Neoconservatives in Europe

Although they form a distinctively American movement, Europe is key to the origins of the neoconservatives, and has been a central concern throughout their history.

Origins

The New York Intellectuals

The most important strand in the emergence of neoconservatism developed among Jewish immigrant communities in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Jacob Heilbrunn has described the milieu:

Though their parents hoped for careers in medicine, law and business for their sons, or as musical and intellectual prodigies, Marxist radicalism was the most common route of escape. As teenagers, they would stand on soapboxes in New York - known as the most interesting city in the Soviet Union - and demand a more just society. They didn't have to be told about the grinding, carking poverty created by capitalism; they saw people living in hovels all around them and foraged themselves for fruits and vegetables on the Lower East Side docks.

Representative figures included Jay Lovestone, born in Lithuania in 1897, Max Schachtman, born in Warsaw in 1904, and Sidney Hook, born in 1902 to parents from Moravia and Galicia, in the Hapsburg Empire.

Shachtman and Lovestone were prominent members of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, which had extensive European links as a member party of the Comintern. Hook was close to the party but not a member. His biographer notes that "Party leaders frequently advised sympathetic intellectuals to retain independence so as to preserve their credibility.'

The factional struggles surrounding the rise of Stalin would see all three break with Soviet orthodoxy. Shachtman was expelled from the Communist Party as a supporter of Leon Trotsky in 1928.. Lovestone, a supporter of Nikolai Bukharin, was purged after escaping from Moscow in June 1929 following a personal confrontation with Stalin.

In a move that would foreshadow later anticommunist networks, Lovestone visited Berlin in December 1930 to launch the International Communist Opposition with support from factions in a number of European countries. He nevertheless hoped for reinstatement by Stalin, publicly supporting the Moscow show trials as late as 1936.

Another significant development was the formation of the anticommunist Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1939 by Sidney Hook. The venture was supported by Sol Levitas's New Leader, a magazine which nurtured key New York intellectuals such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and Melvin Lasky.

Leo Strauss

A second key strand in the emergence of neoconservatism begins with the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss.

Strauss was heavily influenced by his German contemporaries, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. With Schmitt's help he secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study in Paris, which enabled him to escape Germany as the Nazis were coming to power.He ultimately settled in the United States in 1938.

While in Paris in 1933 he wrote a letter to his friend Karl Löwith which underlined the authoritarian nature of his political philosophy at this time:

And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination.(6) I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio… parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.(7) There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.

As Scott Horton has noted, Strauss was writing at a time when liberalism was a marginal force in Weimar Germany.It can be said of neoconservative precursors on both left and right, that they emerged from a Europe dominated by authoritarian ideologies. If they were often victims of the dominant forms of those ideologies, they were also, in many cases, adherents of closely related strands.

World War Two

Among the New York intellectuals, the rise of Nazism did not begin to acquire the central significance it would have for later neoconservatives until the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. Jacob Heilbrunn notes that Sidney Hook was an exception in his early focus on German anti-semitism:

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, many Jewish Trotskyists remained so consumed with their dual hatred of Stalin (the betrayer of Trotsky) and Roosevelt (the betrayer of the working class and saviour of capitalism) that Hitler almost seemed to be a sideshow.

US Labour and British intelligence

To the right of the Trotskyites, Lovestone's movement, by now called the Independent Labour League, was also pacifist at the outbreak of war.However, Lovestone himself was increasingly out of sympathy with this view and wound up the league in December 1940.. He was subsequently hired by David Dubinsky to run the Labour division of William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.The White Committee was closely linked to the network of fronts run by British Security Coordination, the New York based body running British intelligence operations in the Americas.Dubinsky also introduced Lovestone to George Meany of the American Federation of Labor, for whom he would ultimately run the AFL's foreign operations.The AFL was itself linked to the BSC network though another front organisation, the American Labor Committee to Aid British Labor. Thomas E. Mahl suggests that the Committee's chairman, AFL vice-president Matthew Woll was a British intelligence contact. These interventionist efforts within the labour movement were strongly opposed by communists until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

The BSC engaged in an intensive campaign of political warfare to promote American support for Britain and ultimately to bring the United States in the war. It directly inspired the creation of America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) setting the pattern for the postwar development of its successor, the CIA.Likewise, The involvement of American labour with BSC propaganda activity prefigured the role of the non-communist left in the Cold War, and of the neoconservatives in the Iraq War.

