This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.
—Josef Stalin, April 1945
FOLLOWING ITS UTTER DEFEAT in May 1945, Nazi Germany was occupied by Soviet, American, and British troops, all with their own geographic zones. (France was soon ceded a zone by the Americans and British.) The Allied governments were undecided, individually and collectively, about their plans for Germany. Clearly the Nazi regime must be dismantled and Germany disabled from aggression. But elites disagreed over how far to punish and how far to rehabilitate the nation. Toward the close of his life, Franklin Roosevelt had leaned toward the plan proffered by Henry Morgenthau, his Treasury Secretary, that would render Germany permanently agrarian and, Roosevelt reasoned, reassure the Soviet Union that it could work with America in the future. But others in the U.S. government, including former ambassador to Moscow Aver-ell Harriman, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and George Kennan, opposed the Morgenthau Plan because they feared already in 1945 that the Soviets would form and dominate a communist bloc in the lands they had liberated. Hull told Roosevelt that the Morgenthau Plan would embitter and impoverish Germans so much “as to minimize the odds that democratic institutions could take root.”1 Still, at first the Western allies carried out a relatively harsh reconstruction plan in Germany, with no evident plan to build democracy there. In particular the French, once given their own occupation zone by the British and Americans, were only interested in keeping Germany divided and weak and in annexing the industrial Saar region.2
More punitive still were the Soviets, who had lost twenty million people in the war and now set about plundering their German zone and telling the world that they opposed German reunification. In June 1946, however, following an electoral defeat for France’s Communist Party (PCF), Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov began to change tactics in Germany, announcing that Moscow—unlike the Western allies—now favored a united Germany.3 The Soviets had already merged the old German Communist Party (KPD), which had consistently attracted 15-20 percent of the vote during the German Weimar Republic,4 with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in their zone to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED). As General Lucius Clay, Deputy Governor in the U.S. zone, quickly saw, the Soviets thought of Germany as a prize in their increasingly competitive relations with the Western powers. Stalin wanted a united Germany that would be in the solidifying Soviet bloc. Clay urged James Byrnes, the U.S. Secretary of State, to make a counter-move that included a promise to rebuild Germany into a democracy. As Jean Edward Smith writes, Clay “was convinced that a united Germany could be attained and that liberal, democratic values would ultimately prevail. The result would be to extend Western influence to the Soviet zone and bring Poland and Czechoslovakia into direct contact with democratic ideas.”5
In September, Byrnes finally accepted Clay’s advice and announced in Stuttgart that America was going to reconstruct a Germany not only united but democratic.6 In December, Byrnes and Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, announced the economic merger of the British and U.S. zones into Bizonia.7 This Anglo-American cooperation alarmed the Soviets. In March 1947, Marshal Vassili Sokolovski, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet zone, walked out of a meeting of the Allied Control Council in Berlin.8 In June, George Marshall, who had replaced Byrnes as U.S. Secretary of State, announced his famous plan for the reconstruction of Europe. Marshall invited Soviet participation, but Stalin refused and ordered all communist parties in Europe to do likewise. In September, Stalin formed the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), a successor to the old Comintern (but limited to Europe), and ordered all member parties to end the wartime Popular Front strategy of cooperation with “bourgeois” parties. Stalin intended this move to intimidate the liberal governments into coming to terms over Germany. It had the opposite effect, driving them into still closer cooperation with one another and opposition to the Soviet Union.9
In 1949, the French merged their zone with Bizonia, and soon after was formed the Federal Republic of Germany, a democratic member of the now-solid Western bloc. During the late 1940s, the two major parties that emerged in West Germany were the Christian Democratic (in alliance with the Bavarian Christian Social Union), led by Konrad Adenauer, and the Social Democratic, led by Kurt Schumacher. Both men and their parties were adamantly anti-communist and hence Washington (which preferred the Christian Democrats) could trust them to keep West Germany out of the Soviet bloc and indeed from declaring neutrality.10 The Soviets, meanwhile, ended up establishing the SED-ruled German Democratic Republic or East Germany, a loyal part of the Eastern bloc. The timing of the Western decisions suggests that competition with the Soviets in the unfolding Cold War, rather than a pure desire to spread liberty, led the U.S. and British governments to promote liberal democracy in Germany. But it was no accident that the Anglo-Americans promoted that particular regime. In the late 1940s, European societies were highly polarized between communists and radical socialists, who were pro-Soviet, and Christian and social democrats, who were anti-Soviet and, over time, became pro-American.
As Soviet-American rivalry deepened, then, the incentives grew for the Americans to take advantage of the anti-Sovietism of the Christian and social democrats in Germany and to use their occupying forces to remake Germany into a liberal democracy. A parallel growing incentive faced Stalin. Not only were Soviet and American policies endogenous—the two powers were in a spiral model—but their reconstruction policies were endogenous with the polarization of German elites. The more the Americans (and the British) did to build liberal democracy, the more pro-American became German democrats and the more anti-American became German communists and radical socialists. The more the Soviets did to build communism, the more anti-Soviet became German democrats. And this ideological polarization was transnational: elites throughout Europe and elsewhere were paying attention, networking with Germans, and solidifying into ideological blocs as well. The nascent Cold War consisted in part in transnational ideological polarization precisely because that polarization helped drive the forcible regime promotions by the superpowers that divided Europe into two blocs.
In this chapter I offer an explanation for the long wave of forcible regime promotion that marked what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “short twentieth century.”11 As seen in figure 6.1, promotion during this long wave, as in its two predecessors, was uneven across time and space. Some decades featured isolated incidents; the largest cluster came in the years following the Second World War, when leaders of the United States and Soviet Union installed new regimes in most of the lands their militaries conquered. Tying these promotions together in a single long wave is that the regimes promoted were generally of three types: communist, fascist, and liberal-democratic. The regime whose legitimacy crisis ushered in the grand struggle was constitutional or parliamentary government, the model on which most European polities had converged in the 1860s and 1870s (chapter 5). Early in the twentieth century, many elites became convinced that the predominant reforming conservative regimes that had been reconstituted in the 1860s and 1870s were not delivering on their promises. Communism developed in the 1910s as a distinct alternative with transnational appeal, and most constitutional governments reformed themselves into liberal democracies partly in reaction. Fascism appeared in the 1920s as an alternative, more militant way to combat communism. Fascism was virtually wiped out by the defeat of Nazi Germany, and communism and liberal democracy carried on their struggle until the late 1980s.
Figure 6.1 Forcible regime promotions, 1880-2010
Types other than these three were promoted during the twentieth century. In the Middle East from the 1950s through 1970s, Arab nationalism was at issue. French, British, Syrian, Egyptian, and U.S. forces intervened for or against Arab socialist regimes. Arab socialists had affinities with communists and sometimes cooperated with them. But their ideological struggle was against a different foe: traditional Islamic theocracy, a regime that had been in crisis since the 1910s. I discuss this ideological struggle in chapter 7.
Another type of promotion, more infamous, was U.S. support for authoritarianism. Authoritarianism was not a transnational ideology like fascism but a pragmatic arrangement in which a dictator and cohort of elites maintained a domestic order acceptable to the U.S. government. These American promotions fall into two types. The first, comprising U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1900s through the 1930s, involved the U.S. Marines’ landing and helping one faction in a civil struggle. These cases—Cuba 1906, Nicaragua 1910, Honduras 1911, Dominican Republic 1912, Nicaragua 1912, Mexico 1914, Dominican Republic 1916, Cuba 1917, Honduras 1924, and Nicaragua 1925-33—appear in figure 6.1, but are not explained by the transnational ideological struggle among communism, fascism, and liberalism that explains most promotions in this chapter. Although transnational ideological networks existed in the Western Hemisphere, these interventions are better explained by a more conventional economic-interest hypothesis reflected in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1904:
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.12
Roosevelt was referring to these countries’ ability to maintain internal order so as to service their debts and protect foreigners’ assets, and he had in mind in particular Colombia’s refusal to allow the United States to build the Panama Canal.13 Measured in economic terms, the Roosevelt Corollary worked as designed: U.S. economic predominance was established and the average sovereign debt price in Latin America and the Caribbean rose 74 percent after these interventions.14
The second class of U.S. interventions on behalf of authoritarianism took place during the Cold War in what came to be called the Third World. The majority of these interventions did not involve the direct use of American force, but rather economic and military aid and, in cases such as Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, covert action. Those cases do not qualify as forcible regime promotions under the coding rules used in this study. (Cases that do count include Lebanon 1958, Laos 1964-73, South Vietnam 1965-73, the Dominican Republic 1965, and Cambodia 1970-73.) But U.S. support for Third World authoritarianism is still relevant to this study for four reasons. First, such support provides numerous examples of state leaders promoting a regime type other than their own—indeed, sometimes replacing liberal democracy with authoritarianism.15 Such promotions have precedents—Kings of France sometimes promoted Protestantism (chapter 4), the putatively republican Louis-Napoleon promoted absolute monarchy in the Papal States in 1849 (chapter 5)—but the Cold War featured an unusually high number of them. Second, American leaders still cared enough about the regimes of these states to spend resources to preserve or overturn them. Completely ignoring these cases because overt military force was not used would mislead us into thinking that the United States was less active in the Third World than it actually was, and to underestimate the degree to which U.S. leaders manipulated regimes there.16
Third, it is important that most of these non-forcible interventions entailed support for anti-communist authoritarians. Washington clearly was not indifferent about domestic regimes in the Third World, any more than it was in Europe or Japan. As in the German case rehearsed above, Washington’s overriding concern was keeping communists out of power precisely because communists were pro-Soviet. In Europe and Japan, Washington could do this by promoting liberal democracy because even socialists in these countries ruled out working with communists (with the temporary exception of Italy, discussed below). Conditions in the Third World were different. In recently decolonized regions, social democrats were often willing to cooperate with communists because they shared some goals such as land redistribution and industrialization. Fourth, that U.S. support for authoritarian regimes was usually practiced through means other than direct force is significant. Direct use of military assets entails costs and benefits not only in direct material terms, but potentially in normative terms as well. America’s global reputation would have suffered even more had it sent in the Marines to topple a democratically elected government in a time when America presented itself as the preeminent champion of liberty.17
This chapter will show that a majority of forcible regime promotions in the twentieth century was part of the long transnational contest among advocates of liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. As in past cases, the two main types of agent perpetuating this contest were transnational ideological networks and the governments of great powers. When a country became unstable domestically, rulers of great powers would have the usual incentives to promote their regime or at least undermine a rival regime. The same incentives faced rulers of great powers when they occupied countries following a war—in this case, the Second World War, which also eliminated fascism from the competition. The long wave that covered most of the twentieth century had its origins in the legitimacy crisis afflicting constitutionalism in the late nineteenth century. It was only resolved in the 1980s when communism proved decidedly inferior to liberal democracy.
