Cold War: Is It Over Yet? posted by Richard Seymour

In the most vulgarised Cold War discourse, we are invited to believe that the United States and Europe were engaged - through NATO - in a titanic struggle against something called "totalitarianism". One of the curiosities here is that it is liberalism which contains the seed of uncompromising (if benign) despotism, total scrutability and organicism (Hobbes' Leviathan, Bentham's panopticon and Hegel's concrete universal, respectively) which are supposed to be the crucial ingredients of the 'totalitarian' monster. A fairly superficial excursus from this ideological coercion (you're with us or with the evil-doers, commies etc) would appear to be offered by traditional realist approaches to foreign policy and IR. The Cold War, rather than being seen as a new departure in world affairs in which democracy combats its inscrutable Evil Other for decades, is simply a new form of inter-state conflict in which states as equivalent units engage in power-maximising strategies on the basis of developments in military technology. (This isn't always the case: John Lewis Gaddis, the archetypal realist, argues in We Now Know that Stalin organised his foreign policy according to his ideological proclivities more than state interests: classically, however, realists have understood his strategy as being centred on straightforward state interest concerns about continental encirclement and fear of attack through Eastern Europe). In this way, the Cold War is understood as a bipolar arrangement into which most conficts can be subsumed, as a form of proxy military struggle between the leading superpowers. The fact of the Soviet Union professing to be a communist state and the US being a liberal capitalist one was not, therefore, seen as the reason why conflict developed after 1945: after all, it had not prevented an alliance between 1941 and 1945. And as Gaddis notes in an earlier work, (The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947), US policymakers perceived a sharp break on Stalin's part not only from international revolution, but also from communism internally. Even George Kennan, asserting that the Soviet Union was ruled by "messianic Bolshevism", considered USSR foreign policy no more than commonplace pragmatic opportunism. Ideology is seen as something that can be decoupled from foreign policy, albeit it may have some incidental effects.

However, there are obvious and striking problems with the traditional realist approach, and it can hardly be surprising that most such accounts have tended to put US policy in a better light than might otherwise be the case, since in treating Cold War geopolitics as a mere matter of strategic conflict between two super-states, the realists have tended to internalise the priorities and purview of the US. But the problems lie deeper than that. As Justin Rosenberg points out (The Empire of Civil Society), the supposition that states are simply power-maximising units in which military power predominates is recursive. If you equate the state with coercive-military power and therefore assert that statesmen only engage in politics internationally when they attend to security matters, then the claim becomes self-justifying. This approach is reductionist, screening out other actors and other possible sources of policy. Hence, it is argued by realists that it was Reagan's policy of military build-up during the 1980s that forced Gorbachev to redefine Soviet policy and eventually bring about the implosion of the USSR. This fails to account for the internal de-legitimising of the regime, and the economic failure which contributed to that process. In particular, as Mary Kaldor notes, there was a strong 'civil society' current, ranging from various workers uprisings in 1956 and 1968 to Solidarnosc and Charter 77. These movements had the effect of relaxing domestic policies and terminating the Brezhnev doctrine, with obvious consequences for the future of the Warsaw Pact. Similarly, one might consider some well-known internal factors which shaped US foreign policy. In particular, Kennan's notes in US PPS 23: "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." We might add planning document NSC 68, which, alongside widely feted concerns about the USSR's value-system and so on, worries about potential economic instability without the government stimulus of military spending. It then proceeds, handily enough, to embed a zero-sum outlook in official doctrine. Michael Cox argues further from an historical materialist perspective that the Cold War relationship had a primary function of allowing each competing state to realise its goals within its own sphere of influence. For the US it served its dominance of the postwar capitalist order, while for the USSR it assured the internal security and rule of the CPSU.

