The Resumption of History: Part 1 — The Davos Consensus, And Its Discontents
by Carlo Graziani
A Turning Point
I’ve been trying to capture what it is about this moment that feels different from the usual tawdry occasions of televised war served up in our media-hypnotized age. It’s not easy. Sometimes a simile is useful. The most helpful simile that I’ve been able to come up with is this: history is like a mile-wide printed paper scroll that emerges from a slot, usually at a glacial pace that allows its contents to be read at leisure, although coherent interpretation of the contents generally must wait until much later. In the past two months, however, the extrusion rate of the scroll has suddenly speeded up to a fantastic rate, so that no reader can keep up with all the new history that has just been written. It seems very clear that a lot of things just changed in the world all of a sudden. But it’s impossible to take a census of everything that just changed, or of exactly what the implications are for the world that we expect to live in when the scroll eventually slows down again.
We seem to be at some kind of turning point in history, a time that we will come to recognize as having brought to a head conflicts long a-brewing, and, I believe and will argue, bookending a period that began at the end of the Cold War, when the long struggle between the West and the Soviet Union ended with the latter’s collapse in 1991. I do think that period has some lessons for this one.
At the time—actually, a couple of years earlier—a young scholar named Francis Fukuyama published an essay, later expanded into a book, called The End of History, which argued that the impending global triumph of liberalism would remove the drivers of historical development (this summary does not do justice to Fukuyama’s argument), leading to a new era in human development. The argument was greeted with a mixture of celebration for its foresight in predicting the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and mockery for its oversimplifications. And of course, today it is apparent that its predictions were simply wrong. But all of this is quite unfair to Fukuyama, who was one of the very few people who not only noticed at the time that big changes were in the wind, but was also actually trying to make a structural effort to peer into the future. Getting it right in 1989 would have required superhuman clairvoyance. Perhaps the lesson to learn from The End of History is that at such moments, merely identifying the correct intellectual tools to use, and the right trends to watch, might be more modest and achievable goals than actually attempting to scry the future.
That’s what I’d like to attempt here, at any rate. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years mulling over various versions of the “how the hell did we get here” question. The last two months have been very clarifying of a number of issues for me, and helped me unify a number of rather scattered threads. I’d like to try to tell a coherent story of our relatively recent past as a means of sorting out some issues of political philosophy that in my opinion we, in the West, have allowed to become entangled, confused, and corrupted, to the point that we nearly forgot how to believe in the ideals that make us “The West” as something other than a geographical descriptor.
With that accomplished, I’d like to do some accounting of the elements at our disposal for understanding the world described by the scroll still shooting out of that slot.
The result will be a work of synthesis, bringing together a bit of history with some political philosophy in a very informal way, in an attempt to form a basic coherent picture. Such pictures are always wrong, in some sense, because they oversimplify. But they can be useful nonetheless as crude guidance. I doubt that we could expect much better tools for understanding the present, much less the future, from a much more refined treatment.
Even so, I’m not entirely sure I can pull this off. Someone ought to try, though.
Why Did The West ‘Win’ The Cold War?
I want to establish a premise: when asking a question like “Why did the West win the Cold War”, I am not inviting a full-up academic debate on this vast, nuanced, textured, difficult, potentially-hard-to-even-articulate-properly question; nor am I extending an invitation to the run-of-the-mill morality-play types of explanations that frequently devolve into NFL-style sack-dances. I don’t have the space in this type of essay for the former, or the patience for the latter. So I will simply state a view that I believe ought not be controversial. The West prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War in virtue of two logically distinct advantages:
- The tangible economic advantage: Western capitalism was organised in a manner that was unarguably more efficient than the Soviet command economy. Even though the latter was, in fact, a war-mobilization economy for almost its entire 74-year history, and hence capable of generating terrifying combat power, its actual economic power was disproportionately small and immiserating to the people imprisoned in its system. In the end, the competition did not turn out to be primarily military. To the extent that the competition showcased economic success, the Soviet bloc started behind, and only fell farther back as technological progress accelerated.
- The intangible ideological advantages: There were aspects of the respective politics of the two blocs that held different attractions to different people. I am going to return to these in some detail later, because I feel that it is important to disentangle some of the confused political discussion that later issued from that era. For now I just want to state that by the late ’80s, it was clear that the justice politics of Marxism-Leninism were quite discredited, whereas there was still credibility to the Enlightenment ideology animating the Western politics of liberty. Basically, “Freedom”. Really, I know how oversimplified this reads. I promise, we’ll get back to this, because it’s important.
I’m sorry if this seem kind of obvious, but my point is that these two apparently innocent, distinct philosophical threads became entangled in damaging, even toxic ways. Have you ever noticed the sleight of hand that occurs in phrases such as “The Free Market”? The word “Free” does two distinct jobs in that phrase: in the technical sense of the phrase (as a neutral, resource allocation algorithm) the word “free” describes the agility of agents in a market to meet each other collectively so as to establish efficient market equilibria; but in the ideological sense it means something very different: it acts as ideological evidence for the validity of what ought to be a value-neutral technical argument. In one implicit portmanteau phrase, we have a conflation of the tangible and intangible “weapons” that “won” the Cold War. Likewise for “Free Trade”, “Free Enterprise”, and so on. Conservative ideologues routinely use that bit of wordplay to cordon off commerce from taxation and government regulation. What sort of pervert would want to tax or regulate freedom, after all?