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw virtually no forcible regime promotion and, in the same vein, only weak ideological polarization across the states of the Westphalian system. Elites continued to speak of ideological solidarity and threats from opposing ideologies, as they had prior to 1850 (see chapter 5), but governments did little about such threats. The main exception came after the Paris Commune of the spring of 1871, the modern world’s first socialist government. Many European elites saw in the Commune an international socialist-anarchist conspiracy to replicate the events of 1848. The Austrian and German chancellors called for the formation of a Capitalist International in response to the Commune. The Three Emperors’ League of 1873, comprising Francis Joseph of Austria, William I of Germany, and Alexander II of Russia, was conceived as a new Holy Alliance “against European radicalism that has been threatening all thrones and institutions.”18 Each monarch had other motives as well: William, to keep France isolated; Francis Joseph, to grow closer to the newly united Germany; Alexander, to lure Germany from Austria. But their common interest was to block any chance of another transnational wave of revolution.19 The fear, as it turns out, was needless; the Commune did not spark serious revolts elsewhere in Europe and died away after only two months. France’s Third Republic proved itself a respectable moderate regime capable of suppressing revolution with public approval.
By 1907, the states of Europe were polarized, but not according to ideology. Germany, Austria, Italy, and Romania—monarchies all, constitutional to varying degrees—formed one bloc, while republican France, constitutional-monarchical Great Britain, and absolute-monarchical Russia formed the other.20 The First World War (1914-18) was certainly portrayed by the British and French as a war for liberty, and their chief enemy Germany was indeed less liberal-democratic than they, in part because its governments were responsible to the Emperor rather than the Reichstag or electorate.21 But that despotic Russia fought with liberal France and Britain against Germany and Austria shows that ideology was a weak factor. From 1850 through the Russian Revolution of 1917, international politics was relatively consistent with state-centric realism.
The world was certainly not free of civil strife in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In Asia there took place the Indian Mutiny against British rule in 1857 and the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty from 1851 to 1864. The United States had its Civil War in the 1860s; Japan had its Meiji Restoration. In Northeast Africa the Mahdi Rebellion broke out against the British, Ottomans, and Egyptians in the 1880s. These and other domestic broils may have had some deep common causes, such as global demographic growth or economic recession.22 But neither rebels nor their enemies took themselves to be part of a larger regional or global struggle. The systems in which they operated were either domestic or, in the colonial cases, connected to the colonial power. Demonstration effects and fears of wider contagion were weak.
Transnational ideological movements did exist. The political Left was active across Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century it did not proffer a coherent regime. The Left was small and its adherents were divided and ambivalent over just how radical it ought to be. Was change to come by revolution or reform? How far were existing institutions and their advocates and beneficiaries enemies of the Left, fit only for destruction? Historians typically divide the transnational Left in the latter half of the nineteenth century into anarchists and socialists. The two groups often made common cause, and indeed combined under Karl Marx’s leadership to form the International Workingmen’s Association or First International in 1864. They shared a hostility to accumulations of wealth, particularly in the bourgeoisie. They considered their roots old and deep. Radical movements to seize the property of the wealthy had surfaced during the Reformation, for example, in the Peasant’s War in Germany of 1521 (chapter 4) and the Levellers in England in the 1640s. They also emerged during the 1790s, most notably in “Gracchus” Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals in 1796. These movements were not nearly so theoretically developed or stable over time as socialism proved to be; nor were they focused on the factory workers, whose numbers were negligible even in the 1790s.23
Anarchism defies precise definition, in part because anarchists rejected dogmatism, centralization, and discipline. But in general anarchists sought the elimination of the modern state. For anarchists, the state, with its coercive power, was the root of exploitation and inequality; its abolition was the route to liberation. Socialists, by contrast, saw not the state per se as the problem but its captivity to the owning classes or bourgeoisie. For socialists, the solution was for the working class to capture the state and to use it to transform society. Thus, socialists embraced elements of modern social order that anarchists did not, including, writes Albert S. Lindemann, “modern industrialism, political parties, the use of parliament, and more generally the necessity of an extended stage of bourgeois-capitalist development during which time social revolution would be impossible.” Anarchists found socialists too attached to order, which implied an exercise of power.24
Anarchism and socialism both spread in the latter half of the nineteenth century owing to rising discontent with the liberal economics and politics associated with constitutional government. For these intellectuals, constitutionalism in its current form was failing to deliver the prosperity and security that it promised and that radicals in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries had counted on. In Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia, anarchism and socialism spread along with industrialization. Like transnational Lutheranism during the Peasants’ War (chapter 4), anarchism and socialism developed militant, revolutionary wings well before socialism captured a state in 1917. The militancy of self-conscious socialists and anarchists probably dates to the brutal June Days in Paris in 1848 (chapter 5). It was then that the revolutionaries themselves had polarized over whether France should be liberal and laissez-faire or redistributionist, and liberals joined conservatives in savagely suppressing the redistributionists.25 Thus, just as 1848-49 helped kill one clash of regimes, it conceived another—albeit one whose gestation period was to last more than half a century.
Upon the foundation of the International in 1864, labor unions formed and strikes broke out across many countries. But the International was hampered by divisions over both ideology and strategy. Following the failure of the Paris Commune, Marx let the International die off and devoted his attention to his theoretical writings—which of course would profoundly shape events in the twentieth century—but he died in 1883 a disappointed man.26 Notwithstanding the demise of the International, socialism began to advance and gain definition in the 1870s. The growth and definition were spurred by the increase in the numbers of factory workers, the “Great Depression” that commenced in 1873, governmental exclusion and persecution, and the hegemony of Marx and Engels over the movement, which lent it a common language.
Socialism also grew as an unintended consequence of Bismarck’s limited liberal reforms in Germany. In 1866, Bismarck granted universal male suffrage. The result was a spectacular growth in votes for the socialist parties: from 102,000 in 1871, to 340,000 in 1874, to 500,000 in 1877.27 Germany’s socialist parties—some revolutionary, others reformist—united in 1875 to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The SPD’s leadership was reformist rather than revolutionary, but nonetheless in 1878, Bismarck suppressed SPD activity with his Anti-Socialist Laws. These laws strengthened the arguments of the radical Marxists in favor of revolution, but the party’s leadership maintained its reformist course.28 Similar developments were taking place in other constitutional states. Socialists were deeply disappointed that parliamentary regimes and wide suffrage were not ushering in progress as they understood it. Yet, where workers were allowed to vote and socialist parties to hold seats in legislatures—in Italy, France, Belgium, Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany—socialists typically formulated “minimum” alongside “maximum” programs. Minimum programs were designed to draw broad electoral support, and included such measures as widening suffrage, the eight-hour workday, and bettering the conditions of the workers. Maximum programs had to do with class struggle, workers’ state, and other Marxist abstractions.29 In Germany, Karl Kautsky’s Erfurt Program, ostensibly revolutionary Marxist but in practice reformist, set the tone for Western Europe.30
It was in Russia that revolutionary socialism would come to dominate. Russia lacked any real parliamentary restraints on the Tsar’s government, and so reform was not a credible strategy to achieve socialism. Indeed, tsarist repression had generated a tradition of anarchist terrorism in the nineteenth century. With the industrialization of Western Russia from the 1890s, Marxism began to take hold. The Social Democratic Labor Party formed in 1898. In 1903, the young V. I. Lenin wrenched the party toward revolution. Lenin had been radicalized by the government’s execution of his brother and his own years in a Siberian prison. He was convinced that socialist revolution must be engineered by a highly disciplined organization with a small leadership clique that would not deviate from the revolutionary path or dissolve into factions. Thus was born Bolshevism.31
In Paris in July 1889, the centenary of the original French Revolution, the Second International formed. Unlike the First International, the Second excluded anarchists and was more consistently Marxist. It grew to include socialist parties from every European country, the United States, and Japan. Yet, the Second International was likewise hampered by visions between revolutionaries (who tended to be internationalist) and reformists (who tended to be more nationalistic or patriotic). Delegates from countries that allowed socialist participation, led by France’s Jean Jaurès, argued that socialists should participate in bourgeois governments. Those from countries that kept socialists out of government, led by Germany’s August Bebel, disagreed. The two sides also disagreed over whether socialists should work for or against war. Most western socialists, including Jaurès and Bebel, wanted to prevent war. Lenin and the German Rosa Luxemburg argued by contrast that war would hasten the revolution. The Second International ended up with a murky compromise.32
The First World War helped make socialism into a bona fide alternative regime type—communism or Marxism-Leninism. The war finally split the revolutionary internationalists from the reform nationalists and propelled the former into a seizure of power in Russia. The occasion for the split in the Second International was the vote in the German Reichstag on August 4, 1914, over whether to grant war credits to the government. For reasons they justified on principle—including that the threat to Germany from the east, Russia, was the most reactionary country in Europe—a majority of the SPD voted for war credits, siding with their liberal and conservative fellow Germans over foreign fellow socialists. Days later the astonished French socialists followed suit.33 It then being obvious that, contra Marx, the workers had countries after all, the Second International collapsed. At a meeting in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915, Lenin pressed his fellow internationalists to push for a general strike, berating the German Luxemburg for resisting this strategy. As the war dragged on and became staggeringly bloody and futile, Lenin began to attract more followers across countries. In 1916 Lenin, now in exile in Zurich, wrote his famous essay on imperialism that held capitalism responsible for the war.34
At the same time, Lenin was formulating a plan for socialists to seize and perpetually grip power that amounted to a new regime type: Marxism-Leninism. The collapse of the Second International led Lenin to conclude that, although the proletariat does have a single interest across societies, its members and leaders may not always correctly discern that interest or how it is to be secured. Thus democracy, understood as the political equality of citizens, was just “bourgeois democracy,” subject to manipulation by the owning classes by virtue of their ownership. “It is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact,” Lenin writes.35 His solution was the dictatorship of a highly disciplined party under rigid leadership. The Bolsheviks were to rule on behalf of the proletariat which could not protect itself from the wiles of capitalists and the half-heartedness of reform socialists. Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat was to take the form under Lenin of the dictatorship of their putative vanguard, the Communist Party, and within that the dictatorship of its Central Committee.36 The communist regime, then, was one in which control of the country’s physical security and economic production was in the coercive hands of a small, disciplined elite.
