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The Cold War Was Not a Matter of Culpability

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The Cold War Was Not a Matter of Culpability APPENDIX The Cold War Was Not a Matter of Culpability “ idStalin...seeka Cold War?” The question is like asking: ‘[D]oes a fish seek water?’” With these words, John Lewis Gad- Ddis, the foremost U.S. analyst of the Cold War, seeks to under- score his conviction that the Soviet leader was responsible for the Cold War.1 Gaddis acknowledges that, because of the circumstances, even without Stalin a Cold War might have ensued. But he stresses that Stalin’s “dispositional behavior,” specifically, his lifelong “disposition to wage cold wars” annulled any chance that the United States and the Soviet Union could have overcome their differences at the end of the Sec- ond World War.2 Two factors led me to question Gaddis’s line of argument. According to Gaddis, social psychologists attribute causes to the actions of individu- als by categorizing them into either “dispositional” or “situational” behavior. Dispositional behavior, notes Gaddis, reflects deeply rooted per- sonal characteristics that do not change, regardless of the circumstances under which people find themselves. Situational behavior, on the other hand, changes with circumstances; the way individuals respond to events is determined more by the event than by the individuals’ personal traits. Gaddis uses this distinction to propose that Stalin’s dispositional tenden- cies prevented him from abandoning in world politics the paranoia that defined his domestic politics. Gaddis’s exceptional qualities as a historian notwithstanding, he wholly misconstrues the distinction between the two forms of behavior, and the intent for creating the categories. To begin with, the difference is spelled out by attribution theorists, who created the two categories not for the purpose of differentiating people according to whether they respond to an event based on their personality or the situation, but in order to contrast the way responses to events are perceived by the actors 280 • Appendix and those observing the actions of the actors. Both parties, note social psychologists, attribute behavior to different causes: the actors typically attribute their behavior to the requirements of the situation, while the observers attribute the same behavior to the dispositional characteristics of the actors. “The divergent perceptions of actors and observers exem- plify the tendency for people to attribute causality to whatever captures their attention or is salient.”3 Equally as significant, Gaddis misinterprets the implications behind the definitions applied to each category. Disposi- tional causes refer to the enduring characteristics of the individual that, as Gaddis correctly notes, remain much the same regardless of the circum- stances. These characteristics, however, do not automatically denote, as he contends, inflexibility. To be sure, based on the past analysis of an actor’s behavior it may be possible for the observer to predict the manner in which the observed party will respond in the future, but such a prediction does not always lead to the conclusion that the actor is “inflexible.” Gad- dis may be right when he proposes that Stalin was determined to wage a cold war on the West, but this action and whatever other actions he may have initiated against other domestic and international political parties do not prove that he always responded inflexibly to whatever happened. If such had been the case, then the Soviet Union would have never agreed to diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933, or signed an agree- ment with Germany in 1939, or joined forces with the United States and Britain to fight the Germans after 1941. As George Kennan noted: “The [Soviet] leadership is at liberty to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis it finds useful. .”4 “[T]he Soviet leaders are prepared to recognize situations, if not arguments.”5 For my second reason for placing little emphasis on Stalin’s personality traits in the inquiry into the start of the Cold War, I refer to a comment by Karl Marx that was acknowledged by Gaddis in his own analysis. “Men,” wrote Marx, “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by them- selves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”6 Stalin, more than any other Soviet leader, helped shape the structure of the Soviet political, economic, and social system. With the passage of time, Stalin, more than any other Soviet leader, determined the manner in which this system would respond to the external world. And yet, this same system, as became clearly evident following Stalin’s death, developed its own separate identity—not one that was at odds with that of its leader, but one that transcended the leader’s personality. Stated differently, it is most unlikely that the Soviet political system would have tolerated a leader who was unwilling to exploit the opportu- nities offered by the international system that emerged at the end of the Second World War. Notes Introduction 1. See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 336. See also Earl H. Fry, Stan A. Tay- lor, and Robert S. Wood, America the Vincible (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), 257. 2. See Charles W. Kegley Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trends and Transformations 7th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s/Worth, 1999), 99–103. 3.SeeG.W.Hegel,Reason in History (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Pub- lishing Company, 1953); and Robert Heilbroner, Marxism: For and Against (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). 4. See Thomas J. Biersteker, “Dialectical Thinking About World Order: Six- teen Theses on Dialectics,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (Anaheim, Calif.: March 1986). 5. The reader should not infer from this contention that I assume that all decision-makers are hindered by the same psychological and information- processing defects. As I have proposed elsewhere, decision-making skills can vary significantly from one decision-maker to another. See Alex Roberto Hybel, “A Fortuitous Victory: An Information Processing Approach to the Gulf War,” in The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Pol- icy: Insights and Evidence, ed. Eugene R. Wittkopf and James M. McCormick (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999). 6. See Robert Dahl, Regimes and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 3–9. 7. To avoid confusion, it is important to keep in mind that democratic sys- tems can also vary significantly in their levels of competitiveness. The American political system, with its two-party system, is significantly less competitive than, say, Norway’s party system, which for years had a five- party format. 282 • Notes 8. See Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18. 9. To contend that the market affects every aspect of society, including the issues that dominate the state’s political agenda, is not to propose that the market is more important than politics, or that there is a causal relation- ship between the market and politics, with the market functioning as the cause. It is always the state, that is, the political embodiment of a terri- tory, that decides, as it gauges the market’s effects on a peoples’ well- being, whether to institute or to abolish regulations that will alter a market’s levels of openness or competitiveness. 10. Paradoxically, the legitimacy of authoritarian states is heavily dependent on economic success. It is no wonder, thus, that so many dictators who have been in power for lengthy periods are overthrown as their states’ economies falter. Chapter 1 1. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in International Politics (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1983), 106. 2. Ibid., 96–102. 3. Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplo- matic Problems of Our Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 18 and 24. 4. Ibid., 31. 5. The figures appear in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Eco- nomic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 171. 6. It was not until 1860, when Russia founded the city of Vladivostok in the Far East, after acquiring the surrounding region, that Saint Petersburg gained access to a second warm-water port. This new port enabled Russia to have direct access to the Sea of Japan. 7. This action was instigated by the Ottoman government’s decision in 1852 to grant Roman Catholics rights equal to those held by Greek Orthodox Christians. 8. This meant that the Black Sea would be closed to all warships, and that no one would be authorized to set up naval arsenals and dockyards on its shores. 9. Quoted in Kennedy, The Rise and Fall, 177. 10. Gordon A. Craig, Europe Since 1815 (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Win- ston, 1966), 131–34. 11. Ibid., 187 and 197. 12. Asa Briggs and Patricia Clavin, Modern Europe, 1789–1989 (London: Routledge, 1997), 111. 13. The members of the German Confederation were not particularly enthusi- astic about having Prussia as the leader, and thus, prior to the war, they sided with Austria. 14. Quoted in John Lowe, The Great Powers, Imperialism and the German Prob- lem, 1865–1925 (London: Routledge, 1994), 30. Notes • 283 15. As if to add insult to injury, the ceremony in which King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed kaiser (emperor) of Germany took place on Janu- ary 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. 16. Lowe, The Great Powers, 35–8. See also Briggs and Clavin, Modern Europe, 122–23. 17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1993), 4. 18. Torbjön Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 163–64.
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