Political changes after the cold war

...In this way of thinking, it does not matter if the reductions appear "one-sided...

...Although the repressive nature of the communist regimes is understood by most in the West, the full impact of the cold war on politics in the United States, especially in foreign policy, is not yet fully appreciated...

...The reasons for this shift include the new stance of the Soviet Union and the changes in Europe that make a major war between East and West all but impossible...

...Instead of trying to negotiate strategic agreements based on parity, Moscow is trading off concessions in order to generate momentum for more arms control...

...The other development regarding the nuclear question concerns changes in the U.S...

...European business plans to enter the huge new market...

...I am not a trader, and I have no particular love of traders...

...Gorbachev is popular and Americans want their government to help him...

...Should the Pentagon prepare to win a nuclear war or be content merely with a standoff at the level of thirty thousand warheads...

...Superficially, he would seem to be right...

...The government agrees...

...This uncertainty helps to explain the thus-far slow reaction of U.S...

...Enter Lech Walesa to negotiate a compromise...

...business...

...I don't wish to glorify the market and far be it from me to speak of a perfect market or to defend typical Chicago theory based on perfect market competition, which has little to do with the real world...

...Some will prosper...

...This is not the point...

...And if somebody says that the market can get out of control, or leads to all kinds of distortions and therefore needs to be watched with care, I can only applaud that sentiment...

...But business trepidation also reflects long-standing fears of investing in areas where the economic and political future remains uncertain...

...This is true even in the case of the imaginary, idealized commune...

...If capitalist-inspired austerity is the order of the day and Solidarity and other independent trade unions continue to defend workers' rights, then it is not at all clear what will happen...

...What will be lost is "the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, [and] the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism . . . . In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history...

...Assume that a hundred people form a commune, and within that commune there is perfect communism: they all share and share alike, and no money passes between them...

...While critical questions surround the future of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there is another set of questions in the background: the implications of these changes for American politics...

...What no one at this point can predict is the outcome when this ethic collides with "the logic of the marketplace...

...Neither European nor American business has much interest in the development of a society combining economic vitality with concern for human community...

...A• No...

...The slow diffusion of the critique of conventional nuclear thinking offered by the peace movement over the 1980s has played a role as well...

...Just what are the implications of the transformation of Eastern Europe...

...In private, the more revisionist-minded civilian analysts at the Institute for USA and Canada, an Markets and Democracy Q• This brings me to the question of markets and democracy...

...Atomic weapons take up a relatively small part of that budget, so even a decade of nuclear arms control would not free up significant funds...

...And we cannot exclude the possibility that future reductions in nuclear arsenals might undermine stability...

...Suppose that that commune produces anything you like, from books to eggs...

...These attitudes are not being articulated by a popular leader, yet an imaginative presidential campaign could appeal to such embryonic sentiments for a program of "common security...

...Only then can we have peace...

...It is the alternative to the market that dismays me: the alternative is more objectionable...

...In Poland, one can even detect a pattern: A European company proposes a project and defines the level of capital investment, wages, and degree of local control, the last usually minimal...

...History is far from over...

...Public opinion, however, is "soft" —by itself it does not constitute a force for change...

...Liberals, moderates, and even many conservatives have virtually given up on the need for a nuclear counterforce in behalf of extended deterrence...

...There is a tendency in your argument to equate markets and democracy in a way that can be construed as close to the present argument of the right...

...If you don't and if you have what economists call opportunity costs—defined as a situation in which there are mutually exclusive alternatives —then either you must have purchase and sale, i.e., the market, production for the market, and links of a market type between producer and consumer, and between producer and producer...

...Defenders of the status quo will continue to find "enemies" justifying a large military budget...

...it nonetheless requires for its functioning consumer goods and producer goods, it requires things that it must get from other people...

...One possible source is a remarkable shift in public opinion toward the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons policy...

...Several important weapons systems continue on their own inertia...

...Limiting by coupon is unpopular, nobody likes it, so one is left with the damned market, you see...

