Despite the evident disagreements between us, and a certain measure of misunderstanding, I find Edward Thompson’s comment welcome and stimulating. The overriding issues that confront us all concern the future, on which, as he himself makes clear, there is far more that unites than divides us. There are, however, a number of points he raises where some dissenting reply may be in order. These are: the interpretation of his argument on exterminism; the evaluation of European events over the last few months; the role of the peace movement; the plausibility of a ‘third way’.
Thompson disputes my division of theories of cold war into four broad schools and in particular my inclusion of his ‘exterminism’ thesis in what I term the internalist school, that is one which sees the Cold War as a product of comparable forces operating within the two blocs, forces for whom the Cold War is in varying respects functional. As I argued in nlr 180 and in The Making of the Second Cold War, no one can deny the force of internal factors within the two blocs, but on its own such an argument is misleading in two respects: (1) it under-states the degree of contestation and rivalry between the blocs—that is, the degree to which each remained committed to prevailing over the other; (2) it overstates how similar the structures were within each bloc, and in so doing failed to see how far Cold War was a product of the very difference, the heterogeneity of socio-economic systems, between them. I do not think, as he seems to do, that the ideological element in East–West relations was separate from the material interests involved.
Thompson may not like the word ‘homology’ but it is in meaning very similar to the equally un-Anglo-Saxon term ‘isomorphism’ which appears liberally in his exterminism essay. Both denote a similarity or identity of structure. ‘Homology’ is the best I can do to denote the argument that the sources of the Cold War are similar within the two blocs, and that, in his case, these sources are to be found in a military–social dynamic which he terms ‘exterminism’. The category ‘reciprocity’ as he explains it in his comment seems to bear this interpretation out: that the Cold War was driven by forces within each bloc that, through reciprocal interaction, more and more came to resemble each other. After all, the central argument of that text is that whatever differences in social system may have underlain the Cold War in its inception, the predominance of the arms race and arms manufacture has produced a similarity: his stress on ‘isomorphism’ was in part designed to rebut traditional and apologetic left arguments about the differences between the capitalist and non-capitalist systems.