The stabilization of the Cold War in Europe, the reduced likelihood of it ever becoming ‘hot’, and the fact that these matters lay largely out of their hands, induced among West Europeans the rather comfortable conviction that conventional armed conflict was obsolete. War, it seemed to many observers in the years 1953-63, was unthinkable, at least on the European continent (it never ceased to be the preferred approach to conflict resolution elsewhere). If war were to come, the huge nuclear arsenals of the Great Powers meant that it must surely entail unimaginably terrible consequences, and could only therefore be the result of a miscalculation on someone’s part. In that case, there would be very little that Europeans could do to mitigate the consequences.
Not everyone saw things thus. Among a minority, the same evidence inspired movements calling urgently for nuclear disarmament. The British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was launched in London on February 17th 1958. From the outset it was squarely in the great dissenting tradition of British radical politics: most of its supporters were educated, left-leaning and non-violent, and their demands were addressed in the first instance to their own government, not to the Russians or Americans (both major parties in Britain were convinced of the need for an independent British nuclear deterrent, even though it was clear by the end of the 1950s that without American-provided missiles and submarines a British bomb would never reach its target).
At its peak, in 1962, the CND was able to turn out 150,000 supporters on the annual protest march to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. But, together with like-minded disarmament movements in West Germany and the Benelux countries, the British campaign shriveled in the course of the sixties. The anti-nuclear campaigners lost their relevance after the Test Ban Treaty; it was increasingly difficult to claim with any credibility that Europe faced imminent annihilation and new topics had displaced disarmament from the radical agenda. Even in the Soviet Union the dissenting atomic physicist Andrei Sakharov became less concerned with the risk of imminent nuclear holocaust—turning, as he put it, ‘from world wide problems to the defense of individual people’.
There is no doubt that most West Europeans, when they thought about it at all, were in favor of nuclear disarmament: polls taken in 1963 showed that Italians in particular would welcome the abolition of all nuclear weapons. The French were somewhat less overwhelmingly abolitionist, while Germans and British were divided, though with a clear anti-nuclear majority in each case. But in contrast with the fraught debates over disarmament of the 1920s and early ’30s, the nuclear question in Europe did not move people much. It was too abstract. Only the British and (nominally) the French had nuclear arms, and of the others only a minority of the West German political establishment sought them.
Italians, Danes and the Dutch worried on occasion about having US bases on their soil, which exposed them to danger should a war break out. But the weapons that caused concern belonged to the superpowers; and most Europeans, reasonably enough, concluded that they could do nothing to influence decisions made in Moscow and Washington. Indeed, the hard
The most remarkable aspect of the European political scene in the 1950s was not the changes it saw but the changes it
In Italy the change was especially striking. Unlike Europe’s other Mediterranean states—Portugal, Spain and Greece—Italy became a democracy, however imperfect, and remained a democracy throughout the post-war decades. This was no small achievement. Italy was a profoundly divided country. Indeed, its very existence
The backwardness of southern Italy, the
The war had further exacerbated the historical division of Italy: whereas the North, beginning in September 1943, had experienced nearly two years of German rule and political resistance, followed by Allied military occupation of its radicalized cities, the South of Italy had been effectively taken out of the war by the arrival of the Western Allied troops. In the
The failure of post-war agrarian reforms led Italian governments to adopt a new approach to the country’s vexed ‘Southern Question’. In August 1950 the Italian Parliament established a
The function of the Republican state was not very different from its Fascist predecessor—from whom it had inherited most of its bureaucrats:[92] the role of Rome was to provide employment, services and welfare to the many Italian citizens for whom it was the only refuge. Through a variety of intermediaries and holding agencies—some of them, like the
Whatever the economic arguments against such a strategy (its roots lay partly in the inter-war Fascist drive for economic autarky), its social and political advantages were clear. At the beginning of the 1950s the