In this chapter we apply a Weberian analysis to selective foreign policy decisions made by US and European elites in the twentieth century concerning war and peace. We look at the behavior of individual actors and the groups they form because, following Max Weber, individuals “give meaning” to the world around them. They interpret the historical setting in which they find themselves and act to shape the world they seek in the future. Individual and group worldviews overlap and compete. They overlap to become the basis of relationships and structures that shape a particular historical period, and they compete to establish a range of options from which leaders may choose. They operate against an objective reality of power, institutions, and ideas. We can test their effectiveness and hold the individuals or groups that espouse them accountable. At times, as we will show, ideas trump power in determining an actor’s behavior; at other times, power trumps ideas. Causation is discrete and sequential.
Relationalist worldviews say this type of analysis is a mirage. Individuals and the groups they form are not free to interpret and choose the circumstances around them, let alone play a significant role in shaping their future. The past and future are baked in the cake. A quantum rather than Weberian worldview prevails in which individuals and groups do not exist except as they emerge upon investigation. They materialize from a quantum world of wave functions in which every possible action is already prescribed by multiple probabilities. What exists after investigation is not a substance such as an individual but an entangled relationship of the observer, observed, and environment. This entangled “subject” is ephemeral and cannot be tested against an objective world because there is no objective world beyond what is observed. From a relationalist perspective, the free individuals we emphasize in this chapter are not free at all. They are deeply embedded in historical processes and contemporary relationships. They don’t choose their political party, class status, national citizenship, interpretation of history, or alliance preferences. They are those relationships. Actors have little room in the present to reinterpret the cosmological and historical context they inherit. Causation is mutual and holistic.
This is a worthwhile debate.Footnote 1 We see worldviews as substantive and individualist ideas by which individuals define their identities and decide which groups or communities they wish to join or remain a part of. These ideas in turn prescribe their objectives and their use of power and diplomacy in international affairs. We recognize that individuals and the separate groups they form are never completely autonomous. There is always overlap (“smearing,” as relationalists say). Bundles of relationships, fuzzy boundaries, and even structures of relationships exist that may be hard to change. The Cold War, for example, was thought to be permanent. But the whole point of Weberian rationalist thinking, which we affirm, is that individuals can be educated liberally to become self-critical and eventually form and change their worldviews on rational and accountable grounds. Because worldviews are substantive, their differences and relative significance can be measured. What Haas calls “ideological distance” tells us whether worldviews are close or far apart and, over time, converging or diverging. It shows us where boundaries between worldviews lie and how far individuals or groups must move to cross over from one worldview to another. Now, we can compare ideological worldviews relatively against the influence of other variables, such as the distribution of power and the role of institutions (relationships). The “distribution of ideologies,” for example, may involve similar ideologies across states (all democracies), while the “distribution of power” is skewed – the democratic peace under American hegemony. An objective world remains against which worldviews can be tested.Footnote 2 Ultimately, individuals make choices; they are not simply prisoners of deep-seated cosmological and historical processes or ciphers for atoms and wave functions in a purely materialist world.
Our focus in this chapter is on distinct, individualist worldviews associated with political rather than religious or cosmological ideas.Footnote 3 Having made clear our worldview as scholars, we now apply the worldview concept to specific political leaders acting in the foreign policy arena. We examine in particular two types of political worldviews: domestic political ideologies (e.g., liberalism, fascism, communism, and Islamism) and foreign policy orientations (nationalism, realism, institutionalism, and constructivism). We ask in each case how these worldviews interact and affect policy outcomes, especially at the international level. In both cases, distinctive ideas and how they converge and diverge and interact causally with one another in the international system play a central role in creating threats and opportunities for the advancement of actors’ international interests, and thus are critical to the likelihood of war and peace, confrontation and cooperation. In short, ideational orientations espoused by specific individuals or groups of individuals define the map of international contestation, much in the way that power disparities define conflict in materialist ontologies, or institutional rules and roles define conflict in liberal ontologies.
This chapter is divided into two main sections. Section 2.1 examines the role of distinctive political ideologies as causes of world affairs. It details the pathways that connect political ideologies to perceptions of threat and consequent foreign policy behavior. Section 2.2 explores the role of distinctive foreign policy worldviews and demonstrates how these worldviews compete with one another to shape foreign policy outcomes. It demonstrates how distinctive individualist worldviews (what we call type as opposed to role identity) sometimes override realist, institutionalist (relationalist), and social constructivist worldviews.
