summit totally omitted mention of one of the most central issues of dispute between the USSR and the USA: the struggle over the future place in world politics of Western Europe in general, and West Germany in particular
Yet without grasping the nature of this issuc, it is impossible to make sense of US policy over the last six years, impossible to understand the Reagan administration's commitment to Star Wars, and impossible to appreciate why the summit produced the curious result of reaching no agreement on anything except to pretend, for the benefit mainly of West European opinion, that some agreement had been achieved.
And it is only by understanding the political problem that the US administration has been facing in Western Europe that we can grasp why the US has been prepared to embark on a course that threatens the world with nuclear war.
silence on the West European since discussion of it would have exploded one of the most sacred taboos of domestic politics — the myth that the US-West European relationship is a free, collaborative alliance sovereign states whose relations are governed by dialogue rather than power. In the 1950s and 1960s, this myth had great force for the simple reason that US dominance commanded very wide consent, at least in the countries with strong social democratic parties in north west Europe. Such stability depended, however, on a number of factors that by the late 1970s had disappeared. First, a great capitalist economic boom, coupled with massive American economic ascendancy; second, Arnerican strategic superiority over the USSR, ensuring that the West European states had to hinge their foreign policies on Washington's axis; third, the attempted integration of the working classes in Western Europe through social democracy, entailing full employment, the welfare state and the replacement of
right-wing nationalism Europeanism
In the last decade, these bases of American dominance in Western Europe have disappeared. First, and most fundamentally, the boom has gone and international capitalist competi20 tion has become a zero-sum game — simply to holl your share
The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) - Star Wars to most people - is often depicted as either irrational or solely about US military superiority. But, argues OLIVER MACDONALD, these are mistaken
Cof a shrinking market you have to savage your competitor. And in that game the US has been losing in many fields to its West German and Japanese competitors, so that economic warfare has become more and more the pattern, with capitalists enlisting the support of their states to wage this war. In the mid-1970s, there was an attempt to manage this warfare through so-called trilateralism, involving the annual economic summits of the US, Japan and Western Europc. But at the 1978 summit trilateralism broke down as Schmidt refused to do Carter's bidding. ( From then on, the US has been secking ways to restore its cconomic ascendancy by trying to re-organise the world market in its favour, but this has run up against the problem of having an adequate means to coerce its rivals into a new relationship. The problem here was that the growth of Soviet strategic military power made the American military asendancy over Western Europe unbelievable — nobody could suppose that the US would risk its own annihilation for the sake of asserting its interests in Western Europe. The second problem was that detente in Europe had enabled the West German capitalists to increasingly break free from other forms of US coercion: West German dependence on the dollar arca for energy supplies and strategic raw materials could be lessened by getting these from the USSR. And as the 1973-74 crisis showed, Eastern Europe and the USSR could be a vital, short-term substitute market for West German exports in a recession. US attempts to find an answer to this problem tell us much of the story of the new cold war since the late 1970s. The third factor of the old stability was social democracy and the welfare state. In the new conditions, social democracy has ceased to be a bulwark of American interests and is seen as a serious threat to US objectives, especially in West Germany, for the simple reason that to protect jobs and welfare, social democracy is likely to oppose the cold war policies needed to bring the West European states back into line. Thus, unlike in the 1950s and 1960s, US interests now involve barking the most reactionary and militarist forces in north west Europe, the sort of forces they have always backed in countries like Greece, Italy and the Iberian peninsula, not to speak of Latin America. Against this background, we can now dispose of some of the International, No. 2. January/February 1986
Greenhain Common 1983 - can the peace movement stop Star Wars? myths that befog serious discussion of US policy. Myth One is that the policy is the product of the idenlogy of the Republican right: in fact, it began under Carter and is bipartisan in its essenrials. Myth Two is that the military build-up has no political rationale and is simply the mindless product of the military. industrial iron triangle: in fact the military-industrial complex was given the green light by a very wide political consensus in Washington, and as Strobe Talbot shows in Deadly Gambits, it was not super-militarist Perle who fought hardest for cruise and Pershing, but the State Department's chief of European political affairs, Richard Burt (now, by the way, US Ambassador in Bonn). We will look later at the political rationale for Star Wars. Myth Three is that the US doesn't really care about Western Europe at all and regards its military commitment there as a waste of resources. This is an extraordinarily widespread idea, often now coupled with the notion that the US ruling class has shifted to the south west of America and is oriented to the Pacific rim. It is a dangerously mistaken half-truth that needs to be dispelled.
