The Sociology of New Thinking Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War

EnglishThe Sociology of New Thinking The Sociology of New Thinking Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War ✣ In this article I show that ideas inºuenced Soviet behavior during the ªnal years of the Cold War in a much broader, more complex, and more fundamental manner than is generally understood. It was more fundamental because the “new thinking” did not merely signal a reconsideration of policy efªcacy or recalculation of ends and means, but reºected instead a long-term and wholesale revision of beliefs, values, and identity. It was broader because these new ideas were adopted not just by a small group of foreign affairs experts but by a large section of the critical intelligentsia. It was more complex because the process by which ideas were born, developed, mobilized, and ulti- mately transformed into policy was prolonged and variegated—shaped by intellectual, social, and material forces—and consequently resists capture in any single theoretical framework. The implications of this analysis go considerably beyond the now famil- iar argument that “materialist” explanations of the end of the Cold War founder on the central causal role of ideas. Much more importantly, I demon- strate that most approaches to the study of ideas in international relations, including neoliberal models of ideas and policy change, cognitive learning theory, and even some formulations of constructivist social theory, fail to capture the full effect of ideas in this case. No doubt, the explanation set forth below has elements in common with various learning-based approaches to Soviet change. It is, in part, a constructivist argument about the constitutive power of major ideational-identity change. Nonetheless, it differs in key respects. It does not single out a particular cohort of new thinkers (e.g., arms control experts) or a single aspect of the new thinking (e.g., regarding the use of force in international relations) pre- cisely because such narrow speciªcation necessarily misses a broader intellec- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 43–80 © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 43 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520397053630628 by guest on 25 September 2021 English tual-social change. Similarly, it does not break a continuous, decades-long process into discrete cases for comparative examination; doing so may help focus on a single causal mechanism, but it again risks missing the forest for the trees. In tracing the story of new thinking from its origins through imple- mentation, I must perforce consider a succession of dependent variables from the social to the political, from intellectual change to policy outcomes. This apparent sacriªce of analytical “rigor” for empirical “richness” ºows from a conscious methodological choice, an unabashedly inductive approach that of- fers a valuable corrective to the distorting effects of conceptual single-minded- ness in studies of the end of the Cold War. I begin by recounting some early insights into the social-intellectual char- acter of the new thinkers that led to this methodological choice. I then exam- ine the development and mobilization of the new thinking, with particular attention to the means by which not only a set of policy alternatives, but an alternative worldview or identity, captured a reform-minded leadership. In so doing I also suggest the more conservative paths that would likely have pre- vailed in the absence of such coherent new thinking (and such a committed cohort of its exponents). Finally, I discuss the nature of identity change more generally, highlighting broad similarities between the Soviet case and other such instances of social-intellectual-political change. I conclude that insisting on deductively driven, rigorous theory testing at the expense of inductively driven, creative theory building signiªcantly impairs our ability to understand such complex and important episodes of change. The Origins of New Ideas: A Holistic Approach When I embarked on research into the origins of new thinking, two things soon became clear. One was the impossibility of separating reform initiatives in domestic politics from those in foreign affairs. The two were obviously linked in policy terms. For example, economic reformers faced a centralized system geared toward military production, just as proponents of domestic intellectual and cultural change faced an entrenched ideology of global confron- tation. Further, these links extended to the agents promoting change as well as to the structures resisting it. Many reformist economists and sociologists were also leading supporters of a conciliatory foreign policy. Prominent scientists emerged as arms control advocates, and historians and philosophers were among the foremost proponents of cultural and even economic integration with the liberal democratic West. 44 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520397053630628 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Sociology of New Thinking Importantly, many of the new thinkers, despite their diverse occupations, also shared extensive personal, educational, and professional ties. Having studied in the same lecture halls and think tanks, and having experienced the exhilaration of de-Stalinization on the same editorial boards and consultant groups, they also fought parallel Brezhnev-era battles to save reformist gains and had helped each other endure a conservative backlash. Thus, as suggested even by cursory investigation into the background of those who emerged as the most inºuential supporters of perestroika and new thinking, the reformers’ evolution could be grasped only in broader social-intellectual terms. They could no more be understood in separate categories (philosophers and historians, economists and sociologists, foreign policy analysts and diplomats, etc.) than could the reforms they sought to advance. Thus, a second initial challenge was more conceptual. Could the views of Soviet physicists be understood through their attendance at disarmament conferences abroad, while overlooking their earlier efforts at home in the ªght to de-Stalinize and “globalize” the social sciences? Could the beliefs of foreign affairs experts be grasped via their role in détente-era exchanges while ignor- ing their patronage of Moscow’s avant-garde theater or reading of samizdat historical and cultural works? Could economists who sought global integration be viewed as students of the capitalist West without attention to their study of East European reforms, of the market experience of the Soviet 1920s, and of pioneering pre-revolutionary Russian economists? Could the motives and underlying identity of these and other diverse reformers be understood absent appreciation of their strong professional and personal ties, their shared hopes during the thaw of the 1950s and 1960s, and their common anguish over the crushing of the Prague Spring? In short, what my early examination of the roots of new thinking suggested was the need for an approach of greater depth as well as breadth. Important as it was to appreciate the new thinkers as a diverse intellectual elite, it was equally vital to trace their development back much further than was usually done. Recognition of this required no unique insight, only common sense. If one is truly interested in exploring the ideational factor in political change, and if one is able to identify the most inºuential proponents of new ideas, what could be more natural than studying what these individu- als read, wrote, argued, and experienced? And not just on the eve of perestroika, when many were already quite senior, but ten, twenty, or thirty years earlier? For not only common sense but also a large body of research on learning and cognitive change agreed on at least one thing—namely the tenacity of beliefs and values imbibed early in one’s intellectual development. 45 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1520397053630628 by guest on 25 September 2021 English The Production of Ideas: Innovation in the Face of Adversity In the history of new thinking, that tenacity concerned ªrst of all the persis- tence of old thinking. Recent research has shown that ideology had far greater inºuence on Soviet foreign policy than was generally understood. Certainly during the thaw the paranoid extremes of Josif Stalin’s “hostile capitalist encir- clement” ebbed considerably. During the Brezhnev years, the Krushchev-era conªdence that socialism would rapidly overtake capitalism was supplanted by a cynicism in which the preservation of Communist Party rule at home, the empire abroad, and the powerful interests vested therein was upper- most. But numerous sources also stress the enduring inºuence of the “hostile- isolationist” worldview—belief in a world split into irreconcilable camps, fear of capitalism’s innate hostility, and residual faith in socialism’s continued ex- pansion and ultimate triumph over the West.1 For leaders born in revolution and war, and raised in Stalinism’s battle with “external and internal enemies”—from the terrorized 1930s through the Cold War of the early 1950s—such beliefs were axiomatic. Of course, this cohort ruled the USSR until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985. But even for a younger generation of elites, who came of political age in the Khrushchev era and thus presumably were shaped by the relative

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