Prague twelve years later was counterbalanced by a persistent anti-Americanism centered on a campaign against the Vietnam War. That campaign had actually contributed to reinserting the two Communist parties into a general national consensus opposing the war. Significant for the dialogue between Communists and Catholics, early in 1966 Pope Paul VI had established an informal diplomatic contact with North Vietnam through Ber-linguer and other party leaders. 40Moreover, the anti-Sovietism unleashed by the events in Prague in most respects prompted both the PCI and the PCF to intensify their anti-Americanism, almost as an instinctive reaction: their main reproach was that the ruling parties, enslaved to the United States through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EEC, could not “afford to lecture” the two Western Communist parties or the Soviet Union. 41

For the older generation of World War II Communist resistors, the Soviet myth, combined with a vision of capitalist decline, persisted, even after deStalinization and Western economic miracles. The fact that large sectors of the working class, especially in Italy, were still excluded from consumption, economically justified the continuing myth and resulted in improved electoral results for the PCI in the 1970s. That myth also ascribed to the Soviet Union a sincere desire for détente, as opposed to a relentless imperialist drive from the United States. 42But as officials from the U.S. embassy in Rome predicted as early as September 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia might have induced the PCI to begin reevaluating its denial of Soviet expansionism and to seek shelter in the Western alliance for its own brand of socialism, which is what Berlinguer did gradually by balking at the campaign to prevent the renewal of the NATO treaty in 1969, by accepting NATO in 1974 in front of the political bureau, and by publicly announcing this turn in June 1976. 43

For the PCF, anti-Americanism remained a raison d’être , not only because of its orthodoxy, or because of its tactics to harness the youth movement, but also because de Gaulle himself had shifted direction. After recognizing that “with [the] Soviets on [the] warpath this is not time to be feuding with [the] U.S.,” the French government took the role as host to Vietnam negotiations “in part due to the evident unpopularity of ‘way out’ anti-U.S. rhetoric.” 44