...A new Europe .. . These images reflect profound changes taking place in world politics...

...Such movements must aim for an industrial policy whose goal is more than fostering competitiveness in a few high-tech industries...

...All of which explains the lament of Kevin Phillips, a political theorist for the Republican party: "We won the battle against the Soviet Union but we lost the battle for control of the 21st century economy...

...Now, if you can conceive of abundance in this sense, then of course you have a counterargument...

...The end of the cold war necessitates a new political and economic orientation...

...It is through the regional conflicts—ranging from support of the military alliance containing the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to the destructive intervention in Panama—that Washington is most actively trying to check incipient public support for an end to a militarized foreign policy...

...But once the initial enthusiasm dies down, others may push for a balance of incentive structures and social responsibility...

...A lower profile for nuclear weapons in the calculations of both Washington and Moscow is a significant step, although by itself it will not bring about a genuine peace...

...A diminished Soviet threat is bad news for Republicans, who have long relied on anticommunist rhetoric...

...an eighteenmonth unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing...

...Public opinion is thus two-sided, capable of supporting, if properly presented, a fundamentally new approach to security, yet passive toward and even supportive of military action, as in Panama...

...nuclear systems that bolstered the credibility of first use...

...148 • DISSENT...

...If one mixes in environmental concerns, it may be possible to work out a complex alliance between social-democratic and green tendencies in Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy with those reform groupings in Eastern Europe that remain leery of an indiscriminate adoption of the market...

...The Soviets insisted upon negotiating on the principle of parity, something the United States was not willing to concede...

...As long as Moscow retains several hundred survival warheads for "minimal deterrence," all other nuclear systems can be subjected to a more flexible arms control...

...There are indications from Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union that the replacement of statecommand economies by market incentives is bringing with it corruption, profiteering, and worker disgruntlement in the short run, and the prospect of SPRING • 1990 • 145 Comments and Opinions harder work for longer hours in the long run...

...Some more will probably enjoy slowly rising living standards...

...q SPRING • 1990 • 147 Comments and Opinions influential Moscow think-tank, demonstrate an almost dismissive attitude toward technical calculations of the nuclear balance...

...Some political forces will no doubt support the expansion of the market...

...To be successful, a popular effort to reduce the military budget by half must be linked with movements for social justice...

...West Germany, said the editorial, cannot be expected "to finance the experiment of a new variant of socialism...

...Americans are still woefully uninformed about international affairs, and subject to manipulation by politicians who command polling firms that devise ways to present traditional policies in acceptable form...

...Impasse...

...both Germanys announce plans to cut their armies by half over the next decade...

...We must create decent, well-paying employment, counter the drift toward a polarized society, and address the reemergence of racial bigotry...

...The workers don't...

...There are two ways, and two ways only, in which they can get these things from other people: they can have them allocated to them by an administrative authority, or can just go and buy them...

...But there is another element as well...

...This can hardly remain the future basis of social organization...

...Within the Pentagon, nuclear-war planners are proceeding much as in the past...

...Examples of this Soviet revisionism include the INF Treaty, which started from Reagan's original "zero-option" proposal...

...A recent editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a probusiness paper, warned against opposition groups in Eastern Europe whose political program was "to save socialism...

...Two-thirds support efforts to aid reform in the USSR...

...Where and how should the United States use military force in the Third World...

...Market, like commodity production, follows from the separation of the units of production from each other on the one hand, so that their production cannot be for their own use only but for exchange and, on the other hand, from the fact that somehow the multifarious needs of society have to find some sort of expression through contractual relations, which I really cannot conceive of as taking place other than in the form of purchase and sale...

...Short of a catastrophic reversal of perestroika, we can expect a period of significant nuclear arms control regardless of who occupies the White House...

...and a flexible attitude toward SDI research (although not on deployment...

...What is the best way to allocate a military budget higher than that of any other nation...

...nuclear arms control proposals attempted to check the growth of Soviet land-based missiles while protecting those U.S...

