The Logic of the Cold War: The Web of Interdependent Governance and the Connective Power 0739190113, 9780739190111

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 11
Introduction......Page 13
1 Logic of Togetherness at Work......Page 29
2 Governance of the Web of Interdependent Partnership......Page 53
3 Governance of the Big-Brotherly Vanguard Group......Page 87
4 The Cold War Wisdom......Page 121
5 Historical Logics and Emergence of an Interdependent Leviathan......Page 141
6 Construction of the Post–Cold War World......Page 165
Postscript......Page 185
Bibliography......Page 189
Index......Page 199
About the Author......Page 207

Citation preview

The Logic of the Cold War

The Logic of the Cold War The Web of Interdependent Governance and the Connective Power Tian-jia Dong

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dong, Tian-jia, author. Title: The logic of the Cold War : the web of interdependent governance and the connective power / Tian-jia Dong. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024063 (print) | LCCN 2018030937 (ebook) | ISBN 9780739190128 (Electronic) | ISBN 9780739190111 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Balance of power—History—20th century. | Cold war. | World politics—1945-1989. Classification: LCC D843 (ebook) | LCC D843 .D65 2018 (print) | DDC 327.1/1209045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024063 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my son, Daniel Zai Qin-Dong, and the young people of his generation. They deserve a peaceful world.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Web of Interdependent Partnership and the Connective Power—A Global Governance System

1

1 2 3 4 5 6

Logic of Togetherness at Work: A Story Line of the Cold War Governance of the Web of Interdependent Partnership: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the US System Governance of the Big-Brotherly Vanguard Group: The Behindthe-Scenes Story of the USSR System The Cold War Wisdom: A Frame Critical Analysis Historical Logics and Emergence of an Interdependent Leviathan: A Grand Theory Construction of the Post–Cold War World: A Grand Strategy

17 41 75 109 129 153

Postscript

173

Bibliography

177

Index

187

About the Author

195

vii

Acknowledgments

A theoretical exploration into human history, even a small part of it, is a never-ending process. It is never perfect, as Edward Gibbon would tell. I am no Gibbon, of course. I engaged in this project with a big ambition without sufficient skill and knowledge to achieve it. It is my humble hope that I cast a brick to induce the jade—just putting out a commonplace idea with a hope to lead the really valuable discussions to the scene, as a Chinese proverb would teach. I am grateful to many people who have empowered me since I embarked on the enriching journey of historical exploration. First would be my wife, Dr. Qin Dongxiao, who has gone through the whole process together with me without complaint, taking care of me and tolerating my absentmindedness. I also owe deep gratitude to my other family members, my father Dong Zhenlin, mother, Ma Xiao-ji, my two sisters Drs. Dong Hui-jia and Dong Yi-jia, my brothers-in-law Drs. Liu Chen and Wang Gong-chao. I can never forget all my mentors through the years of my education, among them Professors Xu Xu-dian, Pan Qun, Wang Wen-quan, Lu Jing-qi at Shandong University; William Gamson, William Harris, Paul Grey, Diane Vaughan, Eve Spangler, and Frank Soo at Boston College; Andrew Walder, Arthur Kleinman, and Samuel Huntington at Harvard University. Whatever I achieve, it would be the fruit of their hard work. I am deeply grateful to all of them. My deep gratitude also goes to Drs. Janet Surrey and Steve Bergman for their enduring friendship, their spiritual guidance, and their academic inspiration. I am grateful to Westfield State University for granting me sabbatical leave in the spring of 2018 so that I can concentrate on completing this book. My colleagues at Westfield State University Drs. Kate Bagley, Zengie Mangaliso, Tamara Smith, and Gabriel Aquino truly exemplified a unity in diverix

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sity workplace which is both inspirational and supportive. I have been so lucky to have the opportunity to interact with thousands students through all these years of my teaching. These young people not only academically inspired me and challenged me, but also showed me the bright side of human nature and the hope of human future. I am deeply grateful to Mr. Joseph Parry, Mr. Justin Race, Ms. Meaghan Menzel, and Ms. Sarah Craig at Lexington Books for their professionalism in guiding me through the publishing process, especially to Mr. Parry, whose patience and encouragement deeply moved me and empowered me. I am thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their profound insights and helpful suggestions. I benefited greatly from their reviews. Last but not least, I thank my son Daniel Zai Qin-Dong for his comments and technical support at the last stage of this writing. DTJ Wilbraham, Massachusetts March 14, 2018

Introduction Web of Interdependent Partnership and the Connective Power—A Global Governance System 1

AN OVERVIEW Richard Rosecrance summarized the world’s governance system this way: The world does not need to be reminded that it exists in a formal state of anarchy. There is no international government. Nor is there sufficient interdependence or division of labor among states to transform international relations into a social system akin to domestic affairs. Under prevailing circumstances there are only three methods by which that anarchic system can be regulated or prevented from lapsing into chaos: the traditional balance of power; nuclear deterrence; and rule by a central coalition. Each system has been employed at different times during the last two hundred years. 2

I agree with him on the condition that the assertion is about the past situation before the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War ushered in a new world. A new type of global governance has matured, which has been regulating the world since the Cold War and have prevented the world lapsing into chaos. This is the global web of interdependent partnership, which I would term “governance of dynamic interdependence.” At the moment when we are approaching the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall, the image of the ugly Wall touches our hearts and minds. We feel the penetrating power of connection and the desperate weakness of separation. The Cold War is behind us long enough. We have some 1

2

Introduction

space to think about its historical significance. What is it? The Cold War was full of colorful dramas, events that draw our attention in every aspect of human life: military, economy, politics, and culture. In the end in a dramatic fashion, the mighty Soviet Union collapsed into small pieces in a spectacular fashion and disappeared from the map. As we witnessed the triumph of the US-led West, we have the luxury to ask today: What do all these mean historically? At the time when we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Cold War in 2021, what we might really be celebrating? Our future generations will surely ask: What was the Cold War all about? The answer in this book is as follows: the Cold War revealed to us the logic of human togetherness and the power of connection behind the dynamics of this logic. It is only because of the logic of togetherness that the Cold War was “cold” all along. The fact that it did not become “hot” is no mean feat. The enemies fought against each other, but they kept the level of fighting within the control of human rationality. They fought with hatred and disdain toward each other as we human beings always did when we fought wars, but they accomplished one thing our ancestors were hardly able to do: they did not use the weapon they could use; they did not stretch the fighting to their utmost capability. The reason they did not do what they could do in a war was not that they were more rational than their forebears. It was the logic of togetherness that kept them in check. For the first time in human history, we humans could not afford to destroy our enemy. Clearly, the weapons were too powerful to be used—we could not use them to destroy our enemy without destroying ourselves at the same time. However, there was something more about the logic of togetherness. Besides the negative side of mutually assured distruction, there was a positive side of human togetherness this time around in human history: a structure of the web of interdependent partnership was eventually established and we had possessed the power to live a better life without having to destroy our enemy. In fact, with our enemy contained to a “cold” war level, we gained a better position to consolidate among ourselves and construct more opportunities to connect to the forces within our enemy. This was the power of connection. Throughout human history before the Cold War, human international/inter-group relations had been driven by the following three logics: the logic of conquest, the logic of communal bonding, and the logic of uneven exchange. All the three are based on clear boundaries between groups. For the logic of conquest, the practice is that if you belong to different groups let alone an enemy, I either kill you or enslave you. For the logic of communal bonding, we have relationship by fate; we are born into each other’s lives and we naturally belong to the same group which has a clear boundary of us vs. them. For the logic of uneven exchange, it is marketbased interaction driven by uneven power distributions among players. However, the connective nature of the logic of togetherness, and the connective

Introduction

3

nature of international/inter-group relations for that matter during the Cold War, represents a brand-new practice: because of the potential to gain power through breaking through the boundaries via the global web of interdependent partnership. This is a web centered around business networks with sufficient openness to enclose entrepreneurial people of all walks of life to develop cross-boundary relations. Its essence is the connective power—the power to be embedded not only in the within-the-boundary hard and soft powers but also in the beyond-the-boundary “power-in-others” through effective connections between the power agents. During the Cold War, the structure was the web of dynamic interdependent partnership and the human agency was the power agents working through connective power. The “cold” war was in essence a contest of the connective power between the US’s “uniting the web of interdependent partners of mainly business, cultural and political elites (union leaders included) across the globe” vs. the USSR’s “uniting the communist parties across the globe in the name of the workmen of the world.” At the end of the day, the US side not only consolidated its own ranks but also attracted and eventually embraced, united, and even absorbed the “dependable elements” inside the Russian camps whereas the USSR-led communist party, which was supposed to unite the proletariat of the world, failed to connect across national borders. Both sides depended on the specific forms of connection and gained their power in the process. As they struggled for control, the essence of the Cold War became about the two contesting forms of global governance, the American interdependent partnerism vs. the Russian big-brotherism. The direction of the future governance system of human society was determined by which form of connection could gain more power. The embodiments of the American-led open and revolving global web of interdependent partnership with business, community, and political leaders across the industrialized world as partners obtained stronger connective power over Russian-led communist party organizations with other communist governments as little brothers. The reason the American side won was because it was a governing system by building a web of the most globally dynamic social forces and dependable partners and constructing itself as the central link of the web. In this way, it was more effectively connected within the governing body itself and to other social groups around the globe, eventually empowered and united the dynamic power agents within the USSR. The winning strategy was gaining the connective power from guiding, supporting, providing, protecting, and regulating the power agents globally and facilitating their reach to the general population. The Russians lost because their connective power of global governance was too weak to make cross-boundary connections that matched the US interdependent partnership. Its strategy was to develop obedient “little brothers” by organizing small vanguard groups across the globe

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Introduction

and intimidating and materially feeding the general population by coercive intervention, generous material support, and ideological indoctrination. The struggle between these two governing groups represented the historical essence of the Cold War and the result of the struggle manifests the significance of the Cold War. If we use one sentence to summarize the Cold War history, we might say: the Cold War history was a history of the display of the connective power under the logic of togetherness that consolidated and expanded of the web of interdependent partnership as the most viable form of global governance; whereas the Russian challenge only demonstrated to human society what did not work. A UNIPOLAR WORLD IN A HISTORICAL LENS The fact was, as this book argues, throughout the entire Cold War period after World War II, the world was a unipolar one. In fact, the world was long in a process of eventually becoming a unipolar one. In the previous stages of globalization, history witnessed the Spanish predatory system, the Holland commercial empire, French Napoleonic statist universalism, and, of course, British colonialism. The Germans attempted to establish an empire based on ethnocentrism and the Tsarist Russian Empire was an expansionist one. All of them survived and thrived mainly on the logics of conquest, communal bonding, and uneven exchange. The beginning of the era of globalization in the 1850s further enabled the dominance of British colonialism, with German ethnocentric nationalism as the major challenger, and American commercialism, Japanese militarism, and Russian expansionism all bringing their system of governance to the global scene. All the systems clearly failed to satisfy the historical purpose, as it was demonstrated by the two world wars. World War I started and World War II completed the destruction of the British colonialist global governance and its challengers also faded into history along the way, except the American alternative which was transformed earlier by Wilson and later by Roosevelt. It had become a more embracing and open system to enclose a wide variety of entrepreneurial people and satisfy their historical needs of holding the world together by leading other groups of people to stay together, work together, and make progress together. As German and Japanese nationalism faded away into history, the Russian classicist system driven by a vanguard group was a challenger on the global scale, the only one but also a much weaker one. In the unipolar world under the historical trend of globalization, the genuine power has been the network of governments or groups that can effectively connect across national borders to the other groups, empower others, and at the same time absorb power from others. America brought about a new civilization based on this new logic of global governance and new energy of connective power.

Introduction

5

Since the time when Woodrow Wilson proposed his idea after the very destructive World War I, the American interdependent partnerism had emerged. It is essentially composed of four elements: 1. Respecting communal-based national sovereignty; 2. Institutionalizing international interactions and activities via legal and institutional constructions so that conquest drive and power politics would be minimized; 3. Free and fair trade and open investment to guarantee equal and functional interactions to minimize the damaging effect of oppressive and exploitative uneven exchange; and 4. Safeguarding the capitalist system and making sure the capitalist class play a dynamic role in the international system. I do not label the American global governance system as liberalism because it is in fact much richer in contents than liberalism would propose. In addition to pointing out the power from above and beyond the power agents, it is mainly about the mutually empowered power dynamic in between the power agents. The structure that enables this power is a dynamic interdependent partnership, not institutionalized hierarchy. This system of global governance eventually developed into the web of interdependent partnership as the dominant system of global governance. Of course, the seemingly competing one was the USSR big-brotherism. I don’t think either communism or socialism can convey the essence of the USSR global governance system because its practice was much narrower than both the classic communism or socialism would propose. The basic conviction of the USSR big-brotherism is that “it needs only a truly Bolshevist party, applying the appropriate tactics, in order to win.” 3 The realm of international relations is about security, prestige, and material gains, like Hobbes would enlighten us; it was also about ideology, similar to the struggles between different religions in history. However, on a more fundamental level from a long-term historical perspective, the realm of international relations is about building a governing system for a world community of nations. Connective power was the most powerful weapon used in the struggles of this sort. The American global governance based on the web of independent partnership generated strong connective power which functions by further building a dynamic web of dependable partners across the globe. The embodiment of the connective power is the power agents who are empowered and empowering by and through one another, and therefore form powerful networks that embrace and unite the active power agents in the areas of business, culture, politics, as well as society in general, in different nations, and including the power agents inside the enemies.

6

Introduction

POWER BEYOND “HARD” OR “SOFT” Since war is about power contest, it is commonly believed that there are two types of power that help us make sense of the process, especially the results, of war: hard power and soft power. 4 The former is the military and the economy, as well as all the “hardware” that support the military or the economy. The latter is centered on values, beliefs, organizing styles, and the institutionalized way of life in general. The focus of both is individualistic within national/group borders. It is commonly believed that the US won the war because of its military/economic strength and its cultural attractiveness. However, this book argues that the most powerful weapon to generate power both within and across national borders in the unipolar world under the logic of togetherness at the time during the Cold War was the connective power. The web of interdependent partnership provided a structure that enabled power agents to gain power from others and therefore empower others became a way of gaining more power. Therefore connecting power agents through economic and social interdependence would be a measure of power. This power is not only about the degree of connection among the power agents of different groups within a nation/state, it is also about its embeddedness in the connectable power agents in the groups of other nation/states, especially within the borders of the enemies. The collectively possessed wealth of a nation within its national borders is significant but no longer regarded as the most significant because connective power is manifested from and rooted in the capability for cross-border investment and material/ spiritual goods exchange to generate economic, social as well as spiritual, interdependence, including employment and goods to facilitate other people’s livelihood, cultural and entertainment, spiritual fulfillment, social homogeneity. Connective power is revealed by the answer to one question: how large a part can a group play cross-border in the fabric of other groups of people’s lives? Domestically within the group, one important aspect of connective power was jobs. Whichever governing body can effectively create more meaningful jobs will be more powerful. Internationally there were two ways of doing this during the Cold War. One was investment by both the private and the public sectors to create effective channels for those others who are capable of providing products and services to employ people and at the same time make profits (the market-oriented capitalist model). The other was government investment and mass mobilization to directly put people to work (the planned socialist model). Clearly, the latter was limited within national borders and less likely to make cross-border connection whereas the former could connect different groups across borders and better create and sustain profits and employment. It was thus regarded as a higher level of connection. Furthermore, if a group could generate more links socially or even politically beyond the economic connections, it would possess more

Introduction

7

and stronger connective power of empowering other power agents—the ability to build up dependable partners and construct solid connections to more groups across the globe and the ability to enable other power agents to do the things they were otherwise unable to do and, in this way, to make them do things they otherwise would not do. Power to make others do things they otherwise would not do was measured by how solid the connection was and how enabling it could be. Although power is always about a hierarchy, the more powerful and solid foundation for a more effective connective power is rooted in the functional and necessary interdependence. Connective power of course bestows the power agents freedom of action—the powerful does whatever it wants despite the resistance. This is the coercive side of the power. However, on the other hand, connective power is about restraint from freedom of action—power agents act as “agents” of a connective web of social forces and therefore subject to the restraints of the web as a whole. The web of interdependent partnership requires each power agent to act according to the relational rules of the web when they are “merely” pursuing selfish purposes. If a power agent makes good decision and acts upon it and therefore benefits the network of partners on the whole supplydemand chain, he will grow more powerful. Otherwise this power agent will surely suffer the tangible consequence if failing to sufficiently connect to others on the web. The power agents are therefore not free in this sense but nonetheless in a dominant position to shape the events and future. This is the mechanism of connection through performance on the network and gaining power through empowering. The idea of connective power therefore enables us to identify the most fundamental qualification for the dominant governing group as power agent in the unipolar global web of inter-group networks, which is the group’s relational position on the web. Only the group that is structurally rooted in key positions of the web of interdependence can be regarded as the dominant governing body. We can therefore see the winners who emerge and develop from struggle for higher rankings among different groups on different social strata in different social realm and measure the strength of power of different governing groups. Of course, the more groups a governing group can naturally and communally connect to, the more powerful it is. But more importantly on the global scale beyond communal/national borders, the more functional exchange a governing group can engage with other groups, the more powerful it is; the more partners a governing group can enlist to help control and administer other groups across the national borders, the more powerful it is; the larger a social sphere a governing group can socially connect to, the more powerful it is; the more connection a governing group develop to the people who play other types of functional roles in society, like the economic elites, technical experts, or political elites, the more powerful it is; the larger a governing group and the more other socially connected people they can

8

Introduction

connect to, the more powerful it is. We can therefore develop a system of measurement based on these criteria and it can be used to demonstrate the connective power disparity between the America-led global web of interdependent business, community, and political leaders in advanced industrialized countries and the USSR Communist Party and other communist parties at different stages of the Cold War. In this way, the idea of connective power goes beyond the “soft power” vs. “hard power” debate. Connective power is not cultural, not military, not economical, and not political. Instead of talking about institutional or cultural power, as is insisted by the soft power assertion, it is much more tangible and “hard.” It is based on clear-cut genuine connections on a web of interdependent partnership networks. Instead of focusing on military or economic power or political power, which is the foci of “hard” power, connective power asserts that all the military, economic, and political powers are embedded in “enabling” relationships and only work as resources while the enabling connective power bestows the genuine dynamic to the governing groups’ global power struggle. Connective power shares with the “smart power” notion of alliance building but it is far more than that. It is about the deeper and broader connections based on building up and empowering dependable partners and developing solid relationship of interdependence far beyond nationstates’ inter-governmental alliances and state-to-state networks. During the specific historical period of the Cold War, the effective partners were connected to the most global and most dynamic historical forces and to one another, especially the global web of business networks, and gained connective power to achieve global reach this way. THEORETICAL POSITION: BEYOND REALISM AND IDEALISM Therefore, we no longer ask the obvious question “who won the Cold War” because the answer that the United States of America, working as a nationstate, was the winner is no longer so meaningful. Some further questions need to be answered: was the winner America as a state or America as a nation? Or was the winner some groups in America or America as a whole? Or some aspects of a certain group’s practice or the group’s pattern of action as a whole? In order to answer these “no longer so obvious” questions, we have to think about another obvious question: it was between who and whom the Cold War was fought? It would be of little meaning if we say it was between the US and the USSR or the US-led “free” world/advanced capitalist nations and the Soviet Union–led socialist countries. Who were the real players within each side that fought against each other? What was the driving force behind their fight? It might not be easy to identify the real players and

Introduction

9

examine their power without seeing all the aspects of the players, both negative and positive in terms of enabling the players to win or lose the war. Of course, the most important of the aspects of the players is the most powerful weapons each of them used in the battle that enabled them to win the war. Hence, what was the most powerful weapon in the Cold War? The fact was, as this book would indicate, the true winner of the Cold War were the partners on the global web of interdependent partnership. And they won at the beginning of the Cold War, not at the end. The historical significance of Cold War was not about the American national interests, specifically the security of American territory and material well-being, because the real threat the USSR posted was not simply American national interest as realism defines it. 5 It was threatening to American security in a sense that it threatened the very survival of America as a system of global governance. This should be the focus of historical significance in a long-term view. Realism is inaccurate in this regard. In the meantime, the Cold War had less meaning if we talk exclusively about American values, specifically the ideas and institutions of freedom and democracy. Because the USSR values like equality among all people regardless of class, gender, and ethnicity and the rational planning and regulating the irrational human economic activities could not be regarded as unattractive at the time and are still deeply rooted in human mind and heart even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Idealism misperceived the reality in this regard. 6 For realism, the United States as a nation won the Cold War; it was driven by its perceived national interests; and the most powerful weapon was American economy and its military, especially nuclear bombs. For idealism, the US-led capitalist free world as the embodiment of liberal institutions won the Cold War; it was driven by the human common pursuit of liberal democracy; and the most powerful weapons were American values and human rights. This book sets out to go beyond realism and idealism by highlighting the genuine driving force that had the greatest historical significance after World War II was neither the struggle between nations/states nor between ideology/ values. It views the structure of the Cold War world as a unipolar system dominated by the logic of togetherness. The world system was governed by the American-centered revolving web of interdependent partnership, which connected business leaders, cultural activists, community leaders, and political leaders across the industrialized world and beyond. The historical significance of the Cold War was to safeguard this governance system, a Leviathan of dynamic interdependent partnerships, against the challenge of the USSR Communist Party and its “little brothers,” the vanguard parties across the globe. The struggle was to determine which global governance system would determine the future of the unipolar human society. The essence of international relations was these two distinctive governance groups’ capability to reach different power agents of social groups or people and thus gain power

10

Introduction

in this way. Nation-states were units of action in the sense that they were one of many locales where the governing groups were rooted and effectively exercised their legal and institutional governance. This idea is about the clash of the American and the Russian civilizations, but “civilization” here is not defined by religion-centered cultures, as Samuel Huntington suggests. 7 It is about the civilizational logics behind different types of power and governance. The idea also leads to a conclusion that we might have reached the end of one critical stage of history as far as we can foresee, but it does not end at Western liberalism. 8 Instead, history of this stage might end at an America-led unipolar global web of interdependent and hierarchical Leviathan. The idea also partially shares the view of great power politics, but views the great powers on a unipolar global structure and therefore the process of power struggle between the great powers does not have to be a zero-sum game because the major source for the great powers is connective power which is not limited to and exhaustible like the military or economy. The idea views the unipolar American dominance as a Leviathan, but not a liberal one—interdependent partnership is different from liberalism in a sense that international institutions and rules are only one aspect of the Leviathan and can only be maintained by a mutually dynamic relationship within the global web of power agents. The power of international “constitution” to shape global governance is far weaker than dynamically constructed partnership building and far less dynamic than global business networks. This book therefore aspires to present a new theoretical lens for viewing the world as a unipolar web of interdependent partnership through intergroup ties; the acting agents of international relations are the most powerful connective power agents who are empowered and empowering within and across national borders; and connective power is the genuinely most powerful force behind the dynamics of the governing groups’ struggle for a more central location on this web. The vision works as the golden thread that runs through the history of international relations during the Cold War and reveals the true cause of America’s triumph over Russia. It goes beyond the realism and liberalism dichotomy, as well as the hard vs. soft powers one, and develops a new way of thinking about global political order and dynamics. The theme is derived from an ancient Eastern wisdom: a multipolar world is temporary and the permanent historical trend is the movement toward a unipolar world which is the constant of human history. The power dynamics of international relations are driven by the governing groups’ struggle to be the central knot of a global web of inter-group ties in a movement toward a unipolar world and in the meantime, to make other competing groups fall into places as the peripheral links or as the meshes of the web. The global order is therefore framed neither as anarchic nor institutional. It is a movement toward refining a unipolar web which is relational and dynamic based on the governing groups’ struggle to occupy the center of the web. The rules

Introduction

11

are enforced through interactions of different groups while the governing groups expanding the boundaries of their social reach, despite the nonexistence of an institutionalized world government in a seemingly anarchic world. Connective authority is therefore the type of the legitimate global governance enforced by the interactive linkages between or among the governing groups in the unipolar web of inter-group ties. The theory expanded three major theories in sociology into the realm of international society. The first theory is structural-functionalism. The theory informs us that the concept “structural power” in the field of international relations would have to include the meaning of “function” in a global system in order to make the concept of power effectively embedded in agency’s actions. 9 At the same time, sociological conflict theory is used here to highlight that the most dynamic power in international relations is the struggle between or among the governing groups for controlling more and more social groups not only within national borders but also far beyond. The struggle also manifested through establishing institutions to consolidate their control. 10 The sociological network theory provides another building block by depicting society as a web of networks. It helps highlight the issue of connective power in a cross-border web of networks. It therefore reveals the fact that power is not only based on attributes of individual nation-states but also relationally rooted in each other and the relational connections between each other. By analyzing a nation-state’s involvement in types and strengths of inter-group ties and relational positions on the webs of these ties, we can go beyond the individualistic, economic-military oriented view about each nation-state’s power and see clearly the governing groups’ connective power in international relations. 11 PUTTING THE THEORY INTO PRACTICE: A GRAND STRATEGY Based on the theoretical arguments about the Cold War history above, this book is also attempting to provide an analytical tool for making sense of the present and predicting the future. The goal is to reach a clear understanding about America’s future position in contemporary global dynamics and suggest a grand strategy. When the Cold War ended, theorists like Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history,” and later Samuel Huntington pointed out “the clash of civilizations.” But for US policy makers, the question became: now what? What should the US do about this world? The Bush Sr. years quickly faded into history after he guided his administration, tactically navigating through the maze of the great change at the end of the Cold War with sophisticated diplomatic skill and winning the first Gulf War in a spectacular fashion along

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the way. The Clinton era enjoyed the post–Cold War “peace dividend” economically and politically and saw the dramatic expansion of the capitalist free market across the globe, and accompanying it went liberal democracy and American-style institutional construction. History seemed indeed ending at that point. Then the Bush Jr. administration followed a neoconservative agenda to take determined action with a clear purpose to put history to its end. They seized 9/11 as an opportunity to set out reshaping the world in America’s image. However, the global “War on Terror” after the initial stage of “shock and awe” developed into “mission-never-accomplished” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the meantime, the US economy kept full steam ahead, despite the dot-com hiccup at the turn of the century, until 2007–2008. The Great Recession not only threw the US financial system into a deep hole but also damaged the legitimacy of capitalism in general. Obama inherited the situation. His administration facilitated recovery both domestically and internationally by consolidating and retreating in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as attempted refocusing from “War on Terror” to “Pivot to Asia,” while dealing with the “Arab Spring” in an inconsistent style. The results were mixed, with more success on the domestic front than internationally. Now comes the Trump presidency. Its “America First” policy is loud and clear. Many pundits and politicians argue that twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, US foreign policy has finally set on a steady footing and obtained a clear and consistent grand strategy. Has it? As we review the development of US foreign policy as it has been evolving through these five administrations, Ian Bremmer constructed three frames of mind behind the concrete policy issues, which are: independent America, moneyball America, and indispensable America. He ends up in supporting the frame of independent America. 12 This book is leaning toward the indispensable America frame with a firm belief that an indispensable America is not a choice but a structural position. On this structural position, the only agency American foreign policy at this point has freedom to maneuver is to act on its connective power so that it can fully take advantage of the web of interdependent partnership. Since the web is mutually dynamic, I have full confidence that, through its indispensable position on the global web of interdependent partnership, America possesses sufficient connective power to bring prosperity back home and peace to the world. Clearly, my unit of action is different from the indispensable America frame, which regards America as a nation-state. For me in this book, “the web” which includes but is not limited to the nation-state would be more powerful and genuine as the unit of action, a more fundamental power behind the concrete dynamics of daily activities of foreign policy-making. Therefore, the America that is internationally indispensable does not mean it neglects domestic issues. The connective power of “the web” includes its connection to the unions, to the local towns and factories, to the ordinary workers and farmers.

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13

Questions about the nature of domestic political power, social integration, and conflict within national borders, authority and legitimacy of federal and local governments, the dynamics of a wide range of social-economic forces that affect American people’s daily lives, as well as the relation between human agency and historical change, can be better addressed by examining “the web” as a whole and the specific functional and relational linkages between the power agents. Because the most globally connected, and therefore most powerful, web of governing groups is still rooted in America, the American global governance is still the most effective way of reaching the largest number of groups across the globe, the US included. Three key issues are therefore to be addressed: 1. The assumption that America is in decline and is losing its global power is false; all the connective power possessed by other group/ nation-states is limited measured against US power. The potential strength of the other governing systems in competing for dominance in the global web of inter-group ties is unlikely to reach the center of the web. 2. The way for the American governing group to keep its position in the global web of inter-group ties is to strengthen their connective power by promoting a global unification on the web of interdependent partnership while accommodating the local elites for this purpose. The connective power idea demonstrates that if we do not see our power as rooted in others and do not believe we will be more powerful while possessing a more critical position in enabling others to become more powerful, we would lose an important source of power. 3. As a global leader similar to a village head, US foreign policy at this point in history cannot focus on controlling, containing, or confronting our serious competitors once we see their potential to become one. As Cold War history would enlighten us, containment policy only worked when the web of interdependent partnership as a governing body had not taken shape. Once “the web” has gained its governing central position globally, the best policy option in a unipolar world is to push for more indispensable functioning in others’ lives. Therefore, a policy recommendation to US national leaders is inclusive engagement to strengthen all the four dimensions of the interdependent Leviathan by empowering the power agents on the global web of interdependent partnership so that the capability of American connective power on the web will be more solidly constructed as the central link of the web. Logic of togetherness as we witness it through the Cold War will therefore transform all the ancient logics that have governed our human life since the beginning into constructive powers for world peace and prosperity.

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NOTES 1. For related theoretical discussion on these two concepts, see Tian-jia Dong, Social Reach: A Connectivist Approach to American Identity and Global Governance (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008). 2. Richard Rosecreance, “A New Concert of Powers,” Vol. 71, No. 2, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1992). 3. Franz Borkenau, World Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 413. 4. Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Perennial, 1946). Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, seventh edition (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006); The idea of hard power is further developed in Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); and Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Also, see Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (January 1978): 167–214. For the soft power idea, see Joseph S. Nye Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004); The Power to Lead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 6. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: And The Remaking of World Order (New York: A Touchstone Book, 1996). 8. Fancis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 9. Jonathan H. Turner, The Structure of Social Theory, fourth edition (Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1986). Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1964). Talcott Parsons, “The Present Position and Prospect of Systemic Theory in Sociology” in Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1949), 229. Talcott Parsons, Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951). Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953). 10. David Lockwood, “Some Remarks on ‘The Social System.” British Journal of Sociology 7, (June 1956): 134–146. For a diverse sample of different theoretical orientations within the conflict framework, see William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1975); Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press, 1975); James Coleman, Community Conflict (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957); Thomas C. Shelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Englels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliation, trans. Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (New York: Free Press, 1955). 11. For some basic reference on network analysis, see Peter Marsden and Nan Lin, eds., Social Structure and Network Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982); Berry Wellman, “Network Analysis: Some Basic Principles,” Sociological Theory, 1, (1983): 155–200; Ronald Burt, Toward a Structural Theory of Action: Network Models of Social Structure, Perception and Action (New York: Academic Press, 1982); John Scott, Social Network Analysis: A handbook, second edition (London: Sage Publications, 2000). Richard Emerson “Power-Dependence Relations,” American Sociological Review, 17, (Feb. 1962): 31–41; “Power-Dependence Relations: Two Experiments,” Sociometry (27 Sept. 1964): 282–98; John F. Stolte and Richard M. Emerson, “Structural Inequality: Position and Power in Network Structures,” in Behavioral Theory in Sociology, ed. R. Hamblin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Book, 1977); Karen S. Cook and Richard Emerson, “Power, Equity and Commitment in Exchange Networks,” American Sociological Review, 43, (1978): 712–39; Karen S. Cook, Richard M. Emerson, Mary R. Gillmore, and Toshio Yamagish, “The Distribution of Power in Exchange Networks,” American Journal of Sociology, 89 (1983): 275–305; Karen S. Cook,

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“Exchange and Power in Networks of Interorganizational Relations,” Sociological Quarterly, 18, (Winter 1977): 66–82; Karen S. Cook and Karen A. Hegtvedt, “Distributive Justice, Equity, and Equality,” American Sociological Review 39, (1983): 217–41. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, No. 6, (1973): 1360–1380; ”Economic Action and Social Structure: the problem of embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, No. 3, (1985): 481–510. Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ronald S. Burt, Structure Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 12. Ian Bremmer, Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016).

Chapter One

Logic of Togetherness at Work A Story Line of the Cold War

THE COLD WAR RESEARCH IN REVIEW John Lewis Gaddis wrote: The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end. That was not the case when the Cold War began. For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and moral compromises, the Cold War—like the American Civil War—was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all. We have no reasons to miss it. But given the alternatives, we have little reason either to regret its having occurred. 1

But some key questions remain: if the Cold War contest was necessary or inevitable, what were the strategies used to either intensify the contest or reduce it? Who were the actors involved? If the fundamental issues were settled, what were they? In the 1950s and most of 1960s, the scholars who tried to answer these questions predominantly belonged to the “orthodox” school, which believed the Cold War was initiated by the Soviet aggression and the American-led West had to defend itself and the world from the Soviet onslaught. From late 1960s through early 1970s, the “revisionist” school of scholars started to argue that it was the American hegemony that generated fear which in turn intensified the conflict. Starting from the 1970s, scholars began a process of synthesizing, the complexity of the factors was examined to move beyond 17

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simply ideological preferences and responsibility blame. 2 Eventually a postpost-synthesis formed which is represented by John Lewis Gaddis, who believed the Cold War was fighting about fundamental ideological issues between totalitarianism and individualism, “human face” and the “boots on it,” “It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears.” But the history that “then determines which prevail” 3 was mainly a power contest and George Kennan would be the architect of the grand design. They represent the idealist approach toward the research on Cold War history but incorporated realism and perceptions about power into the picture. Ideology mattered because it, too, was “real interests.” 4 Geopolitical interests could not be divorced from the ideological pursuits, as the realists would frame previously. The irreconcilable ideological conflicts between the two sides shaped the perception of geopolitical interests in a way that both sides engaged in many activities without obvious “real interests” behind them. Odd Arne Westad is the new representative of this school of thought. As he declared in his new book The Cold War: A World History: My argument, if there is one argument in such a lengthy book, is that the Cold War was born from the global transformation of the late nineteenth century and was buried as a result of tremendously rapid changes a hundred years later. Both as an ideological conflict and as an international system it can therefore only be grasped in terms of economic, social, and political change that is much broader and deeper than the events created by the Cold War itself. Its main significance may be understood in different ways. I have in an earlier book argued that profound and often violent change in postcolonial Asia, Africa, and Latin America was a main result of the Cold War. But the conflict also had other meanings. It can be constituted as a stage in the advent of US global hegemony. It can be seen as the (slow) defeat of the socialist Left, especially in the form espoused by Lenin. And it can be portrayed as an acute and dangerous phase in international rivalries, which grew on the disasters of two world wars and then was overtaken by new global divides in the 1970s and ’80s. 5

In this chapter, I would like to present a new synthesis, a synthesis focusing on the logic of human togetherness and regarding it as the golden thread working powerfully behind all the dynamics of the actors and their activities. This logic had a solid structure, the global web of interdependent partnership, which was the result of all the forces developed through one hundred years of rapid global changes, including: anti-colonialism and national liberation movement which resulted in nation-states as powerful actors on the global stage; the global expansion of capital and consumer products market which greatly strengthened the global reach of the business networks and the power of business class; the movement of people and global linkage therefore formed across national boundaries which resulted in a global web of intergroup ties and globalized the most dynamic social groups; the dramatic

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change in technology and the enormous increase in productivity which pushed the people who worked on them and for them to reshape human relationships to catch up with the progress. The global web of interdependent partnership as a structure generated a form of possibility for the logic of togetherness, a connective power of global governance that is beyond the traditional and individualistic hard vs. soft dichotomy, the connective power which derives its source of power from linkage with other power agents, empowerment between them and gaining power from others’ power. At this point, the ingredients of a global governance system are complete: the global web of interdependent partnership as its structural foundation and the power agents working through connective power as its agency. Leffler asserts: “The Cold War lasted as long as it did because of the ways in which American and Soviet ideas intersected with evolving conditions of the international system. U.S. and Soviet leaders thought they represented superior ways of organizing human existence . . . These contradictory visions of mankind’s future were inseparable from Soviet and American ideas about the past.” 6 If we accept his assertion, we would say the Cold War was about the way of global governance. The theme of this chapter, as well as this book, is to tell how Cold War history exposes to us an overlooked form of global governance: governance of dynamic interdependence. It tells us how the dynamics between power agents formed a web of interdependent partnership that created and maintained world order through the Cold War history. Let’s see how it worked through the four stages of the Cold War. CONTAINMENT: THE STORMING STAGE, 1945–1953 At the end of World War II, America was at a crossroad. How should the US deal with the USSR? Would the USSR pose a threat after the war? In Washington and across the nation, as well as the Western world, conventional wisdom told people that the USSR was destined to pursue the domination of Western Europe. From the hard power perspective, it would be difficult not to believe that the Cold War was not just like all the other wars which were about conquest of territory and maintenance of control. Therefore the core of the Cold War was seen in Europe because the Soviet Union imposed its domination in Eastern Europe when it implanted unwanted and illegitimate ruling regimes led by Stalin-approved communist parties. 7 Although the United States did the same by having implanted or imposed its own political and economic systems in the areas under its control, it was a common understanding in the US that the Soviet domination of East Europe threatened the security of the US, as well as that of Great Britain. Even a casual conversation became a grave concern when Stalin jokingly responded to Churchill’s congratulations on the Russian army’s capture of Berlin by noting that in

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1815 Alexander I had triumphantly marched into Paris. Today when we look back, we see the historical evidence shows that both sides significantly demobilized their forces—not a sign of aggression. The fear of a huge Soviet land force already in the position ready to sweep westward and pour into the entire Europe was unfounded. It was an imagined fear without factual basis. The army actually no longer existed. But the fear at the time was that the American military commitment to West Europe was so essential that without it, the Soviet Union would transform France, Italy, the Benelux countries, and West Germany into its satellite just like what had already happened to Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. Had that happened, the shift of the balance of power against the US would be decisive and it would result in a security problem for the US. Ultimately the aggression and expansion of the USSR and the loss of Europe would jeopardize America’s survival and ability to thrive as a nation. The Soviet military power therefore must be dealt with, as well as its ideological strength, this wisdom would tell us. The whole purpose was to defend Western Europe and Japan as the “free world,” to safeguard the vital American interests as it viewed as preserving security and institutions of the nation, although the risk of a nuclear war was to be avoided. 8 But George Kennan saw deeper. What he viewed and helped construct was behind the Iron Curtain the emerging Soviet–American rivalry would be dominated by America, whereas the Soviet Union was a factor to be dealt with seriously but no need to fear. The fundamental questions would be: did the United States have to fear the Soviet Union at the end of World War II? The connective power perspective supports Kennan’s vision. From both hard power and soft power perspectives, the fear was of course warranted. The Red Army had sufficient power to sweep through the European continent after it just recently destroyed the once mighty Germany Wehrmacht. Its soft power was also attractive enough to the war-torn citizens of the European countries because of its bravery in fighting the Nazis and its role in liberating the peoples under Nazi rule and also because of the popularity of the communist parties across Europe whose active contribution to defeating the Nazis was admired. But the Cold War history tells us otherwise. It was the connective power that could truly measure the power situation and predict the moves of power agents. Opposite to the hard and soft powers’ prophecy for fear, connective power would predict hope, hope for the best of all possible worlds. Measured by connective power, the Soviet Union at the end of World War II was in fact exhausted in terms of hard power, ideologically empty in terms of soft power, because it was isolated, scared, internally fragile and externally opportunistic. In its dictator Stalin’s mind, he was insecure. As a person who killed all his revolutionary comrades, many of them had helped him and had had deep personal relations with him through life and death, and

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a person who could not even trust his wife when a normal person in his sixties would have enjoyed life together with his children and grandchildren, Stalin’s loneliness and fear were clear, just he did not show it. His connection to his colleagues in the Politburo and to the Communist Party Central Committee was precarious to say the best; and because of this, the love and worship he received from the Party as a whole were deemed short-lived. Therefore the most urgent and more important concern for him was security for himself, then his regime, after that his country, his ideology, as John Lewis Gaddis insightfully points out, “in precisely that order.” 9 A dictator’s weakest point was his connective power, which was built upon force without genuine connection. The higher he rose in the power hierarchy, the less connection he had. It could be freezing cold when he reached the top since everybody could potentially be his enemy. Therefore his biggest worry was his life and his first priority on daily basis would have to be making sure he was alive without getting killed in a coup or assassination. His regime was also precariously hanging in the air because its connection to the society was fragile. It would be a luxury for the dictator and his henchmen to focus on the genuine interests of their country, let alone carrying out their ideology of liberating the world. The last two factors were more likely to be used for the purpose of their self-preservation. Stalin was different from Hitler precisely at this point. For the latter, a strong organization deeply rooted in the German nationalistic society backed him up until the very end and the way to keep himself alive was aggression and expansion because the foundation of his power was ethno-nationalism, therefore expansion was the most sure way to keep his internal cohesion. In fact, Stalin was pragmatic in a sense that he knew he faced a big task to keep and digest his war gains—control over East and Central Europe, more for the purpose of security and less for expansion. For Stalin at the end of World War II, he wanted “neither a hot war nor a cold war.” 10 And his Marxist-Leninist ideological conviction offered him a timely comfort. The “grand vision” of history told him that imperialist countries like the US and the UK would be at war sooner or later, and history would be on the side of the USSR in the long run. Stalin’s realist pragmatism and idealist conviction converged. He was not going to engage in any further aggression, except for defensive purposes. From the soft power perspective, it seemed that the appeal of international communism would be the political and ideological wave of the future. Now we can tell that this fear was wildly exaggerated. The key issue was not that the communist ideology lacked attractiveness to certain groups of people—it still does even today. The problem was that no matter how attractive the message was, the messenger was unable to deliver it. The communist parties, especially the Soviet Communist Party, were not able to exercise sufficient connective power to deliver the ideology to the different groups of people within their sphere of control. The communist parties were destined to be

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thrown out in Russia and Eastern European countries because their power of connection was hierarchically communal depending on the top-down coercive control. This would inevitably lead to their tyrannical and incompetent, even corrupt, governance. Their connective power to reach the masses for whom they were supposed to work for according to their communist ideology was limited and short-lived. 11 Both Roosevelt and Churchill did not want a war with the Soviet Union, either. For Churchill, the British goal was clear: survival as a nation. If the survival of the UK required working together with the USSR, so be it; and of course, be satisfied as a junior partner to the US. Roosevelt had a bigger vision. In addition to the immediate necessities, he wanted to create a collective security organization to prevent war from happening ever again. For this purpose, he would do everything to “hold hands with the devil” and cross the bridge together. Therefore, he rationally acted on his understanding about Stalin and tried to be helpful. At the Yalta conference, he, together with Churchill, made efforts to curb the Polish nationalist government in London to accommodate Stalin’s sense of insecurity about Russia’s neighbors. But dealing with the postwar Soviet Union was another matter. Here we see the working of Kennan’s vision. The vision started from the Marshall Plan, which had great impact on helping potential partners in Western Europe to stand up again and at the same time pushing Stalin into a “security dilemma” since the Plan did not distinguish between the American sphere and the Soviet sphere. 12 People’s reasoning was always twisted by short-term necessities. Stalin was no exception at the end of World War II, a historical moment that determined human existence from that point on, maybe forever. Stalin, despite being the only experienced wartime leader still in position at the time and regarded as a wily old fox, fell into this short-term rationality trap. The Cold War started because of his view on short-term necessities put in place by Kennan and Marshall. Once in the trap, irrational factors like fear would drive him to perceive the other as the aggressor and irrational measures must be taken to counter the aggression. 13 Therefore, the question of whether to allow his Eastern European communist little brothers to participate became a security issue since the American economic aid was viewed as an aggressive step toward breaking up the communist camp, in addition to its role in consolidating the US position in Western Europe. Stalin was thus gradually dragged into a paranoia as the Marshall Plan was implemented. His paranoia transformed into actions. A glaring example would be Stalin’s policy of self-exclusion, revealed through the withdrawal from the talks over the Marshall Plan and symbolized by the refusal of Eastern European countries to participate in the Plan. The Berlin blockade in 1947 was an escalated irrational misjudgment. Kennan’s vision of “containment” started to work as the vicious circle continued as the West-

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ern European countries that accepted Marshall Plan clearly felt the need for the US military protection, in addition to its economic aid. And NATO was thus established as a response to the perceived Soviet offenses, albeit they were defensive in nature. Finally, the Korean War broke out, with Stalin’s permission. 14 Kennan did not expect the war but it clearly drew the lines between the Russian “big-brotherly” top-down dependency governing sphere and the American “partnership” interdependent governing sphere. 15 Containment began. It seemed like a bipolar situation but actually was not. America was in the driver’s seat from the start and Stalin had a hard time governing his sphere of control from day one. The unnecessary purges of the leaders of the Eastern European communist parties would be a clear indication not simply of his paranoia but much deeper about his powerlessness in connecting to the communist parties in the area of his control. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to depend on the communist parties of the Eastern European countries to control its sphere but had no other means to exercise its power over those communist parties except playing a big brother role. Unlike the US, which successfully developed interdependent partners across Western European countries and the web even extended into Central and Eastern Europe, Stalin and his successors struggled to maintain the bigbrotherly way of governance. The German issue can highlight this point clearly: the Soviets occupied about one-third of German territory at the end of the war. It expropriated properties, especially the industrial equipment vital for reconstruction and extracted reparations indiscriminately, forced Germany to give up a large piece of ancestral land to Poland, and the Red Army committed brutality on a untold scale: some two million German women were raped between 1945 and 1947. The linkage was broken from the beginning and the USSR lost its connective power irreversibly. Germans were alienated and the German Communist Party had very difficult time taking roots in German society. But its counterpart in the West accomplished that task quickly, because of America’s help. On the contrary to Stalin, Roosevelt was much more insightful with a vision of partnership building. When the Secretary of the Treasury Hans Morgenthau recommended a “pastoralization” policy toward Germany after the war so that it would no longer be an industrialized powerhouse to pose a threat, Roosevelt rejected it, as he wrote to the Secretary of State Cordell Hall: “No one wants to make Germany a wholly agricultural national again. . . . no one wants complete eradication of Germany’s industrial productive capacity in the Ruhr and Saar. . . . Germany has many other areas and facilities for turning out large exports.” 16 Further, in addition to keeping Germany’s industrial capacity, the Marshall Plan helped West Germany’s reconstruction and therefore laid down a solid foundation for the German government to become a dependable partner on the web of interdependent partnerships with full support from German people. A contrast that told the world very clearly that a unipolar world order

