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This book describes how, after the Second World War, the Labour Party assumed leadership of the International Socialist Movement, thanks to the achievements of the Attlee Government. International Secretary Denis Healey guided the reconstruction of the Socialist International through the early Cold War, making the British vision for socialist internationalism prevail over the French and Belgian. At first, the provisional Socialist International (International Socialist Conference and Comisco) supported cohabitation with pro-communist socialists and the USSR, but with the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe it committed to militant anti-communism. Ambiguity between the Labour Party and Labour Government influenced British policy in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy and Poland, while the characterization and stereotypes of Eastern and Southern Europe shaped the language and actions of the British. Furthermore, the book shows how international contacts and the British and Swedish model encouraged the transition of socialist parties to responsible government parties fully embracing Western democracy and prepared the ideological revision of the 1950s.

This article investigates the political culture of European social democracy at the beginning of the Cold War by analysing the debates inside the Socialist International to define a socialist identity. There is a rich historical literature on what role European social democracy played in the origins of the Cold War, but combining digital history with a transnational approach can produce new insights into this key research question. The rarely explored Socialist International offers the best opportunity to experiment with new tools. The organisation, to which most European socialists belonged, allowed them to coordinate their activities and reach an agreement on ideas and strategy through debate. For this purpose, the Socialist International published a journal in the late 1940s and a book in the mid-1950s, to which most parties contributed articles or chapters. These collections are representative of the political culture of European social democracy at the time, so they provide a great opportunity to analyse transnational debates. In the era of mass parties, examining the ideology of a few great thinkers or top leaders is not enough; political culture is better expressed by myriads of speeches and articles produced by low-ranking party officials and journalists. A comprehensive analysis is beyond traditional textual analysis, but digital history is particularly suited for this purpose, as quantitative text analysis can reveal hidden similarities and underlying tensions within the social democratic culture. This article relies on new data specifically digitised for this article: the texts produced by the Socialist International for the public at large from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. While it is a small corpus, it is comprehensive. The possibility of combining close and distant reading allows us to test which instruments of corpus linguistics are best suited to study the political culture of mass movements. This article employs topic modeling to reveal not just what were the main interests and concerns of social democrats at the time, but also differences among parties and the existence of subgroups within the socialist family. The results will allow to enrich the narrative of how European social democracy acted at the beginning of the Cold War, from the descent of the Iron Curtain, to the intense bipolar tension to the first steps in decolonisation and European integration.

During the Cold War, the thinking of Western European social democrats and communists around science shifted from optimism about scientific progress as necessary to solve social problems to scepticism and concern for technological risks and unaccountable technocracy. The first moon landing offers a vantage point to analyse this transition, as it started a debate about science and crystallised hostility towards scientific funding through taxpayers' money. The reactions of the Western European Left towards Apollo were varied and can be classified into three categories: Big Science Socialism, which celebrated the positive feedback loop between science, state power and socialism; Earth-First Critique, which balanced celebration with reminding of urgent problems on Earth; Radical Anti-Scientism, to which Apollo epitomised imperialistic capitalism and the hegemony of materialistic scientism over humanism. The article examines three figures who approved the Apollo programme for helping collectivism (Tony Benn, Emilio Sereni, Karl Steinbuch) and three figures who condemned it (Marcello Cini, Nigel Calder, Robert Jungk). Beyond these extremes, the article examines the fourth, more nuanced position of the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats (SPD) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which had to reinvent science policies beyond exhausted technocratic dreams and inflexible renunciation of technological modernity.

This special issue re-evaluates the 1950s as a period of transnationalism in ideas and political practices, offering innovative insights into political history and political ideas. Without setting the national and transnational spheres against each other, the issue argues that the dialectics between the two was a defining element of Europe in this period. The articles explore transnational cooperation and exchanges among intellectuals, politicians and trade unionists, showing how they were changing in their interaction. The editorial sets out from the research on the postwar configuration of Europe based on the retake of the nation state, combining it with new research of transnational history and putting out some methodological innovations. The editorial also highlights some significant themes across the articles: the central role of translation and localisation, the interaction with local interests and disputes, the Cold War, the acceleration of European integration, the rise of the Third World, the tensions between hope and fear or between nihilism and rebirth of Europe, the centrality of science.