The revolution and abdication of the Tsar in March 1917 left Russia with divided and unstable government. In Petrograd, the capital, Alexander Kerensky headed a Provisional government recognized by Russia’s allies in the Great War; the government was liberal-democratic, had good relations with Russia’s liberal allies, and pledged to keep the country in the war against Germany. Over the next few months the Wilson administration in Washington offered the Kerensky government a total of $325 million in war credits. Indeed, the Russian revolution helped clear the way for the United States to join in the war against Germany by removing the American pacifists’ argument that fighting would help Tsarist Russia, the most despotic of the belligerents.37 But in various Russian cities, including Petrograd, soviets or workers’ councils held effective power. In April, Lenin arrived in Petrograd from Zurich, courtesy of the German military, who knew of his plans to withdraw Russia from the war. Over the next several months the struggle for power within Russia was entangled with the actions of the Allied and German governments. The Bolsheviks, self-appointed vanguard of Russia’s small cohort of factory workers, strove to win over Russia’s vast peasantry by promising enlisted soldiers land if they would desert.38 Governments in Paris, London, and Washington sent delegations of Leftist politicians and labor union leaders to the Petrograd Soviet in the summer of 1917 to try to renew enthusiasm for the war and to buttress Kerensky’s government. These missions failed.39
Upon seizing power in November, the Bolsheviks attempted to exploit their pre-existing networks and demonstration effects to trigger socialist revolutions in Europe. Among the first acts of the Bolshevik government was to issue to the world a Decree of Peace appealing to the workers of England, France, and Germany—over the heads of their governments—to push for an end to imperialism.40 In sharp contrast to the Kerensky government, the Bolsheviks made clear that for them France, Britain, and the United States were no better than Germany. Needing to honor promises made to Russia’s peasants, and to devote resources to conquering rivals within Russia itself, Leon Trotsky, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, quickly began to negotiate a separate peace with the German government. At the same time he opened side negotiations with Allied officials who believed the Bolsheviks’ rhetoric masked an underlying pragmatism. The American Raymond Robins and R.H.B. Lockhart of Great Britain reasoned that the Bolsheviks’ chief need was domestic security, and that if the West could assure them that it could meet that need, they could be induced to keep Russia in the war and stop exporting their revolution. Trotsky did lead Robins and Lockhart to believe that some agreement might be reached. But Lenin never took these negotiations seriously and they came to naught.41
The chief decision makers in the Western governments, faced with the possibility of a Bolshevik withdrawal from the war and transnational ideological polarization reaching into their own societies, began to cooperate against the Bolsheviks. Within weeks of the Petrograd coup the Americans and French had stopped shipping foodstuffs to Russia.42 French leaders began suggesting to the British Allied military intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks.43 Robert Lansing, the U.S. Secretary of State, wrote in a December 2 memorandum that the Bolsheviks displayed a “lack of any sentiment of nationality and a determination, frankly avowed, to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country.”44 A month later Lansing wrote privately to Wilson: “Lenine [sic], Trotsky and their colleagues are so bitterly hostile to the present social order in all countries that I am convinced nothing could be said which would gain their favor or render them amenable to reason.”45 When the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was announced, pulling Russia out of the war, Western governments at last agreed to invade Russia to topple the Bolshevik regime.
Thus, in May 1918 came the first forcible regime promotion of the new struggle: a Czechoslovak Corps commanded from Paris began fighting the Bolsheviks. In July, British and American troops landed at the port of Archangel in northwestern Russia; the following month, another U.S. force reached Siberia. These foreign liberal troops fought alongside the White (anti-Bolshevik) forces led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak.46 John Lewis Gaddis concludes that behind Western intervention in Russia was “a loathing for Bolshevism so strong that it could cause honest men to put forward and possibly even believe flimsy excuses for involving themselves in the internal affairs of another nation.”47 It is not so clear that the Western governments were making “flimsy excuses,” however. Germany stood to gain enormously from a Bolshevik consolidation of power, and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks redoubled their call on workers around the world to overthrow their governments and told the Russian people that “The external foe of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic at present is British, French, American and Japanese imperialism” and that “World capital itself is now coming for us.”48 The Allies intervened for the sake of their own external security.
Demonstration effects continued. In Germany workers, inspired by events in Russia and weary of war, had struck in April 1917 and did so again in January 1918.49 The strikes furthered transnational polarization: communists were encouraged and capitalists fearful, which in turn raised communist fears of still more capitalist attacks on the Bolshevik regime. Revolution did break out in Germany on November 9, 1918, and a replication of the Bolshevik coup appeared highly possible. Karl Liebknecht, leader of Germany’s radical socialists, declared a Soviet Republic in Berlin; in Munich, Kurt Eisner declared an independent Bavarian Socialist Republic. Few in Germany doubted that a communist takeover in Germany would be met with some kind of military intervention from the Western democracies.50 In Berlin the SPD leader Philip Scheidemann declared a parliamentary republic and the German military backed him.51 The following month, with encouragement from Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and others formed the German Communist Party (KPD); a month later they staged the Spartacist Uprising. Socialist revolution and Western military intervention were prevented by the SPD government’s enlisting volunteer war veterans (Freikorps) to suppress the uprising.52
Much of Europe was rocked by labor unrest during the early months of 1919, and liberals and conservatives saw the “long arm of Moscow” at work. In January 1919, Lenin’s friend Béla Kun proclaimed a Soviet Republic in Hungary, overturning the young liberal monarchy. Events in Hungary further raised Western fears of Bolshevism. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was to last until August, when it triggered a second forcible regime promotion. Romanian troops invaded (with Western allied support) and overthrew the Kun regime.53
Another promotion came in Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire since 1809. The Russian revolution of March 1917 quickly spread to Helsinki and Finnish elites polarized over communism. The November Bolshevik coup in Russia led anti-communist Finns to declare independence from Russia, and in fact the Bolsheviks recognized independent Finland. In January 1918, civil war broke out between Finnish Red Guards, who proclaimed a socialist workers’ state, and White Guards, who asked for German intervention. Russian troops still in Finland fought in support of the former. In April, German troops invaded and helped the White Guards prevail.54
The demonstration effects of the Bolshevik coup were not limited to Europe. In Asia and Latin America, leftists were inspired to imitate the Bolsheviks. Over the next few years communist parties were to form in China, Indochina, Turkey, and much of Latin America.55 In January 1919 Lenin, recognizing the strength of the transnational movement but also its potential to fragment and damage Bolshevik interests, applied his own disciplinary rule and announced the formation of the Third International or Communist International (Comintern). At the first Comintern congress in March, in Moscow, the Bolsheviks made clear that they would dominate the new organization and that member parties were not to work with social democrats in their home countries.56 The only forcible regime promotion concerning communism outside of Europe at this time took place in Iran, occupied during the war by the British. The Bolshevik renunciation of all imperial claims, Russian as well as British, sparked unrest in that country. With encouragement from Josef Stalin, who was keenly interested in revolution in Asia, Iranian communists initiated cooperation with the leading rebel, who adopted a sort of Soviet plan for Iran. In May 1920, Red Army troops arrived to help. Disparity in goals between the Iranians and the Russians led to growing mistrust, however; Iranians came to see the Soviets as Russian imperialists, and the Soviets came to mistrust the revolutionary credentials of some of the Iranians. In 1921, the Soviets withdrew and consensus took hold among the Bolsheviks that they should carry out no more such forcible interventions under current conditions.57
Notwithstanding the fear among liberal European governments of communist contagion, the end of the Great War produced what David Thomson calls a “vogue for democracy” in much of Europe. In Germany, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, liberal-democratic regimes were established in 1918-19 owing to the strength of the example of the democracies’ war victory and their clear desire for such regimes.58 Predictably, this rapid spread of “bourgeois imperialism” further alarmed communists in Russia and elsewhere, who in turn redoubled their efforts at revolution. Still, the short wave of forcible regime promotion triggered by the Bolshevik coup faded as these liberal regimes consolidated power in the 1920s. As Trotsky himself recognized in 1922, liberal governments were taking steps to prevent revolution, and those steps in turn weakened the impression of a communist juggernaut.59 As Bolshevik hopes and liberal fears subsided, the threat of a wave of revolution faded. Under the increasing influence of Stalin, the Comintern began directing more attention to colonial areas in Asia, particularly Afghanistan, Persia, and India, and worked with “bourgeois nationalist” movements against the British Empire.60 Some cooperation with the Western democracies began to emerge, as the British signed a trade pact with Russia and the United States extended massive food aid.61 Stalin, who continued his gradual seizure of power following Lenin’s death in 1924, decided for “socialism in one country” rather than world revolution.62 His betrayals of international communism alienated Trotsky and others, who went on to found the Fourth International, the first of several communist splinter groups.
The long wave of the twentieth century had only begun, however, and quickly became more complex with the emergence of a third regime type, fascism. Like liberalism, fascism differed across countries, but a general regime type is discernable. Common to fascists was the conviction that international communism was the chief threat to good order and that liberalism was too weak to meet that threat. In the 1930s, communism came to be virtually identified with anti-fascism.
Scholars continue to argue about what fascism was (or is). One insoluble controversy concerns whether national socialism, particularly the German variety, was fascism. The two movements had a number of common features that led their adherents to be encouraged by the other’s progress. Most obviously, fascism and national socialism shared ideological enemies: liberalism, individualism, laissez-faire economics, parliamentary democracy, decadence, class-based socialism, and above all international communism. They were also in principle hostile toward capitalism and the churches—the latter they regarded as barriers to progress—although in practice both cooperated with capitalists and clergy in order to broaden their coalitions.63 Thus, I shall follow many scholars and use “fascism” to cover national socialism.