2.1 Ideological Worldviews
Ideological worldviews operate at all levels of analysis: individual leaders, political parties, national identities, foreign policy orientations, transnational groups, and international institutions. We are particularly interested in ideologies at the individual and domestic levels of analysis: the goals and self-image actors articulate that motivate, guide, and give meaning to their international pursuit of power and participation in international institutions.Footnote 4 What core institutional, political, economic, and social goals do leaders advocate and try to realize in their group or country? This domestic worldview in turn conditions their view for ordering international society.Footnote 5 Do individual politicians or political parties, for example, advocate for their country and for the world the creation or continuation of representative or authoritarian political institutions? Capitalist or socialist economies? Theocratic or secular values? Ethnic or civic citizenship? Prominent ideologies that meet this definition include communism, fascism, liberalism, monarchism, and Islamism. These ideologies do not map neatly on the more holistic worldviews examined in other chapters of this volume. Nevertheless, liberal ideologies tend to emphasize rational faculties (explicit knowledge, reason) and lower levels of analysis along Weberian worldview lines. Authoritarian ideologies tend to emphasize nonrational faculties (tacit knowledge, traditions) and higher holistic levels of analysis along quantum worldview lines.
Political ideologies motivate actors to champion particular institutions and values against rival ones. To the extent they overlap, they form political in-groups. To the extent they diverge, they define political out-groups. Ideologies, in other words, encapsulate the shared or conflicting ideas around which domestic and transnational political parties and movements coalesce or collide. Group leaders draw on these ideas as they mobilize supporters and advance their ideology against rival ideological groups. Politics is about ideas and morality (right and wrong), not just about power, processes, and accommodation. Worldviews, as we understand them, are always contested – sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. They do not suffuse individuals in relationalist processes that limit individual choice. They involve individual and human agency. Actors are free to imagine new or escape old group relationships.Footnote 6 Above all, individuals are always responsible for the effect their ideologies have on the freedom of choice of other human beings.
Actors’ ideological beliefs have profound effects on foreign policy behavior. Most importantly, the degree of similarity and difference among ideological beliefs – “ideological distance,” as noted earlier – has major effects on threat perceptions, which in turn critically shape foreign policies. As Haas argues, “There exists a strong relationship between the ideological distance dividing states’ leaders and their understandings of the level of [international] threat … The greater the ideological differences dividing decision-makers across states, the higher the perceived level of threat; the greater the ideological similarities uniting leaders, the lower the perceived threat.” Nau addresses the same issue through the concept of national identity – that is, a country’s self-image which motivates the use of force: “If [national] identities … diverge, hostile nations create a dangerous balance of power. On the other hand, if identities converge, communities of nations may moderate the balance of power.” Alastair Iain Johnston also deploys the variable of “identity”:
The greater the perceived identity difference, the more the environment is viewed as conflictual, the more the out-group is viewed as threatening … Conversely, the smaller the perceived identity difference, the more the external environment is seen as cooperative, the less the out-group is perceived as fundamentally threatening … Most critically, variation in identity difference should be independent of anarchy.Footnote 7
Johnson’s last point is very important, and it is one that we develop later in Section 2.2 on foreign policy orientations. The effects of ideological distributions are independent of the effects of other variables such as power disparities emphasized by realist arguments, institutional constraints emphasized by liberal arguments, and holistic ideas emphasized by social constructivist perspectives. Ideologies shape the real world of power, institutions, and social identities. They are separate, sequential causes of events not simply rationalizations of power (realism), mutually constituted variables (constructivism), or bundled entanglements (relationalism).
Ideological distances shape actors’ threat perceptions and consequent international security policies by three main pathways – conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications.Footnote 8
2.1.1 Conflict Expectations
First, domestic ideological differences play a key role in affecting how actors assess one another’s international intentions. As Michael Barnett observes, “states apparently attempt to predict a state’s external behavior based on its internal arrangements.”Footnote 9 The greater the ideological differences dividing states’ decision-makers, the more likely they are to assume the worst about one another’s objectives. As Secretary of State James Byrnes told President Harry Truman in late 1945, “there is too much difference in the ideologies of the US and Russia to work out a long term program of cooperation.”Footnote 10 Byrnes understood that the greater the ideological distance between actors, the more likely they believe that serious conflict between them is inevitable in the long run. This expectation, measured concretely at one point in time, drives perceptions at later times. Even if ideological counterparts exhibit no hostility toward one another in the present – or even cooperate with each other currently – leaders will often assume that such amicability is temporary and is bound to be replaced with overt animosity.Footnote 11 Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, for example, noted that Germany’s cooperation with the Soviet Union in the early 1920s did nothing to eliminate the two states’ underlying enmity due to ideological differences: “Germany wants revenge [against France and Britain], and we want revolution. For the moment our aims are the same, but when our ways part, they will be our most ferocious and greatest enemies.”Footnote 12 To Lenin, “international imperialism [i.e., capitalist states] … could not, under any circumstances, under any conditions, live side by side with the Soviet Republic … In this sphere a conflict is inevitable.”Footnote 13 These views led Soviet leaders to try to export communist revolution to Germany in the early 1920s, despite major material incentives to maintain cooperative relations with that state.Footnote 14 Former Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov similarly stated in an interview in 1946 that the “root cause” of the incipient Soviet–American confrontation, despite years of alliance during World War II, was “the ideological conception prevailing [in the Soviet Union] that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable.”Footnote 15 Interestingly, when Gorbachev gave up that conception in the late 1980s, the Cold War moved toward its end (see Section 2.2.3).