It is true a sizeable chunk of US capital now has smaller stakes in Western Europe than was the case, say, in the 1950s. This tendency may continue, but in terms of both economic and political power Western Europe remains the fulcrum of the entire US global strategy. If Western Europe swung out of the US sphere and established a new security relationship with the USSR, this would amount to a catastrophic blow to American world power. We must not confuse long-term possible future trends with current realities. As for the growing US desire to pull US troops out of Western Europe, this is true enough but does not at all signily a determination to let Western Europe slip nut of US control. The new measures for organising such control in the 1980s will actually be strengthened by the removal of US ground troops: 'limited' war in Europe would become pulitically less costly in the US
The recent history of US-West European relations
Turning then to the read course of US. West European relations since the late 1970s, we can briefle sommanise the main phases of the struggle:
Phase 1: 1978.82: Ope propaganda iear In 1978, International. No 2. January februars 1980
isha Harrie Washington's carlier pre-occupation with Eurocommunism in Southern Europe suddenly gave way to a growing campaign against what was called 'Finlandisation', with West Germany as the target. At the capitalist summit that year Schmidt had refused to do Washington's bidding on economic policy and the following year Germany launched the European Monetary System. Washington was aware of the growing cconomic links between Bonn and Moscow and also of the potential for much wider collaboration in key energy and raw material fields; the slogan of Finlandisation became a code word for West Germany freeing itself from US control through Ostpolitik. With a Social Democratic government in power, Washington feared, the new economic depression could lead Bonn to try to save jubs by big increases in exports to the East. Plans for economic sanctions and trade embargoes against Moscow as part of a new cold war were well advanced before the invasion of Afghanistan, which was used as a pretext for trying to scuttle Ostpolitik. This was followed in 1982 by Washington's attempts to block the gas pipeline deal and the resolution of the conflict by the West Europeans agreeing to impose technology embargoes against the USSR. Washington was meanwhile working behind the scenes with sections of West German big business for the fall of the SPD government, an objective achieved in October 1982
Phase 2: 1983-84: Nuclear unity plus attempted European political counter measures. With the fall of the Schnidt government, Washington was able to force through the installation of cruise: and Pershing in Europe. Given the nature of the threat these weapons posed to Moscow, the US calculated that the arrival of Pershings would blow the links between Bonn and the USSR sky high. The Kohl government attempted to maintain Ostpolitik on the same lines as under Schmidt, but emphasising closer links with East Germany. By the autumn of 1984, however, this policy lay in ruins as Moscow blorked Honecker's proposed visit to West Germany. At the same time, attempts were being made to establish a Franco-German military and foreign policy axis. The talks on this. begun under Schmidt in 1982, produced proposals for resiving the Western Europcan Union (WEU) as a forum of seven West European states excluding the Americans, where the military political implications of the struggle between West European and C'S capital could be discussed. Parallel 1o 21
this vere plans en strengten the Comen Mishr
1985 to Cinera: Ner As polid done From the start of 1985, the Reagan administration has worked soccessful. ly to strangle the Franco German push. Aide art of the ycar il issuer formal diplomatic notes warming that politary discussions from which Washington is excluded are unacceptable The WEU initiative has thus collapsed. Washington has also the satisfaction of sering efforts to make the BRO: more politically cohesive fail. On the other band, the Reagan administration's hopes that Reagan's Bitburg visit would shore up Kobt eler torally and decisively cement a new Washington Ronn condominium in NATO also collapsed The massie SPD victory in North Rhine Westphalia two days after Burburg led Kohl to wobble away from his initial endorsement of Washington's grand design for West Germany's and Western Europe's future. And at this point, the new Gorbachev leadership in Moscow entered the scene.