Against socialism and communism, fascism sought to integrate the working classes into society as a whole in order to rejuvenate the nation. Fascists across countries emphasized the seizure of power, heroic leadership, violence as creative energy, the state over the individual, egalitarianism, medieval chivalry, and an organic rather than mechanistic society. Perhaps more than a specific program, fascism was an attitude: the nation could and must break free from internal and external constraints and not worry about what follows. Representative statements are from the British fascist Oswald Mosley— “No man goes very far who knows exactly where he is going”—and the Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle— “You must get going, you must let yourself be swept away by the torrent… you must act. The rest comes by itself.”64 Fascism is often seen as a repudiation of modernity and the Enlightenment, but in fact it bundled together various strands of Enlightenment and Romantic thought: history as touchstone, idealism, the metaphysics of the will, a return to nature, a rejection of materialism.65
Italy was fascism’s birthplace. Benito Mussolini had been editor of a socialist newspaper in Milan, but resigned over his party’s opposition to Italy’s joining the Allies in the First World War in 1915. When the war ended in November 1918, Italian workers, inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, struck. The earliest declaration of the Fascio di combattimento, in March 1919, was anti-monarchical and -parliamentarian as well as redistributionist, and supported the striking workers. But other groups—“[s]tudents, soldiers, discharged veterans unable to readjust to civilian life”—recoiled from any dictatorship of the proletariat. Mussolini, by now a man of the political Right, entered Parliament in 1921; his squads of Fascisti used force to intimidate socialists and break strikes. In October 1922, as unrest continued and the liberal government fell, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government.66
Fascist-like movements soon appeared in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Britain, Spain, Belgium, France, Finland, South Africa, and Brazil.67 Populist-nationalist movements also appeared in the 1920s and 1930s in much of Latin America (including Argentina, Peru, and Mexico), China, and Turkic lands. Although elites in these movements shared some affinities with fascism—for example, Peronists in Argentina—most scholars do not classify the movements as fascist.68
Although the groundwork for fascism had been laid in Europe prior to the Great War by cultural rejection of the materialism of liberalism and Marxism,69 fascism emerged and spread when and where it did owing to the crisis of liberal democracy following the First World War and the Bolshevik coup in Russia. People whose countries had adopted liberal political regimes were finding that economic development lagged far behind political; liberal democracy did not deliver on its promises. The war severely disrupted societies and left in its wake millions of aimless veterans. The Versailles settlement also left Germans and Italians in particular feeling like citizens of second-class, “proletarian” nations. And the example of the Bolsheviks was inspiring factory workers to organize, strike, and agitate for revolution. As Juan Linz writes: “The obvious distortion of the idea of democracy in the reality of the early twentieth century and the incapacity of the democratic leadership to institutionalize mechanisms for conflict resolution provided the ground for the appeal of fascism.”70
Postwar labor unrest in Germany produced a similar reaction. In the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the Freikorps seized power in Berlin. Factory workers struck to oppose them, and the government restored order. But discontented German nationalists continued to agitate. From July 1921, Adolf Hitler came to control the new National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which comprised mainly Freikorps men. On November 9, 1923, the NSDAP, inspired by Mussolini’s rise in Italy, attempted to seize power in Bavaria. The Beer Hall Putsch failed, as most Germans recoiled from radicalism. (While Hitler was imprisoned, Hermann Göring and other Nazi leaders fled to Austria and then to Italy, where Mussolini protected them.)71 From prison Hitler decided to try to gain control of the state through constitutional means, and the NSDAP gradually built electoral strength in the 1920s. As elsewhere, German fascists or Nazis were opportunistic concerning labor, capital, the churches, and other institutions; they were especially adept at recruiting conservatives, owing to their mutual antagonism to communism.72 But their plan remained to overturn the Weimar Republic and establish a fascist regime.
The growth of transnational fascist networks in the 1920s alarmed communists as well as liberal democrats. Elites in countries of the industrial world became increasingly polarized among these three ideological groups. Polarization within and across countries was aggravated by Stalin’s order to the Comintern in 1928 to become more militant. Stalin was initiating his first Five-Year Plan, involving rapid construction of capital goods and armaments as well as agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union, and needed to stimulate international and transnational threats to justify the extreme measures at home.73 Communist parties the world over were to revert to their old strategy of treating social democrats as enemies. Increasing communist militancy met with reaction on the Right, and fascist and national socialist parties gained ground.74 The Great Depression that began in 1929 further drained support for liberal democracy toward the communist and fascist extremes, so that in the 1930s it was common for liberals to acknowledge that laissez-faire economics and even democracy itself were in retreat; the future belonged, it seemed, to statism, and the only question was whether it would be statism of the Left or Right. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans were industrializing the Soviet Union at a breathtaking pace.75
With the Great Depression of the 1930s, fascism began to gain still more followers and fascists came to control a number of constitutional regimes. Most important was Germany. In 1930, Hitler’s NSDAP had an electoral breakthrough, winning 18 percent in a national election. The NSDAP made further gains in 1932, and in January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor. In March he gained power to rule by decree, and in July all other parties were banned. In Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss began to rule by decree in 1933. (Dollfuss and the Austrian fascists became rivals to the Austrian Nazis, who sought unity with Germany and ultimately prevailed.) In Hungary the Scythe Cross formed in 1931; in October 1932, Gyula Gömbös, a fascist, became Prime Minister. In Portugal, Antonio Salazar set up his “new state” in 1933. In Spain, the Falange formed in 1933 and in 1936 began fighting to overturn the new parliamentary republic. In other states, fascists established movements but never gained power until their countries were conquered by Germany. The Dutch National Socialist Party formed in 1931. In Norway, Vidkun Quisling formed the National Union movement in 1934. In Belgium, Degrelle’s Rexist movement formed in 1935. In France Jacques Doriot, a former communist, formed the French Popular Party in 1936.76
Mussolini made a bid to lead the international fascist networks, and ultimately a fascist bloc of states, just as Stalin led the Comintern. The Italians organized an international fascist meeting at Montreux, Switzerland, in December 1934; attending were representatives from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. The notion of a nationalist international sounds paradoxical, but the theorist Eugenio Coselschi laid out a general program for all fascist parties that included national revolution and the establishment of corporatist totalitarian states. The chief weakness of the Montreux conference was the absence of any representatives from Nazi Germany; in 1934, Mussolini and Hitler were at odds over the territorial questions of Austria and the South Tyrol. They also disagreed over theory: the fascists were not particularly anti-Semitic, while the Nazis were constituted by anti-Semitism and a more general racism. Mussolini lectured Hitler on at least one occasion that the Germans should emphasize nation, not race.77 Owing in part to Nazi aloofness, the Italians never succeeded in directing the incipient Fascist International.78
Still, the fascist networks remained active, working for revolution and propagating their ideas. The ideas found some receptivity in states that never became fascist. Japan, Asia’s first modern industrial state, departed from democratic government in the 1930s and by 1937 its leaders were consciously imitating fascist institutions.79 Even Western liberal democracies moved in a statist direction via frequent emergency powers and “national governments” and by increasing the state’s share of gross national product.80
The transnational progress of fascism and communism, and resulting ideological polarization across societies, created threats and opportunities for governments in the 1930s. As already seen, Mussolini tried to help fascists and Stalin tried to help communists gain power through networking. Little forcible regime promotion took place, however. The only case in Europe in the 1930s was in Spain from 1936 to 1938. In 1934, Stalin’s concern with the rising tide of fascism in the Western democracies led him to order the Comintern to revert from militant internationalism back to a “popular front” strategy, that is, to enter coalitions with social democrats and even “bourgeois” liberals in order to keep fascists out of government. Stalin made clear that the communists’ goal in all countries remained a proletarian dictatorship, but that the means must now be gradual so as not to drive the liberal states, especially France and Britain, into making common cause with the fascists. Communist parties in France, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere attempted to coalesce with other anti-fascists.81
In February 1936, Spain’s Popular Front—comprising the communists and other socialist parties and left-republicans—won an electoral victory and excluded all Rightists from government, exacerbating ideological polarization in Spain. In May, a parallel victory by the Popular Front in France, including a sharp rise in the communist vote, further polarized Spanish (as well as French) politics. In July, elements of the Spanish Army started an anti-Leftist insurgency, and Spain descended into a savage civil war. When France’s Popular Front government, under pressure from its own centrists and Britain’s Conservative government, refused to help its sister government in Madrid, the latter turned to Moscow for help. Meanwhile, General Francisco Franco solicited aid from Hitler and Mussolini. On September 8-9, Stalin decided to intervene on behalf of the Madrid government; a few days later, Mussolini decided to counter-intervene. All told, the Soviets sent approximately 3,000 personnel, and also created an International Brigade of between 42,000 and 51,000 (many of whom were Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade); the Italians sent 70,000, the Germans 16,000, to help Franco, who ultimately prevailed.82 The German-Italian bombing of Guernica, depicted powerfully by Pablo Picasso, has since become an iconic image of terror bombing of civilians.
The Spanish Civil War helped solidify German-Italian cooperation. In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Rome-Berlin Axis. The following month Germany and Japan formed the Anti-Comintern Pact; a year later, Italy joined that pact. But no further forcible regime promotion took place until the Second World War itself.
The rulers of Germany, Italy, and Japan certainly intended to spread their institutions via warfare, for instrumental and, perhaps, principled reasons (even if the principles were ghastly). But most of their attacks and conquests were intened to build empires. After conquering a land they would usually either annex it or rule it directly via a military governor, governor general, or commissioner. Thus, most impositions of fascist institutions during the war do not qualify as forcible regime promotions under the coding rules I use. Such is not to say that the logic of regime promotion that I offer would not explain the sort of ideological imperialism practiced by the Axis powers. Indeed, the German and Japanese governments both understood that the more fascistic was their external environment, the friendlier it would be toward their interests.83
In three cases, Hitler did impose a fascist regime on a conquered land that he allowed to retain nominal sovereignty. These were Vichy France, Slovakia, and Croatia. In Vichy France, Marshal Pétain promulgated a series of constitutional acts concentrating power in the executive (under the “leadership principle”) and abolishing the legislature.84 In Slovakia, the constitution passed in July 1939 had some nominally democratic features but was modeled after fascism, particularly in its statements about national and social unity and its flexibility about the curtailment of civil liberties.85 Croatia was ruled by the Ustase Party, an anti-Semitic labor party that disallowed any opposition.86 Denmark was a special case: following a quick conquest in April 1940, the Nazis allowed Denmark to retain its constitutional monarchy until August 1943, when strikes and governmental recalcitrance led the Nazis to begin direct rule.87
As for the Allies, they clearly did intend to topple the fascist regimes of their enemies, although, as the experiences of 1944-46 show, they did not have a clear idea of what to put in the place of those regimes. Upon victory, they had the opportunity to reshape large portions of Europe and Asia politically. As the next section makes clear, transnational ideological polarization exacerbated by the war itself constrained them heavily.
Whatever the causes of the Second World War—shifts in the balance of power, ideologies of aggression, an unjust international order—one of its most profound results was the vanquishing of fascism as a transnational movement. Fascists had wanted war, or at least taken active steps that they knew would make war more likely; war for them was a proper activity of the vigorous state, and states that amassed power and asserted themselves would attract followers.88 Belligerents and observers understood the war to be a test not only of nations but also of political and economic systems. The governments presented it in that way, in part to rally support among elites and publics within and without their states’ borders. A victory for Germany meant that fascism would win, both normatively and practically; thus, communists and liberals within Germany’s enemies fought hard, and fascists in those countries collaborated and welcomed German occupation. The same was true for the Soviets and communism: fascists were convinced that Soviet victory meant communism in their own countries, and fought all the harder for that reason, while communists in Europe collaborated against the Nazis. Although most of their ideological fire was directed at communists, the Nazis insisted that an American victory would mean that European civilization would give way to crass barbarism.89 Following the total defeat of the Axis powers, fascists scattered, their leaders dead or imprisoned, their transnational links mostly severed.
