S. HRG. 101-1200, PT. 1 RELATIONS IN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD HEARINGS BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS ONE HUNDRED FIRST CONGRESS SECOND SESSION NOVEMBER 26, 28 AND 30, 1990 PART 1 Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations 36-522 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON 1991 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island, Chairman JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware TERRY SANFORD, North Carolina JESSE HELMS, North Carolina GORDON J. HUMPHREY, New Hampshire (II) FOREWORD AT THE END OF THE COLD WAR PART 1 EXECUTIVE-LEGISLATIVE RELATIONS IN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD "1914 is, after all, when it all began." Thus writes Judith N. Shklar, John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University. This is the theme of this first volume of hearings of the Committee on Foreign Relations dealing with the end of the Cold War. When what began? The age of totalitarianism; a period of seventy-five years when the institutions of western democracies would continuously be on the defensive; often in the utmost peril. We will divide this age into three periods: that of the First World War which began in 1914; the period leading to and including the Second World War; and, finally, what James Burnham, sometime theoretician of the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and later founding editor of National Review, would call "The Third World War." We will have to learn about all of this; for we have little memory of the preceding age. It is not that it happened so very long ago. It didn't. It is just that so much changed in the course and in the aftermath of the First World War that we have but little feeling for what the world was like, what governments were like before then. Such was the shock of that war that Western societies suffered a kind of memory loss. The unthinkable became the normal; what had been normal became all but unthinkable. The First World War gave the world the first totalitarian state, that of Lenin's Russia. William Pfaff has written that Leninism merged into totalitarianism precisely because it emerged from the cataclysm of the Great War. Whatever Leninism otherwise might have become, in the actual conditions of 1918 it took for its social model what was before it in the West-the war state, "totally" mobilized, with hundreds of millions of people under arms drafted to war production, centrally planned, directed by governments given exceptional powers over how citizens lived, where they worked, how they died.2 It is scarcely possible to overstate the immensity of this fact. The appearance of the totalitarian state was a wholly new experience for mankind. The century proceeded from cataclysm, change being 'Judith N. Shklar to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, September 24, 1990. 2 William Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. 106. |