BSC American collaborators were largely drawn from the anglophile east coast elite, and many of them would go on to join the OSS. Lovestone himself applied to join the OSS in 1942, claiming "Practical experience in underground as well as open work in nearly fifteen countries." He was refused because of his communist past in a move that perhaps presaged postwar class tension between the CIA and the non-communist left.

The Free Trade Union Committee

Dominated by anti-communist figures, like Meany, Dubinsky and Woll, the AFL leadership was strongly out of sympathy with the popular front mentality of the latter years of the war. In 1944, Lovestone warned Meany that Communists would seek to take control of trade unions in order to destabilise Western Europe. That autumn, Lovestone drafted the resolution with which the AFL created the Free Trade Union Comittee, of which he became Executive Secretary. From this position he was able to create his own international intelligence network, ensuring that Lovestoneites like Samuel Berger, Joseph Godson and Herbert Weiner were appointed as Labour attachés at US embassies abroad.Another Lovestoneite at the House Unamerican Activities Commitee, George Mandel monitored Government appointments for communist party sympathisers. As an outlet, Lovestone employed Walter Winchell, an influential columnist who had also been a BSC contact in the early 1940s.

Lovestone was also in contact with Raymond Murphy who ran Eur/X, a small State Department office dealing with communist subversion. In 1945, according to Ted Morgan, Murphy spotted an article by French communist Jacques Duclos which he saw as evidence that the Soviet Union was set to relaunch subversive activity against the West.According to Roy Godson, it was actually the Lovestoneite Mandel who spotted the Duclos article while working at Eur-X, and brought it to the attention of Murphy. It was subsequently picked up by Lovestone and passed on to the AFL leadership.Godson describes the episode as an example of the successful use of open source intelligence. In this respect, it could be seen as a forerunner of the activities of neoconservative institutions such as MEMRI.

The Cold War

Postwar left networks

The Free Trade Union Committee was only one of a number of tentative moves by Left anti-communists to develop transatlantic networks in the immediate aftermath of the war. These moves were initially independent of state patronage, although some of those involved had been part of the British-sponsored Atlanticist networks of the early 1940s.

Diplomacy

In 1946, the American Union for Democratic Action sent David C. Williams to London as its representative. Williams developed a close relationship with the Labour Research Department. He was initially sympathetic to Labour's Keep Left group and its desire for Britain to act as an independent 'third force' in world politics, but would spend an increasing amount of time combatting the influence of Henry Wallace's pro-Soviet presidential candidacy.

Intellectuals

In 1945, George Orwell became vice-president of the Freedom Defence Committee, an anti-communist rival to Britain's National Council for Civil Liberties. Along with his colleague Arthur Koestler, he attempted to recruit Bertrand Russell into a new League for the Freedom and Dignity of Man. Although Orwell established links with the Union for Democratic Action and the International Rescue Committee the project fell through for lack of finance.

The former Comintern agent Koestler would nevertheless write to Russell:

The whole history of the last decades seems to me to show that organised collective action through groups, cliques, leagues, petitions, etc. is a form of propaganda that cannot be dispensed with. It is my conviction that the so-called intellectuals have to try to influence the politicians by concerted action, as a chorus and not as solo voices.

In America similar discussions about new forms of organisation initiated by New York intellectuals Dwight McDonald and Mary McCarthy also came to nothing initially, although they would lead to the creation of the short-lived Europe-America Groups in 1948.

Labour

A series of conferences in 1945 paved the way for the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions which brought together the American Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO), the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) and their Soviet counterparts into a single organisation for the first time. This course was bitterly opposed by the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee. According to Ted Morgan, "In the first postwar years, when American foreign policy had not yet jelled into an adversarial position, when there was no intelligence agency, when the government was still halfheartedly attempting accommodation with the Russians, the AFL assigned itself the role of preventing the Soviets from taking over the European trade unions." The FTUC operation consisted of Lovestone, Irving Brown in Paris from October 1945 and Henry Rutz in Germany.