The war affected the grand transnational ideological struggle in a second way: it triggered a short wave of forcible regime promotion such as had not been seen since the Napoleonic impositions in the 1800s (chapter 5). Fascists were decimated, but there remained in Europe and elsewhere liberals, conservatives, and communists who had agreed on the evils of fascism but who disagreed profoundly as to the best regime. Of these, the group with the most momentum and transnational strength were the communists. Transnational communist networks that had been mobilized and swollen by the war and their members considered their system, championed by the heroic Soviet Union, the real winner. Communists had fought alongside “bourgeois” elements in another manifestation of the “popular front” strategy against fascism. In country after country across the European theater they had fought against fascism, but not for bourgeois liberalism or capitalism. Still, good feeling ran high among communists and their non-communist allies at the end of the war, not least because Allied leaders were determined early on not to let ideology wreck their cooperation. Franklin Roosevelt in particular understood the potential for ideological strife to sunder the Grand Alliance and strove to diminish its importance. Roosevelt was relatively complacent about the possibility of Soviet “communization” of lands bordering Russia, and indeed wanted Britain and the Soviet Union to divide postwar Europe so that the United States could manage the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific.90 Stalin, too, wanted to minimize ideological polarization, as his top priority remained building communism in the Soviet Union and doing so would be easier with Western help after the war. Hence, he ordered the communist parties in France and Italy not to start revolutions after liberation from the Nazis; did not help the communists in the Greek civil war (1944-49); and withdrew the Red Army from northern Iran in 1946.91
Even so, as the power of transnational fascism faded with that of Germany and Japan, elites in Europe and Asia began to polarize increasingly according to whether they sympathized with the communists or not. Complicating matters was that most liberated countries contained communist and anti-communist elites, each with a vision for its country sharply at odds with that of the other. Communists had earned prestige in their societies by fighting bravely against the fascists. Stalin proved willing to exploit their unstinting loyalty. Anti-communists included some who had collaborated with the fascists but some who were liberal or Catholic. The latter found a great deal in common with the victorious American and British governments. Transnational ties developed quickly between various European conservatives, who had traditionally been suspicious of political and economic liberalism, and the United States. In particular, Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany made common cause with the Anglo-Americans.
With so many countries teetering between communism and liberalism, it is no surprise that the fall of any country in one direction or the other would polarize others and tempt the Allied governments to promote their own regime type. Neither the Soviet nor the U.S. government seriously feared a domestic overthrow by the other’s ideological movement (although some American elites did have that fear in the early 1950s). The wave of forcible regime promotion in the latter half of the 1940s was done to increase the superpowers’ external rather than internal security. Promotion was a tool to extend or preserve one’s sphere of influence and to arrest the spread of the other’s sphere. In a classic case of endogeneity, Anglo-American and Soviet actions in occupied states exacerbated transnational ideological polarization, making still more forcible regime promotion in more states increasingly sensible for Washington and Moscow. Narrating the feedback loops across societies and between networks and governments would be exceedingly complex. The general outline is clear, however: cooperation among ideological confreres begot not only more such cooperation, but conflict between adherents of rival ideologies, and governments and their policies of forcible regime promotion were part of the process. As David Painter and Melvyn Leffler write of Europe in general:
US policymakers worried that wherever and however Communist groups attained power they would pursue policies that served the interests of the Soviet Union. The potential international impact of internal political struggles invested the latter with strategic significance and embroiled the United States and the Soviet Union in the internal affairs of other nations.92
Communists in occupied countries identified increasingly not only with the Soviet Union but against the United States; that identification tempted Stalin to impose communist regimes in those countries. The same dynamic, mutatis mutandis, operated for liberals and other anti-communists vis-à-vis the United States in the same countries. Moscow and Washington increasingly saw opportunities to use their respective networks to expand their sphere of influence, and increasingly feared that the other was doing the same thing.
The first forcible regime imposition took place in occupied Italy over several years following the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. Communists, socialists, liberals, and other anti-fascists had fought together and indeed were still fighting the Nazis who occupied the northern part of the country. Following Mussolini’s deposition, Roosevelt announced that America aimed to allow the Italian people freedom to set up their own democratic institutions.93 What sounds to liberal ears like a natural and laudable goal sounded threatening to communists, as if the Italians were “free” so long as they chose a U.S.-style regime—a regime that would, of course, tilt toward the West. And indeed, the Americans and British began cooperating to establish a new interim regime in Italy and excluded the Soviets from the Allied Control Council there. In a September 1943 memorandum to the War Department, General Dwight Eisenhower suggested that among the conditions under which the Allies would grant co-belligerent status to the interim government of Pietro Badoglio was “a decree restoring the former [liberal] constitution and promising free elections after the war for a constitutional assembly.”94 To Soviet protests the Americans and British replied that they had troops in Italy and the Soviets did not.
Stalin retaliated by using the Red Army to impose communism in Bulgaria, where no Anglo-American troops were stationed. After the Red Army conquered Bulgaria in the autumn of 1944, the communist-led Fatherland Front seized power and executed all Nazi collaborators.95 Stalin claimed Western actions in Italy as a precedent.96 Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were keenly aware of the need to coordinate a postwar settlement, and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 they agreed that the Lublin Polish government, recognized by Stalin a few months earlier, would hold free elections including broad representation throughout society. The Big Three signed a “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” pledging governments in central Europe “broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population” and “the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsible to the will of the people.” The language seemed clear to Western liberals, but was flexible enough for Stalin to impose a compliant government on occupied Romania two weeks later. Upon assuming the presidency in April, Harry Truman lectured the Soviets about violating Yalta. At the Potsdam Conference in July, the powers agreed to divide Germany into zones, but Truman and Churchill failed to persuade Stalin to follow the Yalta declaration more closely.97
In the meantime, back in Italy elites remained highly polarized between Left and Right. The Left—the Communists (PCI) and Socialists (PSI)—felt an intense common interest with the Soviet Union and staunchly opposed Italy’s accepting Marshall aid or aligning with the West. The PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, had spent twenty years in exile in Soviet Russia. The Right comprised mainly the country’s largest party, the Christian Democratic, which included not only democrats but also monarchists who for religious and cultural reasons mistrusted American-style institutions.98 The U.S. authorities took steps to stack the deck in favor of the Right and to ensure that the Italian regime would be a liberal republic. Washington supported the pluralistic provisional post-fascist governments. It pressured the interim government in 1946 to reject the communist-socialist plan for an all-powerful, popularly elected costituente that would set up a postwar “worker’s state,” and to accept instead a plan that made a radical regime much less probable: local governments would be elected first, making centralization more difficult; a referendum on whether Italy would retain the monarchy would follow, simultaneously with costituente elections that would write the constitution; finally national elections would be held.99
By 1947, a liberal-democratic constitution was in place in Italy. In the crucial national election of April 1948, the United States acted covertly to degrade the odds of the PCI-PSI Popular Front victory. (The Soviets, for their part, supported the Popular Front.) The Christian Democrats won, in part because the Popular Front defended the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948; that cast severe doubt on their claims to desire to work through parliamentary institutions.100 Finally, Washington offered extensive economic aid to Italy, adding credibility to the U.S.-supported regime.101 Democratic Italy ended up accepting Marshall aid and joining NATO in 1949.
The most incendiary case of forcible regime promotion was Germany itself; as recounted at the beginning of this chapter, the Truman administration only decided to promote liberal democracy in the western zones to compete with the Soviets, who had already begun “communizing” their zone. But the Soviets imposed communist regimes elsewhere as well. In keeping with Yalta, democratic Poles were allowed to join the communist-dominated government, but when elections were finally held in January 1947 the communists controlled the outcome, and a Stalinist regime was established. In Romania the Soviets saw to it that the government was dominated by communists, who, as in Poland, fixed the elections of November 1946. A “people’s democracy” was established in April 1947. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the Soviets and local communists proceeded more slowly, perhaps because a greater proportion of elites were anti-communist. What Anton DePorte calls “reasonably free elections” were held in Hungary in November 1945 and in Czechoslovakia in May 1946, producing pluralistic governments. In December 1946—the same month that the Soviet Central Committee declared that the world was dividing into “two camps” —Stalin ordered the suppression of anti-communists, and in June 1947 the Prime Minister, leader of the Smallholders Party, resigned. The communists imposed a coalition on the leftist parties in the August elections, and won a majority; they very quickly established a Stalinist regime.102
In Czechoslovakia, the May 1946 elections produced a communist-led coalition government under Klement Gottwald. The President, Eduard Benes, and Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, still believed they had sufficient freedom of action to accept Marshall aid from the United States. But the communists vetoed the acceptance. In September Stalin created the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), a reconstitution of the old Comintern but confined to Europe, as a way to tighten his grip on communist parties. In February 1948, all non-communist ministers resigned from the Czechoslovak cabinet. Benes accepted a new cabinet that was thoroughly communist except for Masaryk, who was found dead soon after.103 The Prague Coup completed Stalin’s grip on Central Europe and, as mentioned above, helped turn enough Italians against the communists to ensure a Christian Democratic victory in the April 1948 elections there.
Rulers used other means to try to promote regimes in Europe. Most famously, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia extended material aid and advice to Greek communists. Stalin supported Tito until Truman announced that the United States would help the anti-communists in Greece. Tito, who sought hegemony over the Balkans, insisted on continuing to aid the Greek communists, defying Stalin and accomplishing communism’s first great schism.104 The U.S. government also helped non-communist labor unions in France to compete with communist unions that sought to destabilize the restored Fourth Republic.
Transnational ideological polarization, and forcible regime promotion, occurred during these same years in East Asia in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Communist parties had been founded in China, Japan, Korea, Indochina, and elsewhere in the 1920s following the establishment of the Soviet Union. As in Europe, communists had supported the Soviet Union against fascism and Japanese imperialism and by the close of the war enjoyed prestige among many elites. Anti-communists, too, were mobilized as in Europe. Transnational ideological polarization in East Asia gave each superpower reasons to seek to spread its regime, or block the spread of the other’s regime. In early August 1945, upon hearing that America had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Stalin—who had promised to join the fight against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender—requested that Truman allow Soviet troops to join in the occupation. Truman refused and decided to send U.S. troops to occupy the southern part of Korea.105 The Soviets helped establish a Stalinist regime in the North of Korea, while the Americans set up a centralized republic under Rhee Syngman; the Americans allowed Rhee and several successors to avoid democracy as long as they were anti-communist.
By the time of Japan’s surrender in August 1945, U.S. occupation policy had been worked out in debates among the State, War, and Navy departments. The plan approved by Truman was to demilitarize the country and reconstruct it as a liberal constitutional monarchy, including representative government and civil liberties. Truman approved the plan and General Douglas MacArthur, who directed the occupation, implemented it. In Japan, elites were less liberal than anti-communist. MacArthur threatened to put the constitution to a referendum so as to dissuade elites from revising it in a more conservative-monarchical direction. The Americans also broke up the zaibatsu or wealthy industrial conglomerates that had so dominated Imperial Japan.106
Kim Il Sung, dictator of North Korea, sent forces to China in late 1946 or early 1947 to aid Mao Zedong’s communists in their civil war against Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists. Little is known publicly about the extent of this forcible regime promotion.107 Stalin did not send direct military help, but did extend various types of material aid and advice to Mao. The old revisionist view that Stalin wanted Mao to lose cannot be sustained against the evidence.108 But the Soviets never directly intervened with their own military assets.