Assuming enmity, politicians dedicated to opposing ideological beliefs frequently take actions that ensure such a hostile relationship. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly told the Wehrmacht leaders that the origins, objectives, and means of fighting the unavoidable war with the Soviet Union were rooted in the ideological differences between the two powers. Three months before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, he told his generals that the “struggle [with the USSR] is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness …. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated.” In fact, the “main theme” of Hitler’s reasoning for attacking the Soviet Union, according to the Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, was to engage “the decisive battle between two ideologies.”Footnote 16
When leaders have similar ideological beliefs, they are less likely to make worst-case assumptions than leaders whose beliefs are dissimilar. Policymakers who share core ideological principles are likely to trust one another more and to assume that they share major interests – including containing ideological enemies – that will result in cooperative relations. These relationships help explain the significant cooperation that often exists among co-ideologues, including monarchists (Concert of Europe), fascists (Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II), religious fundamentalists (Taliban Afghanistan and al Qaeda), communists (Soviet Union and China in 1950s), and especially liberals (“the liberal peace”). They also demonstrate why ideological convergence, or increasing ideological similarities among states, is often an important source of resolving international conflict.Footnote 17
Because ideological relationships determine the threat posed by power variables, fears of power shifts and intense security dilemmas will exist more frequently among states that are dedicated to disparate ideological beliefs. Ideologically similar regimes, in contrast, will often form a “security community.” Members of a security community rule out the use of force as a means of settling disputes and instead possess stable expectations of peaceful change.Footnote 18 Among these states, power distributions are not an important source of war and peace. As Nau explains:
In a world where national orientations significantly converge, for example today in the EU or North Atlantic region, traditional balance of power forces recede in importance from interstate relations … In a world of sharply diverging sociocultural and political orientations, on the other hand, the balance of power assumes preeminence to mediate security and wider disparities (for example, in Arab-Israeli relations). Military and economic balances do not themselves guarantee stability; but states are unlikely to feel safe or comfortable in a world of widely differing state identities unless they have an independent capability to defend themselves. The security dilemma, in short, is primarily a function of diverging identities not decentralized power.Footnote 19
Indeed, decentralized power exists, it might be argued, precisely because countries have diverging identities. When those identities converge – as, for example, among liberal democracies – decentralized power or anarchy raises fewer if any serious security concerns. Liberal nations exist separately without threatening one another militarily.
2.1.2 Demonstration Effects
A second prominent way in which ideological differences are likely to shape leaders’ threat perceptions is by endangering their most important domestic interests, namely the preservation of their political power and the ideological system (political institutions and values) they support. Leaders often worry that the success of ideological enemies abroad will be contagious, ultimately boosting the political fortunes of like-minded individuals at home, even to the point of revolution. This concern will be greater the more vulnerable the regime is to domestic opposition.Footnote 20 In short, leaders fear the demonstration effects of other ideologies succeeding abroad and weakening their control at home. The greater the ideological differences dividing decision-makers in different states and the greater their internal vulnerability, the greater their fears of domestic subversion are likely to be, by which we mean the likely undermining at home of one set of ideological principles and the spread of a rival one.