Cox, and a number of other critics, rightly maintain that there was nothing inherently anticapitalist about the USSR: it had, at least since the 1920s, given up any prospect of challenging the liberal capitalist order beyond its zones of control. Much is made of Stalin's decision to annexe Eastern Europe and partition Germany, however as Carolyn Eisenberg points out (Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949), the latter was as much an American policy as it was Stalin's. (Also see Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR: 1945-53 for an account of the role of German communist workers in forging an alliance with the Stalinist elite, an alliance that was perpetually strained and ultimately betrayed). New Left critics like Noam Chomsky have always maintained that the USSR, as a state capitalist formation, had very limited aspirations (and capabilities) in foreign policy and that US policy could not therefore be understood as a matter of 'containment'. Melvyn Leffler and David S. Painter argue in Origins of the Cold War: An International History that Stalin's attitude was opportunistic and pragmatic - ready to expand Soviet power, but keenly attuned to the constraints and risks involved. Indeed, Gaddis still maintains such a position, despite preferring to interpret Stalin's expansionism as an artefact of ideology these days. These two claims are consistent with one another, and consistent with the evidence. To illustrate this, and also to introduce the most frequently underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the Cold War, the one which forces us to problematise the inherited categories of that discourse, we can take a brief look at the revolutionary movements in South East Asia during the Cold War: in particular, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The distinctive point about these three states was their colonial or semi-colonial status. China was a semi-colonial state from the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanking right until the victorious 1949 revolution; Vietnam was ruled by the French, and then divided between an American proxy and an independent North Vietnamese state, until 1975 when the last Marines and diplomats escaped from the roof of the US embassy; the Phillipines was of course ruled by the Spanish, and then by a US client network of hacienda owners after a protracted colonial war between the US and the Phillipines from 1898 to 1913. These revolutionary movements were, as with so many other cases across the world, anti-colonial uprisings that expressed themselves in the idiom of Marxism - which is not to say that the leaders of these movements were not serious about intending to construct socialism, but really to understand the uprisings as comprising as their primary element an anti-imperialist dimension, which often intersected with class concerns. This, along with the semi-feudal economic make-up, imposed an unusual amount of ideological and organisational flexibility on the communists. In China, for instance, the crisis of the state began with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and the reaction to it was first felt among urban intellectuals who could get access to the texts of Marx, and later Lenin, and translate this into an appeal to an overwhelmingly agrarian mass. The CCP, when it was founded in 1920-1, had a mere fifty members. Initially, it attempted to forge a base in the urban centres among the working class, but found this both dangerous and inhospitable, and so had to remove to the countryside where 80% of the population lived. They had to face the Nationalists (with whom the Stalinists insisted they form a subordinate bloc, an almost fatal move for them - see Trotsky's critique here), then the Japanese, and then the Nationalists backed by the United States. The Viet Minh, for their part, were able to solve the problem of uniting class war with anti-imperialism by battling the Japanese imperialists and also waging war on famine at the same time. By 1945, both movements had created conditions of dual sovereignty: the Viet Minh siezed Hanoi and created the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in August 1945, while the CCP began an accelerated civil war with the Nationalists in 1946, that finally led to victory in 1949.

The Phillipines, by contrast, did not experience a successful communist revolution. Despite rural disorder and peasant resistance, the movement was hegemonised by the Socialist Party, with which the Phillipine Communist Party merged in 1938. It was not until after the war, and the defeat of the Japanese invaders by the Huks (People's Anti-Japanese Army) that a serious insurgency began. It was evident on the one hand that peaceful peasant resistance was futile against the US client state. On the other hand, the decision to launch a bid for power in January 1950 proved to be premature: there had been insufficient ideological and organisational groundwork, and as soon as the threat became apparent, Washington rushed aid to Manila. Ramon Magsayay was entrusted with 'rural pacification' (counterinsurgency terror), while pledging land reform. The Huk leaders were rapidly captured and the revolt dissipated.

It was this experience that gave rise to America's systematic counterinsurgency strategy during the Cold War. And what this highlights is that, far from being an idealistic clash between two superpowers, or a game of military strategy, the Cold War was essentially about class struggle, in however mediated a form. The Soviet Union could sometimes pose as bearers of the interests of the peasants or working class (although it faced considerable difficulties in doing so, even among sympathetic leaders of the CCP, not least because of Stalin's incredible fecklessness), but the US could not do so. It was unwilling to consider alternatives to patrimonial domination, and did not heed Ho Chi Minh's requests for assistance against colonial domination. For all its claims to represent something different to the former colonial powers, it was essentially the bearer of Western ruling class interests. It was also, on account of the Cold War, able to catastrophically cripple internal dissent through McCarthyism. And because of the economic stability that the permanent arms economy conferred, it could satisfy working class needs enough to diminish the appeal of socialism in any variant. And this process did not simply begin in 1945 with the initial tensions with Russia: it began with the first anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1920s and 30s, with the support for the White Army. It began with European elites supporting fascist movements against communism, and continued with both the US and USSR crushing Antifascist committees in postwar Germany, American forces restoring Emperor Hirohito, British support for far right monarchists in the Greek civil war, Eisenhower forming an historic alliance with Franco in 1953, and the 'Alliance for Progress' in Latin America, which ensured a rolling spree of dictatorships and mass murder.

Well yes, anyway, the Cold War is over, largely because of the historic failure to date of the communist alternative, and because of the collapse of the major state claiming to bear that cause. But it is not hard to detect in the 'war on terror', as it manifests itself in Iraq, Colombia, the Phillipines, perhaps even Venezuela, a continuation of the same policy under different conditions. The 'war on terror' licenses intensified internal repression, and external aggression, just as the Cold War did. It licenses the suppression of trade unions and insurgency in Iraq, just as it warrants the ongoing support for repression in Colombia. It entitled the British government to call striking firefighters 'the enemy within' just as they prepared for the invasion of Iraq. It merits "no protest" zones, and government spying on the populace. It will also undoubtedly be used to justify suppression of anticapitalist demonstrators, who will surely be penetrated by turrrsts.

Yes, it's all over: no, the enemy is still not defeated.