Of course, by the 1980’s with the advent of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, it was perfectly clear that the erosion of the philosophical distinction between liberty and capitalism was the way of the future, and that the two were destined for fusion into a “neo-liberalism” whose character principally emphasized inviolable international trade relations and national fiscal and budget policies favoring business development, rather than national democratic arrangements.
Well, as the saying goes, you can’t argue with success. In 1991 the Soviet Union, against almost everyone’s expectations, fell down without triggering nuclear armageddon. The new neo-liberal order had won.
The Davos Consensus
Another reason one could argue the West “won” is that at the beginning of the Cold War the challenge presented to the West by the Soviet Union was met by US policymakers through the creation of an international architecture designed to manage the conflict that eventually became known as the Cold War. The purpose of this architecture was to contain the Soviet challenge while limiting the risk of all-out war, and the nuclear global annihilation that was the almost certain outcome of such a war. That architecture, the product of cold, realist, amoral, but mindful calculation, succeeded beyond the hopes of its architects in 1991. In doing so, it rendered itself obsolete.
In a perfect world, a careful reconceptualization of that architecture in light of issues likely to arise in the decades to come would have been thought timely at that point. In the absence of a new existential challenge to replace the Soviet Union, this was too much to hope for. What we had instead was a smug triumphalistic victory celebration. Communism had been defeated by—wait for it—“Free Enterprise”. Forget about liberty—the tangible benefits of Western democracy had won the day. Coca-cola and Benetton and Gucci; Intel, and IBM and Microsoft; Boeing and Airbus, CNN and Disney and Mercedes: these were the manifestations of the West’s obvious superiority over the Soviet system.
This narrative was too dazzling and overpowering to be gainsaid. The Western economies were generating wealth, and wealthy people, at such incredible rates, that it didn’t seem utterly stupid at the time to believe the implication: this is it—economic utopia. Get as smart as we are, and we can all be rich.
This, for want of a better term, is the Davos Consensus. The elite government, business, and media figures who meet and issue positions papers at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meetings can stand in quite well for the smug, detached, entitled stakeholders who subscribed to this “get smart/get rich” outlook on modernity.
Something went wrong with Utopia, though. There were discontents.
The Rise Of The Demagogues
Signs of trouble began to appear almost immediately. You would think that if the neo-liberal social order was so wildly successful at producing prosperity as its elite so clearly believed it to be, then voters would systematically reward the order by electing rulers who subscribed to that order. But increasingly, there were flies in the ointment. Rulers were appearing who didn’t fit the neo-liberal mold.
Alexander Stille once wrote that “Italy has had a rather remarkable record in the twentieth century as a laboratory of bad ideas that have then spread to other parts of the world. Fascism was invented in Italy, as was the Mafia, and left-wing terrorism went further in Italy than in any European country”. This quote is from the introduction to “The Sack of Rome”, his 2006 book on Silvio Berlusconi. This observation seems very prescient to me now, because I believe that Italy did indeed do the honors on a very bad idea due to infect the world (as an Italian-American, I’m not particularly proud of this). Berlusconi, contemptuous of democratic norms, fawningly admiring of power, proudly uncultured, intuitively populist, militantly ignorant, corrupt to the core, and utterly determined to evade all limitations on his own power by any means at his disposal, was indeed a warning and a portent of things to come.
He was just the first. Within a few years there came Zhirinovsky, Putin, and Orban. Yanukovic, Erdogan, and Modi. Farage, Duterte, and Salvini. Bolsonaro, Le Pen, and Trump. All in the Berlusconi mode: an eager appetite for power married to an utter lack of interest in democratic norms.
At first all these leaders and wannabes seemed sui generis. They germinated in wildly dissimilar terroirs, so that it seemed absurd to assimilate them. But they certainly seemed to have no difficulty in finding affinities among each other. For example, there is now ample documentation—in the Mueller report—that Russian military intelligence, undoubtedly at Putin’s direction, explicitly set out to aid the Trump election campaign at a critical phase in 2016, by hacking the Clinton campaign and releasing damaging documents at times calculated to do maximum political damage, and later cultivated and groomed Trump and his acolytes using classic spycraft techiques of agent recruitment and maintenance. Muller also documented the unselfconsciously corrupt enthusiasm with which Trump confidantes such as Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone and many others embraced their seduction by the GRU.
Trump and Bolsonaro’s bromance needs no re-hashing here. Marine Le Pen felt her connection to Putin worth playing up until recently. Narendra Modi’s circumspection on condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine decidedly contradicts his country’s lopsided trading preference for the US over Russia.
Recep Erdogan—who, note, is the leader of a NATO country, with a recent history of military tension with Russia, and a clear zero-sum competition with Russia over Black Sea primacy, is playing both sides in the Ukraine conflict, furnishing weapons to Ukraine, but refusing to take a political stand against the Russian invasion. And, why should he? Where are his political affinities, really? Ideologically, he has more in common with Putin than with Biden.
