Anders Stephanson, 14 Notes

The following passages are extracted from:

FOURTEEN NOTES  ON THE VERY CONCEPT OF THE COLD WAR
Anders Stephanson, Columbia University
1996, reissued 2007 
www.h-net.org/~diplo/essays/PDF/stephanson-14notes.pdf

“The well-known is such because it
is well-known, not known.”
--G.W.F. Hegel

Two debates took place last year on H-Diplo about the cold war, debates about the problems of conception and periodization. The first, during spring, concerned the ‘end’ and was occasioned by a remark I had made in passing that the cold war was really over in 1963. The second exchange, taking place in the autumn and virtually without reference to the previous exchanges, centered on when this putative war (or non-war) actually began. Aside from demonstrating a lack of institutional memory, the second debate revealed once again the extent to which the concept of the cold war is radically ‘under-determined’; by the time discussion petered out, we were back in the 19th century. The current debate, meanwhile, has typically branched out in various directions without analytical focus.

The following Notes will not rehearse my original periodization; I have argued for it elsewhere at some length. Instead I will attempt to deepen it by reflecting on the logical and ontological character of the cold war, on the conceptual conditions of possibility for talking about something called the cold war. The starting point for this genealogical exercise is the same as that of my periodization, namely, Lippmann’s critique of Kennan’s X-Article in late 1947 which introduces the term itself but also provides the historical key to its concept...  The essential aspect here is that Lippmann spotted in Kennan’s argument a certain gesture of diplomatic refusal vis-a-vis the USSR; and it was this US move (I argued) that made the cold war a ‘war’ when the refusal was institutionalized under the sign of ‘no negotiation unless from a position of strength.

Reading Lippmann, then, produced a diagnosis and a criterion but not any deeper conceptual determination. To achieve that, the cold war must be situated more distinctly within the very opposition that ultimately framed it: war and peace. If nothing else, one should consider what kind of surrender (or peace) the cold war presupposed and embodied; and that in turn requires a derivation of our notions of war and peace. I confess that a more immediate reason for doing this is exasperation with a very tiresome cliché: ‘Now that the cold war is over, etc, etc.’ Every article on international relations seems to begin with it, no matter what the author goes on to argue. As reified punditry, or something akin to advertising language, the pronouncement (often then followed by reference to that well known ‘globalized economy’) presumes a notion of an epoch so inflated and blurry that it can include everything and anything. Historical concepts certainly have the potential of reassembling past experience in novel ways, to serve new needs of the present. But the name [the cold war] in this case is a mere catchphrase. Moreover, behind it lurks not only a seamless, indivisible notion of the cold war as an epoch but also an essentialist principle, according to which everything is a reflection or expression of an original essence. That essence, of course, turns out to be the entire postwar relation, or conflict, between the US and the USSR. It has to be so, because what gives the epoch such a self-evident aura in the first place is its resounding ‘end’ with the Soviet collapse: the end is then retrospectively inscribed in the beginning and the trajectory of the ‘period.’ Histories of ‘the cold war’ can then be rewritten to explain that obvious ‘end.’ The effect is to conceal or obliterate variations in the nature of the relationship. Different periodizations of the era are also barred or simply subsumed, periodizations, say, in terms of ‘decolonization,’ ‘the economic rise of Japan and Germany,’ or ‘the universalization of the European model of the nation-state.’ [emphasis added]

…

I want to see if the very concept of the cold war can be produced, if indeed it ‘has’ a concept or is perhaps better left on the heap of everyday banalities. In short, does it entail any imminent necessity? What must ultimately be interrogated is thus the polarity of the US and the USSR itself, its very givenness. …

From Note 5: Augustine and Aquinas

… Within that shadowy context of imperfection, however, it remained that Christians desired just peace while the heathen wanted an iniquitous one, a perverse peace of domination and subservience, a peace that is “not worthy even of the name of peace.” Good and bad alike, nevertheless, seek some sort of peace. Even pax falsa, wicked peace, as opposed to pax vera, is thus peace of a kind. War, then, is derived and defined in terms of its goal, peace. …