The first such promotion—by the United States and a number of allies in South Korea in 1950—provoked a counter-promotion by China. North Korea’s Kim Il Sung rejected the division of the Korean peninsula, and from early 1949 began pressing Stalin to allow him to invade the South. Once Mao’s communists began to win in China in 1948, he began pulling troops back to North Korea. In the spring of 1950, Stalin began to warm to the idea, thinking that the Americans were unlikely to respond militarily and also that a Korean war would force Mao to align China more closely with the Soviet Union. Kim believed that upon hearing of the invasion, the masses in South Korea would arise and help topple Rhee’s regime. U.S. leaders would have agreed that Rhee’s regime was unpopular, and partly for that reason judged that the main communist threat to the South was through subversion rather than invasion.109 Kim’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950 does not qualify as a forcible regime promotion because Kim’s aim was to absorb the target.
The U.S. counter-intervention that began a few weeks later, however, was certainly a forcible regime promotion. The Truman administration had already “lost China” in 1949, and its ability to “regain” it through Chiang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan would be further degraded by a communist victory on the Korean peninsula.110 Truman feared demonstration effects in Japan and beyond. In the highly polarized East Asia of 1950, communism was a carrier of Soviet influence and power. There was little possibility of separating Kim (or Mao) from Stalin at that time. The United States intervened massively in the Korean War because U.S. leaders saw in the spread of communism a threat to American national security. In September, Truman signed a directive authorizing U.S. (UN) forces to cross the 38th Parallel into North Korea so as to topple Kim’s regime and reunify Korea.111 The intervention’s end now changed from simply preserving Rhee’s non-communist regime to overturning Kim’s communist one. The expanded goal, and the northward advance of U.S. troops toward the Yalu River, provoked Mao into counter-intervening the following month. The approach of U.S. troops to the Chinese border was threatening to Mao’s regime precisely because, in such an ideologically polarized time, the United States was so thoroughly identified with anti-communism and hence against Mao’s revolution.
Between 1943 and 1950, then, forcible regime promotion begot more forcible regime promotion. This vicious cycle of interaction among rival superpower governments and transnational ideological networks is part of what we mean by the emergence of the Cold War. TINs and the ongoing struggle over the best regime in Europe and Asia were by no means the only causes of the Cold War. The long Soviet-American rivalry was a complex phenomenon with a complex set of causes, including the bipolar distribution of power and the personalities of leaders. Yet, transnational polarization over communism presented Soviet and American leaders with opportunities and threats to which they felt compelled to respond. In responding—by promoting their regime and opposing that of the rival—the United States and Soviet Union became progressively more threatening to each other. Leffler describes the situation as follows:
At the end of the war, international society was astir with demoralized peoples yearning for a better future after decades of depression, war, genocide, and force migration. In the center of Europe and in northeast Asia the defeat of Germany and Japan left huge vacuums of power. In time—and not a very long time, contemporaries assumed—the occupations would end and the Germans and Japanese would reconstitute their governments and political economies. They would then decide how they would configure themselves in the international system, but their future trajectory was a huge, unsettling question mark.112
The bipolar structure of the international system may have made inevitable some type of rivalry between America and the Soviet Union. But the ongoing deep transnational disputes over the best regime made that rivalry especially intense and dangerous, because it pulled the superpowers into dozens of countries where they competed for influence. Had the two superpowers been the United States and Great Britain, both liberal democracies, there is little doubt that any resulting “cold war” would have been a far less dangerous matter.113
The remainder of the Cold War was to be marked by efforts by each superpower, and often by its allies, to promote its regime or at least block the spread of the other’s regime in the Third World. Washington and Moscow used economic incentives, diplomacy, covert action, and other means to try to gain influence in these regions. As in the 1940s, neither superpower government seriously feared for its domestic stability. Rather, the promotions were done for reasons of external security—more precisely, to extend or preserve one’s sphere of influence at the expense of the other’s. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the United States (and sometimes its British and French allies) by no means always promoted liberal democracy. In the Third World it usually supported authoritarian regimes so long as they were anti-communist.
The Cold War after 1950 did feature a number of forcible regime promotions by the superpowers. These were one-time events in the sense that they did not lead to any short waves of promotion. Each of these was triggered by either domestic unrest or a forcible attempt at national reunification (in the case of the Korean War). Like such events in previous eras, these had demonstration effects and polarized elites in neighboring states along ideological lines, giving Soviet and American leaders incentives to carry out still more forcible promotions. But the superpowers’ leaders faced overwhelming incentives not to counter-promote and risk setting off a short wave. The chief incentive was probably the need to avoid nuclear war.
In 1956 the Soviet re-imposition of communism on Hungary took place. That promotion was far along a chain of events initiated by the death of Stalin in March 1953. Stalin’s demise was followed by a succession contest in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, and other reformers struggled against remaining Stalinists. The reformers set out to de-Stalinize the country and the Eastern bloc, both as means and end. Khrushchev and his circle were not trying to make the Soviet Union into a free-market constitutional democracy; they were determined to maintain the communist party’s monopoly of power. But they believed that the Soviet Union and communism had suffered under the rigid, closed, terrifying state that Stalin had built, and that openness to new ideas, including from abroad, would strengthen the regime and country. In good Leninist fashion they purged Stalinists from the Soviet Communist party. Thus, the reformers in the Kremlin urged East European rulers to de-Stalinize their regimes and in some cases purged Stalinists from leadership of their parties.114
Kremlin-directed reform from above was to have unintended consequences. In a milder version of what was to occur under the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the Khrushchev Thaw encouraged the dissemination of new ideas and the bottom-up formation of social groups within the Soviet Union and across the Soviet bloc. Dissenting communists were released from prison and allowed to resume their reformist activities.115 An early indication of what was to come occurred in the form of a worker’s uprising in East Germany in June, quickly suppressed by Soviet tanks. As Khrushchev consolidated his power in the Kremlin over the next few years, struggles continued among communists in Eastern Europe between Stalinists and reformers. At the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev made his famous speech denouncing the personality cult of Stalin. In June a workers’ uprising occurred in Poznan, Poland. The Polish party, headed by Wladislaw Gomulka, sided with the workers and began acting independently of Moscow. The autonomy of Eastern European states was not what Khrushchev had in mind, and Soviet tanks moved toward the Polish border. But Gomulka told the Soviets that the Polish army would fight back. The resulting bargain was that the Polish party could practice communism in its own way but would keep Poland in the Warsaw Pact.116
The Polish uprising, in turn, had demonstration effects in Hungary. In October, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest and the government called in Soviet tanks to restore order. Civil war ensued, and the reform communist Imre Nagy became Prime Minister. Nagy had briefly been Prime Minister in 1953, following de-Stalinization. In 1955, he had published On Communism, outlining his liberalizing plans; the book increased his following among dissidents.117 Now, once again head of the government, Nagy became increasingly radical—that is to say, liberal-democratic—bringing reformers into his cabinet and promulgating what he called “socialism with a human face.” Nagy’s program included multiparty democracy and the dissolution of the communist party. In the Kremlin the Soviet leaders were nonplussed. On October 30, the Soviet Central Committee issued a statement acknowledging Soviet errors concerning Hungary and the other “people’s democracies.” But two days later, when Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and official neutrality, the Soviet rulers decided to move. On November 3, Nagy and other reformers were arrested and Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, quickly restoring the communist regime under the compliant János Kádár.118
The events in Hungary in 1956 deterred other reform communists from trying what Nagy had tried until 1968, when Alexander Dubcek attempted a subtler and more limited set of reforms in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek, one of a group of communists looking to renew de-Stalinization, took office in January 1968. He began to weaken censorship and the power of the secret police and to allow more political action by those outside the communist party. Careful not to duplicate the most provocative moves of Nagy, Dubcek kept Czechoslovakia in the Warsaw Pact. Nonetheless he alarmed the Kremlin. As John Lewis Gaddis writes, “What the Russians feared was …the impact of ’reform communism’ on their long-range military position in Eastern Europe and, ultimately, on the security of the Soviet regime itself.”119 As in 1956, liberalism was a carrier of Western, and ultimately American, influence and hence would degrade Soviet power. Brezhnev ordered the Warsaw Pact to invade and Dubcek was overthrown. Rigid communist party rule was preserved.
In the vast, heterogeneous set of less industrialized states that came to be known as the Third World, the most powerful ideology by far was nationalism. The greatest burden on Third-World elites, and the surest route to legitimacy among their peoples, was to achieve national unity, strength, and independence from their present or former colonial masters. Communist parties across regions formed transnational networks, whose nerve center was in Moscow. But except for in Southeast Asia, communists were relatively weak and usually unable to seize a state by themselves. They were helped, however, by the credibility that communism enjoyed owing to the formidable example of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s successes in wrenching an agricultural society once ruled by a backward monarchy into an industrial powerhouse in the 1930s, and a superpower in the 1940s, made a deep impression on many post-colonial elites who sought national sovereignty and progress. In 1913, Russia’s industrial output had been only 6.9 percent of America’s. In 1932, Soviet output had risen to 27.3 percent of American, and in 1938, 45.1 percent.120 After the war the Soviet Union was suddenly ahead of France, Germany, and even fellow victor Great Britain; it went on to develop an atomic bomb only four years after the United States (albeit with help from espionage). From 1951 to 1955, Soviet annual economic growth averaged 14 percent; from 1956 to 1960, nearly 11 percent.121 In 1957, it was the first country to place a satellite in orbit around the planet. Nikita Khrushchev’s boast in October 1961 that the Soviet economy would surpass that of the United States within twenty years appears risible today, but for several decades it was consistent with the trend in relative strength between the superpowers. At the outset of the Second World War, the Chinese Communist Party was the only strong one in non-Soviet Asia; at the end, communist parties in Japan, India, Malaya, Indochina, the Philippines, Korea, the East Indies, and Burma all were large and enjoyed much popular support by virtue of their heroics against the Imperial Japanese regime.122
Non-communist elites in the Third World were a diverse lot. The chief goals of a great number, beyond acquiring and keeping power, were to develop their states with public works and industry, redistribute resources from landholding elites to peasants, and secure independence from their former colonizers. Regional movements inflected with ideology—Arab Socialism, African Socialism—arose. Some countries, such as Mexico and Ghana, insisted on a unique national path to development that nonetheless involved a high degree of state control of the economy and no meaningful political competition. These socialists were not communists, but they shared many goals with the communist parties in their countries, and the Soviet Union, at various times, was prepared to help new rulers achieve them.123
Liberal democracy and capitalism, by contrast, were associated with the Europeans and their new patron, the United States. The European states were the very ones from which Third World elites were seeking independence. The United States, as mentioned above, had had an informal empire in much of the Caribbean and Central America earlier in the century, and many Latin American elites regarded the Americans as essentially as imperialistic as the Europeans. Decisions made early in the Cold War by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to help the French fight communist independence movements in Indochina permanently damaged in much of the world America’s reputation for being an anti-imperialist power.124 It was the traditional holders of power in the Third World—large landowners and capitalists—who tended to favor cooperation with the Americans and other Western powers. The Western governments favored the preservation of property rights and hence the hostility toward communist and socialist redistribution. The chief divide that emerged in the Third World, then, was over strategy for national development and autonomy. This meant that in many cases, the Left tended toward anti-Americanism and pro-Sovietism, and the Right—notwithstanding its political illiberalism—pro-Americanism and anti-Sovietism.
