In 1946 Edward Carr published a collection of the lectures of his latest history course. His short book, The Soviet Impact on the Western World, was an attempt to describe the multiple layers of Soviet influence on Western politics and society with a special, almost exclusive, focus on western Europe. If not always convincing, his arguments are often illuminating. Writing just before the beginning of the Cold War, Carr highlighted numerous spheres of Soviet influence: the political impact, economic and social impact, the impact on international relations and the ideological impact.Footnote 1
The structure of this article will follow that of Carr's essay and will analyse the effects of decolonisation on western Europe. It is not a general overview of the rise of the Third World in the 1960s, but it does examine how political elites, social movements and citizens perceived and dealt with the growing power and prominence of the decolonising world. Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia receive varying degrees of attention according to the extent of their influence in western Europe during this period. It is important to note that the Third World did not affect all European countries in the same way. The pressure of non-European immigration was, for example, much weaker in Italy than in Britain; on the other hand Italy felt the impact of ‘Thirdworldist’ ideology more acutely.
The decline of European great powers is widely believed to be one of the features that shaped the contemporary world. Eric Hobsbawm stresses that this decline started after the First World War, and argues that the efforts to pursue European integration have only been a further demonstration of this decline.Footnote 2 Geoffrey Barraclough analysed the end of the Eurocentric world from a different angle; from the British intervention in Suez in 1882 to the Suez crisis of 1956 a transition had taken place between two different historical eras whose main feature was the re-emergence of the colonised people.Footnote 3 Lucien Febvre, writing while parts of France were still under Nazi occupation, was convinced that Europe could not solve its own problems after the drama of the Second World War and that ‘the problems of Europe are the problems of the world’,Footnote 4 thereby admitting that European leaders would have to look outside their countries to find future solutions.
At the end of the Second World War Europe was severely battered, both economically and in terms of human lives. At the same time an astonishing amount of faith and energy, even idealism, was devoted to the objective of rebuilding European states and improving standards of living. In Italy there was a collective enthusiasm to rebuild a state which had never really been united except in name, and needed to be understood and discovered once again. The novel Christ stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi is only one of the numerous testimonies of the passion devoted to understanding the cultural and economic hardships of rural areas in the Mezzogiorno, so that they could eventually be overcome. The United States had a pervasive influence over the hearts and habits of some, and helped the western European economies to recover and restructure. This aspect is particularly stressed by Victoria de Grazia:
By the 1970s the outcome was indeed a New Europe, but a close ally of the Market Empire rather than the exact image of the United States. Forming a ‘White Atlantic’ with its American partner, it had its most conspicuous feature in the striving for the satisfaction of consumers’ every desire, the most basic being the comfort and convenience offered by the kitchen, the porcelain whiteness of its new material civilisation all the brighter as it was viewed against the darkness of Third World poverty and the dinginess of state socialism.Footnote 5
Communism also had much appeal in some European countries, particularly in Italy and France. But the argument of this paper is that the pressures coming from the Cold War and from the two competing economic and political systems in the West and in the East would not have sufficed to weaken the European nation-state. The aim of this essay is to stress how the Third World has penetrated western Europe, impressing on more strata of European citizens, more than previously and sometimes for the first time, the end of the centrality of European ‘white’ states. The underlying idea is that an understanding of the impact of the Third World is essential for explaining the evolution – one could even say the transformation – of European states and of European integration during the 1970s.Footnote 6 This essay will follow this theme by examining three issues: politics, society and the economy.
Political impact
In the golden age of empires, the British Empire was spread across a territory 125 times bigger than the United Kingdom; the Dutch empire was 70 times bigger than the Netherlands, the French empire 15 times larger than its metropolitan area and the Belgian empire 78 times bigger than Belgium.Footnote 7 The decolonisation process that took place in the 1950s and 1960s (except in the case of Portugal) marked the end of European expansion, which is considered to have begun in the in the sixteenth century.Footnote 8 This process was not always peaceful. This was particularly true in the case of France, defeated in both Indo-China in 1954 and Algeria in 1962. The Dutch accepted the loss of Indonesia in 1948 only after the United States had threatened to exclude them from the Marshall Plan. The Belgians intervened in Congo in 1960 after it had formally gained independence under Patrice Lumumba, and were opposed by UN troops in their first major military effort. Even though Britain is considered to have mastered the transition from empire more smoothly, decolonisation implied a painful reorientation of its foreign relations. The British government misunderstood the importance of Arab nationalism, guided by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and participated in the failed attempt by colonial powers to control Suez.Footnote 9 Well into the 1960s UK Labour Party leaders considered the Commonwealth to be their main reference point in international politics, as opposed to reinforcing co-operation with western European partners. In the words of Harold Wilson, ‘We are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage of selling washing machines in Dusseldorf’.Footnote 10
