How
can International Relations Theory help us to understand the Cold War
© Barry
Gilheany
This
essay explores the course of the Cold War from its origins in the years in the immediately
after the end of World War II in 1945 to its endgame in the collapse of the
Soviet Union and its communist satellite states in the largely peaceful
revolutions which spread across East-Central Europe in 1989-1991. It tries to explain these events through an
exploration of the main theories of International Realism; namely realism and liberalism. It looks at why none of them anticipated how
the Cold War would end in the manner that it did. It then examines alternative approaches to
studying International Relations such as constructivism and critical theory. It
concludes by validating much of the methodology of those latter approaches in
that they take on board the lived experience of people and nations as opposed
to the reductionist study of states as actors that Realism especially has
engaged in.
Writing
about the course of the Cold War, Joseph S Nye, Jr asserts that the absence of
World War III in the second half of the twentieth century was a remarkable
phenomenon bearing in mind its violent first half. The Cold War was a period of intense
hostility between the two superpowers that emerged from World War II, the
United States and the former Soviet Union, without actual war between the two. Armed conflict did occur on the peripheries
of their respective spheres of influence but it never developed into direct
fighting between the two (Nye Jr, 2005).
It was overtly an ideological struggle between liberal capitalism and
Marxism-Leninism but as it progresses through its various stages it became as
much a struggle for spheres of influence and resources between the two
superpowers.
The
Cold War lasted four decades, from 1947 to 1989. The height of the Cold War was from 1947 to
1963, when there were few serious negotiations between the United States and
the Soviet Union. By contrast, in the
later phases of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s there were many contacts
between the two superpowers and there were constant negotiations on arms
control treaties. The accession of power
by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union heralded the end of the Cold War as
Soviet foreign policy underwent a fundamental transformation leading to the
collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in 1989 and the eventual
breakup of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 (Nye Jr, 2005 pp112-113).
The
early stages of the Cold War can be divided into three phases: the gradual
onset from 1945 to 1947; the declaration of the Cold War 1947-1949 and its
height from 1950 to 1962 (Nye Jr, 2005 p.118)
It
must be stated that neither the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, nor the US
President Harry S. Truman (nor his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt who had
died in 1945) sought a Cold War. Six
issues contributed to its onset: Stalin’s refusal to hold free elections in
Poland and his creation of puppet communist governments in other parts of
liberated Eastern Europe according to his interpretation of the Yalta agreement
in February 1945 ; the termination by the US of its lend-lease aid programme in
May 1945 to its wartime allies and later refusal of Soviet requests for loans
in February 1946; the divisions in
Germany over the establishment by the US, UK and France in the western zone and the consequent tightening of
Soviet control in the eastern zone; the Soviet declaration of war on Japan and
its seizure of Manchuria and four islands in the north of Japan; the refusal by
the Americans to share atomic secrets with the Soviets and subsequent rejection
by Stalin in 1946 of the proposed Baruch Plan for United Nations control of
nuclear weapons and finally events in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean
including Soviet refusal to withdraw troops from Northern Iran and its exertion of pressure on Turkey plus
the civil war in Greece where communist forces appeared to be winning. The latter developments contributed to
Western beliefs in Soviet expansionism which were given full expression by
Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri in February 1946
and warnings by George Kennan, the US Embassy in Moscow charge d’affaires, about Stalin’s true intentions (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.118-120).
The
conflicts in Greece and Turkey led to the second phase, the declaration of the
Cold War from 1947-1949 as the US deliberated whether to take over Britain’s
traditional security role in the Eastern Mediterranean; a role it felt it could
no longer fulfil due to its weakening by World War II. The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in
1947 in which President Truman talked about the need to protect free people
everywhere from subjugation by armed minorities and external powers was the
justification for US help for Greece and Turkey and represented a sharp break
from the isolationism of US foreign policy prior to World War II. The policy of containment that flowed from
the Truman Doctrine had within it significant ambiguities vis-a-viz whether the
US needed to contain Soviet power or communist ideology which were to become
salient with the later split in the global communist movement (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.120-121).
Mistrust
between the West and the Soviet Union heightened with the rejection by Stalin
of the Marshall Aid economic recovery programme for Europe on the grounds that
that he saw it as an economic assault on his security cordon in Eastern Europe;
when Czechoslovakia showed an interest in accepting Marshall Aid a communist
coup followed in 1948. The blockade of
Berlin imposed by Stalin in response to US plans for West German currency
reform led to an airlift of supplies by the Western powers and US began to
plans for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) which was established
in 1949 (the Soviet response was the Warsaw Pact) (Nye Jr, 2005 pp.122).
The
explosion by the Soviet Union of the atomic bomb in 1949 and the victory of the
Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war the same year engendered alarm in
Washington which was expressed by the secret National Security Council Document
68 (NSC-68) which forecast a Soviet attack in four to five years as part of a
plan for global domination. NSC-68 called
for a massive increase in the US defence budget, a call which President Truman
resisted until the invasion of South Korea by the communist North in June 1950
at the prompting of Stalin. Three years
of war followed between United Nations forces commanded by the US and North
Korea and its Chinese Communist allies (who had intervened after the UN forces
who had pushed the retreating North Korean forces above the 38th
parallel which divided the Korean peninsula and approached the Yalu river which
divides Korea from China) before a truce was signed in 1953. With the emergence of a seeming communist
monolith, the Cold War blocs solidified and communication between the two sides
almost ended.