To sum up, Washington's drive since the late 1970s to reestablish control in Western Europe has not yet succeeded, although it has been able to block, without much difficulty, ittempts to present a European capitalist alternative orientation. How does the Reagan administration plan to finally stabilise its relations with Western Europe to ensure its long-term control? The answer: Star Wars. The Politics of Star Wars Press comment on Star Wars does point to two of its possible rationales. First, SDI is a means of state cronomic pump-priming in the technology race between the US and its capitalist rivals as well as the USSk. This is true up to a point, but it must be qualified: the US is struggling very hard to drag the West Germans into the Star Wars programme and it is doing so on the basis of promises that it will share SUI research with those who
'The second rationale is military strategie. it could, if successtal, give the US a margin of military superiority over the USSR in so far as it could protect hey American installations from a second strike. Reagan's stated aim that the U!S would serk to 'prevail over the USSR in a madear war would then begin to make sense.
But why would any sane US administration go for such a dangerous option that positively invites a Soviet pre-emptive strike in the transition period? The answer may be that given the political objectives of the US towards Wistern Europe, the administration may not have any choire. Even a partial Star Wars umbrella over the US produces the most elegant answer imaginable to America's European prolleni.
The arrival of nudeat paris beee die super-powers gave: West Germany and other European states ine basis for an independent foreign policy, cabling then to engage more efferfively in the economic struggle with the US. Paricy meant that the Europeans could argur convincingly that the American 'guarantee to fight a nuclear war in Europe: was no longer credible since the US itself was now threatened with annihiliation for the sake of its European friends'. Parity, the Europeans said, meant Western Burope had to turn to the USSR for a negotiated framework of agreed secarity ... "detente' -. the US had now become decoupled from Europe in terms of security guarantees.
But Star Wars solves this problem: with a partial umbrella over the US, Washington can promise the West Europeans that it won't hesitate to wipe out Europe in a war that will remain limited to Europe, since the USSR would fact defeat if it tried to make the struggle inter-continental. So now the West European bourgeoisies can stop all this nonsense of doing business with the USSR, under the guise of security Those Cirrinan bastards can stop trying to make themselves independent of the Us-controlled zones of the third world for encogy boy getting 10 percent of then conched uranium from de CSSR. They can knuckle under and start talking senously about how they intend to stop undermining American agri business and US industry. Because if they don't they ain't seen nothing yet.
Is there rcally any other way oftackling de problem shed el 22 seeking • Soviet American condominion ser Europe I!!
would grantee de BASR Would got be to condiour Dashe e with Wig dirainy? I here in, a boody has published it Gorbachev and Western Europe The Son ict leaderdp's achievemen of paricy' with the USA in dhe 1970s was coupled with its repcated demonstrations of is desire to privilege its relations with the bourgeoisies of Western Gurope and downgrade its sopport for West European Communist Parties. The accompanying detente of the 1970s was found to be very beneficial for capitalist interests in West Germany especially, but also in France and Italy. As the US counter-offensive at the end of the 1970; developed, the Soviet kadership was immobilised by its own internal leadership decay and transition, a crisis only beginning to be resolved in 1985 with the arrival of Gorbachev.