In fact, while west European governments had been forced to abandon direct control over their former colonies they did everything in their power to retain economic influence. The treaty of Yaoundé, signed in 1963 between the European Economic Community (EEC) and French African territories, was an example of what would be called economic neo-colonialism. The EEC had been created in 1957 in order to improve growth and trade within west European countries. It implied the creation of a common agricultural policy (CAP) to shield agriculture from international competition and took no account of the special requirements of the emerging Third World.Footnote 11
Far from being shocked by the loss of their empires, British, French and Italian citizens were at the beginning for the most part unconcerned with the newly independent countries, which from 1954 were defined by French intellectuals, and later by the press at large, as the Third World.Footnote 12 While for French intellectuals the Third World embodied the idea of a new class of states fighting to have their rights recognised on the international scene, to the average European citizen it represented not much more than a weak coalition of uncivilised peoples waiting to be elevated by superior Western knowledge. One is surprised by the degree of racism to be found in Italian school textbooks of the 1960s. Even in those written by left-leaning intellectuals it is possible to find references to Europe as a ‘superior civilisation’, or positive evaluations of the Italian colonial effort.Footnote 13
The myth of Third World liberation movements gained strength during the 1960s. In France, the essay The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, expressed a strong call in favour of revolutionary violence and of active engagement of the colonised people in world politics.Footnote 14 Written by Frantz Fanon, the Antillean psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary, with a foreword by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the essay marked the strong involvement of left-wing intellectuals in support of the Algerian national liberation front, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The Algerian nationalists had conducted a huge, innovative, and successful propaganda effort to explain the progressive nature of their effort.Footnote 15 In Italy, new periodicals, such as Quaderni Piacentini which appeared in 1961, began to offer a framework for intellectuals to the left of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Here they debated and elaborated on the issues of racism, on the Chinese model as opposed to the Soviet one (with its strong bureaucratic outlook), and on the possible means of emancipating blue-collar workers from the iron discipline imposed on them in the factories. Western radical thinkers became something like intellectual stars by criticising their own culture and explaining new Third World ideas and practices.Footnote 16 A good example is Régis Debray, who met the leaders of the Cuban revolution in Havana, popularised their thinking and produced detailed descriptions of the ways of guerrilla in Latin America.Footnote 17 Philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse, who advocated liberation from the ‘one-dimensional nature of men’ in industrial society, also searched for the ‘Great Refusal’ in China, Vietnam and Cuba.Footnote 18 The growing death toll in the Vietnam War, and what started to be described as heroic resistance by Vietcong peasants against a military superpower, would soon focus the attention of the emerging new left. For the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (German Socialist Student Federation, SDS),Footnote 19 the most prestigious and theoretically oriented organisation of the European student movement, Vietnam was, as expressed in a 1966 resolution, (i) a war of national and social liberation; (ii) a possible model for other conflicts in semi-colonial agricultural areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America; (iii) a menace to the vital interests of the United States and its allies; and (iv) could transform itself into a more general conflict.Footnote 20 Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic SDS leader and a follower of Marcuse's ideas, argued that the continuous mobilisation in 1965–6 against US intervention in Vietnam had created an anti-authoritarian psychological disposition among German students that would only be reinforced through the conflict with university bureaucracy.Footnote 21 At the same time, Latin America was breeding a new generation of Catholic priests who considered violent action to be an acceptable tool to recover human dignity and to liberate from need and poverty. They named this doctrine ‘liberation theology’. Left-wing Italian Catholics also advocated non-violence as a response to Vietnam, as in the case of Aldo Capitini pleading for ‘a Europe united with the Third World and the best part of America’, or leaned towards an analysis of the economic underdevelopment of the South.Footnote 22 The encyclical ‘Populorum Progressio’ (progress of the people), issued by Pope Paul VI in 1967, stated unequivocally that there could be no just cause for war and that peace could only be achieved through economic development, and it even pleaded specifically for the stabilisation in the price of raw materials.Footnote 23
It is safe to conclude that these different signals of attention to the southern hemisphere would have found scant echo in the mass media and exercised only a weak influence on the ruling west European elite, were it not for the explosion of the student revolts in 1967 and 1968. Student unrest in Europe demolished popular theories on the death of ideologies in modern societies, and it also underlined the advent of a new generation no longer obsessed by postwar pacification.Footnote 24 The analysis of European egotism and mercantilist obsessions formulated by US Vice-President Humphrey after an unsuccessful trip to west European capitals in 1967, that ‘Europeans have rejected the world after the loss of their colonies. They resent US power . . . The European are selfish. We should challenge them to participate in the world outside their borders’,Footnote 25 was proved to be wrong.
On 3 May 1968, students gathered at the Sorbonne University in Paris to express their anger for the burning down of the local student association by a right-wing group, Occident.Footnote 26 One of the most important organising groups, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was called ‘22 March’, a mocking but significant reference to the ‘26 July Movement’ created by Fidel Castro after the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks.Footnote 27 Cohn-Bendit was described by the communist Georges Marchais in aggressively nationalistic terms as ‘l'anarchiste allemand Cohn-Bendit’ (the German anarchist Cohn-Bendit). The episode is considered to be the beginning of the May ‘évènements’ that shocked the nation and ended with the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle.