In the 2000s, for example, Russia’s illiberal leaders worried that the “color” liberal revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan would spread to Russia. Vladislav Surkov, the Deputy Director of the Presidential Administration and a top advisor to President Vladimir Putin, claimed that these revolutions had “made a very strong impression on many [Russian] politicians,” and he worried that the spread of these political changes to Russia was a “very real threat.”Footnote 21 Putin expressed similar fears in justifying Russia’s annexation of Crimea after the revolution in Ukraine in 2014 that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally.Footnote 22 Chinese leaders have articulated the same concerns. As Aaron Friedberg summarizes (writing in 2012):
China’s rulers … remain deeply fearful of encirclement and ideological subversion. And despite Washington’s attempts to reassure them of its benign intentions, Chinese leaders are convinced that the United States aims to block China’s rise and, ultimately, undermine its one-party system of government … Although limited cooperation on specific issues might be possible, the ideological gap between the two nations is simply too great, and the level of trust between them too low, to permit a stable modus vivendi.Footnote 23
The US–China trade war initiated by the Donald Trump administration offers further evidence of an ideological explanation of worsening relations. In January 2019, Li Ruogu, a former chairman of the Export-Import Bank of China and former deputy governor of China’s central bank, asserted that the trade war was primarily a product of ideological not economic fears. According to Li, “the conflict wasn’t about the United States being threatened by China’s growth … but by its vision of state-led capitalism. ‘This is the conflict of systems. It won’t end easily.’”Footnote 24
Whereas ideological enemies tend to view one another as subversive dangers to their core domestic objectives, the opposite threat relationship often holds for leaders who are dedicated to similar ideological beliefs. Elites will frequently view the success of ideologically similar regimes with approval since others’ victories are likely to benefit the former’s domestic interests. By demonstrating the advantages or staying power of particular ideological beliefs, a party’s success in one state is likely to aid the political fortunes of like-minded groups throughout the system, thereby increasing the incentives for cooperative relations. Russian leaders, for example, provided generous aid to Belarus for much of the 2000s largely due to a belief that the continuation of the two countries’ illiberal political systems was interconnected. As Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alyaksandar Lukashenka observed in 2005: “A revolution in Belarus is a revolution in Russia,” meaning that a revolution in Belarus threatened revolution in Russia. Key Russian politicians clearly sympathized with this position.Footnote 25 This perceived interconnectedness of domestic interests created powerful incentives for Russia’s illiberal leaders to aid Lukashenka’s regime lest its demise undermine Russia’s system of governance. The same thinking led Saudi Arabia to tighten its alliance with Bahrain (both countries are monarchies) in response to the spread of popular protests throughout much of the Arab world in 2011. Part of these efforts included sending Saudi troops, at the request of Bahrain’s king, into its neighbor to quell domestic unrest. Saudi leaders feared that a successful revolution in Bahrain would inspire and embolden similar pressures in their kingdom.Footnote 26
2.1.3 Miscommunications
A third important way in which different ideological worldviews shape politicians’ threat perceptions is by increasing the likelihood of misperceptions among them. The greater the ideological differences dividing states’ leaders, the more likely they are to attribute different meanings to the same symbols and events, and thus the greater the likelihood of misunderstandings developing. These barriers to effective communication among ideological rivals are not a product of a lack of effort or difficulties of translation, but of different identities that push people to interpret language and other signals in contrary ways. President John F. Kennedy expressed well precisely these points when he wrote to Nikita Khrushchev in November 1961:
I am conscious of the difficulties you and I face in establishing full communication between our two minds. This is not a question of translation but a question of the context in which we hear and respond to what each other has to say. You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about our respective social systems and general philosophies of life. These differences create a great gulf in communications because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying purpose.Footnote 27
Among ideological enemies, misperceptions are likely to result in the creation and exaggeration of conflicts of interest as well as missed opportunities for cooperation. In the 1930s, for example, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin tried to communicate to Britain and France that he was interested in forming an alliance against Germany by instructing Western communist parties to support rearmament and by greatly downplaying the role of the Comintern (which was an institution that had been openly dedicated to the fomentation of revolution against capitalism and colonialism). Western conservatives, however, misunderstood Stalin’s intent and instead thought Stalin’s policy changes were part of a new, more subtle attempt to facilitate ideological subversion.Footnote 28 Similarly, British attempts in 1941 to warn Stalin of Hitler’s plans to soon attack the Soviet Union were misunderstood by the Soviets, which resulted in the opposite effect to their intent. Stalin and his associates dismissed Britain’s warnings as desperate attempts to embroil the Soviet Union and Germany in conflict. The Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maisky, even told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that British warnings to the Soviet Union about Germany’s plans of attack “would not be understood in Moscow and would be resented there.”Footnote 29 The ironic result of this communications breakdown, according to Gabriel Gorodetsky, was that “Churchill’s warning to Stalin of the German deployment [of massive numbers of German troops near the Soviet border] in April [1941], rather than being a landmark in the formation of the Grand Alliance, in fact achieved the opposite. Stalin was diverted from the main danger, suspecting that Churchill was bent on drawing Russia into the hostilities.”Footnote 30
2.2 Foreign Policy Worldviews
As we have argued, ideological worldviews influence international events through the three causal pathways of conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications. But how important are these ideological factors compared to other variables? In each pathway, ideological variables, or what we call type identities, confront and compete with other causal variables such as power, institutions, and role or social identities. In other worldviews, power interests (realist worldviews), institutional factors (liberal worldviews), and role or social identity factors (constructivist worldviews) may dominate. Relationalist worldviews would argue that none of these factors has any distinct influence on outcomes because all of them are bundled together in the quantum world. They exist only as probabilities, until an investigator asks a question, and then pose a fundamental dilemma for an analysis like this one because they cannot be tested against an objective world. So, let’s assume that the specific questions we are asking as investigators trigger the relationist quantum world to yield the Weberian world and specific variables which can be tested against an objective universe. That assumption is not inconsistent with the new relationalism and allows this Weberian analysis to proceed. After all, if Newtonian science is good enough for understanding tennis balls, but not quanta and galaxies (black holes), it may be good enough for the study of politics since the latter operates on the level of tennis balls not quanta or galaxies.