The new Soviet leadership is very frightened of the American drive for superiority and is desperate to modernise the Soviet economy, especially to tackle its growing technological gap vis à vis the West. There are three broad internal strategies in principle open to the Soviet Ieadership in this situation. One would be to go down the Hungarian road, greatly decentralising All smiles in Geneva and marketising the Soviet economy to stimulate innovation and at the same time opening up the cconomy much more to the world market. This would involve atlacking important egalitarian elements in the USSR, almost certainly creating turmoil within the working class as well as within the state bureaucracy. It would also create a form of dependence on the West that would be difficult for the center to adequately control The second option woukd be to create a political liberalisation of major dimensions releasing the controls on ideology and infermation and generating a great political mobilisation amongst both the working class and the intelligentsia, creating a spirio of experiment and invention and a new social dynamism. Kut do option, tried by Khruskkher, is anathema to the burcaucrary which fears like the plague challenges to its power from belois
This leaves the chird option: a more technocratic and les corrupt dension of Brezhnevism, laving structures besically cnchanged coupled with a ham io the world market on a much wider made. This can produce som quandtaive improembis in the short term, but it is unlikely to achieve any lasting sace• unless i involves a quite new type of close relationship with at arkanced capitalist economy
Tees this last option dat the Gorbad Wadership arens in have idloped Technologial poolion will one from drop. not frames for demest institutional changes, and will involt•
an effort at close collaboration with some advanced capitalist states. And it is against this background that we can see how difficult it would be for the Soviets to agree a deal with an American administration that involved a self-denying ordinance over its relations with West European bourgeoisies. The US Commerce Department has for long been cager to boost US trade in non-agricultural goods with the USSR, but the idea of the US being the font of technological renovation for the Soviet Union is a non-starter: it is the principal enemy, Congress proved unfriendly to stable trade expansion in the Kissinger days and there is the subsequent experience of economic warfare. In addition, the type of technology transfer the USSR wants from the West - engineering in manufacturing industry - is at least as advanced in West Germany as in the USA. And the Soviet leadership also know it can offer tempting political carrots to the Bundesrepublik, not least in being able to supply key raw materials that the FRG otherwise must acquire from the dollar arca.
Star Wars, on the other hand, threatens such collaboration in the long term, by making it possible for the US to turn Western Europe into an increasingly menacing armed camp, mobilised against the USSR. And in the short-term, its acceptance in Western Europe strengthens the sectors of capital there most closely tied to the USA. Geneva and the West European States The glorious days of the late 1970s when Bonn seemed a central actor in international high politics are long since over and the Kohl government has been swinging all over the place, riven by internal disputes over foreign policy and seeking to avoid making an irrevocable choice between the threats and blandishments of its three suitors — Washington, Moscow and Paris. The government has swung in the space of a year from commitment to a Franco-German military and political axis, over to the Reaganite package and then back away from it. Both the SPD and the Free Democrats (FDP) are strongly committed to maintaining Ostpolitik and resisting Star Wars this line also has support among some elements within the CDU and the state bureaucracy. On the other hand, the pro-American faction around Stoltenberg is increasingly dominant within the CDU, while Franco-German Gauilism (provided there is a German finger on the French nuckcar trigger) remains powerful within the CSU. The only fiekd of agreement between all these forces is over "Deutschlandpolicik" although exactly what lies behind support lor dose links with de GDR differs between the International No C. lamars/bram 19X8)
groups.
But what the Reagan administration did know before Geneva was that if the summit broke up in acrimony, the resul: would be to tilt the balance in Bonn against the Stoltenberg group, and West Germany would shift towards a renewed Ostpolitik, probably, as the Economist pointed oul, trampling on the Cocom agreements concerning high-tech embargoes against the USSR. This, more than any other single factor, was the reason why Reagan wanted to grin at the cameras and say things had gone well in the Geneva talks.
French policy has also swung wildly over the last few years, but not because of deep internal divisions within the political elite over foreign policy. It has swung as external conditions have sharply changed. At the beginning of the 1980s and up until the clection of the Kohl government, the main French fear was a rapprochement between Bonn and Moscow. Mitterrand acted as a Reaganite vanguard in support of the installation of cruise and Pershing missiles, or at least against the West German Social Democrats staying in power. But the aim of French policy was to create a Franco-German alliance with French military dominance because of its nuclear weapons, an alliance that would dominate Western Europe through the WEU and EEC and that would act as a third force between Washington and Moscow. Reagan has managed to crush this challenge without much difficulty, leaving the French state very much isolated. In such circumstances, Mitterrand has now gone back to square one, pursuing his own Ostpolitik, very much in tandem with the SPD and FDP in West Germany. French policy is strongly opposed to Star Wars.
As for British policy, it doesn't really count for anything much because Britain is a client state of the US. It differs from Washington only on one important point: its limitless hostility to French power. Otherwise the Thatcher regime seeks to do the bidding of Washington in the hope of gaining crumbs from Reagan's table, only to find, all too often, that the Americans are more concerned to placate the French, since the British state is too dependent to require bothering about. The political struggle after Geneva The Gorbachev smile to the cameras after the summit meant three things: first, he was not prepared to pay the cost of a break-down since that would have weakened his leverage in Western Europe; second, gestures of some sort of thaw in the cold war make it casier for West European states to pursue Ostpolitik in defiance of the Americans; and thirdly, he was doing a favour to the West European right by helping to damp down war fears in Europe and thus weakening the peace movement.