This is not the place to elaborate on the fundamental reasons for the 1968 protests. It is worth noting, however, that the total rejection of past nationalism was one of the main ideological components of the students’ movement.Footnote 28 Even though the protesters’ objectives varied across the world, it is possible to say that 1968 was probably the first global social movement. It catalysed dissatisfaction with détente managed by the United States and the Soviet Union, and with the capitalist order both at a national and international level. The empathy with the Third World liberation movements was in some ways motivated by the consideration that decolonisation had not been complete; it had to be accompanied by a decolonisation within national societies against racism and subordination in the family and at work.Footnote 29 Students were influenced by Third World leaders and movements and vice versa.Footnote 30 The gulf separating the 1968 atmosphere from the furious nationalism of much of the European youth before the First World War is striking, and can be further grasped by the fact that the leader of the French student movement Daniel Cohn-Bendit in fact had German nationality, while the leader of the West German students, Rudi Dutschke, came from East Germany, was married to an American and had called his son Che. When criticised by the press for their lack of patriotism, some students replied that, as production and capital movement had no frontiers, then why should politics, and they claimed their right to ‘organise themselves at a European level’.Footnote 31 The whole 1968 movement was permeated with a profound mistrust for physical frontiers:
As long as the nation state survived, it was clear that major conflicts would continue to revolve around them and their conflicting interests. What was also clear was that the external hostility was used as a means of internal stabilisation and integration. Any particular enemy might be largely an ideological invention, a justification for defence spending, or a purely transitory threat.Footnote 32
It has been said that anti-Americanism was a major feature of 1968. Up to a certain point (the opposition to Vietnam) this is true. But this kind of anti-Americanism was a peculiar one, feeding at the same time on underground US literature, on the speeches of Malcolm X, the writings of Fanon and the songs by the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin.Footnote 33 Identification with ideas and models coming from the Third World and the refusal of past nationalism was, in fact, much more important than anti-Americanism. This represented the reversal of a trend which had, for centuries, seen western Europe mainly as a net exporter of political ideas and culture.Footnote 34 European integration, with its difference from the old nation-state, was considered to be a new and interesting space for the action of movements and culture – not, of course, the bureaucratic Europe of Brussels, which nobody even knew or cared about, but a Europe which could develop in a new model, different from the Soviet Union and the United States, somewhere between communism and capitalism.Footnote 35
The most visible short-term effect of this rising social tide was a shift to the left of the more traditional political parties and, in particular, a new general interest in everything related to social and working conditions, as well as to the question of equal rights. West European socialist parties grew stronger: in the middle of the 1970s, of fifteen west European governments, seven were guided by socialist parties and four had the participation of socialist parties, while only four had exclusively conservative coalitions. On the Mediterranean flank of the EEC, authoritarian regimes started crumbling. The students’ movement and their sympathy for the Third World probably stimulated the efforts by European elites to build a new European identity which could conquer the hearts of young Europeans dissatisfied with old politics and old nationalism and attracted by less traditional models. It has been argued that the momentous 1969 European Community summit in The Hague – that opened the way for the accession of the United Kingdom and for a change in the nature of European integration, which up to then was not much more than a common agricultural policy with an external trade tariff – was deeply influenced by the 1968 revolution.Footnote 36 The young activists’ advocacy of Third World issues and their anti-nationalism strengthened efforts to build a political and cultural Europe to react to the scant legitimacy of nation-states.
The case of Portuguese decolonisation in Africa marks an important sign of the evolution in the European political climate. The 1973 economic crisis hit this underdeveloped European country hard. The revolt against the authoritarian regime of Caetano came from within the very same military that had been trained in the colonies and had witnessed a bloody war with a higher mortality rate, as a share of national population, than that suffered by the US army in Vietnam.Footnote 37 The new Portuguese industrial class started thinking of Europe as more important for its business than control over African raw materials. Young protesters from all over Europe came together in Lisbon in order to help transition to democracy (or possibly to witness a communist revolution), and the attractive force of European socialism and of European integration proved stronger than the nationalistic projects of Portuguese communists. The European Community had become an important agent for spreading democracy in the region, with a strong public opinion hostile to imperialistic dreams in the Third World.
Social and cultural impact
While a heated debate took place in Italy over whether the Arab culture should be considered inferior to the European culture, if it were possible or convenient to draw up a scale of world civilisations,Footnote 38 western Europe was right in the middle of a more tangible historical change. Its citizens would be offered an opportunity for a much closer look at other cultures than had previously been possible. European countries had, through the conquest and exploration of other continents, through colonisation and through mass emigration, been exporters of manpower since the sixteenth century.Footnote 39 In twenty years, however, from 1950 to 1970, western Europe evolved from being an emigration area to being one of the most important regions of immigration.Footnote 40 In 1950 the balance of population movement was still negative by a margin of three million. At the beginning of the 1960s this margin was 400,000. It became strongly positive at the beginning of the 1970s.Footnote 41 In this same period the total number of foreigners in European countries grew from 4 million to 11 million.Footnote 42
In the first part of these two crucial decades, intra-European migration prevailed, in particular from southern European countries such as Italy, Portugal, Greece and Yugoslavia to the industrial north. After absorbing the mass of German refugees from eastern Europe, West Germany launched the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) system, signing agreements with Italy in 1955, with Greece and Spain in 1960, with Turkey in 1961 and with Portugal in 1964.Footnote 43 This kind of immigration, centred on seasonal jobs, was considered temporary, and was strongly encouraged by the governments of the growing northern economies whose countries were in desperate need of labour. The celebration of the arrival, in 1964, of the one-millionth Portuguese migrant worker in Cologne ‘with an official welcome and the present of a motorbike’Footnote 44 probably coincided with the highest peak of the intra-European migration wave. European migrants did not share the same rights as local workers, were paid lower wages and were prepared to move back to their home countries once the economic cycle turned downwards, or as soon as they had enough savings to set up a small business at home. In 1968, with the completion of the Common Market and the free movement of workers within the EEC, there would be fewer advantages to hiring Community workers.