In each case, post-war idealism would give way to more hardline anti-communist mood. According to Hugh Wilford, this was not simply a matter of co-optation. "The left itself - British as well as American - played an important role in the process, with its more anti-communist "right-wing" elements gradually squashing the positive, constructive intentions of those who retained a greater sense of leftist possibility." Left initiatives in each of the three strands cited above "directly anticipated the organisational weapons with which the US government would wage its anti-Soviet campaign after the mid-century."

Liberal interventionists

The establishment interventionists who had supported the BSC and staffed the OSS were also regrouping in the immediate postwar period, following the latter's abolition in September 1945. The former head of OSS operations in Europe, Allen Dulles became the centre of an informal grouping, the "Park Avenue cowboys" which campaigned for a permanent intelligence service. Also in this group was Frank Wisner, whose Georgetown home became a salon where figures such as David Bruce, Chip Bohlen, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson and George Kennan debated how to prevent a Soviet takeover of Europe.

As head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kennan was the architect of a far-reaching "containment" policy towards the Soviet Union. In the course, of 1947, this was institutionalised in the Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the formation of the CIA.

Support for the "Non-Communist Left" (NCL)came to play a key role in liberal interventionist thinking, recalling the wartime relationship between the BSC and the AFL.

The thesis which animated all this [mobilisation of] the Non-Communist Left was one which Chip Bohlen, Isaiah Berlin, Nicolas Nabokov, Averell Harriman and George Kennan all ardently supported," Arthur Schlesinger later recalled. "We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism."

Occupied Germany

Occupied Europe was one area where elements of the wartime propaganda networks were preserved in the immediate postwar period. Among those employed by the Office of Military Government US (OMGUS), Michael Josselson and Nicolas Nabokov would go on to become key figures in the cultural cold war.

De-Nazification programmes soon overlapped with intelligence recruitment. Most notoriously, Frank Wisner acquired responsibility for SS General Reinhard Gehlen and his anti-communist network during a brief stint with US military intelligence.

The advent of containment created new opportunities for the non-communist left in Germany as elsewhere. Melvin Lasky, the German correspondent of the New Leader and the Partisan Review was a staunch advocate of an anti-communist propaganda in Europe. In October 1948, he founded a new monthly magazine Der Monat with the backing of the American military governor Lucius Clay.

Postwar Italy

The Italian elections of 1948 were one of the first tests of the CIA's role in the new containment strategy. Rome station chief James Angleton distributed an estimated $10 million in the run-up to the election, in which the CIA's Christian Democrat allies defeated the communists. Lovestone and the FTUC delivered CIA money to friendly Christian Democrat-backed Labour groups, while Britain's new Information Research Department furnished propaganda.

The Information Research Department

Like the CIA, the Information Research Department effectively revived a wartime agency, in this case the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), and its path was smoothed by the fact that many Labour politicians had served in the PWE and its sister agency, the Special Operations Executive. Founded in January 1948, the new agency was initially intended to present Britain as an independent social democratic 'third force' but this mission was quickly overtaken by its anti-communist role.

IRD distributed literature by intellectuals from the Non-Communist Left such as Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. Orwell's role would spark controversy half a century later when it was revealed that he had supplied the IRD with a list of communist sympathisers.

Office of Policy Coordination

The creation of IRD in Britain was paralleled in the US by the establishment of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in June 1948 as the covert action arm of Kennan's containment policy. Although officially part of the CIA, the OPC was largely autonomous, thanks to competing lines of accountability and financing from Marshall Plan 'counterpart funds'. Under the leadership of Frank Wisner, OPC expanded quickly. Within two years Wisner controlled a budget of $200 million and 2,000 staff in 47 stations around the world.

OPC covertly sponsored the creation of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) to organise eastern European exiles. Headed by Allen Dulles, NCFE established Radio Free Europe to broadcast to the Eastern bloc, while a sister organisation created Radio Liberty, broadcasting directly to the Soviet Union.

Like the IRD, the OPC developed a relationship with key figures on the Non-Communist Left, notably James Burnham and quickly linked up with the existing anticommunist left networks. The influence of ex-communists like Burnham, Sidney Hook and Arthur Koestler would ensure that the OPC's own operations bore a significant resemblance to those of the Soviets.