Throughout
the 1950s US policy under President Eisenhower vacillated between rolling back
and containing communism and after the death of Stalin in 1953 his successors
in the Soviet Union; most notably Nikita Khrushchev did try to thaw Cold War
relations. Khrushchev sought a final
settlement of World War II so he could copper-fasten the Soviet hold over Eastern
Europe and exploit the opportunities presented by decolonisation in the Third
World. However his aggressive negotiating style failed to bring any
reconciliation with the Americans. The
Cold War then entered its most dangerous phase ever with the building of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the
verge of all-out nuclear war (Nye Jr, 2005 pp.129-130)
Post
the Cuban missile crisis there was a gradual relaxation of tensions of détente
between 1963 and 1978. There was a
Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and a Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. There
was a growth in trade. The Vietnam War
led to a growing public disillusionment with interventions in the USA. President Nixon engaged in rapprochement with
China in 1972 in order to create a three-way balance of power in Asia (Nye Jr,
2005 p.130)
However
hostility returned in the late 1970s due to the nearly four percent annual
increase in the Soviet defence budget including new heavy missiles, Soviet
interventions in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan and the rightward drift in
American politics leading to the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980
who talked about the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.130-131). In response to the Soviet
SS-20s, Cruise and Pershing II missiles were deployed by NATO in Western Europe
and the Reagan administration developed its “Star Wars” or Strategic Defence
Initiative (SDI) to develop weapons in space.
However
the reincarnation of the Cold War of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a
shadow of its earlier self in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. Ostpolitik relations between West Germany and
Eastern Europe and the Helsinki Accords of 1975 ensured that Central Europe was
free of confrontation, while strategic parity of nuclear weapons prevented
another Cuba. According to Lebow and
Risse-Kappen, this Second Cold War was a search for strategic advantage and a
limited competition for influence in the Third World (Lebow and Risse-Kappen in
Lebow, end, 1995). They claim that by
the time of Gorbachev, East-West relations were fundamentally stable. The superpowers took each other’s commitment
to avoid war for granted and had created a matrix of arms control and “rules of
the road” agreements that supervised their strategic competition and
interaction. These accords were
sufficiently robust to survive the shocks of Afghanistan and Star Wars. Gorbachev’s initiatives to free Eastern
Europe and to withdraw from Afghanistan were built, they argue, on this
pre-existing foundation and his policies represented the final stage of a
reconciliation that had been proceeding unevenly since the death of Stalin
(Lebow and Risse-Kappen, 1995 pp.7-8).
The
Cold War period was exceptional in that it was one of protracted tension that did
not end in a war between the two rival states (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113). Because of its unusual trajectory, the Cold
War offers, in the words of Nye, a unique perspective on International
Relations and illustrates the dynamics of two possible foreign policy choices:
the choice to deter and the choice to
contain (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113) Before
assessing the role of International Relations theories in the understanding of
the Cold War, a brief discussion of the nature of International Politics is in
order.
Nye
defines international politics as
politics in the absence of a common sovereign, politics among entities with no
ruler above them. Consequently
international politics is often called anarchic in the sense that there is no
higher government unlike domestic politics where the government has a monopoly
on the legitimate use of force. Since
international politics is the realm of self-help, and some states are stronger
than others, there is always the danger of them resorting to force (Nye Jr,
2005 np.5)
There
are two main approaches to International Politics: the realist and liberal. Realism has been the dominant tradition in
thinking about International Relations and can
trace its intellectual ancestry to the “state of nature” that Thomas
Hobbes wrote about in the seventeenth century where, in the absence of an
absolute sovereign or Leviathan, life was nasty, brutish and short. For the realist therefore the central problem
of international politics is war and the use of force, the central actors are
states and the beginning and end of the international system is the individual
state in interaction with other states.
Realism has been most prominently associated with the writings and
policies of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was comprehensively
theorised by Hans J Morgenthau in his book Politics
among Nations[1]
originally published in 1948.
The
other dominant tradition is called liberalism
which can be traced back to the nineteenth-century philosophies of Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Liberals
envisage a global society that functions alongside the states. Trade crosses border, people interact with
each other across frontiers and international institutions such as the United
Nations perform some international governance functions. Liberals argue that because the scenario of
Hobbesian anarchy often evoked by realists focuses on extreme situations, it
discounts the growth of economic interdependence and the evolution of a
transnational global society (Nye 2005, p.5).
In
the 1980s, scholars on both sides of the realist-liberal divide attempted to
construct more deductive theories similar to those of microeconomics. “Neorealists” such as Kenneth Waltz and “Neoliberals”
such as Robert Keohane developed structural models of states as rational actors constrained by the
international system. The increasingly reductionist and state-centric nature of
both major approaches was, in the eyes of new and diverse group of theorists
known as “constructivists”, were proving insufficient tools in the
understanding of long-term changes in global politics (Nye 2005, p.7)
On
realists and neo-realists’ accounts then, the Cold War developed out of a loose
bipolar international system consisting of the US and USSR who had emerged as
the dominant superpowers after World War II.