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was forming at the end of World War II and before the beginning of the Cold War. The vulnerability of the USSR disqualified it for being another polar of power because the problems like the German issue it created lasted through the end of the Cold War until this weakness finally brought down the Berlin Wall, as well as the “Iron Curtain.” CONSOLIDATION: THE FORMING STAGE, 1953–1962 John Lewis Gaddis summarized the mindsets of the Cold War actors in the 1950s as he beautifully wrote: “Victory in World War II brought no sense of security, therefore, to the victors. Neither the United States, nor Great Britain, nor the Soviet Union at the end of 1950s could regard the lives and treasure they had expanded in defeating Germany and Japan as having made them safer: the members of the Grand Alliance were now Cold War adversaries. Interests had turned out not to be compatible; ideologies remained at least as polarizing as they had been before the war; fear of surprise attack continued to haunt military establishments in Washington, London, and Moscow.” 17 However, history once again played a trick on human actors. Those who felt unsafe produced a weapon to hurt others and protect themselves ultimately made everybody safer: it’s the time for the logic of togetherness to rule the world in human history. The A-bomb, as Kennan indicated, “cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes. They imply the admission that man only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy.” 18 Miraculously, we humans turned out to be responsible for one another, ultimately; we were our worst enemy only to certain level, we then paused and rerouted our path. Thucydides turned out to be wrong when he asserted that human nature never change; we only become better and better in using weaponry. “Human nature did change— and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began the process by which it did so.” 19 It was not the power from above, nor was the power within; it was the power between us, the connective power, that changed our nature—we humans ultimately interdependent on each other, in terms of safety this time. The reasoning to both sides started out as this: the country could be destroyed completely in a short while by this powerful weapon therefore any disadvantage in the nuclear arms race would be fatal. However, this was not unavoidable. The great nuclear physicist Niels Bohr insightfully anticipated this dangerous outcome and warned Roosevelt, as well as Churchill, that the first requirement of the nuclear age had to be openness. He suggested to share its secrets between the great powers, especially between the US and the USSR. American Secretary of War Henry Stimson also suggested the

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same. 20 They both sounded this warning. Bohr and Stimson were right, only impractical due to lack of trust between the two great powers after World War II. However, they did not foresee another scenario: once both sides owned the weapon, a war, even a cold war, between them became irrational—the word “mutual” became the key. A consensus formed long before Reagan and Gorbachev both realized and jointly declared: a nuclear war is not winnable and must never be fought—if the national leaders were rational enough not to commit their nations to a national suicide. The power of relational connection in an interdependent relationship was clear. A natural conclusion therefore could be reached: the new weapons systems as the most critical part of the hard power developed by both sides during the Cold War were totally unnecessary—“100 – 100 = 0” would be no difference than “0 – 0 = 0”—the ultimate results are exactly the same. 21 Henry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were the two instruments for this historical force of human interdependency. When the generals on the battle field of Korea War called for A-bomb as the US was defeated for the first time in its history, Truman refused. Thus, he was the first commander in chief in human history to refuse using a weapon that was readily available when facing defeat at the highest intensity of the battle—he thus fulfilled the ultimate responsibility between human beings. Eisenhower, as an experienced former army general and Truman’s successor, faced a challenge to come up with a practical strategy to make sure the ultimate responsibility would be taken care of in the long run. He did it by making it as difficult as possible to even start such a war: his “planning only for total war” strategy worked to bring everybody together to face the ultimate responsibility interdependently. 22 With this grand background, the US Cold War focus in the 1950s was in fact not to confront Soviet and defeat communism. Instead, it was to concentrate on consolidating its control over the capitalist world—materializing the Wilson vision of a collective political and economic global system in its sphere of influence. As a consequence, it facilitated the development of the global web of interdependent partnership. The American leadership in interdependent partnership building was executed through postwar economic recovery and political integration among its Western allies as well as former enemies. For the purpose to effectively implement the policies, America undertook explicit commitments to guarantee the security of the capitalist world by its military present both in Europe and in Asia. In the 1950s, the US government seemingly displayed gestures for an offensive toward communism, but for domestic purpose only. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had publicly committed the US to a policy of “liberation” but it was in fact a sham. The US government did not do anything to confront the USSR in East and Central Europe, even when Hungarian Uprising in 1956 called for support urgently. As the Soviet Union sent in its army to crack down the popular movement and punish the Hungarian Communist Party, the US government

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did nothing. Instead, it focused its attention on dealing with France and the UK when the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt signaled their independence and deviation from the American-led web of interdependent partnership. 23 The Russian side continued to show its vulnerability in connective power because of its limitation in making sure the other communist parties in East European countries were dependable, even before the death of Stalin. In the meantime, it also displayed its intention to be a dependable partner on the global web of interdependent governance. It therefore halfheartedly supported North Korea at the beginning of the Korean War, the only hot war fighting between a unified communist camp against the capitalist one. Stalin told his Chinese visitors about his view on a worldwide war: “the Russian people would not understand us. Moreover, they could chase us away. For understanding all the wartime and postwar efforts and suffering. For taking it too lightly.” As to atomic bomb, he asserted: “If war broke out, the use of Abomb would depend on Trumans and Hitlers being in power. The people won’t allow such people to be in power. Atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.” 24 Clearly, the logic of togetherness was working in Stalin’s mind. At the same time, the fear factor that separated him and others was still driving his decision when he rejected the Baruch Plan and therefore missed the opportunity of the US turning over its atomic arsenal to the UN because he could not trust enough for the Soviet territory be inspected. He only felt safe when the Soviet Union possessed its own atomic bomb. Immediately after the death of Stalin, Lavrenti Beria, the powerful boss of the KGB, explored the notion of German reunification. To make this happen, he even proposed an unprecedented pullback of the Soviet troops in Central Europe. The other Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin facilitated the end of the Korean War and eagerly participated in the Geneva Conference that the British and French were promoting. They later embraced the “spirit of Geneva” and pursued other communist parties to embark on the same course, despite the resistance from the parties like the Vietnamese Communist Party. 25 Nikita Khrushchev was a down-to-earth person with a strong sense of reality. He abandoned Stalin’s ideology-guided belief about an inevitable war with the capitalist countries. He was also relational in pursuing a stable international relationship with the US. He genuinely wanted himself and his country to be respected as a dependable partner by others, especially the United States. He therefore advocated “peaceful co-existence.” As early as the fall of 1959, he wholeheartedly embraced the “spirit of Camp David” which he inaugurated together with Eisenhower. On his return to Moscow he stopped in Beijing, hoping to bring his communist comrade Mao Ze-dong on board, at least not testing the strength of capitalist society. His sense of reality was remarkable; his drive for being a dependable partner on the global

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governance web was urgent and genuine. Mao refused his warning and called his action a betrayal to their common cause. At that moment, Mao looked like a true revolutionary while Khrushchev a genuine partner of the US-led web of global governance. 26 At the beginning of the sixties after the Sputnik Shock, which was actually short lived, and the so-called missile gap which was simply a “fake news,” the Soviets had a three-front strategy which was clearly a manifestation of the defensive nature of their frame of mind: (1) strengthening Soviet strategic power to counter the US deterrent; (2) growing Soviet economic vitality to match the industrial might of the US; (3) promoting the liberation ideology and providing economic aids, even military assistance, to forge alliances with the developing countries and anti-colonial national liberation movements around the world. The first two of the three were difficult, if not entirely impossible, tasks, whereas the third one presented an issue of affordability. Ideology was cheap but financial aid was not. If military intervention was required, it would be possible to “break the bank.” Khrushchev and his colleagues knew the limit of their ability to produce the desired results in the three strategic areas. The easy part of the task was military spending, which was doable by coercive control but hardly sustainable because of the expense with great amount of waste. They were therefore forced to sacrifice their economy for the efforts to produce the spent results, mainly temporary superiority in satellite and rocket technology. 27 No matter how weak it was, the USSR was still no doubt a competitor to the US. But it is worth noting that its goal to promote and support anti-colonialism and national liberation movements was consistent with the Wilson Principle which the US was also promoting and supporting, in words consistently, and in action inconsistently. The Soviet action hurt the US as a nation-state, but advanced the US cause. An interesting convergence between the two competitors competing on the same global web of interdependent partnership at least on a shared goal. This forming stage ended with a spectacular failure of Soviet big-brotherly socialism. At the night of August 12–13, 1961, the Berlin Wall appeared. It was ugly by looking and hateful by feeling. After more than ten years of socialist construction, a “workers’ paradise” was physically and visibly turned into a “workers’ jail.” This was in fact a desperate measure after the repeatedly failed attempt to match West Germany’s prosperity and rising living standard. More than two million Easterners simply took the two-minute walk from socialism to capitalism, and most of them were the badly needed well-educated and highly talented people. The Soviet troops could crack down the workers’ protests and riots, but could not build up the linkage to people who just wanted a better life. The Wall was an open display to the world to admit failure of connection as it symbolized separation.

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DÉTENTE: THE MELLOWING STAGE, 1962–1979 We humans learn from crises, especially the ones originated from each other. The year 1962 witnessed the first and only real possibility of a nuclear war between the two great powers during the Cold War: we human beings were on the verge of experiencing a nuclear catastrophe. That was the Cuba Missile crisis in October 1962. Human rationality prevailed, but barely. And the cause of it was rather irrational, even emotional. Khrushchev saw the US missile deployment at its doorstep and wanted to let the US feel what he felt; in the meantime, he was very emotionally involved in Castro’s revolution and wanted to support him as a big-brother was supposed to do. However, mistrust, miscommunication, misunderstanding were common human errors that could cause huge consequences beyond anybody’s control. Fortunately for both the US and the USSR, and for human race as a whole, a compromise was reached and the crisis passed safely. 28 But the warning was clear: we could no longer depend on good will and rational judgment to manage the great power relationship. We must put our reason into rules so that we could make sure we followed it without being sidetracked. Robert McNamara raised the issue of getting everybody to agree on the rule of combat in summer 1962 before the crisis and President John Kennedy called for formal treaties to regulate nuclear tests and other related activities in June 1963. In the meantime, Khrushchev responded positively. 29 Amazingly, a series of treaties emerged: the Limit Test Ban treaty in 1963, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Interim Agreement in 1972, and also in 1972, an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, with more to follow. The abbreviation “MAD,” Mutually Assured Destruction, was used widely. But much more significant beyond mutual relationship and mutually shared interests of survival, the two military powers were constituting each other and were constituted by each other. Treaties symbolized the result of this power of mutual empowerment. They became more interdependent not only on each other’s survival, but also on each other’s dependability in general for a world order. History played a trick and possibly prolonged the Cold War because the Kennedy and Johnson administrations squandered the US advantage in some way. The policy makers and political players in the 1960s were more driven by immediate perceptions and concerns, as well as big ideological words, and less by grand visions. They therefore made a serious mistake by following the old colonists’ footsteps and stepping into a fight with a national liberation movement in Vietnam, under the rhetorical cover of fighting communism anywhere, a fight impossible to win. They therefore lost the Cold War focus and being trapped by a materially and relationally dependent but at the same time psychologically and behaviorally unreliable and stubbornly independent partner, whereas the focus should be on fostering dependable

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partner to enrich the web of interdependent partnership. The US could have done better but did not. 30 On the surface, the world was bipolar through 1960s when power agents around the world gravitated toward either one of the two power centers. But in fact, the world further revealed the unipolar trend since the beginning of the Cold War. Although, as history marched into the 1970s, things did not look so good for the US, especially after the entanglement and defeat in Vietnam. From the hard power perspective, it seemed representing a permanent shift in the balance of power between the two superpowers and the world seemed a bipolar one. The détente seemed a concession as a result of Soviet strength and American weakness. But things were not what they seemed to be. The result was the further gravitating of all the power agents across the globe toward a unipolar web of interdependent partnership. The Cold War logic of human togetherness further revealed its connective power. United States and the Soviet Union relationally accommodated each other in the late 1960s and through 1970s. The Nixon administration focused on two areas which were critical in safeguarding the consolidation of the interdependent relationship between the US and the USSR: on the one hand, it engaged in arms control negotiations and peaceful coexistence with each other; on the other hand, it stopped deterring the other’s presence in the respective sphere of influence by withdrawing from Vietnam and ignoring the communist agitated revolutions in the developing countries. Henry Kissinger formulated the accommodation model after the Peace of Westphalia: each side was to gain “sovereignty” over its geopolitical and ideological sphere of control. “Détente” became a fashionable term and President Nixon even announced in the early 1970s that “a generation of peace” had been achieved. In the meantime, he reached into the core of the communist camp by opening up the Sino-US relationship, which thoroughly displayed the connective power of the American-led unipolar interdependent governance system and exposed the powerlessness of the Soviet big-brotherism. 31 The major achievement of the global governance web of interdependent partnership was the empowerment between the partners across both the Atlantic and the Pacific that brought about the genuine formation of the global web, which was “America led” but not “America only”; its impact was “interdependentinized” the world order through a web of partners, rather than “Americanized” the world. The US was the center of the web but the European countries, including the Eastern European nations, together with nations in Asia had been playing more and more critical parts as knots and links on the web. History witnessed small power agents became more and more independent from either the US or the USSR; France led by de Gaulle and China by Mao were two extreme examples of this trend. However, both strengthened the web of interdependent partnerships as a result. The French left NATO

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military structure while it was no longer needed that much but demonstrated the fact that being away from America could still be a powerful and effective power partner of the global governance web as long as being dependable to the overall web. The web therefore endured a test: it could become even stronger without having to depend on the US. Others were increasingly playing bigger and bigger roles. It was ironic that the Chinese Communist Party acted not in words but in action and started to prepare the party’s accommodation to the existing capitalist world order, although not before it pushed the USSR very hard to continue, even intensify, the confrontation with the USled world order. The Chinese embarked on the path toward a “responsible stake-holder” to the global governance web and brought with it an enormous population effectively organized through many years of revolutionary struggles. Mao’s successor Deng Xiao-ping went even further, seeking to emulate and join the capitalist world order in the late 1970s. 32 In addition, Third World countries led by India, Indonesia, and Egypt, as well as Yugoslavia, developed into a more dependable and less dependent force to exert connective power to empower one another and the global governing web of interdependent partnership, as well. The dramatic economic growth of “the four Asian dragons,” Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, as well as the earlier and bigger scale economic miracle of Japan, told the capitalist story about success and the path toward a better life, and thus became interdependent partners on the global governance web. It was as equally shocking, if not more, to the world as the “MAD” was. We humans had to be together; we could be together for better; we had the way for being together for better. The Cold War logic of human togetherness displayed its bright side. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was seemingly on the rise in terms of hard power: it achieved nuclear parity with the United States and was able for the first time to project non-nuclear military force beyond Europe. Within its sphere of control, the communist parties seemed firmly in control of the societies. The disturbances in Czechoslovakia and Poland were effectively under control. It was not until Gorbachev revised the Leninist foreign policy of international class struggle that Moscow stopped its David vs. Goliath bluff. But talk was easy and cheap. Khrushchev boastfully claimed in 1962 that victory over the capitalist world would start to actualize by 1980 and “the capitalist society would be buried and kids in those countries would play under the red flag of communism.” 33 While this kind of cheap talk and imaginative optimism were ongoing from the 1950s through 1970s, by then the scales of history had tipped in the opposite direction. The Soviet Communist Party had been steadily losing ground. It lost the alliance with the Chinese Communist Party, the biggest communist party, and was forced to use force in “Prague Spring” after building up the Berlin Wall, a sure sign of desperation in controlling the people in Eastern European countries because

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of the weakness of the communist parties in those countries in particular and the communist system in general. 34 A sure sign of its loss of connective power was the Brezhnev Doctrine, which bluntly claimed the USSR’s power to forcefully violate sovereignty of any independent country for the purpose of enforcing Marxism-Leninism by force. Therefore, the Soviet continued its Berlin Wall practice, rather desperately. 35 It openly displayed, once again, its failure to link to people’s minds and hearts, even they were under its political control. A glaring contrast to the great expansion of the empowering connective power on the global governance web. The result of détente actually revealed the most in Europe, which was supposed to be the most contested area for both sides of the Cold War, where the Cold War began and continued to hold the highest stakes throughout its entirety. The American Cold War policy in Europe was generally steady. It steadfastly focused on fostering dependable partners in Western Europe where the US shared the most on all fronts while connecting to East-Central Europe where the Russian big-brotherly top-down dependency was the weakest in connecting to the different societies. In the meantime, other power agents like Germany’s Willy Brandt and some Eastern Europe communist leaders also started to deviate from either Washington and Moscow, all in a way that were independently dependable to one another and to the world as a whole. From the 1960s onward, these interdependent and dependable power agents acted independently and consistently sought, overtly and covertly, to soften the Soviet control over the communist countries in their neck of the woods. Their policy of peaceful engagement and accommodation, instead of and in addition to the US containment and deterrence, worked smoothly. History showed that the continent was peaceful and stable through 1970s, except few scary moments, like the crisis over Berlin in 1961. Although the peaceful and stable Europe was protected by the US military in a form of confrontation, containment, and deterrence, the military front was only part of the story. It was the engagement of the Western Europe with its Central and Eastern neighbors through its more powerful connective power that produced ever-consolidating and very dense social networks. Among them were market-oriented business networks, spirit-oriented cultural networks, politics-oriented human rights groups, as well as others like the intellectual groups. These groups partnered with national leaders like Germany’s Willy Brandt to form political solidarity. Their connective power eventually reached the deepest level of the Eastern European societies and shattered the very foundation of Soviet governance. It seemed that it had been a unipolar system all along in Europe where the power of connection by the West always kept reaching to the East as the power agents in Central and Eastern Europe kept gravitating toward the West, whereas the communist parties worked hard to fend off the powerful reaches of the West connective power. They were eventually exhausted because the “pull” from the West was too

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strong and their connections to the different social groups in their own societies were too weak. As their control eroded, the communist parties lost the source of energy of the struggle. The Western European partners also took a leadership role in initiating negotiation with the Soviets for peace and cooperation. The French and the Germans explicitly courted Brezhnev. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe opened in Helsinki on July 30, 1975, and was the highlight of the détente era in Europe. The USSR gained the past and present: its long sought status quo of its World War II gains was accepted on paper and for the time being. But European countries, including both in the West and the East, gained the future: they could legitimately empower one another on the grounds of human rights, universal principles of justice, international law, and so on all went beyond the framework of Marxism and Leninism; their common pursuit, their historical and newly developed linkages, their ability to reach deep into the societies of their own, as well as the Soviet society, formed a resultant connective power, which powerfully shaped the future, not too far ahead. In addition, they demonstrated that the governance web of interdependent partnership was genuinely global, which sufficiently strengthened and transformed the American economic, military, and technological prowess. 36 INTEGRATION: THE TOGETHERNESS STAGE, 1976–1991 Détente symbolized the power of human rationality in recognizing the logic of history and utilizing the power between humans to govern a never peaceful human world. However, it was ended by two pure human errors—a clear revelation of how fragile human reasoning could be and how dangerous we could be to each other. The first error could be regarded as an accident. The Soviets somehow developed a more sophisticated middle-range missile called SS-20. For pure military reasons, they were deployed in Europe in 1977. Surprisingly, they just did it without even informing their own foreign policy experts, let alone consulting them. One of the top specialists, Georgi Arbatov, later mentioned that “most of our experts and diplomats found about it through the Western press.” The Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin declared it a “particularly disastrous” decision. 37 Indeed, it was. The painstakingly built trust in Europe over the years since the 1960s was broken. As the so-called Basic Principles reached by Nixon and Brezhnev made it clear: efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other was to be avoided. 38 But it accidentally happened. The NATO countries felt threatened and demanded American action. The Carter administration therefore created a Rapid Deployment Force, and further, made the decision together with key NATO partners match the Soviet SS-20 missiles with new and more accurate

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American missiles. 39 In 1979, Pushing II and cruise missiles were installed in Western Europe. The nuclear confrontation resumed. However, there was still hope, because the SALT II reached agreement and it was sent to the US Congress for approval. Unexpectedly at this juncture, another human error occurred. The Soviet Union was dragged into a conflict it did not want to engage. Its governance logic of big-brotherism simply drove it into Afghanistan, the famous “graveyard of empires.” The historical ending of détente, as well as the Cold War in general, started with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, on Christmas Day, that showed how much more cultural classed the Soviet leaders needed to take. But the consequences were far more than failing a class in world religions or anthropology. The invasion effective ended détente as President Carter responded by withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposing embargoes on shipments of grain and technologies to the USSR, planning significant increase in defense spending, and boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. 40 But the action was so natural for the Soviet leaders because of its bigbrotherly obligation to their little brothers who were in trouble. Although they were very reluctant and knew their little brother had little support in his native country, their hands were tied by the “ideological bondage.” 41 Vietnam for the US was an error, a misjudgment about the location of its real strength. It was carried away by its own rhetorical fantasy. It was an American overstretch because it was a deviation from America’s central operating logic. America failed in Vietnam but its essential power did not damage much. Afghanistan was the Soviet’s “imperial overstretch,” but it was an inevitable error and miscalculation on the part of the Soviet Communist Party. It was one that followed exactly the fundamental logic of bigbrotherism. All the aggressive expansions were desperate measures to ease its internal and inherited weaknesses. The governance based on the logic of big-brotherly upward dependence required top-down coercive control and selfless brotherly support to be exercised with full force at the same time, regardless of the issue of sustainability. No matter how exhausting to the source of its power, it had to use motion to create motion so that the governance could be maintained. Therefore, the failure in Afghanistan hurt the core of the Soviet governing system and the consequences were much more serious in damaging the Soviet Communist Party’s survival. Afghanistan was in fact the “graveyard” of the Soviet Empire. On the home front, the Brezhnev stagnation had produced steep economic decline and serious political immobility. The Soviet Communist Party leaders from Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev worked hard to obscure the Party’s weaknesses. They were pressing and posturing, creating illusion of historical momentum. But they saw the large gap between Soviet Union and its Western rivals in terms of living standard and levels of productivity. They

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did not have any other choice but stuck to the socialist planned system and wished that it was a matter of time before catching up to the capitalist countries. In their mind, they knew they were doing an experiment without any assurance of success. The Marxist-Leninist doctrine told them this was an experiment chosen by history and the iron historical law would take them to a bright destiny. But reality told them otherwise and they had little space to exercise their free will. The Western high level of productivity, advancement of technology, and higher level of living standard had always been the goals for them to pursue. The wishful moment to ripen for a historical tipping point of a Soviet victory did not happen. On the contrary, the three strategic goals it developed in the early 1960s and was supposed to accomplish by 1980 were no longer attainable. The power of the Soviet Communist Party peaked as the decade ended and rapidly drifted toward collapse. Through the 1980s, the connective power disparity drove the hard power contest to the dramatic unfavorable direction against the Soviet Communist Party. The Soviet troops were stretched across the globe in Vietnam, Ethiopia, Cuba, Yemen, Mozambique, Angola, as well as some Middle East countries. Its military deployment reached a unprecedented level in the second half of the 1970s. The Soviet Union took in too much while its governing power did not allow it to digest that much. The more it took in, the more spent forces it had to deal with, until it was dragged into bankruptcy. This was a classic example of Paul Kennedy’s “imperial overstretch.” 42 As the USSR was entangled in the unwinnable war in Afghanistan and its little brothers, the communist parties in Eastern European countries were losing control of their respective societies. Progressively more and more groups of people within the Soviet sphere of governance felt the failure of the logic of upward dependency and longed for the possibility of becoming partners of the global web of interdependence. The election of a Polish pope for the first time in history greatly encouraged this sense of possible partnership. The Solidarity Movement demonstrated the genuine desires of the proletariat and the power of it once it was organized. The warm air of “Prague Spring” had been vibrating through the 1970s and 1980s across intellectual groups in Eastern Europe and the USSR, represented by Vaclav Havel. Besides, the successful reform in China since late 1970s pointed out a path for a communist party to renew itself. The combination of the party’s political power with the market force could be so powerful that the whole country was transformed. However, it was hard, if not impossible for the USSR to learn from its Chinese comrades. The fundamental logic of governance the Soviet leaders worked with and the power they relied upon clearly put them at an immovable position. They were forced to play “catch-up ball” throughout the entirety of the Cold War. Once that became impossible, the Soviet Communist Party was exposed as a “paper tiger.” Gorbachev had no choice but to reverse the course. As he said: “We can’t go on living like this.” 43

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However, history was full of twists and turns. At this closing stage with a certain ending in sight, something dangerous happened, which almost killed everything, people, human civilization, as well as all the progress achieved through the Cold War years. President Reagan, from an absolute moral standard, publicly denounced the USSR as an “evil empire,” which did not deserve to exist at all. Communism must be eliminated together with nuclear weapons. “Containment” should be no more; the West should “transcend” and “dismiss” communism. More significantly, he repudiated the notion of Mutually Assured Destruction and single-mindedly pursued a strategy that aimed at sufficient self-protection while capable of destructing the enemy. His argument went as this: we did not need to be tied in a relationship if we were strong enough to defend ourselves. Reagan used his movie acting experience to compare détente with a vivid Old West movie scenario: two gunslingers “standing in a salon aiming their guns to each other’s head—permanently.” Clearly, he forgot in the situation of an Old West town without an effective sheriff, the only way for living together was to point guns at each other so that a balance could be assured. But for him, détente did not make sense for the US. His argument appealed to many like-minded people across the country. Ronald Reagan in fact represented another aspect of Americanism: moral absolutism and practical individualism. He advocated absolute moral standard, refused to accept middle ground, praised self-reliance, insisted on never trusting life to a relationship, wanted to be strong as an individual and never sharing vulnerability. The Reagan administration therefore engaged in a massive US military buildup, especially in defensive weapons for the purpose of shooting down any incoming offensive ones. The most shock and awe to the Soviet leaders was the Strategic Defense Initiative—the “Star War” initiative. It was a “fake news” to certain degree, but its impact was huge. It completely broke down the delicate balance and tranquil equilibrium between the two nuclear powers that was established by détente since 1962 and brought the world once again to the brink of nuclear war. 44 On the one hand, the Soviet’s inability of keeping up with the US technological advancement was thus thoroughly exposed; on the other, its leaders were forced into a corner, a highly insecure and nervous situation. The sound of wind and the cry of a crane would be felt like imminent danger. At this junction, “Able Archer 83” military exercise was launched in Europe with the highest leadership ever involved. The Soviet leadership was alerted. Dangerously, it reached a conclusion that an imminent attacked was on the way. Luckily, this high tension was just for a short while, but the most dangerous short while since Cuban Missile Crisis. 45 Fortunately, a new and younger Soviet leadership could no longer postpone the urge to join and become a partner of the main stream historical trend. “To become a normal nation” was a slogan at the time but also the guiding principle of the new Soviet Communist Party leadership. At the same

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time, the Reagan administration got a warning call from the “Able Archer 83” crisis and President Reagan timely realized a good relationship had to be paramount if he was to pursue America’s national interests because a relationship was in fact the precondition for national interests. He therefore decided to call for a “Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya relationship,” specifically reversing his previous argument. Once again, the logic of togetherness worked. At the November 1985 Geneva summit and again the following October at Reykjavik, both sides connected in shared interest in common human fate. From that point on, the rest of the Cold War history merely brought to the surface the ineffectiveness of the big-brotherly governance and the emptiness of its way of organizing human life. History declared the coming end of the Soviet Communist Party. 46 In the meantime, the American government also faced a challenging question: would it be able to continue leading the global governance web of dynamic interdependence as a dependable partner? It was obviously required to renew itself since its system also contributed to the dangerous moments when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war at least twice during the Cold War. For example, could the US minimize its individualistic “self-reliance, being strong all the time, never sharing vulnerability” mentality? Could it consistently be relational enough to be interdependent instead of independent? Clearly, the Cold War logic of togetherness demanded everybody to change so that we could, as dependable partners, survive and thrive together. To this point, the world witnessed the exposed unipolar nature of the seemingly bipolar Cold War world. A global governance system of dynamic interdependence had been taking shape through the Cold War years and its connective power had empowered the power agents across the world to become interdependent partners to make the world a better, though never perfect, place to live. It was only a matter of time before the Berlin Wall would be torn down. NOTES 1. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. xi. 2. Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. ix–x. 3. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 3; Also, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1983). 4. Jeremi Suri, “Conflict and Co-operation in the Cold War: New Directions in Contemporary Historical Research,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 46, No. 1, (January 2011), pp. 5–9. 5. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 5. 6. Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, The Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), pp. 452–453.

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7. Roy Douglas, From War to Cold War, 1942–48 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Walter LaFeber, ed., America in the Cold War: Twenty Years of Revolution and Response, 1947–1967 (London: John Wiley, 1969). 8. Kenneth W. Thompson, Cold War Theories, Vol. I, World Polarization, 1943–1953 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Hans Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War, the American Forum Series (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970); Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginning of the Cold War, 1945–48,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (April, 1984), pp. 346–381. 9. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 11. 10. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 12. 11. Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 412–444; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 184–188. 12. Marc J. Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginning of the Cold War, 1945–48,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2, (April, 1984), pp. 346–381. 13. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 15–40; Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginning of the Cold War, 1945–48,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (April, 1984), pp. 346–381. 14. Charles M. Dobbs, The Unwanted Symbol: American Foreign Policy, the Cold War and Korea, 1945–1950 (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1981); Alvin Z. Rubinstein, “Stalin’s Postwar Foreign Policy in Perspective,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June, 1964) pp. 186–193. 15. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origin of the Cold War, 1941–1947, Contemporary American History Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Marc J. Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 36–69. 16. Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 72–73; 79–82. 17. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 46. 18. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 47. 19. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 52. 20. Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 320–334. 21. William Burr and David Alan Rosenberg, “Nuclear Competition in an Era of Stalemate, 1963–1975,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crisis and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 88–111. 22. Robert J. McMahon, “US National Security Policy from Eisenhower to Kennedy,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 288–311; Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Emergence of an American Grand Strategy, 1945–1952,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 67–89. 23. Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Emergence of an American Grand Strategy, 1945–1952,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I,

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Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 67–89; Robert J. McMahon, “US National Security Policy from Eisenhower to Kennedy,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 288–311. 24. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 57. 25. Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 90–111; Vojtech Mastny, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953–1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 312–333; Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 357–479. 26. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 49–84. 27. Vojtech Mastny, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953–1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 312–333; Svetlana Savranskaya and William Taubman, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1962–1975,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crisis and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 134–157. 28. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Game: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 166–256. 29. Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 232–245; Steve Weber, “Realism, Détente, and Nuclear Weapons,” International Organization, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 55–82; Sverre Lodgaard, “The Function of SALT,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1977), pp. 1–22. 30. Michael Cox, “From the Truman Doctrine to the Second Superpower Détente: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27, No. 1 (February, 1990), pp. 25–41; Frank Costigliola, “US Foreign Policy from Kennedy to Johnson,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crisis and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 112–133. 31. Daniel G. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Phil Williams, “The Limits of American Power: From Nixon to Reagan,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1944–), Vol. 63, No. 4 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 575–587; Harvey Starr, “The Kissinger Years: Studying Individuals and Foreign Policy,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec. 1980), pp. 465–496. 32. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 49–84 ; Pp. 238–276; Chen Jian, “China and The Cold War After Mao,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 181–200. 33. Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 481–515; Vladislav M. Zubok, “Soviet Foreign Policy from Détente to Gorbachev, 1975–1985,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 89–111. 34. Vojtech Mastny, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953–1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 312–333; Svetlana Savranskaya and William Taubman, “Soviet Foreign Policy, 1962–1975,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crisis and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 134–157. 35. Matthew J. Ouimer, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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36. William A. Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2016); Jussi M. Hanhimaki, “Détente in Europe, 1962–1975,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crisis and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 198–218. 37. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 202. 38. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 203. 39. Nancy Mitchell, “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 66–88. 40. Olav Njolstad, “The Collapse of Superpower Détente,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 135–155; Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 516–552. 41. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 207. 42. Vladislav M. Zubok, “Détente’s Decline and Soviet Overreach, 1973–1979,” in A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 227–264; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. xv–xvii. 43. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 165; Silvio Pons, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 45–65; Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 553–589. 44. Beth A. Fischer, “US Foreign Policy under Reagan and Bush,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 267–288; Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 118–131. 45. Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 138–141; Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991, updated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 65–68. 46. Archie Brown, “The Gorbachev Revolution and the End of the Cold War,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 135–155; Jacques Levesque, “The East European Revolution of 1989,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. III, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 311–332; Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 590–628; Vladislav M. Zubok, “Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power, 1988–1991,” in A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 303–335.

Chapter Two

Governance of the Web of Interdependent Partnership The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the US System

THE AMERICAN ORDER OF GOVERNANCE The hard power approach tells us: “History is not immutable. But there is one pattern that comes very close to being a law of history: in the long run, the rise and fall of great nations is driven primarily by their economic strength. . . . Starting in the late nineteenth century, nothing was as important to the emergence of the United States as its spectacular economic growth.” 1 This is true on the surface and inaccurate on a fundamental level. All the great nations, the Chinese or Persian Dynasties, as well as the European republics or empires such as Athens, Rome, Venice, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, rose because of the effectiveness of their governance system, which was both their source of strong economy and the origin of their power. The essence of a successful governance system was their close connection to the historically most dynamic social forces and their reason of decline was their loss of that connection. The twentieth century was the American century because the US governing group was a uniquely open and dynamic web of interdependent partnership composed of business, community, and political leaders which had established closest connections to the most dynamic social forces domestically and internationally. It was a national system that was most nourishing to the growth of creative and energetic entrepreneurial groups. The connection in essence is a web of interdependent partnership. The spectacular economic growth in the US and the enormous economic strength it thus gained since 41

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the 1880s was a by-product of this connection and a result of the US governing group’s connective power, which was derived from the governing web of interdependent partnership. The global order the American government tried to set up for the purpose of saving and facilitating the global economy from the end of the Great Depression was basically an extension of the American governance order. The classic pluralist assumptions reflected this order to a high degree. Robert Dahl summarizes these assumptions as follows: (1) Society is an “open field” competition for all social groups. (2) The individual pursuit of special goals is the root of social construction. (3) The state gains its political power through its functional role in facilitating the consensual goal of the society and through balancing the special interests of different social groups and individuals. (4) Pluralist nature of government is the instrument of authority. He points out that the underlying dilemma for the governance is autonomy vs. control. 2 Although he underestimates the element of coercion which is an inevitable ingredient of any governance, he highlights a fundamental truth embedded in the pluralist governance system, which is the connective nature of American governance order. As a counterargument, C. Wright Mills offers the “elite theory” to highlight the other side of American governing system, which is a hegemonic yet shared institution. His central theme is that the power in the American democratic system is concentrated and at the same time shared among those who occupy the commanding posts of the three most critical institutions: top executives of large corporations, the military top brass, and leaders in the executive branch of the government. This small and relative tightly knitted group of elites runs the country whereas the vast majority of citizens are atomized into “mass society.” As he asserts: “Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power—and that we hope it does have limits—does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.” 3 There are also some other views about who rules America. 4 We do not get into this argument but need to point out that the pluralist view needs to see the inevitability of coercion whereas the conflict theory must view the rulers and the ruled as connectively entangled. From the connective power perspective, the American governance system is an open and dynamic and hierarchical web of business, community, and political leaders across the country. It is elitist by nature because of control and domination yet democratic in practice in the sense that it is an open web with a high level of dynamic social mobility. The most essential character of the system is interdependency among the social groups. The idealist proponents of the soft power approach always assert that American democratic institutions are the major attraction to others across the

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globe. They uphold American democracy as the brand and symbol of American strength. They reason that since people want democracy and their leaders cannot provide it, they would naturally look for America for guidance. America thus becomes a shining example, a city upon a hill. In reality, election is inevitably not a guarantee for the rule by the people. Even in a mature democracy like the US, let alone the half-baked ones, a democratic system is governed by a network of the powerful people. Democracy is communal in nature and the community leaders are the ones to govern. If the communal bonding is not strong enough like in many places across the globe, democratic political construction only leads to corruption, disorder, mob violence, chaos, and ultimately tyranny. Instead of effectively connecting to the social groups across the society, it is destructive to the establishment and growth of connections among the social groups that compose of the society. Because it puts everyone, including the actors themselves, at the mercy of popular greed and envy, democracy without a powerful web of interdependent business, community, and political leaders is destined to demagoguery and therefore harmful to the very foundation of the society. To hold an election is easy but to secure the just and effective practice of a political system is not. It requires longtime institutional constructions from functioning legislatures—solid network connections of community leaders, not a mob-oriented popularity contest; effective bureaucracies—impersonal organizations with technically competent personnel; full-fledged legal systems— everybody, police, prosecutors, and judges, as well as lawyers, work for a rationally constructed system with collective consent. The key issue for the democratic institutional constructions is, as Tocqueville insightfully pointed out, the maturely organized civil society—“voluntary association,” in his word. And the essence of the American voluntary association is interdependency and the backbone of voluntary associations is the web of all the power agents across the societal spectrum. 5 THE AMERICAN NATIONAL FABRIC Voluntary association is a typical American community-based network but significantly it has a strong global nature because of its nature of interdependency evolving in an open field. It is both communal in terms of local roots and global in terms of its ability to reach out. It manifests the fundamental nature of the interdependent partnership. The essence of it is both communal association and “voluntary” based on individual choice because association is supposed to be a place both of preexisting communal ties and beyond those relational entanglements. Individuals are free to attach and free to detach. Tocqueville focuses on the role of voluntary associations that enables connective power. According to him, social isolation leads to despotism whereas

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the connected life is the foundation of all the good things, including American democracy. His argument goes: People seek to attract esteem and affection of those in the midst of whom they must live, both the relationships they inherit and the ones they develop. Because of the closely tied relational association in a community, individuals acting on their self-interests are more likely to balance the community toward collective good. When people are involved in voluntary associations, their interactions bend their will to the common good, as the common good is defined by their interdependent interactions. Voluntary associations eventually become relational and collective magnets for individuals’ emotional and rational attachments. Connective power that empowers all power agents is thus exercised. It therefore becomes a solid foundation as a model of the global governance web of interdependent partnership across world community of nations. It is true in a sense that the new American-style nation-state is based on a rationally constructed interdependent relationship between individuals and the government. The traditional bonds as well as intermediate social units, such as family, clan, the guild, and church are linked by this higher level connection. Its structure is a web where the government is the center of the web while the units of communal bonding are knots on the web. They mutually reinforce each other as empowering power agents. Benedict Anderson once coined a term, “imagined community,” and it is used to describe the American nation. 6 But the fact has been that the American national community is never imaginary, nor manufactured. It has been tangible based on the structure of the web of interdependent partnership and weaved by the connective power of the power agents inside and outside the government. Industrialization, urbanization, investment, and employment have been the connective links developed by the cooperation among business networks, government officials, and community leaders, including union leaders, across the nation. The competitive companies as the backbone for the society are most effectively connected. They employ talented individuals and train not-so-talented people as well and organize both in the best way possible to produce things that meet the needs of other individuals in society. Both the mom-and-pop shops and the big corporations work tirelessly along the fundamental logic of business operation: to link as many people as possible by constructing interdependent relationships. Business in essence is about relationships. The ultimate success of any business effort depends on relationship building in production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. The governing web of business, community, and political leaders has been a major force of social solidarity that pushes wealth created and owned by the business owners to trickle down to the community as a whole. Because of this fabric of national formation, Americans of varying ethnic and cultural origins live cheek to jowl in relative peace. The bonding is interdependent trade and exchange on a free market or through employment.

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The space between them and the rules governing them are clearly defined by the institutionalized behavior patterns of the interdependent partnership. At the same time, American interdependent partnership fosters communal bonding and transforms it into a building block of the national fabric. America is a melting pot in the sense that the cultural assimilation is based on rationally constructed interdependent relationships, and it stops at the door of ethnic or communal social units—people are hyphenated Americans when they engage in their daily interpersonal interactions with people close to them outside their business or professional sphere. For example, the most divisive moment in America is on Sunday morning when people go to churches or other places congregating from the desire of their heart not their mind. On the other side of the token, America is more united at work. College students take classes together in classrooms but more likely eat separately along cultural-communal lines in dining halls. Narrow ethnic identities bond people together when they do not engage in business relationships. Cosmopolitanism does not have much interpersonal power, except for a minority of people. On the surface we see immigrants arriving with a willingness to fit in their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But the “cultural DNA” in the forms of a shared language, a shared heritage of way of life, a common faith, and so on, instilled by their ancestors for generations, even centuries, is still a part of their identities, largely because of the power of communal bonding. 7 But the nation is real because the connective power of the interdependent partnership of its governing groups, the power agents that hold the nation together, are powerful just enough to form a strong sense of American national identity. American business networks are essential power agents in the structure of this web of independent partnership. Although Calvin Coolidge’s famous assertion “America’s business is business” represents his overconfident in the business class and exaggerated its role in American society, the post–World War II era did indicate some truth in “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” Indeed, national policy had been focused on the big American corporations—General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Westinghouse, Ford, Chrysler, Colgate Palmolive, Boeing, and so on. Obviously, the big corporations eventually became cartelizing or oligopolistic and many of them lost their competitiveness. But for a long period of time during the Cold War, it seemed clear that everybody would do well as long as the big companies did well. All these companies invested nationally or even locally and reinvested profit to generate higher employment and wages and salaries for average Americans. Politicians in Washington, D.C. and labor unions, as well as community leaders, were partners of the big business and they worked together to create a middle class and enabled its impressive growth. The democratic nature of the governance system was not manifested exactly by the people but clearly for the people to a large extent. It was a

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hierarchical and often coercively exploitative system for the people who worked in the companies but they were truly connective and enabling at the same time. Connective power empowering everyone involved in a structure of interdependent partnership would be the best way to characterize the essence of the governance logic. The results of this governance practice in the post–World War II years were therefore highly connective. Domestically they included tens of millions of new jobs, dramatically raised living standards, absorbed large numbers of new immigrants, created technological advancements that led the world in medicine, science, and management. THE OUTWARD TREND TOWARD GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCY The Advent of A New Global Governance System This domestic construction of governance system critically shaped a unipolar world abroad, as it enabled the US to pursue a leadership role in enforcing its global governance of interdependent partnership when it dealt with other nations, friends like the UK and enemies like the Soviet Union, in the process of engagingly networking. America had been a staunch isolationist country since its birth until World War II. Even at the time of Great Depression when the world as a whole was facing immediate catastrophe, the internationalist Franklin Roosevelt made the following statement: “Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.” 8 On the surface it seemed that the great transformation of American foreign policy from the late 1930s to the late 1940s arose from the necessity of dealing with threats to the nation’s physical security, which was defined by the shifting balance of the world powers. Only when most Americans, for the first time since the early republic, realized that “in a world shrunken by air power their safety was threatened by events abroad and concluded that the defense of other nations was vital to their own.” 9 From the hard power perspective, America entered World War II for the following reasons. First of all, a fascist victory would threat the nation’s physical security—the German and Japanese expansion and aggression looked to have no ending in sight. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German war declaration provided clear proof. In a situation like this, in addition to the security threat the nation faced, the material well-being of the nation would also be severely limited since sphere for the US capitalists’ activities would be largely confined. From the soft power perspective, the American political and ideological influence would be dramatically reduced, or even forced to irrelevance if fascism won. All of

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these would surely compromise the integrity of the nation and the quality of its domestic life. 10 All were true. However, they were not the most fundamental factors that prompted the historic departure from a policy of isolation to international engagement. The change had begun before World War I since the beginning of the development of the web of American business-entrepreneurial partnership within and beyond the US borders. The global structure of the web made it clear to American elites that the disappearance of friendly nations that shared similar economic, social, and political institutional constructions would give birth to a hostile environment in which the US, especially its business networks, would have little opportunity to enlist partners. As the US elites saw the inability of the British colonialism to facilitate and protect the web and could not prevent an all-out war that might destroy this global structure, they started to contemplate the Wilson doctrine. 11 Security concerns were defensive measures against the destructive forces but a policy to connect and facilitate a genuine connection to the web of interdependent partnership and use it to govern the world was an active and forward-driving construction. That was the real American interest disguised in the idea of collective security and ideologically constructed as making the world “safe for democracy” or fighting for the “four freedoms.” As Wilson puts it: the United States fights “for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy.” Here democracy is not something as we know it, a political system for individuals to exercise their rights to vote. For America to fight for this communal right is essentially America’s effort of partnership building—to enlist free and independent partners in the web of interdependent partnership. The reason behind the ideological framing was clear: no matter how much they did not want it, American elites, especially the business people, had already entangled in world affairs, despite not in large volume quantitatively at the time, especially before World War I. But the trend was clear: their interests had become and would become more global beyond national; their global interests were destined to be American interests and their entanglement with the Europeans would tie America’s fate intimately to that of Europe’s. An American governing sphere across the Atlantic Ocean had to be consciously safeguarded and the way Wilson chose was to build up dependable partners, even without many people consciously realizing it, let alone naming it, as such. Therefore, both before and after World War II, the orientation of American foreign policy was the reversal of the nation’s long-standing attitude against “entangling alliance.” Clearly, this was a dramatic departure from the American tradition, which dated back to the Founding Fathers. The tradition was based on the British balance of power frame of mind and its assumption about the world was classic European multipolar diversity in

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isolation. It was effective specifically for a weak nation ruled by a developing elite group when it had to avoid the stronger European powers’ damaging and endless ancient style struggles and at the same time claim sovereignty for its elites. However, when the American ruling group had consolidated its global power both domestically and internationally based on the inevitable entanglements, the Wilson vision depicted a globalized unipolar uniformity. Woodrow Wilson insightfully sensed the “one world” trend and attempted to build up a compatible political community to facilitate the growth of this trend. But not for a while. It is understandable that the American representative political system was nationalistic. “All politics is local.” It was indeed representative because the social forces the political system represented at that time was basically national. The government did not feel the immediate and direct urge to maintain international economic ties since there were little of them. The political system only lagged behind the growth potential of the America’s global reach but correctly reflected the contemporary situation that its constituents engaged in the world. The American locally oriented representative system failed to seize the forward-looking opportunity as its president pinpointed after World War I. It was unfortunate that the historical moment was not ripe for Wilson’s foresight and the Great Depression and World War II happened. However, for the “power elites” (as C. Wright Mills would label), the goal had been in focus and the path was clear. The goal was to strengthen American national power by positioning well in the Americabuilt and America-guided global Leviathan, which is the global web of interdependent partnership and the core of national power is the connection to the power agents via the web. After Wilson’s foresight fell short, the Great Depression taught the American power elites a serious lesson that there was no time to wait. It was not that Pearl Harbor destroyed the illusion that America could somehow remain safe behind the two big oceans. Far more than this defensive attitude, the American elites were already determined to be offensive. Its relational entanglement with the world made it no longer a choice to ignore the distant threats to the capitalist economic system, to the world order and peace in general in Europe and Asia and beyond. It was the lesson from the Great Depression that the drive for an American-led global governance to build and guide the global web of interdependent partnership in general and the global business networks in particular was not only necessary but also inevitable, and furthermore, profitable and strengthening. To avoid another Great Depression and protect and advance the national interest in a fundamental way, America must involve, intervene, and govern the global affairs. America had become indispensable, by default, more than by choice. This was exactly what Franklin Roosevelt would tell.