During the 1960s immigration from non-European countries acquired momentum and finally prevailed at the end of the decade. Immigrants were attracted to Europe from Asia, central and northern Africa, and the Caribbean, in patterns that reflected former colonial links and special relationships with European metropolitan areas. Colonial capitals often granted citizenship to those willing to move to Europe. But the movement of population also coincided with the declining birth rate in developed countries and its unprecedented explosion in the Third World.Footnote 45 Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans prevailed in the Unite Kingdom, Algerians in France, Turks in West Germany. By the end of the 1960s there were more than 3.2 million foreigners (both European and non-European) in France (6.4 per cent of the population); three million in West Germany (4.8 per cent of the population); 2.6 million in the United Kingdom (5 per cent of the population); and one million in Switzerland (16 per cent of the population).Footnote 46 In West Germany alone the number of foreign workers climbed from 0.4 per cent of the workforce in 1954 to 10 per cent in 1971.Footnote 47 A 1973 report by the Financial Times stated that 35 per cent of Gastarbeiter worked in the metalworking industry, and that in Stuttgart one worker in four was a foreigner: ‘Go to railway stations of these cities, or Munich, on a Sunday – when the Gastarbeiter congregate as though at a kind of club – and it may prove difficult to find anyone who speaks much German’.Footnote 48
There were strong differences between European and non-European immigration. Italians moving to West Germany were treated as second-class citizens, but could also be counted on their willingness to move back to Italy when job opportunities abroad were reduced. The spaghettis, as Italians were nicknamed in France, had peculiar family traditions but were all the same Christians and white-skinned. For non-European immigrants, the situation was different. First-generation non-European immigrants aimed at integrating into west European societies. They were available to work in the lower-paid and degrading jobs, but their skin colour was different and their religion often involved particular dress codes and gender relationships. Public debate on the immigration issue generally kept a low profile through the 1960s; integration efforts prevailed and the economy was in dire need of the immigrants’ contribution. Only towards the end of the decade did a new wave of racist politics start in Britain, when Enoch Powell, in April 1968, gave his well-known ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The right-wing politician claimed that by 2000 there would be around seven million Commonwealth immigrants and feared that honest, working white ladies would be forced to flee the country. He added that, ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. Powell's views were unpopular at the time, but public opinion was starting to become increasingly cautious about the possible dangers arising from a multicultural society.Footnote 49 The tragedy of the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, for example, sounded a warning bell as to how the tensions between Israel and the Palestinians might spill over into western Europe. A general concern for the problems of uncontrolled immigration from the South led the Italian Commissioner for External Affairs, Edoardo Martino, to speak about the need for a new development and co-operation policy around the Mediterranean:
More than 2 million workers from Spain, Maghreb, Greece and Turkey have temporary jobs in the EEC countries. Together with the African and Portuguese workers they represent those supporters of the European economy engaged in the hardest and humiliating tasks. What is the mission of the Community in the Mediterranean? Is it only to import a workforce, or even to export employment? If it does not want to be submerged by a chaotic immigration and one that could have increasingly painful social consequences, the Community should actively participate in industrializing and developing the Mediterranean basin.Footnote 50
The efforts by the European Community to pursue a Mediterranean policy were among the consequences of the pressures arising from immigration, even though – as we shall see – oil-dependency was the main concern. The first steps of European–Arab dialogue were taken in 1974 and mainly concerned questions relating to immigration and cultural dialogue.Footnote 51 The French historian Fernand Braudel's path-breaking study on the unity of the Mediterranean space was published in 1977. For the French historian the Mediterranean was
Not one civilisation, but many, one on top of the other. Travelling in the Mediterranean means to encounter the Roman world in Lebanon, prehistory in Sardinia, the Greek cities in Sicily, an Arab presence in Spain, or Turkish Islam in Yugoslavia. It means to witness the past eras of the megalithic buildings in Malta, or the Pyramids in Egypt. It means to get in touch with ancient realities next to the very modern ones: the vast industrial complex of Mestre, just next to Venice in its seeming immobility; the fishing vessel that devastates sea beds or the oil tankers, next to the fisherman's boat that is still the same as Ulysses’.Footnote 52
But the negotiations to render the Mediterranean ‘a sea of co-operation’ had disappointing concrete results in the 1970s. The 1973 oil shock and the first signals of the economic crisis favoured protectionist and isolationist attitudes by European governments. It was West Germany that set the tone. In July 1973, Der Spiegel magazine's headline was ‘The Turks are coming, save yourself if you can’. These fears, only strengthened by the oil crisis, set in motion a series of laws aimed at restricting legal immigration to Germany – the Anwerbestop, the official halt to recruiting new guest workers.Footnote 53 Other European countries soon followed, approving similarly restrictive pieces of legislation. Although such legal measures did not manage to halt family reunification (the short-term result was in fact that immigration climbed through the 1970s), they started to shield Europe and its advanced welfare systems from the reforms that would be necessary if the immigrant population were to increase in the next decades.Footnote 54
