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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: History and Theory in the Cold War
This book provides a theoretically informed historical survey of the Cold War and the nature and consequences of its end. It seeks to offer a distinct contribution to the theorisation of the Cold War as a form of international (social) conflict, as well as providing a comprehensive examination of the principal historical developments within the Cold War. Further, the book seeks to trace and explain the origins of contemporary resistance to US global power, particularly as manifested by the rise of Islamist movements and their violent/terrorist offshoots, by highlighting the paradoxical character of the Cold War's end. The argument outlined in this book challenges the intellectual consensus on the understanding of the Cold War within the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and Diplomatic History in four ways:
• through offering an alternative periodisation of the Cold War understood as the 'short twentieth century', 1917–91;
• by stressing how geopolitical conflict between the superpowers was primarily a consequence of their contrasting domestic socio-economic properties;
• by arguing that the Cold War was a form of global social conflict associated with the revolutionary and communist consequences – in the form of political movements and states – of a shifting, contradictory and uneven capitalist development;
• by arguing that the Cold War did not have a singular ending focused on the collapse of the Soviet communism in 1989–91, but rather had a series of ends in time and space, associated with the differentiated containment and defeat of historical communism as a political and socio-economic challenge to capitalism.
The principal intellectual justification for the book is a dissatisfaction with prevailing accounts of the history of the Cold War and the theoretical assumptions that have tended to dominate such accounts.
The theoretical understanding of the Cold War and the explanation of its end have been dominated by the debate between scholars drawing on a Realist theoretical framework and ideational approaches. For Realists the Cold War is understood as the bipolar (superpower) relationship based on strategic competition, which was a consequence of the geopolitical arrangements brought about by the Second World War. In this understanding the Cold War is classified as a typical great power conflict based on the utility of military power and distinguished by the strategic currency of nuclear weapons. From this perspective ideological and socio-economic factors are seen as largely subordinate to the material (military and economic) interests of each superpower; having more explanatory significance for accounts of the domestic political relations of each rather than their respective international relations.
Consequently, the end of the Cold War occurred because the USSR was forced to make strategic concessions (withdrawal from east-central Europe, arms control concessions and ending political-military support for allies) to preponderant US material power. Following this explanatory logic, the social and political developments within the Soviet bloc that altered the domestic socio-economic, ideological and political character of communist states are seen as being of secondary import.
Ideational approaches share with Realist-informed scholars some key theoretical assumptions about the Cold War: that it was a post-war conflict derived from the consequences of the Second World War, and that it was a conflict centred on the conflicting post-war objectives of the superpowers. Both, then, understand the Cold War as the diplomatic history of the post-1945 Soviet–US relationship. However, in contrast to Realists, ideational approaches emphasise the importance of domestic political ideas, values and ideology on superpower behaviour and, consequently, take much more seriously the ideological character of the Cold War conflict and the way in which domestic political factors (and change) conditioned the bipolar relationship. In this respect, perception or misperception played a key role in fomenting conflict as much as conflicting objective material interests.
Further, domestic political change and the way in which ideas evolved within each of the superpowers are seen as ultimately determining for the evolution of the Cold War and its end, highlighted by role of Mikhail Gorbachev's 'new thinking' on Soviet foreign policy changes in the late 1980s. It was a change in the subjective view of the world of the Soviet leadership, ushered in by the generational and ideological changes of Gorbachev, that triggered the end of the Cold War through the impact of domestic political change on Soviet foreign relations. The Cold War system, then, is not a product of the post-war configuration of geopolitical power, but rather a social-ideological construction founded on distinct perceptions of self-identity and the social construction of an enemy. However, this recognition of the importance of ideas and values in superpower relations and the Cold War is rather limited in the sense that it tends to separate the role of ideology on leadership decision-making rather than examining the way in which ideological values were rooted in social and political structures within society and state, which structured and conditioned the determining currency of ideology on decision-making and politics more generally.