Soviet leaders eventually began to exploit these communist and socialist elites and networks in the Third World. But they did not do so immediately after the Second World War ended. Stalin had concluded from setbacks in China in the late 1920s that nationalism would hijack communism in non-industrial societies. Andrei Zhdanov included communists from Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Egypt, and Syria at a Cominform meeting in September 1947; but no Third World party was invited to join the organization. What changed Stalin’s mind was the communist victory in China in 1949. The Soviet dictator began to believe that “the center of the revolutionary movement had shifted from the West to the East” and that, as Chinese communist leader Liu Shaoqi proclaimed, the Chinese revolutionary model might “become the main path toward the liberation of other people in the colonial and semicolonial countries where similar conditions exist.” In turn, with Stalin’s encouragement Mao Zedong began to provide military assistance—strategic advice and training and supplying troops—to Ho Chi Minh’s communists (Viet Minh) in Vietnam in their struggle against the French.125
Following the French defeat in Indochina in 1954, the Vietnamese belligerents and French agreed at Geneva that elections would be held to decide the future of Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration deepened U.S. involvement by supporting the republic in South Vietnam, headed by the staunch anti-communist Diem Ngo Dinh. The Viet Cong, or communist insurgency in the South, grew and the Hanoi rulers began increasing their support for it in the late 1950s. (As in the Korean case, the North Vietnamese attempt to alter the South’s regime does not qualify as a forcible regime promotion because Hanoi’s goal was to annex the South.) Increasing unrest in the South, and related communist guerrilla activity in neighboring Laos, drew in U.S. military support in the early 1960s. The unpopular Diem was assassinated in 1963, and the South was unstable for months. Ho increased support for the Viet Cong still further. In August 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, a U.S. ship exchanged fire with several North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Tonkin Gulf incident led U.S. President Lyndon Johnson to escalate U.S. military involvement the following year.126 “America’s longest war,” as George Herring calls it, was an attempt to preserve South Vietnam from a communist takeover. The consensus in Washington was that a communist South Vietnam would ipso facto mean an extension of Soviet influence and a shift in the balance of power in Asia. Transnational ideological polarization made it difficult for U.S. leaders to resist forcible intervention. U.S. promotion in South Vietnam provoked no Soviet (or Chinese) counter-intervention; other communist governments were content to provide material support.
Parallel to events in Vietnam was a regime contest in neighboring Laos. French departure from Indochina in 1954 left an independent country torn by three factions: the communist Pathet Lao, right-wing forces, and “neutralists.” A neutralist government was overthrown by a right-wing coup in April 1964, and civil war erupted. In the summer the North Vietnamese government began to send forces to Laos to help the Pathet Lao. The Johnson administration responded by beginning a bombing campaign to support the Laotian government. The situations in Laos and Vietnam were heavily interdependent, not least because along the border between the two ran most of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a route of communist infiltration from North to South Vietnam. The government of Thailand, also anti-communist, sent forces to Laos as well.127
A third Southeastern Asian target of forcible regime promotion was Cambodia, which likewise shared a border with Vietnam and a segment of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Neutral in the Vietnamese war, monarchical Cambodia was highly polarized by it, with the communist Khmer Rouge and conservatives increasingly hostile. The government of Prince Sihanouk knew that Hanoi’s use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a provocation to the Americans, but could do little to stop it. In March 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown by the pro-American Lon Nol, who abolished the monarchy and declared a republic. President Richard Nixon then had U.S. forces bomb the Trail and invade Cambodia so as to cut off the Trail and to support Lon Nol’s new republic against a possible North Vietnamese invasion. North Vietnamese already had troops in Cambodia on the Trail, and now these moved deeper into the country to support the Khmer Rouge in their struggle to overthrow Lon Nol and establish a communist regime. (In 1975, the Khmer Rouge succeeded, but by then had split from the Vietnamese Communists and leaned toward the Chinese Communists; Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, establishing a puppet regime in its place.)128
The consensus among Western political analysts is that American fears of falling dominoes in Southeast Asia were mistaken and tragic: dominoes seldom fall.129 But in fact, communists in Cambodia and Laos won their civil wars after the Americans left Vietnam in 1973; Cambodia aligned with China, Laos with Vietnam and the Soviet Union. And demonstration effects from the civil unrest in Indochina were serious enough to spur the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967. ASEAN was originally a cooperative effort by the governments of Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia to commit to and coordinate policies to fight communist subversion. Simply because America failed in Indochina, or ASEAN was successful (and has since outgrown its original purpose), does not mean that demonstration effects are a fiction or that dominoes cannot fall. Rather, the strength of these threats is what produced ASEAN.130
Outside of East and Southeast Asia, Stalin did almost nothing to aid communists and woo socialist state-builders. It was his successor Nikita Khrushchev who recognized the potential for the Soviet Union to place itself on the side of the “wars of national liberation” and weaken U.S. influence over much of the globe.131 Rulers of newly decolonized states accepted his offers. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Soviet engineers and construction crews fanned our over the Third World, leaving public works and factories in their wake.132
In Latin America and the Caribbean, communism had an elite following across most states. Discontent with large landholding families and U.S. hegemony was widespread among many elites. Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, established in 1959, inspired some of the discontented to embrace communism, and made others willing to cooperate with communists. No U.S. administration ever used direct force to topple Castro, but covert action, some of it tragic and some comical, was used. Part of the bargain that resolved the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was an agreement by the Kennedy administration not to invade Cuba.133 But transnational communism in the Western Hemisphere remained a preoccupation for successive U.S. administrations. So did the openness of social democrats in Latin America and the Caribbean to working with communists and adopting some of their programs, such as state-directed import-substituting industrialization. The Kennedy administration sought to win social democrats to the U.S. side through the Alliance for Progress, which was to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to the region in return for various liberal reforms. But in 1964, the Johnson administration was concerned that the example of Castro’s state socialism was overwhelming the Alliance for Progress. Needed instead was U.S. intervention to keep out the “statists.”134
U.S. attempts to keep communists far away from power are well known. The two occasions on which such attempts involved the direct use of American military force were in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983. In the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, a social democrat and the country’s first elected President, was overthrown by a military junta in 1963 after promulgating a new constitution. In 1965, military officers who favored Bosch rebelled. Johnson sent 22,000 U.S. troops in April to prevent, as he said, “the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.”135 Bosch was not a communist, but the fear in Washington was that he would move the country in a statist direction and an alignment with Cuba would eventually result. Eighteen years later, Ronald Reagan sent 1,900 U.S. forces to Grenada to overthrow a Marxist regime that recently had toppled another Marxist regime. Three hundred troops from the Organization of East Caribbean States joined the Americans. The Americans restored the constitutional government that had been overturned in 1979.136(The Reagan administration used other means to undermine the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and to buttress non-communist regimes elsewhere in Central America.)
In sub-Saharan Africa the Soviets and Americans began to compete for influence in the 1960s by aiding particular factions in various countries. The factions were seldom originally constituted by commitment to one or another ideology, but instead were tied to particular tribes or tribal coalitions seeking hegemony over their newly independent state. Still, the desire for and possibility of superpower patronage led some to adopt one or another Cold War ideology. In Angola, which gained independence from Portugal in 1975, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took on Marxism-Leninism. Its chief rival, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), had Maoist roots but struck a bargain with the American-led bloc and began to espouse constitutional government and free markets. In August 1975, South African troops invaded to support UNITA. In October, thousands of Cuban troops invaded to support the MPLA. The following year the U.S. Congress cut off aid to UNITA, and the MPLA won the first war. UNITA regrouped and, with help from South African forces, made significant headway. By 1985, when the Reagan administration renewed aid to UNITA, 50,000 Cuban soldiers were in Angola.137
The Soviets offered aid to Middle Eastern Arab states, and Arab socialists—Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria, and others—accepted it. Several forcible regime promotions took place in the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these had more to do with the intra-Muslim struggle between Islamism and secularism that I analyze in chapter 7. But British and Iranian military intervention in Oman was aimed at keeping that country from becoming communist. Communist movements gained momentum on the Arabian peninsula in the 1960s, helping force the British out of their long-time colony Aden and eventually setting up the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) in 1970. The independence movement in Aden, and simultaneous Nasserist revolt in North Yemen (chapter 7), inspired a rebellion in the Dhofar region of Oman, then ruled by the conservative Sultan Said ibn Taimur. The rebels first aimed for a progressive republic, but Yemeni communists aided them and in 1967, the Dhofar rebels adopted a broad program under the name Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLO). The PFLO received Soviet and Chinese aid and sought to spread communist revolution throughout the Persian Gulf. A number of governments—the Saudi, Jordanian, UAE, British, Iranian, and even Egyptian rulers—wanted to halt communism and Soviet influence in the region and aided the Omani monarchy in various ways. In 1970, British troops helped the Sultan’s son and successor Qabus ibn Said hold on to power; in 1973, the Shah of Iran began sending troops—eventually numbering 3,000—to help.138
One of the most consequential forcible regime promotions of this long wave was the Soviet invasion of the Republic of Afghanistan in December 1979. Because that intervention was also part of the intra-Muslim struggle between Islamism and secularism, I address it in chapter 7. The Soviets’ prolonged failed attempt to support a communist regime in Afghanistan was a significant event in the discrediting of the Soviet model and hence of the end of the long wave.
As with previous long ideological struggles, that between communism and liberal democracy sometimes appeared to have ended, presumably in a draw, but then the struggle would reignite later. Superpower détente in the 1970s was prolonged and deep enough that elites began to refer to the struggle in the past tense. Patience, rationality, and good diplomacy (including U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam) had permanently de-polarized international politics, it was thought. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter famously proclaimed that Americans were over their “inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”139 Language used in 1978 by James Chace, then managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, is typical of elites at the time: “At a time when foreign policy is clearly vulnerable to a variety of interest groups, is it even possible to erect a broad foreign policy consensus as was done in the cold war era?”140 But as long as the question of the best domestic regime remained so contentious, and the contenders mutually exclusive and enjoying huge transnational followings, the struggle could not end. Carter acknowledged the struggle had restarted when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It could end only when ideologies converged or one lost its credibility across states. In the event, it was the latter. The failure of communism as a strategy toward sovereignty, prosperity, and justice became manifest in the 1980s. Marx had once looked forward to the “withering away of the state.” It was the Soviet state, and with it communism itself, that withered away.