Cultural influence is less straightforward and more difficult to evaluate than importing people. Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that the main result of the penetration of ideas from the South was the end of cultural Eurocentrism, already weakened by the experience of the devastating destructive power of European nationalism in its totalitarian expression, and by the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as important cultural and political models. In the 1970s Geoffrey Barraclough, with the sponsorship of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), attempted to write a multipolar global history in which no European perspective would be adopted. This was to be the first work of its kind to be translated into Chinese.Footnote 55 If, up to the 1960s, the literary scene had been dominated by the Europeans and the North Americans, in the following decades, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, no serious reader could do without Latin American literature; even the committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature discovered writers from the South.Footnote 56 Literary critics reflected on the ‘world language of modern poetry’ and on the universal communicating power of the words of Pablo Neruda, who became a global cultural star after he won the Stalin Prize in 1953.Footnote 57 Even one of the most recent expressions of Western culture, rock music, was shaped by world influences. In 1968 the Beatles dressed in Indian fashion together with their rivals the Rolling Stones; reggae music by Bob Marley became one of the essential rhythms of the youth. There is no statistical method of assessing the consequences of this penetration of new ideas and means of expression. Surely every strictly deterministic explanation should be discarded: the end of cultural Eurocentrism did not necessarily lead to an openness to new concepts and traditions, but it could well have had the contrasting effect of triggering a rejection of non-European culture; it could well have stimulated the search for a European identity profoundly rooted in past history or in religion.
Energy dependency
Over the course of the twentieth century the world economy shifted from coal to oil. At the same time, western Europe underwent a revolutionary transition from energy independence to dependence on the oil of Third World countries. The share of coal in total world energy consumption decreased from 94 per cent in 1900 to 62 per cent in 1950 and to only 28 per cent in 1973. On the other hand, oil consumption increased in the same years from 3.8 per cent to 27 per cent to 48 per cent respectively.Footnote 58 In western Europe, in particular, the share of oil in energy consumption rose from 20 per cent in 1946–8 to 57 per cent in 1971, while by 1973 its energy deficit had reached 50 per cent of total consumption.Footnote 59 Bairoch notes that until the 1950s transportation costs for heavy commodities were so high that the only option was local self-consumption. Lowering transportation costs contributed, among other factors, to building European dependence not only on oil but also on a number of other commodities and raw materials on the other hand, thanks to the CAP the EEC became an exporter of agricultural commodities).Footnote 60
As western Europe imported a wider range and greater amounts of raw materials, the Third World's output and export of commodities and raw materials increased continuously during the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 61 However, contrary to expectations, rising levels of production did not directly benefit the South in terms of revenue. Indeed, one of the few undisputed phenomena in economic history is represented by the declining terms of trade of raw materials in the two decades after the Second World War. Much has been written to explain this phenomenon, which is one of the pillars of the accusations of neo-colonialism against the developed countries.Footnote 62
Keeping in mind the two elements explained above – Western dependence on oil and raw materials imports and the declining terms of trade for Third World producers – the oil crisis of 1973 and the battle engaged in by raw materials producers to obtain higher prices for their exports should not come as a complete surprise. The main facts behind the oil shock are well known.Footnote 63 On 16 October 1973, after the start of the Yom Kippur war and in order to support Egypt's attack on Israel, the Arabian Gulf producers unilaterally announced a new posted price for crude oil of US$5.119 per barrel. This measure was soon followed by planned production cuts of 5 per cent each month, and by an oil embargo targeted on specific countries, among them the United States and the Netherlands. In view of continuing US support for Israel, the countries the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) fixed a new price for crude oil, $11.65 a barrel, at the end of December 1973 (the market price of oil had increased more than 400 per cent in three months). The oil question was a strategic one, but in the two years between 1972 and 1974 there were also spectacular jumps in the prices of other commodities. Speculative actions in the market, rising demand in the West at the highest point of the economic cycle, greater political leverage of some Third World countries and stock accumulation, all combined to produce what was called a ‘commodity boom’. In 1973 the market price of copper increased by 115 per cent and zinc by 190 per cent, and there were also strong increases in the price of phosphates, coffee and wood.Footnote 64 There were expectations that Third World producers would follow the OPEC model and organise themselves into cartels to force prices upwards. This was a serious danger, considering that, for example, in 1974 only four countries controlled 80 per cent of world copper exports, and that two countries controlled 70 per cent of world tin exports, four countries controlled more than half the world's exports of natural rubber and another four managed 60 per cent of world bauxite exports.Footnote 65