And all of this without even going into the frenzy of democratic norm-breaking practiced by Donald Trump during the squalid midden that was the Trump Administration itself, and the consequent stomach-turning spectacle of Putin’s effective commandeering of US policy towards Ukraine. How did we get from the “triumph” of 1991 to this? How do we explain the cancerous metastasis represented by this challenge to the neo-liberal order?
I have a candidate explanation: anxiety.
Tomorrow: The Age of Anxiety
All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History
Monday Open Thread
japa21
Did a quick reading. Will need to go back into it with more attention (some distractions currently occurring in the Japa household). At first glance, however, I will have some nitpicks, but so far this is obviously a set-up for the next chapters.
Ishiyama
Rather than asking why the West won the cold war, I would ask what did the West win from the cold war (which wasn’t so cold for the suffering proxy victims in all corners of the globe)?
WaterGirl
@Ishiyama: I think “win” was in quotes for a reason.
jl
Thanks for interesting post, and I will look out for the next one. I can see an argument for anxiety, but I’ll be looking for a good story of where the anxiety came from. Or, since there has always been anxiety, what ramped it up so much in such a relatively short time frame that people started thinking authoritarianism was the way to go.
I’m from the liberal Stiglitz/Dean Baker school of economic thinking, so I have my own opinions, but probably unwise of me to vent and spew my view until I see the argument.
Carlo Graziani
@Ishiyama: What the West “won”, I’m arguing here (but the full argument will be developed over the course of the week) is moral confusion over why it “won” at all.
There were undoubtedly many proxy victims of the Cold War, as you correctly note. It is also true, however, that it was an unprecedented period of lack of direct warfare between great powers. Given that those powers were locked in an irreducible existential struggle, and that such a direct war would certainly have incinerated the globe, I would say that among the real available alternatives, the one that we lived was probably the least bad.
jl
@WaterGirl: I was getting that book learning in college and grad school at the time, and close to international economics and policy eggheads. The conservatives thought that winning the Cold War meant that we would tell everyone WTF to do, and F them. Which is why I think neo-con foreign policy and a lot of that general stripe of national security and international relations, and radical free market policy economists (often not real economists) are working through serious developmental emotional issues rather than working on a grown-up intellectual discipline.
That was a good way to lose the win, IMHO. Or if not lose, at least throw it away thoughtlessly
Edit: I used the word ‘thought’, but what I saw was people sitting back on their desks yelling vicarious victory brags, and I’m not kidding about that. I saw quite a few juvenile spectacles from supposed IR and natsec sages. And the free market econ policy types were wandering around lost in fantasy beyond even the fantastical econ theory world, babbling nonsense.
Feathers
I was hoping that Carlo had learned from the previous debacle, which I read after the fact, but apparently no. This is lazy writing, which would be returned to the student for a rewrite in any undergraduate class. Lazy writing is the outcome of lazy thinking. Maybe I’m wrong but life is too short for this.
And five parts? What is going on around here?
Roger Moore
@Ishiyama:
One thing we undoubtedly won was to incorporate most of Eastern Europe into NATO and the EU. That’s actually a pretty big win, since those countries are increasingly prosperous and a military asset. It shouldn’t be surprising that we won that, because freeing the countries occupied by the USSR was one of the big goals of the Cold War.
hotshoe
@Feathers: You have no more self-awareness than a dog licking its own asshole.
Ohio Mom
I vaguely remember hearing about a book titled “The End of History” and snorting because I was certain history would be back and bite us in the ass upon its return.
I will be interested to read what you mean by anxiety. I put the blame on the insidious way Libertarian beliefs have infiltrated our culture. It’s a philosophy that is antithetical to democracy.
Carlo Graziani
@jl: Yeah, I kind of felt that in a way the neo-cons were the first of the conservatives to become fully deranged, although for completely different reasons than the remainder of the rest of the conservative movement.
While the Soviet Union was a fact of life, they were the extreme part of the spectrum of views of how to approach the problem — the “Roll-back” crowd. They were very wrong, but they were not insane. When the Soviets had the very bad manners to collapse without firing a single nuke, it completely unhinged their world-view. They simply couldn’t understand the world without a main enemy in it to organize their thinking. Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Bolton—those guys were lost. They needed Saddam, as pathetic as he was. We all paid the price.
japa21
FWIW, I think an argument could be made that China won, or, at a minimum, gained tremendously from the Cold War. Viewing the Cold War as only a struggle between the West (which itself is a misnomer) and the Soviet Union can overlook at lot of what was happening in the world.
japa21
@Carlo Graziani: It wasn’t only the neo-cons who needed an enemy. And I think this is where a lot of anxiety comes in. I have a hunch this will come into play in your writing going forward, but human nature is such that people need to have enemies. The Soviet Union represented that enemy not only for the neo-cons, but also almost all of NATO and, quite simply most common citizens as well. When the USSR fell I predicted a rise in racism and racist incidents in this country. People needed others to blame.
As long as NATO was focused on the USSR, they tended to lessen the need for nationalist feelings. With the USSR gone and Russia appearing diminished, the sense of a need to work together was diminished and the need to “regain” pride in one’s country rose ..The stronger the nationalist bleating, the more people responded. The US was actually behind the trend to some degree, but it was festering.
