The Ruins of Ideology: Europe After 1945

The mid-20th century was an era of ideological absolutes. As the dust of World War II settled, Europe found itself not liberated into peace but fractured by a new divide—not between fascism and democracy, but between communism and anti-communism. This division, as the French sociologist Raymond Aron observed, meant that “every action had to be considered in light of how the Soviets would perceive it.” The intellectual landscape of postwar Europe was marked by a stark binary: one was either for or against the Soviet project, with little room for nuance.

The prewar fascist sympathies that had flourished across the continent—from Brussels to Bucharest—were hastily buried beneath a veneer of anti-fascist unity. Former collaborators and reactionaries now donned the mantle of progressivism, aligning themselves with the ascendant left. The fascist rhetoric of apocalyptic urgency, moral absolutism, and disdain for liberal compromise was easily repurposed by the radical left. The war had not just reshaped borders; it had reshaped minds.

The Rise of the True Believers

The postwar years saw an extraordinary generational shift. The old intellectual elites—tainted by collaboration, exile, or irrelevance—were replaced by a younger cohort shaped by war and resistance. In France, Jean-Paul Sartre (40 in 1945), Simone de Beauvoir (37), and Albert Camus (32) emerged as dominant voices. Italy’s Alberto Moravia (38) and Elio Vittorini (37) filled the void left by discredited fascist-era intellectuals. In Germany, where Nazism had decimated the intelligentsia, figures like Heinrich Böll (28 at war’s end) represented a new beginning.

Eastern Europe witnessed an even more dramatic transformation. Prewar conservative and nationalist elites were swept aside by Soviet-backed regimes, and young Communist cadres—many in their 20s and 30s—rose to prominence. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, then in exile, captured this fervor in The Captive Mind (1951), describing how intellectuals initially embraced communism as a force for modernization, only to later confront its oppressive realities.

The Allure and Disillusion of Communism

For many young European intellectuals, communism was less a political ideology than a moral crusade. The Czechoslovak writer Pavel Kohout, later a dissident, recalled his youthful adoration for the Communist Party in 1948: “We sang hymns to Gottwald’s party, believing it carried the torch of justice.” This idealism was widespread—until the realities of Stalinism set in.

The turning point came with the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. Show trials, purges, and the imposition of Zhdanov’s doctrine of “two cultures” (which demanded absolute ideological conformity in all intellectual pursuits) shattered illusions. By the early 1950s, even staunch supporters like Miłosz and the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đilas recognized that communism had become “an apparatus of power, not a revolution.”

The Parisian Crucible: Intellectuals in the Cold War

Paris, the traditional haven for exiled thinkers, became the epicenter of Cold War intellectual battles. French intellectuals—Sartre, Camus, Raymond Aron—grappled with the moral dilemmas of political engagement. Sartre argued that neutrality was impossible: one had to choose between the Soviet bloc and the “imperialist” West. Camus, initially sympathetic to communism, grew disillusioned, culminating in his 1951 essay The Rebel, which condemned revolutionary violence and led to his break with Sartre.

The French Communist Party (PCF), though electorally strong, alienated intellectuals with its rigid Stalinism. Meanwhile, anti-communist liberals like Aron warned of Soviet totalitarianism, while leftists like Emmanuel Mounier tried to reconcile socialism with moral integrity. The debates were fierce, personal, and deeply ideological.

The Cultural Cold War: Books, Bombs, and “Coca-Colonization”

The battle for Europe’s soul extended beyond politics into culture. The Soviet-backed “Peace Movement” mobilized intellectuals against American “warmongering,” while the U.S. countered with initiatives like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950), which promoted liberal anti-communism through journals like Encounter and Preuves.

American cultural influence—from jazz to Hollywood—was both celebrated and feared. French communists decried “Coca-Colonization,” while Soviet-bloc regimes banned Western music as “decadent.” Yet, despite official hostility, American pop culture seeped into Eastern Europe, undermining communist propaganda.

Legacy: The Fractured Continent

By the mid-1950s, the initial postwar idealism had waned. The Hungarian Revolution (1956) exposed the brutality of Soviet rule, and Western intellectuals began distancing themselves from Moscow. The Cold War’s cultural frontlines had shifted, but the divisions it created—between East and West, between compromisers and true believers—left a lasting mark on European thought.

The era’s central lesson, perhaps, was articulated by Arthur Koestler: “If the cause is wrong, you cannot help others act rightly.” The intellectual Cold War was not just a clash of ideologies but a reckoning with moral responsibility—one that continues to resonate today.