There are a number reasons which help to explain the origins of the economic crisis in western Europe in the 1970s: the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system and the return to the unstable system of free-floating currencies; labour market constraints due to the power of trade unions; the end of mass consumption and the saturation of the European market; the emergence of exporting economies in Asia and Latin America (the newly industrialised countries – NICs). Among these factors a special place should be accorded to the impact of the oil shock, if not for its strictly economic effects, then certainly for its psychological impact. The oil shock forced Europeans to recognise the interdependence of the world economy. The editorial comment of an Italian periodical specialising in development studies stated that, while up to then the Third World was only remembered for its dangerous political instability, ‘at this Christmas 1973, even though fuel and shop lights are not indispensable, strictly speaking, for the spirit of this festivity, the Third World has become, in Italy, in Europe, in those countries hit by the embargo of Arab countries, the cause of all hardships and privations’.Footnote 66 Daniel Yergin considers that, for the Europeans, ‘the disruption instantaneously transported them back to their bitter post-war years of deprivation and shortages. Suddenly, their economic achievements of the 1950s and 1960 seemed very precarious’.Footnote 67 Pessimistic attitudes and predictions of decline prevailed among west European intellectuals. The first edition of Charles Kindleberger's The World in Depression appeared in 1973, and was hotly debated as the spectre of the Great Depression seemed to loom over contemporary Europe. This pessimism had been stigmatised by Carr in the preface to the second edition of his What is History?:
My conclusion is that the current wave of despair, which looks ahead to nothing but destruction and decay, and dismisses as absurd any belief in progress or any prospect of a further advance by the human race, is a form of elitism – the product of elite social groups whose security and whose privileges have been most conspicuously eroded by the crisis, and of elite countries whose once undisputed domination over the rest of the world has been shattered.Footnote 68
But Carr's positive approach to the future could not be shared entirely by the average European citizen. Some returned, not always happily, to riding their bicycles on car-less Sundays. In Italy, late movie shows were abolished, while strong speculation and hoarding provoked scarcity of many common goods, even though the Japanese extreme of the run on toilet paper was not reached.Footnote 69 Overall, the informed European citizens endured the oil crisis and its consequences with two different attitudes reflected in the correspondence columns of the Financial Times. A Mr Wood, for example, took the environmentalist perspective:
Sir, Exhorting customers to use less oil is a very unreliable way of conserving supplies. Surely it would be better to offer all those sensible people who have properly insulated their homes and factories a rebate on the installation costs or on their oil tax.Footnote 70
Mr Holmes, on the other hand, stuck to the more conservative confrontational approach:
In all the commentary which has appeared in recent weeks, nothing has been said of the most daunting aspect which ensues from the oil restrictions imposed by the Arabs, that is to say the potential shift of balance to the Russians . . . If exports to the Arab countries are stopped, within just a few months everything would grind to halt. Is it not better to have a short sharp economic conflict than to be starved of energy?Footnote 71
The economic crisis and the oil shock favoured the diffusion of an environmentalist culture in Europe. It became theorised, among other places, in the books of the American scientist Barry Commoner and in the 1972 report of the Club of Rome, with its outspoken title The Limits of Growth.Footnote 72 Energy conservation, together with environmental protection and the development of alternative energy sources, in particular of nuclear energy, became important political issues. Some sectors of the European social democracies, which up to then had been mainly concerned with wages and workers’ rights, or with the evolution of the Welfare State, started to speak of ‘sustainable development’. In an important meeting in Schlangenbad in December 1973 between the German federal chancellor Willy Brandt and the Austrian and Swedish prime ministers, Bruno Kreisky and Olof Palme respectively, the three social democratic leaders debated the consequences of the 1973 oil shock.Footnote 73 They all agreed that this could be a momentous opportunity rather than a setback for the European economy. Brandt argued that the increased costs of energy could lead to a shift to a public transport system and to another technological boom. Kreisky also focused on the need to shift from cars to railways and on the necessity of a public energy system, and predicted a new life for the planned economy. Palme made the broader argument that while socialism would have to change to take into account the end of economic growth and find new means to redistribute wealth, this would be an extraordinary opportunity for Europe to find its own way, since both the US and the Soviet models had lost their capacity to attract.
The impact on international economic relations
Is it possible to speak of a united front of the South in the international economic relations? It has been argued that post-colonial Third World countries had some margins of freedom because they were, after all, in a position to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States:
Like the Europeans and the Chinese, therefore, the ‘third world’ was in a position to choose during the Cold War. But the fact that so much of it was simultaneously rejecting colonial legacies created a handicap for the Americans, whose connections with colonialism were much more visible than those of their Soviet rivals. Moscow had one other advantage as well, which was that industrialisation in the USSR had proceeded much more rapidly than in capitalist west.Footnote 74
But arguing that the South was able to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States is not the same as saying that it had the ability and the organisational strength to pursue an active role in the international economy, sometimes in opposition to both the capitalist and the communist worlds.
