Power and Protest

"Yes, but in a good way. This dissertation got started when Jeremi and I began talking one day about the absence of good histories of the détente era. It’s the period of simultaneous improvement in Soviet-American and Sino-American relations during the late 1960s and early 1970s. So it’s associated with Nixon and Kissinger, but also Willy Brandt in Germany, Leonid Brezhnev in the USSR, and of course Mao in China because of Nixon’s extraordinary trip there in 1972. Our first thought was that Jeremi should do a comparative history of these countries’ diplomacy at the time. But he, like many of our students, was interested in taking diplomatic history beyond the traditional diplomat, to look at cultural influences on the conduct of international relations. This meant focusing on what was happening inside each of the different countries. It’s more like a reconsideration of what the history of diplomacy ought to include. For Jeremi, it was at first the protest movements that were such a prominent feature of the 1960s in the US: anti-nuclear, civil rights, women’s rights, and certainly anti-Vietnam War. I said fine, but what was happening at the time in Europe? In the Soviet Union? In China? So this became an international history of protest movements, and Jeremi did find parallels. For example, KGB reports on Soviet youth at the time read very much like FBI reports on American student protesters. The connections became even more interesting, though, when Jeremi reminded me that leaders in each of the countries he was looking at felt under siege from domestic critics. In the US, Western Europe and even the Soviet Union, it was discontented youth. In China, Mao was being challenged by his own party and governmental bureaucracy – hence the Cultural Revolution he himself led against them. Each of these leaders came to realise that they could defuse domestic protests by settling international differences. For the Americans, this meant getting out of Vietnam. For the West Europeans, more exchanges across the Iron Curtain. For the Russians, getting access to Western trade and technology in order to raise living standards. And for Mao, who was on the verge of war with the Soviet Union in 1969, it meant opening relations with the United States. Exactly. Their internal positions were precarious, so they tried to stabilise their external relations. Jeremi’s work doesn’t discredit the traditional view that détente was meant to lower the risks of nuclear war. What it does show, though, is that this was not the only explanation, and that it’s only by going beyond traditional approaches to diplomatic history that we can see what those explanations are. His book has reshaped our understanding of détente. And I, again, have had to rewrite my lectures."