Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

and Italy sought from World War II, they would surely not have obtained by winning; yet they obtained the most significant parts of it by losing. Glory, power, and wealth may all be obtained with less effort and greater certainty by nonwarlike methods. As science and technology advance, making war more horrible, they also make it possible to achieve any aims at which war might be directed by other, nonviolent, methods.

The relationships between political organizations (to us, states) are chiefly political relations, based on power and concerned with influencing the policies of other such entities. We have tended to see such relationships in dichotomies, especially the sharp contrast between violent and nonviolent methods of war and peace. In fact, however, methods of influencing policy form a spectrum without any significant real discontinuities, and range from all-out nuclear warfare at the upper end, down through tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons, then through various levels of nonviolent political, social, and economic pressures, to levels of peaceful persuasion and reciprocal favors, to economic grants and even gifts.

When Khrushchev renounced the use of both nuclear war and conventional violence, and promised to defeat the West by peaceful competition, he was dividing the spectrum into three levels, but in fact it is a continuous spectrum with 100-megaton bombs at the upper end and Olympic Games, International Geophysical Years, and foreign economic aid at the other end. When Khrushchev made his statement, he was convinced that the Soviet Union could outperform the United States on the level of peaceful competition because it could, in his opinion, overcome the American lead in the race for economic development and that, as a result, the Socialist way of life would become the model for emulation by the uncommitted nations. The failures of Socialist agricultural production in Russia, Cuba, China, and elsewhere, and the great triumphs of non-Socialist economies in Japan, Europe, and the United States, soon revealed, even to Khrushchev’s supporters, that the Soviet chances of triumphing over the West by peaceful competition were very small. Conceivably this might force the Kremlin to raise its anti-American activities to a higher level of conflict, even to the level of violence, although probably through surrogates and satellites and in third-party areas (such as southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America).

To prevent such a raising of the level of Soviet-American conflict, it might be worth while for the West to consider the possibility of yielding the Kremlin some victories on the lower, nonviolent, levels, especially if this could be achieved at little cost to us. It might also be worth while for us to consider what must be Russia’s real goals. Obviously preservation of the Communist regime must have a higher level of desirability to Moscow than Castro’s success in Cuba or the Kremlin’s control of Budapest. Thus to the Politburo, now as earlier under Stalin, continued control in the Kremlin has a higher priority than world revolution. The West can help Russia’s rulers get what they really want (their own domestic power), and at small cost, in return for what they can want only secondarily (the expansion of Communism). Thus, like Stalin, they can be forced back to “Socialism in one country.” With rising domestic demand for higher standards of living in Russia, and growing evidence that these are more likely to be obtained under a non-Socialist or mixed economy, they could be forced back to “non-Socialism in one country,” if this strengthened their own control in the Kremlin, as it well might do.

In fact, some such process is already under way. The Soviet Union has always been more conservative and less extremist in international matters than it appeared or sounded. Much of Khrushchev’s truculence, even abroad, was for domestic rather than for foreign consumption. A recent study of 29 crisis situations in foreign affairs involving the Soviet Union in the 1945-1963 period shows that they were aggressive in only four, were cautious in eleven, and were more cautious than aggressive in fourteen. The four aggressive ones were concerned with Berlin, Hungary, the U-2 incident, and Cuba. The study showed that only 8 of the 29 crises were initiated by the Soviet Union, while 11 were initiated by the United States. The general conclusion of the study was that Soviet policy would grow increasingly conservative, since they were primarily concerned with state building and retaining what they have already achieved.

The chief uncertainty of continuing this process arises from the problem of political succession in the Kremlin, a major unpredictable factor. Here the chances are two out of three that the trend would continue in Soviet policy, since the one case of a successor who would reverse the more conservative policy is outbalanced by the two cases of a suc-essor who would retain it or of a disputed succession that would make an active Soviet foreign policy difficult. The fact remains that there are in the Soviet Union no institutional safeguards for any policy , just as there are none for the succession. But it is clear that pressures to continue a more moderate foreign policy will be strong, under any successor, now that the Russians are increasingly convinced that their present achievements are worth keeping, as the pressures for domestic improvements continue, and as their future hopes and expectations along these lines become more clearly envisaged.

In this way the Superpower neutralization (and the included nuclear stalemate) will continue into the future. From this flow three consequences:

1. Movement of Soviet-Western rivalry down to lower, less violent, levels of conflict and competition.

2. Continued disintegration of the two Superblocs, from the inability of the chief Power in each to bring force against its allies because of the need to accept growing diversity within each bloc in order to retain as much as possible the appearance of unity within the bloc. This process is well illustrated by Moscow’s difficulties with China, Albania, and now Romania, or by Washington’s troubles with De Gaulle or with its Latin American allies.

3. A growing independence of the neutrals and uncommitted nations because of their ability to act freely in the troubled waters stirred up by the Soviet-American confrontation.

These changes, rooted in weapon developments and technological changes, have less obvious political implications. Policy and politics are concerned with methods of influencing the behavior of others to obtain cooperation, consent or, at least, acquiescence. In our Western world, power has been based to a significant extent on force (that is, weapons), and to a lesser degree on economic rewards and ideological appeal. In other cultures, such as in Africa, politics has been based to a considerable extent on other considerations, such as kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. Changes in weapons within the Western states system have brought about changes in political patterns and organization that threaten to cause profound changes in political life and probably in the Western states system.

For many centuries, from the ninth century to the twentieth, the increasing offensive power of Western weapons systems has made it possible to compel obedience over wider and wider areas and over larger numbers of peoples. Accordingly, political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states. The national state, its size measured in hundreds of miles, was based, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the weapons system of the nineteenth century, founded on citizen soldiers with handguns and moved (or supplied) by railroads and wagons, could apply force over hundreds of miles. This, in many cases, proved to be approximately the same size as the European linguistic and cultural groupings of peoples; and, accordingly, it became easy to base the popular appeal for allegiance to the state structure upon nationalism (that is, upon this common language and cultural tradition). Languages and cultures covering lesser areas than those that could be ruled over by the existing nineteenth-century system of weapons and transport, such as the Welsh, the Bretons, the Provençals, the Basques, Catalonians, Sicilians, Ukrainians, and others, by failing to become centers for one of these dominant weapons-organized structures, went into political eclipse.