YY_Sima Qian
Marvelous stuff, Carlo!
Anxiety (& hopelessness) lies in the root of most turns toward authoritarianism, going back to Ancient Greece & Rome. Neoliberalism has been quite efficient in creating anxieties among the middle classes.
That is why I am concerned about the swift turn toward “extreme” geopolitical competition (at least the one involving China, Putin just ended the argument wrt Russia). Reactionary forces will leverage the popular anxiety from the competition to promote their reactionary goals, in established democracies such as the US & the UK, & in hard authoritarian regimes like China, & everything in between. Far too many in the liberal camp do not seem to understand that, & are instead fanning geopolitical competition in the false hope that a foreign threat can lead to a domestic consensus toward renewal. The Left wing does seem alert to insidious dynamic, but it is in the process of being discredited by elements w/in that have fallen into apologia for anti-Western regimes, which the reactionary forces are only too happy to harp on. Rather reminiscent of the OG Cold War.
Carlo Graziani
@japa21: One thing I’m not going to touch in this series, but which I think is interesting, is that China does transition to Deng’s opening pretty much during the West’s neo-liberal fusion of its commercial and ideological values. Which makes it much easier to see — very real — hypocrisy in US lectures on democratic values. This is an aspect that I hope it will be possible to explore again later in the week. It’s a bit early for it now.
Uncle Cosmo
Carlo, everything beyond the first 2 paragraphs should have gone “under the fold.” Regardless of how brilliant your writing and trenchant your thesis might (or might not) be. One simply does not post this much verbiage on the front page, forcing blog readers to scroll many pages down just to reach the next thread. It’s a blatant abuse of the privilege of posting on the front page. You deserve to be admonished and, should this behavior continue, have your access canceled and be cast back down amongst us ordinary posters.
(I might be back to discuss your tome once I’ve had time to read it. Or not.)
kalakal
For many in the west at the time this would ring very hollow
Unemployment in the US was 8%, the UK 10.8%, Finland 19%, Spain 24%.
Put another way the employment rate (% of working age employed). in the EU was around 60% and in the US 70 %.
This was the era of ‘greed is good’, ‘I got mine’ with rapidly rising inequality and the demolition, particularly in the UK and US of the idea of society. There was also a recession in the early 90s. This was the era of privatisation, of seeing public goods being sold for a song to asset strippers. I remember being appalled at what the moneyed interests of the West were doing in the ex Soviet Union, It was Thatcher/Reaganism on steroids. There was a great deal of popular discontent in the West, fertile soil for A Man on a White Horse aided and abetted by a, at best supine, at worst propagandist media.
I was overjoyed at seeing the Berlin Wall fall, I was horrified at the way Western Interests dealt with the remains of the Soviet Union.
Villago Delenda Est
I think it’s crucial to note that the corporations of the West loathe actual free markets as the obscure Scotsman imagined them. So “Free Enterprise” isn’t really all that free when the Corporations seek endlessly to rig the game in their favor…the greedy merchants the Scotsman spoke of, working tirelessly to take advantage of the public.
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: I am, on the whole, optimistic. I don’t believe for a moment that the situation concerning relations between the West and China are remotely comparable to those between the West and Russia. There is competition, to be sure, but there are also commonalities of interest. The past decade has seen somewhat poisoned relations, but we do have longer recent history of more carefully-considered relations and behavior.
And there is a tremendous common threat confronting both, that is difficult to ignore now, and is going to be totally unignorable within a few more years: climate change will, I believe, force the same kind of common understanding and action that an alien invasion would in a science fiction novel.
As I say, I’m hopeful that the current business with Russia can be cleared away with relative despatch, after which perhaps one can hope for dialog between grown-ups.
YY_Sima Qian
@japa21: China, & most of E/SE Asia, won the Cold War by minimizing their active participation. They also did not buy into neoliberalism to a great degree. In the 80s, when the US & the USSR were ramping up & maintain high military expenditures, China demobilized 1M men from its army, relegated military modernization to the last of the Four Modernizations (Scientific, Industrial, Agricultural & Military), & essentially starved the PLA. This despite China’s military at the time was clearly obsolescent/obsolete, following China’s nearly 2 decades of autarky, stagnation & anarchy. Deng was a decidedly non-sentimental, über-paternalistic authoritarian, but he was a visionary. I can’t imagine another leader in the world confronting similar security situation as China in the early 80s making a similar call.
The PLA was so starved of funding that it had to go into a variety of businesses. (& why China was the only country selling weapons to both Iran & Iraq in their wear in the 80s.) That did wonders for morale & professionalism, something that had to be reversed from the later 90s on.
tom
@Uncle Cosmo:
not to underbus WaterGirl, but she posted Carlo’s essay, not Carlo, and you can’t hold him responsible for that.
debbie
Carlo Graziani
@kalakal: Well spotted. You’re on to “Anxiety”…
WaterGirl
@Uncle Cosmo:
Holy cow! That’s all on me, Uncle Cosmo. Not Carlo. I try to always remember to do that with long posts, but occasionally I forget, as I did this time.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: It also didn’t quite start w/ Berlusconi. GOP of the “Gingrich Revolution” had already exhibited early signs of the know-nothing populism w/ a strong reactionary bend. Berlusconi was among the 1st to dispense w/ the pretense, though.