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From this perspective, it would be easy to make sense of which side the US would be on as the war was engaging in Europe and Asia. The German ethnocentrism and the Japanese militarism were not the people the Americans could do business with. They simply could not be linked to the global web of interdependent partnership as it had been developing since 1900s when the American power elites were eventually becoming the center of this web. The German or Japanese victory would surely put to an end of the establishment of the American system of global governance. In the meantime, America had become the leader of the “free world” which was composed of the nations that possessed the potential to be interdependent partners within the US global governance system. At the end of World War II and the beginning the Cold War, the direct task for the US was to eliminate the elements that had contributed to the worldwide Great Depression before World War II. More precisely, it was to engage in a global reconstruction and adjustment of the capitalist system since the challenges to the survival and growth of the American-led global governance system were fundamentally within the capitalist system itself, not the outside threat of communism. It was only because the capitalist nations did so bad, the capitalist system was broken, the world and the US included were in such danger. The communist challenge was a sideshow if capitalist countries could do well and the capitalist system be reenergized. To integrate Germany and Japan thus became critical because they were advanced industrialized nations yet in danger of becoming hostile to the global market–oriented interdependent web of American governance, if left unattended. Since both were on the dangerous paths of authoritarian capitalism and militarized capitalism, as well as coercive regional autarky, it would be important to transform them into dependable partners of the US-led web. In the meantime, the British Commonwealth and its imperial preference system was also the challenge to the thriving of the US-led global web of interdependent partnership and thus hurt the foundation of the US global governance. The Atlantic Charter, hastily drafted but a clear reflection of a longtime American pursuit, highlighted an American war aim and far beyond. Its main goal was to open up the world market for the global reach of the business networks. Specifically, it was about free trade, equal access to natural resources for all interested and capable buyers, and international economic collaboration to advance labor standard, employment security, and social welfare. 12 All the items the Wilson principle would propose and key measures for a global web of interdependent partnership. Of course, there had always been voices against the US efforts of global governance construction—extensive foreign commitment, in the words of the policy’s opponents, before, during and after the world wars. However, they became weaker and weaker as time went by. At the time, when President Truman inherited Roosevelt’s grand idea and started to implement more outward

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policies, Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft voted for Truman’s economic and military aid plans, although he voiced strong opposition to both NATO and Korean War since he regarded them as “new obligations” and must be strictly limited. The stronger opposition was from the left like Henry Wallace but not strong enough to launch a serious challenge. 13 The perceived foreign threats would be powerful weapons to make opposition evaporate and the obstacles set up by the aged political system soften. The issue of national security was always an effective talking point against isolationists. The Interdependent Leviathan At the beginning of the Cold War, it was no longer the issue whether the US could afford the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the NATO, the strategic arms race, the buildup of armaments. In addition, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, as well as other multilateral organizations, institutionalized the hierarchical governing order of the web of interdependent partner relationships. America’s connective power, its indispensable position on the global web as an equal but more important partner enabled it to fulfill the Wilson project. The American interdependent Leviathan had destined for its construction of a world community of nations. The US was in the position to shape more and more nations to depend, for their own prosperity, upon others by strengthening the connective power of empowering the power agents across the globe in the structure of the global web of interdependent partnership. One of the constructive consequences was that the powerful transnational actors, the dynamic global entrepreneurs like multinational or global corporations, as well as the NGOs, hence gained political and social protection for their functional governance. This was an internationalized New Deal to certain degree in a sense that governance by a central authority was enhanced greatly, but not entirely. While the Europeans were dependent, they were not powerless. As they were on the path to become dependable partners of the US-led global web, they wanted their own system, which was linked to but not identical to the American one. Its implementation would inevitably transform other industrialized nation-states into partners, but not dependents, of the American sphere of governance. A new capitalist world order would be set up. This would be a unipolar international community that ultimately served the construction and expansion of the American-led interdependent Leviathan. Roosevelt and Churchill had made it clear that the end of the war was for America’s enemies, its friends, and even America itself, to be reformed and integrated into this postwar economic system. 14 This idea was later institutionalized as the Bretton Woods system, which successfully combined nation-states’ freedom to address their individualize national economic issues with the global economic governance and integration. 15 It reflected the spirit of the web of

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interdependent partnership as a global governance system and was designed to solve the internal problems of capitalism so that it would not be trapped in an endangered situation like the Great Depression. Since Soviet communist was not a major concern for this purpose, this system was not about fighting communism. At the same time, it was not about America’s “national” interests per se because the web of governance was global in nature. It was about a global governance system in a unipolar world. Realism might see it as a plan to get American business back on its feet by opening up the world for trade and investment. This notion is not exactly accurate because it overlooked the genuine nature of American business in this new global governance system. Of course after the dramatic experience of the Great Depression, business needed market and investment opportunities. But more significant beyond business as nation-bounded economic entity, the business class within each nation became business networks across the globe and it was thus regarded as a global network which was not bound by national borders and it played a role as a “functional Leviathan” to govern by connecting to people’s daily lives across the capitalist world. The effort was a strategy to build a global community, beginning with the West solidarity through economic openness. It was designed to facilitate and be managed by the US-led interdependent governance of all governments of the industrialized nations. 16 In essence, it was a governing Leviathan far beyond business per se. Therefore, the West’s solidarity, the unified capitalist world, was not simply driven by the threat of the USSR or the need to confront communism. In fact, during the Cold War, the Soviet system as well as the Third World development did not discredit the industrialized capitalist world but, on the contrary, reinforced it. All the countries, including the USSR, had to embrace the reach of the global web of interdependent partnership, even during the Cold War. No matter how much they were against the capitalist system politically and ideologically, they could not avoid the economic and technological reach of the global web. For example, the Group of 77 Non-European developing countries, the largest group of nation-states except the UN, “seeing global development as interconnected, irrespective of political and economic systems.” 17 The dense web also facilitated the institutionalization of the Western cooperation as a functional partner of the interdependent governance system. Even after the Cold War was long gone, they were still together, unified by inseparable interdependent ties. At the end, as Jeffry A. Frieden would tell: “Global economy and culture form a nearly seamless web in which national boundaries are increasingly irrelevant to trade, investment, finance, and other economic activity.” 18

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A Unipolar World A common wisdom believes that the Cold War was featured by bipolarity. The world order since the end of the 1940s through early 1990s was dominated by the two superpowers. In fact, this was a misperception, far from the truth. The “Iron Curtain” metaphor was more like a fancy word game by Winston Churchill with his geo-strategic pursuit behind it than an accurate reality. The world order created in the 1940s during World War II was in fact a unipolar one. This unipolar world had the following features with profound American character: the commitment to an open market economic system and its multilateral management, the state-run social welfare system to stabilize the uneven social consequences of the capitalist drive for profit and market share, and it at the same time actively engaged in international affairs for its own survival and thriving necessities. National governments across the globe were in fact playing functional roles as partners of the US-led interdependent global governance system. This was a global frame in which individual nation-states would be parts of the system. They could not exercise the full sovereignty within their national borders, contrary to what the Westphalia system guaranteed. They would be interdependent on each other for critical resources, market and capital, including human and social capital. Their national identities were preserved through their specific functions as partners in the interdependent relationship. However, their authority as a governing body of their territories would not be shattered. Instead, it was strengthened by the mutual support among the interdependent nation-states. By being effective and dependable partners, they were empowered by the global web of governing networks in domestic control and international functioning. Connective power was the fundamental driving force for the ever expanding and consolidating of the global governance web of interdependent partnership. The system finally delivered the world away from the British colonialism, German ethnocentrism, Japanese militarism, and its only challenger was the Russian big-brotherly expansionism, but the threat was peripheral without enduring power. Instead, the enemy of the unipolar world of interdependent partnership would be the Hobbesian state of anarchy: a world of quarreling local elements, especially nationalistic groups, with war or the threat of war as the only means of settling disputes among them. Therefore, the most stark and pervasive conflict since the Great Depression or even earlier since World War I was between globalism and nationalism or tribalism. The embodiment of the former was the global governance web of interdependent partnership and represented by Wilson and Roosevelt and the embodiment of the latter was the ethno-national forces beyond the institutionalized settlement. The fighting between democracy and fascism, between capitalism and commu-

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nism as well as between national independence and colonialism were all reflections of this fundamental conflict in the twentieth-century human society. It was also the true driving force behind the international dynamics before, during, and after the Cold War. The historical trend that had been driven by the growing strength of the global governance web of interdependent partnership was to break down barriers that had historically separated nations and peoples in diverse areas of human life and therefore further and further integrate of the world as a functioning whole. Of course, this web was not powerful enough to drive full steam ahead and to smooth out all the uneven consequences resulting of its progress. But it clearly represents the historical trend of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And the American governing body, including its business networks, political power agents, and community activists, has been leading the charge and marching ahead of the procession. AMERICAN POWER Measures of Power: Hard, Soft or Something Else? The indicators for national power usually include the following factors: population size, education level, natural resources, economic output, social cohesion, political stability, military might, ideological appeal, diplomatic alliances, technological advancement. Among the factors above, the hard power and soft power approaches would point out different ones that are more fundamental and can be regarded as the ultimate source of a nation’s power. The “hard” power approach would focus on military and economy while the “soft” power perspective on ideology and institutions. All are true but further examinations would reveal much more. The Cold War was a power contest between the US and the USSR. It therefore could be an excellent case to highlight which one(s) were the true indicators of national power. The soft power approach highlights John F. Kennedy’s support for the Civil Rights movement which started in the 1950s for American national power. 19 It argues that a civil rights revolution, in turn, bestowed the US with political and moral authority in the industrialized countries and inspired the people of the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s. As Joseph Nye asserts: “Protest movements are a part of popular culture that can attract some foreigners to the openness of the United States at the same time that official policies are repelling them.” 20 It was a fact that the American freedom of speech and assembly became an inspiration for the human rights movements that contributed to the overthrowing of communist regimes across Eastern European countries. However, this is a half-truth. The other half is that the Soviet Communist Party, as well as other communist parties, bestowed ordinary people another aspect of human rights—guaran-

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teed for ordinary people, regardless race, ethnicity, and gender, right to work and the right to receive education and health care, the rights that had more substance than political rights of free speech and assembly. When people experienced life in an urban slum in the US, they knew the significance of this substantive side of human rights. Even for the majority middle class people, daily life was stressful despite all the political rights they enjoyed. A job was more significant than the right to vote when employment was hard to come by. Furthermore, American primary and secondary education system served more as an instrument to stratify people and less as an egalitarian path of upward social mobility. The health care system was another unattractive part of the American system as was compared to the Russian universal care, especially for the uninsured. Therefore, American “soft” power without linkage to the different social groups of people could be empty talks. It thus could not be the major reason for America’s victory over Russia in the Cold War power contest. Of course, American hard power was very impressive toward the end of the Cold War, as it was compared to the Soviet Union’s. Specifically, the “hard” factors that affected the results of the Cold War were as follows: the coming of Information Age, COCOM, Pershing missiles in Europe, the “to be born” Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), the US military dominance at every level—land, sea, and air, especially space, the huge economic advantage, the much higher living standard, and so on, as was contrasted to the Soviet Union’s military and especially economic hardware systems, which were lagging behind and impossible to catch up the US, especially in the areas of technological advancement and product quality. The USSR’s worsening economic situation, the rising infant mortality rate and declining life expectancy condensed into the failure to raise living standard of the average citizen. All these factors contributed to the defeat of the Soviet Union. But what was the ultimate source of this awesome hard power? The US spent much more on defense research and development than the USSR and crucially, it did it without breaking the bank. The reason was obvious: the growth of the US GDP was impressively larger and larger, the percentage of its military spending to GDP was therefore kept affordable. The hard power approach emphasizes the US’s economic resurgence from the turmoil in the 1970s. Indeed, the period from 1973 until early 1980, the US economy experienced a very difficult period. It was the rigorous economic growth in the 1980s that produced and financed the military spending, which in turn pushed dramatic advancement in technology. The Kremlin Communist Party leaders therefore lost hope for an arms race with the US and eventually lost faith in their system. But the key issue that would falsify the hard power argument is that the rigorous economic resurgence in the 1980s was not driven by the separated and separable domestic hard power components— many of them were not good, even bad, for economic growth. For example,

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in terms of financial capital, the national domestic savings rate was low; in terms of human capital, primary and secondary public education was unable to generate sufficiently qualified labor force and tap the full potential of people so that they could have impact on boosting productivity and, at the same time, in terms of physical capital, the nation’s infrastructure was not satisfactory. On top of these hard power factors, the US bureaucracy is equally, if not more, inefficient than its USSR counterpart. The Russians suffered the same but not worse on these issues. They made huge effort to change the domestic problems that impeded economic growth without much success, so was the US. The difference between the two sides was, in fact, the volume of connective power each of them possessed. The American Connective Power in Action Both the attractiveness of American cultural institutions and American hard power items were based on American wealth and the wealth of a nation was created by investment and trade, which were the connective means to bring people together and make national power powerful enough. The key factor that differentiated the US and USSR was the US government’s connective ability to strengthen the profit-making power of the US based global web of business networks. As Hans Morgenthau pointed out in his 1969 book A New Foreign Policy for the United States, American foreign policy had a tendency of swinging between the extreme of an “indiscriminate isolationism and an equally indiscriminate internationalism or globalism.” He recognized the reality of American politics which required a “middle ground of subtle distinctions, complex choices and precarious manipulation which is the proper sphere of foreign policy.” 21 However, there had been a center of gravity no matter which way the policy was swinging. This pivot was the strengthening of a hierarchy of interdependence among power agents across the globe. John Connally, the economic nationalist Secretary of the Treasury, boasted he was a “bully boy on the manicured playing fields of international finance” by helping Nixon end the Bretton Woods system, which symbolized a retreat of the US from its global commitment. On the surface, it was for domestic gains and produced a short-term result domestically despite the fact that it prolonged the financial instability across the capitalist world in the 1970s. 22 However, the underlining logic was as Connally’s successor, an internationalist, George Shultz indicated: “Santa Claus is dead.” 23 Dependency was no more; the Bretton Woods had fulfilled its role to support the partners growing into maturity. It was time to be interdependent. In the meantime, interdependency did not mean independency. It was the internationalist and free market advocate George Shultz who restarted another round of building up a post–Bretton Woods global web of interdependent partner-

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ship, in the library at the White House, by inviting the finance ministers, especially the strong internationalists Helmut Schmidt of Germany and Valery Gisdard d’ Estaing of France, to a meeting in 1973. The “Library Group” or the “G-7” was initiated. He later in 1975 gave a positive recommendation to change the mind of a reluctant President Ford for the Germany–France initiative of an annual summit of the advanced capitalist countries. In this way, Shultz contributed to winning the Cold War as the Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Administration more than as the Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration because of his contribution in building an enriching web of interdependent partnership. 24 Similarly, Paul Volcker did more than Ronald Reagan in a sense for ending the Cold War by killing hyperinflation and decisively shifting the balance of power toward investors. The 1970s witnessed an era of domestic stagflation, a combined hyper-inflation and stagnated productivity. The energy crisis added oil to the fire. Volcker’s high interest rate and low inflation policy built a solid foundation for a global capital market and therefore generated huge energy from the global web of business networks. 25 “The crisis of the 1970s drove political economies everywhere toward international and domestic markets; the greater the transformation, the later it started. Between 1979 and 1985 the advanced industrial countries turned from the conflict and confusion of the 1970s to financial orthodoxy and economic integration.” 26 The integration of the global market worked powerfully to restore the global governance of the web of interdependent partnership, which served as a structural foundation for the wave of successful restructuring programs of most American and European corporations. International competitiveness drove US manufacturing productivity which grew almost three times faster in the 1980s than in the 1970s. The greatly increased productivity improved profitability which in turn not only trickled down to small business and average middle class but also enhanced the national economic foundation for military spending. The connective power of gaining power by competitively empowering other power agents worked its magic. More and more American big corporations became multinational and their profitability and productivity became the strength of American national economy. As the global chain of supply and demand was becoming unbreakable—because exports were vital for manufactured goods and farm products—millions of US jobs became dependent on the market abroad. Production was also further integrated. For the multinational companies, production by their foreign subsidiaries was integral part of the division of functions internally organized in the companies. This enabled companies to become active power agents to empower a wide variety of other social groups. For example, companies, big and small, in a competitive context on a global scale, must be able to organize and mobilize their managers and workers to a

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degree that they could create a moving target for competitors. Therefore, employees must be empowered to constantly improve a product or technology in order to sustain the company’s competitive edge on the global market. As cross-border trade became more and more critical to the profitability, more and more previously domestically oriented companies actively joined the crowd. Equally if not more critically was the in-and-out flow of financial capital because direct foreign investment was becoming an organic component of the overall US economy. The linkage between the financial centers in New York, London, Frankfort, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and many others across the globe was so tight that they integrated into a seamless body. They felt each other to the level that any hurt on one part would surely be felt by the whole. “From the early 1970s to the early 1980s new foreign investment by multinational corporations soared from about $15 billion to nearly $100 billion a year, while international lending went from about $25 billion to about $300 billion a year. International financial market grew from $160 billion in 1973 to $3 trillion in 1985. The availability of unimaginable sums of money, with hundreds of billions of dollars lent out every year, held most countries’ interest in the benefits of economic openness.” 27 However, “those who stood for the integration of national and global markets, and for the market more generally, had triumphed. But bringing inflation down and pushing the rate of return on investments up were a turning point, not an end point. In the OECD, victory over inflation was barely achieved when deficit spending surged so rapidly as to dwarf that of the 1970s.” 28 Toward the end of the Cold War, the US trade deficit turned America almost overnight into the world’s largest capital importer and debtor. One widely shared intellectual confusion was that America’s debtor status and dependent on capital from abroad had put the nation at the mercy of foreigners. America’s national independence was therefore regarded as being in danger. This was a typical hard power argument. 29 From the connective power perspective, it is a situation of “functional conflict,” as Lewis Coser would enlighten us. 30 First of all, the world, the US as a major part of it, which was increasingly dominated by the global financial market, had a two-way flow of capital. The large quantity of capital investment connected both foreign and domestic investors alike, which was a major indicator of a nation’s connective power. Accordingly, the ability to attract capital in-flow was significant. It was a clear sign of a strong linkage between the nation and the global web of business networks. And this connection would not evaporate overnight, as many people feared. The worry, that one day when the foreigners withdrew their capital the US would have to experience a hard landing, was unfounded. The worry was unnecessary because the connective power would at least stay for awhile if it could draw so much capital into the country in the first place. Furthermore, the in-flow of capital made the linkage between the nation and

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the capitalist networks across the globe so tangible that it surely enhanced the nation’s connective power to empower the capital market which did not respect national borders. In fact, the strength of the US capital market was revealed more by its international than domestic connective power. For example, in October 1987 the US stock market crashed. Domestic investors were more panicked than Japanese investors. When the former was selling, the latter was buying. 31 However, this functional aspect of connection was enabled by conflict between nations. Empowerment did not mean being a nice guy and being accommodating all the time. Connective power on the world market worked different from laissez-faire free market in its pure form. It involved its ability to address each power agent’s national issues through international means, by initiating, enduring, and resolving conflicts between and among nations. America’s interdependent governance enabled it to achieve this difficult task. It therefore shaped international trade, facilitated foreign direct investment, and addressed debt issues. The conflict functioning of the interdependent governance was manifested on two fronts: burden-sharing and international business practice institutionalizing. For example, since Reagan Administration carried out a nationalist approach on economic issues, it started in 1981 negotiating with Japan to “voluntarily restrain” it automobile exports to the US. Then in 1984, “voluntarily restrain” of textile exports was asked as well. In 1986, the US threatened to impose antidumping duties on Japanese products if Japan did not agreed to increase the share of US semiconductors in its market. Japan complied with reluctance and resentment. Later, the Reagan Administration further developed “managed trade” idea and the Omnibus Trade and Competitive Act in 1988 was signed. The policies toward imports became hostile toward the trading partners beyond Japan to include China, Mexico, Canada, Singapore, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Brazil, as well as some other countries. However, through the Reagan years, all his administration’s nationalistic pursuit did not hurt others while protecting the US: by the time Reagan left office, the share of imports entering US market had doubled from 12 percent to 24 percent. 32 The seemingly selfish protective measures actually stimulated the consolidation of the connections between the US and its international partners on the global web of business networks. It was rather a process of mutual empowerment and dynamic interdependence. The emergence of the so-called bloc-ism manifested another aspect of “functioning conflict” on the global web. It was the tendency of deeper integration and mutual empowerment among some economic power agents across national borders but within a regional “bloc.” It became interesting that while it was designed to exclude the others, the others were actually attracted by it and actively sought joining. The free-trade agreement with Canada had raised the talk about a similar agreement with Mexico and even

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Japan. The Reagan “bloc-ism” had hastened the efforts of the pan-Pacific countries, from Japan and South Korea in the north to Australia and New Zealand in the south. All the power agents were empowered to collectively build up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a “new Pacific partnership,” an effort to enlarge the existing Association of Southeast Asian Nations and serve as a gateway into the US market, a critical way to empower the export-oriented economies across the Pacific and at the same time benefit US investment and export. The Bush Sr. Administration implemented two “fair trade” policies called “aggressive reciprocity” and “retaliatory super 301.” Instead of hurting trade because of “reciprocity” and “retaliatory,” they did promote import, and at the same time produced the desired results for exports. For example, the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Trade offered Japanese companies tax deductions on their imports, which benefited both the US and Japanese businesses. The Japanese government became a more effective partner in a way that was more compatible with the global web of interdependence. Connective power’s mutual empowerment through functional conflict was also revealed by the clash of national institutions and cultures. President Bush engaged in the so-called structural impediments initiative talks. These talks were constructive, and at the same time, coercive. It intended to have the Japanese adopt Western, or precisely, American values and business habits. The major items included: “saving less and spending more, eliminating inefficient mom-and-pop stores and breaking down long-term relationships among government bureaucracies and various business groups.” The effect of minimizing these “structural impediments” not only removed many road blocks that negatively affected smooth business networking between the US business and the Japanese one, but also fundamentally improved the Japanese business institutions and cultural practices. Beyond the direct impact to further open the Japanese market to American business and reduce the trade deficit with Japan, the beauty of the effort to build up partnership was a two-way process. The Japanese government, in turn, was using the talks to exercise some degree of coercive power to make the US adopt a set of Eastern values and business habits. The major items included: “saving more and invest more, encouraging corporations to pursue long-term profit strategies and forego short sighted views, improving commercial application of available research and development, spending more on technological advancement, using a larger share of profit on training and education of the workforce.” All these coerced advices in fact helped improve American competitiveness and made American business groups more adaptive on the global web of business networks. 33 Throughout the Cold War, foreign economic policy was seen as a way to strengthen the interdependency between the nation and its partners. This goal was achieved by strong US companies stretching their tentacles to every

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corner of the globe. The focus on profitability and productivity of American business enterprises enhanced their connective power across the globe and at the same time strengthened the national financial capital of the US. As is demonstrated by history, the most dynamic force before and during the Cold War was the global web of business networks, which depended on the US for security, regulation, and protection, as well as US’s coercive power to smooth out the national, cultural, and political differences that impeded the process of global networking. In turn, this web enabled the US to exercise its connective power to reach social groups in most part of the world. More critically, it provided solid foundation for the creation and development of American hard and soft powers. Hierarchy of the Web and American Connective Power Even more significantly, the business interdependent integration across capitalist countries was only one, if a critical, aspect of the overall global governance system. The US possessed huge amount of connective power based on its indispensability as the central nation among nations. While acting on its own interest, the US saved Europe twice from internal suicidal struggles and then saved it for the third time during the Cold War from the Soviet Union. In the interwar periods, the US played Santa Claus until 1973, driven by its own economic interests but also envisioned a bigger picture of a US-led governance, to pump dollars into Europe’s economies, as what John Maynard Keynes mentioned “the economic consequences of the peace.” 34 Although the Dawes and Young Plans, two US-led economic assistance programs after World War I, seemed too premature in promoting the US leadership of global governance system before US business ties with the world were sufficient enough to justify its self-interests, the foresight of building up the central position of the global web was admirable. The assistance programs were, on the one hand, designed to create or restore a safe and profitable Europe for US financial investments and product exports, and on the other powerful instruments to assert the American-governed interdependence between partners. The Marshall Plan did the same a generation later on a much larger scale and accomplished much more. The US-led post–World War II institutional constructions would have been in fact less empowering without the solid foundation of the connective power through interdependent partnership between the European countries and the US. No matter how splendid they were, from the UN to NATO to the IMF to the World Bank, the dynamic behind them was American interdependent governance system and its ability to enable the Europeans and the Japanese to mutually empower each other because of the empowering connective power in the structure of interdependent partnership. Through effectively positioning itself at the center of the global web of interdependence, America as a nation gained national

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power for itself and provided opportunities for others. Along the way, it turned US national interests into international public goods. The connection among national government, even the occasionally nationalist ones, like the Reagan Administration, made it indispensable to each other and to the global web. Interdependence was vital because the ability of close coordination to enable each other to do the things they otherwise would not be able to do was the ultimate source of the US hard and soft powers, as well as other partners on the web. Tricky and difficult but relational and functional, government coordination was needed to secure political stability in key areas of the world, open sea lines, the sanctity of borders, and greater openness in the economies of trading partners and investors. The governments were also needed to be open to the world sufficiently so that they could make sure workers and managers entered their jobs with internationally competitive skills and to provide opportunities for the constant upgrade of those skills. For the government involvement and coordination, it would be less effective, if not impossible, without sufficient power to coerce and empower at the same time. In this case, governments were interdependent partners but among them, leader or leaders was called for to make sure everybody did what it was supposed to do without intentionally or unintentionally hurting others and the whole. The leadership role became an essential job for the US government and its significance was both economically national and strategically global. American global governance system was one not only based on the linkage of interdependent and diversified network of partners and helpers but also based on coercion in protecting, regulating, and shaping the global web of inter-group networks. Therefore, American global governance was natural, hierarchical, and indispensable. The US seemed pulled into a leadership role in shaping the international structure and dealing with international problems. The demand for the US presence overseas was huge. In fact, the underlying fear for most nation-states was that the Americans might “go home.” During the Cold War, not only Germans, French, Dutch, British but also the Soviet Russians were not eager for Uncle Sam to leave Europe. Countries like India, Yugoslavia, and Indonesia also recognized the role the US and its governance partners played, despite their fierce non-alliance sentiment. The Chinese were in a similar situation. Even when they were ideological rivals as China was in the Soviet camp and Americans were talking about “lost China,” Beijing supported the American presence in Japan and Korea, despite the fact that they just fought a bloody war in Korea against the US a few years ago. The Filipinos’ attitude was very interesting and intriguing. They had anti-American sentiment because of their colonial experience. While they wished the American naval bases on their territory to be removed, they felt the inseparability between the US and the Philippines not only in terms of defense but also in the areas of economy and social connec-

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tions. The US involvement in assisting other nation-states on the fronts of mediating rivals and resolving conflicts tended to stabilize the status quo and further link the power agents in different locations to the unipolar global web. The US was therefore an indisputable center of the global web of international, inter-group networks. The EU or the EC before it took pride as a peaceful civilian power economically and politically strong but without military might. The European economic integration was only possible when the US used its military force as its security guarantor. The interdependent governance that the US operated on enabled it to pursue its own interests by serving those of others—gaining power by empowering—and thus created global demands for its service and provided the benefits only it was able to provide. It was neither altruism nor egotism but enlightened self-interest that bred further connective power. Furthermore, it was less of the US leadership’s conscious choice and more of the historical role the US naturally assumed because of its central location on the web of global interdependent governance. The US thus became a default power because of its center position on the global web of interdependent partnership. No one else was able to replace it through times of war, hot or cold. The UK built up a global empire for itself based on colonialism by exploiting the colonies to enrich the colonial power at home in London. Although it produced a whole slew of precious public goods such as free trade, open sea lines, the gold standard, its colonialism was based on the logic of conquest and superior administrative control. It had less connective power than the American governance which derived its power from empowering its partners. The reason was that the British could not embed its power in other power agents such as other powerful nations and work together with them as partners. Instead, it generated heated colonial competition and eventual war between the great powers. Besides the British, the Germans tried its ethnocentrism and Japanese used its militarism. All sought to govern and all of them failed, as the US governance system of interdependent partnership prevailed. The USSR was in the exactly same situation when it launched its challenge to the US governance. Limited Hard Power and Unlimited Connective Power In such a connected world web of interdependent governance, governments were tied to their network positions on the interdependent web and the usefulness of the hard power at their disposal was restricted. Nuclear weapons were a good example. It was a unique weapon that made the nations vulnerable individually but invulnerable relationally. The power of a superpower who possesses the weapon was therefore diminished over time as this type of hard power was contested in a globalized world and the government could not use it to hurt others without at the very same time hurting itself and the

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whole world, or even hurting itself more than others if it was a bigger stakeholder of the web-linked world. Instead of the ability to render the others vulnerable, it would be a victim itself more or less if it used the weapon in any case. Here we see connective power to empower action and restrict action at the same time overpowers hard power’s ability to freely make others do things despite their resistance. Interestingly, connective power could magically turn failures into success—unthinkable from the hard or soft power perspective. During the Cold War, the US suffered many incidents that showed its lack of freedom to do what it wanted or even complete failure at what it was trying hard to do: the loss of China, the prevailing of communism in Eastern Europe, the stalemate in the Korean War, the defeat in Vietnam, and the inability to remove the Castro regime in Cuba so close to home. But these very failures showed, very interestingly, the connective power possessed by the US. It was because the US acted as the agent of the global web of interdependent partnership, its central and leadership position on the structure of the web limited its freedom to use its hard or soft power fully on something that was not necessarily beneficial to the web as a whole. The restraint in fact enhanced the US connective power by strengthening its leadership position on the global web. RENEWAL OF POWER THROUGH INTERDEPENDENCE Power Renewal in Theory As we all know, the ultimate test of a great power is its ability to renew its power. The reason is clear, as Manur Olson would enlighten us: 35 a society declines when bureaucratic stagnation, business monopoly, caste style hierarchy, social rigidity, organizational obesity and arteriosclerosis make its innovation and adaptation difficult or even impossible. All of this is because of the development of “distributive coalitions”—the vested interests that developed and established in time through stability of the society. The aging of a society is therefore measured by the maturity of the “distributive coalitions.” The more firmly they are established, the more aged a society. And the damaging issues above tend to become more predominant. Economic efficiency will be reduced and societal change constrained. “Distributive coalitions” kill dynamism of the economy and weaken the society as a whole. The trend leads to a dangerous end: the society becomes a closed society, unable to sustain competition from outside and its members entangled in collusive internal struggles in which everyone benefits from everyone else’s disadvantage. 36 Mancur Olson’s warning in the early 1980s about this danger was clear and persuasive. Since societies that suffered much in war, revolution, and other drastic upheavals are supposed in a better position to gain flexibility for growth because their social, economic and political structures are substantially destroyed and newly grown ones are much less

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likely to be rigid, societies that experienced stable growth for a long period of time must strive to find ways that are short of revolution and less destructive but still sustain the dynamism of their youthful vitality. The key issue is to keep open to the outside competition so that internal social mobility is maintained smoothly enough. It is required that most elements of the society need to develop close connections to the outside world. Therefore, the connection to the outside becomes vital for the society’s internal mobility and fluidity. Coercive adaptation becomes a necessity in a competitive external environment. Obviously, both “hard” and “soft” powers are too individualistic and all the individualistic powers nurture arrogance inside the power-holders’ psych. In the meantime, an individualistic and separated power structure keeps the powerless in passivity. Both facilitate system rigidity. The ultimate source that drives the renewal of power is the power agents’ entangled connections to its potential source of power in which its power embedded, in this case, the outside world of interdependent partners who engage in powerful competitions. Only strong connections can keep a power agent, especially the allpowerful superpower that has enjoyed lasting peace and stability, grounded in reality and continuously renewing. As Montesquieu put it, “Republics end with luxury; monarchies with poverty.” 37 This idea is loud and clear: for a power to endure, it has to be open to competition, flexible to pressure from the opposition, and susceptible for change. The ultimate key issue for a power to renew itself is its degree of interdependence to the outside world. The renewal of American national power was manifested in the three major areas of a society: Silicon Valley and Wall Street leading the way of the economy; the Ivy League colleges symbolizing education institutions and as the vanguard of cultural change; and Washington, D.C. as a reflection of the nation’s political center. Renewal of American Economy: From Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Beyond Competition and opposition to monopoly, both public and private, had been hallmarks of American society. The US-led the way in the modern world in attempting to institutionalize antitrust and antimonopoly practices in business. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act which was enacted as early as 1890s was one of the earliest. State ownership of enterprises had been rare in US history and state capitalism seems impossible. The whole structure had enabled the emergence of new companies in large quantity. This dynamic economic force came and went at a very high rate on a scale unimaginable in other societies. However, during the 1950s and 1960s after a long period of stability and prosperity, the cartelized and oligarchic control of big business became established “distributive coalition.” They shared vested interests and were rigid. Soon, before they realized what was happening, they lost creativ-

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ity and the flexibility for change. If in a closed society, they would have been very likely surviving and thriving as monopolies. Thanks to the open system and international competition, new companies emerged in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and the 128 Corridor in Boston that led the way in a new economy of high-tech industry. The US economy could be so open that during the process of the struggle of renewal, many of the big companies became borderless global corporations. Their products were “composite,” meaning mixture of things made everywhere across the globe. For example, a microprocessor designed in California would contain chips from South Korea or Taiwan and was financed in Japan. The nationality of its owners were globally diversified; the location of the company headquarters was no longer so critical in determining its national character. The locales with most talented and skillful workers who can be employed at a competitive wages would attract the companies to engage their production, whether it was San Francisco, Taipei, Dusseldorf, or Osaka; the locales with most efficient system to generate and transfer money and therefore easiest to gain highest returns would be the places of financial transactions, whether it was New York, London, Tokyo, or Frankfurt. National borders had become less and less significant in business profitability and productivity. The globalized high-tech industry launched a huge wave of information revolution, which pushed every other sector of the society renew itself. “Walter Wriston of Citybank, perhaps the most powerful international banker of the 1980s, saw the new capital mobility and telecommunications as part of the evolution of an ‘information standard’ that allowed markets to monitor governments. ‘The gold standard,’ he said, ‘replaced by the gold exchange standard, which was replaced by the Bretton Woods arrangement, has now been replaced by the information standard. Money only goes where it’s wanted, and only stays where it’s well treated, and once you tie the world together with telecommunications and information, the ball game is over.’” 38 The US financial system had been influenced by the European “old money” since very early stage. The European financial powerhouses, like the Rothschild family, had penetrated the US financial system as driving forces behind its operations. With this globally unified “information standard,” American banks became more globally oriented. Both pushed by the pressure of global competition and pulled by the huge profit potential from a new and big market, they worked hard to transform themselves to reconstitute their institutions so that they could build and maintain powerful positions across the globe. Hedge funds would be one of the institutional setups. More significantly than the internal rigorous buildups to adjust to the global trend, Wall Street bankers like George Soros were working on the idea of a “global central bank,” a deemed necessary institutional construction to keep financial markets on an even keel, a big step toward further strengthening the global

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interdependent governance. The reason was clear: they felt both a sense of achievement and a sense of anxiety inside the huge wave of globalized capital market. On this front, Wall Street, as well as the financial sector of the US economy, was the most dynamic global leader. What Robert Reich once prophesized was becoming true. He said: “We are living in a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will be no longer national economies, at least as we have come to understand that concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation.” 39 However, the losing national allegiance of the companies did not mean people who worked in those companies lost their national identities. Belonging as it was symbolized by national identities was still significant in driving people’s minds and hearts. Small businesses and new enterprises had been a powerful engine to generate and maintain business networks. They were more likely to link the local to the global, by employing people locally but selling products across the globe; by operating locally but financing through a globally connected web of networks. Because of the power of communal bonding, globalization in the area of individuals’ identity formation could not be exaggerated. If an ideal corporation as a business entity with the sole purpose of profit seeking could overlook its national identity, the people, including its top leaders, who worked in it and made daily decision for it, would not. Their identity formation was still deeply rooted in respective nations and they gained their sense of belongings primarily from the nations they identified with. Therefore, Americans, as owners, shareholders, executives, and all the other business leaders, were still exercising their nationality mainly as Americans and for America, no matter how much they were connected on the global web of business networks in their supposedly borderless corporations. Viewed from this perspective, corporations still rooted in nations since their people did. Therefore, globalization had brought renewal and generated energy in the high-tech industry in particular and in the economy in general, but it did not amount to the level of “great transformation” that minimized American national identity. Apple and Microsoft were and are American companies, in light of the fact that they have been truly global. Renewal of the American Human and Cultural Capital: Beyond the Ivy League Private colleges, especially the Ivy League schools, led the way for highquality human capital development during the Cold War. American universities were the envy of the world. The success of American universities, especially the Ivy League colleges, as well as most elite private high schools, was because they were parts of the global web of interdependent partner-

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ship—they ran to produce dependable graduates who could be interdependent partners in the world on a global scale. These students, in turn, could bring the best returns to the schools. The schools survived and thrived on this long-term view about investing in these students. A hierarchical order of the success of their students was a result of the school’s competitive position on the global web of interdependent partnership. The top layer of the web would be the Ivy League schools that worked as the central knots of the web. During the Cold War, American workers in car companies, steel plants, or bank and retail businesses had one enormous advantage over workers in other countries: privileged access to American capital of investment. They could use this privilege to gain easy access to the opportunities of employment and opportunities to prepare them for employment, including education and on-the-job training, whereas workers in other countries did not have such opportunities. They therefore used their advanced skills to produce products that no one else could and sold the products at an advantageous price. However, a problem arose: this special access was in violation of the market principle of competitive advantage. It therefore was not good for US workers because its monopolized nature on the labor market would surely damage the competitiveness of the workforce in the long run. Because of its global nature, the business class would eventually lose the incentive to empower the American workforce if it was viewed as uncompetitive on a global scale. A global strategy was necessary to develop American workers’ global competitiveness. In an ideal market, it was for the international competition to equalize capital investment on human capital across globe so that the workforce competitiveness could be maintained. American workers would be coerced into a situation to actively improve their skills: what could we do better than others in terms of productivity to justify our higher earnings than workers in other countries? How could we do better than others? If every product was to be measured globally, the value of human capital would be the same. This global competition on the human resource front would be the precondition for new business enterprises, new skill sets, new innovations, and most importantly, more skilled and creative citizens to mushroom. Therefore, the global interdependence among business enterprises pushed the American workforce to further strengthen its competitive advantage in a global division of labor system, which turned out to be able to renew American domestic work force and improve human capital. On the front of human capital in general, all the citizens were needed to be transformed and they were transformed one way or another, more or less. The degree of their transformation through the education system measured the level of success of the schools, as well as the nation’s power, because its students were a nation’s greatest human resource. The effectiveness in developing and mobilizing the skills and creativity of a far greater proportion of its citizens would be a broader measure of a nation’s power. But local and

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nationalist perspectives were not effective to offer a solution. The sincere and tremendous efforts to improve the performance of the public school system in urban areas in general and in many rural areas resulted in failure. The human capital in the US was skewed by the sustained inability of American society to deal with its deficiencies in public primary and secondary education and thus left a large proportion of its population unemployable and alienated from the societal channel of human capital development. The potential of these people was left untapped. Throughout the period of the Cold War, roughly about 15 percent of working-age Americans had been unable to be dependable contributors in the societal process. There were inherited problems, mainly racial or gender discriminations that resulted in illiteracy, ill-fit motivations, and unable to engage in adequate training. 40 The renewal of the education system must be able to address this issue. Contrary to the open and globalized strategy for improvement, public schools depended entirely on local support. The socioeconomic factors of the local residents of each school district determined the quality of the education of the schools. No matter how much federal or state government invested and intervened, local roots were the source of each public school’s ability to perform well. If it was unnecessary or impossible to uproot the local roots of the public schools, it would be clearly beneficial if the school districts introduced the elements of global competitiveness. Cultural capital was another issue that renewal was called for. American cultural capital became less appealing because of arrogance nurtured by being on the top of the world for too long. Mainstream culture had become more and more localized and intentionally unique and therefore in danger of cultural isolation from the rapidly changing world. If the trend continued, America would lose sufficient attraction to the culturally dynamic global cosmopolitan people along the way. It was unproductive or even destructive to assume that the rest of world would take the trouble to understand America and Americans had no desire to reciprocate by learning from others in terms of learning foreign language, cultures, or consumers and markets. This aged attitude rooted in localized isolationist mentality obviously hurt the US competitiveness and left the US at a competitive disadvantage. During the Cold War, many Americans realized that they had benefited from the spread of English as a universal language because it made it so much easier for them to deal with others. But at the same time, they were also in a disadvantageous position because the others were forced to learn English and therefore gained understanding and access to both cultures and markets while the Americans were limited by their language when they engaged in interactions. The others could speak and use American English and at the same time Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French, and so on and they could penetrate deep into their own market with their native language and also did the same in the US, while Americans had not developed sufficient abilities to

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move into others’ world and penetrate deep enough to be interdependent, culturally and socially, by building up close connections on others’ land. This would be a revolutionary revelation and its “cultural shock” was tremendous in pushing Americans to improve their cultural capital. The global governance position of America also put pressure on specific government branches and required them to meet the cultural standard of global governance. For example, US legislators rarely thought about the rest of world when they wrote laws and regulations. It seemed that the compatibility of American standards to the rest of world was the thing that could be neglected. Although this pattern of cultural insensibility was more or less rooted in their political arrogance, it would make sense to enrich these lawmakers’ cultural capital so that when they claimed that “American exceptionality was supposed to become the universal standard and the rest of the world would cater to it,” their claim was based on a clear sense of cultural comparison between America and others. Their behavioral pattern was clearly incompatible with the leadership role of the global web of interdependent governance because “interdependence” required cultural compatibility, or at least taking other cultures into consideration when taking action. Therefore, the development of the global web had been testing the stock of cultural capital of each branch of the government, so to advance the government’s overall leadership ability to face the new challenge of global governance. Critically, it was not bad that our partners were all developed to a level so competitive that we had to treat them seriously in order to engage in interdependent interactions with them, even as we were exercising the power to govern them. After all, we wanted our customers, investors, vendors, or business partners, even our subordinates, rich and resourceful, but we needed to force ourselves to learn from them, to know them at least, and to change ourselves if necessary. We needed to be dependable so that we could engage in interdependent exchange or governance. We felt the power of mutual empowerment as we exercised connective power over them. The cultural capital of America’s self-improvement was thus improved. Renewal of American Political System: Beyond Washington, D.C. There are some fundamental questions to be answered as we try to make sense of who did win the Cold War: was it the US government, its political system, that won the Cold War? Could it consistently maintain its leadership role in the global governing system of the web of interdependent partnership through the Cold War and beyond? Was the US as a political entity in decline in the sense that its domestic system had made it unable to lead those globally oriented and at the same time nationally rooted groups? Did the US consistently have the ability to attract people of every religion and ethnicity into the

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fabric of national life? Could the electoral system prevent populist drive and limit its damage? Would powerful interest groups overwhelm the system and make it unmanageable? All in all, if we believe there was close linkage, a solid interdependent partnership, between the US government and the industrious, innovative, entrepreneurial networks of social groups that enabled the government to reach every corner of the American society, and most parts of the world as well, do we see signs of weakening of the linkage toward the end of the Cold War? The price America had to pay for governing the world was to reform its own traditional way of governing itself. The deeper its global governance, the broader the change it experienced at home. In fact, the ground was shifting. As Robert Putnam points out in his well-researched book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, “The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-third of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.” 41 Traditionally, “voluntary associations,” the localized communities, had been the foundation of the American way of governance, the American democracy, as theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Dewey pointed out to us. 42 Of course, as Putnam says: “Voluntary associations are not everywhere and always good. They can reinforce antiliberal tendencies; and they can be abused by antidemocratic forces. Further, not everyone who participates will walk away a better person: some people who join self-help groups, for example, will learn compassion and cooperation, while others will become more narcissistic. In the words of political theorist Nancy Rosenblum: ‘The moral uses of associational life by members are indeterminate.’” 43 Good or bad, either way, the tide had been changing. The traditional social capital was diminishing because the strengthening of weak ties of global and professional networking were weakening the strong ties of communal bonding of locally developed voluntary associations. The ground for American democratic societal construction was renewing. As Nan Lin pointed out about the “homophily principle” or “like-me hypothesis”: “social interaction tend to take place among individuals with similar lifestyles and socioeconomic characteristics.” 44 Clearly, “weak ties” based on interdependently shared self-interests and similar background had saliently replaced localized communal bonding as the nature of “voluntary associations.” “Strong traditions of civic engagement—voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and literary circles, Lions Clubs, and soccer clubs—were the hallmarks of a successful region.” 45 “Voluntary associations” had become more “voluntary” based on shared interests, even if they were still local. When

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individuals pursued upward social mobility, the most critical and effective, albeit difficult, path would be weak ties, as Mark Granovetter famously asserted. 46 This development in social bonding had eroded the communal based “distributive coalition” and therefore empowered the very foundation of American political system’s renewal. Too many strong social ties within a region or a nation with people who shared mechanical solidarity was good for communal bonding but not good for functioning in global interdependence. Without being involved in the global web of interdependence, which were composed of weak ties, the strong localism or nationalism would weaken the innovative power of American individualism and at the same time encounter the difficulty in cooperation with loyalty and commitment to the broader global community. The Cold War reality of the web of interdependent partnership eventually showed that “interdependence” required the ability to link to others by seeking shared interests beyond communal bonding. It was not simply a moral or political issue. It was about competitiveness on the global web of inter-group ties. It was the interactions on the global web, the weak ties, that enabled each society to further develop its communal advantages and minimize the disadvantages. Toward the end of the Cold War we saw that the “small state” model was exhausted and interest group politics were developing. Did that mean that it represented a shift of the “distributive coalition”? Or a new coalition formed to rid the nation of being brought down by the old “distributive coalition”? The government, although claiming to be “small,” was in fact run by a big bureaucracy and it was surrounded by the inextricable network of interest groups. These interest groups were rarely local. They were national or international. They strove for their narrowly defined interest no matter how politically disadvantageous and fiscally unsustainable it became. However, they were under the power of the web of interdependence. The connective power of empowerment could change their pursuits in a rationally reasonable way by empowering other power agents, sometimes including themselves. Because of their interdependent linkages, the interactions of their narrowly defined purposes made it reasonable for the federal government to be a stronger arbiter or enforcer. For example, the federal government had been the protector, and regulator at the same time, of American business network. The business network, in turn, with all its internal conflicts among themselves and external conflicts with other interest groups, worked well with the government as a critical power agent of the system, domestically and internationally, in an interdependent way of governance. A seemingly “un-American” turn had occurred: the federal government had more and more become the center of the entire social system. A “military-industrial complex”? Might not be. Government bureaucracies in the US had been weaker than bureaucracies in most other countries and more divided in a system of checks and balances. But it was for the Treasury Department with the guidance of the political concerns to guarantee private banks

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and companies and for the Federal Reserve to inject liquidity, simply because no one else could do the job and it was called for by the globalized interdependent ties society had to deal with. There also had been a gradual shift in the center of gravity of global financial power. New York City seemed in the process of being forced to share power with Washington, D.C. as the financial capital of the country and the world, as more and more financial firms felt the pressing need to be closer to the government policy-making center. The revolving door of the American governing system of business, community, and political leaders had been evolving. Through the power of connection on the web of interdependent governance, the federal government had gained more and more connective power to empower other power agents around the country and became more powerful along the way. The thriving of K Street in Washington, D.C. as the center of the lobby firms would be a clear indication. America as a nation had become more dependable in an interdependent relationship with other partners across the globe. It was also required to be the leader of the global governance of an interdependent web. Since American strength and power depended on its leadership position on this web, which was the source of its connective power, it would be understandable that the federal government had been expanding and enlarging, a sign of institutional renewal. In this way, the US government as a whole had been at the top of the hierarchy of the global governing web since the time before the Cold War and was able to enlist other sovereign states as its partners and helpers to keep their respective house in order. Those partners fulfilled their sovereign responsibilities by maintaining an order that enabled the development of the compatible governance within their borders and thus helped in facilitating the development of the global web of interdependent partnership. Their performance constituted US strategic interests. The US was therefore able to defeat Russia by showing them how far they were behind in this global hierarchy. During the history of the Cold War global struggle, the American government had been a protector, provider, and regulator of the global governance system. It transformed the three ancient logics of human society, conquest, uneven exchange and communal bonding, into Wilson/Roosevelt Principles, which evolved into the logic of togetherness which sustained world order, kept peace, and protected prosperity through the Cold War era. Its nature of interdependent partnership enabled the governance system’s continuous expansion of its energy and the American government gained its renewal along the way. The Cold War ended and American government got what it wished for. The true winner was the American government–led global governance system, which worked in the form of the web of interdependent partnership. All its power agents, including many inside the USSR, were empowered. The American government, of course, worked the hardest, gained the most and

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was continuously empowered in the process of renewal to become more powerful domestically and internationally. NOTES 1. Ricard Holbrook, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2008; See also in Derek Chollet and Samantha Power, The Uniquiet American: Richard Holbrook in the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). For a similar and more systematic view, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 2. Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 4–6; Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 3. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 40–41. 4. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power and Politics in the Year 2000, third edition (London: Mayfield Publishing, 1998). 5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: HarperPerennial, 1966). 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006). 7. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middle Town in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harvest Book, 1937); Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962). 8. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 484. 9. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 484. 10. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 520; pp. 523–525; 536–539. 11. Woodrow Wilson, “The World Must Be Made Safe for Democracy,” Address to Congress, Asking for Declaration of War, April 2, 1917. 12. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 533. 13. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 102 14. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 256–257. 15. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 278–300. 16. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 617–620; Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 256–257. 17. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 392. 18. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. xv. 19. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 714–715. 20. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), p. 52. 21. In William G. Hyland, “America’s New Course,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2, Spring 1990.