Wisner was formally introduced to Jay Lovestone by Matthew Woll in December 1948. Lovestone received the first payment from Wisner for his FTUC activities a month later.

Americans for Intellectual Freedom

Dwight McDonald and Mary McCarthy's Europe-America Groups collapsed in early 1949, after an attempt by Sidney Hook and a faction around Partisan Review to turn it a straightforward anti-communist vehicle. All those involved, along with Nicholas Nabokov and Bertram Wolfe, took part in the creation of a new organisation, the Friends of Russian Freedom in March 1949. This too however was rapidly overtaken by the creation of Americans for Intellectual Freedom in response to the Cominform-sponsored conference which opened at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Among those who took part in the protest at the Waldorf were Hook, McCarthy, McDonald, Nabokov, Arthur Schlesinger, and David Dubinsky. Michael Josselson was also present on behalf of Wisner's OPC, which was secretly funding the protesters via Dubinsky.

The success of this event prompted Wisner and his assistant Carmel Offie to plan a counter-conference to coincide with the Cominform's World Congress of Peace that April. Through Irving Brown, the OPC arranged for French Socialist David Rousset and the journal Franc-Tireur to be billed as sponsor of the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War on 30 April. The OPC paid for Sidney Hook, Ignazio Silone, Carlo Levi, James T. Farrell, Franz Borkenau and Fenner Brockway to attend the event, which was, however, judged a failure.

Congress for Cultural Freedom

Nevertheless, pressure for a systematic response to the Cominform continued to grow. In August 1949, ex-Comintern intellectuals Ruth Fischer and Franz Borkenau proposed a permanent structure for this purpose at a meeting with Melvin Lasky in Frankfurt. Lawrence de Neufville and Michael Josselson passed on an outline proposal which reached Frank Wisner's desk in January 1950, and was approved in April.

The Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom opened on 26 June 1950. According to Frances Stonor Saunders, its 'ruling apparat' consisted of Nabokov, Burnham, Josselson, Lasky, Koestler, Brown and Silone. Burnham and Hook were aware that the American delegation had been funded by the OPC. The British delegation, which included Hugh Trevor-Roper, Julian Amery and A.J. Ayer was also funded by the IRD.

A divide soon emerged between hardline ant-communists, many of whom were themselves ex-communists, and more moderate figures. Trevor-Roper wrote:

It wasn't really intellectual at all in my opinion. I realized that it was a reply in the same style to [the Soviet peace conferences] it spoke the same language. I had expected and hoped to hear the western point of view put forward and defended, on the grounds that it was a better and a more lasting alternative. But instead we had denunciations.

The event was judged a success by Frank Wisner who moved to arrange continuing OPC support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a permanent entity.

NSC-68 and containment militarism

By 1950, American's containment policy was taking a new shape, labelled containment militarism by Jerry W. Sanders. The definitive statement on the new doctrine came in the NSC-68 memorandum of 7 April 1950, principally written by Kennan's successor as Director of Policy Planning, Paul Nitze. Nitze modified Kennan's original containment formulation by presenting the Soviet threat in military rather than political terms.

NSC-68 claimed that the Soviet conventional forces were capable of over-running Western Europe, driving towards the Middle East and launching diversionary attacks elsewhere, simultaneously with a nuclear strike on the United States. In fact, the Soviet Union would not attain the latter capability until 1957-58.

Jerry Sanders argues that this exaggeration was deliberate:

The reason for this hyperbole was fear that Western European nations would adopt an independent neutralist course which would greatly diminish American imperial power, both economic and political, first in that vital region and then in other parts of the world.

In support of this point, Sanders cites the following passage from NSC-68:

Even if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem of the free society, accentuated many fold in this industrial age, of reconciling order, security, the need for participation, with the requirement of freedom. We would face the fact that in a shrinking world the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.

The Committee on the Present Danger

Implementing the NSC-68 program presented a major challenge, as Harvard President James Conant later noted:

Troops for Europe, universal military service and foreign aid were all parts of one package, and all three proposals were highly distasteful to the new isolationism that emerged at the end of 1950.