EZSmirkzz
Far out man!
I just finished a similar piece highlighted over at “War on the Rocks” written by Andrew Ehrhardt which you probably have already read,
which is very much in your wheel house. As I stated last night, War is failure! Full stop! YMMV, but it is my philosophical statement which I’m sure many people disagree with in its’ entirety. At the moment Putin does at any rate.
Looking forward to the rest of you essay.
WaterGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: I think you will be interested in Part 3!
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: The first Berlusconi government — which admittedly seemed like pure farce at the time — was elected in March 1994, edging Newt out by 8 months :-). Even though he was out of office by 1995, his party was in Parliament, protecting his business interests constantly from that point on, even though he was out of government between 1995 and 2001. During that time, he succeeded in consolidating his private TV stations as effectively a parallel “State TV Network”.
Geminid
Erdogan’s is an interesting case. His country is the most economically developed Muslim country. There is a good educational system, and Turkish engineering companies do a lot of work overseas. There is some economic dysfunction right now, but it doesn’t have to be longterm. Erdogan employs autocratic methods, and Turkey’s democratic tradition is not that strong. The military used to throw democratically elected governments out when it wanted to. While Erdogan was a young man the military hanged the senior civilian leadership, and Erdogan hasn’t forgotten this.
Turkey’s official neutrality in the current war might seem anomalous for a NATO country, but this is the norm for Middle Eastern and North African countries. Many U.S. allies in the region are neutral, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.
The U.S. has been tolerant of this. When Israel’s Foreign Minister recently hosted his counterparts from Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt, and Morocco at the “Negev Summit,” Secretary of State Blinken also attended. The principal topic of discussion was the prospective JCPOA to limit Iran’s nuclear program and it’s ramifications for regional security, not Ukraine. Countering grain shortages was another.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister may not have been invited to this party, but that country has been mending it’s frayed relations with all these countries. Erdogan’s relationship with the U.S. is cool, but better relations with our other allies in the region can help.
Some analysts think Erdogan had this in mind last month when he hosted President Herzog of Israel and proclaimed “a new era” in Turkish-Israeli relations. The two countries relations have been cold but now Ergogan is eager to exchange ambassadors for the first time since 2010.
Carlo Graziani
@EZSmirkzz: I hadn’t seen this. Reading it now. Thanks for the tip!
EZSmirkzz
@Carlo Graziani:
You bet.
Brachiator
There was never a real Cold War. Marxism was always a fraud, a religion pretending to be economic and historical analysis. This is not to say that the West was superior. But the Cold War was simply the old competition of great powers with different dressing.
I suppose that Cuba has tried to keep the Marxist faith. It hasn’t helped them much.
One surprising element, hiding in plain sight, is the degree to which insecure, venal plutocrats have subverted democracy in order to pursue their own aims, and the degree to which Putin could seduce and bribe conservatives to support his own aims.
Carlo Graziani
@Geminid: I have some Views concerning Erdogan, which have less to do with his tactical maneuvering for temporary advantage on the international stage, and more to do with his determination to dismantle of the legacy of Kemal Ataturk. To my mind this makes him appear nostalgic for Ottoman greatness in the same way that Putin is nostalgic for Tsarist splendor.
This could be a bad interpretation. But I’d have to be argued out of it.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl:
And the eye-watering subscription rates, too, WG!
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: I am on the whole pessimist, but do hope for better!
There are many voices (including mainstream ones such as Fareed Zakaria) in the US that recommend right-sizing the China challenge & differentiate the challenge that China presents from that of Russia. One key distinction is the Russia does not believe it has any stake in the existing international order, & wants to sow chaos everywhere & hope to emerge w/ a more advantageous position from the chaos. China OTOH is very much interested in international order, & is not actually inimical to the current order, but wants adjustments/”reforms” to better reflect its power & influence, & wants to eventually occupy a privileged position w/in the order (any order). Putin promotes right wing authoritarianism, China does not care about how the “barbarians” organize themselves. Putin disseminates disinformation to promote political division in other countries, China disseminates disinformation to deflect foreign criticism of its internal repression. Putin’s cyber warfare aims at causing damage, China’s cyber warfare aims at collecting information (IP & info. that might be useful for other intelligence operations.)
However, much/most the conversation at the political & policy level in the US do not capture that complexity. There are even more voices working to conflate the challenges that China & Russia present, especially in the wake of the Russian invasion. I get the sense the Biden Administration has not yet reached internal consensus or coherence on China, but there is a consolidated consensus in Congress that will be hard to budge. (However, the consensus on Congress wrt China may be an inch deep. Other than the notion of needing to be “tough on China”, there is actually less agreement on the means, & even less on the ends that the means are supposed to achieve.)
Omnes Omnibus
That will come as a surprise to all the people who patrolled the IGB, who flew SAC missions, played hide and seek with Soviet subs, and especially to the people who died or were imprisoned for trying to cross the Iron Curtain.*
*I suppose the dead aren’t easy to surprise.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Let’s not blame either of you but rather Uncle Cosmo for being a shit about it.