So the Gorbachev smile was the cue for Mitterrand to play host to Jaruzelski - the General's first trip to the West since his coup in December 198, which he used profitably as a cover for a long-desired purge of intellectuals in Poland. By legitimising Jaruzelski diplomatically, Mitterrand was doing a favour for his new friend Willi Brandt who nipped over to Warsaw the very next day to open up a new era in FRG-Polish relations. Brandt was acting in many ways as a proxy for the Kohl government itself, since Jaruzelski can clear the path for Honecker's trip to Bonn next year, thus beginning a new round of Deutschlandpolitik and openings towards Moscow.
But the very same day that Jaruzleski was in Paris, Weinberger was in London signing his SDI deal with London, trivial in itself as far as Washington is concerned, but a vital political precedent in the struggle for Bonn. And in the second week of December Shultz was on the march through London on his way to Bonn, stepping up the pressure. With disarming frankness he used the occasion to stress how SDI greatly reenforces the credibilty of the US commitment to be ready to annihiliate Europe in a 'limited war'
Infighting in the Kohl government over Star Wars has reached a new peak with one CDU leader declaring that FRG participation has already been agreed, while Foreign Minister Genscher, the FIP leader who made all this possible by breaking with the SPI) in October 1982, still declares his strong hostility to Star Wars.
23
The signs are that the iS will win the political struggle to
draw Bonn into the Star Wars research programme carly in 1986. This will not necessarily mean Bonn endorsing the testing and installation of a Star Wars system. No doubt Bonn will try to maintain opposition to these steps and will try to continue developing its economic and political links with the East through continuing to press Washington for an agreement with the USSR on Star Wars and arms control through the Geneva process. But by agreeing to participate, the Kohl government will have allowed the Reagan administration to get at least a foot in the door into the internal political debate in Bonn. The new axis of West European politics and the future Since the late 1970s, Washington has gone a long way towards shifting the entire internal and external axis of West European
Externally, there has been a massive shift in Western way. We can simply list symptoms of this: cruise and Pershing, the new follow-on-forces attack doctrine, the Bundeswehr's acceptance of airland battle war-fighting methods, and so on.
Star Wars is simply the kcystone in this arch. The logic of all these changes is to turn Western Europe into a knife pointed
threatening vital Soviet security interests and inviting a harsh Soviet hostility to the new order in Western Europe. This change in Western Europe's external posture is accompanied by an American declamatory rhetoric is the need Fastern Burope and unite Europe 'in freedom'
This American drive to reorient Western Europe's relations with the East is accompanied by an equally vigorous push to ensure its 'allies'' dependence on US power in the third world, particularly the Middle East. West European efforts to have their own policy on the Palestinian issue as a means of gaining stable Arab markets (food, weapons, manufactured goods) and possessing secure non-American sources of oil (West Germany and Italy from Libya) have been under ferocious attack from Washington. US policy in the Middle East is as much about ensuring its own grip on Western Europe's economic jugular as about handling substantive regional issues there.
We have argued here that this American drive is motivated above all by the need to restore control over Western Europe. Unable to do this through economic diplomacy, as in the early post-war years, and unable to do it through direct control over domestic political agencies, as in Latin America, the US has had no alternative but to use the only weapon it does control: NATO. This institution possesses two essential features: first, legitimacy within the political systems of North West Europe; secondly, it has a strong bureaucratic column reaching down from Washington through the defence ministries, armed forces and intelligence agencies as well as the capitalist military suppliers of the West European states.
The US has had to use this instrument, and has been able to use this instrument to wrench Western Europe back towards effective subordination. This has had a consequence -- greatly increased risk of war in Europe. For the US administration this consequence is no doubt unfortunate, but it felt it had no choice.