In 1963 a Group of 77 Developing Countries (the G77)Footnote 75 met within the UN framework in order to prepare its strategy in view of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) that would be held, for the first time, in Geneva in 1964. The basic aim of the Geneva Conference was to produce a radical reform of the General Agreement on Tariffs Trade (GATT) liberal trading system which had already been attacked by the poor countries during the negotiations for the Havana Charter in 1948.Footnote 76
Up to the Santiago UNCTAD III conference in 1972, the South managed to remain cohesive and to elaborate a series of concrete proposals, despite being composed by countries with political systems ranging from that of socialist Algeria to the authoritarian military government of Brazil to the Indian democracy. It assumed what could be defined as a ‘reformist’ attitude, grounding its analysis on the ‘dependency theory’ that was diffused among Third World's elites in the 1950s mainly through the writings and the activities of the Argentinean economist Raul Prebisch, the first UNCTAD Secretary-General.Footnote 77 The G77 pleaded for specific reforms, centred on the idea that only trade and automatic redistributive measures could help the economic development of the poor countries (‘trade not aid’).Footnote 78 The following reforms were envisaged: (i) on trade matters: commodity agreements to stabilise prices and create ‘stockpiles’; abolition of the tariffs on goods produced by southern countries such as agricultural products; special preferences for the manufactures of developing countries; (ii) on aid: automatic transfer of 1 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of developed countries to the poor countries; elimination of ‘tied aid’; improvement of the payment conditions for foreign debt; and (iii) on international monetary reform: links between the creation of special drawing rights (SDRs) and development financing.
Until the 1973 oil shock, developing countries were improving their economic performance: in the period from 1950 to 1975 developing countries’ GDP increased on average by 3.91 per cent each year, compared with the 3.2 per cent average increase in GDP in the industrialised countries.Footnote 79 But the considerable pace of economic growth in the Third World, even with expanding agricultural production, did not manage to compensate for the astonishing population explosion that the South was witnessing. Furthermore, GDP growth was not fast enough to reduce the wealth gap between developing and industrialised countries.Footnote 80 Until the end of the 1960s, the EEC was the largest trading bloc in the world, accounting for 20 per cent of international trade, and had no strong incentive to support a structural change in the international economy in favour of developing countries.
The oil shock of 1973 was pivotal for the evolution of the economic strategy of the G77. The alliance of commodity producers for a reformed international economy seemed to embody the dreams expressed, only a few years earlier, in a letter to the Secretary-General of UNCTAD by a student at Tufts University:
I only wonder why the poor nations do not use this power directly and strategically to force the rich nations to their concessions . . . Why don't the LDCs [least developed countries] not unite and present their demands in the form of an ultimatum, saying in essence, that if the rich nations do not give preferences, assign 1% of their GNP for development, give better terms of trade, give more aid etc., then the LDCs of the UNCTAD will stage a total economic boycott of the developed world, depriving them of precious coffee, sugar, rubber, tin, etc.?Footnote 81
Under the new leadership of the OPEC countries, and of Algeria in particular, the new G77 strategy implied that the commodity producers from the South should use their negotiating power to redistribute global wealth and at the same time modify the regime of international economic institutions in their favour.Footnote 82 Although some G77 countries were becoming increasingly sceptical about such an aggressively anti-liberal and anti-capitalist stance, a strong degree of cohesion still prevailed. As argued by an Indian UNCTAD delegate, when questioned on the reasons for the illogical ‘unholy alliance’ between oil-exporting and oil-importing countries of the South,
You in the West are interested only in your oil. If you get that cheap again, you would soon forget us. So we intend to use the oil crisis to force you into a general revision of the terms of trade giving us greater justice.Footnote 83
This shift towards a ‘radical strategy’ started with the 1973 meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers and reached its apex in April 1974 at the end of the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations with the approval of the Declaration on the Establishment of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). This declaration was accompanied by a Programme of Action whose main feature was the creation of a common fund for commodities, with the contribution of both consuming and producing countries. At the end of 1974 the UN General Assembly also approved the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of the States, which included provisions for the nationalisation without compensation of extractive industries.
West European economic diplomacy was profoundly affected by the G77's action at the United Nations. Some of the internal reasons suggesting a closer co-operation with the South have already been mentioned: immigration, the 1968 students’ movements and energy dependency. Equally important were more traditional foreign economic policy concerns. The European Community had completed the formation of the Common Market in 1968, after which all trade negotiations were to be conducted by the European Commission. The EEC was the largest trading bloc in the world, the more open to exports and imports from developing countries and increasingly dependent on energy imports from Arab countries. At the same time economic tensions with the United States seriously worsened after the US decision on 15 August to close the ‘gold window’ and suspend dollar convertibility. The decision was taken by Richard Nixon's administration with no previous consultation with its European allies. It affected dollar reserves held by the European central banks and decreased the value of developing countries’ exports, many of which were traded in dollars.
