A simple-but-compelling Cold War propaganda poster, making a visual argument for western European unity as a bulwark against the Communist threat.

The poster features a young woman astride a verdant Europe. Seeking protection from the looming storm clouds of Communism, she holds aloft an umbrella comprising the flags of western European nations (Surely it is no accident that those of the United Kingdom and France are carefully centered, while that of Germany is barely visible!)

This poster was published by Paix et Liberté, an anti-Communist organization active in France between 1950 and 1955. At the time western Europe was taking its first critical steps toward economic and political union, with the formation in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community.

The poster was the cover of Chlara Bottici and Benoit Challand’s Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

References
For more background on Paix et Liberté, see Bernard Ludwig, “Paix et liberté: A Transnational Anti-Communist Network,” in van Dongen, Roulin and Scott-Smith, Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).