From Note 9: Marx, Engels and Lenin

What Clausewitz generally had in mind was war in a European frame, war as epitomized in a battle performed in a baroque theater. Yet his formative experience from the age of thirteen onwards had been devastating war with the French and he remained uncertain about ‘total war’ as political liquidation. Hegel, on the other hand, stuck to the traditional view that the enemy’s internal order was beyond attack. International (i.e. European) law protected “domestic institutions” in times of war. Hegel’s lineal descendants Marx and Engels thought otherwise. Nation-states to them were irrational and bound to be undermined by the globalization of capital. More originally, they also claimed that the whole apparatus of inside and outside, sovereignty in short, served to hide the real nature of the state, namely, class rule. In a way, then, one was always already in a sort of war, a class war, whether openly declared or merely smouldering. Class conflict was a state of affairs, resulting from a certain mode of production; and as long as it remained, there could be no pax vera, only pax apparens.

… [Lenin's]  vision was followed not by Trotsky’s internationalism but Stalin’s Fortress USSR. At no time was Trotsky’s notorious formula at Brest Litovsk - ‘neither war nor peace’ - in the basic interest of Stalin’s Fortress. Lenin’s view did survive, however, in different and reinvigorated form in the figure of Mao, theorist of protracted civil war and invasion of the enemy’s social order; but that is another story.

From Note 11: Wilson and Roosevelt (i)

For the matrix or logic of the American cold-war project after the war was established by Roosevelt during 1939-41 in his attempt, in my view generally justified, to prepare the United States for (and perhaps steer it towards) the ‘inevitable’ open war.
…
As FDR saw matters, it was in fact inherently impossible to deal with dictators: ‘normal practices of diplomacy... are of no possible use in dealing with international outlaws.’ Out of this notion came the notion of ‘unconditional surrender’ enunciated at Casablanca in 1943 but actually present from the beginning in Roosevelt’s outlook. Symptomatically, he took the formula (he said) from U(nconditional).S(urrender). Grant and the Civil War, a kind of conflict that could indeed only be fought to that end. Henry Stimson expressed this logic in a more unequivocal and radical fashion when he projected onto the whole world Lincoln’s famous dictum that no nation can survive half slave and half free: from now on it was the world itself that had to be either free or slave. This was a prescription for limitless war, indeed the reinvention of war as civil war on a global scale in the name of total victory and the principle of universal right. The idea followed in the spirit of Wilson’s earlier one that the only really secure world would have to be one in accordance with US principles (i.e. those of ‘humanity’). Less obviously, it was also symmetrical with Lenin’s notion of international class war.

From Note 13: Lippmann (ii) and Kennan

… One need not embrace the Soviet position to see that the cold war as embodied in the American stance was utterly against Stalin’s interests, that he would have liked precisely what he said he wanted: negotiations, deals and reduction in tension, coupled with relative isolation, above all, recognition as an equal. Instead the USSR became a pariah.

Gilman and Simpson on Ekbladh, The Great American Mission

H-Diplo Roundtable Review: David Ekbladh. The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Volume XI, No. 35 (2010)


Nils Gilman:

"[T]he argument that all (or even most) postwar development programs were modeled after the TVA, to my mind, is simply unsustainable. It is one thing to argue that the roots of postwar “high modernist” developmentalism can be traced to various specific pre-war “developmental” practices, including the TVA; it is altogether another to suggest that these practices, as well as the ideas underpinning them, did not undergo radical changes during the postwar period.
...
[The] typical colonial vision of development as “an archipelago of schemes” was in the postwar, post-colonial period replaced by an integrated and monolithic vision of “development” as a singular process destined to unify and integrate a world of liberal welfare-capitalist nation-states. In contrast to the fragmentary view of development in the prewar period, the postwar period’s vision of development was integrationist and committed to the notion that “all good things go together” – implicitly, if not explicitly. ...