Today, the old contest between the individual and the collectivity has passed from most regions of the world. Cuba and North Korea remain communist, and China and Vietnam retain ruling Leninist parties with a rhetorical commitment to the old Marxist vision. Maoist guerrillas continue to plot and fight in Nepal, the Philippines, and parts of South America. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is trying to revive some variety of transnational state socialism, and may yet succeed in polarizing politics at least in the Americas (chapter 8). It is safe to say, however, that the long legitimacy crisis that struck constitutional government in the 1910s, that began to affect international relations directly with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and that spawned the self-destructive fascism, was ending by the mid-1980s. It ended when it became nearly incontestable that communism did not work on its own terms. The countries that tried it were falling behind, while those that tried democratic capitalism were moving ahead. Communists the world over lost credibility and support, and socialists began to abandon their traditional embrace of dirigisme and began to favor “neoliberal,” market-based economic policies. Communist TINs lost membership and their ability to make rulers tremble; the political Left as a whole decided that reform rather than revolution was the best strategy to effect change.
The liberal economic reforms begun in China in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping were a signal that communism was not fulfilling its promise to raise standards of living and make great the nations that implemented it. In the Soviet Union itself, economic growth never again reached the impressive levels of the 1960s. The period of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule was to become known in the late 1980s as the “years of stagnation,” and with good reason. As Willie Thompson, a British communist, puts the matter:
The year 1981 was supposed to have been the year when, according to Khrushchev’s boast at the 22nd Congress, the USSR would overtake the USA in material consumption, not to speak of other indicators of public welfare. All that had, of course, been quietly forgotten, and the continuing dependence of the Soviet Union on US grain imports were [sic] a humiliating reminder of just how inferior in that capacity it was to a country with a much smaller agricultural sector.141
Daniel Patrick Moynihan adds that, as a U.S. Senator in the late 1970s, he noted Soviet statistics indicating acute manpower shortages; a ten-year and widening gap between male (64) and female (74) life expectancy; and a steep rise in the infant mortality rate from 22.9 deaths per 1,000 births in 1971 to 31.1 deaths in 1976. “In a word,” Moynihan writes, “communism was dead.”142 All in all, Leonid Brezhnev had led the Soviet Union into what Western writers were to call “imperial overextension,” an overextension that was partly a function of communism’s intrinsic incapacities.
In Africa, Latin America, and East Asia, countries that adopted Marxism-Leninism generally fared much worse than their counterparts that adopted economic liberalism. David Lane writes:
Capitalism on a world scale has proved to be more successful as a system of production and consumption than anticipated by a succession of communist leaders from Lenin to Brezhnev….[T]he “developmental model” of state socialism had positive effects in Eastern Europe and the Third World immediately after the Second World War. But from the 1980s the rise of the capitalist South-East Asian economies such as Taiwan, Malaysia and South Korea provided an alternative for the developing societies of the Third World.143
Fred Halliday adds: “In the end …it was the pressures of the West, above all the demonstration effect of capitalist economic success, which brought the Soviet system, and that of its defected allies, down.”144 Neo-Marxist dependency theory, which had prescribed socialist revolution and no economic interaction with the United States and the West in general, was likewise failing. Zbigniew Brzezinski points out that in the 1980s, Tanzania, which had adopted state socialism, was economically stagnant and actually reducing industrial output, while neighboring Kenya, which had adopted more market mechanisms, enjoyed modest overall and industrial growth.145
Compounding the problem for Third-World communists was the growing scarcity of Soviet aid, a scarcity itself caused by communism’s stagnation. In the 1970s, Moscow had begun to target aid on strategic countries such as Angola and Ethiopia.146 No longer was massive aid available to any Third World regime that was adopting Marxism-Leninism. Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office in 1985, further cut aid to foreign communist parties and regimes even as he moved the Soviet Union itself toward democracy and capitalism. By the mid-1980s, Moscow was telling clients in Africa and Asia, including Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, and Vietnam, to integrate into world markets and try to attract foreign investment, “clearly signaling thereby,” as Brzezinski writes, “that the Kremlin was not about to foot their development bills.”147 Gorbachev informed the Cubans that they should improve their economic situation by conciliating the United States.
The effects in the Third World of the decline of socialism are difficult to trace directly. By the 1980s, however, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, those international lending agencies that were gatekeepers to the international capitalist economy, began insisting that borrowers implement more monetarist policies.148 Economic development now meant austerity to shrink state control over the economy. It was beside the point that South Korea and Taiwan were not laissez-faire economies; what mattered was that they had succeeded with capitalist openness rather than with socialist autarchy.
During the twentieth century, at least sixty-eight forcible regime promotions took place. As in previous periods, governments cared enough about the domestic institutions of other states that they sometimes spent dear resources, and risked still more resources, to alter or preserve those institutions. Of these, the great majority were ordered by governments trying to exploit the opportunities, and answer the threats, that the long transnational contest among liberal democracy, communism, and (in the early decades) fascism presented them with. Some interventions—ex ante ones—followed domestic regime instability in one or more states. A short wave of promotion followed the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. The Allied intervention in Russia, which entailed capitalist and communist armies killing one another, intensified the demonstration effects from the Russian Revolution and added to the incentives facing the Bolshevik and democratic governments to promote regimes. A smaller wave hit Southeast Asia in the 1960s, as regime instability, fomented by transnational communist networks and aided by the Soviet and Chinese governments, gave the United States incentives to intervene.
The biggest wave—an ex post one—broke during and after the Second World War, when the German, Soviet, and American governments’ forces found themselves with powerful incentives to use their occupying troops to install new regimes in conquered lands. These promotions were not simply afterthoughts or epiphenomenal of the war effort. The Nazi, Soviet, and American governments all had choices concerning what to do with the lands their armies occupied. The Nazis allowed Denmark to remain a constitutional monarchy; the Soviets allowed Finland to remain a constitutional democracy. Using troops to impose a regime on an occupied country cost resources and, as all sides knew, risked alienating the other powers. Had the Roosevelt and Truman administrations not made Italy a democracy after 1943, or Stalin not made Bulgaria communist in 1944-45, superpower relations may have been less hostile. But it would have been difficult indeed for them not to do those things. As in previous ideological struggles in previous centuries, transnational polarization was an exceedingly powerful magnet.
Isolated forcible regime promotions also occurred. Among these were Soviet and Italo-German interventions in Spain in 1936 and U.S. interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America in the 1980s. In all of these cases, the intervening government sought to extend or preserve influence by blocking an unfriendly regime. Throughout these decades, as in other long waves, governments also used economic and military support, covert action, and other tools to try to promote one regime or another.
The mechanisms present in previous long waves—regime instability or great-power war triggering transnational ideological polarization, in turn leading governments to use force to promote domestic regimes—were present during the so-called short twentieth century. Revolutions and coups, and the Second World War, excited ideological activism in many countries and sometimes made regime promotion almost irresistible to great powers. As in previous periods, there were also episodes of regime instability or revolution that did not produce any forcible regime promotion. The United States never invaded communist Cuba (although it did virtually everything short of that). There were also cases in which a great-power government did not impose a regime on a conquered land. Stalin did not install a communist regime in Finland in the late 1940s. In such cases, countervailing incentives were too powerful. Even so, dozens of forcible regime promotions took place, demonstrating that governments cared enough about the regime types of other states that they sometimes spent dear resources and risked more to alter or preserve those regimes.
Notwithstanding the important differences in circumstances across these decades, the forcible regime promotions are connected by a strong thread: they took place in states containing elites who were part of transnational ideological networks, and the ideologies that constituted those networks displayed remarkable continuity throughout the period. Communists in Southeast Asia in the 1970s used tropes and symbols similar to those of communists in China in the 1940s and in Russia in the 1910s. Fascists in Hungary in the 1940s were self-consciously similar to fascists in Italy in the 1920s. These continuities point us to a larger ideational structure, the legitimacy crisis facing constitutional governments that gathered steam in the early twentieth century. When the Bolsheviks seized power from a constitutional provisional government in Russia in November 1917, one leading contender for legitimacy became Marxism-Leninism. When Mussolini and his circle took power in constitutional Italy in 1922, fascism became a second contender. Communism and fascism both generated transnational networks of remarkable robustness and energy. Qua networks, they were not always coherent or tightly controlled. There was no centralized, effective conspiracy at any point. Governments did attempt to control and exploit them, and Soviet rulers had more success than did Mussolini. What is striking is that, as in previous cases, the ideas to which these networks appealed—their diagnoses and above all their prescriptions for societal ills—had such traction across so many countries for so long. In the communist case, elites in Third World societies far from industrialization nonetheless found the Soviet model inspiring; even those who did not become communists admired the rapid state-building that Stalin had accomplished.
Communism, fascism, and constitutional democracy—the last of which had only weak networks except in the Soviet bloc after the mid-1950s—each had its advocates and exemplars. For decades each had a plausible claim to superiority. The rise of Italy in the 1920s and the far more spectacular rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s made fascism appear, in the words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “the wave of the future.”149 The Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization in the 1930s and its indispensable role in crushing Nazi Germany in the early 1940s lent it formidable prestige among elites the world over. Constitutional democracy had the United States, Britain, and France as exemplars in the 1920s and 1930s, and the much more impressive U.S. example from the 1940s onward.
The grand ideological struggle endured as long as no clear winner emerged. The Götterdämmerung of 1945 pushed fascism off of the stage. In the 1950s and 1960s, communism appeared to have more momentum than constitutional democracy, particularly in the Third World. Even in the West a school of thought arose about the robustness of communist totalitarianism.150 The struggle only ended in the late 1980s, when communism’s failures to make good on its promises regarding growth and industrialization led the leaders of China and the Soviet Union to abandon it. Constitutional democracies, with their capitalist economies, had clearly outdone communist ones with their command economies. Transnational communism lost its Soviet patronage and its animating energy. Communist guerrillas, particularly Maoists, remained in some countries but had to fund themselves through criminal activity, further undermining their credibility. Social democrats in the Third World had little reason to cooperate with the shrinking, dispirited communists.
There is ample reason to think that constitutional democracy will face more legitimacy crises in the future. Indeed, at the time of this writing a reconstituted socialist authoritarianism, called Bolivarism or Chavism, is enjoying a powerful influence across most Latin American societies. In chapter 8 I discuss possible implications of transnational socialism for U.S. foreign policy and international relations more generally.