Historically, actors in international affairs have taken four distinct approaches to thinking about the interaction of “type” ideas with other variables. They reflect the four main foreign policy traditions or worldviews of any country: nationalist, realist, institutionalist, and ideological. Each tradition implies a different causal relationship between type identities on the one hand and power, institutions, and role or social identities on the other.Footnote 31
The nationalist orientation comes closest to a pure Weberian worldview. Nations, like individuals, are separate and distinct. They have a unique type identity and act, rationally for the most part, to preserve that identity. This imperative to survive shapes in turn the realities of power, relationships/institutions, and social identities. Nations mostly take care of themselves. Independence and unilateralism prevail, not interdependence and multilateralism. Institutions such as alliances are unnecessary, except in extremis. Power balances emerge autonomically. Social or shared identities are thin; type identities matter most.Footnote 32 The materialist universe consists of an equilibrium of multiple and roughly equal powers.
The realist worldview is mostly Weberian but adds some interdependent or institutional aspects. Not all type identities matter the same. Great power identities matter more because great powers have more agency (capability) and responsibility to balance power and preserve world order. The balance of power (power) then shapes military capabilities (e.g., arms races), institutional relationships (e.g., the United Nations), and social identities (e.g., great power solidarity). Great powers cooperate and compete regardless of type identity, and cooperation does not narrow ideological differences.Footnote 33 Social identities remain thin.
The institutionalist worldview operates between the Weberian and quantum worlds. Interdependent, rather than independent, relationships shape power (e.g., collective security, trade), institutions (e.g., multilateralism), and role or social identities (e.g., common rules, regulations, practices).Footnote 34 Actors strive to resolve their geopolitical (realist) and identity differences by negotiations and common rules. They build up international institutions and develop the habit of cooperation, which helps them narrow geopolitical and type identity differences. Over time, role and shared identities take on greater importance, and a world community or “community of nations” emerges.Footnote 35
The social constructivist worldview tacks toward the quantum end of the worldview spectrum. The world is no longer made up of separate Weberian entities or interdependent relationships between separate entities. It is now a holistic world of entanglement in which individual and separate identities disappear into discourses and language games. Communicative practices shape identities, and role or social identities matter more.Footnote 36 Social constructivists “bracket the corporate [i.e., domestic] sources of state identity and interests, and concentrate entirely on the constitutive role of international social interaction, exploring how structural contexts, systemic processes, and strategic practice produce and reproduce state identities.”Footnote 37 Over time, relationships replace identities, as actors merge at higher and higher levels of analysis. The world becomes a whole; actors are diffused rather than distinct.
Let’s look at several empirical examples of how “type” ideological variables interact with and at times override materialist, institutionalist, and social constructivist worldviews
2.2.1 When Type Identities Override Geopolitical Realities
Type identities are frequently more determinative of leaders’ threat perceptions and foreign policies than material variables, even when geopolitical realities are stark. After World War II, western European countries viewed the United States as less threatening than the Soviet Union even though US troops occupied western European countries and Soviet troops did not. Power balances were not the issue; ideological ones were. Today, US leaders view North Korea as much more threatening than Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, even though the latter are orders of magnitude more powerful (and all have nuclear weapons or the capability to acquire them relatively quickly). During the Concert of Europe from 1815 to 1848, leaders in the monarchical great powers saw weak liberalizing states (such as Naples and the United States) as much more threatening than fellow great powers. Because liberalism might spread (demonstration effect), they viewed liberal revolutions as major threats to their domestic interests.Footnote 38
No better example of how type identities can override profound geopolitical realities exists than the way British and French conservatives and socialists favored opposing alliance policies in the 1930s.Footnote 39 Conservatives refused to ally with the Soviet Union despite the massive power threat posed by Germany, whereas most socialists pushed hard for such an alliance to balance Germany. The root source of these clashing preferences was opposing ideological orientations toward Germany and the Soviet Union. Most conservatives viewed the Soviet Union as the greatest ideological danger in the system, Nazi Germany a lesser one.Footnote 40 This intense ideological hostility to the Soviet Union prevented an alliance with this state throughout the 1930s. Even after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 – when the power-based threat from Germany was reaching extremely high levels – key conservatives continued to emphasize their intense suspicions of the Soviets on ideological grounds. In April that year, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote his sister, Hilda: “Our chief trouble is with Russia [and thus not with Germany]. I confess to being deeply suspicious of her. I cannot believe that she has the same aims and objects as we have or any sympathy with democracy as such.”Footnote 41
British and French socialists reacted ideologically to Germany and the Soviet Union in exactly the reverse way, resulting in opposite alliance preferences. Because socialists viewed Nazi Germany as the greatest ideological threat in the system, the Soviet Union a lesser one, the barriers to an alliance with the Soviet Union were much smaller than they were for conservatives. British Labour Party leaders, according to a summary by William Tucker, argued as early as 1934 that the Soviet Union lacked “aggressive designs toward other states,” thus making it “a natural ally of the forces of peace” against the fascist states.Footnote 42 There “was no question upon which Labour opinion was more united than the necessity of an [alliance] agreement with the Soviet Union.”Footnote 43 French socialists concurred.Footnote 44 Power variables were identical for British and French conservatives and socialists. Their ideological worldviews, however, were not, and these differences resulted in opposing policies on the most important security issues of the era.
