by Kevin Reilly
But too many differences separated Third World countries for them to act as a single force. Did a huge and economically booming China have much in common with a small, impoverished, and conflicted Sierra Leone? What did an oil-rich conservative Islamic monarchy such as Saudi Arabia share with a war-torn communist Vietnam? Beyond these obvious differences lay often intractable and bloody conflicts between Third World countries. India and Pakistan, both armed with nuclear weapons, fought several wars since their independence from Great Britain in 1947 and faced off over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Iran and Iraq, neighboring Muslim states, fought a terrible war in the 1980s, costing perhaps a million lives. Nor did a common commitment to communism prevent war between China and Vietnam or between Vietnam and Cambodia. The genocidal suppression of the Tutsi people of Rwanda in 1994 set in motion bitter conflicts among the many states of central Africa. Any unity to which the Third World once aspired proved enormously difficult to achieve in practice.
The Collapse of Communism
A final realignment of the last turbulent century lay in the collapse of communism, a remarkable event in itself made even more so by the unexpectedness, rapidity, and peacefulness with which it occurred. Within a few years, a major source of inspiration, horror, and global conflict in the world of the twentieth century had largely vanished.
Three Routes to the End of Communism
The Soviet Union . The chief event in this process—but not the first—was the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a country along with its state-run economy, its Communist Party, and its ideology, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet system badly backfired and led to its collapse in 1991. That event marked the disappearance of the world’s largest state, one that had been central to Eurasian political life, and it generated new instabilities in many places along the borderlands of the former Soviet Union. It also signaled the end of the great global rift of the Cold War that had shaped so much of the twentieth century. And because communism had become so identified with socialism in the popular imagination of so many, the fall of the Soviet Union seemed to bring at least a temporary closure to a 150-year ideological debate about capitalism and socialism as distinct and rival systems.
Eastern Europe . In 1989, two years before the Soviet Union disintegrated, the communist regimes of eastern Europe were swept away by popular upheavals and by the unwillingness of their Soviet sponsors to rescue them. These revolutions marked the demise of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the end of the division of Europe between East and West. Germany was subsequently reunified, and a number of the eastern European states actually joined the Western military alliance of NATO.
China . A further component of the collapse of communism occurred in China, beginning in the late 1970s. While communism disintegrated from within in the Soviet Union and was overturned by popular rebellion in eastern Europe, in China it was largely abandoned as an economic practice in favor of private farming, attractive terms for foreign investment, and a much-expanded role for the market, even while maintaining Communist Party control of political life. In the process, China emerged as an economic giant and a major political force in East Asia and beyond.
Taken together, these three routes to the end of communism represent a remarkable conclusion to one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious experiments and deepest conflicts. How should we explain it?
Explaining the Soviet Collapse
In the case of the Soviet Union, the core failure was economic. The country’s rigid centralized economy, despite impressive earlier successes, could not keep pace with more dynamic Western economies, especially as the information age required flexibility and innovation rather than simply replicating existing technologies. Soviet citizens able to travel abroad were often stunned at the availability of consumer goods in the West compared to the paltry choices in their own state-run stores. The burden of very heavy military spending, intended to catch up and keep up with American power during the Cold War, further sapped the Soviet economy. A sharp decline in Soviet economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s shocked and embarrassed Soviet leaders and finally stimulated a serious effort at reform, reducing the role of the state and introducing elements of the free market. But those reforms, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, made a bad situation worse as state planning mechanisms were dismantled before a functioning market system had emerged. As the Soviet economy contracted, millions experienced new hardships in the form of widespread shortages, mounting inflation, and the threat of unemployment.
