Anti-Americanism in the PCI's Political Culture. An Overview (1947-1991)

In the years of the Cold War, anti-Americanism has been a key component in the vision of international politics and cultural identity of Italian Communist Party. Its meaning has undergone a deep transformation over time, however, political and moral. In the early years of the bipolar confrontation (1947-1954), anti-Americanism was an instrument of the politics of Soviet State and the Cominform initiatives aimed at fighting political, military and socio- economic integration between Europe and the United States. Associated with the "struggle for peace" and Anti-imperialism as a doctrine of international politics, it identifies, on a political level, a model of organized mobilization related to the long historical cycle "war - revolution" opened by the First World War. Cycle that the elites of international Bolshevism - adhering to a " Clausewitzian " vision of the relations between war and politics - do not yet considered concluded . On the ideological level, however, the anti-Americanism remains a "positive" rethoric about modernity and about its rational and productivistic values. Since the mid 50s , but mostly from the middle of the next decade , the anti-American approach is redefined in a more complex framework . Alongside the traditional dogma of anti-Imperialism - raised in the context of the Vietnam War – it begins to emerge an increased interest for critics of the Western model, in the framework of the theories of underdevelopment (and policies related to them) , post-conciliar theological thought, debate on the affluent society. Against this background, the anti-Americanism of the Communist Party will be gradually transformed into a "moral" approach about the power’s being and the relations between politics and civil society. So, in the Seventies, it finally takes an explicit connotation of criticism of Western civilization and modernity. A criticism that invest so much the size of the anthropological-cultural model of development in Western societies, since the classical dimension of power politics as a tool of International Relations . In the years of Berlinguer’s secretariat, anti-Americanism will meet up with the idea of Europe, helping to elaborate an ambivalent and contradictory idea: on the pragmatic level, Europe represents the policy and institutional framework for the development of social and "Fordist " democracy, according to the way drawn from the reformist forces in the Fifties and Sixties; at the ideological level, instead, it provides a radical alternative to the social, political and institutional US model; alternative based on the values of social justice and international peace. It will be a contradiction to explode in front of a process of European integration increasingly affected by the dynamics of economic and financial globalization, the crisis of Twentieth century industrialism and the explosion of the "Second Cold War".