In addition to critically affecting the meaning that individual leaders give to power variables, ideologies can also at times be a direct cause of power shifts. Political scientists often treat ideas as a residual variable, exerting only marginal influence after international power and domestic institutional exigencies are accounted for.Footnote 45 Ideological leadership is relatively discounted. The historian H.W. Brands, Jr. argues, for example, that President Ronald Reagan’s success in the Cold War can be largely explained in terms of events not policy: Reagan “had no policy agenda beyond basic conservative principles. He expected events to furnish direction. They obliged from the start.”Footnote 46 Yet, it can be argued that events were not moving in Reagan’s direction in the late 1970s. The strategic rivalry was moving decisively in the Soviet direction, and the US and world economies were languishing in stagflation. As John Lewis Gaddis notes, “the Nixon-Ford years saw the most substantial reductions in American military capabilities relative to those of the Soviet Union in the entire postwar period.”Footnote 47 Meanwhile, worldwide inflation rates tripled, growth slowed by 25 percent, and unemployment jumped by 50 percent. Reagan was not favored by structural forces; he had to alter them. In a multivariant and constantly changing world, proving causality is impossible. Yet a plausible case can be made that Reagan’s ideas about both strategic relations and the world economy preceded his time in office, mobilized political support to put him into office, informed the policy initiatives he implemented once in office, and ultimately coincided (correlated) with a revitalization of the strategic balance and the world economy.Footnote 48 By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had disappeared, and from 1980 to 2010 the world economy enjoyed average annual real growth of 3 percent plus. In short, ideological factors mobilized a policy agreement (the so-called Washington consensus) that altered geopolitical circumstances.
2.2.2 When Type Identities Override Institutionalist Factors
When ideological identities diverge, leaders are more likely to focus on their competing than their common interests, thereby making it very difficult for institutions and routinized diplomacy to facilitate sustained cooperation.
The failure of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s illustrates these dynamics. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger adopted realist and institutionalist approaches to US–Soviet relations; they minimized ideological factors. As John Lewis Gaddis summarizes, they believed “that the geopolitical interests of ideologically disparate states could, in certain areas, be congruent. Once diplomacy was purged of its sentimental and emotional [i.e., ideological] components, it should be possible to identify and build upon these common interests held even by previously irreconcilable antagonists: survival, security, a congenial international environment.” Sustained “serious negotiations on substantive issues,” Nixon and Kissinger believed, was the key to convincing the Soviets to focus not on “the clash of competing interests” but on “the evolution of ‘habits of mutual restraint, coexistence, and, ultimately, cooperation.’ This, Kissinger insisted, was what was meant by détente.”Footnote 49 Its goal was the coexistence of great powers, not the eventual triumph or merger of one ideology with another.