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22. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 783. 23. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 783. 24. Michele Fratinanni, John J. Kirton, Alan M. Rugman, Paolo Savona, New Perspectives on Global Governance: Why America Needs the G8 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). 25. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 372–374. 26. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 378. 27. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 397. 28. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 378–379. 29. Shafiqul Islam, “Capitalism in Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1989 Issue 30. Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glenceo, IL: The Free Press, 1956), pp. 151–156. 31. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 402–405. 32. Shafiqul Islam, “Capitalism in Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1989 Issue. 33. The discussions above are based on Shafiqul Islam, “Capitalism in Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1989 Issue. 34. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920). 35. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 36. Jan de Vries, “The Rise and Decline of Nations in Historical Perspective,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1983), pp. 11–16. 37. Anna Lydia Ward, A Dictionary of Quotations in Prose: From American and Foreign Authors, Including Translation from Ancient Sources (Originally Published by T. Y. Crowell, 1889; Digitized by Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 38. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 402. 39. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage Press, 1992), p. 3. 40. Robert D. Hormats, “The Roots of American Power,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1991. 41. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 27. 42. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: HarperPerennial, 1966); John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 314. 43. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 341. 44. Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 39. 45. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 345. 46. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6, 1973 (1360–1380).

Chapter Three

Governance of the Big-Brotherly Vanguard Group The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the USSR System

VANGUARD GROUP: A FAILED WAY OF GOVERNANCE V. I. Lenin in his famous What is To Be Done asserted: I assert: 1) that no movement can be durable without a stable organization of leaders to maintain continuity; 2) that the more widely the masses are drawn into the struggle and form the basis of the movement, the more necessary is it to have such an organization and the more stable must it be (for it is much easier then for demagogues to sidetrack the more backward sections of the masses); 3) that the organization must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolution as a profession; 4) that in a with despotic government, the more we restrict the membership of this organization to persons who are engaged in revolution as a profession and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to catch the organization; and 5) the wider will be the circle of men and women of the working class or of other classes of society able to join the movement and perform active work in it. 1

Indeed, this Leninist “vanguard group” idea put forward a challenge to the global governance system. After its initial success in Russia in 1917, it stood as a fortress, if not a city upon a hill, to display an alternative to the world. To most observers’ amazement, the practice of this small vanguard group did eventually achieve a remarkable level of success: at its heyday in the 1950s, it led a communist camp composed of twelve countries with 38 percent of the world’s population, 24.2 percent of the land area, and one-third of world’s 75

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industrial output. 2 And in a unexpected speed starting from the later 1980s, it collapsed. The once mighty Soviet Union disappeared from the map in 1991. How do we make sense of the rise and fall of this big-brotherly vanguard group? The USSR inherited the Russian Empire’s relentless territorial expansion and control. Its hard power was military, soft power was ideological appeal to the liberation of the working class people and the oppressed nations, and ultimately leading the proletariat dictatorship to bring human society to the classless heaven of communism. Its connective power had been Communist Party–dictated communal structuring and administrative control via party cadres and members, similar to the aristocratic caste system in old Russia, only more control. Therefore, besides the pursuit of power for itself, it did bring some public goods to the ruled, such as national equality in sharing resources and division of labor in production across the sphere of its control, free education and health care to the poor and lower-class people. And the replacement of the traditional rich and powerful aristocratic class by the cadres of the Communist Party also produced channels for upward social mobility and therefore generated waves of burst of national energy. But by doing this, it operated tyrannically on the logic of conquest to exercise high level of coercive control for its “big brotherly” governance. Its connective power eventually became a spending power and its national energy became weaker and weaker. The hard power approach would tell us that its failure was the system’s exhaustion of power in the areas of economy and military. It could no longer keep up with Western industrial productivity and creativity. It was true that the realists in the Soviet leadership were surely appalled by the imminent losing of the perceived “Star Wars” with the US in the superpower arms race in the 1980s. They realized that they did not have the power to sustain another generation of rivalry on land, at the sea, and in the space. But the question is: did the whole system have to collapse? With MAD—mutually assured destruction—capability as its hard power at its disposal, and the US was highly unlikely to take offensive actions, the system could still keep going for a long while, no matter how uncompetitive its economy and military were, let alone a system that created the spectacular Sputnik on the high end and maintained basic living standard for the ordinary people. After all, being the second best or even a loser did not have to die and a social system lost in competition did not mean it would go through such an extreme collapse. The soft power approach would regard this historical phenomenon as a result of the Soviet communist ideology, its inability to attract people’s heart and mind, a failure at the pressure of the Western ideas of freedom, human rights, and democracy. To most young generation of Russians and East Europeans, especially the Soviet intelligentsia, the communist ideology indeed was false in theory and evil in practice. But how could we make sense of the facts that Marxism-Leninism thoroughly dominated the entire life of the

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Soviet Union for more than seventy years? Why was it so influential among the nationalist elites of the ex-colonial world that they claimed themselves as communists for their nationalist purpose? Further, why were so many Americans, not only the youths who worked in Russia as “guest workers” 3 and the ordinary intellectuals like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but also the highest level intellectuals like Harry Dexter White, one of the designers and founding fathers of the postwar capitalism, 4 attracted by that ideology? On the other side of the token, if it was so weak and unattractive, why was it taken so seriously by the US governing group and the entire Western world in the first place? In sum, why was the Soviet soft power so attractive, then? People might reject the regime, but they accepted the system. 5 Clearly, we cannot judge the communist ideology from a rear-view mirror. For so many people through the Cold War era or before it, Marxism-Leninism alone provided a valid and “scientific” interpretation of history, and therefore a powerful weapon to predict the future. To the intellectuals, the attraction of the ideology was the exercise of human rationality in planning, regulating, and managing chaotic and crisis-producing economic activities. To ordinary people, Soviet ideology represented a collective and egalitarian spirit and a genuine sense of self-worth in a work unit. For the elites in ex-colonial countries who were unable to benefit from the global capitalist system but on the contrary felt exploited and oppressed by it and its twin brother colonialism as it was represented by the British and French, big-brotherly governance featured with generosity was a better and more attractive alternative. Most fundamentally, for the people across the globe who were not able to join the free market capitalist system as partners or employees and therefore felt excluded from the governance system of interdependent partnership, a communal-based top-down administrative governance system seemed a better way to go. For the working class people who were connect to the web of business networks but the linkage was too weak to bring them the sufficient benefit from the web of business networks, a government-enforced workermanager relationship and the idea of class struggle that produced this more equal and dynamic relationship would be more attractive. For the national and group leaders who were not able to gain a sense of value as equals to the leaders of modern industrialized nations because of their nations or groups’ weak linkage to the web of capitalist system, the idea of anti-imperialism would be attractive. With its attractiveness to so many people across the globe, it is hard to say the ideology per se was the factor that brought the Soviet Union down. Obviously, the ideology did not work. In practice, it was a failure. The people who were supposed to make it work failed to do so. What happened? The connective power approach provides an alternative explanation. It tells that the rise and collapse of the Soviet Union was more a result of the Russian Communist Party’s gaining and then losing power in empowering

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other groups of people, including the empowerment within the party organization between the leaders and the led on every level of the organization as well as empowering among party members, often at the expense of others. The failing of connection resulted in its mounting inability to exercise the above-communal administrative big-brotherly governance. Globally, the Russian Communist Party simply could not reach the social groups and individuals within and beyond its borders in an effective way since the way of its connection to these people was by exercising the logic of above-communal administrative and coercive control. The organizational linkage among communist parties across borders did not have sufficient power to enable the Soviet Communist Party to empower others and at the same time be empowered by others. 6 Specifically, the vanguard model failed in four areas: first, the Communist Party leadership failed to connect to the party members and eventually the connection among the members of the leadership group dissolved. Second, the communist party as a whole failed to connect to the general public, especially when it engaged in economic activities. Third, Russia as a nation failed to connect to the other ethnic groups, the “little brother” nations, within the USSR based on its big-brotherly control, despite its big-brotherly efforts, sometimes brotherly sacrifice. Finally, the Soviet Community Party failed to connect to almost all the other communist parties in Eastern Europe and across the world. Indeed, it was a systematic failure. Compared to the American governance system which gained its strength by building, enabling, regulating, and empowering interdependent partners, the Russian connective power of big-brotherism via a vanguard group was weak and unsustainable. It did not have sufficient power to govern a vast country, let alone the world. It is also worthwhile to point out that the failure should be regarded as the failure of the vanguard group model per se, the creation of Lenin and Stalin’s brand of communism. Although this model inherited the Tsarist system to some degree and they were in common by sharing some basic governing logics which not only organized Soviet life for more than seventy years but also organized Russian life for more than four hundred years, they are different fundamentally, just like the difference between Lenin and Ivan the Terrible, the founders of the two systems. Its collapse in a dramatic fashion was the collapse of Lenin-Stalin’s governing system of a centrally planned economic powerhouse that was designed to someday rule the world, and put on hold the Russian ideal of being a third Rome by providing a new way of life for human society. For its neighbors, the fear of Russian conquest and expansion dissipated at least for a while; and for the world, the prospect of Russian hegemonic domination had been eased. However, Russia as a nation fundamentally kept its character in its special shape. The winners of the Cold War were not only the Americans and the Western Europeans but also many

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elements inside the USSR, many of them later became the leaders of the new Russia, including Boris N. Yeltsin and Vladimir V. Putin. They were winners because they became partners in the global web of interdependent partnership at the end of the Cold War. But whether they would continue to be partners of this global governance web had to depend on the fragile workingin-progress of the web as an effective governance system. The significance of the end of the Cold War was therefore an end of the vanguard group model of global governance that worked as a serious challenge to the way of governing the world. It is not about the permanent defeat of a global or regional hegemon. It might somewhat be about the elimination of a revolutionary ideology but not be too sure since many elements of the ideology are still alive and well. Human history thus witnessed a passing of an unfit form of global governance and human society has continued marching toward more hopeful global governance. As prominent Russian historian Yuri Afanasyev mentioned: “We have made one important contribution—we have taught the world what not to do.” 7 THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF A VANGUARD GROUP Lenin taught the Russian revolutionaries before they took power in 1917: “We must have as large a number as possible of such organizations having the widest possible variety of functions, but it is absurd and dangerous to confuse these with organizations of revolutionaries, to erase the line of demarcation between them, to dim still more the already incredibly hazy appreciation by the masses that to ‘serve’ the mass movement we must have people who will devote themselves exclusively to social-democratic activities, and that such people must train themselves patiently and steadfastly to be professional revolutionists.” 8 “In Russia the Bolshevik party had really been, to a great extent, what Lenin wanted it to be: a select community, a sort of religious order of professional revolutionaries, crusaders of a materialistic faith, a selection of the most self-sacrificing, the most decided and active among the revolutionary intelligentsia.” 9 Throughout the Soviet years, the most important force in USSR society was this vanguard group, the Bolshevik Party. As Lenin highlighted above, the Party was a distinctive but also critical connective power in the USSR. The Soviet governance system constituted of two layers. The first layer was defined by the 1936 Constitution, which was supposed to be the most fundamental law of the land. It stated that the country was a multi-ethnic, multi-nationality union and the Supreme Soviet was the ultimate authority. However, it was ambiguous about the role of the communist party and the legitimate power of the party leadership. It appeared only in Chapter 10 Item 126 which guaranteed citizens’ freedom of assembly, then it made it clear

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that the most active and more enlightened workers, peasants, and intellectuals would voluntarily form the advanced Soviet Community, and then became the vanguard group fighting for the purpose of constructing a communist society. Therefore the Constitution served as a front cover for the state system. Underneath the front cover was the core layer of state governance, defined by the party bylaw. Because the party controlled everything, it was the true reflection of the spirit of the political machine. This was a highly centralized system without a clear distinction between the party apparatus and the government branches. On January 5, 1930, the party published its bylaw on its organizational structure and personnel management. According to this bylaw, the most fundamental foundation of the party’s power was its organizational arm which reached to every corner of the society and controlled almost all resources of the society. The correspondent government branches, departments, offices became the subordinates. In terms of personnel management, election was set up as an empty ritual, if not completely abolished. All the government officials were appointed by the party’s organization department on the next higher level, based on the party member roster, called “position roster.” The KGB in fact had the final say on the personnel issues. 10 The party was the largest organized force, with an average of seventeen million members over the years and well organized into a disciplined hierarchy. Inside the party, it was highly hierarchical. 11 The Party’s connective power was basically about coercive empowerment—to forcefully enable the other power agents to do the things they otherwise would not be able to do. For example, the Party exercised its command of the armed forces and the secret police, the KGB. More than three-quarters of the army’s officers and all of its generals belonged to the Party and subject to the Party’s control. The Party appointed the commanders of the armed forces. In the army, the Main Political Administration was set up to indoctrinate military personnel and keep them ideologically in step. 12 The KGB exercised imposed enforcement of the Party line by keeping a watchful eye on every social group and regulating everybody’s life by generating fear among people and therefore creating a sense of certainty along the Party dictatorship. The Russian intelligentsia as the most free element of the society attracted KGB’s most attention. 13 This enabling coercion was more revealed by ideological indoctrination. On the one hand, the Party made people more productive along the Party line; on the other, eliminated their individual initiative and creativity. As Lenin explicitly indicated: “The workers can acquire class political consciousness only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” 14 The vanguard group must impose “class political consciousness” onto the workers “from without,” at least to launch them onto the right path. The Party should remove the old and new threat to the working class solidarity and

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pave the way for the rapid social change. Robert Lynd’s research supports this positive side of education. 15 But coercion became necessary should they resist. Therefore, “education” had become “ideological indoctrination.” 16 This side of coercive enabling was more manifested by the Party’s control of people’s daily life. It instilled a way of life that was shaped by the Party doctrine. The Party also maintained ideological control over the intelligentsia, the most dynamic social group in Russian society. On the one hand, the Russian intelligentsia was most victimized by censorship and travel restrictions; on the other, they were force to go to the mass, even the labor camp— many deep philosophical ideas and classic literature were produced that way. Of course, resistance was everywhere. But the Party got its way. 17 In the provinces the regional committees of the Party were the only effective organs of societal administration. They managed much of the countryside and many provincial towns. More importantly, for a long period of time, the Party could effectively mobilize and organize the party members into a well-connected work unit. Members gained their identity through the Party and received their social esteem, as well as material benefits, from the party membership. 18 Just like the traditional Russian aristocracy and more so in terms of discipline and organization, the party members felt they were a part of an elite group that possessed the power to lead society and shape the lives of others. The Party’s group mentality was in fact closer to the Tsarist aristocratic group than to the proletariat class. Further, through constant meetings in which daily peer criticism and self-criticism occurred, and important projects were specially assigned, party members got a sense of distinction for playing special social roles. They were also bestowed the power to decide rules. The Party, as constructed as the Leninist “vanguard group,” played a role not only as a “vanguard group,” but more as a central link on top of the societal web that enabled the society to connect and be together as a whole. Although it was obvious that the so-called proletariat dictatorship was more dictatorship than proletariat, the party members, especially the party leaders on all levels, constructed itself as an institutional backbone of the society. This was just this type of connective power within the Party and between the Party leadership and the members that created a new “aristocracy” with Party General Secretary as the new Tsar. 19 The Party itself was a big web with each layer of hierarchy as the center to the next layer. The Party thus became the center of the web of the entire Russian life. Its power was deeply rooted in its indispensability and central location of the societal fabric. Ligachev, a conservative leader of the Community Party during the Gorbachev’s reform era, opposed a multiparty system because he believed it would mean the disintegration of the Soviet system since there was no other political force except the Communist Party which united all peoples of the country. “What happened in our country is primarily the result of the debilitating and eventu-

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al eliminating of the Communist Party’s leading role in society . . . its ideological and organizational unraveling.” 20 He was correct, factually. FAILURE OF CONNECTION WITHIN THE VANGUARD GROUP Very tellingly, it was Yegor Ligachev who spoke about the urgent necessity of reform and change: “Either the country is doomed to further stagnation, or we gain strength and forge ahead to progress. That is how the question stands. We have no third course.” 21 However, very ironically, the dilemma was: reform and change must be from the Party itself. The fact was, the collapse of the Soviet Union started from the collapse of the connective power within the Communist Party, its hard and soft powers simply followed to evaporate. Its governing logic of top-down administrative control could no longer hold the Party together since it could not gain the real ability to empower partners and enable subordinates. Eventually over time, the connective linkage between the Party members, and linkage between the layers of party hierarchy, the linkage between the Party leadership and its members, and in the end, the linkage among the leaders themselves all disappeared. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Winston Churchill’s famous prophecy could be used accurately to describe the beginning of the system. The corruption was not simply about bribery, abuse of power, or anything illegal. Most damaging was that the Party factotums became inactive, inflexible, lazy, incompetent, and very arrogant machine-like zombies. They had no experience and no interest in reaching out to the real people. In a system in which the lower layer of the hierarchy was always supposed to listen and do what it was told to do, everybody tried to empower themselves, their close relatives and friends before empowering the people they were supposed to empower, and eventually and more seriously, the easiness of this practice made them lose the ability to even empower themselves. Interestingly enough, this type of bureaucratic rigidity was actually started from very fluid, mobile, and active interpersonal movement. This started from the very top. In the beginning when the Party’s leadership role in the society was taking shape, it was the cult of personality of Stalin that pushed the system to work. Other party leaders on different levels of the party apparatus did the same in a lesser fashion. They depended on creating a semi-“charismatic authority” to not only legitimize its power but also the critical dynamic to make their power work. It was “semi-” because Stalin did not attribute his power to a god and ground it on a divine system. Instead, he, as well as Lenin, attributed his power to the “mass.” He regarded himself as the representative of the supposed fundamental and long-term interests of the people. Therefore, he was not a god or god’s representative, but the representative of

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a vanguard group that was organized around a self-claimed right to fight for the people. The vanguard group was the agent of the people and he the agent of the vanguard group, although both were self-appointed with the power to coerce the people they were supposed to be “agent” for. There were Constitution, the Party bylaw, and so on. But as there was no clear law in writing to define their powers, the party, as well as the country, was fundamentally ruled by an informal network of power agents. During the Stalin era, all of them answered to Stalin personally. In fact, the power was informally controlled by Stalin and a few of his favorite helpers. The core group changed over time based on the members’ personal relationship with Stalin. They set up many standing committees to make key decisions and run the major operations, above the regular party system, even above the Politburo. The Party’s central committee close to lost its power in the political system. They were not subject to any institutional checks and supervision at all. The only thing that could make them think twice was the possibility of losing power if they did something wrong. Therefore, the Party leadership virtually was an interpersonal network of dependent relationships. Its essence as top-down control was so informal based on cult of personality that once Stalin was dead, a process of institutionalization had to happen, as Max Weber insightfully taught long time ago. 22 But the change was hard. Since the popular will was never allowed to deviate from the Party’s and individual initiative must be in line with the Party line, inside the vanguard group, even inside its central committee, the top leadership was critical. Personalized representation was no longer possible, an institution had to be in place. But how to build this institution? The Party had no idea. Khrushchev era was a period of transformation, but a half-baked one. He destroyed the cult of personality but failed to establish an institution to replace it. The vitality of the vanguard group was still dependent, to a large extent, on its leaders’ personality and interpersonal relations. 23 Brezhnev and his team of leaders built a team without an effective institution. They were party functionaries all their lives and did not really know how to be institutionalized leaders. This era was referred as a period of stagnation. In fact, it should be better regarded as an era of institutional immobilization. The leaders occupied their positions for life, without the possibility for their removal barring death or being purged. Among this group of party bosses, power was concentrated in the Politburo and secretariat, only a handful of them. They were supposed to be both decision makers and enforcers and everybody else just executors. The local and grassroots-level party secretaries were used to being the boss of everybody under them; their words had the force of law and even more than the force of law because law was “legislated” by what they thought of as right. They were above the law, which was also manifested by the fact that they had the prerogative to order the courts around and tell the

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judges how to enforce laws. They therefore concentrated in their hands all the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers. This type of big-brotherly top-down control was effective in empowering different groups of people but only in the short run, during emergencies. It would never be sustainable in the long run because laws were always a balanced rational construction whereas personalized administrative power was rather arbitrary and subjective. Since their only bosses were their superiors on the Party’s line of command, they themselves became parts of a machine by simply answering to their party superiors. Party leaders on every level instinctively looked upward for guidance and instructions. No one from below could challenge them so they did not have to feel any responsibility to empower the people they led. Ironically, in the beginning of this machine-like system, the lower level party bosses competed to serve the perceived interests of their party superiors and made every effort to gain favor from them. But that all was because of the interpersonal mechanisms of the system. Once the system was institutionalized, their position was secured and their work was routinized, they lost even the motivation to please their bosses. It was an organization led by a group of men with grey hair. All of them had filled the Politburo throughout the post-Stalin era routinized institutional path. Even the seemingly energetic and innovative Gorbachev and his principal associate Aleksander Yakovlev were no exception. They were Party men, and it was their “partyness” (partinost in Russian) that made it possible for them to get into the Politburo because they were instantly recognizable by their comrades as “one of ours.” 24 The Communist Party therefore was not an empowering, enriching, and enabling place, hardly a breeding ground for resourceful and innovative leaders. The inevitable power struggle within the Party further turned it into an organization of mediocre and limited bureaucrats. The energy of the whole system evaporated. 25 Most serious of all, what ended the Party’s dictatorship was the fact that the Party itself was the victim of its own dictatorial power. It suffered from a distorted life of its own creation and became seriously ill, as many Russians would say. In the end, the Party’s absolute power only mobilized its members temporarily but made the Party as a whole and members as individuals inefficient, riddled with bad habits, corrupt, stagnate, and having low quality of work. The Party leaders on every level lost their connections to the lower level Party officials and the disease gradually reached the rank and file of the Party. As Robert Kaiser insightfully pointed out, the smothering of initiative and responsibility was one of the most discouraging but also most palpable consequences of governing by the Party’s logic of top-down control. By the late 1980s, the Stalinist vanguard group had become weak and lax. It had lost its revolutionary fighting spirit, which Lenin had regarded as essential to a

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vanguard group. When reform began, hundreds of thousands party members quit and the top leadership within the Politburo split. 26 FAILURE OF CONNECTION BETWEEN THE VANGUARD GROUP AND THE PEOPLE The Russians are good people. For centuries, they were described as men of sheep characters, figures like Alyosha the Pot, Nikita Firsov, and Matryona Vasilyevna by their great writers would make everyone be distressed and raged in indignation when they met these individuals in Tolstoy, Platonov, and Solzhenitsyn’s novels. Pushkin also used his poems to depict this character of his countrymen. 27 Over centuries under cruel dictatorship on every level and at every corner of the society before Stalin, Russian people were trained to live in this sheep-like mentality. “Follow the shepherd” as obedient as a sheep would be a critical survival skill, even a habit of heart ingrained in their souls. Therefore, for those elites like Tolstoy who loved the people and wanted to do something for them, a dilemma was clear, Isaiah Berlin points out in his Russian Thinkers: “All those populists and socialists and idealistic student who in Russia ‘went to the people’, and could not decide whether they went to teach or to learn, whether the ‘good of the people’ for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives was what ‘the people’ in fact desired, or something that only the reformers knew to be good for them, whether the ‘people’ should desire—would desire if only they were as educated and wise as their champions—but, in fact, in their benighted state, often spurned and violently resisted.” 28 But Berlin discovered a more positive frame of thinking among Russian Intelligentsia, as Aileen Kelly summarized: “The urge to assert the autonomy of the self through revolt against necessity continually clashed with their demand for certainties, leading them to acute insights into moral, social and aesthetic problems that in this century have come to be regarded as of central importance.” 29 Lenin was one of these Russian intelligentsia who stood higher and saw deeper. He understood the Russian national character, of course, but also pointed out an interactive process, as he wrote: But to concentrate all secret functions in the hands of as small as number of professional revolutionists as possible, does not mean that the latter will “do the thinking for all” and that the crowd will not take an active part in the movement. On the contrary, the crowd will advance from its ranks increasing numbers of professional revolutionists, for it will know that it is not enough for a few students and workingmen waging economic war to gather together and form a “committee,” but that professional revolutionists must be trained for years; the crowd will “think” not of primitive ways but of training professional revolutionist. 30

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This would be a dynamic “from the mass to the mass” strategy, as the Chinese Community Party leader Mao Ze-dong would summarize. The key in the process, clearly, is mutual empowerment. The linkage between the professional vanguards and the mass must be strong enough so that they “feel each other” in the process of interactions. Passivity and fatalism on either side would be fatal. Fundamentally, it should be a process of mobilizing the mass, paving the way for them, and leading them onto the path. But at the same time, learn from them, absorb their wisdom, and incorporate their initiative and creativity into the process. This was easier said than done and this was exactly what the CPSU failed to do, or to be more accurate, was beyond their ability to accomplish. At the beginning of the revolution in 1917, the Party was confident that it had the ability to empower the masses. It therefore abolished almost all traditional links between the state and the society, the intermedium institutions like the Orthodox Church. Indeed, they achieved spectacular results. The Party members went to the people, mobilized them, organized them, and were functional in their lives, and built genuine connections with them. As an American guest worker observed in late 1930 to early 1940: There were no unemployment in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks planned their economy and gave opportunities to young men and women. . . . Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardship in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival. . . . I went to a workers’ meeting in a large Moscow factory in 1940. I saw workers get up and criticize the plant director, make suggestions as to how to increase production, improve quality, and lower costs. They were exercising their rights of freedom of speech as Soviet citizens. . . . At the same time, the population was taught by a painful and expensive process to work efficiently, to obey orders, to mind their own business, and to take it on the chin when necessary with a minimum of complaint. 31

The picture was vivid, the fact was clear, the linkage between the workers and the Party was depicted, and the nature of the Party’s connective power in mobilizing and organizing ordinary people was revealed. However, the dark side of this beautiful picture eventually over shadowed its bright side. The most fundamental failure was revealed in the Party’s process of connection to ordinary people in their daily struggle in production, consumption, distribution, and exchange—the vital areas of people’s lives. The Brezhnev era was truly “the years of stagnation.” The industry that produced Sputnik lagged behind and the situation was hopeless. The reason was the top leaders of the vanguard group made it do something way beyond its capability—to run an enormous and extremely complex modern economy with a centrally controlled top-down decision making and enforcing system. When this inability to connect reached the factory floor, it became pathetic.

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For example, forced around-the-clock work to meet monthly arbitrary production targets—“Shturm,” meaning “storm.” People were good, they just blindly obeyed orders and minded their own business. But the orders they obeyed were from thousands miles away, “scientific calculation” from the top. Workers, even factory directors had little opportunity for innovation in product design, production efficiency, and quality control, no matter how much they wanted to do so and how much they could do on paper. No matter how much initial enthusiasm workers and grassroots managers had, it would be surely worn out. The Party could not make people feel the feelings of connection to their users and costumers and nobody felt responsible for the products they produced. Nobody felt they needed to be dependable so that they could engage in an interdependent market exchange relationship. Russian economist Shmelyev characterized this governing system as doing “everything that is economically abnormal and unhealthy.” 32 The results of the Soviet economic activities were indisputably bad. The Party therefore lost its connection to the mass on the consumption front. It might be acceptable to live a hard life for awhile but not for a hopeless duration without a future. When waiting in a long line to get daily necessities, people would have a hard time to feel about a competent leadership, the one ordinary people could trust blindly believing “Yemu Vidnyei—He knows what he is doing.” 33 Although the rural areas of the USSR were backward to begin with, the old Russia from 1896–1913 was the largest grain exporter; on the international grain market from 1907–1913, 45 percent was from Russia. Stalin brutally enforced a modernization process that in fact not only made the USSR a grain importer, but also and more seriously, destroyed the empowering connection between the Party and the rural population. All collectives and state farms (kolkhoz and sovkhoz) were burdened with a bureaucratic group of people. These people were supposed to design and plan scientifically and manage rationally but in fact frustrated the lives of the rural people in a way that was beyond repair. Farmers had been tied to the hopelessly inefficient structure of state or collective farms, forced to fulfill orders from far-off bureaucrats who knew nothing about farming. It was an even more exploitative system than the traditional villages which were controlled by the city-dwelling aristocrats. The new rural elites during the Soviet era were two groups of people: the tractor drivers and the mechanics. They had the best jobs and had highest social status. They were better off than the ordinary rural farm workers. They were supposed to be the Party’s link to a “modernized” countryside. However, the connection between them and the Party was not so helpful in increasing agricultural productivity. They could do little to effectively manage the farms. They were not the genuine productive force to empower the kolkhoz and sovkhoz members in protecting farm’s vitality from season to season, planting and harvesting to get the most

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out of the land. The Party’s connective power therefore weakened beyond any rational design. Even when the reformers tried to implement long-term rental or privatization together with market mechanism, the result was still hopeless. The market-oriented agriculture reform in China was a big success. Since 1978, agricultural production went up dramatically and it provided a solid foundation for further economic reform in China. But in the USSR, it failed miserably. The reason was simple: entrepreneurial farming in the countryside was completely eliminated for over sixty years and successful entrepreneurs of the previous age were completely wiped out by Stalin’s very brutal collectivization. There were no living farmers who ever practiced entrepreneurial farming that made prerevolutionary Russia an exporter of grain. The new policy to attract famers into business was promising but few people took the opportunity because the rural residents were no longer able to engage in the special type of work that was required for entrepreneurial farming. The Party’s attempt to connect to the farmers through the monetary market mechanism failed. Farmer could not enter a market exchange relationship without being an equal and interdependent partner. The market mechanism did not work if the relationship between the players was a top-down with one side in control and able to enforce its demands. In this sense, the damage was even deeper. The most serious was that, very ironically, even if they were free to do anything without the bureaucratic control, they had to be coerced to do it. Freedom had to be imposed and coerced! More than three generations of the Party bureaucratic control had shaped rural residents into high level of dependency on the Party and its state bureaucracy and destroyed their ability to be independent producers and managers of their own land, even if they could do it without interference. Furthermore, many sovkhoz and kolkhoz members became so dependent on the system that they could not allow others to leave the large unit. The few farmers who showed initiative and risk taking were labeled kulaks, meaning they were subject to the similar killing like in the Stalin era. Some of them indeed were stabbed and their farms set on fire. 34 The Party’s effective connection to the most productive force in the rural areas was completely broken down. Over the years of governing, the Party did not empower the rural residents to make them stronger and more interdependent; instead, it made them weaker, more dependent, and less productive. Clearly the Party failed to build up the connection that would enable ordinary people to empower each other without the Party. The official Marxist-Leninist ideology of equality among all workers, regardless of their ranks in the Party and backgrounds in society, seemed great. But in reality in the USSR, the previous centuries’ semi-caste system framed people’s comparison within their own “caste” and Stalinist Bolshevism intensified its “leveling mentality.” For the people who belonged to the same level of the society,

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everyone should receive the same rewards, regardless of their contributions. This “Russian national character” that discouraged self-reliance, self-value, and self-responsibility and minimized the growth of the interdependent interpersonal dynamic was in fact rooted in the working of the combination of the logic of communal binding and the logic of top-down control. The result was by no means fostering a mentality or social relationship of individual independence or interdependence. Instead, it produced the sense of attachment that froze individuals within immediate social relationships and made them attach to the government, to the community of their birth, and to each other. People were therefore inextricably entangled in each other’s lives and had no freedom to detach. The upside of this would be the sense of community and its downside would be the sense of balance between peers—jealousy was the hallmark of this mentality. As Georgi Arbatov vividly described: “Okay, maybe I’ll have to go hungry, but just don’t let my neighbor prosper!” Kabaidze’s suggestion that “citizens do their own thing was as un-Soviet, or more accurately, un-Russian, as cherry pie.” 35 The Party failed to foster a dynamic for ordinary people to become more able among the equals so that they are able to empower others and be empowered in turn. Envy among neighbors was widespread and the Party, instead of mobilizing people to empower each other, seemed instilling an idea of socialism that was naturally compatible to a mutual distrust and mutual impedimental interpersonal dynamic. Socialism seemed becoming about, by eliminating the exploiting class, making everybody the same. When few would question the Party members’ prerogatives and privileges, the socialist ideal seemed applicable only to peers within the community. The Party fostered this communal attachment mentality and it became an impediment to rational construction of the economy and society in general. Connections among people were hardly empowering. FAILURE OF CONNECTION BETWEEN VANGUARD GROUPS WITHIN THE UNION Another failure of the Soviet Communist Party was its inability to exercise its connective power over other nations within the Soviet Union. The vanguard group’s big-brotherism was proven unable to deal with the relationship between nations inside its borders. It could not even keep the connection between the party organizations in different republics within the Union. The whole framework was based on Lenin’s program. Some refer the program as the “Leninist compromise” and regard it as one of the greatest contributions by Lenin on the issue of nationality, because the Soviet Union’s governing system granted political-administrative recognition, as well as the symbols of nationhood, to a number of national groups, based on their

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distinctive historical homelands, cultures, and languages. They therefore became nominally sovereign republics within the USSR. Each of them should have their own national identity under the condition that their sovereignty was limited by the control of a proletariat party, namely, the Communist Party. “The program consisted of three components: (1) the absolute rejection of any division of proletarian organizations and, above all, the party along lines of nationality; (2) ‘National Self-determination’; and (3) ‘Full Equality of Nationalities and Languages.’ Obviously, the first component offered nothing positive. But neither did the second—in Lenin’s interpretation the right to self-determination encompassed only the right to secede. For nationalities choosing not to separate, it offered nothing at all. Thus, only the third component, the call for equality, constituted the positive core of Lenin’s nationality program.” 36 Obviously, this did not seem like a “compromise.” The very foundation for the design of the program was the old Russian Empire. The fundamental issue was that for the “Republics,” the only difference was the change of masters, from the Russian Tsar to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, just a nicer one speaking with big words. Russian Empire changed to become Union of Socialist Soviet Republics but they did not expect much difference between a conquered nation and a “republic.” 37 For Lenin, the essence was that the Communist Party was organized to ignore national characters, national attachments, and loyalties. It was oriented as a global organization with the purpose of liberating the human race as a whole. Therefore, the country was still controlled as an integrated political and economic entity. As a Marxist group with a historic mission in mind, Lenin would see encouraging national groups to maintain their unique identity and cultural practice would be so natural and harmless as long as their “equality” did not include autonomy to manage their economies and govern their affairs, since these two must be controlled by the unified proletariat party. “Equality” meant equal among nationalities, not between the Party and each nationality. The key issue would be the vanguard group: its unity and vitality, its ability to mobilize and organize its members from all nationalities. 38 Indeed, “A fundamental tension was thus built into the Soviet system from its very origins.” But the tension was not as the following assertion would tell: “the federal structure offered an organizational framework and political legitimacy for the protection and advancement of the interests of national groups, but at the same time Soviet ideology anticipated the ultimate dissolution of national attachments and loyalties and sought the creation of an integrated political and economic community based on universal Soviet citizenship.” 39 But in fact, the tension would be within the proletariat party and the challenge was how to keep the vanguard group united and energetic as a cross-nationality group beyond its members’ ethnic and cultural belong-

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ing and communal bonding. This was a big task Lenin handed over to his successors. Therefore, in Stalin’s reality, repression served as a critical mechanism in maintaining central control from Moscow. The “sovereign” republics were treated as provinces. The connective power lay in the Party’s mobilizing and organizing ability directly applied to the population in each Republic. It would not be so important to cultivate the cooperation of indigenous political elites so long as the Party was firmly in control. Opportunities for advancement in the Party hierarchy were determined by both political reliability and professional meritocracy: loyalty and performance, but balancing among nationalities was overlooked. It was deemed no limit for a minority to rise to the top. Obviously, this was proven fragile because its precondition was that the Party’s administrative control could override communal bonding; but in fact, the two must be compatible and the former must be rooted in the latter. If the Communist Party’s governance was to drive the Party’s control beyond communal bonding and push the local elites away from their communal roots and attach themselves more to the Party, it would create a tendency that was destined to weaken the Party’s connective power to empower the individual nations. The indigenous elites would have to constantly balance between the drive toward the center and the connectivity to their local roots. This balance would collapse sooner or later because of the irreconcilable inner conflict within the vanguard group, the very pivot. It was a matter of time that either the local roots would overcome the top-down control of the Party or vice versa. When the Community Party as the ruling vanguard group set out to make others its obedient followers, the balance between the Party elites inside the Party across national lines coexisted alongside with the balance between the Party as a group and other social groups in each nation. The balance could tilt toward either the nationalist side or the Union side. 40 Grievances were always there. Over the years, the Party, instead of making dependable partners and interdependent to one another, exercised bigbrotherism over the other groups in ethno-nations. The big-brotherism was exercised often at the expense of everybody, at least in the eyes of the supposed beneficiaries. For the poor and weak nationalities who received aid, they complained about control. For Russia and Ukraine, the two biggest ones among the nations, they felt they were made a victim of the big-brotherism by sacrificing its material interests for the benefit of others. In fact, everybody felt being victimized by the Party control. Economic factors were a big part of people’s shared experience. The Communist Party leadership in Moscow intentionally designed and strictly enforced a division of labor system across the USSR. As simple as a shoe, its different parts could be produced in many different places across the vast landmass of the country thousands of kilometers away from each other—one part produced in Vladivostok in the far east and another part in Tallinn, Estonia, and assembled in another place

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far away from both Vladivostok and Tallinn. A coercive division of labor and specialization were enforced. There was a clear political rationality behind this economically irrational design: to minimize economic independence within each Republic and shape the economic interdependence within the USSR into center and periphery so that strengthen the control from the center. This was clearly a big-brotherly logic of top-down control. This design naturally increased the difficulty of central planning. But the key issue was that the absolute power of the central economic ministries easily became arrogant. It intruded itself to override the organic linkage of the economic units. These built-in features of the command economy provoked resentment everywhere but more so in the non-Russian republics where they were perceived as threatening vital republic interests. In their eyes, Moscow at thousands of kilometers away ignored the social, cultural, and ecological interests of local communities. 41 But complaints could be kept in check, if the Party itself was united across the national lines. Toward the end of the 1980s, the fragile balance reached a breaking point, what Lenin worried about the most happened. This time, the crisis was within the Party, the vanguard group itself saw fracture within its own ranks along ethno-national lines, just as Lenin worked the hardest to prevent. Ethno-nationalism had become a very serious issue at the time, not because of clash of cultures or national identities, nor about national equality. This came as Gorbachev’s reforms unintentionally split the Party. It shifted the source of power for the local party leaders and pushed them to look for support from their communal bonding instead of the administrative center in Moscow. Because of the pressure to encourage greater grassroots energy the reform pushed, especially democratization, interest of the local Community Party leaders were altered. Democratization meant local roots, meaning a new path toward power would be local, based on communal bonding, which was exactly in the opposite direction from the previous one, the one that determined their career advancement and source of power exclusively originating from their superiors in the Party hierarchy, ultimately centralized in Moscow. The reform showed them that they also need to depend on their perceived responsiveness and connection to their local constituents. The measure for this local connection was success or failure in competitive elections, a key item of the reform of democratization. Ground was shifted. In essence this was not about the loosened control from Moscow. This was about a clear signal to the party elites in each republics: you must reassemble your power base; you must localize your source of power. As a result, there developed a driving force to assemble the local elites, the modern urban activists, mainly within the Communist Party, in the republics and national autonomic areas. They stimulated the locally developed cultural intelligentsia and, more and more, the elites began to link themselves to their local community, common nationality, and shared historical experiences. A corre-

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lation seemed clear: the stronger the community elites linked to the local community, the more likely they moved more and more away from the central hierarchy. For the communist parties in the Central Asian Republics, the drive for separation was much less intense since there was much less democratization so the party elites did not link so closely to their communal base and therefore did not feel so much pressure for independence. Whereas the communist parties in the other republics felt the powerful communal bonds and the density of contacts among the local elites which offered a national base for organizations away from the gravity of the Party. Once this group of people occupied a dominant and prestigious place in local society, they would inevitably move the ethno-national republics toward national autonomy in its genuine sense. The most powerful driving force fragmenting the USSR thus firmly established itself. In this way, conflicts between the Party elites along national lines stimulated the conflicts between the Party and other social groups in each Republic, which generated intense ethnonationalist sentiment among Russians and non-Russians alike and it usually took extreme and chauvinistic forms. One incident did happen that set off a whole chain of events at an explosive speed to expose the effect the powerful trend of shifting loyalty of the local Community Party leaders—the first time in the Soviet Communist Party’s history that it spilt completely along national lines: the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh by two Soviet Republics Armenia and Azerbaijan Republic, a territorial dispute in June 1988. The Soviet Communist Party as an organization fragmented, so did the entire Soviet system. The trend quickly developed into a situation when divisions along national lines had proven more powerful than the Party discipline; emotional attachment to national identities more powerful than the commands from Moscow. Facing the trend, Gorbachev and the other top Party leaders were powerless; the once mighty and forceful CPSU as an organization did nothing, except a desperate coup attempting to save the Union by force. In the end, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, led by their respective former Communist leaders, sign the death certificate of the Union on December 8, 1991, before the once mighty Soviet Union was formally dissolved on December 25, 1991. 42 It exposed a truth about cross-nationality governance via a vanguard group: socialism as it was practiced by the Soviet Communist Party could not create “a new historical community” in which national antagonisms were obliterated. Soviet governance enforced by the Party in the name of socialism would not automatically eliminate nationalistic attachments and loyalties. The Leninist dream that a new communist multinational community, in which all its members live a life of peace, equality, prosperity, and all good things, under the big-brotherly guardianship of the Communist Party, would not become a reality. In fact, the fracture started from within the Communist Party of the USSR. Lenin would be hugely surprised and saddened when

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nationalistic sentiment was used as a readily available weapon for the power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev and among party elites inside the vanguard group as well, before it spread to the general population. It might be safe to say that coercive control without taking roots in communal bonding was shaky to the say the least. Coercive control could never overcome communal bonding and replace it completely with an administrative system. A nation was more than just a group of people who shared an area to make a living on a geographical map. It meant a people’s habitat, a social and cultural sphere within which a people’s history evolved and their minds and hearts were uniformly shaped by such shared experiences. All these very sensitive factors were impossible to simply translate into rational calculation of material interests, and therefore could not be thoroughly reshaped by political control. FAILURE OF CONNECTION AMONG THE VANGUARD GROUPS BEYOND THE UNION Another indicator of the Soviet Communist Party’s failure in its logic of governance was its inability to exercise connective power over other communist parties across globe. Communist Parties in other countries in general and the Soviet Communist Party in particular advocated a doctrine of internationalism. But this ideology ended up in empty talk. It was not because the USSR did not exercise its hard power in military or economic fronts or its soft power in indoctrinating its little brothers. The key reason for its failure was its weak connective power. Theoretically, an internationalized proletariat class would be the social foundation for all of them and a worldwide proletariat revolution would bring them all together. As “Working men of the world, unite!” they become one. But this aspect of Marxism, which Lenin seemed to believe, was incompatible with the labor movements across the globe. Workers organized unions, not for a purpose of overthrowing the capitalist class, but for bargaining with it. As capitalism progressed with all its problems, the proletariat seemed attaching more and more closely to the capitalist class, more dependent on it for a good life or a not-so-good life. As is pointed out, for Marxism, “one thing is certainly not true: the idea that, at the height of such a crisis, the proletariat will rise and, throwing all the propertied classes into the dust, will take the lead of society, abolish private property in the means of production, and create a regime where there are no more classes.” 43 History had soundly proven that the proletariat class was not likely to be an action unit because it could not generate sufficient international connections to achieve international unification—it was less connected internally within itself and more connected externally to the capitalist classes it coexisted with or even attached

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to. The proletariat class was not a standing alone social force internationally. Its very existence depended on its attachment to the capitalist class within national borders. Its class struggle against the latter was only a manifestation of its dependency. It came into being and benefited from industrialization as a result of the capitalist class’s drive for profit and market expansion. Employment had been the life-line for the proletariat class and profits trickled down from the capitalist class’s market expansion and profit-seeking had been the major source of the proletariat class’s well-being. In fact, as capitalist classes gained power across the globe, the proletariat class in each advanced industrialized nations shared the profit in a significant way, because of its connection to the capitalist class as a coexisting part of the business networks at home. The real living standard of the proletariat class had been dependent on the capitalist class’ profit-making. Economic crises like the Great Depression and any recessions of smaller scale hurt both. They fundamentally shared the web of business networks and therefore the fate of capitalism. The “middle class” was in fact the label members of the proletariat class would more readily use. Nationalist sentiment and inter-class connections within nations were proven to be more powerful in mobilizing and organizing proletariat class in advanced industrialized countries. The former had the power of spiritual and emotional appeal and the latter offered concrete material benefits, whereas class consciousness, class organization, and class struggle could provide neither. Lenin fought for the idea of a “world proletariat revolution” and but pragmatically chose “socialism in one country” instead. Socialism, as well as communism, was national from the beginning of its practice and any effort to make it go beyond national borders would have to operate under the logic of big-brotherly upward dependence, which was unsustainable. Soviet communism therefore had a hard time having international appeal, let alone effective global governance, across national borders. The reason was clear: it did not have a global force to rely on. As the vanguard group of the proletariat class, the hope for communist parties of different nations working together internationally would be shared class interests. As always when connective power was established and strengthened, there were “push” and “pull” aspects of it. If a world proletariat class did exist, it would be the “pull” aspect to draw each communist party toward the unified global class and therefore attach to the class and one another. But since this international social force was absent, the “pull” making the communist parties act would be mainly from their own country. For the communist parties to connect to the CPSU, the CPSU must possess enough power to “pull” them into its orbit. This power must be able to reach deep into those little brothers’ own countries and empower the social forces in those countries so that the little brothers felt the “pull” from within, in addition to just from without. As is clear, connective power requires dense social networks and their wide reach

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to empower others and at the same time gain power from the linkage. However, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union basically eliminated all the autonomous connection channels and links as intermediaries within its own territory and encouraged other communist parties to do the same. It was too confident about its ability through mass mobilization and professional organization. In reality, the communist party’s monopoly on social connections without interdependent helpers greatly damaged its connective power to link and empower other social groups both inside and outside its sphere of ruling. When they developed inter-party linkages between them, the connection was poor in content and weak in strength. But at the same time, the CPSU “pushed,” the pressure from Moscow to make sure the little brothers did not deviate from its orbit by compromising too much to their domestic forces. This further damaged the CPSU’s connective power by losing its ability to empower the social groups inside its little brother’s territory. It therefore became a “pushy” bully and the connection could not be maintained with a mutual empowerment. Although it seemed less and less pushy since the death of the “pushy” Stalin. His successors Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and especially Gorbachev were simply keeping the “red line” of the Communist Party and did more helping than demanding. In fact, they ended up in more reacting to what happened in those countries than acting on its own initiatives. But the connection still failed. Clearly, the problem was the “pull” aspect of the relationship. There was simply not enough power to pull the communist parties toward the CPSU. Although it constantly offered helping hands, it was neither relationally enough to foster dense networks nor functional enough to be indispensable in others’ lives. 44 The national communist parties survived as all groups did: to pursue the group’s selfish purpose, which would most likely and most critically be about strengthening their control over their national territories. Hence, they would strive for gaining connections to the social forces inside their countries and felt the “pull” from these inside forces because these were the forces that were more likely to empower the party, more than the CPSU. Therefore, the world had witnessed tensions and conflicts, even military ones, between the CPSU’s borderless internationalist communism and the other communist parties’ borderconfined nationalism, more accurately, tribalism or clan spirit. There was misunderstanding about the relationship between the CPSU and the Communist International, Comintern. As Borkenau pointed out: “It would be a grave mistake to overestimate the role of Russia, or, more correctly, to regard the basic character of the communist parties simply as a result of ‘order from Moscow.’” 45 The communist parties in Western European countries were organized in a different way with a different membership pool, simply corresponding to their local situation. While the Russian Communist Party was organized as a vanguard group, the Comintern communist parties in the West were different. They consisted of essentially of

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shifting elements, which came and went. The membership was a new one every five years and they therefore experienced to a great extent rapid changes in policy. They were “pulled” by the local social forces fighting the immediate benefits for them and with them and strove for direct connection to the local working class and beyond. Therefore their goal and daily struggle were not compatible with Moscow’s. 46 The more serious relationship between the world communist parties was the Soviet Communist Party’s “brotherly relationship” with its Eastern European counterparts. It was on very shaky ground to begin with. The USSR organized the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, CMEA, as cross-nation vehicles for its governance of the Eastern Europe communist states. Both displayed enormous hard power militarily and economically, but lack of connective power despite its forced division of labor on the production and distribution fronts. The ruling communist parties in Eastern European countries were still hard to govern. 47 The whole process highlighted the idea of connective power: both the hard and soft powers were ineffective and the effectiveness of the connective power was the missing key. Between the communist parties and among them, it was a sort of connective power contest that defined their relationship. In this contest, the CPSU was on the weaker side because of its elimination of all autonomous social forces that would have played crucial roles as intermediaries to have connected different groups of people, whereas other communist parties in the Eastern European nations kept some of these groups so these groups formed a much denser, richer, wider, and more solid connective power among themselves and between them and the CPSU. The CPSU was alone and weak to compete—a very embarrassing situation for a big power holder with overwhelming hard power throughout and more attractive soft power, at least in the beginning stage. The Polish case provides an excellent example to highlight this point. Stalin mocked the Catholic Pope for his weakness in lack of military prowess. But his own control based on army divisions was only weaker. It was very ironic that it ended up being defeated in Poland by the Catholic Church that had absolutely zero division of army. The reason was clear: no matter how many divisions of armed forces the Soviet had, its governance was nationalistic and therefore subject to the dividing and destructive power of ethno-nationalism, whereas the Catholic Church’s governance in Poland was derived from its strong connection to the social groups of strong local roots in that country. Despite the fact that the Soviet Communist Party was in fact the “saver” of Poland from Nazi Germany whereas Catholic Church at least did very little in that regard and therefore possessed stronger soft power in addition to its hard power, Stalin’s hard power theory was proven wrong. It had only temporary effects, whereas connective power was more enduring. The “Solidarity Movement” was also about the connective power developed

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by an autonomic social force. On the surface, it was a movement of the working class fighting for their economic interests. But if we look deeper, we see it as an embodiment of the connective power of all social groups that joined together and empowered each other in a connective power contest in which the Polish Communist Party and more so the CPSU lost. 48 The CPSU’s relationship with other Eastern European communist parties also showed the effect of it connective power. Despite its overwhelming hard power over those small countries, its connective power was actually weaker than most of them. Therefore, in a connective power contest, it lost. Tito and his Yugoslavian Communist Party started its fracture with the Soviet Communist Party as early as the late 1940s when Stalin was still alive and the Soviet Russian hard power was at its peak. Since Tito’s army liberated Yugoslavia from the German Nazis independently without Russian support, the Yugoslavia communist party had strong connective power locally, whereas the Soviet one had zero. Therefore, the signal was clear: without enough connective power to the nation as a whole, the CPSU could not expect a bigbrotherly governance. Unless a communist party was forced, it would not submit to the CPSU leadership. The big tank hard power was not scary if you could not use it effectively; and the natural and warm “brotherly” soft power between the communist comrades was in reality unnatural and cold, despite the historical and geo-political linkage between the two countries. 49 Hungary was another case. A proud nation with deep history, open culture, and a vibrant middle class free spirit of independence, Hungarian Communist Party presided over a nation with a strong drive for independence or a interdependent international relationship. It therefore deviated from the Soviet orbit and wavered in 1956 before the Soviet intervention. But the influence lingered since its connections to Central and Eastern European nations were dense and deep, especially its vibrant middle class people. 50 Then we saw the “Prague Spring” in 1968 and the Russian tanks roaring down the street in Prague. This case exposed the weakness of the Soviet Communist Party in connecting to its little brothers. Tanks could crash the visible protests but not the invisible warm “spring air,” in the form of “human face of socialism.” The “spring air” not only continued in Czechoslovakia, but also gradually but solidly spread across Eastern European communist countries, even inside the USSR. The CPSU actually submitted to this “spring air” and started to promote, although covertly, individuality, self-expression, pleasure-seeking, in work and consumption. Behind the “spring air” was the linkage between Czech intelligentsia and their counterparts across the Communist camp in Eastern Europe and the USSR. 51 The Romanian Communist Party had always been alienated from the “big brother” since the nationalistic sentiment within the county and the Romanian Communist Party had to use nationalism to legitimize its power. It resolved to attack the CPSU on the issues of Moldova and claimed its ethnic and historical linkage to the people

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in that area. 52 Bulgaria was the only outlier in this group of Eastern Europe communist parties. The reason seemed clear: the USSR had stronger connective power to the social groups there. Beside the historical linkage, the Orthodox Church and a large Russian minority population in the country bestowed a certain level of connective power to the USSR and therefore enabled it to empower the Bulgarian Communist Party to have an easier time gaining communal support without having to make too much effort dealing with difficult issues inside their own country. 53 Of course, the opposite of the Bulgaria situation was the German problem. There was no doubt that the West Germans had much stronger connective power to its Eastern countrymen, much more than the Russians. Shrewd West German leaders like Konrad Adenauer knew this very well so they decided against the idea of unified but neutral Germany for the time being because to build up close ties with the US and the West camp was more critical than German unification, which would come sooner or later. This decision created a huge headache to the USSR, and the ugly and embarrassing Berlin Wall came into being as a result. And it was not only a symbol of weakness, a clearly indication of powerlessness in connecting to the German people, but also a damaging weapon used by the enemy to further weaken its connective power. 54 Its fall openly announced to the world the failure of the USSR, specifically the CPSU’s hard and soft powers. Both the Warsaw Pact and the CMEA could not save it. The Cold War therefore ended at that point. By exercising its hard power, the Soviet Communist Party and Russian people spilled blood to liberate the Eastern European nations but could not earn the real connection. It even failed to connect to the local communist party of its own creation, let alone the general public. The more the Russians believed they deserved the right to control, the more resistance they would encounter because of its short of connective power to the power agents in those nations. An insightful observer would surely sense the weakness of the Russian connective power in terms of maintaining its governance. Russian tanks clearly symbolized not strength but weakness. The more we saw the Russian tanks, the more fragile the connection between the Soviet Communist Party and its Eastern European counterparts. In fact, the need for local connection and the roots in local connection had made communism in each country be fused with rigid nationalism from the very beginning, whether it be the Russian sentiment of a “Third Rome” or the Chinese drive to return to its old glory. In the meantime, their communist experience, working as a monopolized power as a vanguard group with history in their hands, fostered a spirit of intolerance, self-righteousness, oversimplification, and overconfidence. The only social force that they facilitated was most likely to be the populist groups. In the process, they not only eliminated the autonomously interdependent social forces but also destroyed the relatively internationally oriented elements in their own societies, espe-

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cially the business and intellectual elites who were in the position to link the country to the global web. Without such internationally oriented groups in their societies, the result would be nationalist chauvinism. The Chinese case is telling. For the US, China was a “lost and found” but for the USSR, “family-feud.” China and the US fought two bloody wars during the Cold War but with totally different motives. For the Korean War, the Chinese fought to show solidarity with the USSR; for the Vietnam War, the Chinese fought to compete in the sphere of influence with the USSR. The Chinese Communist Party gained its power fundamentally independently from the CPSU and the Comintern. As a matter of fact, the CPSU and the Comintern did more harm than good when they “helped.” They made the Chinese Party more dogmatic and more international but along the way, made it divorced from its roots in rural China. This soviet influence was exactly what Mao Ze-dong and his comrades within the Party fought very hard to eliminate. When Mao took complete control of the Party during the Yanan era, the Chinese Communist Party became a Chinese IntellectualPeasant Party with some urban link and very nationalistic. For its selfish group interests and for the nation as a whole, it worked with the Guo Min Dang, the Nationalist Party, in fighting the Japanese. In the process, it built up solid local roots, mainly in the rural areas. After it drove the Nationalist Party to Taiwan and gained national power, its connective power was still deeply rooted in China, not international communism, despite the fact that it received massive economic and military aids from the USSR. An interesting question would be: why did the French, the Germans, let alone the British, become interdependent partners with the US after the Marshall Plan and NATO, whereas under the leadership of Mao Ze-dong the CCP quickly became an arch enemy of the USSR not too long after Stalin’s death while still receiving massive and vital aids from the USSR and despite a mutual assistance treaty including defense? The struggle between the two former comrades lasted through 1989 until almost the end of the Cold War when Gorbachev visited China and normalized the nation-to-nation relationship but not as communist comrades any more. They even fought a “hot” bloody war in the late 1960s over a minor territorial dispute. What was the issue? If we introduce the “push/pull” idea, we might see the Russians were not so pushy, at least after Stalin. They behaved more like a supportive big brother, with generous money and knowhows. And they were more reactive to the Chinese attitude than actively imposing their own agenda. So the “push” factor seemed not there. But the “pull” factor spoke loud and clear: the USSR had close to zero connective power over the Chinese whereas the US had huge among of connective power over its Western European partners. The US government together with countless social groups and mainly the business networks, as well as ethnic linkages, developed very dense empowering connections and rich in con-

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tents. But for the USSR, its networking connections to the Chinese social groups were virtually absent, except the few good feelings left by the interpersonal interactions by individual engineers, teachers, technicians, and workers who worked alongside the Chinese. From the hard power perspective, the USSR devoted equally, if not more, resources to China; from the soft power perspective, Russian cultural influence in China was huge in the 1950s—Russian music, Russian literature, Russian construction styles, Russian painting, Russian fashion and food were everywhere in China and deeply attractive to the Chinese and admired by them. But both hard power and soft power were proven superficial. More fundamentally was the connective power that was so weak; therefore the whole process generated the incompatibility of the relationship in general. 55 To this point, we might be able to say: the Russian big-brotherly logic of governance clearly made the Leninist drive for an international organization of communist parties a unrealistic dream and the communist universalism a myth. This governing logic simply could not maintain dependable partners. THE PATH TOWARD INTERDEPENDENT PARTNERSHIP The Soviet governance system was doomed to failure from the start. It originated in a very special circumstance in Russian history and had little global resonance. This historical inevitability was vividly described by insightful writers like Orwell, Zamiatin, Solzhenitsyn, and Akhmatova, as well as many experts in international relations and political science. They used words like “monolithic” and “totalitarian” to describe the system and believed it had a clearly purpose of world domination. This view is inaccurate. They reached this conclusion from a wrong perspective. The USSR losing the Cold War and its system collapsing was, to a lesser degree, due to its big-bully like oppression and more its weakness in building up, enabling, connecting with and mobilizing the power agents both inside its own territory and globally. Its hard power and soft power eventually became hollow as its connective power diminished. Its system failed not because it was too powerfully oppressive but because its oppressive dictatorship made itself powerless in doing anything. Toward the end of the Cold War and a few years before the system completely collapsed, it desperately needed talented and entrepreneurial people, the people who were autonomously independent enough to be dependable to the Party, instead of dependent on the Party; the people who had the drive and ability to take initiative and get the job done; power agents who were powerful enough to empower the Party instead of sucking energy away from the Party. Unfortunately, the Party, the vanguard group, had been working so hard to eliminate this kind of people. As they disappeared from

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society, the Party became powerless and the vanguard group lost its energy to charge ahead; even if very few in the group could, nobody could follow. Gorbachev realized this, although a little late; even Ligachev knew this situation very clearly. Only in 1985 after the “grey generation” of the old leadership all were “gone to meet Marx,” they decided they could not live that way. They began to look for an answer, and got “perestroika.” Why? Freedom and democracy, glasnost, individualism, humanity were all the things the Soviet system worked hard to minimize but they were essential for building up, strengthening, and empowering an entrepreneurial social force that would be interdependent enough to empower the Party and sustain the system. The system’s energy would depend on individuals feeling like human beings and so living and working with full energy. The power to control would sooner or later exhaust itself without a process of mutual empowerment. Monopolizing power by eliminating other power agents was a wrong way to go; it hurt others, it hurt oneself. Simple yet profound. Gorbachev obviously recognized this truth but had to encounter another simple yet profound truth: individuals are the creation of their times; the creation of the infrastructure of their times; the creation of the system of the infrastructure of their times. No matter how hard he and his team worked, no matter how intelligent he and his team were, no matter how favorable the environment was, it took time to change the system, to change the structure within the system, to alter the time, so that a new generation of individuals could be created. The process of restructuring a sufficient infrastructure of an energetic system would have to include the institution of private ownership, or a mixed form of it, as well as an institution of fully developed market for free exchange of products, guaranteed fair competition among enterprises, and division of labor based on natural talent and competitive advantage. However, the Soviet Communist Party was already too weak to do much and it was soon swept away by the strong waves made by its own elites. The Party elites were still in control of the resources of the Party, despite the Party itself disappeared, which included the government’s executive functions, the military and the defense industry, as well as other vital areas of the Russian economy, among other things. They essentially owned society in the first place. But the old “Party hands” were still “hands” without their own brain. Even the judiciary was still looking for order from the top administration. Even Gorbachev himself was a “partyness” after all—he never overcame the authoritarian instinct he grew up with, and his successor Boris Yeltsin was the same. The Communist Party as an organization had gone but the fundamental issue of the ownership of Russian society was resolved within the same group of Russian elites—whether as members of the Communist Party or as a knot of an oligarchic business network. They had a difficult time coming up with a “normal” leadership on all levels of Russian life. It seemed that individuals were still hostages to a system that enforced

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dependency. Interdependent partnership could hardly develop. The centrally controlled governance therefore had a strong foundation. For the elites, and owners, of the society, it was much easier to rely on simple and safe command-and-administer routines. This internal traditional composition was certainly not helpful in facilitating an internal network that was more likely to serve as an agent to transform Russian society. The American goal during the Cold War was to defeat the Soviet Communist Party and the US got what it wished for. However, the victory of the US over the USSR was like winning a soccer game. The winner might be stronger and more effective overall, but its victory did not automatically mean it was better in every aspect as a team. The loser lost for a reason but it did not have to be completely weak on every front. Victory for one side did not necessarily mean defeat of the other in all aspects. At the same time, the winner might win on its own strength, but it was also possible that it won on its opponent’s weakness and the willingness to surrender so that it gained the opportunity to overcome its weakness and became stronger. For us to better make sense of the outcome of the Cold War, the conventional winner mentality is to be avoided. The United States and its Western Allies won the Cold War through the global web of interdependent partnership and Soviet leaders especially Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin all joined the United States’ side claiming victory as winners themselves, because they believed they were partners, too. They believed they acted in their country’s best interests by promoting the elements of their society that were most closely affiliated with the West and therefore more “normal” in the eyes of the Western mainstream, albeit these elements were weak in Russian society and could not become dominant without a steady power to facilitate its further development. They were the interdependent partners to the West, and to their own society as well. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were the products of the most connected force of that moment in Russian history, not the results of the counter-forces against it. This force abandoned the corrupted and no longer connective Communist Party and joined the American side. The Soviet Communist Party was the organizational form of the Russian elites who survived and thrived in specific historical situations. Its governing logic was flawed big-brotherly conquest by utilizing communal bonding, the Russian-style communism. However, these people, despite their party label and ideological cover, were practical and dynamic. Once they realized the Soviet communist system never worked as it was advertised, they strove for change. As Sergei Arutiunov would tell: “In fact, extreme prowess in adopting to changing conditions and heroic stoicism in defending one’s homeostasis are probably two side of a single coin of Russian character. We see this today when about ninety percent of the politicians in the Party of Power, all bureaucrats, all successful managers of private businesses, are the same former important Communist Party functionaries, or Komsomol leaders, or ex-

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KGB officers. We find them today quite sincerely denouncing communist dogmas and advocating the market economy.” 56 Gorbachev would be a good example: a “partyness” but a dynamic one. His raising to the top in the Party was strongly recommended by Andropov, a former KGB head and a wellrespected representative and leader of the Russian elites within the Party. He was accepted by his comrades because they needed his leadership. They all fully realized the fact that “We can’t go on living like this.” Gorbachev’s announced aspiration was to transform the Soviet Union into a “great power,” a “normal society” that was to be integrated into the world community. The linkage between “great” and “normal” was remarkable. To be “normal” as an integrated part of the world community was a means for Russia to be “great” again as the old ways of being an odd man out in a prosperous Europe and beyond no longer working. To make Russia be great again, Gorbachev did not want it to be isolated, viewed as aggressive and even threatening. Instead, his way to greatness was for the Soviet Union to be an integral part of Europe, to be respected and therefore influential. Gorbachev’s aspiration struck a responsive chord among the Russian elites across Soviet Society. They attempted to make Russia a partner to the US and its Western Allies, not a defeated and dysfunctional enemy. The result of their efforts was the Russian state capitalism. Therefore, Americans got what they wished for only in a sense that challenge to its global governance system from the vanguard type was gone, possibly forever, but a different monster emerged. The Russian system of governance dies hard. It transformed into another form. This new form was state capitalism. 57 It is the Cold War legacy for Russia as a result of its transformation from socialism. The Russian state as a governing body was not only a political entity but also an economic one—a continuation of the fundamental Russian big-brotherly governance. The state became a leading player in the free-market system competing and networking on the global web of business networks. It was supposed to be a step forward toward a free and open market system so that Russia could develop its business network and develop a “normal” governance system. The transformation from command-planned socialist economy to state capitalism made a great impact on the world. The state-owned or statefavored elements of the Russian economy formed a strong business network on the global web of interdependent partnership. This business network enabled Moscow to affect the world in a more powerful way than the Soviet Union during the Cold War years in the following ways: strategic investments, trade and price regulation, and supplying or withholding vital natural resources. Of course, it seems that it is not without weakness, which is its inherited dependency on a top-down administrative system. As this type of system has always led to, the Russian state capitalism is also weak in generating dependable partners because its internal logic does not encourage the

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elements of interdependence, as it is featured by monopoly and bureaucracy. Besides top-down administrative control, corporatist communal hierarchy is another character of Russian state capitalism, which is also in place to suppress interdependent partnership. But the moral is: never look down upon the loser when you win. It was obvious that there was no known formula for creating an interdependent network of partners out of a command-planned system. The Chinese did it rather successfully in a way as the Chinese Communist Party’s leader Deng Xiao-ping famously mentioned: “Feeling the stone while crossing the river” (when you don’t know how deep the river is). However in any case, the successful exercise of connective power by building and linking to interdependent power agents was for sure a key piece of the puzzle for a gradual process of establishing the system. As Isaiah Berlin insightfully pointed out a long time ago: “Men’s act may seem free of the social nexus, but they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. . . . ‘Power’ and ‘accident’ are but names for ignorance of the causal chains, but the chains exist whether we feel them or not. . . . But all is well: for we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.” 58 NOTES 1. Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 288–289. 2. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, “The Organization of the Communist Camp,” World Politics, Vol. 13, No. 2 (January, 1961), pp. 175–209. 3. “An American Impression of the USSR in the 1930s,” in Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 17–21. 4. Been Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Henry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 5. Alex Inkeles, Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life In A Totalitarian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 6. Alfred B. Evans, “Rereading Lenin’s State and Revolution,” Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 1–19. 7. In Gale Stokes, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Maria Kovacs, “Reasons of the Eastern European Revolutions of 1989” (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991, Occasional Paper/East European Studies, No. 31). 8. Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 290. 9. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 419. 10. Leonard Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second edition (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970); Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Lenin and Stalin (New York: Longman, 1981).

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11. Robert Tucker, ed., Stalinism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Robert W. Orttung, “The Russian Right and the Dilemma of Party Organization,” Soviet Studies, 1992, Vol. 44, Issue 3, pp. 445–479. 12. V. A. Semykin, “Creating Organizational Structure of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) Political Bodies and Organizations in the Active Army in 1918–1920s (Some Aspects of the Problem),” In the World of Scientific Discoveries/ V Mire Nauchnykh Otkrytiy, 2014, Vol. 60, Issue 11, pp. 4519–4540; Amy Knight, The KGB and Civil Military Relations,” in Soldiers and the Soviet State: Civil-Military Relations From Brezhnev to Gorbachev, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 93–125; Condoleezza Rice, “The Party, the Military, and Decision Authority in the Soviet Union,” World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Oct. 1987), pp. 55–81. 13. David Satter, “The KGB,” Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 213–245; Howard L. Biddulph, “Soviet Intellectual Dissert as a Political Counter-Culture,” The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sept. 1972), pp. 522–533. 14. Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 287. 15. Robert S. Lynd, “Planned Social Solidarity in the Soviet Union,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 3 (November, 1945). 16. R. D. Charques, “Education in the Soviet Union,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939), Vol. 11, No. 4, (July 1932), pp. 493–511. 17. Wayne DiFranceisco, Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet Political Culture and ‘Covert Participation’ in Policy Implementation,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September, 1984), pp. 603–621; Malte Rolf, “A Hall of Mirrors: Soviet Culture under Stalinism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 601–630. 18. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (London: Macmillan, 1959). 19. Stephen R. Burant, “The Influence of Russian Tradition on the Political Style of the Soviet Elite,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 273–293. 20. Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev Kremlin: The Memories of Yegor Ligachev (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), Afterword. 21. Robert G. Kaiser, “The U.S.S.R. in Decline,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, Winter 1988/89. 22. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated, edited with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 196–252. 23. Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). 24. William Taubma, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017); Robert G. Kaiser, “Gorbachev: Triumph and Failure,” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1991. 25. Leonard Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second edition (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970); Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Lenin and Stalin (New York: Longman, 1981); Robert Tucker, ed., Stalinism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Robert W. Orttung, “The Russian Right and the Dilemma of Party Organization,” Soviet Studies, 1992, Vol. 44, Issue 3, pp. 445–479. 26. Robert G. Kaiser, “The U.S.S.R. in Decline,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, Winter 1988/89. 27. Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Shatskiy, Sean Harrison, Pushkin Poems: A Russian Dual Language Book (Maestro Publishing Group, 2017); Clarence Brown, ed., The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). 28. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin Classics, 1978), p. 297. 29. Aileen Kelly, “Introduction,” in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin Classics, 1978), p. xxxiv. 30. Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 289. 31. “An American Impression of the USSR in the 1930s,” in Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 17–21.

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32. Robert G. Kaiser, “The U.S.S.R. in Decline,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, Winter 1988/89. 33. “An American Impression of the USSR in the 1930s,” in Jussi M. Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 19. 34. Robert G. Kaiser, “The U.S.S.R. in Decline,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, Winter 1988/89. 35. Robert G. Kaiser, “The U.S.S.R. in Decline,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, Winter 1988/89. 36. Isabelle Kreindler, “A Neglected Source of Lenin’s Nationality Policy,” Slavic Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, (March, 1977), pp. 86–100. 37. Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance,” Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 294–303; Francine Hirsch, “Toward an Empire of Nations: BorderMaking and the Formation of Soviet National Identities,” The Russian Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (April, 2000), pp. 201–226. 38. Alfred B. Evans, “Rereading Lenin’s State and Revolution,” Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 1987), Pp. 1–19. 39. Gail W. Lapidus, “Gorbachev’s Nationalities Problem,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 4, Fall 1989. 40. Ellen Jones, Fred W. Grupp, “Measuring Nationality Trends in the Soviet Union: A Research Note,” Slavic Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 112–122. 41. Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse: Understanding Historical Change (New York: M. E. Sharp, 1998), pp. 25–59; 98–113; Gail W. Lapidus, “Gorbachev’s Nationalities Problem,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 4, Fall 1989. 42. Willam E. Odom, “Soviet Union and After: Old and New Concepts,” World Politics, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Oct. 1992), pp. 66–98; Glennys Young, “Fetishizing the Soviet Collapse: Historical Rupture and the Historiography of (Early) Soviet Socialism,” The Russia Review, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January, 2007), pp. 95–122. 43. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 420–421. 44. Mark Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 83, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 788–854. 45. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 416. 46. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 419; 420. 47. Mark Kramer, “Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine: A New Era in Soviet-East European Relations?” International Security, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter 1989–1990), pp. 25–67. 48. William Avery, “Political Legitimacy and Crisis in Poland,” Political Science Quarterly (Spring, 1988) Pp. 111–130; Paul G. Lewis, “Obstacles To The Establishment of Political Legitimacy In Communist Poland,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr. 1982), pp. 125–147. 49. Fred Warner Negal, “The Communist Party of Yugoslavia,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (March, 1957), pp. 85–111; Mark A. Cichock, “The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1980s: A Relationship In Flux,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 53–74. 50. James Mark, “Society, Resistance and Revolution: The Budapest Middle Class and the Hungary Communist State 1948–1956,” The English Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 488 (September 2005), pp. 963–986; James Mark, “Antifacism, the 1956 Revolution and the Politics of Communist Autobiographies in Hungary, 1944–2000,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 8 (December, 2006), pp. 1209–1240. 51. Anna J. Soneman, “Socialism With A Human Face: The Leadership and Legacy of the Prague Spring,” The History Teacher, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Nov. 2015), pp. 103–125; Anna Paretskaya, “The Soviet Communist Party and the Other Spirit of Capitalism,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 28, No. 4 (December, 2010), pp. 377–401; Laura Cashman, “Remembering 1948 and

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1968: Reflections on Two Pivotal Years in Czech and Slovak History,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 60, No. 10 (December, 2008), pp. 1645–1658. 52. Keith Hitchins, “Romania,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (October, 1992), pp. 1064–1083. 53. Maria Todorova, “Bulgaria,” The American Historical Review , Vol. 97, No. 4 (October, 1992), pp. 1105–1117. 54. William A. Pelz, “From the Berlin Wall to the Prague Spring: A New Generation of Europeans,” in A People’s History of Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2016), pp. 183–196; Dina Rome Spechler and Marin C. Spechler, “A Reassessment of the Burden of Eastern Europe on the USSR,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 61, No. 9 (November, 2009), pp. 1645–1657; Kristina Spohr, “German Unification: Between Official History, Academic Scholarship and Political Memoirs,” The Historical Journal , Vol. 43, No. 3 (September, 2000), pp. 869–888. 55. John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 54–84; Michael H. Hunt, The Genesis of Chinese Communists Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Wishnick, “Russia and China,” Asian Survey, Vol. 41, No. 5 (Sept/Oct., 2001), pp. 797–821; Lorenz M. Luthi, “Restoring Chaos to History: Sino-Soviet-American Relations, 1969,” The China Quarterly, No. 210 (June, 2012), pp. 378–397; Lyle J. Goldstein, “Return to Zhenbao Island: Who Stated Shooting and Why It Matters,” The China Quarterly, No. 168 (December, 2001), pp. 985–997; David Kerr, “The Sino-Russian Partnership and U.S. Policy toward North Korea: From Hegemony to Concert in Northeast Asia,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3 (September, 2005), pp. 411–437. 56. Sergei Arutinuov, “Introduction: Russian Culture in the 20th Century,” in Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Corer and John Rickman, Russian Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. xvi–xvii. 57. Jude Wanniski, “The Future of Russian Capitalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Spring 1992). 58. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin Classics, 1978), p. 49.

Chapter Four

The Cold War Wisdom A Frame Critical Analysis

KENNAN’S CONTAINMENT IDEA The Cold War revealed, for the first time in human history, the logic of human togetherness. It has two aspects: the necessity for human beings to live together and the possibility for them to do so. George Kennan was one of the first people who recognized this logic and offered his unique view on both the necessity and possibility of the logic. First of all, togetherness did not happen in a friendly world where everyone was nice and helpful. In the eyes of Kennan, the enemy was real and tough. It was internally despicable and externally aggressive. So the task to deal with this enemy would have to be daunting. As Kennan described in his famous “long telegram”: “For their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict . . . Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country onto ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes.” 1 Further, this despicable enemy was destined aggressive: “On the invisible plan, it would make full use of communist parties throughout the world, as well as such other groups as it could penetrate and control, to undermine the influence of the major Western powers.” 2 “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of 109

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life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” 3 But Kennan saw the necessity of living together with the enemy he despised so much. As John Lewis Gaddis mentioned: “The real significance of atomic weapons, he (Kennan) concluded, lay not in the need to bolster international institutions, but in the realization that ‘if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of XVIII century.’ The complete annihilation of enemies no longer made sense.” 4 Here, the necessity was the structural situation caused by mutually assured destruction, as Kennan laid out: “(a) in the best of circumstances (i.e., that the Russians lack atomic weapons or facilities for employing them against us) it implies on our part a war against the Russian people and the eventual occupation of Russian territory; and (b) in the worst of circumstances, the virtual ruin of our country as well as theirs.” 5 Based on this fundamental understanding, his containment strategy was the idea to confront and counter the enemy with full force while avoiding war. The possibility of achieving this goal was constructed as follows: “(a) preventing the power of the Sov. Gov’t from extending to point vital or important to US or British Empire; and (b) without forfeiting the confidence & friendship of the Russian people, to bring about the discrediting of those forces in Russia who insist that Russia regard itself as at war with the western world.” 6 Gaddis highlights the key aspect of Kennan’s frame of mind: “Most important, for Kennan, was Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of policy by other means. Kennan correctly understood this to imply not that politics are suspended during war, but just the opposite: ‘Foreign policy aims are the end and war is the means,’ Violence therefore could never be an objective: ‘Even in case of Germany it is questionable whether a war of destruction was desirable.’ It would certainly not be possible against the Soviet Union: the only possibility was a ‘political war, a war of attrition for limited objectives.’” 7 Here we see the Cold War logic: it was not only necessary but also possible for the enemies to live together on this planet while fighting against each other. But exactly how to deal with an enemy that Kennan despised a great deal because of its oppressive and aggressive nature? Kennan argued with and convinced the power holders in the US that the Cold War (the term was not invented yet at the time when Kennan proposed his idea) was winnable, as long as it was fought in his way. As Gaddis would point out: “Contrary to what almost everyone else at the time, Kennan portrayed the Soviet Union as a transitory phenomenon: it was floating along on the surface of Russian history, and currents deeper than anything Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had imagined would ultimately determine its fate.” 8 What set Kennan’s essay apart was not the alarm it expressed but the optimism it reflected: the Soviet Union’s position, he argued, was more likely in the long

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run to weaken it than to strengthen it. The reasons went back yet again to Gibbon, ancient Rome, and “the unnatural task of holding in submission distant peoples.” The U.S.S.R. had taken over, or incorporated within its sphere of influence territories that even the tsars had never controlled. The people affected would resent Russian rule. Successful revolts “might shake the entire structure of Soviet power.” “Nor could Moscow provide economic assets to offset political liabilities. Land reform would not put more food on people’s tables. Trade with the capitalists would undermine self-sufficiency. Heavy industry would drain resources from consumers, forcing them to accept a Soviet standard of living.” 9

Therefore, the assumption for the strategy of “containment” would be: “the Soviet Union’s self-generated problems would frustrate its ambitions if the West was patient enough to wait for this to happen and firm enough to resist making concessions.” 10 Here we see two aspects: patiently waiting and firmly confronting. The logic was clear: to be able to live together with an aggressive enemy, we have to leave enough space for our enemy for its strength diminishing and for us “waiting” the mellowing fruit. In the meantime, we have to consolidate our space to accomplish the “confronting” aspect. The key word here is “distancing.” “Kennan’s personal views were clear: he wanted to end any pretense of shared interests between the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. There should be an outright division of Europe into spheres of influence, with each side doing as it pleased in the territory of controlled.” 11 Why not divide Europe “into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” Kennan asked. And then insisted, “within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least [try] to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.” “Plans for the United Nations should be set aside ‘as quickly and quietly as possible.’ The United States should abandon Eastern Europe altogether. And Washington should accept Germany’s division into a Soviet and consolidated AngloAmerican zone, with the latter integrated as much as possible into the economic life of Western Europe.” 12 This was exactly what happened through the Cold War, and the enemy was defeated and Kennan’s strategy worked. The Western European kings, queens, princes, and aristocrats first recognized this necessity of togetherness at Westphalia after a bloody, long war among them. They realized they had to live together among the other kings, queens, and the aristocrats because it seemed impossible to kill or enslave the others by conquest. But this necessity was only among themselves in a multipolar structure. They therefore developed the idea of “sovereignty” to recognize the authority of each other in their own territories. It worked in a short run but history have proven the idea and the system that implemented it could not work in a long run. As more and more social forces developed within and between each “sovereign” nation and circumstances changed, nationalism, colonialism,

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and statism all produced destructive wars among the European countries until they fully exhausted themselves, destroyed each other, and surrendered to either the Americans or the Russians. It was not because they were stupid; it was structural. The “sovereignty” idea was built on a structure of a multipolar “balance of power” system, a system that nation-states as power agents were “balanced” only temporarily when they were competing for dominance with all their might they could amass. The treaties, the agreements, the conferences in a multipolar system only addressed the recognized necessity of living together when there was a balance of power, which could happen but was hard to maintain. The system was an immediate reflection of the contemporary power balance which would surely change sooner rather than later; balance of power was never predictable. If any one nation or group felt more powerful among others, it would no longer feel the necessity to live together, war between/among nations would be inevitable. It is not difficult to understand that with all their mighty power and intelligence, the designers of the Westphalia system failed to address the structural necessity for being together because the system was designed on a very shaky ground. Had the European kings and aristocrats seen the end result of World War II at Westphalia in 1648, might they have been smart enough to implement something more structural? Chances were, they would not. We do not blame the Europeans for their limitation because time had not arrived for them to rise to this height and see beyond their immediate horizon. After all, they did not live in a web of interdependent relationship and therefore could not realistically envision a world from the unipolar perspective. George Kennan saw more at the end of World War II. He therefore stood higher and saw better beyond the traditional European horizon. George Kennan’s insight was no doubt profound. First, for the necessity of human togetherness, we could see the effect of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of MAD, mutually assured destruction. We might further depict a whole picture beyond weaponry for the necessity of human togetherness. It was necessary for all the peoples to live together also because we no longer had the luxury to freely detach from someone we did not like and attach to the one we liked. Free choice of friends and foes was no more. Anybody could be an annoying neighbor, or enemy with deep hatred. But we still had to deal with each other, one way or another. We humans essentially held each other hostage, we therefore inevitably hurt ourselves when we hurt others, and were not clear who was going to be hurt more. But for Kennan, his necessity was in a bipolar structure, still within the balance of power frame of mind. For him, the Soviet Union was an evil that needed to be destroyed, togetherness was just temporary. And this necessity must be accompanied by a solid reasoning about possibility, the possibility about destroying the enemy and achieving a hegemonic instead of an interdependent unipolar system. For Kennan, only because the Soviet Union was a self-destructive evil, it was better to wait patiently until it eventually exhausted itself and gradually col-

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lapsed. Of course, waiting did not mean doing nothing. The strategy also proposed actively inducing a mellowing of the fruit while strengthening and fully using “all the cards” America had. The possibility of being together with the Soviet Union was because of the achievable middle ground which was to limit the space for communist expansion and wait for its collapse. Therefore Clausewitz’s “politics is the continuation of war” gave Kennan a strategy about something between war and peace—“containment.” It assumed there was a middle ground between war and diplomacy and the failure of the latter did not have to lead to the former. War was not inevitable if diplomacy did not work. The United States did not have to remove the Communist Party from power in Moscow and the Eastern European capitals. The possibility of togetherness was based on the evaluation of the underlying hard power and soft power of the USSR: it was overstretched in terms of hard power and its ideology was a wretched one. In the meantime, the possibility of living together included mobilizing and incorporating all the connectable elements across borders but only limited use of connective power. Specifically, his idea in fact composed of two key elements of the governance across borders but they were more hegemonic than interdependent—it set out to build useful and subordinate partners: to strengthen the advantage of the US global governance logic by building up dependable and dependent partnership with the Western European nations combined with Japan, and at the same time attacking the weakness of the Russian global governance system, which was the Soviet Communist Party’s difficulty in enforcing big-brotherism. With the understanding of the necessity and possibility of the logic of togetherness, Kennan proposed a series of political actions without engaging in military force. This was basically what the US did throughout the Cold War, with exceptions of the Korean War and Vietnam War. Both crossed the middle ground with mixed results. Fundamentally, it was still a fragile and delicate balance of power with the ultimate purpose of destroying the enemy, just in a softer way without violent war, without a grand vision of constructing a global system to govern the world and shape a world order. Here we can see Kennan was still inside the European “balance of power” frame of mind—only a bipolar balancing. What he failed to recognize was the web of interdependence as a structure and not only the internal forces inside each side that cried for the necessity of living together, but also the potentially unified force across the dividing lines of the two superpowers that demanded togetherness; and further, the forces fighting as enemies trying to destroy each other were transforming each other and co-constituting each other, possibly in a positive way toward living together peacefully. The necessity of togetherness was more based on interdependence and less on hegemony and its possibility was the power of connection between/among power agents, in addition to the hard and soft powers each of them possessed. If Kennan recognized this aspect, he would have constructed the real purpose of “con-

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tainment” as not only being about destroying the Soviet Union and the strategy not only exerting pressure as much as possible to accelerate its collapse. He would have proposed the international systems like the UN, which he strongly opposed, the Bretton Woods system, and so on, for the purpose of facilitating the growth of the potential unipolar power agents everywhere on the web of interdependent partnership. The vision would have been setting up a unipolar structure for human togetherness. The power in between the two superpowers to transform each other should decide the strategy. The unipolar structural necessity was more realistic than idealistic if we recognize the structure of interdependence of social forces across national borders after World War II. This was not the structure that calls for a bipolar or multipolar “dividing the pie and everybody gets a piece of it” so we live together. Instead, it was a unipolar “we are inescapable from each other and we have to construct each other so that we can live together.” It would call for a global governance system to overcome either a multipolar anarchy or a bipolar balancing. In a speech May 24, 1989, in New London, Connecticut, President George H. W. Bush declared, “The grand strategy of the West during the postwar period has been based on the concept of containment: checking the Soviet Union’s expansionist aims, in the hope that the Soviet system itself would one day be forced to confront its internal contractions. The ferment in the Soviet Union today affirms that wisdom of this strategy. And now we have a precious opportunity to move beyond containment.” 13 At the time to “move beyond containment,” it would be the time to integrate the Soviet Union into the “community of nations.” Almost thirty years later today when we look back to ponder President Bush’s assertion about the history of the Cold War, could we ask a “flawed” question, a question in violation of the rules of historical research? Is it possible that we integrated the Soviet Union into the “community of nations” before the beginning of the Cold War without having to go through the constant scares of a nuclear war and risk the total “mutually assured destruction”? But if we ask the question in another way, it might not seem so flawed: what does the Cold War experience tell us about the other aspects of the strategic choices to sustain a world peace, if everybody agrees there was a common logic behind all the struggles, the logic of togetherness? FROM WILSON TO ROOSEVELT: A LIBERAL LEVIATHAN 14 Woodrow Wilson had foreseen the logic of togetherness more than thirty years before Kennan. His “collective security” through the League of Nations was the first baby step toward an American-led global governing system.

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Wilson envisioned a system of global governance, a Leviathan, which was based on the idea of interdependence and composed of four major aspects as we can see it today: 1. nations large and small are independent with full sovereignty; 2. international organizations work as guarantors to exercise institutionally legitimate power; 3. free trade and open investment enable fair exchange of goods, capital and labor; 4. and, implicitly, the business people do business without the limitation of borders. 15 I would believe this was the best construction about a global governance system toward the construction of a web of interdependent partnership. It set out to lay out the principle of interdependence to address the three ancient logics of society that caused war and other conflicts. For item one, I would say national sovereignty provides a solid base for relational interdependence among the nations to overcome the shortcomings of the logic of communal bonding. It would be a governance framework of “unity in diversity” by accepting everybody while working together in a collective way. For item two, my understanding is that it is about institutional interdependency for the purpose of collectively legitimizing acceptable behaviors so that the logic of conquest would be curbed. Through institutionalization, empowerment between partners would be legitimized based on a collectively agreed-upon system. Acceptable patterns of behavior can be established. Item three addressed the issue of functional interdependence by promoting division of labor in international society so that organic solidarity can be eventually established and human society as a whole can thus pass the stage of mechanical solidarity. Item four points out the dynamic social force that is destined to carry out the mission because it would surely facilitate the development of a global business network. The whole idea can be termed as “a global governance of dynamic interdependence.” This would be the first and fundamental framework of America-guided global governance system, a Leviathan based on the web of interdependent partnership. This American governance obtained the potential to replace the nationalism-driven British colonialism, German ethnocentrism, Russian expansionism, and Japanese militarism once it was formed. All the above represented the ultimate level of the Westphalia order which was no longer suitable to the new and growing unipolar world. The Atlantic Charter highlighted Franklin Roosevelt’s contribution to the frame of thinking on global governance. It confirmed the Wilson principles on individual liberty, national sovereignty, and an institutional order of the world—all reflections of the American way of life, as Roosevelt would envi-

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sion. As he experienced two very painful challenges in his life: the Great Depression and another world war after the one Wilson experienced, he became more grounded in practice and more in-depth in thinking. It was clear in his mind that the logic of togetherness was undoubtedly alive and well. It was working powerfully—just calling for recognition and being taken care of. Its necessity was not necessarily “mutually assured destruction” as we know it since nuclear weapons were not fully developed at the time. It was the mutually assured destruction in the economic area since nations were mutual dependent on one another as the Great Depression clearly highlighted. And its impact on politics was enormous, which could ultimately lead to another devastating war. For the capitalist society to avoid another Great Depression and further to avoid democracies like Germany becoming fascist, it was necessary for nation-states to work together. The only way to prevent the self-destructive tendency of capitalism from actualization was to build an international order. To make democracy safe, to make capitalism safe, and to make the American way safe, an international order had to be essential. As his advisor, Secretary of State Cordell Hall insightfully pointed out in 1944: “A world in economic chaos would be forever a breeding ground for trouble and war.” 16 Then, Roosevelt showed his deeper insights for global governance of the international order as he designed: about its possibility. If it was necessary, how could human beings driven by their self-centeredness with conflicting interests and ideas make it work? He had three new international organizations in his mind: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations, to institutionalize the international relations so that right relations would be established and wrong ones delegitimized. The two economic organizations had real power. The IMF was for the purpose of helping any nation-state that was in financial trouble to prevent its trouble from spilling over to other countries; the World Bank was to support the development of the underdeveloped countries so that they could eventually catch up economically. This was truly partnership building by empowering dependable partners as good behaviors empowered and bad regulated. The idea fully reflected the deep understanding on the economic and political fronts of the logic of togetherness. The UN would be a place for legitimacy and its Security Council a collective decision-making body. These were truly excellent institutional construction, but how to make it relational to be inclusive in a world of togetherness and be functional so that every power holder would play a positive role? Roosevelt showed his broad vision and statesman heart. He had welcomed the Soviet Union as a partner to join. As he rationalized his action: “I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.” 17 It was unfortunate that Stalin rejected the IMF and World Bank idea, to his successors’ great regret, and missed a good opportunity to become an effective dependable partner in the new global

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governance system. Clearly he was driven by his rigid mind-set about shortterm national economic independence and faith in the long-term decline of capitalism. However, in the shorter term, his nation lost much-needed financial empowerment and in the long run his successors would have to seek membership of these organizations and could only be a much less effective partner with a much weaker position. The Roosevelt system itself flourished in the years to come. Dependable partners were empowered and established, a governance system based the web of these interdependent partners maintained a healthy economic order across the capitalist world and beyond in terms of fair trade, stable currencies, better coordination between governments internationally, more effective government planning about their own economy, and developed business networks globally. It really achieved Wilson’s wisdom on economic liberalization, which was so critical for both capitalism and democracy. Collective security was supposed to be accomplished at the UN but stopped halfway at legitimizing power in the UN forum. But the UN worked in a way to legitimize the units of action, the power agents, as the sovereign nation-states. Although Roosevelt did not advocate national self-determination, the UN system in fact encouraged nations seeking independence from both British and French colonialism and Soviet big-brotherism. In the end, the success on this front was remarkable. The Cold War history would tell us that this vision worked but not alone: it worked together with the Kennan wisdom to produce the end of the Cold War. In the meantime, they together highlighted to us: behind their wisdom there was the logic of togetherness. All is good except one thing: how to live together with an enemy who refuses to work together and is completely undependable? For Kennan, it was to kill him; for Wilson and Roosevelt, it was to include him and regulate him. But what if he can be neither killed nor regulated? Both visions seem not able to offer a solution. Here we see the limitation of both visions because they depend either on individualistic hard and soft powers to contain the enemy or the collective power to institutionalize the enemy. We might have to see another kind of power: the power of connection in between the power agents and its ability to address another aspect of the necessity of the logic of togetherness: the dynamic transformation aspect. If we look further at the whole picture, we would see both visions missed an important aspect of the logic of togetherness: in this world of inescapable togetherness, nations were co-constituting and co-constituted: the US would be the US without the USSR and vice versa. There was a power working in between the power players, in addition to the power either within each of them or above them. The global structure that every nation worked with and in had become a dynamically interdependent one. Therefore togetherness was not only about living together with an enemy without having to engage

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in hot war, or setting up a global governance system of institutions. It was not only about patiently awaiting the destruction of the enemy, or regulating them in a collective institution. In addition to the destructive aspect, as Kennan would point out, and the legitimizing and regulatory aspect, as Wilson and Roosevelt would enlighten, a more critical aspect of togetherness would be constructive transformation: a mutuality system between the power players that everybody not only shared but also transformed. In this world of togetherness, we not only had to face someone who might be 51 percent enemy and 49 percent friend, 51 percent competitor and 49 percent partner, but also the transformable enemy or friend, competitor or partner. 18 The dynamic of interdependence could be powerful enough to transform nations or groups. This would be another necessity of the logic of togetherness. For Kennan, enemy was enemy, dyed-in-the-wool, through and through. Although he pointed out the social forces within the USSR that might play a positive role in the Cold War for the US cause, he essentially regarded the USSR, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, especially the Stalin regime, as an enemy to be completely defeated in whatever way that would not start a hot war. He only envisioned the destructive aspect of the logic of togetherness and failed to see the constructive aspect, especially the structural necessity that called for the constructive transformation aspect. His construction was limited to infrastructure and security reconstruction in the Western part of Europe even leaving the Eastern part of it to the USSR, to help the West get back on their feet in a physical sense before the USSR did it. For Wilson and Roosevelt, the construction of international institutions was like stacking potatoes into a bag, or putting different kinds of vegetables into a salad bowl, without having to mesh them and cook them. The international institutions only bound individual nation-states together as what they were only to make sure they stayed together in a regular and stable way. Both, together, worked in the Cold War and won the war, but the path was rough and bumpy, with many twists and turns, ups and downs. In fact, through the Cold War in the global village, the US was the head of the village while the USSR was a challenger, despite a distasteful and aggressive one for Kennan. To focus on its destruction was necessary in the very beginning stage but it would be misguided if the inclusion and regulation aspects were missing from the overall strategy. However, that would still not be enough. The logic of togetherness would call for the transformation and construction aspects of the relationship. To actively engage and transform would be the necessary ingredients for constructing a global system with the enemy included as a factor and with a purpose of transformation, transforming the others as well as ourselves. The most critical aspect would be this co-constituting and co-constituted process. Therefore, the logic of togetherness revealed to us a structural necessity, which was the web of dynamic interdependent partnership in a unipolar world. We had to live together and deal with each other because of the web as a whole.

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And construction of a unipolar world to actively build up positive social forces and transform them to be more compatibly interdependent would be a more important structural necessity. Here we have to touch on another aspect of the logic of togetherness the Cold War revealed: the issue of the possibility we humans could live together by confronting each other, regulating each other, and transforming each other. Only after we address this issue, can we confidently say that we are not naïve and idealistic to talk about togetherness. It is indeed realistic. The possibility revealed by Kennan was the view of the weakness of the enemy, but not limited to it. The weakness was actually on both sides, so patiently waiting generated the possibility of living together. The power to maintain togetherness would be hard power to keep balance of power and soft power to influence the positive elements inside the enemy camp. For Wilson and Roosevelt, the possibility of human togetherness would be accepting each power agent’s freedom and independence while collectively institutionalizing agreed-upon behaviors and regulating individual freedom, in the meantime, facilitating a true global force, the capitalist class, to grow and expand so that a common economic linkage would be built and the foundation for the international institutions would be strengthened. I would like to add yet one more aspect of the possibility of the logic of togetherness: the working of the connective power in the unipolar world on the interdependent structure of social forces. It was based on the unipolar structural necessity of dynamic interdependence and working between the power agents via mutual empowerment. The structure resulted in two possibilities: relatedness of the power agents like nation-states and other social forces across nation-states and the functionality of them. Therefore there was a development of mutuality between social forces to work on a unipolar global order and expand their mutually reinforced existence in all power units, including all the supposed enemies that might contain some percentage of friends and many elements that are relatable and functional. Of course, we can see this with the hindsight from a rearview mirror, because Cold War history has proven the success of Kennan’s containment strategy and Wilson–Roosevelt’s global governance construction; we can see further the success of the logic of togetherness through the structure of dynamic interdependent governance by the working of connective power. There were many power agents other than the US who contributed actively to the end result of the Cold War. The growth of a global web of interdependent partnership included the leaders of the Western European countries, especially the West German leaders, as well as business networks, the “lost and found” former enemies like the Chinese leaders, also the elements inside the USSR, including Khrushchev and Gorbachev, even Ligachev, and especially the social forces in the USSR that either actively participated in the interdependent partnership building or passively contributed to the process through doing

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nothing to support the opposing force. In addition to risking so much and spending so much to engage in deterrence, the efforts made to recognize, mobilize, and relate to the real or potential interdependent nation-states and other power agents across the globe worked in a way that was more realistic than idealistic. The power that worked to govern the world more powerfully was neither hard nor soft, but the connective power that empowered the power agents everywhere to be interdependent partners to address the common necessity of human togetherness. Yes, a Leviathan was present and worked powerfully. But it was not the US, the nation-state, or a G. John Ikenberry’s “liberal Leviathan” working from above, 19 but the global web of partnership as a “dynamic interdependent Leviathan” working in between the power players. The power that enabled this Leviathan to govern was connective power with empowering nature between the power agents, not the Kennan hard/soft power within individual power holders or the Wilson–Roosevelt collective power vested in institutions beyond individual power unit. In the end, it was the web as the governing Leviathan to use the individualistic hard/soft power, the collective institutional power, and the connective power of mutual empowerment and transformation that guided us to avoid the possible tragic fate: we human beings did not have to surrender to whatever animal that could survive the human’s final war. THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS For the first time in human history, the logic of togetherness revealed to us that the era of war between great powers was behind us, possibly forever, but great power politics remained, possibly intensified. Behind each great power, there developed the global web of interdependent partnership. It worked as a global governance system to relationally link the great powers, to functionally structure them into their positions, and to institutionalize the relationship between them and regulate their individual behaviors. A special type of power arose between them through their dynamic interactions, the connective power to empower the power agents to their status on the web and therefore enable the logic of togetherness continuously dictating the world order. The source of this power was not from within each individual great power, nor from collective institutions above each individual power agents; it was from between great powers and all the power agents in the form of a web. Hierarchy was still present and worked powerfully. But the web was more dynamic than hierarchical because the status on the web depended on the measure of connective power, which was in turn based on the functional and relational dependability of each great power. Beside its structural setup, the web of interdependent partnership had a solid social foundation, which was the global business-entrepreneurial net-

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works. Marx was wrong when he called for “working men of all countries, unite!” But he was right about the bourgeoisie class when he mentioned it historically “has played a most revolutionary part.” 20 However, since he viewed the bourgeoisie class as an independent social group separated and separable from other social classes or groups, it was supposed to be always a small and privileged minority in society. Its meaningful connections to and shared interests with other classes or groups would diminish as its internal self-destructive force would surely work. This was not true in reality. The bourgeoisie class as a “class” did contain a self-destructive force which generated cycles of economic crisis and huge economic inequality. However, it was in fact a web of business-entrepreneurial networks which reached out to almost every social groups at every corner in advanced industrialized societies. As a network, its boundary was fuzzy. It was an open system with a high level of mobility of and in itself and at the same time linked with many interdependent partners in politics, local communities, and even proletariat organizations. The theoretical power of Marxism was minimized by the reality of business-entrepreneurial networks’ social connections. On the contrary, its adversary, the camp of communist parties, was outliers away from the main stream and struggled to get in. They were more as an attachment to the dynamic business networks and their “class struggle” worked more as a part of their social connections to support their dynamic functions on the global web of interdependent partnership. The answers to the following questions provided empirical evidence about the theoretical assertion above. How real was the Soviet threat? Did it warrant the worry that produced the risk of mutual destruction? Specifically, in the best of all possible worlds, if not the best of all imaginable worlds, what was feasible and what was not? What was the key issue at the beginning of the Cold War? What were the non-essential ones? What were the threatening issues and what were merely the annoying ones? Did the US have the power to bring the USSR in the tent and recast its system? How was it possible that the US could facilitate the change in the USSR that would lead to its modification and transformation into an interdependent partner? The understanding about the Soviet Union before the beginning of the Cold War was that it was a powerful and aggressive expansionist imperial party-state driven by a totalitarian ideology with a high likelihood to unite proletariats of all countries and develop a big military to establish a monolithic bloc of communist countries and achieve world dominance at the expense of the well-being of free people across globe. Obviously this was a distorted vision without the merit of reality. But fear played its part as the US went through the storming stage to position itself on the web of interdependent partnership. The path of history through the logic of togetherness eventually led the US to discover and link to the web and contribute to its further development. The containment strategy guided the US to create a bipolar

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hostile world divided by ideology and geography, even when there was no single great power, including the USSR, that posed a “clear and present threat” to the national security of the United States. The containment policy itself could be regarded as a first stage effort of the United States’ construction of the post–World War II global governance order. Since the core component of this system was interdependent partnership among Western industrialized countries, and it was dynamic in nature, it seemed necessary in the time of postwar chaos to set up a boundary between “us” and “them” so that an in-group solidarity could be possible. The deteriorated relations between the US and USSR might be regarded as a byproduct of the construction of this global governance system. However, the Wilson–Roosevelt system had already constructed a broader background for Kennan’s containment strategy to work within. The existence and development of the web of interdependent partnership had already, in fact, made the three major parts of the containment order—balance of power, nuclear deterrence, and detent/peaceful competition—in the US-led camp’s favor, even before the beginning of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War was a historical watershed in the sense that it finally revealed to the world that it had been a unipolar one long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world had been governed by the web of interdependent partnership since the storming stage of the Cold War and its order had been formed at the forming stage, roughly in the early 1950s after the Korean War. The bipolarity was not ended at the end of the Cold War—it was an illusion which never happened. The significant outcome of the end of the Cold War was the end of decades of containment of the Soviet Union— largely by the continued efforts of the Soviet Union itself to be a “normal” country and integrate into the Western world—its long efforts to become a dependable partner in the governing web of interdependent partnership. The history of the second half of the twentieth century was, on the surface, the history of the Cold War. But in essence, it was the history of the establishment of the American-led global governance order backed by the marching of the global web of interdependent partnership to every corner of the world, in which communist parties and communism were only a side show. The Soviet Union and its little brothers never possessed the power to govern the world remotely comparable to that of the United States and its partners. The Soviet Communist Party leaders often boasted their country’s potential to “overtake and surpass” the US and many people in the US and Europe accepted this claim. But the Party leaders who knew better rarely believed it even when they were making efforts to make it a reality, except during few short moments. Their actions spoke louder. Since Khrushchev, they worked hard to join the governing web, although many times by acting out and showing off differences when rejected or ignored.

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Therefore, in terms of strategy, interdependent partnership requires the power players to distinguish annoyance from security threat because they can be confident about the connective power of the governing web. The post–World War II conflict between the US and the USSR was, to a large extent, a communal conflict—two groups of people fighting for prestige and interests simply because they were divided into two groups and strove for demonstrating who was better. This kind of conflict had always been an inevitable part of human social existence in a small village, most of the time as annoyance instead of security threats. But how strong was this annoyance before and during the Cold War? Was the Russian belief in a specific Russian way stronger than its feeling toward joining the web of global governance and becoming a partner of it? Indeed, there were negative attitudes toward Europe and the US in Russia. Speaking in general terms, the Russian communal feeling drove the Russians to imagine a threat from the outside, even 100 years before NATO was established. The Soviet Communist Party naturally publicized its official ideology that regarded the Western capitalist countries as aggressive robbers who were preparing to destroy the “workers’ paradise.” But this was rather irrational, even paranoiac, which could easily evaporate at exposure to the outside world. Tsar Alexander III even made such a paranoiac statement that Russia had not had and could not have any true friends and allies except its own infantry and artillery. Over time with a little deeper thinking and more exposure, more and more Russian intellectuals and business people realized and felt personally the affinity with the world in general and the West in particular as they got chance to see and interact with the outside world. History tells us that communal bonding which generates fear and distrust to the outside world and intense conflict within the group would eventually yield its grip on people, if the reach of connective power provides linkage to the interdependent partnership in a larger world. Of course, it was too idealistic and naive to require the communist party leaders to be tolerant, honest, communicative, and forthright in its relations with others. The fact was that nobody, capitalists and communists alike, could be expected to be so ideal. The reality as we knew it was and always had been that human beings were never entirely good or bad, trustworthy or untrustworthy. Moral absolutism only revealed our self-centeredness and arrogance. Only when we believed we were God or God’s representatives did we assume we were entirely good and others were completely bad. The communist party leaders, even individuals like Joseph Stalin, were normal human beings like others. They were at the same time charming and irritating, honest and deceptive, admirable and despicable. The key would have to be working together to allow the dynamics of connective power work between individuals or groups so that togetherness could be worked out. Individuals became good because of sufficient interdependent mechanisms be-

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tween them. It was annoying to deal with someone who was different and hard to relate to but it did not have to lead to war or even to risk a war. The leaders of the communist parties were rational enough to know that they could not insist on their ideological position that the accomplishment of its purpose depended on controlling, subverting, and destroying all the other systems of human existence. They wanted to show theirs was better because they wanted a higher and more important position in the web of global governance. Clearly, their ideological bluff was simply a manifestation of their paranoiac suspiciousness. But the problem was that paranoia could easily create paranoiac reaction because human beings shared the same mental composition. Engagement might be the best avenue to facilitate the exercise of mutual transformation through connective power so that the parts of good characters could be maximized and at the same time the bad ones nobody felt comfortable with would be minimized. It was important to understand that the Soviet Union was not on the path to become a Western-style country. It was not realistic nor necessary for it to be so. Not everyone could be the same. For the global governance of the web of interdependent partnership, what was feasible and sufficient was the web’s acceptance of differences within a relational and functional framework so that a dynamic and transformative relationship between the interdependent power agents could be fostered. Whether the government was authoritarian or democratic did not matter that much. It was not necessarily beneficial if the Russian political system was democratic. Democracy as we know it was the best form of governance (the worst except the rest—as Churchill would say), but no one would guarantee we human beings could never develop a better one, if we were not stuck in the “end of history” heaven. Diversity under the governance of the web of interdependent partnership might be the best form to allow enough space for this development. The key was to create opportunities for the USSR to transform its operating logic from big-brotherly upward dependency to interdependent partnership. Specifically, this was the key to shift the same ruling elites from being members of the Communist Party to being parts of the global web, becoming dependable in the global business-entrepreneurial networks or other global connections. Therefore, the connective perspective of engagement based on shared linkage to the global web of connections would be better than the individualistic perspective of containment based on the understanding of the isolated Russian tradition. As the leader of the unipolar world, the US was a village head and ought to lead the village like a village head was supposed to do. In a village, all individuals had to live together for a lifetime without possibility to escape, the logic of togetherness would be the basic principle of way of life. Individuals, especially the leaders, could not hurt others without expecting to be hurt. On the other side of the token, individuals were in it together especially security-wise and economically. So they benefited from being together. The

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more dependable they were, the more interdependent others would feel toward them, the higher status they would be in the web of interdependent partnership. A village head was not supposed to choose and pick friends and enemies based on his own preferences and to judge the natural characters of his villagers. The best way to deal with an annoying, aggressive, even threatening and at the same time powerful villager was to develop connection with him, through whatever means. “Everybody has a mother” might be a good teaching. It might not be a good idea to gang up with others to “contain” him. It would be highly risky because he might start a fight that everybody got hurt beyond tolerance. As long as there was a chance, engagement to seek mutual transformation would be the best way to go, especially when there was strong possibility that this villager’s relatives, mother for example, as well as his sons or daughters tended to change and could therefore exert connective power over him. The unipolar world was as inseparable and notso-easy detachable like a small village, a leader of this world must realize that the answer to the question “what’s in it for me” was no difference than the answer to “what’s in it for the transformation of others.” A mutually exclusive choice from containment and deterrence would be engagement and transformation. The whole purpose of engagement would be to allow connective power to work and facilitate the development of a reliable and productive partner. The power to empower and enable participation in international society would be a key issue. Roosevelt was a good example. In the meantime, engagement would be viewed as a means to bring the dangerous and unpredictable player into the tent, as Lyndon Johnson would say, where they are less likely to make mischief and more likely to be transformed by the web of interdependent ties, especially the business-entrepreneurial networks. According to this approach, although the policy of containment was necessary only at the beginning stage when chaos among power agents made interdependent linkage totally impossible, it was like playing with fire—to risk making the potentially dangerous groups of people more so by pushing them to the extreme before, hopefully, they became exhausted and collapsing under the weight of their own vulnerability. It would be indeed a “cold war” strategy—to start a war with confrontation without explicit military actions. On the contrary, the policy of engagement would be safer. Since it regarded good relationships as paramount, instead of individual strength, it focused on engaging one another through connective power. The experience as it was shown in the Cold War would tell us that the essence would be to humbly accept the logic of togetherness and work on the driving force behind the dynamic of the logic. Sharing vulnerability might be necessary since it was a reality as a dependable partner on the global governance web of interdependent partnership. Every partner honestly strove to be interdependent because each of them had vulnerability so that they all need one another. If a

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group or nation-state assumed itself completely strong and to be independent without vulnerability to need interdependence, this group or nation-state would be on a path of self-destruction, because it actually acted on a dream, a unrealistic illusion. Its practice would be about the exercise hard and soft powers individually and therefore be viewed by others as undependable. Khrushchev pretended the Soviet Union was invincible as a big brother to its Cuban little brother, and ended up causing the Cuban Missile Crisis and a humiliating retreat. Reagan strove to be invincible by the “Star Wars” strategy and almost caused a nuclear war and retreated to the amusing a “Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya relationship.” The realistic picture of the world would be: nobody was without vulnerability. It would be realistic to not assume invincibility. The survival and thriving of group or a nation-state depend more on its ability to overcome its vulnerability than showing off its strength. This could only be accomplished through good relationships. International relations was essentially a contest of connective power on the web of interdependent partnership, therefore the leadership position would depend on whose connective power was stronger to establish its unipolar global governance and therefore transform a threatening enemy into a changeable and, likely, annoying partner. The leader did not have to be the US if the USSR had stronger connective power and it was powerful enough to transform the US. If the American governance was powerful enough to renew itself and modify itself in the process of transforming both the self and the challengers, the engagement policy would not only be the safest, the most cost-saving and most effective, but also more historically significant from a long-term view. More critically, it sustained an international order that guaranteed collective, or more accurately, connective, but not unilateral, security and peace. The main question was not for what purpose and to what end America should commit its power. Instead, it was and had always been how American ruling elites could work as a governing group for the global governance web of interdependent partnership. Specifically, how would America contribute, as a dependable partner and the strongest one, to the global governance system? How did the US, as a connected global leader instead of an isolated nation-state, exercise its power over or with others? To what kind of a world may the US reasonably and justly look forward? How should the US facilitate the formation of the “national characters” of other nation-states at the same time its own national identity was renewed by the web of interdependence? What attributes or characters or “personalities” of other nation-states was the US looking for and seeking to help construct as it was constructing its own? The answers, based on the examination of the Cold War history, can be summed up in one phrase: interdependent partnership, and one sentence: American power was connective and its essence was partnership building and maintenance. Therefore, the best foreign policy is the strategy of inclusive engagement.

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For the best of all best possible worlds, human society depends on the effective governance of the web of interdependent partnership. And the web depends on its strongest partner, the US, to pursue a policy that marches along the path of inclusive engagement. It would also be the most effective way to expand the US connective power by being a dependable partner in the web of interdependent partnership. In terms of the relations between the US and Russia, the nuclear weapon was still a worrisome issue, a risk left over by the Cold War containment policy. But even from a security point of view, the long-term historical force of global governance would work more powerfully to ensure an environment that would render the nuclear weapons useless. A localized view might miss a good opportunity to engage Russia after the Soviet Union. Although contemporary Russia was no longer a superpower, it could not be simply viewed as “a third world nation with nuclear weapons.” This could not be further from the truth. Without transforming it into a dependable partner on the global governance web of interdependent partnership, a new Russia could grow into a threatening great power, guided by ethno-nationalism. As the global leader, the US ruling group must be proactive to strongly oppose any type of nationalism in any country because it would be the most possible hotbed to grow next Hitler. And the best and most effective way would be to facilitate a transformation of those power agents, including itself, into dependable and interdependent partners. The connection between business-entrepreneurial networks in each country and their counterparts on the global web could be critical in this process. For example, joint ventures for the purpose of producing consumer goods should be given profit incentives for their investment. Even specialized banks might be necessary to finance the business connections. It was also important to accept the countries into existing international economic institutions like WTO or IMF and facilitate its increasingly important roles in those institutions. Of course, like any effort to build up partnership through engagement, the process would be a mixture of dialogue and quarrel. But in any case, there should not be containment or deterrence. New windows would open once the process began. This type of engagement could not be regarded as “political trade” simply because it focused on long-term benefits based on gains in social spheres and departed from the short-term calculation of international trade and investment. The governance web of interdependence partnership required the US to manage a relationship that focused on facilitating dependable partners through constant struggle between all the power agents in contradictories of elements of friend and rivalry, cooperator and competitor, pleaser and annoyer, even comrade and enemy. The goal was to minimize the incompatibility of social systems of any country so that more and more countries would become dependable partners on the web of interdependence. An adaptive networks of relationships will be full of disappointment and annoyance but at the same time they can be effective and productive in a world of the logic of togetherness. In a smaller and smaller global village, individual nation-states and social groups have to deal with each

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other to make sure human beings will never risk a “mutually assured destruction” in security, in economic, and in civilization. The world we all share is not perfect, it is sometimes miserable, but it is the best of all possible alternatives. NOTES 1. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 220. 2. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 220. 3. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), pp. 220–221. 4. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 234. 5. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 234. 6. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 234. 7. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 235. 8. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 187. 9. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 195. 10. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 196. 11. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life, (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 202. 12. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 189. 13. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the United States Coast Guard Academy Commencement Ceremony, May 24, 1989,” in Speaking of Freedom: The Collected Speeches (Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 48. 14. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012). 15. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 19; Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 21–22; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 16; pp. 92–93. 16. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 16; p. 93. 17. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 16; p. 93. 18. Tian-jia Dong, Social Reach: A Connectivist Approach to American Identity and Global Governance (Lanham: University of America Press, 2008), pp. 3–7. 19. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 20. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 500; p. 475.

Chapter Five

Historical Logics and Emergence of an Interdependent Leviathan A Grand Theory

LOGICS OF HUMAN HISTORY Human history is stained with human blood. When we are not fighting, we constantly squabble. The universal love is universally twisted and perfect sense and sensibility between individuals are hard to come by and always conditional. We are individualistic when we are driven by our needs for physical survival and compete for resources. We are equally individualistic when we are driven by our psychological bias and cognitive limitations and we somehow develop shallowness, stupidity, a sense of vanity, and a sense of jealousy that hurt others as well as ourselves. Even in the name of honor or reputation beyond self-interests, we humans conquer, enslave, and exploit one another; in the name of our collectivity or religious fantasy, we kill and genocide. Will human history continue to witness bloodshed in the future? Are we human beings destined to destroy ourselves? Neo-realism seems believe so. The reason is as John Mearsheimer summarized: great power politics. 1 The idea of “Thucydides’s Trap” highlights this argument very clearly. 2 The three logics— conquest, communal bonding, and uneven exchange—that have dominated the entire human history clearly support this line of argument. However, the Cold War was a rare time when the two global powers kept their war “cold” and avoided the historical routine. “Countering enemy and avoiding war” was the feat it achieved. Can human history thus witness a light in the long and dark tunnel? A new logic, the logic of togetherness, 129

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dominated history this time. History this time concluded with the triumph of the American-led global web of interdependent partnership, a web that is business centered, state guided, community leaders and social movement entrepreneurs actively participated, multi-grouping and cross-border networks. The structural focus of the web of interdependent partnership was to make everybody dependable, including the leaders of other nations by empowering and connecting to them to make them dependable partners. The Communist Parties’ big-brotherism in the Soviet Union and other communist countries failed in the end. And the most powerful weapon for the US to accomplish its global governance is the connective power of mutually empowering the dependable partners, which is the engaging ability to connect with and therefore enable others to do the things they otherwise would not be able to do. However, this “enabling power” is very difficult to exercise. Empowering others and making them dependable between or among groups is not as simple as exercising hard economic power or military might or showing off soft attractiveness. It is not about forming alliances, either, as the “smart power” idea would tell. Nonetheless the connective power was powerful enough to enforce the logic of togetherness and transform the three ancient logics along the way. The logic of togetherness enlightens us, for the first time in history, that human beings have to and are able to find a way to live together due to both the shared vulnerability of mutually assured destruction and the shared strength of interdependent connection so we all do better. A global Leviathan is emerging as a result. However, the logic of togetherness does not operate in isolation from the other three logics. The three ancient logics that govern human interactions since the beginning of human history not only die hard but also work powerfully for or against the advent of the logic of togetherness. The logic of togetherness requires effectively overcoming the dividing drive of the logic of communal bonding, the enticing force of the logic of conquest, and the alluring temptation of the logic of uneven exchange. In the end, the exercising of the three logics is to be transformed into a hierarchical global governance system based on genuine interdependent connections between the groups in terms of natural relatedness of communal bonding and functional and mutually benefiting exchange. In this way, the global web as a governance system can effectively reach the largest possible population across the globe. The key issue depends on the nature of the connective power, which is coercive and hierarchical like all the types of power and at the same time enabling and empowering since its source of power is embedded in its linkage on the web of relationships. It is most powerful when it has the ability to connect to the genuine historical forces and therefore able to enable others, albeit coercively sometimes through a hierarchical system, to do the things they otherwise would not be able to do. In this way, the power agents of

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connective power are able to shape history. Internationally, it is not a selfcentered relationship between want and might. In essence, it is connective in the sense that a nation’s power is not individualistically located within its national borders but rather relationally rooted in the web of interdependent partnership of inter-group connections. But how do we make theoretical sense of the logic of togetherness, the global web of interdependent partnership and connective power of mutually empowering dependable power agents beyond the Cold War history? Can this idea be generalized into a universal theory? For the misery and dilemma of humans living together as a society, there are many theories offered by profound theorists throughout history. I would like to synthesize and modify those theories and therefore answer one key question: how does the logic of togetherness, through its structure of the global web of interdependent partnership and its agency of connective power of mutually empowering dependable power agents, transform the three fundamental logics of human existence and ultimately bring about an interdependent Leviathan? FROM COMMUNAL BONDING TO A RELATIONAL LEVIATHAN The necessity of governance in a form of coercive mastership was systematically raised by Thomas Hobbes. 3 His famous phrase depicts the state of nature of human society as “war of all against all”: an anarchic situation where rational individuals, when they are inevitably together, pursue their unlimited, unrestricted desire for security (avoid death and injury), reputation (status), and gain (possessions). Because people who seek the same things are enemies to each other, they have a restless desire for power in order to defensively guard themselves and to offensively dominate others. The results are, obviously, either conquest or chaos. Hence, individuals pursue safety and happiness but, ironically, end up in a constant fear of danger, injury even death—a life of misery. Hobbes’s solution is coercive: each rational individual would have to transfer power to one big sea monster so that it can use the combined force to enforce the agreements among individuals—the state, or Leviathan, thus comes into being. It is a perpetual sovereign power with monopolized and organized coercive violence against which each individual is powerless. To put it in another way, individuals would have to be controlled by the state, to be overpowered by it, and subject to its enforcement of rules and order. It seems that we humans will have reached the end of history once Leviathan is firmly established. But what’s the problem? What is the obstacle for establishing coercive control over human society via a Leviathan? The an-

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swer seems that while Hobbes talks about a singular all-mighty Leviathan over human society as a whole, human history has produced many “small leviathans” across specific human communities. Many different types of “small leviathans” exist on all levels of human society, except the human society as a whole. The “small leviathans” on different levels of human society have firmly established since the very beginning of human society. In fact, it has been an inseparable part of human existence. Even without a hypothetical universal agreement among individuals about the formation of state, human communities on different scales have been powerful “leviathans” to govern human individuals. Also because of this fact, “war of all against all between or among individuals” was rarely a reality. These many “small leviathans” make individuals more communal than rational because they are naturally controlled and their individuality is shaped by different types of social forces since the beginning of their lives. All our relationships we depend on and live through to sustain our lives enable a leviathan one way or another. Because of the inextricable bonding we live through as human beings, we accept coercive power in our daily lives as a given. In this way, the “small leviathans” already possess power over individuals by minimizing conflicts among them and therefore enabling them to go on their lives. To this point, we might be able to modify Hobbes’s theory as follows: the all-mighty singular Leviathan must be built upon many “small leviathans” instead of upon individuals. Therefore, the connection among these “small leviathans” would become the key issue. How is it possible to instill human individual sense and sensibility in a relational and eventually universal way? Sigmund Freud’s super-ego theory might help us make sense on the issue of linking individual, parenting, community, and civilization in general. 4 Since human life begins with the fact that individuals are born in relations—we at least have a mother; this relationship fundamentally shapes our existence as a human individual. Human individuality is embodied in their sensations—we feel, therefore we are. Sigmund Freud reveals that our sensations are relationally shaped—the body is independent from the soul; but its independence is limited. Individuals try to maximize their sensational happiness. But their initial associations in life at birth or the first few years fundamentally shape this pursuit. In order to deal with the inevitable inconsistency between the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle” after being separated from her/his mother, the infant gradually learns that the best way of coping is to conform to the preexisting association with the mother by taking her into the self (super-ego), and allowing that internal parent to monitor her/his behavior. Clearly, this is more relational than rational because it pushes individuals to go with the flow and submit themselves under the coercive power of preliminary communal bonding, instead of rational choice at every turn. If there is an inconsistency, their super-ego will inform them by making them

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sensually feel the sense of unhappiness. Therefore, super-ego works as an internal mechanism to make human beings coercively bond with their close relationships from the very beginning of their lives and on the deepest level of their own sensation. Through this kind of inner entanglement, individuals’ liberty is framed by human connections. The coercive aspect of power started with human inextricable communal bonding but it is not simply external; all the external systems are largely unsuccessful without working through the built-in mechanism. Connective power is thus first created and shaped by the inevitable preexisting social bonding. It is based on individual’s inevitable attachment and belonging to a preexisting relationship or societal structure. It is more than Hobbes’s individual rationality and beyond rational choice. Communal bonding highlights that we do not need a reason to exercise power over or empower one another; we naturally do, one way or another. It is inevitable because the bonding is formed before we were born and through our lifetime, with our parents, with our community, with our nation. The bonding seems eternally tying us together. This bonding implants in individuals’ hearts by creating a sense of safety and warmth inside its realm and insecurity and disorientation outside of it. Individuals feel that “we are in this together.” A relational leviathan is thus established. However, the key issue is: how big is the relational leviathan that is based on the community that bonds individuals? What’s the boundary of the “civilization” that civilizes individuals and makes them accept a leviathan in their lives? The Freudian theory can only point out the potential for individuals to break away from their boundaries of their initial community/civilization but cannot point out a sure path beyond psychological realm. In essence, we are still limited within our “small leviathan,” albeit a relational one. The impact of this type of relational leviathan can be seen in the following ways. Because of the communal bonding of inevitable and inescapable entanglement, individuals’ choices are limited within the community. Individuals are connected by relationships they inevitably form and it is naturally ethno-centric or kinship-centric. Heider’s Balance Theory highlights the social dynamic that a strong initial association has to reshape individuals’ behavior pattern when they engage in further associations—a mutual reinforcing and empowering process but very limited within small circles. 5 The stronger the tie between any two individuals in an initial association is, the larger the proportion of their life is tied to the association and the more limited his/her further association is. The reason is that stronger ties involve larger time commitments that suck individuals deeper into the association, and more significantly, the issue of cognitive balance arises: I want my friend’s friends to be my friends; if my friend’s friend is my enemy, this strains my relations with my friend. The result is the limit of expanding the association because of the initial association. The reason why our being more

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closely tied to our family, local community, or nation is more relational than rational. Is it possible that we eventually overcome the power of communal bonding and develop a “Leviathan” to govern the entire human society across the globe? The essence of the problem of communal bonding is twofold: the within-group tension and the between-group insulation. In both cases, instead of “together, we can be greater,” it is “together, we are lesser.” Within groups, the closer the relationship is, the more likely individuals experience conflicts with one another. The reason can be the followings: (1) they see each other more clearly, feel each other more vividly and experience each other more colorfully; (2) they sense the urgency to change each other if they see, feel, or experience anything that is incompatible; (3) they care about one another so much that they no longer feel the need to respect each other’s boundaries; (4) it is socially pressured to go up and higher and it is stressful and oppressing because of the competition for higher status in a “closed and inescapable” system. Since “we are in this together,” we have no way out but to take care of one another, no matter how much we want to worry about ourselves first. We therefore “shrink” from our normal self when we are less than wholeheartedly motivated. Would this in-group oppression push individuals outward looking and seeking free and mutually empowering interdependence from outside-communal bonding connections? Possible but limited by the between group situation naturally formed by the logic of communal bonding. It is very ironic that the more conflicts individuals experience in a communally bounded group, the closer they usually become, because of the painful adjustments they experience that make them be more compatible to one another. In the meantime, they grow more distrustful toward outsiders because they are more likely to feel at a loss when dealing with strangers. Communal bonding hence becomes a dividing, instead of uniting, factor across groups in society at large and its connective power becomes disconnective power. It pushes groups to become insulated from one another. A “leviathan” within the limit of communal bonding becomes less connective and more divisive. It is less likely to be linked to connective power on a large scale. Human beings are united in and, at the same time, divided by, different types of communal bonding—a very ironic fact. Our exercise of connective power is also limited by this fact. Communal bonding therefore is a major dynamic that makes humans kill and injure more fellow humans than any other species does to us. Hobbes is right when his assertion of “war of war against all” is applied to the intergroup or international situation. Otherwise, we would have had a world government a long time ago. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for “rational” groups or nation-states coming together to reach a contract to submit their sovereignty to a Leviathan. Communal bonding is the reason why human

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rationality for developing a “Leviathan” which is good for everyone in the long run does not work. However, the logic of togetherness, the development of the web of interdependent partnership, as well as the power of mutually empowering connections are eroding the boundary of communal bonding. These forces have been therefore generating external pulling power that worked together with the internal pushing power to connect dependable individuals across communities/nations. The enlargement of the relational leviathan becomes possible. For specific forms of the enlarged leviathan through across boundary connection, the idea of the strength of weak ties and social capital are constructive. They enlighten us that the network ties we develop while pursuing our rational interests in a communal setting enables our interdependency. Humans are inevitably drawn into networking because it enables them to be more powerful and thus strengthens their position of empowerment. Granovetter’s model, the strength of weak ties, 6 indicates that the strength of social ties is a function of the amount of time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and reciprocal services. Weak ties among individuals open bright windows for the individuals/groups who are trapped in communal bonding. Therefore they are significant for the construction of a global governance system because of two reasons: they involve many more actors quantitatively and they qualitatively reach people across communal boundaries who are different from each other and therefore capable of reaching new people and gaining fresh connections. The concept of “strength of weak ties” further leads us to the idea of social capital, which means that social relations have value; to develop social relationship is a value-added process. It highlights that the amount, type, and strength of social connections can be effective indicators of how much capital, resources, and power an individual possesses. It is an effective indicator of power of mutual empowerment in the interdependent relationships. Peter Marsten and Nan Lin’s theory on social capital furthers this line of thinking. 7 The multiplicity of the individual rational choice for weaving interpersonal ties produces new social structure beyond their community of origin. More rewards and power are given to those who demonstrate a high degree of loyalty and/or a high level of performance—more dependability and more powerful to empower—in an interdependent structure, which is composed of networks. Leadership is manifested in a form of enforcing agency to be more dependable whereas freeloaders are punished by being placed on low positions in the hierarchy. Social structure thus formed on the basis of a web of interdependent partnership in a hierarchical shape to support the exercise of connective power. Furthermore, the network approach provides a relational view about governance by addressing the issue of location when it talks about connection. Therefore, connective power is grounded in its location and connection

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to the overall network of connections from which it is derived and exercised. Actors are knots and links in an interconnected web of networks driven by their location on the system. Leviathan is in a form of a hierarchically constructed interdependent system. Richard Emerson’s theory highlights this point. 8 He hypothesizes a situation of unilateral monopoly, in which actor A possesses a source of valuable resources while actors B1, B2, and B3 are dependent on actor A for these resources without other choices. The Bs are naturally driven by their location in the network to shift the power dynamic by either reducing the value of the resources they receive from A or forming a coalition to negotiate better terms. The emergence of a division of labor among the Bs is the ultimate measure of balancing the relationship—empowerment between them in order to gain a better location on the web. In this situation, Bs become specialized in their exchange relationships with A— each B provides A with different values in exchange for his monopolized resources. In this way, each B will become monopolized in certain ways so the degree of dependence of A on each B will increase. Karen S. Cook further develops a hypothesis that highlights the power dynamics of centrality. 9 According to this hypothesis, as points increase in the network, connections increase. The power will shift from the center of the entire network to the points where most connections are developed. The point that has the most connection is in the position to monopolize the most resources. Therefore, the dynamics are from bottom up. It is the communal network that bestows the balancing power to the disadvantaged actors. Therefore, in a naturally formed, tightly bounded community, there is a connective power dynamic that empowers the weak and eventually balances the unbalanced relationship. It also important to point out that the “small leviathans” are nonetheless a foundational building block of a global Leviathan. Because of communal bonding, we humans idealize human oneness—we yearn for companions with whom we can be so close that we share flesh and blood and bone and each part of each is forever kin. People therefore have kind heart, nice behavior, and genuinely enjoy companionship. “Empathy” becomes an essential part of human existence. This fact is intensified by the sense and reality of “inescapability” of human communal bonding—the impossibility of “intentional attachment and selective detachment.” It is required to “sail with everybody”—like it or not because we are on the same boat and will stay on it for life. Connection is therefore paramount. This is the most important aspect of the logic of togetherness. The most effective survivors are those who seek to change “them” and “us” in a dynamic process of developing inclusive relationships. There is little space for individualistic rational judgment. Great disparities of wealth and power are inimical to this communal bonding and therefore discouraged. However, as the logic of togetherness sustains more egalitarian interdependency, the logic generates a hierarchical order at the same time. A process of natural selection strengthens the associational life by

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bestowing social status to individuals who are more qualitatively and quantitative connected in the connected life. A relational Leviathan beyond the communal based power thus emerges. FROM CONQUEST TO AN INSTITUTIONAL LEVIATHAN The fact that human rationality does not work so well when constructing a governing body is because humans are not rational in the first place when dealing with the issue of power. However, that does not mean they cannot establish a “leviathan” on a larger scale. Throughout human history, the power that has been exercised to overcome communal bonding and build a “leviathan” cross communal boundaries has been conquest. It is a coercive construction of power which possesses an overwhelming, monopolized, and organized force. “Leviathan” thus goes beyond the notion of “social contract” between rational individuals, as Hobbes originally understands. It is important to note that conquest and coercion are not inconsistent with human nature. On the contrary, it is possible to implant a “leviathan” deeply into individuals’ psych that they blindly obey an “abstract authority” without any communal bonding at work, as Stanley Milgram would demonstrate through his famous research on obedience. 10 It seems beyond normal cognition that how individuals could deliver devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being without any reason except being requested to obey the orders of an experimenter in charge, simply because they were at Yale University—an authoritative institution. Milgram’s conclusion is that virtually all of us are willing to do as we are told if we regard the person who issues the order is representing an authority. We don’t think, we follow; or we think in a societal norm-based frame. We do what we do rather blindly. We conform more than think straight. After we have done it, as the concept “cognitive dissonance” would tell, 11 we justify what we do by making up reasons. It seems that, psychologically, we humans are cognitively reformulated to become incapable of resisting authoritative mastership. On the contrary, we need it to “enable” us to do the things we are not able to do through our own initiative. History tells us that coercive power has powerfully linked the strong and the weak and enabled the former to exercise their will over the latter. A “leviathan” is more likely to be controlled by the strong and be used by the strong to enforce the outcome in their favor. Hobbes ends up in supporting an absolute monarchy. Bachrach and Baratz highlight that, because of the accumulative nature of power, the powerful can manipulate the agenda so any issue that does not fit the dominant frame is automatically screened out. They can also manipulate symbols to manufacture bias to sanitize any challenger and make any chal-

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lenge a “non-event.” 12 Lukes goes even further by revealing how “mindcontrol” legitimizes coercive power. As Lukes puts it: A power holder does much more than exercising power over the powerless by getting him to do what he does not want to do. He is able to exercise power over him by influencing, shaping, or determining “his very want” so that eliminates the possibility of resistance in the first place. The mechanisms for this practice include “the promotion and sustenance of all kinds of failures of rationality and illusory thinking, among them the ‘naturalization’ of what could be otherwise and the misrecognition of the sources of desire and belief.” 13 Coercion eventually becomes a habitual power that plays a function of connection. Behind all the maneuvers lies the deliberate construction of meanings and patterns of social behavior. As a consequence, the sense of powerlessness on the part of the weak is internalized. They are socialized into a habit of dependence on the powerful so they “voluntarily” or blindly obey. Or worse, a “multiple” or “split” self, that is, vague, ambiguous, immature, and partially developed consciousness implanted in the hearts and minds of the powerless. 14 This is not necessary for a functional society; it is even outrageous for an ideal society. But it happens inevitably because of the falsely perceived elements of protection, leadership, guidance, and guaranteed security offered by the strong to the weak. Even in a democratic society with all the democratic norms and institutions, the ruling groups are still able to actively create and maintain this type of hegemonic control. Some people normally obey and some others give orders. Social order thus take shape. It is depressing when we talk about the logic of conquest in human history. But the logic of togetherness has made it possible to transform the oppressive coercion into legitimate institutions. The structural condition would be the web of interdependent partnership and the agency the power of connection. Max Weber shows us this possibility. It is the process of institutionalizing rational/ legal systems and the key word is “acceptance”: how is it possible for a large assemblage of individuals (persons or other units of action) to accept the distribution of power? He thus develops the concept of authority, which is the legitimated or accepted power. In this way, naked power becomes legitimate power through the construction of a synchronized and institutionalized power of political, economic, and cultural origins. An “iron cage” of bureaucracy turns out to be the best organized power. 15 For Weber, authority, the legitimized and acceptable power, is a form of interdependent connection between the dominated and the dominating, despite of the obvious inequality of status, possession, reputation, and power. One side is clearly in control but also empowers. Otherwise, the acceptance is withdrawn. Weber therefore highlighted a fact throughout human history: power that successfully facilitated the expansion of human connections is accomplished by institutionalizing the interpersonal relations which are interdependent in nature. Individual action units have become subjected to the control of the larger institutionalized establishment, which is beyond the individual

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power agents and reflects the collective will of all of them after their negotiation and struggle in an interdependent relationship. The resulting establishments control the process of their activities and their interactions with each other, both restricting and enabling because the unbalanced, one-sided control of power becomes a collective and “institutionalized” interdependent relationship. However, this institutional construction is hollow and weak without a real social force behind it. When the relationship becomes “impersonal” as it is defined by the institutionalized legal system and bureaucracy, it is likely to become hollow. What is the “interpersonal/intergroup” that is “institutionalized in the case of legal authority”? What is the social force that backs up the legal institutions and how does it strengthen its connection to the action units so that its power is strong? Georg Simmel depicts money as a socially functional power. He perceives the institution of money as a social force to further integrate social system by controlling individuals’ minds and hearts, forcefully quantifying human social relationships, alienating workers from their work but at the same time setting the division of labor beyond human will. Money works as a coercive medium of integration, solidarity, and orderly change, as long as it is of low intensity and high frequency and therefore releases tension and becomes normatively regulated. Therefore, it enables individuals to accomplish things by institutionalizing individuals’ behavior the way they ought to but is unlikely to do without the coercive power of money. In the entire process, coercion has functional importance. As Simmel points out: “Occasionally the consciousness of being under coercion, of being subject to a superordinate authority, is revolting or oppressive—whether the authority be an ideal or a social law, an arbitrarily decreeing personality or the executor of higher norms. But for the majority of men, coercion is probably an irreplaceable support and cohesion of the inner and outer life.” 16 The web of interdependent partnership is present here. As Georg Simmel points out, the dynamic of action is rather a society-wide web of group affiliations. It has been developing in an inseparable mingling associative process. 17 Money works as a connective power that empowers all social groups of people who use it. Although it does not necessarily decrease individuals’ communal feelings, it does generate a new dynamism of loyalty and belonging to the rationalized institutions—Max Weber’s rational-legal authority found its substance and embodiment. So far the largest unit of institutionalized leviathan is nation-state. In fact, “state” as a form of “leviathan” has carried human society onto a critical historical stage toward a world community of nations. The development of the rationalized institution of states is close to the Hobbesian rational individuals who get together to reach an agreement for the “Leviathan.” Theda Skocpol’s state manifests this aspect. According to her “bringing the state back-in” thesis, a state connects to society in four basic areas. The first is that

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the establishment and transformation of state is the essence of societal construction. The state is regarded as the core of society, especially during a revolutionary era. Second, political institutional constructions as well as the procedures they set up have strong impact on the identities, goals, and capacities of social groups. Social groups, as well as individuals inside them, are shaped by the structural frame of state and their size, shape, and organization are inevitably institutionalized. Third, therefore, the outcome of group activities, as well as individual behavior patterns, are determined by state institutions because the state possesses the power to decide whether a group “fit”— or lack thereof—between its goals and capacities and the state political institutions. Last but not least, individuals’ bonding to the state is accumulative. Previously established social policies by the state affect subsequent politics. Because these policies affect different social groups of individuals differently, they have long-lasting impact on the shape of the overall formation of groups and the potential strength of each group in the formation. 18 Here we see a clear picture of institutional leviathan—a hierarchically constructed empowering partnership between institutionalized state and the institutional process of social groups by the state. Skocpol’s theory later further orients toward welfare state and the role state plays in developing nationwide large scale communal bonding. The state as an institutionalized formal association is a powerful enabling power that empowers society and makes all the different groups within the state’s borders effectively connected beyond the traditional communal bonding. 19 Logic of togetherness here works through the web of interdependent partnership between the state and different social groups. An institutionalized leviathan thus established by the empowered power agents. FROM UNEVEN EXCHANGE TO A FUNCTIONAL LEVIATHAN Power dynamics are clearly behind market exchange as is highlighted by Sven Beckert’s cotton empire. 20 It is clear that the development of modern capitalism was not only driven by the West’s self-made men and free market trade. The success of this group of people and the strength they gained in society depended also on getting the others in line, which required coercion, oppression, and exploitation, albeit not always violent. Capitalism did not have to go hand in hand with imperialism but many times it did. Oppressive exploitation could be based on institutionalized investment and employment so that it coercively shapes the fabric of others’ lives while trickling down some proportion of the profits to the oppressed and exploited who are involved in the business process of production and exchange. In this way, the market force operating by the business people is so powerful that it disables

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individuals’ freedom of choice based on their desire and ability. Market as an institution is supposed to be about individual choice and its fundamental nature is democracy in an economic sense: individuals vote with their feet and business operations are therefore voted in and out based on their ability to address individuals’ choices. However, in the capitalist institutional system, the average individuals are free but weak on the market; they are too free to follow their desires and too weak to fulfill their desires, they are vulnerable and subject to the dominance of the more organized and resourceful business class who are therefore powerful enough to not only address individuals’ choices but also more often than not to reach deep into individuals’ lives and shape them. Two concepts might be able to further the understanding: differentiation and fragmentation. Division of labor and specialization automatically differentiate people. For the working of market, it is natural and positive if it is based on and in the frame of integrated common system where everybody is free and equal. However, if the differentiation combines with the inequality like class, gender, race/ethnicity, and so on, especially the unequal situation among nation-states, the consequences can be disastrous. Sadly, the combination has been normal in history. A caste system or a latent caste system looms large. In this case, the market system gravely violates its original tendency to free individuals and equalize them so they can freely exchange as equal partners on the market. It hence develops a built-in element of uneven exchange. Furthermore, exchange and competition on a free market put a huge burden on individuals. As market force takes over in society in general, individuals have to learn to achieve professionalization, specialization, and standardization in order to play their roles and gain inclusion in the system. This process is very complicated, full of uncertainty, anxiety, and it is a process of survival of the fittest. Without family linkage and other unequal and unfair factors, individuals are very likely to end up in confusion, disorder, ambiguity, “split self,” multiple identities. The root of these irrationalities is individuals’ inability to rationalize in the supposedly rational market system. Since the whole system is built upon rationality, individuals’ irrationalizing of rationality fundamentally breaks the system into divided, isolated, and insulated pieces. The consequence is societal fragmentation. Individuals’ drive for personal needs and wants—material gain and physical/psychological comfort—based on their ambiguous perceptions, limited cognitive capabilities, unstable emotional reactions has the potential to overwhelm society and the market system will become unsustainable. The supposedly integrative factors, such as legal-normative constructions, educational establishments, will be powerless. The differentiating factors like national/ethnic identity, class, race, gender, and all other social categories that categorize people, are

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likely to become salient in individuals’ social lives, which further divide, instead of unite, people. Adam Smith’s theory highlights a voluntary and mutually beneficial path of a global market system which has the potential to overcome the outcomes of the logic of uneven exchange and move toward an order of world community. He systematically highlights that human beings are brought together and kept connected by an “invisible hand” of market. 21 The market system further facilitates the development of a global web of business networks. In the era before or without the dominance of the market force, political, economic, and social life was governed by a dense web of interlocking relationships of communal bonding which was dominated by the natural hierarchy in a local community. Where an individual was born determined this person’s loyalty and belonging and all the aspects of social solidarity. The rise of the market system enabled the web of business networks across traditional communal boundaries and pushed forward the dramatic development of nationalism and then globalism in the nineteenth century, and replaced communal bonding as the main governance system by the increasing prevalence and dominance of market relationship. The key question Smith has answered is: is it possible for self-interested individuals to stay connected long and peaceful enough without external coercion? Smith reveals a situation that human beings, without an external authority, can stay connected peacefully and constructively without having to fight against each other. This situation is when individuals inevitably engage with each other for exchange on the market and thus develop a functional relationship. Individuals’ specialization, as well as societal division of labor, generates this inevitability. Here, rational egoists do not behave in a Darwinian sense which leads to the logic of uneven exchange. They are Smithian egoists whose pursuit of their self-interests produces economic growth for them all. Functional exchange based on specialization and division of labor works as the mechanism to minimize the possibility of zero sum game and improves everybody’s welfare through enlarging the pie. For Smith, social interaction is a positivesum game, through which resources are expanding; specialization enables greater production, because when people specialize they produce more wealth than if they try to produce everything by themselves. Since there are differences in natural talents in different people, specialization and exchange fully utilize individuals’ comparative advantage. In sum, individuals’ pursuit of self-interests in the end generates a self-reinforcing mutual empowerment system. People with equal status mutually depend on each other based on the result they produce and the mutual empowerment is enforced by mutually accepted contract and reciprocity, which clarify mutual benefit, as well as responsibility, by measureable reliability-result. This system transforms selfish individuals into mutuality oriented actors of self-control, self-reliance, and self-discipline—whatever they want, they have to and are able to “earn

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it” through interaction with others, be functional in other’s life and in the process mutually empower one another. The implication is thus clear: freedom and equality among individuals are not only possible without harming the collective well-being, but also desirable because of their power to expand resources, utilize individuals’ competitive advantages, and generate more production. Power of individual freedom as it is exercised through laissezfaire market exchange generates empowering energy, which connects individuals to form the foundation of “the wealth of nations.” The doctrine known as liberalism came into being. Smith holds that in the social realm, any domination of one social force is harmful; in the economic realm, any monopoly within a nation is harmful and tariffs between nations are harmful, too; in the political realm, the state must be small and minimal (the “nightwatchman” state) with the only function to protect citizens against violence, theft, and contractual fraud. The state is an equal partner to function in the division of labor market system to provide necessary service to other partners, instead of being a top-down, overwhelming, and monopolized hegemonic power. A functional leviathan thus emerges out of a free market which works as an “invisible hand of order.” Investment, employment, and all the elements in the process of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption are carriers to bring tangible material benefits to individuals and shape their lives along the way. This type of empowering connective power makes the power agents really feel the power in their daily lives to be in control when they play their functional roles in others’ lives. This group of people became powerful as a governance force because of this. It therefore produced new economic and social dynamism beyond communal, and gradually, national borders—a functional leviathan. Adam Smith was the first theorist to develop a theory to describe this system, to justify and celebrate it. The “invisible hand” of market hence became the catch phrase for the new era of history. Karl Polanyi calls it “the great transformation.” 22 However, the three basic assumptions that support the Smithian logic of thinking seem shaky. First is that actors act individually. Second, they are rational. They individually know and are capable of pursuing their rationalized “utilities.” Third, the market as an “invisible hand of order” works as the driving force to channel the individuals’ rational pursue to produce collective welfare. But the assumptions are not present in real life, as humans are social animals. Structural-functionalism advanced the understanding from the societalist view. It therefore further answered the questions like: who is supposed to do what in this functional leviathan? How is its governance system organized? Structural-functionalism substitutes market for functional social structure and individuals’ rational choice for individual social roles. Similar to the market that shapes individuals’ rational choice, the functional social structure sets up roles for individuals to play and they connect to each other and

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mutually empower each other that way. The structural whole bestows meaning for individual roles and, at the same time, individuals’ role-playing makes the structural whole alive. Structural interdependence is the mechanism that connects the functional parts of the structure and sustains human individuals’ mutual empowerment. Functional role playing manifests connective power that empowers power agents. Talcott Parsons contributed the most to the structure-functional way of governance. His point of departure is the “interaction of a plurality of actors”: “The structure of social systems cannot be derived directly from the actor-situation frame of reference. It requires functional analysis of the complications introduced by the interaction of a plurality of actors.” 23 Note that he does not talk about an overarching, overwhelming societal whole from above; instead, he mentions the connections of a plurality of actors—a web of interdependency. And the agency, the mechanism, for the interaction of a plurality of actors is role-playing. It is an interesting model for a world community of nations. However, a key issue is how to deal with the actors who are not dependable and therefore do not play a role to empower others— how do people stay connected under the logic of togetherness if there is without an external authority to make them dependable and worthy of being a partner? Parsons contributed a key conceptualization, he terms it “institutionalization” which highlights the essence of a functional leviathan beyond Smith. The process of system institutionalization is the process of individual transformation. It highlights a stable establishment of certain patterns of interaction among individual actors. It infuses with cultural values and norms, which, in turn, can become internalized through socialization and therefore transform individual actors into functional parts of the whole. Individuals’ roles in the social system are defined, clarified, and therefore played; rules based on dependable interactions of individual actors are formed and therefore patterns of interaction are stabilized; values and norms are further set and eventually internalized, and in the end, individuals become role players and status adherents in the interdependent ties and connective power is sustained and developed. Similar to Smith, Parsons believed social control is necessary but only functional when it functions in setting up rules and enforcing them to serve the other parts of the functioning structure. Only when actors are socially dependable, in addition to their dependability in economic exchanges and division of labor, can they be functional as an equal partner to engage in mutually empowering role-playing activities. 24

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PROLETARIAT DICTATORSHIP VS. BUSINESS NETWORKS: A STRUCTURALLY DYNAMIC LEVIATHAN In a world of great transformation, the most critical question a thinker needs to ponder is: which social force drives the trend and is therefore the most dynamic actor in contemporary and future human history? Karl Marx provided a theory. 25 For him, power is embodied in the bourgeoisie class and the class is global in nature and powerful enough to break down communal, even national, boundaries. The bourgeoisie class therefore becomes a global force and its power is social in terms of the entire capitalist system, deeper than political and economic. As the owners of the most advanced means of production, they carry its production across the globe and own economic power to dominate, oppress, and exploit the non-owners. Their economic power is thus transformed into both political and cultural powers along the way. The commercial empires and colonialism manifest this globally oriented power. Class struggle is the dynamic of the force of productivity and the means and mode of production which work as the driving forces to link different social groups across the globe. The bourgeoisie also worked as a coercive power to destroy the aristocracy-centered old governance system and eliminated the feudal boundaries of communal bonding. It also constructed the universal legal system, the universal educational system, and dramatically secularized the religious system. Engels developed the Marxist view on class and envisioned a global state. Like Hobbes, Engels views state as an inevitable “leviathan.” The difference between him and Hobbes is about the origin of state: for Hobbes, Leviathan is the result of an agreement among equal individuals whereas for Engels, Leviathan is an institutionalization of unequal class struggle. 26 Individuals are community-bound all the time but classes in modern times are universal. The conflict between the classes results in the formation of the combined political power of the class with its economic power. Since the modern classes, both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are global in nature, the state that resulted from their struggle is also global. In the meantime, Engels highlights how the state maintains compliance of the non-owner class despite it represents the interests of the ruling class against the ruled class. Besides forceful coercion of the police and military, the state exercises mind control and ideology-shaping through religion, legal construction, and education. The system as a whole makes dominance by the ruling class seem natural and empowering and the system goes beyond community-national boundaries. For Marx and Engels, class struggle is structural, not individual. Its ultimate result is a structural transformation of society into a proletariat dictatorship, a necessary stage of history as it is marching toward a classless society. It is more about separated and separable classes fighting for their independent class interests for a structural purpose beyond their self-consciousness.

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The objective connective nature of their relationship reflects their historical mission on a global scale. Both are conditional to the other in a historical sense and the proletariat class struggles against the bourgeoisie with a mission to establishing a classless society via a proletariat dictatorship, which can be regarded as a global Leviathan. The theory highlights the forces that are global and are able to bring about a global governance system, although the global governance system itself is more divisive as the proletariat class will eventually eliminate the capitalist class through class struggle. Under this governance system, the end of history will be a classless and stateless communist society. Karl Marx in Communist Manifesto uses the slogan “working men of all countries, unite!” to highlight how the most dynamic historical actor ultimately builds up a global leviathan. 27 Clearly, close to 180 years since the assertion was made, history witnessed division, instead of unity, of the “working men of all countries.” In the meantime, a force, a dynamic historical force, is uniting across national borders. This force is the bourgeoisie/ capitalist class, which has developed into a global nucleus group. Its unity consists the core of a global web of inter-group ties. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the capitalist class in developed countries has been hugely discredited and it is no longer fashionable to even mention its historical contribution. However, Marx is insightful when he mentions, “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.” 28 His mistake is that the “bourgeoisie” did not only play a most revolutionary part in history, it will play a most revolutionary part in the foreseeable future. The part it plays is to exercise the power of unity among itself across national borders and the power of connection to most other social forces within and across countries. Marx is wrong because he was trapped in a dichotomy of either individualistic or collectivist perspective. He believes that each class fights for its own selfish interests and the proletariat class is the only social force that represents the collective interests of humanity after it wins the class warfare against the capitalist class. However, he fails to see the bourgeoisie as business groups existing as a global web of networks. The global web of business networks, in the process of working on its selfish interests, “found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers,” 29 and far beyond that. It generates not only financial capital and material capital but also human capital and social capital—it needs to train and transform a people of traditional men into dependable human resources for the capitalist system and it builds up tangible social connections in the process of investment, production, marketing, and consumption. In this way, “working men of all countries” exist as attachments to the business networks and their survival and advancement depend on the achievements of the people who employ

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them. The global web of business networks, therefore, connectively plays a role as the backbone of humanity as a whole. Even Marx’s basic logic of reasoning supports this argument. 30 Marx’s point of departure is the force of productivity and the means and mode of production. The class that creates and advances the force of productivity by owning the mode of production works as the most dynamic driving force in society and therefore shapes other forces of the society. Since the business networks are composed of people who own the most advanced means of production and pursue profit with it by engaging in relations of production, they dynamically connect to and effectively transform other social forces. Class struggle in modern society, which is viewed by Marx as the distinctive feature of the capitalist society, is, in fact, characterized by the dynamics of the business networks’ mobilization and utilization of other social forces. In this process, the business networks construct the legal system, the educational and religious system, and all the ideological constructions. In this sense, this global web of network is the most dynamic force in shaping the social system. It is therefore both an interest-based class of bourgeoisie and a relationship-based networks of business people. Here, market economy is rather a step-2 result from the step-1 development of a business network. Fundamentally, it is the connections among the business people to institutionalize private ownership and free enterprise so that the foundation of a market system is set up. People here see the economic side and its impact on the political side from Adam Smith’s theory but fail to appreciate the social side of the whole system that shapes both the economic side and the political side. In addition, the business network has been the most effective way to weave society into a whole, an essential element in the gradual process of interdependent partnership formation. Investment, employment, and management are the most effective connective power to bring in the lower-class people to be part of the societal franchise. To the working class’s needs and its growing strength, the business network is structurally more sensitive because of the power of the web of the economic connections between them. It is more sensitive than the communist party, the so-called working class’s vanguard group, because the relationship between the business people and working class people is essentially in line with functional leviathan whereas the relationship between the communist party and the working class people is more about the logic of conquest. The dynamic of business leadership in all the major areas of society has been the driving force in the modern world and solidly positioned the business networks in the center of the global web of inter-group ties. The global triumph of the entire capitalist institutional construction, from its financial market to its managerial organization through manufacturing and marketing to product consumption, manifests the business networks’ central role. The essence is that the whole capitalist institution provides an institutional setting

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for the business networks to reach other forces, the vastest population no any other social force has ever reached, across the globe. Furthermore, since the business networks reach people by organizing the essential items of their daily lives in the areas of production and consumption, the web of connections this group of people build is more tangible, solid, and enduring. A class-based leviathan driven by the dominant class’ selfish class interests is destined to be limited in scope and depth. Global web of business networks, despite its vast power of connection, inevitably requires doing business with gentlemen only, instead of everyone. It is clear that the possibility of equal exchange depends on all units being reliable. If they do not possess the equal capability and resource to be in an exchange relationship, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for a relationship to form and be sustained and connective power will be nonexistent. The key problem is its exclusiveness: the exclusion of those interpersonally perceived undependable; the exclusion of those short of resources and skills; the exclusion of those who are freeloaders, cheaters; the exclusion of those who are marginalized, isolated, and insulated; the exclusion of those who survive in poorly managed and badly organized organizations or networks. Despite of the ideas of institutionalization, the nature of interdependent partnership renders ineffective of the normative transformation of individuals who are not dependable, if not completely powerless. Also, no matter how helpful networking can be for individual advancement, business network itself is highly exclusive. Many individuals cannot gain a position on the weak ties and many individuals do not have the ability to achieve a dynamic rebalancing. Social capital is not cheap, anyway. WEB OF INTERDEPENDENT PARTNERSHIP: A GLOBAL LEVIATHAN The cross-boundary web of interdependent partnership showed its potential to facilitate a singular Leviathan on the global scale. For most part of human history, people lived in their clans, the natural community they were born into. The logic that governed society was clearly the logic of communal bonding. When the clans eventually developed into tribes which in turn became empires, it was the logic of conquest that prevailed. Empires were established and maintained by conquest and administrative coercion. The logic of uneven exchange had existed through human history but never been a major power to connect different people and bring them into a large political and social unit until the era of industrialization. The fully developed intergroup trade, finance, and employment enabled exchange among a vastly diversified groups. However, there are always power dynamics behind trade and exchange. New nations like the United States of America formed in the

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era. Ownership of the means of production under the logic of uneven exchange gave birth to two global classes: the capitalist and the proletariat. The latter failed to unite and deliver its historical mission whereas the former pushed history to a higher level. But a class-based leviathan is never sufficient. The two World Wars and the Great Depression in between called for a new logic of human existence. The logic of togetherness operating in the structure of the web of interdependent partnership emerged with an agency of the connective power of mutual empowerment during the Cold War. There were two conditions for its birth. The negative one was the shared vulnerability: the powerful weaponry that firmly established the principle of mutually assured destruction. However, the positive one was the shared strength: the forming and development of the global web of interdependent partnership which was business centered, state guided, and community leaders actively participated and its international/intergroup networks were border-breaking. It was brought about and maintained by inescapable and enriching mutual empowerment between hierarchical and interdependent partners in a functional social structure, market, or market-like social networks. It has been working because individuals are framed into exercising their rational choice based on the inevitable interactions between one another, due to specialization, division of labor, role-playing, and special locale/positions on the social ties. In this way, the logic of communal bonding is transformed into a relational leviathan; the logic of conquest is transformed into an institutional leviathan; the logic of uneven exchange a functional leviathan; as well as business networks as a structurally dynamic leviathan to become an organic part of the web of interdependent partnership. Moreover, the web of interdependent partnership does not only include independent units that are strong and resourceful enough to be dependable, its connective power of mutual empowerment also reaches out to connect and empower those previously excluded. As a consequence, it has minimized enmity between those system insiders and outsiders. A high level of alienation and antagonism among different social groups across the globe is avoided. Karl Polanyi points out that public goods and collective goods as structural sources are hard to manage in a bourgeoisie-dominated system. 31 Public goods are non-excludable—you cannot keep anyone from consuming them and non-rival—not subject to “crowding.” Collective goods are non-excludable for members within a given group but rival between the groups. Distinguished from the two types above is private goods. They are fully excludable and also rival anything on the free market for sale or in the tribal society for competition. Among the three types of goods we humans inevitably depend on for living, only the last one can be safely maintained by individuals or their interactions and managed by bourgeoisie control. The public and collective goods inevitably ask for a social force to govern their use so that they

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can benefit the collectivity as a whole. The global web of interdependent partnership, working through relational leviathan, institutional leviathan, functional leviathan, as well as structural leviathan, can provide social force, connective enough to tie individuals and social groups together for the task. We are able to manage the “global commons,” world peace included. Theory about historical structure and trend is good at pointing out the dilemma and contradictories. At the end of its wits, we see human agency: how do humans exercise their creativity to develop and execute strategies to continue the positive historical trend and avoid the negative possibility? We’ll discuss further in the next chapter. NOTES 1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 2. Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ s Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985). 4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961). 5. Fritz Heider, “Attitudes and Cognitive Organization, Journal of Psychology 21 (1), 1946, pp. 107–112. 6. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties” American Journal of Sociology 78, No. 6, 1973; “Economic Action and Social Structure: The problem of embeddedness” American Journal of Sociology 91, No. 3, 1985; “The Theory-Gap in Social Network Analysis,” in Paul Holland and Samuel Leinhardt, eds., Perspectives on Social Network Research (New York: Academic Press, 1979); “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory, No. 1, 1983. 7. Peter Marsden and Nan Lin, eds., Social Structure and Network Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA.: Sage Publications, 1982); Nan Lin, Social Capital; A Theory of Social Structure and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8. Richard Emerson, “Power-Dependence Relations,” American Sociological Review, 17, Feb. 1962; “Power Dependence Relations: Two Experiments,” Sociometry, 27 Sept. 1964. 9. Karen S. Cook, “Exchange and Power in Networks of Interorganizational Relations,” Sociological Quarterly, No. 18, Winter 1977; Karen S. Cook and Karen A. Hegtvedt, “Distributive Justice, Equity, and Equality,” American Sociological Review 39, 1983. 10. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: The Unique Experiment That Challenged Human Nature (New York: HarperCollins, 1974). 11. Joel M. Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007). 12. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 13. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2005), p. 149. 14. Murray Edelman, “Symbolism in Politics,” in Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism, ed. Leon N. Lindberg, Robert Alford, and Claus Offe (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975). 15. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947); Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968); From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (paperback edition), ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).

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16. Georg Simmel, “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1955), p. 299. 17. Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliation, translated by Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (New York: Free Press, 1955); The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 18. Theda Skocpol, State and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); “Bringing the State Back In,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3–37. 19. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Diminishing Democracy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 20. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015). 21. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Books, 2003). 22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 23. Talcott Parsons, “The Present Position and Prospect of Systemic Theory in Sociology,” Essays in Sociological Theory, (New York: Free Press, 1949), p. 229. 24. Talcott Parsons, Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951); Action Theory and The Human Condition, (New York: Free Press, 1978); Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward A Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953). 25. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The MarxEnglels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); The German Ideology, Part One with selection form Parts Two and Three, together with Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy,” edited and with introduction by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970). 26. Friedrich Engels, On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in The Marx-Englels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). 27. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The MarxEnglels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). 28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The MarxEnglels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 475. 29. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), p. 779. 30. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The MarxEnglels Reader, second edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); The German Ideology, Part One with selection form Parts Two and Three, together with Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy,” edited and with introduction by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970). 31. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

Chapter Six

Construction of the Post–Cold War World A Grand Strategy

CONNECTIVE POWER IN ACTION The “Davos Group” is a forum that is a good reflection of the behind-thescenes governance mechanism of the interlocking global web of dynamic interdependent partnership. It can also highlight the working of the connective power of empowering ties among global power agents. The group started in 1971 during the most dramatic and hotly contested days of the Cold War when the US seemed to be declining while the USSR seemed to be rising, on hard power measures during the Vietnam War. At first it was called the European Economic Forum and later changed to the World Economic Forum. It initiated by the Europeans, an unmistakable sign of interdependent partnership across the Atlantic Ocean. Once it began, it fit right into the American-led global governance system because it has been an open and revolving web of global networks of business leaders and community/national policy makers. It gained its name as “Davos group” or “Davos men” because each year in January since 1971, a group of super-connected people, about 2,500 in 2015, meet in Davos, Switzerland, to engage in networking and coordinating. This small group of people, as Samuel Huntington wrote, “control virtually all international institutions, many of the world’s governments, and the bulk of the world’s economic and military capabilities.” 1 But for Huntington based on his “clash of civilizations” theory, since their numbers are few—“less than 50 million people or 1 percent of the world’s population and perhaps by as few as one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s popula153

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tion” share its culture, it is therefore non-representative to the masses across the globe and its influence is limited. 2 But I would believe this seemingly small number of people do have “a secure grip on power in their own societies” and far beyond. It is neither possible nor necessary for the global governance system to be “representative.” The “Davos Group” is socially powerful because it represents the most connected web of interdependent partnership across the globe and therefore powerful with connective power of empowering ties. It is true when we look at this group of people by isolating them from the other social groups they are not representative. But the world is a hierarchical and fuzzy web of international power agents who survive and thrive on the structure of the global web of interdependent partnership. If we see them as a concentrated power of connections that reaches out to almost every social group across the globe, we know they are the center of the global web of business, as well as political and social, networks. As any connective power, this group of people gains their power through others and their power is rooted in others because their center and top position on the global web enables them to both empower others and be empowered by others. They therefore constitute a part of the most solid foundation of a global governance system. Their connective power is rooted in interdependent partnership which reveals through their control of investment, employment, trade, and technical innovation. For them, the world has already been a community. A world order has already been achieved. It is still a community of nations, but a Leviathan to effectively govern this community has developed. They represent a new civilization that cuts across the civilizational line; they represent a new social group that cuts across communal and national boundaries. Of course, they do not represent liberalism and democracy because they represent a hierarchical web with themselves on the top and at the center and they seek to build and maintain dependable partners while excluding others. However, that does not mean they do not take roots in ethno-local or national grounds because their connections to local and national leaders are strong. Although few local or national leaders have gained their positions by competing on how western they are, they cannot afford to lose their connections to this global web. In fact, they actively seek the connection. Therefore, the Davos Group’s connective power in fact drives the local communities’ activities to a great extent and reshapes them in a universal way not limited in legal and education systems. They are universal not in the liberal democratic sense but in a sense that they act as a global web and they pursue each part of the web to adapt to the web as a whole by actively working to make the parts compatible to the normal networking with the others on the web. They are not “western” in a strict sense but actively integrating all the element of other cultures into its mainstream. In this sense, they are both universal and multi-cultural.

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A good example is global corporations as is defined and described by Kenichi Ohmae. 3 Global corporations are similar to multinational corporations in that they operate in many nations across the globe. However, they are distinctive because they utilize and integrate the local elements of human resource, production, marketing, and services and therefore transform these elements into system insiders. Therefore, the organizational form of global corporation has become a major institutional form of the global web of interdependent partnership that is capable of both economic and social reach on a global scale. In reality, they have transformed many parts of the world by changing many men and women who were previously loyal to their isolated clans, tribes, and/or nations into corporate citizens whose loyalty and efforts are more or less devoted to the corporations in particular and to the global interdependent web in general. In the meantime, through their efforts to survive in nations that are different from their nations of origin, global corporations adjust themselves and adopt the local way of life to an extent that a mutually meaningful and beneficial connection can be rationally constructed. It is a process of mutual empowerment in a seemingly power-over relationship. In fact, it is both hierarchical and mutual. In this way, they effectively strengthen the global social connections and change “them” and “us” at the same time for a closer connection of previous separated people and for the further establishment of the world order as a whole. The so-called McDonaldization of Society might be an example of this constructive yet complicated process. As George Ritzer described, 4 McDonald’s four principles of operation, “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control,” transformed all the places it goes across the globe. It is a unifying and integrating process that has effectively linked the world by shaping human mind, albeit the channel is via their stomach. The result is not a simple globalization. Instead, “McDonaldization of Society” constitutes both “glocalization” and “grobalization,” meaning the local and the global are co-constructing and co-constituted, instead of mutually repelling. In essence, it is mutually empowering, despite the fact that not everybody goes to the “hamburger university.” Despite the negative comments in the US 5 and recent withdrawal from China, McDonald’s transformed both the US and China for more connection, stronger integration, and more solid unification in frame of thinking and patterns of practices. All of this would reveal a fact: the seemingly economic drive of the business power agents is in fact structurally facilitating a unification and networking process of capitalists of all countries. “Free to do business and equal before the law,” a type of business drive, has been shaping the world into a unipolar web. The world needs peace and order. Peace, as always, remains fragile without power to preserve it. Can this group of business, political, and community leaders effectively govern the world community of nations and bring

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peace and order to the world? Does it have the power to be a fully developed global Leviathan and make the world avoid the realist “Thucydides’s Trap”? The answers to these questions would be that this group does have the potential to gain the power to preserve peace and maintain order. The reason is that it encompasses of the four critical aspects of an interdependent governance system via the global web of interdependent partnership, a power agent to carry out the Wilson/Roosevelt Leviathan. It is both local and global under the logic of communal bonding; it is institutionalized to strive for legal/ rational legitimacy; it is functional through market mechanism to reach people in their daily lives; and it is dynamic as an integrated social class/group. Its performance through its not-too-long history demonstrated that this group’s connective power could produce “connective security.” It was not “collective security” as the soft power of international institutions intended to generate nor alliances and balances the hard power approach would propose. The connective power was powerful enough to reach and connect sufficient groups of people across the globe for rational decision-making. This is an important historical experience we gained from the Cold War struggles, which is: to inclusively engage one another through the connective power of empowering ties on the hierarchical web of international power agents to bring about a surge in global demand for entrepreneurial opportunities and liberalized investment/trade so that different social groups’ daily pursuits would be reshaped on a rational ground. By comparison, both the liberal solution—to engage all the others equally in international institutions—and the realist solution—to confront the enemy militarily and economically—are weaker and less likely to leave lasting mark on history than connective power possessed by the “Davos Group” and “global corporations.” CHECKING SELFISH DRIVE BY INTERDEPENDENCE It is important to point out that this group mainly drives for business people’s selfish interests—interests that are not always compatible with the interests of other social groups. This is not a big problem if the connective power of empowering ties via the web of interdependent partnership reaches all parts of the world to connect all social groups. Connection can create an interdependent dynamic to push each party to be dependable. However, if it cannot, there will be a big problem. For the peasants in Sudan, the Afghan tribal leaders, or the Palestinian who has spent his entire life in a refugee camp, or any group of people who are not able to be qualified members of the business networks and to be dependable in that sense, religion or a communal power is the more close and imminent help. Communal bonding has powerfully existed in people’s lives for so long and rooted in their minds and hearts and

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daily lives so deeply, it works its magic to bring people together and offer them effective governance, irrational maybe but powerful anyway. The web of international power agents as interdependent partners is unable to completely replace thousands of years’ human creation of their traditional communal bonding, in which people gain a sense of place and bulwarks against life’s vicissitudes. Communal bonding continues to be a critical piece in life’s puzzle. But from a long-term historical perspective, this trend does not have legs because it is a reaction to the marching of the global web of interdependent partnership as the powerful international power agents. It takes time for the power agents to gradually and continuously reach more and more areas of communal life by generating entrepreneurial opportunities through investment and employment. “The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Jawaharlal Nehru made this famous statement. 6 However, it’s a half-truth. He overlooked the power of mutual checking between the forces of a capitalist society. Capitalist society dominated by well-connected ruling networks based on their connective power is in fact rooted in a structure of interdependence, a different structure from what was in his mind. Nehru highlighted the problem of uneven exchange, which is an exercise the world over by the unevenly distributed power of one dominant group while excluding, oppressing, and exploiting the other social forces. However, the ruling networks in capitalist societies are structured in the web of interdependence and cannot survive without sufficient connection to other social forces, especially the professionals in journalism, academia, and union leadership. They therefore work hard as a dynamic force to empower others by transforming individuals of all classes into dependable members of the web. Once people are transformed to be useful and usable by their linkage to the business centered entrepreneurial networks and therefore become system/ web insiders, they are members of the middle class and will not become poorer. In everyday terms, we say it is all about jobs—to get a job is to become an insider of the fabric of the societal web and therefore benefit from the advancement of the society. Obviously, in the system characterized by highly complicated high-tech industry and a very sophisticated structure of modern financial and managerial systems, the task to transform individuals into insiders of web fabric has become harder and harder. The people traditionally too distinctive from the social fabric of the interdependent web in both developing and developed countries are destined to have less opportunity to get access to the global web. Without the opportunity to go through the process of socialization, acculturation, and identity reformulation by linking to the global web, the people without this linkage are less likely to become insiders and more likely to become poorer. The solution, however, is the ruling entrepreneurial network more fully exercising its connective power—the dynamic interplay between the ruling

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networks and the people of other social groups. The business-centered entrepreneurial networks are a critical part of the solution, not the problem. To deal with the issue of poverty and minimize the gap between the rich and the poor on a global scale, neither modernization theory nor the dependency theory would work. The former artificially inject modern technologies and financial resources from the outside by government-appointed techno-bureaucrats without the connection between the local and global business and other professional groups; and the latter use government administrative power to artificially and coercively cut off the connection of the global web of interdependent ties between the global business/professional groups and the local ones. Both overlooked the dynamic connective power of empowering. It is impossible to solve the poverty issue without being closely involved in global division of labor, global market fabric, global finance networks, global educational system, and modern managerial and technological interactions. The close causal relationship between poverty and isolation is obvious: lack of access to generate wealth through the global web of interdependent partnership is the cause of poverty. But how can the local people effectively connect to the web? The sensible solution depends on the power agents’ networking power: bridging the connections between the global business/ professional groups and the local ones. Once the two segments of the networks are connected, engine of economic development will be organically rooted in local community and at the same time drive toward an effective linkage to the global web of wealth creation networks. Localization and globalization happen at the same time when global and local business/professional groups as power agents of connective power are connected. The business network of the entrepreneurial groups will bridge the access of local production to the global economy and therefore generate capital by making local products acceptable to the global production and consumption structure. Furthermore, the global web of interdependent partnership works with its strength, the local connections between the global business groups and the local ones facilitate the support from communal bonding. The economic development becomes organic beyond the simple top-down administrative control. The vast locally oriented social networks serve as the guarantor of keeping profit in the community so that the business groups, local as well as global, can connect to the local communities by investment and employment. In the meantime, the construction of the business-enabling institutions is a process of enhanced control that transforms the local way of life. In sum, poverty is only a surface manifestation. The fundamental issue is the limitation in terms of connective capability of social groups. The business networks possess the most powerful connective power through their efforts of business networking. It is the worldwide unity between the global business groups and the local ones that is vital to effectively connect people and transform them to become wealth creators. Connection and inclusion are key

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words for the networking solution of poverty. In order to do so, connections become paramount. The business networks’ connective power plays a key role in maintenance and promotion of the persistent all-inclusive web of different social group networks. Barriers are clearly alive and well in the process. Besides social classes, boundaries between nation-states have shaped people’s loyalties in a powerful way; countless diversified groups in nation-states are exerting their power over the construction of national interests and the understanding about national identity; legal systems and business norms are still far from unified— the rules are different in many areas; civilizational lines are still clear— people are still loyal to their culture; their perceptions about their interests in the international relations are still, to a large extent, shaped by their different way of life. Despite all of this, a trend has been taking shape: the power of empowering connections based on the web of interdependent partnership across nation-states is the driving force behind the dynamics of creating a united web of international/intergroup ties. Competitions among big corporations across the globe over how to divide profits have become more and more rationalized and institutionalized; business operations are more and more globalized and inter-connected; business organizations are engaging one another through more and more across border cooperation; even small business owners are becoming a part of the global network of interdependent transactions. Clearly, a web of interdependent ties across countries, cultures, and all the other geographical and political barriers has formed and is strengthening. A world order is forming. It is important for national leaders to recognize this historical trend and lead their nations accordingly. Since the web of interdependent partnership is highly hierarchical in natural, a nation’s power depends on its collective ability to gain empowering ties and therefore a more centered location on the web. THE STRUCTURE AND AGENCY FOR A GRAND STRATEGY There is a myth in the circle of pundits, practitioners, and policy makers that a coherent theory is not necessarily needed and different theories can be cherry-picked to fit the specific situation (e.g., Mitt Romney’s article in Foreign Affairs in 2007 explicitly mentioned this point). 7 On the other side of the token, American foreign policy is constantly blamed for its lack of grand strategy. In fact, policy making must address two aspects: the structural determinism and the agency. Structurally, the world without a world government has long been a puzzling challenge to scholars and practitioner alike. However, if we view the world as a web of interdependent partnership with a dynamic

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movement toward a unipolar system, the world is no longer an anarchy—an order is clearly demarcated and established in the process of forming the web of inter-group ties, despite the fact that the world is without a world government. On this web, not only the “jungle principle” that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is no longer true, the “balance of power” theory does not apply, either. The power structure of the web of inter-group ties is not multipolar, not bipolar, but centric and unipolar. Although each nation-state is a separated and separable individualistic entity, their self-conscious and independence, to a large extent, depend on the structural connections between the different social groups, nation-states are one of them, within national borders and outside groups on the different locations of the web, especially their connections to the center of the web. Each nationstate is therefore closely knit onto the global web. Effective structural and functional connections from the center of the web can effectively affect or even shape the peripheral groups’ action. The necessity for effective global governance by a well-connected group naturally arise from this structure. There are at least two practical issues. First of all, power agent networks’ global unity is necessary because of the shared vulnerability. They have shared vulnerability when they deal with nature—the planet they live on and share is so fragile and so many natural factors are completely beyond our control. For example, the eruption of a pandemic, global warming, and so on. A unified global ruling network is the only viable force that can generate sufficient technological and productive capabilities for governments to utilize, when they have to organize all the power agents to deal with natural disasters. However, the more seriously shared vulnerability is the possibility that people hurt each other. Class struggle, national warfare, racial and ethnic conflicts and cultural clash all generate the high possibility that people may hurt each other to the extent that they die together, or at least live miserably together. As divided as they are, governments in the form of nation-states are supposed to be in the position to deal with the issues of shared vulnerability but they more often than not heighten the possibility instead of lightening it. Since human beings are more divided than united and it is impossible to form a world government, the only realistic social force that has both connective power and selfish drive to connect to the largest possible population across the divides of classes, nations, and cultures is the web of interdependent partners. It is indeed the most dynamic global force to exercise its connective power to minimize the factors that divide human beings throughout history. Without the interdependent web, national governments are likely to subject themselves to the distraction of the most powerful social groups within their borders and their nationally selfish and interest group–oriented policies will only keep human beings on the edge of destroying one another. The web of interdependent partnership is

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the only hope for productive connection so that all the social forces can work together to deal with this situation in a persistently effective way. Another practical issue that highlights the necessity of global unity of the web of interdependent partnership is that we face a situation in which we have to deal with a partner who is 51 percent friend and 49 percent enemy or to deal with a rival who is 51 percent enemy and 49 percent friend. I would term it “connective conflicts.” As a consequence, we have to be able to emotionally endure constant tensions with virtually everybody on the one hand, and to rationally limit conflict with most of them to a certain level on the other. It is highly dialectic that when we are fighting for our interests, we have to constantly make sure we don’t hurt the other side too much because of the inseparability of our interests from theirs. This situation calls for a globally unified social force that is capable of rational interactions. The web of interdependent intergroup ties across all boundaries is the only viable form of human connection that is capable of dealing with the “connective conflicts” because interdependent ties are rational and people operating in a web of interdependency are the only ones who can rationally simplify the complicated multifaceted “connective conflicts.” A clear example is the economic crisis since 2008 and the difficulties we experienced when dealing with it. If the web of interdependent partnership of all countries was not sufficiently united and its interdependent ties were not strong enough, the situation would have been much worse—just like in the early 1930s when the world suffered the Great Depression. Fortunately, the global web of interdependent partnership worked well enough to be able to filter out most of the irrational elements and guide the nation-states to develop sensible solutions. Agency-wise, the Cold War history demonstrates a fundamental cognitive shift about the power agents of international relations from both the realism and the idealism. The active power agents of the web of interdependent partnership are the dependable partners on the web, which can be any ruling network of different social groups within or across nation-states. In the process of their strive for their relational and functional positions on the global web, they wield connective power to move the dynamic of international relations. Although nation-states are still regarded as the most active power agents, they are regarded as “agency” working in the structure of a global web of interdependence and their source of power is connective power of empowering ties in addition to their hard and soft powers. They therefore cannot pursue its national interests by simply building up its individualistic hard and soft powers and they cannot focus on spreading and enforcing its values by constructing domestic and international institutions, either. The “smart power” approach is highly speculative because the real power it depends is very shaky, to say the least, if not harmful in the end. In sum, the structural and agency context for grand strategy construction can be summarized as: international relation is not about national interests, as

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the realism would assert; it is not about universal values either, as the idealism would argue. The basic understanding is that the structure of the world is not an anarchy, and cannot be regarded as a “zoo” as many pundits would say, despite the absence of a world government. Instead, the world is a dynamic web of interdependent partnership and the dynamic movements of the web has created a unipolar global governance system, a global dynamic interdependent Leviathan is in the process of becoming real. In the process of struggle in building up the Leviathan, the most powerful power is neither hard nor soft; it is connective, which is defined as the ability to enable others to do what they otherwise cannot do and at the same time, be empowered by others. This, of course, cannot be simplified as being nice and doing good deeds. It means being power agents to structurally function in others’ lives so that being connective to engage in power struggle and empowerment. The effective governing body through the last half century is the America-led interdependent partnership, which has been the structural determinism to power agents’ exercise of connective power across the globe. Of course, this understanding about world structure does not regard the world as a neatly regulated functional order. The global order based on the centric web of interdependent partnership is, in fact, fuzzy. The “fuzziness” is revealed on three levels. The first is the level of rational integration, which more resembles the contemporary international institutional orders with institutionalized rules, norms, values, and conventions. The second is the level of traditional diversification, which is reflected by cultural/civilizational or religious alliances based on historically justified glories with specifically shared meaning constructions of their actions. The third is the level of temporarily and narrowly reasoned fragmentation, alliances based on national/ group interests. On this “fuzzy” web, it is the dependable partners of the web, the “global nucleus links,” as agency that cut across all three levels of international order to connect its members across the globe. Their central positions on the web enable the members of these groups to work as active power agents to incorporate the three levels and make an order out of them. As the very center of this web, American ruling networks occupy the commanding position. The America’s Cold War triumph over Russia and the global reach of American power would be a good example. THE AMERICAN LEADERSHIP The American ruling networks composed of government, business, and professional people as the “global nucleus link” play a key role in governing the world. It is through this group’s professional and productive connections and structural functions that America won the Cold War over the Russian Communist Party and has earned the central position in the global unipolar web of

