MARIA ANTONIETTA CONFALONIERI

Atteggiamenti di massa verso gli Stati Uniti e l'Unione Sovietica nell'Europa del Sud

(correlati socioeconomici e preferenze partitiche)

N. 149

Summary — The paper examines the attitude towards the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Generally speaking, the intensity and the distribution of such attitude among the public's opinion of the four countries mirrors the ideological polarization and the salience of issues of foreign policy (mainly the country's membership of NATO) in the political debate. Greece shows a strong polarization of the public feelings towards the superpowers; anti-american attitudes are widespread in every sector of the population and very intense in the young generation and among the voters of the KKE and the PASOK; moreover pro-Russian feelings and the preference for the socialist models concerning political and social development are much more spread than anywhere else in Southern Europe. Spaniards are on the whole even more hostile to the U.S. than Greeks, but the political significance of this attitude is somehow lesser: first of all because the feelings towards the U.S.S.R. are uniformly negative; secondly because of the weakness of the extreme left, which in the 1986 elections proved unable to draw support from the PSOE’s conversion to Atlanticism. In Italy no social or political group exhibits either strongly anti-American feelings or pro-Russian attitudes, extreme-left included; the American model is quite popular, more among the younger generation. The Portuguese are more positively inclined towards Americans, even among the political left, than Greeks and Spaniards, and the American model is slightly less popular than the European ones, mostly among the youth. Moreover no sympathy is exhibited for socialist models, despite the élite political culture of the period immediately following the collapse of the authoritarian regime.