Feeling Political across Borders: International Solidarity Movements, 1820s–1980s

Abstract

As the long history of international solidarity movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates, emotions fostered a sense of common belonging in the name of so-called universal brotherhood, solidarity of peoples, or defence of human rights. Investigating exemplary political mobilizations in Europe that transcended national borders, such as the Philhellenism of the 1820s, the solidarity movements during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and against the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, helps to illustrate the strengths but also the limits of these feelings. These movements, which shaped and were shaped by individual and collective emotions such as compassion, fear, and anger, but also enthusiasm and hope, developed a complex relationship with patriotism and universalism, as well as with the state and other political institutions.

Paris, 24 October 2019: two weeks after the beginning of the social revolt in Chile against the government’s neoliberal policies, a collectively authored op-ed piece in support of the protesters was published in the French daily Le Monde. After underlining the ‘cynicism’ of the ‘frightening inequality’ that had existed in Chilean society since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), the signatories concluded as follows:

We are in solidarity with the formidable popular movement that has risen up. We demand that Chilean President Sebastian Piñera withdraw his troops and armoured vehicles and listen to the demands of his people. We stand with the protesters and the social forces that are calling for another system, another life. We mourn those killed by repression, but we French or France-based intellectuals and artists want to believe that justice will finally return to this country that is suffering, yet so dear to us.¹

In this appeal, deepest sympathy, compassion, sadness, and anger in the face of the distant suffering of ‘the Chilean people’ were mingled with the hope that a new social order would emerge and that one day, justice would be done in the face of a state denounced as violent and cynical. The presence of tanks and soldiers in the streets of Santiago de Chile also resurrected an emotional shock felt from one continent to another during the military coup d’état forty-six years earlier on 11 September 1973, which had resulted in a profound surge of international solidarity. The Chilean case thus testifies not only to the role played by emotions in international solidarity movements but also to their permanence and effectiveness. The Chilean demonstrators of 2019 drew heavily on the emotional repertoire of the 1970s and 1980s by using songs, but also photographs and images from that period, conscious of reaching a broad public audience, beyond social networks and generational distinctions, but also beyond borders.²

The claim of international solidarity evident in this example, and explored more broadly in this chapter, refers to a set of discourses and practices born out of the relationship between people who are aware, despite the geographical and cultural distance that may separate them, of a community of interests that entails an obligation for some to act, serve, and assist others.³ The ways in which emotions have been defined, evaluated, expressed, and elaborated—what Alain Corbin has called the ‘lexicon of the heart within politics’—and the emotional templating that takes place within this process of political mobilization are still too often neglected in the history of social movements, even though their relevance is increasingly demonstrated.⁴ Where political engagement is both collective and international, it is especially important to ask which emotions and what kinds of ‘emotional communities’ have led individual actors to fight together in an ‘esprit de corps’, in order to both inspire and give voice to an experience of collective devotion on a public, international scale.⁵ How do mobilizations across borders create emotional templates for political, religious, and social identities, but also intensify these identities and encourage a sense of belonging, from one country or continent to another?

Focusing on the modern period, this chapter follows the profound change in attitudes or mentalités heralded by the Enlightenment, which, as Bertrand Taithe reminds us, was based ‘on the transfer of compassion [from selfish] to distant, even universal objects’.⁶ However, in this new paradigm, as Luc Boltanski has shown, ‘distance is a fundamental dimension of a politics which has the specific task of a unification which overcomes dispersion by setting up the “durable institutions” needed to establish equivalence between spatially and temporally local situations’.⁷ The history of international solidarity movements since the nineteenth century must therefore be understood as the history of an evolving and complex institutionalization and its emotional templating. Whether in the name of ‘universal brotherhood’, ‘solidarity of peoples’, or in defence of ‘human rights’, the challenge posed by analysing the relationship between emotions and calls for international solidarity is the same. The task is to understand how this sense of common belonging arose, was expressed, and developed through these mobilizations, or perhaps even declined, transforming enthusiasm into disillusionment on an international and transnational scale.⁸

Three political moments are particularly relevant for the broader history of these mobilizations in Europe over the last two centuries: the philhellenic movement of the 1820s, the marshalling of support for the Republicans during the Spanish War from 1936 to 1939, and the solidarity campaigns against the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Using these three examples, it is possible to trace emotional echoes from one cause to another, by analysing how the political actions, media coverage, and political emotions characteristic of these three moments were interwoven—and became disentangled—through time. They illustrate how international solidarity movements have strongly contributed to an evolving relationship between emotions and politics at national, international, and transnational levels.⁹

The Philhellenic Movement of the 1820s: People’s Solidarity against Cold State Diplomacy

When the Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire broke out in March 1821, demanding independence from the Sublime Porte, the European public had little awareness of this region at the far end of the continent, which had long been seen merely as a theatre for Venetian and Ottoman rivalries. The conflict, which lasted more than eight years and led to the creation of the First Hellenic Republic in 1830, nevertheless had a lasting effect on international public opinion in Europe and beyond. It provoked a ‘profound shaking of conscience’ and a ‘broad mobilization of hearts’ in favour of the Greek insurgents.¹⁰ This ‘highly contagious emotion’ resulted in active and multifaceted support for the insurgent movement: advocacy work within support committees in Zurich, Stuttgart, London, Madrid, and Paris, the collection of donations, and a wide range of cultural expressions, such as paintings, songs, poetry, and pamphlets. It also inspired hundreds of German, Swiss, Italian, English, and French volunteers to go fight the Ottoman army.¹¹