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus: Maybe what Brachiator meant to say was along the lines of:
“There was never a grand ideological conflict; instead it was crass and conventional Great Power conflict, with all its horrors, and none of the great edification that would have come with the Great Ideological Conflict”.
Carlo Graziani
@Chetan Murthy: Of course, I would—respectfully—disagree with that interpretation as well.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Or as one wag put it, “the last real Communist in the Soviet Union was murdered by 1921″.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy: There very seldom are Grand Ideological Conflicts. Maybe the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps WWII if you squint at it the right way.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Let’s not forget The Crusades.
Carlo Graziani
@Villago Delenda Est: @Omnes Omnibus: @Chetan Murthy: You guys are a bunch of cynics. I hope to change your minds by the end of the week.
Villago Delenda Est
@Carlo Graziani: Omnes and I are both cold war hey check out the IGB type vets. It’s black and white over on the East side of it!
PJ
I understand you are using a broad brush here, so what I write here is not so much a direct criticism as more of a “yes, but . . .”
Many people in America, and in the West generally, tend to look at the rest of the world as if they do not have agency, and are just pawns to be manipulated by great leaders or great powers. We can see that in the various negative reactions to and surprise, on the far right and far left, at Ukrainians deciding to fight for their freedom and sovereignty. For both the anti-Americans and the “realists”, the war in Ukraine happened not because Putin couldn’t tolerate a free and successful, and much less corrupt, Ukraine oriented toward Europe on his doorstep, which success and freedom the people in his country might decide to emulate, but because the US forced him to go to war by expanding NATO to former Soviet bloc countries and Soviet republics, and by tempting Ukraine with the possibility of becoming more like the rest of Europe. Putin really had no choice in the matter, and the Ukrainians should just have to suffer whatever punishment he would choose to inflict for them believing our foolishness.
The Ukrainians, of course, had another view of things, as did all the former Soviet bloc countries and Soviet republics who immediately signed up for NATO and the EU as soon as they could. It turns out, not many people want to be poor vassals to a cruel and corrupt empire of the Russians, whatever name it goes by.
I don’t mean to diminish the role of the US and the rest of the West during the Cold War. The West showed the people of the Soviet Bloc a better, more free alternative, and I think Western culture in particular played a much bigger role than most political analysts give it credit for in leading to the downfall of Communism. But the reason that we “won” was not because of any feats of arms, or moral courage, or amazing economic freedom we had, but because the vast majority of people living under Communism really, really hated it.
It was crap economically, it was crap politically, and it was crap culturally. Even the most idealistic Communists could see by the 1970s that it was a failure. Yes, it did eliminate the previous class structure – most people were now in “one class”, but it was decidedly the lowest middle class. Housing and medical care were guaranteed, but you might still have to wait decades for your own apartment, and in the meantime have to live on top of other families in buildings that hadn’t been kept up since WWII. You could get most basic consumer goods, but you might have to stand in line for hours for them. You might be able to buy a car or a phone, but you would probably have to wait years, or decades to actually get one. You would get paid enough to put food on the table and get drunk every night, but if you had bigger ambitions than that, you had better bury them.
And of course it wasn’t the end of a class system, it just gave rise to a new class system, where the nomenklatura would get paid a little more but mostly exercise their power in privileges and freedoms, like travel, that others would never be allowed. And the nomenklatura, the people who ran the country, were far from the best and brightest – they were the opportunists, hacks, and worms who would say and do whatever the party bosses wanted. So the government and industries were run by amoral incompetents who would never suffer for their stupidity and corruption unless they crossed the party, which they would never deliberately do.
And, of course, if you actually wanted to exercise freedoms guaranteed in your constitution, like freedom of speech, expression, assembly, etc., you would be beaten and arrested, could lose your job, be imprisoned, and your children would never be allowed to get a higher education. It wasn’t the 1950s anymore – you wouldn’t be executed for any of that, but you would be punished.
If it hadn’t been clear before, the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 drove home the point to where it couldn’t be ignored even by true believers – the true ideology of the Soviet Union was just brute violence, and the only thing holding the system in place was the threat of the Soviet Army.
So when Gorbachev took the threat of invasion off the table in 1989, the system collapsed.* Even most of the nomenklatura and apparatchiks were glad to see the end of Communism, because now they could get really rich (and that opportunity, combined with their well-honed corruption, gave us the new oligarchs of Central and Eastern Europe.)
Anyway, the point remains – we “won” because the people of Central and Eastern Europe shook off their chains, just as the Ukrainians have now chosen to resist new chains from Russia.
*Gorbachev seems to have been a real believer in Communism, and thought that it would survive even if people weren’t forced to bow down to it. Note that, at the very same time, the Chinese CP definitely did not take the threat of violence off the table, and used it to crush the Tiananmen Square uprising. They stayed in power, the Soviet CP did not.
Villago Delenda Est
@PJ: A lot of the surnames of the Nomenklatura just happened to be those of old Boyar families. The Who had it right.
