Les relations dangereuses: French Socialists, Communists, and the Human Rights Issue in the Soviet Bloc, by Valetine Lomelli

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Valetine Lomelli Les relations dangereuses: French Socialists, Communists, and the Human Rights Issue in the Soviet Bloc Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012. 210 pp., $35 (pbk) ISBN: 978-9052018430Starting with the Prague Spring of 1968, dissent in Eastern Europe affected not only Soviet bilateral relations with the United States but also, and perhaps more importantly, relations between the US and its Western allies, with deep repercussions for their internal politics as well. This fine work by Valentine Lomellini thoroughly examines the distinctive French case, highlighting how the human rights policies of the French Communists (PCF) and French Socialists (SFIO, then PSF) characterized their relationship as freres-ennemis, from their union pact to their competition for supremacy within the Left until the presidential election of Francois Mitterrand. Lomellini also skilfully examines how that same rivalry affected the two parties' respective relationships with French foreign policymakers, in a constant triangular interaction. France's prominent international role thus conditioned the attitude of the French Left toward the USSR (165). Indeed, the main merit of Lomellini's book consists of weaving together domestic and international factors (an approach, as authors Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall have recently nicknamed it in their America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity) to provide a complex and often illuminating analysis of the internal as well as international dynamics of French foreign policy. Lomellini has explored archival sources from five different countries, while focusing mainly on the two parties' repositories, a vast diplomatic record that, however, does not eclipse her subtle understanding of French culture and politics.The author is at her best when she unravels the subtly contradictory nature of both socialist and communist policies toward detente, giving the Mitterrand group credit for most closely approximating a grand strategy at both the internal and international levels. No doubt the two pillars of the new PSF-alliance with the communists and support of Eastern bloc opposition-were irreconcilable. But the PSF's dialogue with the communists successfully used Eastern European dissent to create the condition for re-equilibrium within the Left. At the same time, aspiring to be a government force and counting on the traditional ties France had with the East, the PSF maintained a dialogue with Moscow without renouncing criticism of its human rights record; Mitterrand's hope, like de Gaulle's before him, was that detente-therefore the need to maintain and improve state-to-state relations-would lead indirectly to democratization in the East.Another original conclusion, perhaps too often reiterated, but consistent with the author's intermestic approach, is that the real turning point for the PCF and its reversal to full orthodoxy was not during its support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (since the PCF, for example, criticized the Kremlin's decision to exile dissident Andrei Sakharov on the basis of his condemnation of that same war), but during the Polish crisis of the following two years. And the real cause of this realignment was domestic, as the PCF aimed at drawing a sharp distinction between its choices and those of Mitterrand, who took a conservative turn on those international matters in anticipation of the 1981 presidential election.The PCF continued to pursue its mistaken assumption that it could best reemerge from its internal isolation by recovering international ties with its brother party, the CPSU. It consistently acted as guardian of the international image of the USSR (62). In fact, it was the PCF's very orthodoxy (a label that Lomellini wisely tends to avoid) that became the main cause of its domestic troubles. It is true, however, that the politics of identity have always carried a greater weight in France than in other European countries, and so it is not too unfathomable that the PCF could believe that by strengthening, rather than adapting, its identity, as its Italian counterpart had done, it could regain the traditional communist electorate that had gradually moved to the PSF through the 1970s. …