In August 1950, Conant and others close to the NSC-68 drafting process began discussions about a 'citizens lobby' along the lines of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. The proposal took further shape at a 'private citizens conference' in late September attended by some 50 key figures from the worlds of business, academia and the media. Co-ordination with the Truman administration was a key element of the plan, which received Secretary of State George Marshall's blessing at a meeting in November.

Conant, Vannevar Bush and Tracy Vorhees, announced the formation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) on 12 December 1950. The fact that all three men were republicans lent a powerful aura of bipartisan support to Truman, who met congressional leaders to seek additional defence funds the next day.

The CPD's membership was clearly rooted in the Second World War interventionist coalition, with no less than 12 members of the CDAAA. Sanders identifies distinct corporate-capitalist and scientific-technocratic strata within the Committee each with origins going back to the Roosevelt administration in 1940. The labour element of the interventionist coalition was less prominent, although the AFL's David Dubinsky would join the CPD in the spring of 1951.

Sanders suggests that the CPD marks a point at which imperialism had clearly replaced Wilsonian liberal internationalism as the operating ideology of the foreign policy elite. However, his judgement on the CPD's strategy could equally be applied to earlier and later manifestations of the interventionist coalition:

What happened next is a tribute to the unique insider/outsider status of such elite "citizens's lobbies" that afford them the opportunity to both make policy within the state and shape opinion in the larger society.

In early 1951 the CPD launched a major propaganda offensive, sponsoring pamphlets, films and radio addresses in the run-up to a 4 April Senate vote, which committed a 100,000 man army to Europe, and greatly expanded presidential power over foreign affairs. In one such radio address, William Donovan called for the "All-out employment of the nation's economic, political, and psychological weapons to regain initiative in the Cold War."

The International Organizations Division

In fact, a major re-organisation of the CIA's covert action programme was already beginning as the CPD came to prominence. In January 1951, the new CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith moved to reign in the OPC by appointing Allen Dulles Deputy Director of Plans. Jay Lovestone atttempted to exploit this to renegotiate the FTUC's relationship with the CIA, but was rebuffed in a March 1951 meeting with Dulles.

In April 1951, Thomas Braden was appointed head of the International Organizations Division, taking control of the labour networks from Wisner. Lovestone was told by Carmel Offie that the CIA planned to bypass him and deal with his agents directly. On Offie's advice he and Dubinsky obtained a meeting with Bedell Smith on 9 April which led to the reorganisation of the FTUC's relationship with the CIA.

Hugh Wilford describes the meeting, which degenerated into a "shouting match", as the beginning of a steady decline in CIA sponsorship of the FTUC.

Underying the organisational tension were simmering social and even ethnic tensions. The CIA, after all, recruited most of its entry-level staff from the Ivy League universities, while its higher echelons were dominated by military top-brass and corporate lawyers. It is clear that there were conservative elements in the Agency who never felt comfortable working alongside the ex-radical, immigrant-stock proletarians who staffed the FTUC; indeed there were some who positively opposed the relationship on security grounds.

The re-organisation also affected the Congress for Cultural Freedom which had been established with a permanent steering committee in November 1950. Under Braden's direction, the aims of the Congress were clarified. In Stonor Saunders' description:

It was to engage in a widespread and cohesive campaign of peer pressure to persuade intellectuals to dissociate themselves from Communist fronts or fellow travelling organisations. It was to encourage the intelligentsia to develop theories and arguments which were directed not at a mass audience, but at that small elite of pressure groups and statesmen who in turn developed government policy.

The tensions between the CIA and the Lovestoneites may have been reflected in the Congress. Lovestone's man Irving Brown had been among those appointed to the steering committee by Wisner. Allen Dulles asked de Neufville to keep an eye on him but was told "this was almost impossible because he was running it like it was his own operation".

Gaitskellites and Bevanites

The American military build-up was paralleled in Britain. Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell introduced a budget that would almost double Britain's defence budget to support the American war effort in Korea. It included plans to charge for NHS spectacles and teeth, prompting Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman to resign from the Government in April 1951. This marked the beginning of a struggle that would divide the Labour party for a generation. The pro-American right of the party coalesced around Gaitskell, who had worked in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, in opposition to the Bevanites, who still believed in the possibility of a 'third way' between the United States and the Soviet Union.