Between 1971 and 1975 the EEC took a number of important decisions regarding developing countries. In 1971 it was the first among the industrialised countries to adopt a General System of Preferences (GSP) legislation allowing tariff-free imports of manufactured goods from all the G77 countries to the EEC without reciprocity. Although the total value of such goods was not impressive, the Community's GSP was recognised by the developing countries as a ‘revolutionary step’ because it represented a derogation from the free-market clause of the GATT. The EEC's new attitude towards the South and increasing hostility toward Washington clearly surfaced in a 1972 meeting between the Dutch socialist president of the Commission, Sicco Mansholt, and Nixon's representative for international economic affairs, Peter Flanigan. Mansholt had come to consider the development of the South as the main challenge for western Europe and redistribution of resources to developing countries as the key to future global survival.Footnote 84 He described to Flanigan his attitude toward traditional trade negotiations in these terms:
The EC will begin to develop commercial and industrial policies which will look to the interests of the LDCs. The problems Europe has with the US are not important. The ‘Eberle negotiations’ earlier this year were a big mistake for Europe. It was ‘silly’ to have spent so much time and political capital on a few million dollar worth of trade in citrus fruit, tobacco, etc., when 20 per cent of the world was starving. He assured me that he was not the least concerned with soybeans, ‘to hell with your soybeans’.Footnote 85
In the official declaration of the October 1972 Paris summit, the heads of state and government of the six EEC founding members decided that the Community would engage, for the first time, in a global co-operation and development policy.Footnote 86 The Community formally aimed to broaden its almost exclusive focus on Africa to include other regions of the world. In February 1975 the EEC signed the Lomé Convention with forty-six African, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) countries. Strongly influenced by the ACP countries during the tough preparatory negotiations, this treaty was the closest the Community ever came to taking into account requests from the South. The Convention included industrial co-operation, special preferences, and a stabilising fund for the export earnings of a number of ACP commodities (STABEX). The innovative nature of Lomé was also highlighted by the fact that the Convention had been approved by all the west European trade unions, and even by the Italian communists, who had criticised the previous agreements between some African countries and the EEC (Yaoundé Convention) as a neocolonialist affair.Footnote 87
The last episode of the G77's successful pressures on western Europe was the convening in December 1975 of the Conference on International Economic Co-operation (CIEC). The CIEC was a European response to the previous US proposal of a conference of oil consumers aimed at the creation of a common front against OPEC activism. The French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, had put forward the idea of a different international meeting, where both oil consumers and oil producers would take part, and even envisaged a consensual move towards the New Economic Order.Footnote 88 Due to the pressures from Algeria the conference focused not only on oil matters but also on development problems. While the main aim of France and of its European partners was to find an agreement on stable oil prices, the G77, on the other hand, wanted to discuss development problems with particular mention of the Common Fund for commodities. French diplomacy was designating North–South dialogue as a departure from the liberal Bretton Woods order: a new global negotiating framework for energy and raw materials. De Guiringaud, who would be appointed minister for foreign affairs in 1976, argued:
The post-war order, focusing on the elimination of economic frontiers, was based on American-inspired agreements (Bretton Woods, the Atlantic Charter) and found its vital core in New York, the centre of international economic and financial activities after London . . . The new order that we are devising aims at reconciling the advantages of the free circulation of men, goods and capital, with the right of each government to intervene in the determination of its national destiny; in order to accomplish this objective the new order will be based on a co-operative collective management of the global mechanisms by the community of states.Footnote 89
The failure of the CIEC, after its last ministerial meeting in 1977, was at the same time the failure of the radical strategy of the G77 embodied by Algeria, but also the last important diplomatic attempt by western Europe (the Nine had a common representation in the CIEC) to act as the promoter of North–South dialogue and to attempt a reform of the Bretton Woods economic order.
Conclusions
It has been argued in this article that, in different and often underestimated ways, the Third World had a profound impact on western Europe in the period ranging from the advent of the global youth movements of 1968 to the end of détente in 1975. This is probably the time in which European integration tried most openly to perform as the engine of world economic co-operation and to promote an international legal framework that would help to set a limit to military confrontations. The European Community aimed at becoming ‘the developing world's most understanding partner’ and to apply the teachings of co-operation between the member states (strongly reinforced in new ways in the first half of the 1970s)Footnote 90 to the rest of the world.Footnote 91
The impact of the Third World on western Europe was pervasive. It was an important factor that allowed for the weakening of the nation-state and the demise of nationalist politics. It produced a radical shift in the very meaning of European integration. While up to the end of the 1960s European integration had moved in parallel with reinforcement of the nation-state, in the 1970s the European Community became a stabilising factor in response to its economic weakening and loss of legitimacy, and also a political actor able to spread democracy in the region and develop a dialogue with the ‘less-developed countries’. If the argument presented in this article is correct there is a lot to suggest that the United States and the Soviet Union, and their ideological and military confrontation in ‘global Cold War’, cannot explain important features of the international history of the postwar era.
History rarely moves in pre-established patterns. The pressure of the Third World on European countries also had extremely destabilising effects. New phenomena emerged in western Europe: immigration and cultural diversity, energy dependence, the fear of climate change, Arab nationalism and the first examples of terrorist attacks on the European territory, inflation and unemployment, and extreme political tensions in Italy and Germany. There was a growing sense among the elites of the Old Continent of being on the verge of decay or, at any rate, of momentous choices to be made to ensure its future, as testified by the appearance of numerous alarmed pamphlets in the middle of the 1970s.Footnote 92
All these factors increased the need for stability, control and protection felt by common citizens, as did the fear of European trade unions of increasing competition from manufactures coming from Asia and Latin America. It could be argued that the efforts to pursue new forms of co-operation with the South were eventually revised, in the longer term and from the 1980s, in favour of a renewed relationship with the United States, of the strengthening of the cultural, political and economic concept of a united West (one of the instruments to fulfil this purpose was the creation of the G7 in 1975),Footnote 93 but also of a European-driven reinforcement of the multilateral economic institutions of Bretton Woods, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the GATT, to manage the global economy according to the rules set by industrialised countries.