By analysing the policies and ideas of German social democracy, the British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party, this article explores their attitude towards science and their imagination of the future in the 1950s. Deeply different, social democrats and communists shared a positivist attitude in favour of scientific progress and high modernity. This painted their attitude towards the space race, peaceful nuclear power and automation. Science was conceived as a neutral power to be supported, but it required political guidance to harness it and turned it into social progress. Thus, their disagreement was over the political implications for capitalist societies experiencing growing prosperity. Science was also a powerful rhetorical argument to castigate the conservatives for failing the nation and allowing it to decline and fall behind its competitors. The article combines comparison and transnational history, innovating the latter by introducing the concepts of horizontal, vertical and antagonistic transnationalism.

The British Labour Party’s troubled relationship with today’s European Union (EU) and its opposition to federalism trace their historical roots to its vision of international socialist cooperation in the interwar and post-1945 period. International socialist cooperation could only take place voluntarily between independent socialist parties. This proved that cooperation among European nation states was desirable, but sovereignty was not to be pooled into supranational institutions—especially when it could mean permanent entanglement with the troublesome French, Germans and Italians. A different vision for the institutionalisation of European unity thus emerged. In addition to showing as much, the chapter gives insights into transnational history by proving that transnational socialisation did not always result in convergence and cooperation.

The article explores the views of Denis Healey about Italy, and demonstrates that his rhetoric on the Italian national character is connected to British socialism and the British relationship with Europe. Healey’s opinions about Italy have been informed by the idea – very common among British and European socialists – that European people do not share a common nature. In 2013, he spoke of an ‘olive line’ separating the North – defined by pragmatism and responsibility – and the South – defined by abstraction and fiscal laxity. Healey adopted a discourse grounded in essentialism. Social and economic factors, contingency and agency are not important in shaping the behavior of a group of people. Political action is a derivative of the ‘national character’, a mixture of cultural and geographical determinism, which is hard to define and impossible to modify. This was used by Healey to explain the failure of democratic socialism in southern Europe. During the 1970s and 1980s, Italy played a part in Healey’s reflections, and past experiences were reworked to validate his political positions. His argument about the national character formed the basis for his skeptical position regarding European unification, which in the 1970s had divided the Labour party, and worked against international socialist cooperation as well. Speaking about the ‘national character’ of the Italians was a rhetorical choice by Healey, which gained strength from pre-existing political positions from the early twentieth century, but could also be revitalised to deal with contemporary issues like the European Union and Britain’s role in the world as late as 2013.

Between 1918 and 1945 the British Labour Party effected the transition from the political opposition to the area of government. The transformation was not due to an innate British attitude toward a two-party system, but it was the result of a struggle to remove the taint of being a party “unfit to govern”. Thus Great Britain set an example to other European socialists. Until then communist had been saying that you could only build Socialism through dictatorship, just like in Russia, now social-democrats took Great Britain as an example of a feasible “socialism with freedom”. On two occasions British socialism became a matter of contention between the conflicting souls of the Italian left. In 1946 it became the shibboleth to distinguish fellow travelers from democratic socialists. Saragat’s social-democrats affirmed that the Italian Socialist Party should have become like the Labour Party: a democratic party, independent from communists and ready to develop ties with the middle class. On the opposite side, Basso indicated the British experience as the perfect example of social-democratic betrayal, with its rejection of revolutionary ideals and class struggle. In 1951 Piero Calamandrei had a debate with Togliatti on whether it was possible to challenge the social question in a parliamentary democracy. The secretary of the Italian Communist Party affirmed that the Western system was irredeemable, while Calamandrei held Great Britain as the only case in which political freedom coexisted with social rights. In these discussions the non-democratic left developed such objections toward the social-democratic Welfare State and mixed economy that it took various decades to be removed.