Europe's Intellectuals and the Cold War

The European Society of Culture, Post-War Politics and International Relations

Nancy Jachec

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780763705
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1, 600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values.
Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Footnote Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Introduction The Not ‘Cold War Intellectuals’
• 1. After the Resistance: the Origins of the SEC in European Federalism, 1946–9
• 2. The SEC’s Early Years: the ‘Politics of Culture’ and the Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe and the World (1952)
• 3. The ‘Civilization of the Universal’: Overtures toward the Third World (1953–6)
• 4. The ‘Will to Dialogue’: the First East–West Meeting, March 1956
• 5. The Cold War ‘Crisis Years’ and the East–West Meetings 1958–63
• 6. The Cultures of Black Africa and of the West Colloquium (1960), the World Association of Culture (1962) and their Aftermath
• 7. Returning to Europe: Reform Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Early Human Rights Movement in Eastern Europe in the 1960s
• 8. 1968: Toward Solidarity, the ‘Substance of True Democracy’
• Glossary of Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates Section
• Back cover