Tony Judt - Postwar

It was estimated at the time that the cost of maintaining a British presence in Northern Ireland was £3 billion per annum, at a time when London was hard pushed to balance its budget.

The unimpeachably law-abiding French Socialist Party even formed a ‘Committee for the Defense of Human Rights’ in the Federal Republic, offering to provide expertise and practical help to defendants accused of terrorist acts there.

As in Germany, the police had actually found the leaders at one point, only to lose them again. Arrested in 1974, Renato Curcio escaped from prison in February 1975, only to be recaptured eleven months later.

Initially released, Negri was re-arrested in 1983. In June 1984 he was tried and condemned to thirty years in prison.

One such network, the infamous ‘P2 Lodge’, was a mysterious Masonic web of right-wing politicians, bankers, soldiers and policemen, organized by Licio Gelli, a former militant in Mussolini’s ‘Social Republic’ from 1943 to 1945. Its 962 members included thirty generals, eight admirals, forty-three parliamentary deputies, three active Cabinet Ministers and a fair cross-representation of the highest ranks of industry and the private banking sector.

West European punk left a particularly ugly aftertaste in the waning years of Communist Eastern Europe, where it was taken up by nihilistic underground bands cynically fastening on to a heritage of political and musical dissidence for their own ends. In a repellent blend of pornography and political incorrectness, the Spions, a Hungarian punk group of the Eighties, recorded ‘Anna Frank’: ‘A little forced intercourse before they come and take you away, Anna Frank! Make love to me! Anna Frank! Cry you bitch! Anna Frank! Otherwise I’ll give you up! Anna Frank—the boys are waiting for you.’

In Britain this trend could be traced to longstanding enthusiasms for vegetarianism, ‘authentic’ building and clothing materials and the like—often overlapping with networks of socialist societies and rambling clubs: the Left’s response to the hunting, shooting and fishing of the conservative set. In continental Europe the cultures of both Left and Right reflected a very different history. Whereas Britain’s Good Food Guide was founded and edited by Fabian socialists and presented from the outset as a contribution to class warfare on the gastronomic front, France’s Guide Michelin was always and only a commercial enterprise, albeit directed to much the same audience.

By 1980 the Soviet Union was releasing almost as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the United States—a statistic that would until very recently have been a source of pride rather than embarrassment for its admirers.

Within certain limits environmental protest—because of its ostensibly apolitical character—offered a safe space for political action and national self-expression in otherwise restrictive regimes. By 1983 the problem of water pollution had brought fully 10 percent of the population of Soviet Lithuania into a ‘Lithuanian Nature Protection Association’.

Heideggerian existentialism in this key opened another link to the West: the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier had many years before claimed to see in the existentialism of his contemporaries (like Sartre) a ‘subjective barrier’ against what he excoriated as ‘objective materialism’ and ‘technology’, In later decades, Mounier’s intellectual heirs in the circle of writers on the journal Esprit would be among the first in Western Europe to publish and celebrate Havel and his fellow dissidents.

In the same years Moscow even funded the minuscule American Communist Party to the tune of $42 million, a revealing exercise in undiscriminating generosity.

On April 13th 1976, just nine weeks before the Italian elections, Kissinger publicly declared that the US would ‘not welcome’ a Communist role in the government of Italy—thereby confirming Berlinguer’s intuitions.

One of Brandt’s first decisions upon taking office in 1969 was to rename the ‘Ministry for All-German Questions’ as the ‘Ministry for Inter-German Relations’: to allay East German fears that the Federal Republic would continue to assert its legal claim to speak for all Germans, and to indicate his readiness to treat with the GDR as a distinctive and enduring entity.

This legal fiction, and the emotional issues surrounding it, account for the Christian Democratic Party’s initial reluctance to sign the 1973 Basic Treaty which established relations with East Germany—and for the CD’s continuing insistence upon keeping open the issue of the eastern frontiers right up to 1990.

From the very start of Ostpolitik , special attention and privileges were accorded to Volksdeutsche , Germans still living beyond the frontiers of Germany, to the east or south. Defined by family or ethnic origin, such people were accorded full citizenship if they could reach the Federal Republic. Hundreds of thousands of residents of Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Hungary and elsewhere suddenly rediscovered German backgrounds they had taken great pains to deny for the previous half century.

The first ‘Helsinki Group’ was founded on May 12th 1976, in Moscow. Its eleven initial members included Yuri Orlov, Yelena Bonner and Anatoly Sharansky. Helsinki Watch, the international umbrella organization set up specifically to publicize rights abuses in the Helsinki signatory states, was born two years later.

The Makronisos’ warders’ practice of forcing Communists to repent and then turn on those who refused was remarkably similar to Romanian Communist techniques in the prison at Pitesti in the same years, albeit marginally less vicious. See Chapter 6.

At first, as elsewhere in Europe, the US expected to find friends and allies on the centre-left of the Greek political spectrum. It was soon disabused of this, however, and switched to a close and enduring friendship with the nationalist and military Right.

And to Costas Gavras’ influential 1969 film Z, based on the Lambrakis affair.

The officers, most of them formed in military cadet schools under the pre-war dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, were perhaps not as unpopular as their foreign critics asserted. But they were—rightly—presumed to have the sympathy (and perhaps more) of the United States. What was in essence a belated extension of the Greek civil war of the 1940s rapidly came instead to be seen as the latest cause célèbre in Europe’s century-old civil war. ‘Greece’ now replaced ‘Spain’ as the divining rod for polarized political sentiment.

Since 1962, Greece had ‘Associate’ status with the European Economic Community.

The junta itself, however, did not escape retribution. Eleven of its leaders were tried and convicted in August 1975. Three were given death sentences, later commuted to life in prison. Papadopoulos died in custody in 1999, unrepentant to the end. Brigadier-General Ioannidis was convicted at a later trial for his role in the suppression of the Polytechnic revolt. He remains in prison at the time of writing.