NEW ORTHODOXIES:I

SUPERPOWERS AS GOG AND MAGOG

Timothy Garton Ash discovers a new -isn't which equates the United States with the Soviet Union UNILATERALISM. Trilateralism. Multi- lateralism. And now: Equilateralism. My term, but definitely not my thing. Equilateralism holds that the two sides (United States and Soviet Union) are equal, and that our side should distance itself equally (and as far as possible) from both. The equilateralist equation: US = SU.

Equilateralism, now widespread in the peace movements and on the Left in Western Europe, has more often been characterised as the 'theory of moral equivalence'. I think my term is better, because it's shorter, and because the equa- tion is not just a moral one. Some equilateralists think America is as bad as Russia. Others merely think it's as danger- ous — a political rather than a moral judgment. In fact there are as many varieties of equilateralism as there are of unilateralism, and as complex underlying causes. Here are just a few notes towards a definition.

There are four main ostensible areas of equilateralist concern: nuclear arms poli- cies, the Western and Eastern alliances, the superpowers' 'backyards' and the inter- nal order of the Soviet Union and the United States. Obviously these areas over- lap in reality, and in equilateralist state- ments they overlap even more. Most wide- spread is the view that the United States is as much to blame as the Soviet Union for the escalation of the nuclear arms race. This sentiment spills over into the much' less widespread view that the West Euro- peans stand to the United States as the East Europeans do to the Soviet Union; or, at least, that Washington would like to treat us that way.

The theorists of the 'new cold war' articulate this most clearly. 'The cold war,' writes John Gittings in his introduction to the Penguin paperback Superpowers in Collision (co-authored with Jonathan Steele and Noam Chomsky), 'is not only a contest for power but a mechanism through which each [superpower] main- tains control over the clients and allies within its own empire.' And E. P. Thomp- son writes of 'the tendency for both milit- ary alliances — Nato and the Warsaw Pact — to become instruments of superpower political control, reducing the lesser states to abject cliency. This is as true in the West as in the East of Europe.' (Note the easy transition from the cautious 'tendency' to the unqualified 'as true'.) Then there is the argument that the United States behaves as badly as the Soviet Union in areas outside Europe, which it may or may not consider to be its `backyard'. 'Afghanistan, yes, but what about Vietnam?"Poland, yes, but what about Nicaragua?' Asked for his reaction to the imposition of martial law in Poland, Gunter Grass told a West Berlin magazine: `I believe. . . that Poland is entirely com- parable with Nicaragua and other states in Central America, with what the United States is trying to do there and has often enough done.'

Last, and definitely least, there is the implication that even domestically the United States may not be that much better than the Soviet Union. Witness Gunter Grass's emotional outburst about the poor of the Bronx at the PEN congress in New York. A fine pseudo-scholarly example comes from Fred Halliday, now Professor at the London School of Economics, in his Making of the Second Cold War. Compar-

ing 'advanced capitalist and advanced com- munist states' Halliday avers that commun- ist states 'have removed many forms of economic, social, racial and sexual oppres- sion characteristic of capitalist societies, but in the realm of political democracy— of voting, publishing, organising, criticising established authorities — these countries have, as yet, failed to produce liberties that compare with those achieved under capi- talism. In the language of Western political theory, the communist states offer "sub- stantive" freedoms — to work, housing etc. — but not "procedural" ones — to vote, criticise and so on.' Well, who cares about mere 'procedural' freedoms so long as you have 'substantive' ones? But obviously most equilateralists have no doubt where they would rather live. The equilateralist argument is really about the external behaviour of the Soviet and American superpowers, not their internal conditions.

Words like 'essentially' and 'ultimately' work overtime in equilateralist arguments. The equilateralist starts with a sweeping global generalisation. If challenged, however, he or she tends to respond with very specific examples: challenged on the degree of police surveillance in Eastern Europe, responds with individual example of MI5 or CIA phone-tapping in Western Europe; challenged on the degree of Soviet control over Eastern Europe, responds with individual example of US unilateral action from bases in the UK (e.g. the declaration of a 'red alert', without con- sulting the British, in 1973).

Now of course you can find individual examples of brutality, injustice, cen- sorship, military high-handedness and even secret service skulduggery in Western Europe which are almost as bad as the individual examples I can cite from Eastern Europe — particularly if you include Chile and El Salvador in Western Europe for the purposes of this argument. (This may not seem so unnatural to the average young West European, for whom Eastern Europe is almost as remote as El Salvador.) In- deed, you can go on matching individual example for individual example until the emus come home. The point is to avoid the middle level of analysis, between the glob- al generalisation and the individual exam- Pie, where you might be forced to ask the question: what is the exception and what is the rule?