These manifestations of solidarity towards the Greek population took after those led by anti-slavery activists, with their religious and bourgeois roots, considered to be the first transnational humanitarian and solidarity movement. For abolitionists, the denunciation of the suffering faced by African slaves expressed a recognition of the latter as human beings, capable of feeling the same emotions as themselves, and therefore subject to the same suffering. Unlike the Greek case, however, their commitment did not go as far as automatically recognizing the same rights for all.¹² Moreover, the mobilizations in favour of the Greek insurgents were part of a wider phenomenon that became known as ‘philhellenism’, or ‘love of the Greeks’. First coined in connection with volunteers fighting in Greece, the term encompasses two historical phenomena.¹³ First, it describes the scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical movement devoted to the study of ancient Greece that was initiated in the second half of the eighteenth century. Second, it denotes ‘the affirmation of a lasting solidarity with the Greek people’, who were considered throughout the nineteenth century one of the last oppressed nationalities in Europe in need of defending.¹⁴ Indeed, the Greek uprising occurred at a pivotal moment in the early nineteenth century. As William Reddy has pointed out, this was when the ‘legacy and … features of practice’ of the sentimentalist period ‘were set in a new intellectual framework and put to new uses’, now combining a romantic mood with the rise of political liberalism.¹⁵

Philhellenic sentiment was based primarily on enthusiasm for Greek culture, which was a central reference point for European and Western elites. Their admiration was not so much for its contemporary incarnation as for a largely fantasized representation of Ancient Greece.¹⁶ Support for the new Greek independence movement was framed as a feeling of gratitude and debt towards those considered to be the fathers of democracy and European civilization. ‘We are all Greeks’, proclaimed the English writer Percy Bysshe Shelley; ‘[O]ur laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.’¹⁷ These cultural references and feelings acted as a bonding agent at the heart of the transnational philhellenic movement.

Enthusiasm for the Greek cause also had romantic roots, of course. Philhellenic discourse was neoclassical in word and romantic in spirit.¹⁸ Reference to the Middle Ages was important, especially the memory and legacy of the Crusades, manifesting as a ‘resurgence of an immemorial solidarity’.¹⁹ The simultaneous fascination and repulsion towards the East—associated with the struggle of Christianity and humanity against a Muslim world of barbarians and miscreants—was once again revived. Helping Christian Europe’s Greek co-religionists became a duty, a necessity. In 1825, a new crusade was greeted in an appeal in favour of the sacred cause of the Greeks by the French royalist writer François-René de Chateaubriand, printed as Appel en faveur de la cause sacrée des Grecs, while his Waldensian colleague, the liberal Benjamin Constant launched in sensationalist terms his dramatic appeal to the Christian nations (Appel aux nations chrétiennes en faveur des Grecs) :

A country flooded with blood and covered with ruins, entire populations disappear under the sword or in the midst of the flames, women subjected in the very midst of these torments to the last outrages of the victors’ brutality, old people subjected to terrible torture, impaled captives hanging from the masts of infidel ships, thousands of heads sent by ferocious slaves to their foolish masters—such is the spectacle that Greece offers to our eyes wherever Muslims enter … Is there a need to awaken the emotions of humanity with words?²⁰

In addition, supporters of the Greek insurgents were also driven by liberal political motivations. While the Holy Alliance States refused to take sides and condemn Constantinople’s abuses, the Greek cause became a means of expressing opposition to the conservative politics that prevailed in Europe. In supporting Greek aspirations, the philhellenes sought to defend the idea of universal solidarity among people so dear to the Romantics, not to mention the principles of self-determination and freedom in one’s own country. Many of the volunteers were veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns.

The philhellenic movement was primarily represented and templated within the Catholic or radical liberal milieus of the enlightened bourgeoisie and brought together a range of political sensibilities including royalist and republican circles, social philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham (one of the first to use the neologism ‘international’ in 1780), and Saint-Simonians.²¹ If one also considers the organizers, both the large and small donors and the volunteers who went to fight in Greece, the movement was very broad-based, attracting popular support from the workers of Manchester to the peasants of Hesse.²² Social boundaries seemed to melt in the face of the terror provoked by horror stories about Turkish rule and the motivation inspired by the Greek dream of independence.²³ This led to the creation of a multitude of associations and committees, both local and national.²⁴

This philhellenic impulse facilitated the emergence of the ‘first militants in the modern sense of the term’, with no legitimacy other than their own will to act.²⁵ Through their intervention in the public arena, popular opinion became an important element of power that now had to be taken into account by the political leaders. The work of winning over public opinion was carried out on an international scale through a vast media campaign. Pamphlets, testimonies, newspaper articles, and other materials were produced, translated, and disseminated by well-organized networks.²⁶ The London Greek Committee, established in March 1823, created a ‘Literary Sub-Committee’ in charge of transmitting information to the press. In the midst of a revolution, the new media landscape of the 1820s played a key role in mobilizing large numbers of people internationally. In a political exchange of unprecedented intensity, both philhellenes and their opponents discovered the effectiveness of mass-distributed propaganda that transcended borders.²⁷

Beyond the press, works of art and cultural productions permeated the daily lives of Europeans in a flood of images and philhellenic references that circulated widely, thus contributing to the formation of a common imagination beyond geographical and social borders. The achievements of the Greek army were chronicled in songs, almanacs, paintings, engravings, and even crockery.²⁸

Delacroix’s La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi , exhibited in August 1826, was painted in reaction to the fourth siege by the Ottomans of the fortified town of Missolonghi (Fig. 11.1).²⁹ Press descriptions of the fall and destruction of the city in the spring of that year had provoked deep shock among readers. Within the monumental painting, the cold, blue, and grey-blue colours of the female figure are contrasted with the warm tones of both the janissary in the background and the sleeve from which the arm of a corpse emerges in the foreground. Inspired by Byron’s work, which Delacroix—like so many others in Europe or abroad—had read, the allegory shows a martyred woman whose silent appeal also made her a subject of history and a spokesperson for a cause that would seize the future.³⁰ Exhibited in London and then Paris, the painting epitomizes how, in a fusion of historical epochs, philhellenism was able to convey and mobilize emotions from classical antiquity (Victory), Christianity (Marian colours and figure), Romanticism, and Orientalism for a political cause.

Fig. 11.1

Eugène Delacroix, La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi , 1826, oil on canvas, 213 × 142 cm. © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux

Yet these representations and reports all had in common a biased and binary vision of the conflict, counterposing evil (Ottomans) to good (Greeks), barbarity to civilization, and, more or less consciously, silencing the massacres committed by the Greeks. One argument used to justify this imbalance was that, whereas on the Turkish side the atrocities were committed by a state, on the Greek side popular violent outbursts were merely a reaction to the aggressions and humiliations they had suffered. Aside from informing public audiences, the goal of these partial accounts and cultural representations was above all to provoke fear, compassion, and anger. This abundant use of emotion reached its peak with philhellenism. Maïté Bouyssy has shown the extent to which the mobilization of blood proved to be particularly convincing within French philhellenic discourse: tears and blood, multiplied in waves, were central issues in the portrayal of collective action. Neither the Great Terror nor the revolutionary or Napoleonic wars had produced ‘such a representation of blood’.³¹ Geographical distance and the small number of direct witnesses in the Greek case favoured bloody embellishment in partisan representations, dispensing with the need to reflect on shared responsibility, as could often be the case for events in closer proximity. The collective imagination was deeply imprinted by these images and stories of distant horror and barbarity, which provoked fear, disgust, and anger, while also catering to the audience’s preparedness to almost voyeuristically revel in such carnage.

A transnational philhellenic community was thus born. Transcending state borders, it sought to form a counter-monopoly on information in response to initial refusals by governments to condemn abuses committed by the Turkish side or to intervene in the conflict.³² The attitudes of individual states were almost immediately interpreted as cynical, cold, and distant, their leaders insensitive to the suffering of Greek men, women, and children. This elicited sharp attacks on certain leaders, such as the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. A proponent of maintaining the status quo established at the Congress of Vienna, Castlereagh even told Parliament that the atrocities committed by the Greeks were as bad as those committed by the Turks, which earned virulent condemnation from the philhellenes. Byron in particular used his fame to express his hatred of the minister, whom he described as a ‘[c]old-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!’³³

With their romantic vision of universal solidarity among people, the philhellenes were pretending to propose a different model of diplomacy from that of the Holy Alliance, which was considered to be a despotic and inhuman system. This dichotomy between passion-filled public opinion and cold, calculating governments was disputed by the Austrian minister Metternich, who defended the realism of diplomatic policy.³⁴ In 1824, he denounced the new British minister Canning, who supported the philhellenes, as ‘[t]he personified symptom of the disastrous evil which is found in all the pulsations of its fatherland, of an evil which threatens to deliver its exhausted body to dissolution’.³⁵ Metternich hoped that the British cabinet would eventually remember ‘the natural mobility of popular opinions and the danger of the extremes to which they so quickly lead’. Canning, for his part, highlighted the contrast between Austrian despotism with democracy, stating that governments in the US and France governments ‘could not keep popular feeling … within due bounds’.³⁶

A new conception of the relationship between the people, public opinion, and governments emerged from philhellenic passion on an international scale.³⁷ The influence exerted by the philhellenic movement on the various states remains a matter of debate within the historiography. One interpretation is that the philhellenes by successfully ‘ridiculing the official diplomatic discourse’ paved the way for Navarin’s decisive 1827 expedition led by Great Britain, Russia, and France, which resulted in the crushing defeat of the Turkish fleet.³⁸ An alternative view is that the governments involved followed the primary interests of the great powers and were indifferent to calls for revenge by the philhellenes.³⁹ Notwithstanding this debate, the broad resonance of the philhellenic mobilizations revealed the effectiveness of its emotional templates, that is, a passionate, unashamedly biased commitment to the Greek cause: the common will among people to make themselves heard and to act beyond national frameworks based on a shared and increasingly mediatized vision of solidarity was put into action. For this reason, they can be understood as precursors of today’s social movements.⁴⁰ Philhellenism contributed to the structuring, organizing, and politicization of public opinion, a key element in ‘the long, nervous, aggressive wait of the Vormärz’ across the German lands and on a European and transnational scale in the wait for 1848.⁴¹

The Spanish Civil War: Feeling and Institutionalizing the International Socialist Brotherhood

The campaigns in support of Greek independence foreshadowed other struggles for the creation of nation-states and the Springtime of the Peoples of Europe in 1848. With great empathy, European audiences followed the struggle of the Poles in the 1830s and that of the Italians in the Risorgimento from 1848 to 1871 via the press and other committed publications. Emigrants and diasporic communities played a decisive role as transmitters of news and go-betweens.⁴² In 1851, the Italian revolutionary and patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, later dubbed the ‘Prophet of the Religion of Humanity’,⁴³ declared:

[T]he conviction is gaining ground that if on any spot of the world, even within the limits of an independent nation, some glaring wrong should be done … then other nations are not absolved from all concern in the matter simply because of large distance between them and the scene of the wrong.⁴⁴

In fact, the nineteenth century—typically seen as the ‘century of nationalism’—was also the century of internationalism. This was reflected by the establishment of institutions and in an ever-increasing sense of belonging to a common brotherhood, in which religious roots fused with new political aspirations.⁴⁵

The workers’ movement played an essential and active role here.⁴⁶ After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx eschewed the concept of ‘fraternity’ to describe the workers’ movement but also avoided the concept of ‘solidarity’, due to its association with ideas of national unity.⁴⁷ It was not until 1864 with the creation of the International Workers’ Association (IWA), or First International, that Marx finally agreed to use the term. In both size and ambition, the IWA heralded a new era. It sought to go beyond the scope of advocacy work,⁴⁸ stating that it was ‘one of the great aims of the Association to develop among the workers of the different countries not only the feeling but the fact of their fraternity and to unite them to form the army of emancipation’.⁴⁹ Fraternity in action was thus clearly distinguished from the largely symbolic fraternity of the bourgeoisie.⁵⁰ The emergence of the workers’ internationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, which found expression in socialist and communist political parties, transformed this call for universal fraternity in action into a set of practices and emotions that were located at the heart of a complex relationship between social movements and state policies, between internationalism and patriotism. Different types of actors were mobilized, at different scales.

Solidarity was a much-discussed theme at various international congresses of the labour movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, however, it came under scrutiny. The deck was shuffled again in 1917 by the Russian revolution, then in 1919 with the creation of the Comintern, or Third International, and once more in 1921 with the emergence of international solidarity as core principle in the foreign policy of the new Soviet state. The centralized and bureaucratic Comintern fully embraced a process of institutionalization, inoculating itself against the fragilities intrinsic to other international associations and affirming the existence and vitality of a culture of workers’ autonomy.⁵¹ It also created an auxiliary network of organizations at the crossroads of trade union action, humanitarian, and political mutual aid that broadened the meaning of international workers’ solidarity and its associated practices.⁵² Solidarity thus became the fundament for ideological and political confrontation—a tool for demonstrating the moral and economic superiority of one system over the other and its fidelity or not to Moscow.⁵³

The Spanish Civil War that followed General Franco’s coup d’état of 16 July 1936 against the left-wing Republican alliance government of the Popular Front, in power since February, was a crucial moment. International workers’ solidarity now took centre stage in the great confrontation between democracy, fascism, and communism. Socialists, communists, and anarchists were brought together in the same anti-fascist struggle, through international communist action and organizations such as the International Solidarity Fund. Solidarity committees founded in different countries, mostly by the communists, were responsible for advocacy work, but also for collecting money, arms and, later, humanitarian aid, especially for Spanish refugee children. Photographic reports published in the European left-wing press depicting the destruction caused by the war fuelled the emotional response sought by the republicans of Madrid and left-wingers in their effort to reach a broad public audience. These many reports, showing wounded and deceased men, women, and children in scenes of general ruin, together with internationally distributed posters calling for solidarity with the Spanish people, stimulated empathy among the general public for the Republican camp.

The Republican government in Madrid produced one of the most famous of these posters (Fig. 11.2). It depicts a woman and a small child, the very icon of innocence, being terrorized by bombing—a reference to the violent air raids on the Spanish capital. Produced by a Spaniard whose identity is still under discussion, this modern graphic composition, which applied the technique of photomontage using a photograph taken by the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa, was one of the first visual manifestations of international cooperation regarding Spain. The religious dimension of the motif is obvious and enabled the poster to speak to an audience beyond left-wing political activists alone. The accompanying text, grave but fully integrated into the overall graphic design, directly addressed the audience with a call for solidarity: ‘What are you doing to prevent this?’ It demanded that the sadness and fear caused by the motif be transformed into a willingness to act and react; it also evoked guilt and even shame for inaction in the face of the tragedies taking place in Spain. The poster was translated into several languages in order to address different national audiences. The international mobilization for Spain played a decisive role in both crystallizing an anti-fascist political identity that was rooted in militant practices and establishing, on the basis of popular images, a political discourse of international solidarity and humanitarianism.⁵⁴

Fig. 11.2

Poster published by the Ministry of Propaganda, Spain in 1937 in English, French, and Spanish. English version: © Imperial War Museum (Art.IVM PST 8660); French version: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Photo SCALA, Florence; Spanish version: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatsammlung, archive no. K-0028

At the heart of the conflict, however, different emotional politics were expressed on either side of the front line, but also within the left wing, defined by specific expectations of the fighters. From July to September 1936, there was a wave of relatively spontaneous support from foreign militants or exiled Spaniards eager to show solidarity with the Popular Front government in Madrid in its armed struggle against fascism. Studies on the reasons for the departure of international volunteers to Spain illustrate how political opinions and socio-economic circumstances were intertwined.⁵⁵ As for many of the Philhellenic volunteers 100 years earlier, unemployment was a factor, but the template of revolutionary romanticism, echoing the Russian revolution of 1917, and a desire to learn from the experience of combat played major roles. In the end, it was the pre-existing political commitment of organized militants that dominated: nearly 80 per cent of the French volunteers were political activists or members of a left-wing party or trade union before travelling to Spain. For them, it was a question of going to fight for common interests, even to the point of risking their lives, alongside ‘comrades’ whose struggles, humiliations, and hardships they shared.⁵⁶ They went to Spain to pursue a political and emotional education. As the Frenchman Simon Lagunas, a communist activist since 1934, remembered:

There is something that people cannot understand about what we experienced, which is very important, and that is anti-fascism. It was the cement of the time. … So as far as Spain is concerned, with the victory in the elections [in February 1936], there was overflowing enthusiasm in the French working class, among the French people, and when Franco’s attack began, then it turned into anger. And there was a current of solidarity of a strength we can hardly imagine now. ⁵⁷

Commitment in Spain thus represented a continuity of experience with what the philosopher Simone Weil called the ‘pure, undiluted joy’ of shared victory and fraternity, which she herself had experimented in France in the 1930s and which acted as an effective template at local, national, and later transnational levels.⁵⁸ And yet, militant enthusiasm intermingled with anger and revolt. The non-interventionist stance taken by the British and French governments, made official on 6 September 1936, incited shock and outrage, just as the inaction of the European States over the events in Constantinople that had mobilized the Philhellenes. ‘We did not want to be cowardly witnesses to an immense deception: “non-intervention”’, wrote one French Brigadist.⁵⁹ It was therefore necessary, through private action, to make up for the failure of the authorities.

These feelings of enthusiasm and anger were both encouraged and hindered, however, by one key actor: Moscow, and, by extension, its communist network, which made full use of emotions in its public messaging. Moscow’s position of official support for the movement from October 1936 was a response both to this disappointment and to the momentum that had arisen in favour of solidarity, while still aligned with the interests of the Soviet state. The creation of the International Brigades in October 1936 was a de facto attempt to form a multinational army under Communist control to fight against the Francoists. The ambition was to bring militant enthusiasm under strict discipline. This was largely staged in the international communist or popular press—from the French magazine Regards, to Life in the US, through to the German Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung—in reports by pro-republican journalists and photographers including Gerta Pohorylle alias Gerda Taro from Germany, Erne Endrö Friedmann alias Robert Capa from Hungary, or David Seymour alias Chim from Poland.⁶⁰ The Italian communist journalist Teresa Noce remembers how the women activists of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) were at pains to remind the energetic volunteers that it was a real war, where people suffered and died.⁶¹ The emotional discourses on the Republican side, seen in the example of the International Brigades, illustrate the way in which communist, partisan, and state propaganda, in the name of international solidarity, combined the call for militant jubilation with efforts to regulate emotions.

Thirty-five thousand combatants were engaged in the International Brigades, coming from Europe but also from the Americas and Asia. Many of them were workers, half of them communists, mostly men, aged between twenty-six and thirty-four.⁶² The internationalism inscribed on the posters, proclaimed in militant songs, expressed in speeches, and implicit within the official name of the volunteer force was no empty rhetoric. It had long been a daily, lived experience for many left-wing activists who sympathized with Polish, German, and Italian political exiles at home.⁶³ The German communist writer Erich Weinert’s Song of the International Brigades , which he wrote in Spain, began: ‘We, born in the distant fatherland/Took nothing but hatred in our hearts’ and continued ‘Spain’s freedom is now our honour/Our heart is international’.⁶⁴

However, although the hearts of more than 3300 Italian anti-fascist Brigadists did beat for Spain, they continued to beat for Italy as well. Spain became the geographical and symbolic space in which to gain armed experience, moral strength, and legitimacy, so that Italians opposed to Mussolini could return pride and dignity to Italy and later fight fascism on Italian soil.⁶⁵ The namesake of the Italian anti-fascist battalion, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), was an important symbol of Italian patriotism and the triumph of national unity but, having fought in Latin America and Europe to defend the freedom of peoples, was also a ‘hero of both worlds’. A humanist, universalist, fraternalist, and pacifist, the figure of Garibaldi became associated with a commitment to republican Spain, in an effort to counteract his appropriation by the fascists. Garibaldi also represented a moral stance, a model for how to behave, and a genuine feeling.⁶⁶ This testifies to the close interweaving of patriotic and internationalist feelings in solidarity with Republican Spain.

The battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, where the communist Garibaldi Brigade fought against legionnaires sent by Mussolini, allowed observers to perceive the performative force of the emotions at the heart of the anti-fascist mobilization on one side and the Francoists on the other.⁶⁷ The battle ended in a republican victory. The communist Brigadist Luigi Longo described it as a clash of two contrasting worlds of emotions:

Two worlds met and measured each other in Guadalajara: the fascist world of misery, oppression, and brutal force, represented by Mussolini’s legions, and the world of the people with its spontaneous and creative enthusiasm, its faith in the most glorious national traditions of freedom and solidarity among peoples, its unlimited sense of sacrifice and its countless resources. … With their heroism and sacrifice, the Garibaldians saved the honour of the Italian people, the reputation of its human qualities and its moral and military effectiveness.⁶⁸

The emotional strength of the anti-fascist commitment was presented as an asset, not a limitation, to military effectiveness. It is interesting to note that, on the fascist side, the military defeat was also explained in terms of emotional communities in opposition.⁶⁹ The fascist legionnaires were defeated not because of military inferiority, the argument went, but due to their lack of idealism and heroism—in other words, because of ethical inferiority. The Italian fascist general in charge regretted that his men had been ‘passive’ and ‘incapable of feeling the slightest hatred for the adversary’. The Garibaldi Brigade, by contrast, fought ‘masterfully and in a fanatical and hateful manner’.⁷⁰