Peace was maintained through containment, a specific American policy of
containing Soviet communism so as to promote a liberal economic and political
order (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113), and a balance of terror created by both sides’
possession of nuclear weapons. Classic
realism took it as axiomatic that all states would define their interests in
terms of power. Neo-realists substituted
a universal desire for security for the traditional focus on power but within a
self-help system that they assumed was anarchic (Herrmann, 1995) Security typically depended on the
acquisition of power, whether military or alliance based pace NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the arms races which both
superpowers engaged in.
The
Cold War ended because one superpower, the Soviet Union, voluntary relinquished
its strategic role and ambitions due to its chronic economic difficulties. The opening of Soviet archives revealed huge
disparities between the Soviets and the US in respect of military and economic
resources; this asymmetry of power seriously undermines balance of power
accounts of the Cold War. In the words
of John Gaddis, International Relations specialists failed to see the end of
the Cold War coming (Gaddis, 1993). With
their emphasis on states and international systems, they relegated the domestic
and human dimension of decision-making.
Abstract reasoning and hard facts counted more for them than the
understanding of foreign languages and culture and the uniqueness of particular
personalities and moments (Roberts A, 2008).
The
subsequent soul-searching among International Relations scholars contributed to
the emergence of the ‘constructivist’ school,
referred to above, which took proper account of human consciousness and
how lived experience shapes each individual’s and country’s perception of the
world (Roberts A, 2008 p.339).
Constructivists
have argued that realism and liberalism fail to adequately explain long-term
change in world politics. They emphasise
the importance of ideas and culture in shaping both the reality and discourse
of international politics. They draw
upon different disciplines to examine the processes by which leaders, people
and cultures develop their identities and learn new behaviour. For example they will ask why practices which
are now universally abhorred such as slavery and apartheid used to be
acceptable. Constructivists point out
that concepts such as nation and sovereignty are socially constructed, not just
“out there” as permanent reality (Nye, Jr, 1995 pp.7-8).
Closely
related to constructivist approaches is critical theory in International
Relations which in its analysis of subjects such as the role of women, gender,
ethnicity and religion can provide the necessary links between International
Relations and International History (Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000).
In
particular, feminist theories of International Relations raise a very different
set of questions to those posed in mainstream International Relations. They critique notions of power and what
constituted the public sphere of the Cold War. In the context of the Cold War,
Cynthia Enloe describes a new picture of diplomacy in her book Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist
sense of international politics.[2]
She argues that the skills of the unpaid diplomatic wives were as important
to the smooth running of diplomatic activity as those of civil servants in
foreign embassies. Her feminist story of
international politics encompasses not just the diplomat’s wife but also the
prostitute servicing military bases and the low-grade workers in Third World
economies.[3]
(Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000, p.753).
In
conclusion, I concur with Richard Herrmann’s contention that abstract models of
the international system such as those provided by realist and liberal
theorists are not true or false. They
are more or less accurate representations of some part of world politics
(Herrmann, 1995 p.263). Regarding the Cold War, the major defect with realist
theories in particular was their tendency to make predictive claims; their
failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet bloc and consequent end of the
conflict and to recognise the power asymmetry between the US and the Soviet
Union hoisted them on their own forecasting petards. The lessons for International Relations
theory in the future is that it must make greater use of narrative and the
lived experience of a wider set of actors than bureaucratic and ruling elites
as analytic tools if it is to make sense of International Politics in the 21st
century.
Bibliography:
Gaddis,
J., Winter1992-93: International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War International Security 17(3), pp. 5-58
Hermann,
R. (1995)Conclusions: The End of the Cold
War – What Have We Learned in Lebow, R. and Risse-Kappen (eds.), International
Relations Theory and the end of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University
Press
Kennedy-Pipe,
C., (2000) International History and
International Relations Theory: A Dialogue beyond the Cold War. International
Affairs, 76(4), pp.741-754
Lebow,
R. and Risse-Kappen, T. (1995) Introduction:
International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War in Lebow, R. and
Risse-Kappen, T (eds.), International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University
Press
Lebow,
R. (1995) The Long Peace, the End of the
Cold War, and the Failure of Realism in Lebow, R. and Risse-Kappen, T
(Eds,), International Relations Theory
and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press
Nye,
J, Jr. (2005) Understanding International
Conflicts. An Introduction to Theory and History. Fifth Edition. Longman Classics in Political Science: London: Pearson
Roberts,
A. (2008) International Relations after
the Cold War. International Affairs 84(2), pp.335-350
©
Barry Gilheany 2015
[1] Morgenthau, H, 1973. Politics
Among Nations. Fifth Edition New York: Knopf
[2] Enloe C, 1989 Bananas,
beaches and bases; making feminist sense of international politics. London:Pandora
[3] Enloe C, 1993 The morning
after: sexual politics at the end of the Cold War Berkeley, CA: University
of California Pres
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