But secondly, the Us drive since the late 1970s to regain control in Western Europe has involved a transformation of the domestic politics of these states. This has involved busting the corporatist, welfare-state consensus in which social democracy was SO important and achieving what one might call Italianisation of electoral politics, in the sense of permanently 'excluding the main working class parties from office and trying to delegitimise them in popular consciousness. This process is well advanced in Britain, though it has some way to go in West Germany.
The brilliance of the Reaganite operation has been to exploit to the full the cagerness of the parties of the right to win power and delegitimise social democracy in internal politics, in order to force them into the Reaganite mould in external politics. Washington forced the parties of the right to win power against the left by defending US external policy. Far from fearing the deetoral polarisation OVer Reaganite militarism, Washington relished it as the only means of committing bourgeois forces in Western Europe to an external policy that harms their own economic and security interests. 24 Resistance to Reagan's new order will continue from
bourgeois forces in the future, but it will be a resistance of manoeuvre, little conspiracies, foot-dragging and whining, without principle or unity. Yesterday's politicians and pundits of the consensus centre and centre-right are learning the hard way that you can't both try to defeat the labour moment domestically and cffectively resist US militarism externally. Some such people may try to move leftwards and seek to form a modern equivalent of the Popular Front; the bulk will go all the way down the appcasement road, hoping, as of old, that 1939 won't actually arrive.
The Left tends to vastly over-rate the capacity of bourgeois Europe to resist Raganism. (See the Bloomfield article in the December Marxism Today for a classic statement of these illusions). It ignores the fact that as a hard, political entity, Western Europe doesn't even exist: it is fragmented into little states, seething with rivalries amongst themselves, easily exploited by the US for its own advantage. US capital is itself a strong political actor within Western Europe and Reaganism has a natural ally in the military industries, which welcome the political and ideological side of Reaganism, while opposing the US arms competition. Important sectors of West European capital are gaining their profits from the dollar area and will resist strong moves that would lead to strong US retaliation against them. Finally, any strong West European challenge would have to take political and ideological forms that would create chaos in the parties of the Right, at a time when the role of these parties in the offensive against the labour movement to restructure capital is more vital than ever. The limit of the capacity of bourgeois Europe in a struggle with the US in present circumstances is foot dragging to slow down the tempo of events. Only in the event of an American frontal assault on German and French vital economic interests might a hegemonic push for a Franco-Cierman — and thus 'Europcan'
But what if, after regaining control of Western Europe, Washington does seck to reduce the risks of war by doing a deal that would institutionalise its relationship with Moscow? This is in principle a desirable objective for the Reagan administration, which does not, after all, want a war. The US has some carrots that would not jeopardise its ascendancy in Western Europe: a big trade boost with the USSR, crisis management arrangements, regional security guarantees over Afghanistan, over relations with China, in the Middle East, some restrictions on the arms race in Europe and on chemical weapons. But none of this seems enough to placate and assure the Soviet leadership. Would the two super-powers be prepared to do a deal whereby Washington limited Star Wars in exchange for cast-iron Soviet guarantees that it would buttress US control over Western Europe, and West Germany in particular? This is perhaps the only possible deal that could be envisaged.
But in the meantime, the left must try to clarify its own course of action. It really has two strategic options: either it can try to live within the new American order, dreaming that it can return to the good old days when Washington was happy to do business with European social democrats, and hoping that it can somchow 'humanise' American policy. This is the politics of yesterday's people like Denis Healey. Or it can defend the progressive elements in social democratic traditions -- democratic liberties, economic security, a strong trade union movement, and face the fact that these values as well as a commitment to peace involve a head-on confrontation with the new American order, an attempt to defeat it and force Washington to retreat.
This strategy requires the labour movement to confront the basic mechanism through which every step of the American political offensive has been implemented: NATO. It must repudiate the discipline of NATO and must also repudiate the political basis of NATO — namely the subordination of Western Europe to American political objectives, in the defence of capitalism
The development of an anti-NATO political force in the labour movements of Western Europe, linked to a programme for jobs and planned cconomic growth, is the only viable option for the left in the late 1980s. The growth of such a movement is also the only way in which Washington could be forced to rethink its orientation and seck to organise an orderly retreat.
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