Furthermore, Gorbachev’s reform program also featured semidemocratic elections for a new parliament and a range of new freedoms for newspapers, magazines, and intellectuals generally. The result was an avalanche of political organizing, historical revelations, exposures of corruption and privilege, and new novels, plays, poems, and films, all of this devoured by a public long starved of such opportunities. These new freedoms unleashed a torrent of public discussion that both revealed the long alienation of many people from the communist regime and deepened the gulf between them. The shock of “therapy by truth” comes through in this excerpt from an essay by Soviet writer Alexander Tsipko:
No people in the history of mankind was ever enslaved by myths as our people was in the 20th century. We had thought that we had tied our lives to a great truth, only to realize that we entrusted ourselves to an intellectual fantasy which could never be realized. We thought we were pioneers leading the rest of mankind to . . . freedom and spiritual blessing, but realized that our way is the road to nowhere. We thought that building communism in the USSR was the greatest deed of our people, but we were purposefully engaging in selfdestruction. We thought that capitalism was a sick old man sentenced to death, but it turned out that capitalism was healthy, powerful. . . . We thought that we were surrounded by people with the same ideals, grateful to us for saving them from capitalist slavery . . . but it turned out that our friends and neighbors were only waiting for a chance to return to their old lives. We thought that our national industry, organized like one big factory . . . was the ultimate achievement of human wisdom, but it all turned out to be an economic absurdity which enslaved the economic and spiritual energies of . . . Russia.14
The new freedoms also opened the door to large-scale public protest—by workers stunned by new economic insecurities, by champions of democracy who despised the corrupt and authoritarian Soviet system, and by non-Russian nationalities who saw an opportunity to escape from their long domination by Russians. Furthermore, many among the Soviet elite readily abandoned communism as widespread opportunities for personal enrichment became available in the rapid and largely corrupt privatization of state enterprises. These combined pressures led to the dramatic collapse of the entire Soviet system in 1991, following a failed attempt by conservative forces to roll back Gorbachev’s reforms. While the Soviet collapse had deep roots, there was little sign of it in 1985 when Gorbachev came to power. In that sense, it was less the product of the country’s many diseases than of the treatment that the doctor prescribed.
The Chinese Difference
As in the Soviet Union, economic problems, plus the immense disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, brought communist reformers to power in China after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Led by Deng Xiaoping, the reform process unfolded quite differently than in the Soviet Union. The most dramatic Chinese reforms took place in the rural areas where collectivized agriculture rapidly gave way to individual family farms and a great increase in agricultural production that raised rural living standards substantially. Nothing of the kind occurred in the Soviet Union. But in dealing with state-owned industrial enterprises in the cities, Deng moved much more gradually than Gorbachev, maintaining overall state control while slowly introducing market prices. China also opened itself to the world economy far more successfully than the Soviet Union, welcoming foreign investment in “special enterprise zones” along the coast. Rural industry likewise flourished in a unique form cal
led “township and village enterprises,” owned and managed jointly by local governments, private entrepreneurs, and various collective groups.
These reforms, which increased in the decades after 1979, amounted to an abandonment of communist economic policies and the introduction of a largely capitalist or market economy, all of this, amazingly, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party. Furthermore, and in sharp contrast to the economic disaster of the Soviet Union, these reforms were remarkably successful, generating the world’s most rapid economic growth and raising the living standards of millions of Chinese people.
China’s reform process also differed from that of the Soviet Union in its refusal to accompany its economic changes with Sovietstyle political and cultural freedoms. When demands for such freedoms erupted in demonstrations in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, they were harshly and decisively suppressed. Reflecting memories of the chaotic Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping declared,
Talk about democracy in the abstract will inevitably lead to the unchecked spread of ultra-democracy and anarchism, to the complete disruption of political stability, and to the total failure of our modernization program. . . . China will once again be plunged into chaos, division, retrogression, and darkness.15
Such policies enabled China’s Communist Party to maintain its monopoly on power even while presiding over what was rapidly becoming a market economy. And despite the presence of many minorities, the overwhelming numerical dominance of ethnic Chinese meant that China did not face the kind of intense nationalist demands that led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union.
The triumph of communism in China in 1949, the country’s impressive military performance in the Korean War (1950-1953), its dramatic break with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and its growing appeal in parts of the Third World had already given China an important international presence. Now in recent decades, its remarkable economic success made it a major player in the markets of the world and a great power to reckon with in East Asia and beyond. The rise of China to great-power status both reshaped the lives of the fifth of the world within its borders and reconfigured the contours of global power.
The End of the Cold War
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the abandonment of long-established communist economic policies in China brought an end to the Cold War. Russia and China actively sought foreign investment and entry into international capitalist bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Reductions in nuclear and other weapons followed. Although tensions remained between Russia, China, and the West, they now lacked the bitter ideological dimension and sense of immediate military threat that had characterized the Cold War. Throughout the world, communism had been discredited, and state management yielded to the market as the primary mechanism for generating the holy grail of economic growth. Having surmounted communist challenge, the supporters of capitalist democracies had reason to feel triumphant as the twenty-first century dawned.
But the communist challenge had long affected the development of capitalist societies. In the United States, for example, the Cold War drove an enormous expansion of the role of government as defense spending ballooned, it fostered increased funding for higher education as a means of keeping up in the arms race, and it contributed much to the growth of executive power in what was termed an “imperial presidency.” It also made many Americans deeply suspicious of those with socialist sympathies or left-wing views and gave rise in the early 1950s to a wave of anticommunist purges.
