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.