TY - JOUR
AU - Parmar,, Inderjeet
AB - “The ferocious violence of the Cold War’s killing fields was every bit as central to the making of the contemporary world as Europe’s long peace” (p.562; italics mine). That final, concluding sentence of the book sums up its key take-away point. Perhaps less so among global historians than liberal IR scholars, this conclusion needs to be driven home because liberal IR accounts simply ignore the experiences of peoples beyond Euro-America. The intimate interconnectedness of the “long peace” in Europe, heavily militarized and potentially violent as it was, is presented in Chamberlin’s compelling and largely persuasive account as just one part of the larger story of the simultaneous global violence unleashed in the Third World. Chamberlin’s thorough study of the cold war’s bloodbaths across the Third World represents not only a catalogue of the sheer normality of global violence, but also the development of new histories shedding light on global processes that go beyond the nation and state, beyond reified categories of east-west or north-south. The world’s fluidity, movement and global processes—flows of arms, money, armies, and blood–is exposed here in its utter globalized barbarity. Agency is assigned to all actors, their subjectivities restored: the drivers of global violence are as much great powers as they are national liberation movements or ideologically-inspired revolutions. Chamberlin has produced a book of great lucidity and masterly scholarship, one that forces the intellectual abandonment of purely “national” or simply “western” histories. Yet, there remain key blind-spots in even so masterly a work, raising questions drawn from other paradigmatic standpoints. The book’s three parts fit well together, telling a story starting in east Asia and the Chinese civil war, passing through to southeast Asia and west Asia, a story of the transformation of struggles from secular-ideological from the 1940s up until the 1970s, to the adoption of the vernacular of theology and violent “religion” in the service of “liberation”. The story is neatly weaved but reveals a somewhat too smooth passage from the ideological to theological. The elision of Latin America’s 1980s bloodbaths, largely by U.S.-funded and trained militaries and death-squads, does not fit the neat picture of ideology to theology. Perhaps a story of ‘liberation theology’ might have worked although it might have required tweaking the big arc of Chamberlin’s argument. If its final sentence is its striking conclusion, the opening page provides the cue to a painful, though illuminating, read: 70% of people killed in cold war violence lived in a belt from East Asia to the Middle East; that more than 14 million people therein died violently in three “catastrophic waves”; that most foreign aid (80%) flowed to this belt; and that it hosted 95% of all Soviet battle deaths and 999 of every thousand American soldiers killed (1). The book’s title is no exaggeration—killing fields and bloodbaths are the very warp and woof of this part of the world and of this book. Mere footnotes, if that in conventional histories, and absent in liberal IR accounts, Chamberlin’s book puts the southern rim of Asia right into the making of “international order.” Chamberlin rightly argues that “violence played a fundamental role in shaping the contours of the US-Soviet rivalry and international politics after 1945” (3). So much for all those studies of consensus-building by great powers to shape the international system. Chamberlin pulls no punches; there is no whitewashing of the “inherently violent history of the post-1945 era,” a previously concealed “core dynamic” of that order (5). Yet, there is an instructive unstated assumption animating this study of globalized violence. The benefit of such an approach is clear—the world’s history is seen in all its symbiotic horror—but restoring agency to Third World peoples also means assigning blame to them, especially their elites. And surely this must be faced by “anti-colonial” and “anti-imperial” critics of western power, who frequently cite a “century of humiliation” or “unequal treaties” as painful memories, of wrongs in need of correction. Yet, it probably depends on how such an analysis is contextualized. In opening up agency as belonging, as it does, to all actors, the analysis strays closer to the conventional. Global South agency is turned on itself even as it is recognized as significant. Hence, the Chinese civil war and Mao’s 1949 victory brought massive bloodshed to China but also the active attention and violent intervention of the superpowers. Real politik demanded the superpowers enter the domestic and regional politics of the Third World, exacerbating problems, entrenching conflict, making it ideological, and leading to even greater bloodshed. As if by a law of nature, a communist revolution in China, or anti-colonial liberation struggles in Vietnam, meant, even required, American attention and intervention. Over and above actors, therefore, there is a theory of global powers operating in the subtext of the book that is never subjected to any significant scrutiny. In addition, despite the book’s global approach, it is also clearly American-centred. The U.S. is not just another actor but the principal power—active everywhere. Yet, how did the U.S. come to be so globally-engaged and interventionist? Where did its military, air, and naval bases appear from? How did a nation apparently if imperfectly attached to “isolationism” come to consider “everywhere” a national interest, or how did such a “national” interest come to reign supreme? Where is an analysis of American empire and of the active construction of its global economic, financial, political, institutional, cultural, intellectual, and military imperium? Of course, this is a historical study by a historian and not an IR theorist. Yet, Chamberlin clearly operates with an underground theory to explain states’, elites’, and others’ behaviors. And any truly thorough study must deal with its own explanatory framework, and its flaws. A key question worth highlighting here is the relative equality assigned to world forces in causing and carrying out violence on so large a scale. It would have been illuminating to read a discussion of who did the most killing, including creating the broader conditions that created a climate of violence—which state, movement, ideology, or theology? Yet, in the book, there is no discussion of this. This is important—we should know where to assign greater or lesser blame even if there’s more than enough blame to be shared. At the moment, there is an implicit, unwitting claim that the blame was equal between the superpowers and that peoples undergoing anti-colonial rebellions brought violence upon themselves. This unwittingly threatens to let U.S. imperial power off the hook. Yet the larger import of this study stands: that violence in the Third World and the long peace of the West are symbiotically, and causally, interconnected. That conclusion opens up new questions relating to the very meaning and processes of “hegemony”—whether of the liberal or neo-Gramscian kinds whose principal focus is consensus and legitimate leadership. It may well be time to look far more closely at Gramsci’s contention that hegemony is everywhere a combination of violence and persuasion. That is an altogether different understanding of hegemony which Chamberlin’s book has opened up. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Global Violence and Europe's Long Peace Intimately Connected
JO - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhaa013
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/global-violence-and-europe-s-long-peace-intimately-connected-VaNkFksIk5
SP - 504
VL - 44
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -