In the field of scholarship that political correctness labels ‘The United States in the World’—formerly known as ‘us Diplomatic History’ or the ‘History of us Foreign Relations’, and surely due to be rebranded a few years from now—it is difficult to find a more distinctive and unconventional figure than Anders Stephanson. A heterodox European Marxist trained at the universities of Gothenburg and Oxford, Stephanson had initially intended to study the interwar us left. He instead ended up writing a pathbreaking doctoral thesis on the thought of George Kennan and becoming a ‘us in the World’ specialist, who brought to the subject a singularly imaginative and original approach.
Influenced by Althusser, Foucault, Poulantzas and, although he tends to deny it, Derrida; inevitably drawn to Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte; clearly, though not always explicitly, shaped by a left-wing reading of Carl Schmitt; involved in the radical cultural project represented by the journal Social Text; and indebted to Fredric Jameson, Stephanson is in every respect an unusual presence in what was, and often remains, a fairly conservative subfield. And yet, despite this—or perhaps because of it—it is difficult to identify a scholar who has contributed more to debates about the nature of the Cold War, the foreign policy of the United States and, more broadly, what is often presented as a distinctively American way of understanding (and acting in) the world.
Stephanson has never been the most prolific of writers. In addition to two monographs, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989) and Manifest Destiny (1995), he is best known for a series of innovative articles and numerous engaging, pugnacious reviews, which won him few friends in the profession. Yet as many of those who had the privilege of engaging with him—and of receiving his often merciless comments on their work—can attest, he more than compensated for this with feedback of extraordinary generosity: granularly detailed, empirically exacting and intellectually uncompromising. Verso has now published American Imperatives, a crucial collection of twelve lightly revised and updated essays, some of them appearing for the first time.
The collection is divided into three sections: the Cold War as a ‘us Project’, ‘Diplomatic History’ (that is, historiography) and ‘us Foreign Relations’. Two closely intertwined themes, however, run across the chapters. The first concerns the nature and temporality of the Cold War, as a world-shaping struggle between two great powers; the second is an attempt to characterize the allegedly idiosyncratic American way of engaging with the world and defining both what that world is and what it ought to be. How does the United States operate within the international system? How does it conceive such a system and undertake to shape it? Stephanson addresses these questions by doing what he has always done best: periodizing and dissecting, proposing chronologies and deconstructing themes and definitions. The most arresting proposition in American Imperatives is indeed linked to his definition and periodization of the Cold War, which began in the late 1940s, he argues, a terminus a quo to which few historians would object, although even this conventional starting point has been questioned. But in a meaningful sense it ended in 1963, Stephanson maintains, rather than—as convention would have it—1989 or 1991. This is not merely a revision of chronology. Nor is it the familiar claim that détente began earlier than commonly assumed, or that the Cuban Missile Crisis inaugurated a more cautious phase in superpower relations. Stephanson’s argument has always been more nuanced, radical and provocative. Around 1963, he contends, the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union ceased to possess the quality that had made it specifically a ‘Cold War’. What followed could still involve hostility, proxy conflict, military competition and reciprocal demonization. The great-power antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union did not end, nor did its often tragic reverberations around the world. But it would no longer be governed by the same underlying logic that made it a Cold War.
That logic had rested on the refusal of the us to recognize the Soviet Union as a legitimate member of the international system. The Cold War was therefore not simply a rivalry between two states or two blocs, nor merely the framework through which the system was structured. It was, Stephanson has long contended, a specifically American mode of organizing the postwar world founded on the nondialectical rejection of an adversary which might be opposed, encircled and ultimately abolished, but not genuinely engaged. By the early 1960s, however, abolition had become indistinguishable from mutual annihilation. The Soviet acquisition of a credible retaliatory nuclear capability deprived the United States of any plausible expectation that the conflict might conclude in victory as Americans had traditionally imagined it: the enemy defeated, illegitimacy extinguished and righteous order restored. Nuclear parity—and mutually assured destruction—transformed that prospect into collective suicide. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1963 Test Ban Treaty thus assume enormous importance in Stephanson’s periodization. They marked the emergence of a shared us–Soviet interest that neither ideology nor rejectionist rhetoric could erase. From then on, the superpowers were bound together by what Henry Kissinger would call ‘interdependence for survival’.
Nuclear weapons were, Stephanson writes in the preface, ‘ideology killers’. Atomic vulnerability exposed the limits of American doctrines constructed around absolute difference and uncompromising struggle. It obliged us officials to recognize that the monstrous totalitarian adversary possessed not only the capacity to survive but the power to determine whether the United States itself would continue to exist. The Soviet Union had become an enemy with whom Washington had to communicate, negotiate and establish rules. It had, in other words, become something close to Schmitt’s justus hostis: a legitimate foe rather than an unlawful presence awaiting elimination. The post-1963 relationship thus became dialectical in a way the earlier Cold War—or, better, the real Cold War—had not been. Washington and Moscow recognized that they depended upon the restraint and rationality of the other. Their common interest was negative in the obvious sense that both wished to avoid annihilation. But it also contained a positive dimension, since the two powers collaborated, however unevenly, in constructing an international nuclear order that preserved their privileged position in a profoundly unequal system.
Stephanson’s emphasis on the 1963 turning point provides both the conceptual anchor and the chronological pivot of this collection, beginning with his famous ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War’, originally published by H-Diplo in 1996, which appropriately opens the volume. The essay offers a quintessential example of Stephanson’s interest in the production and naming of ‘constitutive concepts’: the circumstances in which they emerge, the purposes they serve, the boundaries they create and the forms of chronology they produce. To call a period the ‘Cold War’ is not an innocent descriptive act. It assigns coherence to a set of events. It identifies certain conflicts as manifestations of a larger whole and reduces others to secondary or local phenomena. Stephanson’s recurring complaint is that historians have too often used the term without producing the concept. ‘Cold War’, he writes, has been a chronological label rather than an explanatory instrument. It names an era—usually extending from the late 1940s to the end of the 1980s—within which almost anything involving international politics, development, culture, violence, decolonization or capitalist integration can be situated. Fashionable efforts to ‘decentre’ the study of the Cold War, however laudable their empirical findings, have only deepened this conceptual opacity. For Stephanson they must be countered by an opposite effort to ‘recentre’ the Cold War and circumscribe both its definition and its chronology.