In his effort to broaden his cast of characters, moreover, Ekbladh’s The Great American Mission ends up undervaluing the role of the postwar modernization theorists, which was to systematize – in other words, to theorize – how the particular practices of the interwar period could be brought together into an intellectually coherent whole. Moreover, the desire to create (and receptivity toward) such a grand unified theory of liberal development is incomprehensible outside the Cold War frame. The challenge to global liberalism posed by an integrated and ideologically committed Communist developmental alternative demanded an equally integrated and committed vision of liberal developmentalism. The postwar discourse of modernization, in contrast to prewar developmental discourse, was explicitly designed by its authors [...] to serve this integrating function. Modernization theory, in other words, framed development in terms of a metahistorical theory that could serve as a tool in the Cold War struggle. This social theory of modernization reached a crescendo around 1959, and thereafter began almost immediately to decay, as some modernization theorists went into government and began to promote the military as a vehicle for modernization – something that seems awfully hard to square with the idea that there existed some unbroken commitment to “the TVA creed.”

The claim of an abiding liberal consensus on modernization might just work if it is limited to talking about the narrow group of policy intellectuals that gathered around MIT, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago in the 1950s, and can perhaps even be extended to the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses in the 1960s. But the broadening of The Great American Mission’s scope to include NGOs, business people, international institutions, and military officials should, in my opinion, have led to precisely the opposite conclusion, namely that there was NO broad consensus on what to do about development. When policy intellectuals and policymakers claimed there existed such a consensus, what these statements really entailed were efforts to sideline objections to their vision. In other words, these pronouncements of consensus were not factual descriptions of reality, but rather normative claims – bids for paradigm consolidation in the case of the social scientists, and bids for hegemony on the part of the politicians. In the end, what made it impossible to uphold the fiction that there existed any such consensus on development were the calamities in the field during the 1960s – from the misbegotten Alliance for Progress in Latin America, to famines in Africa and South Asia, to the political, military and moral disaster in Vietnam."

Brad Simpson:

"[B]y conflating virtually all twentieth century developmental projects, ideas and organizations with modernization Ekbladh obscures the intellectual and policy significance of modernization as a peculiarly Cold War project. And by reifying a ‘liberal consensus’ on development that never really existed he overemphasizes the dominance and continuity of a particular scheme – the TVA-style plan – vis-à-vis other noncommunist visions and programs of modernization, their myriad manifestations abroad and concurrent critiques.

...

Part of the problem here is that the decline of modernization theory cum policy was uneven, and critiques laid out in best-selling books and popular analyses moved at different speeds compared to the academy, much less the bureaucracies and practices of states and multilateral institutions. Even as proliferating international institutions and NGOs reframed the goals of development around poverty reduction and sustainability, modernization discourses persisted in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. The World Bank, for its part, hardly abandoned large-scale, state-led development projects carried out in the name of modernization, despite much argument to the contrary. The early 1970s represented the high tide of its commitment to state-guided population control and green revolution programs, and through the 1980s the Bank funded the largest transmigration program in history in Indonesia, led by the military modernizing regime of Suharto. Indonesia was no outlier – but the site of the Bank’s first and largest country mission, one of the largest recipients of Bank loans and a crucial source of legitimacy for the Bank’s increasingly central role in international development.
...

Though most academics writing about development and the development community more generally had long rejected modernization discourses, some of its core ideas refused to die, ready to be dusted off and hauled back into service after September 11, 2001. As if by intellectual gag reflex, policymakers and popular commentators revived core assumptions of modernization theory as an intellectual framework for apprehending places like Iraq and especially Afghanistan, with militant Islamic revivalism standing in for the basket of cultural atavisms that animated the literature in the 1950s and 1960s.

The “first time as tragedy, second time as farce” quality of U.S. ‘nation-building’ efforts in both countries would be comical if not for their often ghastly human impact. But the TVA seems to have faded as a pivot point of discussion about development in either place. Perhaps the crumbling of America’s infrastructure and the epic failure of Hurricane Katrina has tempered U.S. hubris about exporting its developmental technology elsewhere. In any case the name of the game in Washington now is counterinsurgency (COIN), embraced on both left and right – as in the early 1960s - as the indispensible partner of development, with both carried out as a public-private partnership dominated by the Pentagon and its gushing spigot of militarized aid
dollars."

Reviews of Cumings' Dominion

Bruce Cumings. Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 672 pp.

