THE ROLE OF FINNISH LEFTISTS IN SOVIET–FINNISH ARTISTIC EXCHANGES DURING THE LATE SOCIALIST PERIOD

The article examines artistic exchanges between the USSR and Finland from the viewpoint of the Finnish left. After WWII, Finland was in a difficult geopolitical position; although not occupied by the USSR, it received little support from the West and so remained an independent capitalist democracy, with little foreign leverage. The Soviet influence was felt in many areas, and throughout the Cold War, Finland received many more world-class Soviet artists than any other Western country. This was in part a consequence of Finland’s proximity to the USSR, but the Finnish Communist Party, a major domestic political force, also played a role. Immediately after the war, organizations associated with the Finnish Communist Party enjoyed a virtual monopoly over such exchanges, but this began to change in the mid-1950s. Around that time, the USSR began to allow Finnish artists to train and perform at its world-class arenas, and many of those Finnish students had links with the political left. Based on interviews and supported by archival material from Finland and Russia, the article explores the role of the Finnish left in these artistic exchanges.     

The 2006 election: more than ever,a Berlusconi-centred campaign

Abstract

The article offers a review of the most salient events of the 2006 electoral campaigns. It argues that with exception of 1994, the recent 2006 electoral campaign has been more focused on Berlusconi than the previous campaigns. As a matter of fact, Berlusconi, trailing in the polls, made all possible efforts to set the campaign agenda. He resorted to a massive overexposure of himself on the television stage and gave rise to a number of ‘media events’ that have dominated the electoral narratives, like the Vicenza speech at the Confindustria conventions and his final announcement of abolishing the municipal tax on homeowners. All that was not enough to gain re-election, but his frantic campaign activity allowed him to re-acquire a clear leadership of the House of Liberties, which had been previously challenged by his own coalition partners. The article analyses also the Berlusconi – Prodi debates, and the reasons why electoral debates promise to become a fixed feature of the Italian politics.     

From World War to Cold War: Scandinavian media attitudes to the Soviet Union 1945–1948

At the end of the war in Europe in 1945, an alliance-loyalty attitude was predominant among the Scandinavian public voices on the Soviet Union. This attitude incorporated a favourable image of the Soviet war effort and implied that the Soviet system had undergone changes during the war. Another significant group supported the Soviet system more unequivocally. These attitudes were dominant in the Scandinavian media and public debate until late 1945 or early 1946, when opposition to and fear of the Soviet Union began to be openly expressed in conservative and social-democratic newspapers. A bipartisan attitude to the Soviet Union had not developed at this stage, as the alliance-loyalty attitude was transformed into a clearer third-voice attitude that saw the Soviet Union on the one hand as a power which was not worthy of imitation, but which on the other hand accepted that the Soviet Union was seeking international peace and cooperation. Third-voice supporters in the Scandinavian media sought investigative reports on conditions in the Soviet Union, as they claimed that the growing anti-Soviet attitudes were based on a lack of accurate knowledge. Considering that Denmark, Norway and Sweden had experienced different conditions during the war, the differences in public attitudes to the Soviet Union were comparatively small. The public third voice on the Soviet Union was clearly weakened in 1948 by the reception of more critical information on the Soviet system and the perception of news on international developments.     

The Partito Democratico after the 2013 elections: all change?

This article analyzes the changes that occurred within the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) from the fiasco of the general election in February 2013 until the European elections in May 2014, focusing in particular on the extent to which the presence of a new, distinctive type of leadership has contributed to such transformations. The first section describes the most relevant events affecting the party in the period considered, such as the failure to gain a parliamentary majority, the problematic re-election of Giorgio Napolitano as President of the Italian Republic, the transition from Pier Luigi Bersani to Matteo Renzi as party leader, and the transition from Enrico Letta to Renzi as Prime Minister. The following sections deal with questions of renewal in the party's organization, with an emphasis on the key role played by Matteo Renzi as the new leader. To achieve its goal and explain how the PD has changed in recent months, the article resorts to the well-known framework of the three party faces proposed by Katz and Mair.     

Attlee,Bevin, and Political Warfare: Labour's Secret Anti-Communist Campaign in Europe, 1948–51

Clement Attlee's Labour Government oversaw the emergence of a vigorous anti-Communist discourse and the establishment of an anti-Soviet Western alliance in the early Cold War. In January 1948, the Prime Minister authorised the Information Research Department to launch a political warfare offensive designed to combat the spread of Communism in Europe. Two years later, against the wishes of his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Attlee set up a high-level interdepartmental committee to oversee the subversion of the Soviet Union's position in Eastern Europe. These developments forced Whitehall to re-fight the bureaucratic battles of the Second World War over who actually controlled covert warfare. Bevin, like his predecessor Anthony Eden, fought unsuccessfully to maintain exclusive ownership of national security strategy in this area. Attlee ended his monopoly by making a rare but significant intervention in his Foreign Secretary's domain in the search for a new central machine to fight the Cold War.     

Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the dialogue with the PCI

In this article I study the theoretical impact of Cold War ideology on Italian democracy through the dialogue between Norberto Bobbio and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party in the mid-1950s, in particular the philosopher Galvano della Volpe and the General Secretary Palmiro Togliatti. I claim that Bobbio's choice of dialogue with the 'enemies' of the western model of democracy was in itself a criticism of the Cold War logic and its Manichean theology of good and evil. What I call Bobbio's politics of dialogue has been roundly criticized in Italy, particularly since 1989, when revisionist scholars accused the non-Communist intellectuals of previous generations of not understanding Communist totalitarianism. I take the revisionists' challenges as my point of departure for an analysis of Bobbio's politics of dialogue and its underlying theoretical implications. Bobbio challenged the Communists on three related topics: the theory of the state, the philosophical character of Marxism, and the theory of liberty. Keeping the door open to illiberals did not imply relativism or passive acceptance of any opinion: failure to understand this basic fact led late revisionists to misinterpret Bobbio's dialogue with the PCI as a sign of weakness rather than strength. The dialogue strengthened Bobbio's conviction that it was crucial to link the defense of individual liberty to the defense of democracy, and thus avoid the dualism between negative and positive liberty, liberalism and democracy, a trait peculiar to Cold War liberalism as well as its leftist antagonists.     

The Italian political system and détente (1963 - 1981)

This article examines the impact of détente on the Italian political system, linking together internal and international dynamics in both the political and the economic spheres. Relying on various new archival sources, it analyzes the conflicting effects on Italy of both the relaxing of Cold War tension and bipolarism, and the 'bipolar' strategy to reassert US hegemony: the failure of the reformist design of the center?-?left of the 1960s; the 'strategy of attention' in 1969?-?71 and its sudden halt; the building of a 'devaluation model' after the end of Bretton Woods, and the consequent shift from Kissinger's neo-centrism to 'national solidarity'. Détente favoured a crisis of the centrist pattern of Italian politics but at the same time the 'bipolar' features of both the US and the Soviet 'strategies of détente' led to a decline in US hegemony, relaunching the DC's centrality and its ability to manage external constraints. Reaganism was to recast US hegemony on a new basis.     

The transformation of the Italian party system

Abstract

This article analyses the political and social changes that occurred in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s in ways that bring economic and sociological models together in a historical perspective. It argues that the rise of the new Right following the disintegration of the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party was the result not only of the changed international situation (which was none the less important) but of the changes that had been taking place within the Italian political parties and the growing importance of neo‐patrimonial tendencies over the previous fifteen years. Increasingly open forms of corruption (on the part of the political classes rather than the industrial bourgeoisie, even though they too were to some extent accomplices) are interpreted as a sign of the crisis and disintegration of the political system that had taken shape in the postwar period. Hence the nexus of anguish and politics for both the upper classes and the rest of Italian society that has become one of the most important features of the situation in Italy today.     

Between Social Reformism and Conservatism: Soviet women under the Finnish occupation regime, 1941–1944

The article deals with the Finnish gender policies during the occupation of Soviet Karelia in 1941–1944. It explores the wartime occupation of Soviet Karelia as a clash of Bolshevik and Finnish visions of the woman's position in society, including the level of visual propaganda. Based on oral history interviews and former Soviet archival materials, it also demonstrates how the local population reacted to social visions imposed from above, thus combining the approaches from ‘above’ and from ‘below’.     

1949年日本国会选举的政治意味

议会政治下的国会选举通常会透露出社会政治意识的走向。战后的日本议会政治,是在战前议会政治基础之上植入美国式民主政治理念,以英国式民主政治为范本确立起来的。而1949年1月日本国会大选,则可以看成是战后日本议会政治由英国式民主政治模式转为日本式民主政治的标志性选举。藉助这次选举,保守性质的政党开始确立优势地位、派阀政治出现、中间政治意识失势等战后日本社会政治诸多特征都呈现出来。研究1949年1月的日本大选,对于把握战后日本保守政治体制的形成和日本社会政治意识的分化,具有十分重要的意义。     

Enrique Díaz Retg and El Diluvio: reportage from the Italian frontline (1916)

In the year 1916 Enrique Díaz Retg, a staff journalist working for the Spanish newspaper El Diluvio, extremely popular among Barcelona’s working class readers, was assigned to report from the Italian front. Following an invitation from the Italian Foreign Office, he was granted permission to visit war zones under the control of the Italian army. During this journey, which began on 5 September and concluded in Rome on the 22nd, he traveled with two other famous Spanish reporters, Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Eduardo Gómez de Baquero. Comparing the articles produced by the three journalists allows us to perceive the main distinctive features of Enrique Díaz Retg’s work. From an ideological point of view, his articles reveal a bias in favor of the Latin race and in them he calls for Mediterranean nations to unite, openly inviting the Spanish authorities to enter into war against the barbaric German enemy. In doing so, he contributed to widening the social gap that in the years to come would increasingly alienate the working class from the institution of monarchy and the Catalan elites.     

Italy 1990–2014: the transition that never happened

This introduction explains how the contributors to this special issue draw on interdisciplinary approaches to explain why after 1992–94 Italy never experienced a true transition and why the crisis has become systemic, affecting the entire Italian political, economic, financial and institutional system with far-reaching consequences for Italian society and its future.     

Layers of Disunity: The presidential politics of Finnish business, 1981–1982

This article examines the political activity of business in late Cold War Finland, the main focus being on the presidential election campaign of 1981–1982, which was a major watershed in Finnish politics. The purpose is to investigate the divisions cutting through business circles. Different layers of disunity can be found: a turf battle between business associations and their leaders, divergent attitudes towards the Social Democrats and disagreements concerning Finland’s foreign relations and trade, particularly with the Soviet Union. These divisions were long-lasting: they emerged by the mid-1970s and remained in effect until at least the late 1980s.