The détente process resulted in a number of noteworthy agreements.Footnote 50 But institutionalized diplomacy did not succeed in ending the Cold War. The effects of ideological differences, despite Nixon’s and Kissinger’s beliefs to the contrary, were a major barrier to conflict resolution. As Raymond Garthoff explains, the “foremost” reasons for the collapse of superpower détente in the 1970s were the very different understandings of the meaning and purposes of détente possessed by US and Soviet leaders and their failure to understand these differences.Footnote 51 And these differences in conceptions and failures in understanding were rooted in ideological differences. Whereas Nixon and Kissinger hoped that détente would end the Cold War by institutionalizing the pursuit of common interests, Soviet policymakers hoped to use détente to make the superpower rivalry less dangerous while they continued to pursue an intense ideological and military struggle at lower economic cost. As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Leonard Brezhnev asserted in 1972:
The CPSU has always held, and now holds, that the class struggle between the two systems – the capitalist and the socialist … will continue. That is to be expected since the world outlook and the class aims of socialism and capitalism are opposite and irreconcilable. But we shall strive to shift this historically inevitable struggle onto a path free from the periods of war, of dangerous conflicts, and an uncontrolled arms race.Footnote 52
President Reagan took a different approach to détente than Nixon and Kissinger. Like the Soviets under Brezhnev, he emphasized the ideological differences that limited the potential for diplomatic cooperation. He sought not coexistence but an end to the Cold War. As he told Richard Allen, his national security advisor: “my theory about the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”Footnote 53 Reagan rejected the notion that all ideologies were morally equivalent. As he explained in 1988, “We spoke plainly and bluntly … We said freedom was better than totalitarianism. We said communism was bad [and] … made clear that the differences that separated us and the Soviets were deeper and wider than just missile counts and number of warheads.”Footnote 54 Rather than pursue détente, Reagan armed his diplomacy by reasserting American ideological exceptionalism (distinctiveness) and reviving American economic and military capabilities. He forced the Soviet Union to take negotiations seriously because it could not compete outside the negotiations. As Mikhail Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues in October 1986, “our goal is to prevent the next round of the arms race. If we do not accomplish it, the threat to us will only grow … because we are already at the limits of our capabilities.”Footnote 55 Reagan’s approach saw ideological factors driving material realities and determining institutional outcomes.
2.2.3 When Type Identities Override Social Identities
If détente or US ideological superiority did not end the Cold War, did it end by changing social or role identities brought about by changing international practices? Social constructivists might think so. The United States and Soviet Union came together around the shared ideas of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking.” Social constructivists count on repetitive interactions to influence outcomes, as do institutionalists. The difference is that, for social constructivists, these interactions are communicative and substantive, not ameliorative and procedural. Did the diplomatic discourse in US–Soviet relations change as Gorbachev developed his ideas of glasnost and perestroika and a common European home? This is the social constructivist explanation. Or did type identities shift such that the Soviet Union moved toward liberalism and eventually abandoned communism, and US–Russian institutional and geopolitical relations shifted accordingly from enemies to friends? This is the type identity, agency-oriented explanation.
Efforts by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev to end the Cold War in the mid-to-late 1980s illustrate well these dynamics between type and social identities.Footnote 56 Alex Wendt crafts the social constructivist explanation. According to Wendt, Gorbachev’s policies are “an example of how states might transform a competitive security system into a cooperative one.” Because
competitive security systems are sustained by practices that create insecurity and distrust … transformational [international] practices should attempt to teach other states that one’s own state can be trusted and should not be viewed as a threat to their security. The fastest way to do this is to make unilateral initiatives and self-binding commitments of sufficient significance that another state is faced with “an offer it cannot refuse.” Gorbachev [did] this by withdrawing from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, implementing asymmetric cuts in nuclear and conventional forces, calling for “defensive defense,” and so on.Footnote 57
The problem with this analysis is that Gorbachev’s much more cooperative international policies from 1985 to 1988 did not convince US leaders that the Cold War was ending. Although US elites acknowledged that Gorbachev’s more cooperative international relations were helping to make US–Soviet relations less dangerous, their dominant sentiment was that Gorbachev’s initiatives did little to alter the overall adversarial character of the superpowers’ relationship. Before 1988, no key American official claimed to believe that the end of US–Soviet enmity was likely in the foreseeable future. For example, on the eve of the Washington Summit in December 1987 when the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed, Secretary of State George Shultz asserted that “there is nothing in the ‘new political thinking’ [the name of Gorbachev’s domestic and international reform agenda] to date which suggests that the end of the adversarial struggle [between the superpowers] is at hand.”Footnote 58 The following February, Shultz stated that he found it “difficult to believe that [America’s] relations with the Soviet Union will ever be ‘normal’ in the sense that we have normal relations with most other countries.” Thus “it seems unlikely that the US--Soviet relationship will ever lose what always had been and is today a strongly wary and at times adversarial element.”Footnote 59 A new edition of the National Security Strategy of the United States, issued by the President Reagan in January 1988, reached similarly pessimistic conclusions. According to the document, “despite some improvement in US–Soviet relations over the past year, the long-term threat [posed by the USSR] has not perceptibly diminished … There is as yet no evidence that the Soviets have abandoned their long-term [aggressive international] objectives … We must not delude ourselves into believing that the Soviet threat has yet been fundamentally altered.”Footnote 60
What pushed the most powerful decision-makers in the Reagan administration to believe the Cold War was ending were not changes in Soviet foreign policies, but proposed changes in Soviet domestic politics (type identity) that convinced key US leaders that the ideological distance dividing the superpowers was narrowing considerably. In April 1988, Gorbachev laid out major new institutional objectives for the Soviet Union that would be voted upon in the Nineteenth Party Conference, which was scheduled for June. These proposals included holding competitive elections involving nonparty members; establishing a new, popularly elected Congress of People’s Deputies that would select a standing legislature (a new “Supreme Soviet”) that possessed significant power; creating an independent judiciary; and providing protections for freedom of speech, assembly, and press.Footnote 61 The conference approved all these initiatives, and the elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies was scheduled for March 1989.