...As long as they do, Fukuyama's prospect of a homogenized planet dominated by VCRs, health clubs, fashion, and do-it-yourself projects remains in the distant future, if ever at all...

...The geographic and cultural proximity of the West Europeans helps account for the different reaction...

...That is a risky statement, and there are caveats one must quickly add...

...Perhaps more than at any other time in the postwar period, Americans are willing to entertain a new approach to national security...

...European and even Japanese business and banks have taken steps to carve out a future role for themselves in Eastern Europe...

...I am not particularly fond of the market...

...The current situation regarding nuclear weapons policy is another potential source of change...

...The result was that the United States developed war-fighting systems and the Soviet Union tried to reply in kind...

...acceptance of onsite inspection to verify treaties...

...More than three-quarters of the public want Washington to take the lead in combating global warming...

...The forces for political reform in the "East" all seem to recognize the need for some market incentives...

...From an interview with Alec Nove by Anders Stephenson in Social Text, Winter 1984-85...

...Only a revitalized social movement will be able to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the next decade...

...Yet the traditional "need" to pose a not-incredible nuclear first strike has almost disappeared...

...Freedom in this sense for them to function requires, it seems to me, that they be able to go and buy them, except on one assumption, an assumption made by some Marxists and occasionally implied by Marx himself, that under socialism everything will be so plentiful that all they have to do is go to a common store and obtain them by simply bringing a large sack and taking them away with no money passing...

...Since 1948, the debate over national security has been restricted to the following questions: By what diplomatic and military measures should we confront an enemy seen as expansionary...

...Two developments have transformed this dangerous pattern...

...business reluctance is due in part to anachronistic trade barriers, especially on hightechnology products, that are only now being slowly dismantled...

...Yet no one really can predict what will be the ultimate reaction of Eastern Europeans to "bottom line" practice...

...or you must have material allocations, you must have rationing of materials and rationings for the consumer so that their consumption is then limited by coupon...

...Different social groups will continue to struggle over the answers...

...This new openness implies far more than registered support for reducing the defense budget and renewed commitment to social programs...

...For most commentators the answer is easy: capitalism has triumphed and a significant part of the world is now open to market forces that will secure political democracy...

...Over the past 146 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions twenty years, U.S...

...Republican politicians may soon be wishing that they were able to talk about Alger Hiss and the Soviet threat...

...So it is not a question of my preference...

...One aspect of living under the communist regimes has been the spread of an ethic, however ill-realized, in which society is supposed to provide at least some guarantees of security...

...Now, with the removal of the "evil empire" and a growing recognition of the futility of nuclear weapons, the political agenda has become more open...

...Americans are now willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union on issues including nuclear arms control, AIDS research, combating terrorism and nuclear proliferation, and preserving the environment...

...Are there sources of change within the United States that could, at the end of the cold war, resurrect a progressive agenda...

...First, the Soviets seem to have concluded that conventional thinking regarding nuclear weapons—comparing different systems as if the nuclear balance represented some measurable military and political significance—is hopelessly outmoded...

...In his © Paul Joseph famous essay "The End of History," Francis Fukuyama argues that the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union will culminate in a homogeneous world dominated by "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands...

...But this "end," he writes, "will be a very sad time...

...The cold war both served the international interests of the United States and helped provide for domestic tranquility...

...experiments to see how onsite inspection might work...

...The cold war took the form of a dangerous nuclear arms race, very expensive preparations for a conventional war, and intervention in regional conflicts...

...Let's pass over Fukuyama's nostalgia for the cold war and focus on what appears to be the victory of the capitalist economy...

...This restricted debate has also contributed to the gradual weakening of the progressive impulse within the Democratic party...

...strategic community...

...They seem to feel that almost any reasonable proposal will be accepted if it loosens the arms control logjam and lowers the profile of the nuclear question in future U.S.-Soviet relations...

...Fukuyama sees a world without ideological competition, dominated by market forces and liberal democracies that do not go to war with each other...

...In the meantime, access to free health care, old-age pensions, and other forms of the social safety net is being eroded...