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A Rambo come to judgement: Fred Halliday, Marxism and International Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
Extract
According to Fred Halliday's ‘Vigilantism in International Relations: Kubálková, Cruickshank and Marxist theory’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, July 1987) our article entitled ‘The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’’ (Review of International Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, July 1986) along with the rest of our work suffer from serious defects. It appears according to Halliday that we ‘do not understand’, we ‘wouldn't understand’, ‘couldn't understand’, nor could our readers ‘divine from our work’. We are, according to Halliday, ‘simplistic’ and ‘given to overstate’. We are ‘ideological’ and ‘tendentious’, our work is ‘inapposite’ and ‘misleading’. It ‘misrepresents’ and it ‘ignores’, it is ‘disputable’ and ‘contentious’, ‘historically and theoretically inaccurate’, ‘dense and meandering’, ‘spurious’ and ‘ill-intentioned’. We ‘obscure issues with polemic’, our ‘simplifications are underpinned by other simplifications’, we ‘erect on a flimsy base’. ‘More attentive reading’, Halliday feels, would ‘tell us a thing or two’. We are guilty of ‘elisions of argument’, ‘dubious imputation of motive’, and ‘foreshortening of logic’. Others have a ‘historical and theoretical erudition’ that we, Halliday feels, ‘as yet’ cannot ‘muster’. There is more: Halliday finds it necessary to make comparison of our credentials and writing with those of others whose writing he finds less difficult to follow. The credentials of some gain recognition as (somewhat obscurely) ‘second to none’, and the works of some others are judged ‘fine’, ‘able’, and ‘most competent’. He extends his approbation to yet other authors who unlike Kubálková and Cruickshank manage to talk about their subject (Marxism and International Relations) ‘appreciatively’, ‘calmly’, and ‘positively’. In an ad hominem turn Halliday expresses his misgivings as to Kubálková’s scholarship for he again feels she ‘transposes’ (‘with ease’) ‘totalitarian method’ and the ‘conformist disciplining’ of debate ‘from the eastern bloc’ on to Western academia.
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References
1 For example the allegation that we never refer to the Medvedevs. As a matter of fact we do. Or the allegation that nobody has challenged a thesis of one of his books in print. As a matter of fact they have. E.g. Makinda, S., Third World Quarterly, 5 (1983), pp. 501–502Google Scholar; Kevin, A. C., Australian Outlook, 37 (1983), p. 133Google Scholar.
2 Verso and New Left Books (London, 1983)Google Scholar.
3 The two positions centre around the portrayal of the world as based on two competing, mutually threatening, antagonistic, profoundly different socio-economic systems; capitalist and socialist. Halliday’s model is based on I. Deutscher’s ‘Great Contest’ between the two different socio-economic systems, with the Soviet model resting its case on the peaceful coexistence of state s of two socioeconomic systems. In both cases the two systems are capitalist and socialist where the latter is in the neo-Trotskyist view (as opposed to the Soviet) adjudged traditionally as ‘deformed’ and weaker than its capitalist counterpart.
4 Or as he himself put it in a BBC programme broadcast across the world, there are n o MacDonalds, Bank of America, nor advertisements of Coca Cola on Red Square or Kutuzovsky Prospekt, but there s i social security and housing that does not exist in the USA (ABC, Brisbane, April 1987).
5 The asymmetrical similarity in this regard in the analyses of conservative and radical revisionist historiography, as well as between the conservative and Soviet theories are well documented (Holsti, O. R., ‘The Study of International Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows: Theories of the Radical Right and the Radical Left’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII, No. 1, 1974Google Scholar) in which the identification of bad and good are of course reversed. A reviewer of Halliday’s work argued that Halliday ‘presents a mirror image, though a more subtle and refined one, of the absurd simplicities of the Reagan claim that all international troubles should be laid at the door of the Kremlin’. Roberts, Adam, ’State of the World’, New Society, 64 (1983), p. 481Google Scholar. Or, as another reviewer put it, ‘Halliday’s charges of tendentious analysis and simplistic policy’ levelled at his opponents, apply on the contrary to his own book. Campbell, J. C., ‘Has the red tide ebbed?’ The Middle East Journal, 37, No. 3 (Summer 1983), p. 469Google Scholar, fitting ‘events to preconceived notions of good and evil’. Henze, P. B., ‘History and the Horn’, Problems of Communism, 32 (1983), p. 66Google Scholar. With his portrayal of the Soviet Union (as a number of his reviewers pointed out) as ‘selfless’, ‘benign’, a ‘benevolent friend’ of the Third World, her foreign policy interpreted ‘most charitably’, and ‘most generously’, Halliday for example effectively embraced (with much agonizing and many an expressed qualm) the invasion of Afghanistan, followed by a subsequent endorsement of the Dergue regime in Ethiopia. (Cox, M., ‘The Cold War and Stalinism in the Age of Capitalist Decline’, Critique, 17 (1986), p. 18Google Scholar; Cox, M., ‘In search of the Second Cold War’, Irish Slavonic Studies, 5 (1984), p. 205Google Scholar.) As another reviewer writes in the same vein, Halliday’s view of the ‘Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 [as] one instance of ‘supporting ruling communist parties against attempts to overthrow them’ is a libel on Dubcek’, A. Roberts, op. cit., p. 481.