PJ
Another quibble: the use of rank nationalism to maintain power didn’t start in the late 1990s, it started at the very beginning of the 1990s, as soon as the Communist Party was out the door. Tudjman in Croatia, Milosevic in Serbia, and Meciar in Slovakia all used racism and perceived historical grievances to stoke hate and consolidate their power.
PJ
@Brachiator: The wholesale corruption of the Republican Party and conservatives more generally is an interesting story which gets started in the 1950s with massive resistance to the changes wrought by desegregation but really picks up steam in the ’70s and ’80s.
Librarian
@Brachiator: I agree that the Cold War was primarily a great power conflict. I have always believed that nationalism is a stronger force than ideology. Communist ideology in the USSR was only superficial; Russian nationalism was the primary force behind Soviet actions. This is why the Cold War did not end when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed; it’s still going on now, only with the same Russia that it has always been fought with, now without the Marxist veneer.
Another Scott
Thanks for this. I think that you are seeing many of the same connections that I have.
One of my hobby horses is that the right wing usually becomes much more powerful in times of economic hardship, and they know that, and so they have a heads I win / tails you lose approach to power. So, it’s not surprising that many of these trends started in Italy, where central governments are usually weak and economic growth is often uneven and problematic.
That’s why I had a feeling of dread with the GQP-strangled recovery under Obama (when sensible investment by the federal government would have put us on a great path…)
Looking forward to the rest. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Yes, a good way of putting it.
There was a great deal of misery caused. And with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world may have come close to destruction.
And I know people who were persecuted by the Soviet and Cuban regimes. I have a high school friend whose family was largely wiped out in China.
YY_Sima Qian
@Librarian: Stalin (despite being Georgian), Mao, Tito, Ho Chih Minh, Kim Il Sung, Castro, etc. were all nationalists 1st & foremost. The Sino-Soviet split was a great power conflict, w/ notional disagreement in Communist doctrine merely another battlefield to be fought over.
Ishiyama
Yeah, I know; but it could have been so much better – “mistakes were made”.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Huh, Italian national politics really has been dysfunctional for that long (& even longer).
Bupalos
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Bupalos
@Carlo Graziani: hmm…I went to Straussian school and was, for a time, paid by neocons through Heritage. Which is now embarrassing and gross.
I’m going to faintly disagree that the collapse of the Soviet Union left neocons rootless and going crazy for enemies. Sort of, but they had a real theory, which in retrospect was insanely stupid and ahistorical. But it was stupid and ahistorical in the precise measure and way that “the west” itself was stupid, and in the precise way that Fukyama was stupid. It was just a belief that history moved in a certain invisible hand, freedom-loving direction. The “victory” in the cold war proved it, as you’re saying.
Everyone was drunk. Neocons were drunk enough to try their big dumb idea, that states could be erased, and would spontaneously catch the invisible hand, freedom-loving zeitgeist and become all orderly and freedomy…because…um…reasons…well anyway just trust us, we read Plato!
We’re still doing a version of this now, on the left. Its currently an idea that there isn’t really any actual valid reason for Trumpism, that it is primarily a rump racial backlash, and that therefore it will go away…just a matter of “demographic change” or some such supposedly inevitable process. Obviously I think the causes are deeper and broader, and I’m interested to read your take on the anxiety society.
Brachiator
@PJ:
The post World War 2 era saw all manner of change. Some Western nations sought to re-impose colonialism, only to find that formerly dominated nations expected the West to live up to promises of freedom.
In America, civil rights activists were pushing the Democratic Party to adopt a strong civil rights plank. This inevitably caused a push back by Southern Democrats.
To greatly oversimplify, but to pick a couple of points. The Democratic Party was an interesting big tent. Truman began to desegregate the military. A good number of black civil rights activists had served in the military during WW 2 and Korea. But in 1952 the Democratic Party VP candidate was a hard core segregationist, John Sparkman.
The Dixiecrats tried and failed to form a viable third party.
Goldwater’s failure to endorse all of the Civil Rights Act pushed more black voters away from the GOP.
1964 was the last time the Democrats won the white vote.
George Wallace scared the GOP by making any kind of showing in the 1968 elections. 1968 was also the first presidential election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
By 1972 the Republicans decided to welcome the racists with open arms. This election was the first in American history in which the Republican candidate carried every Southern state.
The 1972 election was also the first after the ratification of the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18. The newly formed Libertarian Party was also on the ballot.
The battle to be more inclusive of women, nonwhite people, gay, lesbian and transgender people has led to a pushback.
We also see the GOP today trying to recreate a pre-Warren Court America.
kalakal
@Carlo Graziani: Heh, it was how I felt at the time. I remember saying to my then wife that in a couple of decades there would be a terrible price to pay for treating the ex USSR the way Thatcherites were treating depressed industrial areas in the North of England where the steel mills/mines/shipyards were being shutdown
Berlusconi’s superpower, and it should have been a clear warning, and I for one missed it, was the way he was able to completely ignore convention, all the unwritten rules that make govts work in a democracy and not be punished for it. We saw this in spades with Trump, the US political system was confronted with “Well what are you going to do about it?” again and again and much it just folded. An entire political party gave up all pretence at respecting democracy. They were sliding down that road for years but Trump didn’t even bother to pretend. Anyone remember the emoluments clause?