In September 1938, the International Brigades were disbanded. Moscow undertook to withdraw the foreign volunteers from Spain in a strategic bid to win support from Paris and London, even on an unofficial level, in the struggle against fascism, and violently brought the remaining fighters to heel, including carrying out summary executions. The strategic interests of the Soviet state had finally prevailed over militant internationalist enthusiasm. The final military defeat of the republicans led to a deep sense of shame and humiliation, followed by despair, when France, where many international volunteers had sought refuge, put them in camps. In his notebook, the Italian communist Giancarlo Pajetta wrote: ‘January 1939. For us, the border is still closed. … How true the words of Ernst Busch’s song sound: “Born in a faraway land, now our homeland is here”. And how painfully ironic its end is: “We will return home when fascism is defeated.”’⁷¹

Many veterans of the war in Spain felt deeply disillusioned once the universalist and militant enthusiasm had dissipated; there was also the feeling of having been betrayed by Moscow and that the proclaimed policy of international solidarity had been hijacked by Stalin. Commitment to anti-fascism led these freedom fighters into the international resistance in Europe and kept them away from their homeland for years, sometimes long after the end of the war.

International Solidarity and the Defence of Human Rights in Chile after 1973: Competing Political Emotions?

After 1945, neither the socialist and communist political parties nor Moscow maintained a monopoly on international solidarity and its political emotions. In an increasingly interconnected international arena and an accelerating process of globalization, the institutional landscape of solidarity had indeed changed. The legitimacy of the United Nations and many international non-governmental institutions was not only based precisely on the principle of solidarity but also on the universal defence of human rights. Moreover, among a more divided Left, the existential international struggle against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s had rematerialized in a struggle for freedom and justice against North American imperialism, with the Cold War and anti-colonial movements as a backdrop. Hot on the heels of the mobilizations against the Vietnam War—‘the Spain of our generation’ according to European intellectuals—the international solidarity movement against the coup d’état in Santiago de Chile on 11 September 1973 and the resulting dictatorship, which lasted up until Pinochet’s departure in 1990, appears to have been exemplary in reflecting the new diversity of emotional policies conducted in the name of solidarity.⁷²

The fall of the Popular Unity government under the socialist President Salvador Allende provoked strong reactions all over the world as soon as it was announced. Immediate shock took hold beyond Chile and the international left as photographs and video footage depicting the aerial bombing of the presidential palace of La Moneda, the seat of democratically elected power, by its own army were broadcast, along with images of soldier patrols sowing terror in the streets of the capital. The violence was not only symbolic but physical as well. These images were also associated with a sound document: President Allende’s last speech, delivered from within La Moneda while the bombing took place. Broadcast on the radio over a background of gunfire and explosions just before his suicide, his words were not of despair or fear, but expressed firmness and courage: ‘These are my last words, I am sure that the sacrifice will not be in vain and that at least it will be a moral punishment for cowardice and treason.’ Copies of the recording, saved from the military raids, were sent abroad a few days later via the Chilean Communist Party. This journey was the beginning of a long international career for the speech. The East German record label Eterna made 5000 audio copies, which sold out within three days. In France or Canada, the speech accompanied an anthology of Popular Unity songs, which became anthems of resistance to the junta almost overnight (Fig. 11.3) .⁷³

Fig. 11.3

Album cover of the last speech of Salvador Allende, 1973, published by Eterna, VEB Deutsche Schallplatten

Its intense media coverage made 11 September 1973 a global event, anchoring it in a common imaginary that was highly emotional, dramatic, and sombre. The tone was set for the left: Allende’s sacrifice had made him a hero and a martyr who fought with determination—to the death—against the cruel and traitorous junta personified in the figure of General Augusto Pinochet. A portrait of Pinochet taken by the Dutch photographer Chas Gerretsen became the very icon of evil, hatred, and terror for public audiences around the world.⁷⁴ The solidarity mobilizations that ensued drew largely on this material, which the event itself had delivered, giving shape to a specific template: that of a commitment based on anger and fear, especially on part of the exiled Chileans, linked through these iconic, spectacular, and emotionally charged images of good and evil.

The European left responded quickly to this violence and repression, initiating several political campaigns for solidarity with the ‘Chilean people’. The campaigns had three main objectives: to denounce the crimes of the Chilean dictatorship and secure its diplomatic isolation on the world stage, to obtain the release of the junta’s political prisoners, and to defend and support the continued political struggle of the Popular Unity alliance. Solidarity activists in Europe threw themselves into intense advocacy work to raise public awareness through publications, such as newspapers or newsletters, political and cultural events, fundraising, and providing material aid to Chilean political exiles. Key actors in these campaigns were Moscow and its numerous affiliates in international communist political and cultural networks: parties and trade unions, record or film distribution companies, and publishing houses helped to spread a united message of official solidarity with Chile to an international public audience, both in the East and in the West. The physical presence and testimony of Chilean political exiles in the movement—women and men who had themselves experienced repression and torture and became committed solidarity activists abroad—contributed greatly to the mobilization of emotion beyond traditional communist circles.

A common language of words and gestures combined with a shared musical repertoire enabled the creation of an international emotional community. In the dominant emotional template of campaign discourse, solidarity was felt, expressed, and exercised not for ‘victims’, but for ‘combatants’ and ‘resistance fighters’: it encouraged not pity for their suffering but respect and admiration for the courage of ‘comrades’ in struggle. The gesture of the raised fist, a time-honoured symbol in the language of left-wing internationalist political struggle, was repeated on stage, on posters, on record sleeves. The media played an essential role in helping to consolidate and spread these political and combative emotions from one country to another, on a transnational level.⁷⁵ Concerts bringing together European musicians and exiled Chilean musicians, such as the famous bands Inti-Illimani or Quilapayún, mass demonstrations of people brandishing the names and portraits of ‘heroes’, political meetings, art and photography exhibitions, and film screenings were all moments and places where the emotions aroused by the fate of the ‘Chilean people’ were collectively performed and expressed.⁷⁶ The main goal was to remind people that they were part of the same community of people struggling against inequality, American imperialism, and capitalism. Lurking in the shadows but omitted from contemporary accounts, however, were the divisions between communists, socialists, Christian democrats, and left-wing democrats, for from these mobilizations there also had to emerge a sense of hope that political victory would be won through class struggle: ‘The people united will never be defeated!’ (El pueblo unido jamás será vencido).