6 Then again, as Halliday himself revealed, advantages that flow from being critical of the USSR are not to be scoffed at. As he put it: ‘Chomsky’s focus [critical as it is only of the USA] may also be politically self-defeating, since the critique of US crimes in the third world will carry greater force if it is coupled with a comparable assessment of crimes by other forces, nationalist or communist.’ Halliday, Fred, ‘One reason why’, New Society, 27 05 1982, p. 353Google Scholar. ‘Although his discussion of the USSR is almost uncritical compared to his analysis of the USA, he does admit that the USSR made the cold war possible in at least three ways. First, by failing to move towards socialist democracy; second, by accepting the logic of the arms race; and finally, by its ambivalent support for Third World struggles … Halliday … attacks those within the peace movement who would place equal blame upon the USSR for the present impasse … Soviet actions may have justified the New Cold War: America however caused it.’ Cox, M., ‘The Cold War and Stalinism in the Age of Capitalist Decline’, op. cit., p. 23Google Scholar.
7 ‘The Russians can be rebuked for their failure to assist other movements that needed their help not for what they have done’, Halliday, F., ‘The Arc of Revolutions: Iran, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia’, Race and Class, XX, 4, 1979, p. 387Google Scholar. ‘If there is a criticism of the Soviet role, it is that Soviet non-military aid is too small, and that the USSR has not mad e clear a commitment to help transform the country economically, as it did in Cuba’, Halliday, F., ‘Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution: Socialism in the South’, MERIP Reports, No. 81 (1979), p. 16Google Scholar. See also Halliday, , The Making of the New Cold War, op. cit., pp. 157–158Google Scholar and Cox, M., ‘The Cold War and Stalinism …’, op. cit., p. 68Google Scholar.
8 Marxism and International Relations (Oxford, 1985 and 1989)Google Scholar.
9 Kubálková, V., Marxism-Leninism and Theory of International Relations, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Lancaster, 1974Google Scholar.
10 ‘A Double Omission’, British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1977Google Scholar.
11 Marxism—Leninism and Theory of International Relations (London, 1980)Google Scholar.
12 Marxism and International Relations, op. citGoogle Scholar.
13 International Inequality (London, 1981)Google Scholar.
14 ‘Some of the best critical work on the arms race and on the Third World, is done within the very confines of the imperialist state. The work of such writers as William Appleman Williams, Noam Chomsky, Richard Barnet, Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, Michael Klare and Seymour Hersh is illustrative of this tendency’, Halliday, F., ‘America’s New Cold War’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1984), p. 758Google Scholar.
15 Halliday’s empirico-positivist position is clarified further in his discussion on Soviet ‘weakness’ relative to the United States. Halliday believes there to be ‘independent criteria’ (p. 170) by which not only the relative merits of theories can be judged but by which also the relative strength of the powers can be sufficiently accurately measured as to enable a strategic rationale to be based upon his findings: that the courtesy service provided him by the world’s ‘pentagons’ accurate to the last dreadnought, flintlock (and submarine ripple pulse drive?) will help us to wager western survival on his arithmetic. The curious thing is not so much that not all of us believe in Halliday’s positivist science, but that Halliday wonders at our naïveté and ‘ill-intention’. Some it turns out are not naïve: he speaks of ‘independent’(!) Soviet writers by which he means not refugees like the many but those like the Medvedevs who approximate his Truth.