H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XI, No. 34 (2010)

Jerald A. Combs, SFSU:

"Cumings argues that American history and foreign policy have been dominated by a Western outlook since Washington’s Farewell Address. He dismisses the Atlanticist outlook as one held by a tiny elite and which predominated only in the period between 1941 and the end of the Cold War. Instead of looking across the Atlantic for allies and models, even most Easterners in the period prior to 1941 hated England, despised European mores, and concentrated on continental expansion and internal markets."

Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine:

"Although other scholars have described America’s Janus-faced foreign policy, in which a estern-looking tradition of nationalism, expansion, and unilateralism faces off against the tradition of Atlanticism and internationalism, never before has such an interpretation been so solidly anchored in a deep investigation of the West’s evolving political economy, culture, and involvement with the Pacific. Cuming’s states that the “central problem of the book is how to understand and explain the difference between an Atlantic-facing internationalism and a Pacific-facing expansionism.” One, of course, dealt with Europeans; the other largely with people of color.

...

California’s story is one of gold, Indian extermination, and railroad barons. Texas history is organized around cotton, cattle, oil, and the cowboy mythology. In offering the figure of the loner and the satisfactions of retributive violence, the oil and cowboy cultures of Texas fused together into an ethos that spread through the nation and even the world. For the Pacific and the Caribbean, Cumings lays out the story of colonial acquisition, the “dirty war” in the Philippines that transplanted the fierce traditions of frontier Indian-fighting to overseas imperial possessions, and the triumphalism of the Great White Fleet."

Ander Stepahson, Columbia:

"Pacificism Writ Large, or, Schumpeter in California"

"There are really two related arguments, or two arguments unfolding on different levels that intersect in a single event. There is, first, an argument about expansion and periodization. For a century and a half, the U.S. develops westwards, fairly easily, quite powerfully, facing away from Europe, secure and isolationist (in a manner of speaking). World War II changes all that, turning the U.S. into a predominantly Atlanticist power and for the duration of the cold war as conventionally understood (that is, until 1989-91), so it remains. Another name for Atlanticism would be ‘internationalism.’ The collapse of the Soviet Union then brings into view a kind of generalized (or ‘globalized’) version of that Atlanticist form of hegemonic rule in the 1990s, which is at once the dialectical end of Atlanticism and the preservation of it at some higher level (I am simplifying and rewriting a bit).

Unexpectedly, very unexpectedly for Cumings himself (and me too), this was cut short by a particularly atavistic return in 2001 to some pre-1941 form of unilateralism in the figure of George W. Bush and his cohort...


The second line of argument has to do with that great transformation and its axial event. Government (or the state) had always been involved in development. Witness the gigantic subsidies to the railroads, in turn the constitutive factor in the process. Witness also the intimate connection between state and often individual business on the crucial problem of providing water to essentially arid southern California, a feature amplified by the New Deal and creating a spectacular kind of hydraulic state at the opposite political end of what such a state notoriously was supposed to be. World War II, however, marks a decisive, qualitative shift. Massive infusions of funds serve to industrialize across the board, to connect the west organically to the rest of the nation, while actually also catapulting to the cutting edge of capitalism at home and abroad. Unrepeatable historical and geographic circumstances in combination with federal intervention opened up for a monumental expansion of innovation and entrepreneurship, two already existing features in the region that, in combination with extraordinary natural resources and agricultural prowess, made the west (i.e. California) peerless in capitalist development. California (and the rest, though less so) benefitted enormously from having been created ex nihilo as it were, from being a late developer in world capitalist terms and from having no existing structures to contend with, only abundant resources and incomparable weather, the totality now fueled by cheap water and cheap electricity, not to mention local oil. Paradoxically, this moment also provides the ground for the emergence of rightwing Republicanism, the kind of politics that lives on denigration of taxes, Washington and the government whilst benefiting tremendously from these very institutions, above all in the form of defense expenditure. The combination of forces and the conjuncture following first 7 December 1941, then the advent of the cold war in 1947, and then, finally and irrevocably, the outbreak of the Korean War (in a way) in June 1950, all produced an exceptional space for capitalist development. This, then, is the outside project deployed to rev up what is already there, creating the full-fledged Pacific city on the hill.