Accordingly, the mainstream understanding of the Cold War – Realist or ideational – rests on reducing the explanatory significance of the socio-economic properties of the superpowers and the wider social systems (communism and capitalism) that each was part of. Consequently, both approaches tend to separate the bipolar political–military relationship from wider transnational political, economic and ideological processes associated with the spread and/or contraction of the rival social systems of capitalism and communism and the international and geopolitical consequences of the expansion of each social system. The argument of this book tries to unite these two conceptual areas – the strategic/military with the socio-economic and ideological – thus providing an historically richer and more sociologically informed account of the Cold War through anchoring military power and geopolitical relations in the contrasting socio-economic properties and ideological structures of states.
RADICAL THEORIES OF COLD WAR
The neglect of the socio-economic dimensions of the Cold War in mainstream theories has been tackled by a number of radical theories of Cold War informed, to varying degrees, by a Marxist understanding of international relations. There are two strands to these arguments.
The Cold War and Intra-Systemic Conflict
The first emphasises socio-economic conflict within each of the superpower blocs to varying degrees, claiming that it was primarily internal conflict that shaped the evolution of the Cold War rather than the external superpower conflict. Thus, although there was antagonism between the superpowers and the social systems that each led, there were also intense socio-economic contradictions within the political relations of each bloc, which the intensification of the external Cold War conflict helped resolve. This approach outlines a radically different perspective on the Cold War from mainstream arguments, playing down external geopolitical and ideological conflict and emphasising internal/intra-bloc conflict.
With their focus on internal conflict such approaches obviously questioned the socio-economic distinctiveness of the USSR and other types of revolutionary state with some Marxists going as far as describing the USSR as a form 'state capitalism', and in this respect the Cold War is seen as a form of inter-imperialist conflict between different, antagonistic forms of capitalist state. In this sense these arguments can be seen as being about imperialism, and in particular attempts to revise Lenin's classic statement on imperialism and inter-imperialist conflict. The prevailing assumption within such perspectives is the organically, conflictual, violent and war-like tendencies or consequences of capitalist development, and the way in which the existence of the post-war liberal peace was in part contingent on the Soviet communist threat. What flows from this is that without the functional role of the Soviet threat towards the unity of the capitalist world under US leadership, the stabilisation of postwar capitalism would have been much more problematic.
Ultimately, according to this 'internalist' perspective, the driving force for international conflict was not between the two superpowers and the social systems that they led, but rather emerged from within each bloc. Thus, the Soviet threat and the way in which the USSR consolidated its power over east-central Europe after 1945 was a fundamental factor – a kind of deus ex machina – in bringing together the advanced capitalist states under US leadership. Further, the continuation of US hegemony over the advanced capitalist world – those states that were and are the main economic rivals of the US – required the continuation of the Soviet threat as it was this that gave the US particular leadership privileges over its economic rivals, and which helped ensure that economic tensions did not escalate into political conflict because of the way in which the advanced capitalist world – through institutions such as NATO – was dependent on the military protection of the US. For the Soviet Union and the ruling elements within it, and the socio-economic constituencies that were allied with such elements, the domestic stability of authoritarian communist rule required the continuation of an external context of threat and insecurity that helped justify not only domestic power structures, but also the character of its political presence with east-central Europe.
Through focusing on the priority of internal socio-economic and political dynamics these approaches also suggest that the superpowers, to varying degrees, were less concerned about the expansion of the social system that each led and more concerned about their respective survival in a way that ensured the political status quo within each bloc. In a word, both superpowers, and especially the USSR, were conservative in their international orientation and averse to pursuing policies that threatened to jeopardise the 'systemic status quo' upon which their power and leadership rested. The upshot of this is that the USSR is seen not only as a conservative power but in some respects a counter-revolutionary power understood as pursuing policies that subverted and undermined the prospects of realising socialist revolution by non- (pro- Soviet) communist forces in other parts of the world, when such developments threatened to jeopardise the ideological power of the Soviet leadership. This argument is most strongly associated with the state-capitalist argument and derives from the critique and hostility towards Stalinism based on the defeat of the left-opposition within the USSR by the late 1920s and the construction of a Stalinist – as opposed to socialist – Soviet state.