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inter-group ties. In their foreign policy statements published in Foreign Affairs in 2007, both Obama and Romney admired “The Greatest Generation” and its leaders. 8 However, “the Greatest Generation” was great not because it was unique in individualistic strengths materially or spiritually. Rather, this was a generation of Americans whose ruling group successfully and effectively linked itself to the most fundamental and most dynamic historical force and therefore positioned itself at the center of the global web of interdependent partnership ties. Based on the understanding above, there is little doubt that America’s grand foreign policy strategy in the post–Cold War world is to strengthen American ruling networks’ position as the “nucleus of the global web.” All the policies, strategies, actions, activities should be centered on this purpose. To be more specific, the grand strategy ought to be focused on facilitating American networks’ leadership role and therefore uniting the power agents of all countries through constructing a global web of interdependent partnership ties. It is not only highly necessary for the America-centered global web of interdependent partnership to lead the cause of uniting the power agents across the globe but also possible to accomplish the cause. It is indeed a critical cause worth fighting for and it is winnable. There have been heated debates on the subject of whether America is in decline or not. However, all the views focus on the individual characteristics of America today, from its economic strength to its military power, to its political stability, as well as its demographical composition. The Cold War history has offered another perspective: since the dynamic of the world is structured as a web of interdependent partnership and the power agents gaining their power through connective power of empowering ties, the rise or decline of a nation is measured by its ruling groups’ ability to generate collective connection to this web—how central their positions and how powerful their connections to the global web of interdependent partnership. This type of connection enables the ruling groups to empower other groups within the nation and therefore exercise connective power over others across the globe. Using this measure, we can see America is fundamentally not in decline. On the contrary, it is rising. The American ruling group, after winning the Cold War over the Russian Communist Party, has continued to be the nucleus of the interdependent world and the most dynamically connected. Business the world over cannot achieve business success without some degree of connection to American business; education, science, and technology and almost all the other areas of vital human existence are in the same situation. The American business is the heart of the world’s business community. All the “veins and arteries” link through it, and it pumps energy through the whole system. Clearly, from big multinational/global corporations, like GE, Walmart, and MacDonald’s, to small start-ups in Silicon Valley, American

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business networks are the most dynamic focal points of business operations the world over. Despite so many discussions on the so-called America in decline theme, if anyone looks through the most recent Fortune 500 companies list, it is clear that America is not in decline. American strength is more manifested by its business groups’ networking power to create, facilitate, and strengthen business outreach across the globe. American business groups are the indisputable center of the global web of business networks. Even looking beyond pure business on the entrepreneurial activities in general, few can succeed without some degree of involvement with something in America. America has been and will be the center of finance, production and innovation, education, consumption and cultural trend, science and technology, as well as managerial construction, across the globe. The world depends on the American entrepreneurial networks’ global reach to invest and supply financial capital, to set up rules for production and consumption, to gain managerial skill and institutional capital, to mobilize local groups to develop any type of global networks and therefore to gain social capital, to transform idling and unproductive population into human resources to gain human capital, and so forth. Furthermore, the institutional constructions that support American business-entrepreneurial networks have maintained their central positions on the global web of interdependent partnership. For example, American elite schools are the nucleus where the rich and powerful of almost all countries send their next generation for education. They therefore have become the machines that have been producing and will produce sufficient human resource to link America to the world for generations. To be sure, to be a member of the ruling group in any country, a person needs local roots. However, education in one of the American elite schools, from high schools like Deerfield Academy, Philips Andover, to Ivy League universities, has become a highly marketable leadership credentials. Also, the strength of American connective power is manifested by its ability to empower and attract the most talented people across the globe and generate the most energetic American scientific research and technological advancement, which works as the most powerful engine for the world. If we accept this assessment, we can conclude that the embodiment of American strength and its global leadership is its ruling groups as the “nucleus link” of the global web. These are the groups of people who occupy central positions both domestically and globally in the major fields of human activities. They are not only the vanguards and exemplars of human pursuits, not only possessing the strength of “hard” power and the attractiveness of the “soft” power, but also, and more importantly, the nodes and nucleus of the entire global web of professional and productive ties and therefore structural-

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ly play a functional role in the lives of many other social groups of people and relationally link to them within and beyond the borders of the US. It is important to note that the American ruling group is by no means limited to the “Davos Men.” These are the peoples who are in positions to effectively link millions of entrepreneurs and business executives, as well as the professionals and workers who play key roles in the global production, consumption, exchange, and distribution systems. They are business-centered but far beyond the business community. Union leaders, community activists, social movement entrepreneurs, as well as politicians, are all parts of the network of this group. Their connective power has been effectively mobilizing and organizing blue/white collar workers, farmers, teachers, school/university administrators, scientists, journalists, artists, spiritual missionaries, and all the people from different walks of life to strengthen the central position of America on the global web of interdependent partnership. They are the embodiments of American values symbolized by American “soft power” and act on technological, economical, and military powers symbolized by American “hard power.” Globally, the connective power of American ruling group empowers many social forces across the globe and gets so many different power players together, and by connecting to them, organizing them, shaping their agendas, transforming them, and integrating them into the web. The web has structurally overcome the challenges and flattened the world into a global village where everybody has been knit together in one way or another and everything has to be measured against a global standard set by the global web of interdependent partnership. In this way, the American ruling networks as the “global nucleus group” exercise the connective power in a structural way through their central positions on the inter-group web, instead of occupying others’ land or meddling in others’ affairs. In the web-like world, the connective power possessed by American ruling networks as the “global nucleus group” is more powerful than both the “hard” and the “soft” powers we usually talk about. Since these networks are energetic and actively engaging, America is strong and powerful. Who are we? What’s the identity of America as a nation? Samuel Huntington raised this critical question and answered it with a cultural definition. 9 However, the Cold War history showed to us another possible way of constructing American identity, which is based on the ideas of the global web of interdependent partnership and the connective power of empowering ties. America’s uniqueness is represented by its ruling networks’ unique locations as the center of the global web of inter-group interdependent partnership, a web that weaves human society together through the connective power of empowering others and gaining more power at the same time. As the nucleus group of groups, all the essential human connections across the globe are to and from it. Because of the American network’s central positions, all roads lead to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston,

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the dairy land of Wisconsin, the cornfields of Iowa and, of course, Washington, D.C. They are less than cities upon the hill for others to worship or to imitate and more, much more, functioning as centers of communication, transportation, human resource education, scientific imagination and technical innovation, spiritual revitalization, business management and daily life development, and international political connections. They are the nerve centers of human society as a whole and “nodes” of the webs of all different human connections, through which human society on a global scale is possible and other components of human society survive and thrive. In the ancient times, China regarded itself as the “Middle Kingdom.” Today, America is the “Central Republic,” due to the connections built by its ruling networks. Therefore, America is naturally and reasonably to see its identity as such. The ideal image of American identity can thus be constructed as follows: it is a nucleus nation among nations. It is more than a “strongman” as a realist would tell or an “exemplar” as an idealist would propose. More accurately, America is a “central republic,” a “nucleus,” that is structurally functional in others’ lives and well connected to exercise power through strengthening position of empowering the power agents the world over. THE DOMESTIC AND THE GLOBAL For our cherished world peace, prosperity, and progress, the only realistic force that can bring all these good things to human society is the America-led global web of interdependent partnership. Since it is both necessary and possible for the America to lead the way, we have to ask: how does American connective power of empowering the power agents across the globe, which is embodied in the structure of the global web as the “global nucleus link,” benefit the American public domestically? How does this “Central Republic” manage its domestic problems? Can the American power agents of connective power effectively connect American people of all walks of life within national borders, as they exercises its power to connect to the world? Do they have the potential to minimize a “1% vs. 99%” divide? James Carville and Stan Greenberg’s book, It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, represents a wrong perspective about the nature of American society. 10 From the angle of electoral politics, they might be right. But in reality and from the policy perspective, they are wrong. To measure the significance of a social force in history, it is not about how rich or how poor it is. It is about how dynamic it is. The middle class in the US is by no means the engine of American society. As the failed experiment of the USSR demonstrated, any social force that depends on the government for its surviving and thriving cannot be the most dynamic driving force in either domestic or international

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affairs. The fact is, It’s the Business-Entrepreneurial Networks, Stupid! As we all well know, the American middle class’s American dream is about jobs. The question therefore becomes: who are the people in the position to create and maintain jobs? The answer is clear: the business-entrepreneurial networks. For any government to create jobs, all sensible solutions converge into one phrase: entrepreneurial investment. With little doubt, the people who can invest and invest effectively and efficiently are members of these networks, for which government is naturally an interdependent partner. For the American government to adopt a grand strategy to facilitate this endeavor, it is important remember Calvin Coolidge’s famous words: “The business of America is business.” Clearly, he was overconfident about the business class per se. But his assertion is nonetheless insightful in terms of pointing out the most dynamic force in American society. If “business” means entrepreneurial activities and the networks entrepreneurial business people generated, Coolidge is correct. Entrepreneurial-business networks are different from individualistic business class. It is about entrepreneurial linkages of all the people who invest, supervise, regulate, negotiate, work, and manage. The networks are only successful with the logic of interdependent partnership as their operating guidance while working through and overcoming the impact of the logics of communal bonding, uneven exchange, and conquest. To fully actualize American strength, to effectually exercise American power, and to complete American identity, the key is the organization and mobilization of the entrepreneurial web of interdependent partnership within America. This is a task for the American political system to strive for. Is the American political system strong enough and effective enough to support this web, while it works as the “global nucleus link” and enforces its outward and forward looking construction of the world, America itself included? To answer these questions and as a review to Robert Kagan’s neoconservative view, 11 Robert Keohane insightfully points out: “unknown.” 12 Fareed Zakaria views this from another angle but in a similar way. In his The Post-American World, he describes the US political system as America’s “core weakness” because of the gap between the savvy cosmopolitan elite (the Davos men) and the myopic popular majority that drags the country down and the cherished political system is unable to address this gap. 13 By nature, an ideal political system is, rather, a connective democracy, a political system that is effective and powerful because behind it is the connective power that is powerful enough to empower the power agents who are located on the three pillars of a democratic society: communal bonding in the forms of civic participation and community involvement, rational-legal construction of a hierarchical system and democratic ideology instillation through education, and division of labor and exchange in the free and fair market mechanisms. These three pillars all have strengths and weaknesses in terms of organizing and mobilizing different groups of individuals. Only

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when they work together can they mesh up different groups of individuals into a coherent society so that the web of interdependent partnership is formed to connect different social strata, social groups, and individuals. The society is therefore hierarchically democratic: all the three pillars are hierarchical in terms of personal, positional, and financial capabilities. Equity rather than equality is more realistic and freedom is limited within the boundary of the roles people play. The roles are hierarchically positioned, based on a set of rules and norms, which are determined by the locations and links on the web of interdependent ties. The embodiment of the web of interdependent partnership is the networks of entrepreneurs of all walks of life. In reality, the American political system features by two characteristics: interest group politics and electoral politics. The worry is: will interest group politics and electoral politics exert too much or too little control to either strengthen or weaken the interdependent networks? Will civic involvement based on the participation of the community “backbones” continue to work well with the business-entrepreneurial networks both nationally and locally when facing the challenge of mass participation and interest group politics? Will rationally constructed hierarchical administrative system strong and effective enough to support the market mechanism by minimizing its inherited nature of inequality and exclusion so that the widening gap between the rich and the poor will be narrowed? Political uncertainty would surely hurt America’s competitiveness on the web of interdependent ties and therefore it would be difficult for America to benefit from the central position of the global web of interdependent partnership. As a nation that possesses both “hard” and “soft” powers, this could also be harmful to the world as a whole. However, it might be unnecessary to worry that America as a nation might be in danger if its government is pushed around by its most powerful interest groups because of the connective power of the web of interdependent partnership. The “big egos” and the “my way or the highway” mentality of some groups are in fact checked in mutually empowering networks on which these groups are surviving and thriving. It might be natural for the most domestically powerful interest groups tending to unilaterally and narrowly construct America’s national interests and exaggerate the impact of its cultural values without contextual and relational perspectives. But other groups, including groups of social movements entrepreneurs, are also working hard. The danger that George Washington worried in the very beginning of the nation, namely, factions, would not be so worrisome because if all the groups strive to make the political system focus on short-term policies and actualize the policy goals by simply wielding individualistic “hard” and/or “soft” powers, a connective power between them will develop and they would become more and more linked to and interdependent on one another through the common battleground—the political system, like producers and consumers do on a market.

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The results would be political compromise, mutuality, and ultimately, empowerment—just as the supply and demand market system as long as the competition is fair and open. Nationally, political hegemony, military expansionism, cultural chauvinism, and social isolationism, and all the other selfdestructive activities would be minimized by the mutual checking power in between groups. In fact, the biggest problem for American political system is not social groups striving for connection to the system and to one another. It is its inability to enable the connection of the groups of all walks of life domestically. Its biggest failure was the Great Depression from late 1920s through 1930s. It exposed all the weaknesses of old-fashioned politics because of its inability to timely fill in the gap between different groups of people, especially the haves and have-nots. When people needed to deal with financial dislocations, dashed expectations, grievances on all fronts, and all life’s miseries, as they suffered from uneven exchange, they flocked back into the comfort of their communal bonding and coercive mastership. Popularism, nationalism, cosmopolitan socialism, fascism, communism, and so on all manifested their roots in the ancient human connection. The society as a whole dithered and stumbled and all the network connections were on the verge of breakdown. The whole world seemed to be ready to go back to the logics of communal bonding, coercive mastership, and uneven exchange. This very painful and dangerous period of history set the scene for the emergence of the global web of interdependent partnership, the best societal entity that could enable the survival and growth of human race. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was born in this time to meet the test of history and succeeded over time. Sheri Berman observed: “The postwar order represented something historically unusual: capitalism remained, but it was capitalism of a very different type from that which had existed before the war—one tempered and limited by the power of the democratic state and often made subservient to the goals of social stability and solidarity, rather than the other way around.” Berman calls the mixture “social democracy” and others call it “hybrid capitalism.” 14 So far no economic theory surpassed John Maynard Keynes’s theoretical insight on economic system. I would call it the emergence of the global web of interdependent partnership, a new civilization shaped by a new type of governance. The beauty of this system is its inherited self-conflict: the system is global because it empowers the power agents of the world, especially serves to the business networks for its nondiscriminatory trade and investment which requires openness of the global market and each other’s society and cooperation between all ruling groups across the globe for a peaceful and stable global order. However, at the same time, the power agents to implement and carry out this system are governments and governments are national. A national government must respond to domestic demands of powerful interest

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groups and it is to be organized to maintain domestic stability and solidarity. At least by law and on paper, it is a national government’s commitment and most important responsibility for its people’s well-being within its national borders. A good example highlights the beauty of this seemingly conflicting situation. In 1942 during the negotiation, Britain’s national interest for full employment and economic stability after the war ran up against the American governance’s global focus for free trade. Here we see the working of the American governance of building and shaping the global interdependent partnership. American governance prevailed so that the governments became interdependent partners. They worked together to govern the world to guarantee its global nature and avoid unproductive, even harmful drive for narrow national interests. The emergence in 1944 of the Bretton Woods system on monetary order, the International Monetary Fund, secured a free flow of capital and goods while safeguarding the domestic economic stability. As Roosevelt said at the opening of Bretton Woods, “The economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern of all its neighbors, near and far.” 15 And, without doubt as postwar history has clearly proven, America as a nation and American people of all walks of life benefit greatly, together with other partners on the global web. Lenin was right when he predicted that imperialism meant war—the war between imperialist countries were inevitable. 16 It was true when the British colonialism was the global governance system as two World Wars happened and the old-style European imperialist countries committed suicide because of the broken balance of power, as Lenin would predict. However, on the ashes of the imperialist wars, history witnessed the emergence of the America-led global web of interdependent partnership as the new global governance system, different from what Lenin foresaw. Lenin’s prophesy about a socialist future did not turn out to be true. This American system has powerfully facilitated the growth of the global web of interdependent partnership and maintained peace and prosperity among capitalist countries. It rescued and reshaped the old European capitalist system and defeated the Soviet challenge along the way. As the Cold War ended for close to thirty years and the web of interdependent partnership has stood as the only global governance system, we see its connective power of empowering the power agents and maintaining a peaceful world order now and in the future. Humans from this point on will continue to travel their journey on the path directed and governed by the web of interdependent partnership long into history, although the historical logics of human society, communal bonding, uneven exchange, and conquest, will surely make the road full of ups and downs and twists and turns.

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NOTES 1. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: A Touchstone Book, 1996), p. 57. 2. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: A Touchstone Book, 1996), pp. 57–59. 3. Kenichi Ohmae, Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, revised edition, (New York: Harper Business, 1999). 4. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, sixth edition (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011). 5. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Perennial, 2012). 6. Jawaharlal Nehru, quoted in the New York Times Magazine, Sept. 7, 1958. 7. Mitt Romney, “Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges,” in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007. 8. Barack Obama, “Renewing American Leadership,” and Mitt Romney, “Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges,” both in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007. 9. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 10. James Carville and Stan Greenberg, It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! (New York: PLUME, 2013). 11. Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 12. Robert O. Keohane, “Hegemony and After: Knowns and Unknowns in the Debate over Decline,” in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012. 13. Fareed Zakaria, The Post American World, release 2.0, updated and expanded edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011). 14. Gideon Rose, “Making Modernity Work: The Reconciliation of Capitalism and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012. 15. Thomas Hale, David Held, Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 121. 16. V. I. Lenin, On Imperialism, in Irving Howe, Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 291–299.

Postscript

As the long journey of writing this book is approaching its end, it gets more and more personal. I always vividly remember the moment I heard my son’s heartbeat for the first time about twenty years ago on ultrasound when he was about ten weeks old in his mother’s stomach. The heartbeat was like a fast running train and, ever since, it has been the sound I think the most in my mind and the inspiration I feel the most in my heart. The heartbeat made a strong statement about the value of human life and the strength of human heart-to-heart connection. Through the years, I did my best to be a good father, within the limitation of my imperfections in love, in patience, in knowledge. But far more important than my love is the fact that my generation has not experienced a great power war so far. No matter how difficult life could be, I have enjoyed peace, a peaceful environment to raise my son. Can his generation be so lucky? I am sure he will do the same to his son or daughter as I did to him. But will human history allow him to do so? Indeed, the Cold War history has enlightened us the theme in the post–Cold War era and the most urgent task for our human endeavor at this time in history. In the past we had dealt with the themes such as class struggle between economically opposing classes as Karl Marx and others have pointed out; national wars between ethno-nations as Thucydides and others have showed us; clash between different civilizations with religions as their core as Samuel Huntington told us; economic development and prosperity as we have been working hard on in the past century. However, the theme as is revealed through the Cold War history would be human togetherness. Our urgent task therefore would have to be building up a global governing system to cover all the themes in the past and bring different groups of people together and keep them in order so that we can sustain human togeth-

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erness. The Cold War history also enlightens us that the accomplishment of this task is not only necessary but also possible. I am most grateful to my grandfather for leading me onto the path of exploring human society through history. My grandfather was a historian. His specialty research area was in Song Dynasty and the Mongolian conquest wars. At the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution in China in 1966, he was thrown out of work and forced to stay home while all his books and other research materials were confiscated. I was the only one who actually benefited from his suffering. He stayed home for more than ten years with nothing to do except telling historical stories to me, the only grandson who lived together with him throughout the whole time before he passed away in 1982. He was such an excellent story teller that not only me but also the kids from the whole neighborhood were deeply attracted. We gathered together at certain times almost every day to hear the stories, especially the “hot” wars the Chinese people suffered and made others suffer through the long history of China. After 1976, he got some of his books and research notes back. I can vividly remember the moment when he finally could resume his research. He was so excited and determined in spite of his old age and the very poor living conditions we were in at the time. At age eighty, he got up almost every day before 6:00 a.m. and sat in his wooden chair to read and write. The room was very cold in the winter, so cold that I could feel the freezing wind drifting around the room from the unsealed windows and doors all the time and the only place that was bearable was a two-square meter area around a small stove. He put on layers of layers of clothes and kept writing, with tearing eyes and running nose from the freezing temperature. And in the summer, the temperature could reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit and we could only afford a very small electric fan—already a luxury at the time. And the mosquitos . . . My grandfather kept writing about one of the hottest wars in human history: between the economically prosperous but political and militarily incompetent Song Dynasty and the energetically aggressive Mongolian invaders. Why did human beings so brutally kill millions and millions they regarded as the other and enslave the rest while they could otherwise benefit much more through exchange and mutual adaptation? Are we truly a bad animal like the great Thucydides would tell or we can do better? These were the questions he asked. Unfortunately to him, to me, to my family, and possibly to human society, he did not get to finish his work. The difference between the “hot” war my grandfather examined and the Cold War we discussed in this book was the logic of togetherness. The achievement we humans deserved to be proud of was that we kept the Cold War cold. Obviously it is wrong to accuse us human beings as being morally corrupt and we are really so bad that we deserve to be brutally killed like the people in Song Dynasty or this time scorched to death in the violent nuclear ocean of fire as individuals and possibly as a species. It would also be wrong

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if we assume human history is always moving forward with progress. The high level of human civilization achieved in Song Dynasty China was ruined by the Mongolians as the entire production system was destroyed. The Chinese history was set back hundreds of years, if not forever. The real issue is whether human civilization has developed onto a level that enables itself continuously existing and progressing or it is weak and corrupt as Song Dynasty that ended up in a fate of being almost extinguished entirely? Or even worse—destroying each other to the level of human extinction as a whole? The brutal and bloody war engaged by the Mongolians against the Song Chinese demonstrated that people were ready to kill, cruelly. The Song Chinese invented gunpowder and it was used for their destruction. But the Cold War changed the question from “I live and you die” to “we all die together” and the entire human race as a species will have to surrender to whatever animal that can survive a nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare if the similar great power war like the Song-Mongol war ever happens. We of course don’t want that result for ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, for the human creations we accumulated through the entirety of our human endeavors, but can we feel the sense of togetherness and at the same time curb our selfish big egos so that we are not driven by it to hurt others so much that we end up in hurting ourselves? Fortunately we see hope through the history of the Cold War. We human beings had proven we could overcome our desire to act out upon our hatred, jealousy, self-perceived material interests, and sense of power, even if we are holding fast on those ideas inside our minds and hearts. One side of human nature may never change from what Thucydides saw it. But he simply overlooked another side of it, a bright side that brought us hope. This side was as Confucius prophesized about 2,500 years ago: “mutual trust has taken roots and dependable neighboring harmony instilled; individuals no longer regard only their parents as parents and treat only their children as children.” We human beings therefore are entering an era of togetherness. Naive? Idealistic? Not anymore. Throughout human history until the Cold War we humans were driven by the three logics: the logic of conquest, the logic of communal bonding, and the logic of unequal exchange. We shed enough blood because of them. What we have accomplished in the Cold War history demonstrated that we humans are capable of overcoming the limitations imposed on us by the three ancient logics. A world governed by dynamic interdependent partnership displayed to us its connective power. We therefore gained the potential to become more powerful by empowering others. In this way, we see the destiny of reaching the Confucian ideal.

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Index

A-bomb, 24, 25, 26 Able Archer 83, 35 adaptive networks of relationships, 127 Adenauer, Konrad, 99 Afanasyev, Yuri, 79 Afghanistan, 33, 34 America First, 12 American elites, 48. See also power elites American entrepreneurial networks, 164. See also business networks American national identity, 45, 165, 166, 167 American ruling networks, 162, 163, 165, 166 Americanism, 35 Anderson, Benedict, 44 Andropov, Yuri, 104 anti-colonialism, 18, 27 anti-imperialism, 77 Arab Spring, 12 Arbatov, Georgi, 32, 89 Arutiunov, Sergei, 103–104 The Atlantic Charter, 49, 115 authority, 138; charismatic, 82; connective, 11; legal, 139 Bachrach, Peter, 137 balance of power, 1, 29, 47, 56, 112, 113, 119, 122, 160, 170 balance theory, 133 Baratz, Morton S., 137

Basic Principles, 32 Beckert, Sven, 140 The Berlin Blockade, 22 Berlin, Isaiah, 85, 105 The Berlin Wall, 24, 27, 30–31, 36, 99 Berman, Sheri, 169 big-brotherism, 3, 5, 35, 78, 89, 91, 112, 117, 130; governance logic of, 33; Soviet, 29 big-brotherly: guardianship, 93; governance, 76, 77, 98, 101, 104; topdown control, 84, 92; top-down dependency, 24, 31; upward dependence, 33, 34, 95, 124 bipolar: balancing, 113; structure, 112; world, 29, 35, 122, 160 bipolarity, 52, 122 Bohr, Niels, 24–25 Bolshevik Party, 79, 86. See also communist party, Russian Bolshevism: Stalinist, 88 Brandt, Willy, 31 Bremmer, Ian, 12 Bretton Woods system, 50, 55–56, 65, 114, 170; Post-, 55 the Brezhnev: Doctrine, 31; stagnation, 33, 86 Brezhnev, Leonid, 32, 33, 83, 96 Bush, George H. W., 11, 59, 114 Bush, George W., 12

187

188

Index

business networks, 18, 77, 95, 117, 120, 145, 147, 169; American, 45, 47, 71, 164; entrepreneurial, 120, 125, 127, 157, 167, 168; global, 48, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 104, 115, 120, 124, 142, 146, 148, 164. See also global web of interdependent partnership; web of interdependent partnership capitalism, 52, 115, 117, 140, 169 capitalist: class, 5, 94, 119, 146, 149; networks, 57; system, 49, 51, 76, 170; world, 55, 117 Carter, Jimmy, 32, 33 Carville, James, 166 Catholic: Church, 97; Pope, 97 the central nation among nations, 60 Central Republic, 166 centrality, 136 Churchill, Winston, 22, 24, 50, 52, 82, 124 civic engagement, 70 civil society, 42 clash of civilizations, 153 class consciousness, 80, 95 class struggle, 95, 120, 145, 147, 160, 173 classic pluralism, 42 Clausewitz, Carl von, 110, 113 Clinton, Bill, 12 co-constituted, 117, 119, 155 co-constituting, 113, 117, 119, 155 cognitive balance, 133 cognitive dissonance, 137 The Cold War logic. See logic of togetherness collective farm, 87 collective security, 47, 114, 117, 156 colonialism, 4, 52, 62, 77, 112, 115, 117, 145, 170 Comintern (Communist International), 96, 100 communal attachment mentality, 89 communal bonding, 93, 103, 132, 133, 133–135, 136, 137, 140, 142, 156, 158, 167, 169. See also logic of communal bonding communism, 5, 51, 52, 95, 122, 169; international, 21, 96, 100 communist party, 147; Chinese, 29, 31, 100, 105; German, 22; Hungarian, 26,

98; Polish, 98; Russian, 5, 78, 96, 163; Soviet (CPSU), 21, 22, 30, 33–34, 35, 53, 77, 78, 86, 90, 93, 94, 95–96, 97–99, 100, 102, 103, 123; Yugoslavian, 98 communist society, 146 communist universalism, 101 community of nations, 114, 153; world, 50, 139, 155 compatible governance, 72 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 32 conflict theory, 11, 42 Confucius, 174 Connally, John, 55 connective power, 3, 4, 6, 13, 21, 24, 30, 58, 62, 63, 95, 129, 133, 136, 144, 147, 148, 158, 163, 167, 170; agent, 10, 44, 131, 166; American (US), 12, 41, 55, 60, 127; British, 62; Chinese Communist Party, 100; dynamic of, 124; exercise of (use of), 69, 105, 112, 124, 125, 135, 153, 157, 161; governing group’s, 11, 123, 155, 157, 160, 165; idea of, 7, 8; indicator of, 57; measure of, 120; new energy of, 4; of communal bonding, 134; of empowering, 46, 50, 56, 59, 71, 130, 131, 143, 149, 156, 165, 166; of global governance, 19, 35; of web of interdependent partnership, 29, 168, 170; perspective (approach), 20, 42, 57, 77; Russian (USSR), 24, 31, 34, 76, 78, 79, 97, 99, 100, 101; Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 91, 94, 98; voluntary association, 43; working of, 119, 153. See also global web of interdependent partnership; interdependent partnership; web of interdependent governance; web of interdependent partnership; connective security, 156 constructive transformation, 117 containment, 22, 35, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 119, 122, 124, 125, 127 Cook, Karen S., 136 Coolidge, Calvin, 45, 167 corporatist communal hierarchy, 104 Coser, Lewis, 57

Index cosmopolitan elites, 167. See also Davos, Men cosmopolitan socialism, 169 cosmopolitanism, 45 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), 97, 99 cross-border web of networks, 11 Cuba Missile Crisis, 28, 35, 125 cult of personality, 83 cultural capital, 66, 68, 69 cultural DNA, 45 cultural chauvinism, 169 Czechoslovakia, 30, 98 Dahl, Robert, 42 Davos: Group, 153, 156; men, 153, 165, 167 the Dawes and Young Plans, 60 Deng, Xiao-ping, 30, 105 dependability, 135; relational and functional, 120. See also partner, dependable dependency theory, 158 détente, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35 deterrence, 122, 125, 127 Dewey, John, 70 distributive coalition, 63, 65, 71 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 32 egalitarian interdependency, 136 Egypt, 30 Eisenhower, Dwight, 25, 26 electoral politics, 168 elite theory, 42 Emerson, Richard, 136 empathy, 136 enabling power, 130. See also connective power enabling relationships, 8 end of history, 11, 124, 131 engagement, 125 Engels, Friedrich, 145 enlightened self-interest, 62 entangling alliance, 47 Estaing, Valery Gisdard d’, 56 ethnic identity, 45 ethno-centric, 133 ethno-nationalism, 21, 93, 97, 127 European Common Market (EC), 62

189

European Economic Forum, 153. See also World Economic Forum The European Union (EU), 62 evil empire, 35 fascism, 46, 52, 169 first Gulf War, 11 force of productivity, 145, 147 Ford, Gerald, 56 forms of global governance, 3, 4 four freedoms, 47 French Napoleonic statist universalism, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 132 Frieden, Jeffry A., 51 from the mass to the mass, 86 Fukuyama, Francis, 11 functional conflict, 57, 58, 59 G-7, 56 Gaddis, John Lewis, 17, 18, 21, 24, 110 Gaulle, Charles de, 29 the Geneva Conference, 26 Geneva Summit 1985, 36 German ethno-centric nationalism, 4 German ethnocentrism, 49, 52, 62, 115 global central bank, 65 global commons, 150 global corporation, 50, 65, 155, 156 global governance: American, 5, 12, 49, 60, 61, 114, 115, 122, 153; of dynamic interdependence, 35, 115; of interdependent partnership, 41, 43, 46, 52, 124, 125; unipolar, 125; web of, 29, 30, 32, 123, 153, 170. See also web of interdependent governance; web of interdependent partnership global hierarchy, 72 global nucleus group, 146, 165 global nucleus link, 162, 164, 166, 167. See also nucleus, of global web global order: anarchic, 10, 159, 162; institutional, 10 global web of governing networks, 52. See also global governance; web of interdependent governance global web of interdependent partnership, 1, 2, 3, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 62, 79, 103, 119, 122, 156, 158, 161, 163; agent of, 63; American, 163, 166, 170;

190

Index

business network on, 104; center of, 162, 165; competitive position on, 27, 66; development of, 25, 72, 120, 148, 156, 163, 169, 170; institutional form of, 155; interlocking, 153; position on, 164, 165, 168; structure of, 19, 153, 163. See also interdependent partnership; web of interdependent partnership global web of wealth creation network, 158 globalism, 52, 55, 142 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 25, 30, 34, 81, 84, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 102–104, 119 governance of dynamic interdependence, 1, 19. See also global governance; interdependent partnership; web of interdependent governance; web of interdependent partnership Granovetter, Mark, 71; model, 135 graveyard of empires, 33 Great Depression, 48, 49, 51, 52, 95, 116, 149, 169 great power politics, 120 Great Recession, 12 Greenberg, Stan, 166 Group of 77 Non-European Developing Countries, (G-77), 51 Hall, Cordell, 22, 115 hard power, 6, 25, 30, 54, 62, 97, 117, 119, 120, 125, 161, 162, 164, 168; American (US), 60, 61, 165; contest, 34; perspective (approach), 20, 41, 46, 53, 57, 63, 76, 101, 156; Russian (Soviet Union), 76, 82, 94, 101, 112; Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), 98, 99; usefulness of, 62; vs. soft power, 8, 10, 18 Havel, Vaclav, 34 The Helsinki Conference. See the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Hitler, Adolf, 21, 26, 127 Hobbes, Thomas, 131, 132, 134, 137, 145 Hobbesian state of anarchy, 52 Holland commercial empire, 4 homophily principle, 70 human capital, 67, 146, 164 human rights, 76; movements, 53

Huntington, Samuel, 10, 11, 153, 165, 173 idealism, 9, 18, 161, 166 ideological bondage, 33 Ikenberry, G. John, 120 imagined community, 44 imperial overreach, 33, 34 imperialism, 140, 170 inclusive relationship, 136 India, 30, 61 Indonesia, 30, 61 inescapability, 136 information revolution, 65 initial association, 132, 134 institutional immobilization, 83 institutional interdependency, 115 institutionalized interdependent relationship, 139 inter-group ties: global web of, 10, 18, 61, 70, 146, 147, 160 interdependence: American-governed, 60; dynamic, 58, 117, 119; functional, 115; hierarchy of, 55; human, 25; web of, 7, 34, 58, 60, 127, 144, 157, 159, 161 interdependent governance, 26, 51; dynamic of, 119; unipolar, 29; way of, 71. See also global governance; web of interdependent governance interdependent interpersonal dynamic, 88 interdependent partnership, 10, 43, 45, 52, 60, 69, 76, 102, 122, 123, 124, 153; American, 3, 5, 25; across Atlantic, 153; dynamic, 5, 119, 174; formation, 147; nature of, 148; power agent of, 161; unipolar, 29. See also web of interdependent partnership interdependent power agents, 105, 124 interdependent ties, 161; inseparable, 51; web of, 125, 161. See also interdependent partnership; institutionalized interdependent relationship; power, of web of interdependence interest group, 70; politics, 71, 168; inextricable networks of, 71 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 50, 60, 116, 127, 170 international power agents: web of, 156, 157. See also interdependent power

Index agents international ties: web of, 159 international unification, 94 internationalism, 55, 94 interpersonal network of dependent relationship, 83 interpersonal power, 45 invisible hand, 142–143 Iron Curtain, 20, 24, 52 isolationist, 46, 49, 55; mentality, 68 Ivan the Terrible, 78 Ivy League colleges, 64, 66, 164 Japan, 30, 58, 61 Japanese militarism, 4, 49, 52, 62, 115 Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya relationship, 36, 125 Johnson, Lyndon, 125 Kagan, Robert, 167 Kaiser, Robert, 84 Kennan, George, 18, 20, 22, 24, 109, 110–111, 112–113, 117–120, 122 Kennedy, John F., 28, 53 Kennedy, Paul, 34 Keohane, Robert, 167 Keynes, John Maynard, 60, 169 KGB, 80, 104 Khrushchev, Nikita, 26–27, 28, 30, 33, 83, 96, 119, 125 kinship-centric, 133 Kissinger, Henry, 29 The Korean War, 22, 25, 26, 50, 61, 63, 100, 113, 122 Leffler, Melvyn P., 19 Lenin, V. I., 18, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 89–91, 92, 93–94, 170 Lenin-Stalin governing system, 78 Leninist Compromise, 89 Leviathan, 115, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 148, 155; America-guided, 48; class-based, 148, 149; functional, 140, 143, 147, 149, 150; global, 136, 146, 148, 156; institutional, 137, 140, 149; interdependent, 9, 10, 13, 50, 115, 120, 131, 162; liberal, 114, 120; relational, 131, 133, 135, 137, 149; small, 131–132, 134, 136, 137;

191

structurally dynamic, 145, 148, 150 liberal democracy, 12, 155 liberalism, 5, 10, 143, 155 Ligachev, Yegor, 81, 82, 102, 119 like-me hypothesis, 70 Lin, Nan, 70, 135 logic of communal bonding, 2, 72, 89, 115, 129, 130, 134, 148, 167, 169, 170, 174. See also communal bonding logic of conquest, 2, 62, 72, 115, 129, 130, 138, 147, 148, 167, 170, 174 logic of togetherness, 2, 4, 6, 9, 13, 72, 174; the Cold War wisdom, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125; the golden thread of the Cold War history, 18, 24, 29, 30, 35; a grand theory, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 144, 148 logic of uneven exchange, 2, 72, 129, 130, 142, 148, 167, 169, 170, 174 long telegram, 109 Lukes, Steven, 138 Lynd, Robert, 81 Mao, Ze-dong, 26–27, 29, 86, 100 Marshall, George, 22 the Marshall Plan, 22, 50, 60, 100 Marsten, Peter, 135 Marx, Karl, 145–146, 147 Marxism, 94 Marxism-Leninism, 31, 32, 34, 77, 88 McDonaldization, 155 McNamara, Robert, 28 means of production, 145, 147, 149 Mearsheimer, John, 129 mechanical solidarity, 115 men of sheep characters, 85 Middle Kingdom, 166 Milgram, Stanley, 137 military-industrial complex, 71 Mills, C. Wright, 42, 48 modernization theory, 158 Mongolian, 174 monolithic, 101, 122 Montesquieu, 64 moral absolutism, 35, 123 Morgenthau, Hans, 22, 55 multinational corporation, 50, 56

192

Index

multipolar, 160; anarchy, 114; Europe, 47; structure, 111; world, 10 mutual empowerment, 58–59, 69, 86, 102, 119, 131, 134, 135, 142, 143, 149, 155 mutual impedimental interpersonal dynamic, 89 mutual transformation, 124, 125 mutuality, 142. See also mutual empowerment mutually assured destruction (MAD), 28, 30, 35, 76, 110, 112, 114, 115, 128, 130, 149 national identity, 66 national liberation movement, 18, 27 nationalism, 52, 71, 99, 112, 127, 142, 169 nationalist: chauvinism, 100; party, 100; sentiment, 95 NATO, 22, 29–30, 32–33, 50, 60, 100, 123 Nazis, 20, 98 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 157 neo-conservative, 12, 167 neo-realism, 129 network theory, 11 New Deal, 50, 169 Nixon, Richard, 29, 32 non-alliance sentiment, 61 non-government organizations (NGO), 50 nucleus: of global web, 163, 164; of interdependent world, 163; nation among nations, 166 Nye, Joseph, 53 Obama, Barak, 12, 162 Ohmae, Kenichi, 155 Olson, Manur, 63 open market economic system, 52 organic solidarity, 115 the orthodox school, 17 Orwell, George, 101 Parson, Talcott, 144 partner: dependable, 7, 8, 22, 26, 27, 31, 35, 47, 49, 50, 52, 104, 117, 122, 125, 127, 130, 153, 162; free and independent, 47; hierarchical and interdependent, 149; interdependent, 100, 117, 120, 121, 127 partnership building, 22, 25, 47

party-state, 122 partyness, 84, 102 the Peace of Westphalia, 29. See also Westphalia, order peaceful co-existence, 26, 29 Pivot to Asia, 12 pleasure principle, 132 Poland, 30, 97 Polanyi, Karl, 143, 149 populism, 169 populist, 70, 85, 99 power: of connection, 2, 146; of transformation, 124; of web of interdependence, 71. See also connective power; hard power; soft power power-in-others, 3 power elites, 48 power renewal, 63 practical individualism, 35 Prague Spring, 30–31, 34, 98 preexisting association, 132 proletariat, 3, 94, 122; class, 94–95, 146, 149; dictatorship, 76, 81, 145, 145–146; party, 89, 90; world revolution, 95 public goods, 76, 149; international, 61 Pushing II missile system, 33 Putnam, Robert, 70 Putin, Vladimir V., 79 rational choice, 132, 143, 149 Reagan, Ronald, 25, 35–36, 56, 58, 61, 125 realism, 9, 10, 18, 51, 161 realist, 76, 166 reality principle, 132 Reich, Robert, 66 relational interdependence, 115. See also connective power relations of production, 147 the revisionist school, 17 revolutionary intelligentsia, 79 Reykjavik Summit, 36 Ritzer, George, 155 role, 168; playing, 143, 144, 149; social, 143 Romney, Mitt, 159, 163 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 22, 24, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 114, 115–119, 125, 169, 170 Rosecrance, Richard, 1

Index Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 77 Rosenblum, Nancy, 70 rule by a central coalition, 1 Russian expansionism, 4, 52, 115 Russian intelligentsia, 80, 81, 85 safe for democracy, 47 self-reliance, 35 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 64 Shultz, George, 55–56 Silicon Valley, 64, 65, 163–164 Simmel, Georg, 139 Skocpol, Theda, 139–140 smart power, 8, 130, 161 Smith, Adam, 142–143, 144 social capital, 135, 146, 148, 164 social democracy, 169 social isolationism, 169 social reach, 11 socialism, 5, 27, 89, 93, 104; in one country, 95 socialist, 85 soft power, 6, 42, 54, 97, 99, 117, 119, 120, 125, 161, 162, 164, 168; American (US), 60, 61, 165; big-brotherly, 98; of international institutions, 156; perspective, 20, 46, 53, 63, 76, 101; Russian (Soviet Union), 76, 82, 94, 101, 112; vs. hard power, 8, 10, 19. See also connective power; hard power The Solidarity Movement, 34, 97–98 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 101 Song Dynasty, 174 Song-Mongol War, 174 Soros, George, 65 Soviet intelligentsia, 76 Spanish predatory system, 4 sphere of influence, 111 the spirit of Camp David, 26 the spirit of Geneva, 26 the Sputnik Shock, 27, 76, 86 SS-20 missile system, 32–33 Stalin, Joseph, 19, 20, 22, 26, 33, 82–83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 96, 97, 98, 100, 116, 118, 123 state capitalism, 64, 104 state farm, 87 state-run social welfare system, 52 statism, 112

193

Stimson, Henry, 24–25 Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), 35, 54, 76, 125 strong ties, 71. See also weak ties structural-functionalism, 11, 143 structural interdependence, 143 Taft, Robert, 50 Thucydides, 24, 173, 174; Trap, 129, 156 Tito, 98 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 43, 70 totalitarian, 18, 101; ideology, 122 tribalism, 52 the Truman Doctrine, 50 Truman, Henry, 25, 26, 49–50 Trump, Donald, 12 Tsarist system, 78 unclear deterrence, 1 unified global ruling network, 160 unipolar: global web, 10, 159, 162; intergroup networks, 7, 10; international community, 50; structural necessity, 113, 119; trend, 29; uniformity, 47; world, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13, 22, 31, 35, 46, 50, 52, 112, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 155, 159 United Nations (UN), 50, 51, 60, 114, 116 unity in diversity, 115 vanguard group, 3, 4, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 96, 99, 101, 147; cross-nationality governance of, 90, 91, 92, 93; leader of, 86; Leninist, 75, 81; model of global governance, 78, 79; of proletariat class, 95; practice of, 79, 80; Stalinist, 84 vanguard model, 78 Vietnam, 28, 63; War, 100, 113 Volcker, Paul, 56 voluntary association, 43, 70, 70–71 vulnerability: shared, 130, 149, 160; sharing, 35, 125 Wall Street, 64, 65–66 Wallace, Henry, 50 War of all against all, 131, 134 The Warsaw Pact, 97, 99 Washington, George, 168 weak ties, 70–71, 135, 148

194

Index

the wealth of nations, 143 web of group affiliations, 139 web of interdependent governance, 50, 61, 62, 69, 71, 72, 120, 122, 130, 155, 156, 161; connection to, 47, 125, 167; crossboundary, 148, 159; status on, 124, 168; unipolar, 111, 113; Wilson construction of, 115. See also global governance; unipolar; The Wilson vision; The Wilson/Roosevelt system web of interdependent partnership, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 24, 29, 71, 122, 127, 135, 139, 149, 159, 160, 161; American, 5, 9, 129, 161; between state and social groups, 139; centric, 162; development of, 122, 135; dynamic, 3, 41; entrepreneurial, 167; hierarchical, 159; institutionalized behavior patterns of, 44; structure of, 2, 44, 129, 138, 148; unipolar, 10. See also global web of interdependent partnership; interdependent partnership Weber, Max, 83, 138

Westad, Odd Arne, 18 Westphalia: order, 115; system, 52, 112 White, Harry Dexter, 77 The White House, 56 Wilson, Woodrow, 5, 47–48, 52, 114–115, 115–120 The Wilson vision, 25, 27, 47, 48, 49, 50, 115, 117 The Wilson/Roosevelt system, 72, 119–120, 122, 156 work unit, 81 World Bank, 50, 60, 116 World Economic Forum, 153 World Trade Organization (WTO), 127 Wriston, Walter, 65 The Yalta Conference, 22 Yeltsin, Boris N., 79, 94, 102, 103 Yugoslavia, 30, 61 Zakaria, Fareed, 167 zero-sum game, 142

About the Author

Tian-jia Dong was a recipient of a prestigious national award in China for his research on rural development before coming to Harvard University for a research opportunity in the early 1990s. He received his PhD in sociology from Boston College, and is now a professor at Westfield State University where he has been teaching since 2003. He has published two books, Understanding Power through Watergate: the Washington Collective Power Dynamics (2005) and Social Reach: A Connectivist Approach to American Identity and Global Governance (2008), as well as numerous articles in both Chinese and English.

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