This powerful political and emotional motto, which lay at the heart of the international solidarity campaigns in Europe, was perfectly synthesized in a large, brightly coloured fresco mural that was painted on a wall at the University of Bielefeld in West Germany in 1976 (Fig. 11.4). Heavily inspired by Latin American visual political culture, the mural was painted over a span of fourteen hours in a clandestine cooperation between university students and the Salvador Allende Brigade of Chilean artists in exile. Its message to everyone who walked through the main hall of the building was upbeat: from the pain and tears born of the repression and terror inflicted by American imperialism, a unity is emerging among the Chilean people (miners, peasants, workers), whose commitment to struggle is breathing new life into the dove of peace and the hope of seeing a peaceful, free, and independent Chile reborn. The mural’s obvious visual references to Picasso’s Guernica (1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid) renewed for the students and staff of this German university the link between two great moments in the emotional history of international, anti-fascist solidarity. In the German text painted along the entire length of the mural, keywords such as ‘antifascism’, ‘struggle’, ‘suffering’, and ‘terror’, but also ‘future’, were linked to an emotional vision of victory against the dictatorship. Like this mural, the solidarity campaigns used iconography as part of their mobilization strategy, in order to show, rather than merely suggest, emotions. This enabled emotions to have a profound influence on the political imagination of the period.

Fig. 11.4

Chile mural in the Central Hall of the University of Bielefeld, 1976. © Britta Ledebur, 7 November 2014, Archive of Bielefeld University

Yet there was also another tone present in the speeches and emotional rituals denouncing the crimes committed by the Chilean dictatorship: a universalist defence of human rights. The coup in Chile was a decisive moment for Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization launched in 1961. During the 1960s and 1970s, it became the main organization advocating for human rights, which, according to Samuel Moyn, ‘spawned a new brand and age of internationalist citizen advocacy’.⁷⁷ The political dedication of its founder, Peter Benenson, born in London in 1921, can be traced back to his involvement in anti-fascist solidarity between the wars. At the age of sixteen, he and his school friends collected money to help orphaned victims of the Spanish Civil War, and later, as a law student, he helped two young Jewish Germans flee the Nazi regime.⁷⁸ After a decade practising as a barrister and two unsuccessful bids for election with the Labour Party, Benenson confronted the disappointment he felt towards existing political institutions by proposing a new mode and space of action that aimed to be explicitly apolitical and non-partisan.

In May 1961, Benenson issued the initial Amnesty call for the release of prisoners of conscience throughout the world, East and West, North and South. His new movement was ‘designed in particular to absorb the latent enthusiasm of great numbers of such idealists who have, since the eclipse of Socialism, become increasingly frustrated’.⁷⁹ The idea was to capitalize on the restlessness of women and men who were dissatisfied with institutional political structures but felt powerless in the face of the world situation: ‘The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust all over the world could be united into common action, something effective could be done.’⁸⁰ The injunction was clear: not to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the experience of negative feelings, but to transform them into hope and action. It was this kind of emotional templating, despair that was diverted into action, that lay at the heart of Amnesty’s pledge. This could only be done in an internationalist spirit, Benenson implored. Quickly renamed Amnesty International , the movement—almost exclusively Western and male—adopted an emotional template designed to make everyone feel that they belonged to a higher, equal, universal humanity: ‘It is to give to him who feels cut off from God a sense of belonging to something much greater than himself, of being a small part of the entire human race.’⁸¹ Amnesty thus represented a dual legacy: that of European Christian ecumenism and that of the new social movements and the New Left-extra parliamentary, anti-authoritarian, and critical of both American and Soviet imperialism.⁸² The goal was to offer a response, in discourse and praxis, to political upheavals both past (fascism, Nazism, genocide of the European Jews during the Second World War) and present (Cold War, globalization, secularization in the West). Sceptical of traditional forms of authority and institutions, especially church and state, Benenson wanted to assert a new moral authority. How did this translate in terms of emotions?

The preface to Amnesty’s September 1974 report on a year of dictatorship in Chile stated:

In publishing the report, Amnesty International hopes that it will provide a factual basis for a continuing program of assistance to the victims of the coup and, what is equally urgent, for a renewed campaign of international pressure upon the Chilean Government to restore human rights in Chile.⁸³

Seeking to distance itself from the antagonistic political rhetoric of other international solidarity initiatives, Amnesty spoke of ‘victims’ rather than ‘comrades in struggle’. The authors of the report also insisted on its factual nature. This was a founding principle of Amnesty’s work, which it sought to raise above politics and conflict—it was necessary to be able to inform and persuade through factual rigour, not by arousing emotions such as pity, compassion, or fear.⁸⁴ Only the testimonies of torture victims or relatives of the disappeared, the cornerstone of these reports, could allow the expression of emotions. Amnesty’s reports thus ensured the documentation of evidence, which then fed into the actions of national and international political institutions, but also local and regional political solidarity committees. The Chile Solidarity Committee in West Berlin, for example, which brought together activists from the New Left, worked with Amnesty. Amnesty increasingly gained a reputation for sober rhetoric, not lukewarm positions, and this enabled it to reach audiences beyond activist circles. The Committee regularly made the pages of its newsletter, the Chile-Nachrichten, available for Amnesty press releases.⁸⁵