Equilateralism is a Weltanschauung — a way of visualising or imagining the world. Its central image is a simple and extremely Powerful one: rational, civilised man or woman — A. European — stuck between two irrational, uncivilised giants — Gog and Magog, US and SU. This is almost an archetype. 'We are pig-in-the-middle,' writes Thompson, 'while an interminable and threatening argument between born- again Christians and still-born Marxists goes on above our heads.' Variations on this one visual theme enter our sub- conscious through a thousand cartoons. Indeed, so difficult is the image to resist that even our Nicholas Garland, who could not be more sensitive to the differences, ends up drawing two stone-age men wield- ing tree trunks to illustrate the superpower nuclear rivalry (Spectaror, 12 April 1986).

Equilateralism fits into the shape of a rational argument: there is the thesis (American view), the antithesis (Soviet view) and the synthesis (our view); two extremes and the rational middle. Equilateralists also revel in being attacked from both Washington and Moscow. Then they can say: 'If both sides attack us, we must be right.' Equilateralism is a habit. Once acquired, it's difficult to chuck. Whatever the Soviet Union does, the equilaterdist exclaims 'Yes, but'; the `other hand' jerks automatically into ac- tion. The immortal Martin Walker, Mos- cow correspondent of the Guardian, offers us a classic example in his considered judgment on the Chernobyl nuclear disas- ter. Chernobyl, he writes, in the Guardian of Wednesday 14 May, 'was the kind of incident that brought out the worst in both systems as we all reverted to type, the West over-reacting and the Russians under- reacting.' (No pun intended?) What are the roots of equilateralism? One is the self-destruction of the Soviet model. After all, it was not so long ago that a great many people on the Left — and not just communists — naturally assumed that the Soviet Union is better than the United States. If they now say only that the United States is as bad as the Soviet Union, this is a kind of progress. But if people on the once fellow-travelling European Left have ceased to believe in the Soviet model, people on the once staunchly anti-Soviet European Left (and social democratic or liberal centre) have largely ceased to be- lieve in the Soviet threat. This is one of the paradoxical results of the success of the 1970s détente in Europe.

West Berlin is the locus classicus. So successful has the Four Power Agreement of 1971 been in stabilising and regularising the relationship of West Berlin with the Soviet Union and East Germany, that even the inhabitants of this 'island in the red sea' have largely lost that sense of being im- mediately threatened by the Soviets which was so vivid in the (half) city's conscious- ness from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Indeed, some of them apparently feel more threatened by the American, British and French troops which are there to defend them. And even more by Nato's Cruise and. Pershing II missiles stationed on West German soil.

Here is the other side of the equation. A downward reassessment of the Soviet mod- el (by communists) and of the Soviet threat (by anti-communists) is matched by a downward reassessment of the American threat (by anti-communists) and an upward reassessment of the American threat (by communists and anti-communists!). Equilateralism and anti-Americanism are not identical — a moderate equilateralist may still love the American way of life, a rabid anti-American may not be equilateralist at all — but they are obvious- ly related.

It would require hundreds of learned pages to explore the many reasons historical, cultural, economic and social behind the downward reassessment of the American model, which has taken quite different forms in different West European countries. The upward assessment of the American threat, by contrast, can be summarised in two syllables: Rea-gan. No matter that the Nato 'two-track' decision which led to the deployment of Cruise and Pershing was taken under Carter. No matter how cautious the Reagan adminis- tration has in practice been in its European and Soviet policies. No matter; for the equilateralist those two syllables sum up everything that is aggressive, ignorant, unpredictable and irresponsible. Rea-gan. The very name is like a gun.

A different President, a different rhetor- ic, a different policy towards Nicaragua these would take some wind out of equilateralist sails. Much wind would still remain: the sense of (false?) security which is a lasting achievement of European détente; the hypochondria about limited sovereignty (inviting the false and ignorant equation with the really limited sovereign- ty of East European states); above all, perhaps, the Gog and Magog cartoon- picture, or archetype, and the habit of equilateralist thinking which can somehow almost manage to make America co- responsible for Chernobyl. One other last- ing source of equilateralism is the reduc- tion of Soviet-American relations, in the pill:die eye, to the single subject of arms control. If the competition between the superpowers is reduced to arithmetic tables of weaponry, then the two sides inevitably look very much alike.

These are just a few, more or less random and superficial journalistic observations. Clearly a new -ism really cries out for a scholarly book. Let some able postgraduate now wade into the sea of words, point out the critical distinctions between North German protestant equilateralism, Quartier Latin equilateral- ism (Regis Debray) and East Oxford equilateralism, and give us the Anatomy of Equilateralism. All I ask for myself is a citation in the next supplement to the OED.

This is the first of a series in which authors examine the received ideas of our time.