...

Schumpeter’s own limits have to do with class and there is indeed nothing much about class in Cumings. This is partly because we are in some Hartzian universe where the bourgeoisie is everywhere and therefore nowhere: California exceptionalism if you will, ‘the clean slate,’ but the main reason is precisely that Cumings is following Schumpeter. The Austrian was preoccupied with the productive disequilibria of creative destruction, innovation and entrepreneurship, with talent and its conditions of possibility. Here he always recognized his deep debt to Marx (and Cumings carefully notes their affinities), above all on the subject of creative destruction, the constant revolutionizing of the means of production. Schumpeter, however, was not concerned with labour and exploitation. Class entered into the account early on as the bourgeois failure to displace the outmoded aristocracy in Central Europe and later, conversely, in the bourgeois failure to find some counterpoint to aristocratic purpose.2 California, as Cumings celebrates it, is presumably a Schumpeterian success in that regard: it never has to face the bourgeois impasse because the rivers of talent never dry up. I merely note this feature in Cumings. All I want to do is render it explicit so we can think systemically about his way of thinking systemically.

...

Cumings’s sizeable intervention had to do with Schurmann’s shortcoming on, inter alia, the issue of state, class and ideology, not to mention his reliance on Schumpeter (“Schurmann hurts his own analysis most when he is consciously being Schumpeterian and anti-Marxian.” 60).

Cumings thinks, by contrast, that consensus rather than conflict is the mark of the U.S. in the cold war, though he also retains Schurmann’s distinction. Evidently, then, there is an interesting essay to be written on Cumings, Schumpeter and Schurmann. Here I will only cite one of Cumings’s remarks which is relevant for his present Conclusion: “Accommodation is a sophisticated strategy that usually draws the fire of narrowminded conservatives who mistake its intent. Yet it is a truly conservative policy for defusing conflict, predicated on maintaining the existing arrangements” (62)."

Stephanson on Gaddis

ANDERS STEPHANSON: "SIMPLICISSIMUS"

New Left Review 49, January-February 2008

Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.

"John Lewis Gaddis has been one of the most ideological figures within the subfield of us ‘diplomatic history’. All historians, of course, operate in and through ideology; Gaddis, however, has been unusual in foregrounding the ideological nature of his works. Though the message to be conveyed has not always been the same, he has been constant in his defence of us interests, and has consistently mirrored—albeit with slight lags—the prevailing attitudes of the powers that be. A realist in the 1970s and neo-Reaganite from the late 1980s onwards, Gaddis was somewhat disgruntled in the Clinton era, but has found the second Bush altogether more congenial. Gaddis’s method, too, has endured across his extensive œuvre: always disdainful of any excessive fascination with the archives, he has preferred to pick out some theme or idea and drive it through with relentless single-mindedness and clarity, subordinating every aspect of the proceedings to his ideological aim. His characterization of Ronald Reagan in his most recent book, The Cold War, applies equally to himself: ‘His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity’.

...

There remains the insurmountable problem called the People’s Republic of China. Where does it fit in Gaddis’s scheme? How could the United States virtually ally itself with the most radical of Communist regimes, which was not even diplomatically recognized, against a far more conservative one, officially committed to the idea of peaceful coexistence? On these issues, Gaddis offers nothing but cursory remarks, murmuring vaguely that the consensus on China is still unclear—as though any such consensual clarity would have mattered to him. This reticence stems from a certain ambiguity on the foundational question of whether the Cold War was a systemic conflict. If a utopian communist such as Mao could decide, on ‘realistic’ grounds, to ally with the us, and if the us could ally with him in the name of triangulation, what systemic dimension could there possibly be?

...

Moreover, pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony cannot be said to form a specifically ‘American’ trinity as Gaddis contends. Indeed, there is arguably no trinity at all: what makes the former two effective is, in the end, hegemony. Without this normative ingredient, pre-emption and unilateralism would become simple tools of classical statecraft, or, put differently, the military house rules of the state of Israel. This, not the redoubtable John Quincy Adams, seems the immediate model."