Reagan and America’s most important policymakers immediately recognized the ideological significance of Gorbachev’s 1988 plans. Reagan asserted in a speech in London after the Moscow Summit in June that the Nineteenth Party Conference proposals, which included “such things as official accountability, limitations on length of service in office, [and] an independent judiciary,” were “cause for shaking the head in wonder.” These proposals convinced Reagan that Gorbachev “is a serious man seeking serious reform.” Because of Gorbachev’s domestic objectives and their institutionalization, the Soviet Union was very likely now entering a period of “lasting change.”Footnote 62 Reagan’s advisors also took note. Ambassador Jack Matlock remarked: “as I read [Gorbachev’s proposals] and discovered one new element after another, my excitement grew. Never before had I seen in an official Communist Party document such an extensive section on protecting the rights of citizens or such principles as the separation of powers, judicial independence, and presumption of a defendant’s innocence until proven guilty.”Footnote 63 With these proposals, “what had passed for ‘socialism’ in Soviet parlance had dropped from sight. What the ‘theses’ described was something closer to European social democracy.”Footnote 64 To Matlock, the conference proposals indicated that “Gorbachev was finally prepared to cross the Rubicon and discard the Marxist ideology that had defined and justified the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union.”Footnote 65
It was shortly after the Americans became convinced that Gorbachev was trying to revolutionize the Soviet domestic system that they began to assert that the Cold War was at an end. When Reagan was asked at the Moscow Conference – which was held just weeks after Reagan learned of Gorbachev’s goals at the Nineteenth Party Conference – if he could declare the Cold War to be over, the president answered: “I think right now, of course.”Footnote 66 A few days later, he stated in a speech in London that Gorbachev’s revolutionary reforms were possibly ushering in “a new era in human history, and, hopefully, an era of peace and freedom for all.”Footnote 67 These statements came mere months after Reagan and other leaders had declared that the fundamental threat posed by the Soviet Union remained intact. The night after learning about Gorbachev’s new domestic objectives, National Security Advisor Colin Powell recounts that he “felt a conviction deep in [his] bones … I realized one phase of my life had ended … Up until now, as a soldier, my mission had been to confront, contain, and if necessary, combat communism. Now, I had to think about a world without a Cold War.”Footnote 68
Gorbachev’s domestic policies that indicated a substantial narrowing of the ideological differences dividing the superpowers thus accomplished what changes in geopolitical shifts and international diplomacy could not: they convinced US leaders that US–Soviet enmity was ending. As Nau concludes, “the decisive shifts that ended the Cold War were ideological not material or institutional. The United States and western countries revived confidence in democratic ideals (after the alleged malaise and governability crisis of western societies in the 1970s), while the Soviet Union lost further confidence in communist ideals.”Footnote 69
2.3 Conclusions
The point of this chapter is not to argue that worldviews understood as political ideologies and type identities override in all cases other influences on outcomes. There are times when materialist forces exert preeminent influence – for example, when nuclear weapons compel security interdependence;Footnote 70 or when institutional forces overcome historical geopolitical rivalries, as in the case of the European Union.Footnote 71 Even social and relationalist identities matter increasingly in such issue areas as global warming. It is simply to suggest that our Weberian agency-oriented approach has important advantages that are eviscerated in more relationalist and holistic approaches. In our approach, perspectives are identified with specific actors and objectives. These actors perceive the world differently and contest their differences against an external world which they cannot completely know but which pushes back to tell them if their worldview is not false.Footnote 72 They wrestle with moral dilemmas. As Michael Barnett points out (Chapter 5, this volume), Israeli Jews deliberate and decide between nationalist and cosmopolitan worldviews. Whatever they decide, whether they fail or succeed, they are responsible. In debates about the causes of the end of the Cold War, the reader can test different foreign policy worldviews against the evidence and decide which one makes more sense. In holistic worlds, there is no contestation of political or religious perspectives. There is no good and evil. Nothing can be questioned because boundaries are uncertain and everything is in the process of becoming. There are no certainties, no firm truths. Seen critically, the holistic vision is an appeal to disarm intellectually, to abandon the pivot of individual inquiry and insight, to blur any distinction between points of view, and to lose the element of choice which is the very essence of freedom.
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