The argument that Stalin betrayed the Bolshevik Revolution, transforming the USSR from a revolutionary to a counter-revolutionary state, is based on his creation of a dictatorship defined by political terror and an economy organised upon the dominance of the party-state bureaucracy rather than democratic workers' power. This internal betrayal is seen as being mirrored by an international betrayal of revolution evident – according to such approaches – by the failure to mobilise workers effectively against the rise of Nazism in Germany, the failure properly to aid, and the attempts to limit, the revolutionary socialist character of the Spanish Revolution between 1936 and 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and the failures of the USSR to support socialist revolution in the post-Stalin era.
Whether or not one agrees with the interpretation of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the character of Stalinism, these arguments highlight important aspects of the history of the Cold War largely neglected by the mainstream debate. The internal socio-economic and class dynamics of each social system are important for tracing the domestic sources and causes of the foreign policies of the superpowers. Further, the argument that the Cold War was a struggle, in the words of David Horowitz, between 'imperialism and revolution', and not between the USSR and the US, highlights the significance of revolutionary movements and change realised without Soviet assistance, which highlights the 'autonomous revolutionary' sources of Cold War.
However, these analytical and explanatory strengths are tempered by the failure to connect the way in which the domestic socio-economic constitution of each superpower (and the blocs that they led) determined their form of international relations, and also the failure to recognise fully the significance of the Soviet role in support of international revolution. With respect to the first issue, there were major, indeed fundamental, differences in the way that each superpower related to the wider world and social system that each led, and the differences derived from their contrasting domestic socio-economic properties. This was significant not only in the role of force and coercion in the reproduction of the political power within their respective blocs – its centrality in the reproduction of Soviet-communist power and its more limited role in the reproduction of the (internal) social relations within the advanced capitalist world – but also in the expansion of each social system.
The Cold War and Inter-Systemic Conflict
The second strand of Marxist-informed theories of the Cold War locates the dynamic of Cold War conflict less in the internal contradictions within each bloc and more in the international antagonism and conflict between the two social systems – hence the Cold War is seen as inter-systemic conflict. This approach is associated with the work of Isaac Deutscher and Fred Halliday, and it is this theoretical framework that has most informed the conceptualisation of Cold War outlined in this book and elsewhere. Deutscher's work is distinct from that of those Marxists who focus on intra-systemic conflict, because he argued that the USSR and its social system operated according to a different socio-economic logic – though far from meeting the socialist idea of democratic workers' control of the means of production – from that of capitalism. In this respect, world politics after 1917 was characterised by a 'great contest' between two rival social systems for global socio-economic supremacy based on the relative and comparative economic performance of each.
Though far from uncritical of the Soviet regime, Deutscher's understanding of the Soviet system recognised its revolutionary and socialist character reflected in the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, the organisation of production, consumption and exchange through the five-year state plan, and the significant improvements in the material living standards of the Soviet people that this system had helped secure. Further, Deutscher's understanding of Soviet socialism was imbued with a significant dose of idealism in two senses. First, through his hope and expectation that it could be reformed from within and, second, that the authoritarian and coercive aspects of the system – most associated with Stalin and his political and economic legacy – could be removed or reduced.
These 'idealistic' hopes about the possibilities of extending socialism within the USSR combined with the Marxist-Leninist assumption that an economic system based on state planning would inevitably out perform a capitalist system characterised by a history of crisis, slump, depression and war. The degree to which these two elements of the great contest – the prospects for reforming the Soviet system and the inherent contradictions and tendency towards crisis with capitalism – were interrelated was not fully resolved by Deutscher, as he did not live to see the economic stagnation that characterised the Soviet bloc's economic performance in its latter years, nor the transformation in the nature of capitalist development, such that the economic crises that ended the long boom in the early 1970s did not trigger major political conflict between the advanced capitalist states or moves towards socialism within these states.
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Excerpted from "The Cold War and After"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Richard Saull.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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