Emotions were not, however, absent from Amnesty’s discourse and practice. Indeed, the choice to become a member was based on individuals’ emotional states in moments when they reached a tipping point towards taking action. In 1981, journalist Carola Stern, co-founder of the group’s West German section, recounted one student’s motivations for joining:

[S]he had noticed how, when watching the daily television news, her horror at fresh acts of terror was gradually disappearing, how bland indifference was taking the place of sensitivity. She said she had come to Amnesty International lest, while she was still young, she lose the capacity to show solidarity and to love other people.⁸⁶

Individuals could feel emotionally overwhelmed by the flow of information in an increasingly mediatized society. Amnesty offered individuals a platform for taking action, while listening to their emotions, in a way that was more than just a gesture. The practice of writing letters to prisoners, which was at the heart of Amnesty’s work from the very beginning, went beyond statistics and impersonal relationships and made it possible to establish a bond, however tenuous, with another living person. This balance between compassion on the one hand and the desire to keep one’s own emotions at a distance on the other was a constant subject of debate within the Amnesty leadership, particularly at the National Secretariat in London between expert researchers and those responsible for communication and campaigns, but also between national sections, casting doubt on the unity of the organization’s message.⁸⁷

By the early 1980s, Amnesty had reached a peak position of moral authority, having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. However, it was now facing competition from other non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, founded in 1978. In this light, Amnesty’s US section decided to adjust its public image in order to reach a younger audience, especially those who had grown up in a globalized world dominated by audio-visual media. It organized international music tours of acclaimed artists, most of them Anglo-Saxon, who performed the role of human rights ambassadors on stage.⁸⁸ Following two successful tours in 1986 and 1988, in October 1990, the third one made a stop in Chile. Pinochet’s departure from power in March had ushered in a phase of transition to democracy. Amnesty wanted to welcome this new stage in Chile’s history, while still raising international public awareness: the struggle had to continue so that justice could be done.⁸⁹ They decided to hold two concerts in a highly symbolic venue that was far from being emotionally neutral: the National Stadium in Santiago. Having been used as a concentration camp in the first weeks of the dictatorship, it held a sinister memory for Chileans and non-Chileans alike. To counter this association, a giant backdrop reading ‘From Chile … Embrace Hope’ adorned the stage. To close the second concert, during the performance of ‘They Dance Alone’ in Spanish by the British musician Sting, a song he had written in homage to the mothers of the regime’s victims, women from the Association of the Families of the Disappeared joined him on stage.⁹⁰ Each of them held up a portrait of their loved one, ‘in a powerful talismanic function’.⁹¹

With its carefully chosen emotional language and visual codes, this performance was a public relations event with blurred political contours. Emotions were no more just suggested, but clearly stipulated. The event was also broadcast on television, thus transmitting Amnesty’s message and actions to a much wider community: a global media audience. This event inaugurated a new kind of emotional template, namely, emotions as a spectacle for a large audience, for Amnesty International, which sparked a series of internal debates. Despite this, its effect in terms of membership was significant, with numbers in Chile increasing by 2000 in the following weeks.

Between 1973 and 1990, emotions not only remained an essential tool for international solidarity mobilizations; their templating had to change and evolve too. The political cultures and emotional policies of the various actors in international solidarity changed in order to cope on the one hand with a growing feeling of being overwhelmed by a more global circulation of information and on the other hand with increasing political disillusionment among those on the left.⁹²

Conclusion

The history of international solidarity movements from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries illustrates the decisive role emotions played in the emergence of new political cultures. Philhellenic enthusiasm contributed to the formation of a democratic space in Europe. Greek support committees appealed to a public audience that transcended state borders and heralded political parties in the making. In the 1930s, as the movement for international workers’ solidarity became more generalized and politicized, it was also extended through a process of institutionalization led by the Comintern, which contributed greatly to shaping the emotional styles linked to appeals for solidarity and their associated actions. The Spanish Civil War nourished the pathos in left-wing narratives, among them the myth of the fighter for international communist solidarity, whose institutionalized political emotions triumphed over those of socialists, anarchists, and so on. Forty years later, as communists and other left-wingers denounced the Chilean dictatorship, another new voice could also be heard with a very different tone: that of Amnesty International that defended human rights in the name of universalism. In each of these political moments, international solidarity created new frameworks not only for patriotic but also for internationalist and universalist sentiments.

What all three examples discussed here demonstrate is how international solidarity movements have contributed in their discourses and practices to the establishment of distinct emotional templates, each time drawing inspiration from previous mobilizations. Following a process of growing institutionalization combining state and non-state actors, international solidarity mobilizations have provided an important framework for anchoring the political feelings of citizens, both individually and collectively, in transnational space.

Beyond questions of success, failure, and effectiveness, at least one observation about these international solidarity movements is obvious: the images and sounds produced and reproduced through these mobilizations have become part of our common imagination. Present-day political emotions largely follow the templates forged in these moments of solidarity. This collective imprinting has sometimes been to the detriment of their protest qualities. The fresco mural in Bielefeld, which was clandestinely produced, is nowadays a monument under heritage protection. Nevertheless, even today, the mobilization of solidarity with Chile demonstrates the extent to which political emotions persist as performative phenomena on an intergenerational and international scale.Caroline Moine(moine@mpib-berlin.mpg.de)