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian:
Oh, lordy, it’s beyond human powers of description. Just in the mid-90’s, I recall reading a message from an Italian graduate student who had a Russian officemate. The Italian fellow would relate episodes from the burlesque that was Italian politics at the time, while his Russian colleague would explain the meaning of the news about scary characters such as Zhirinovsky circling around Yeltsin’s vodka-pickled near-corpse. In the end, the Russian delivered himself of the following verdict, to be imagined in a heavy accent: “Italy is comic version of Russia. Russia is tragic version of Italy.”
kalakal
The end of the USSR was a great opportunity to make a lot of things better, to clear a lot of the sour hangover and unfinished detritus of WW2, Colonialism and Nationalist rivalry. Instead the economic elites of the West used it to increase the power of their version of the corporate state regardless of the cost.
We blew that chance but it may be that the outcome of Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a chance to lance and clean out a lot of the poison, not only in Russia, but in the West. There are plenty of Western oligarchs, politicians, religous fundamentalists all too ready to worship at the alter of Putin. In all the current horror there is chance that neolibralism and its commodification of everything, its treatment of all but the elites as ‘human capital’ , it’s putting current profits before the existential threats of climate change and ecological devastation be reversed.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Damn! I will definitely remember the last line…
LosGatosCA
Very good post will read the next one.
My hot take is a dual candidate explanation: complacency/hubris in the elites and anxiety/discontent in the masses.
Basically, the elites wanted to exploit the post-Cold War ‘opportunities’ for economic gain without making any real case for the masses. While the masses could see that these ‘opportunities’ and the economic rewards of the ‘peace dividend’ were being hoarded by the elites.
Inevitably, the ‘opportunities’ went south because the elites have been decidedly lazy over the past 30 years. Bush/Cheney and the neo-cons amplified the elite lazy trend in every way possible. Then the Great Recession confirmed every suspicion the masses had that they were being systematically disadvantaged economically.
And so you have scapegoats being sought by the masses and racist/cultural demagogues providing them.
wetzel
Hi there Carlo. You and I both owe a lot to Balloon Juice and Putin’s War in our writing, I think. I’ve managed to get over 10,000 words of raw materials for something coherent for the PhD part of an MD PhD, I’ve been working towards for a long time . It’s pressing me with another 100 points on the Holmes Rahe scale. I don’t know about you. I can feel it. Everybody can feel it. I hope it’s a turning point like you imagine.
I hope it will be the Star Trek door, the final victory for the international rule-based system, like Fukayama portended, the events which will later be seen as the final straw towards world acceptance of democracy and government based on the concept of popular sovereignty, etc.
My brain lights up with a whole lot of cautionary alarm bells and problems with the verifiability criteria for meaningfulness. First of all, Fukayama has a terrible philosophy of history in depending on Hegel positively. You cannot ground phenomenology on a concrete idea. It becomes a form of will to power, a compliance thought mechanism, to claim history is on your side, but not only that, we reflect it ourselves in our own enlightened appreciation of how well things have gone for us. It’s no different than saying God is on your side.
I think whatever is strong in the West which might save the day is there is a faith in the self-evident dignity, or sacred character of the individual, and this is embedded in the Constitution of liberal democracies. I think it is better to situate this aspect of Western democracies in existentialist humanism. This is better to situate it within common sense, I think. Basic general revelation.
This is better than a dialectic of enlightenment, the American enlightenment, or however it is expressed in Fukayama, the idea of Manifest Destiny.
There have had a few Walpurgas Night’s of writing here at Balloon Juice for both of us! Credentials don’t matter. Philosophy is social. I am trying to break your ideas. It is the pre-Socratic way. Claims need evidence or rational justification.
There is an acrid glow in the sky. You understand how somebody like W.H. Auden would be awake to it September 1, 1939.
I’m really worried the West is going to puff up like a rooster, all the while China and Russia are taking us down the road into scientific totalitarianism. While we get drawn into reciprocal violence with them, their genocides and our own, we will not be able to understand. We will not be able to assimilate, in Piaget’s language of cognitive development. When you can’t assimilate stimuli, your schemas have to change. How are your schemas changing to accommodate to inhumanity? How did your schemas change to accommodate to the inhumanity the Iraq War, of Abu Graeb? While Boris Johnson parades around Kyiv, he is sending the Syrian victims of genocide to Rwanda. How his poll numbers rise!!
Many of those Syrian refugees are actually congregants of the very first physical churches founded by Jesus’ own disciples, or those that knew them, in that part of the world. Genocide is making us inhuman. Whether democracy, liberty, fraternity and humanity are going to prevail or whether it will be the unconsciousness of scientific totalitarianism, I am much less sanguine. This is because the transformation of a liberal democracy into a fascist totalitarian government is spontaneous in the thermodynamic sense. It is irreversible. Both China and Russia will be more stable if this happens to us, and their information war is more sophisticated than ours because they have phenomenology and have no qualms against classical, operant and cognitive methods in black propaganda.
I think our leadership, in its plain spokenness, Biden. I think they’re doing a good job. Zelensky too. There it’s like Ukraine reached into a barrel and pulled out Lincoln.