The communist threat also stimulated Western reforms of capitalism, aimed at overcoming some of the insecurities, inequalities, and instabilities that unfettered market economies seemed to generate. During the twentieth century, state authorities in capitalist societies learned how to use their taxing and spending policies and adjustments in the supply of money to moderate the ups and downs of their economies. They proved increasingly willing to regulate banks, stock markets, and factories to protect their citizens from earlier abuses. And they constructed various kinds of welfare measures—unemployment insurance, national health care programs, minimum-wage laws, and tax breaks for the poor—to provide a measure of social and economic security in the face of unpredictable market forces. The collapse of communism coincided with—and perhaps caused—a retreat from these state welfare policies in many countries, but the triumphant capitalism of the twentieth century’s end was quite different from that of its beginning.
Conclusion: Something New;
Something Old
From the perspective of 1900, who would have predicted that established European states would exhaust themselves in two bitter wars within 50 years, that Europe’s empires would come apart by the 1960s, that the Islamic world would reassert its values so dramatically, or that the United States would emerge as the leading power of the twentieth century’s second half? Who could have foreseen the revolutions that brought down ancient regimes in Russia and China or the global division of the Cold War? Who could have realistically anticipated trips to the moon, artificial satellites circling the earth, or the instantaneous communications of the late twentieth century?
And yet, at least in hindsight, these changes had roots in earlier patterns and periods of world history. The world wars reflected the centuries-long inability of European states to re-create the kind of unity that had characterized the Roman Empire long ago. Twentieth-century communism represented an effort, even if misunderstood, to apply the ideas of Karl Marx and European socialists of the preceding century. Islamic revivalism drew on vivid memories of Islamic centrality in the Afro-Eurasian world for 1,000 years and on equally vivid memories of 300 years of Western imperialism in the Middle East. The struggles for independence and the emergence of new nations in Africa and Asia paralleled an earlier process in the Americas.
Recognizing the new in the context of the persistent is the challenge not only of historians but also, more important, of citizens, whether they are comfortable with what is or are searching for what might be.
Suggested Readings
Betts, Raymond. Decolonization. London: Routledge, 1998. A short account of the struggles for independence in Asia and Africa and the end of European empires.
Chatterjee, Choi, et al. The 20th Century: A Retrospective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. A thematic rather than a region-by-region examination of recent world history.
Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. A concise account of Islam in the twentieth century, with a focus on its revivalist wing.
Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A survey and assessment of conflicting interpretations of the Nazi phenomenon.
LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2000. New York: Longman, 2002. A global account of the Cold War, emphasizing its impact on American life.
Read, Christopher. The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System. New York: Palgrave, 2001. An up-to-date examination of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
Spence, Jonathan. Mao Zedong. New York: Penguin, 1999. A brief biography of China’s revolutionary leader.
Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962. A popular and riveting account of the origins of World War I.
Notes
1. The term comes from Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).
2. Maurice Hindus, Red Bread (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1.
3. Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 316.
4. Quoted in Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 221-22.
5. Life, February 17, 1941.
6. Ronald Steel, Pax Americana (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 254.
7. See Robert McNamara, In Retrospect (New York: Random House, 1995).
8. Quoted in Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War, 19
45-1987 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1988), 105.
9. Robert Malley, “The Third Worldist Moment,” Current History, November 1999, 359-69.
10. David Ranson, “The Dictatorship of Debt,” New Internationalist, May 1999, 1-4.
11. Quoted in Francis Robinson, Atlas of the Islamic World since 1500 (New York: Facts on File, 1982), 163.
12. Sayings of Ayatollah Khomeini (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 3-29.
13. Quoted in Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107-8.
14. From Novy Mir, 4 (1990): 173-204. Cited in Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, eds., The Soviet System from Crisis to Collapse (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 283-84.
15. Deng Xiaoping, “The Necessity of Upholding the Four Cardinal Principles in the Drive for the Four Modernizations,” in Major Documents of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1991), 54.
Beneath the Surface of
Globalization and Modernity
THE PAST CENTURY
More of Us: Population Growth in the Past Century
A Demographic Transition
Consequences
Variations and Redistributions
Enough to Eat?
To the Cities
On the Move
Young and Old
Debates and Controversies
Too Many People?
Controlling Population Growth
Economic Globalization
An Industrializing World
