The Origins of Anti-communism. . - Reviews - British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War - book review

British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War. Markku Ruotsila. Frank Cass. [pound sterling]39.50 (Us$57.50). 274 pages. ISBN 0-7146-5160-5.

The author, a Finnish Academy Researcher at the University of Tampere, has based this book, the third volume in Cass's 'Cold War History' series, on his doctoral thesis at Cambridge. Now that the Cold War is a thing of history, students are beginning to stand back and look at something which dominated intellectual and political life in the free world for some eighty years.

There have been several histories of how anticommunism worked, what were its policies and who were its major spokesmen but little analysis of what it was intellectually. This volume, an exercise in intellectual history, makes a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the twentieth century's politics. 'Anticommunism' the author writes, 'was always a compound entity issuing in profoundly dissimilar programmes'. Conservatives, liberals and socialists could all be anticoinmunist.

This study of the period 1880 to 1947 concentrates on ideas, and not on the policies which resulted from them. It attempts nothing less than a 'reassessment of the ultimate driving force behind the Cold War and of the mutual interrelations of the various anticommunist persuasions of the Anglophone world'. The Cold War was not 'primarily about opposition to the foreign expansionism of the Soviet Union' or even opposition to the horrors perpetrated in the U.S.S.R. These objections were only part of the agenda; the other was the competition between traditional approaches to economic growth and human freedom (whether conservative or liberal in politics) and state-controlled socialism, as to which would form the century.

Behind these lay another debate between equally traditional views of collectivism v. individual initiative and between atheistic materialism and the belief that the world was created by God. The struggle had already begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century when, both in America and in Britain, the role of the state began to grow and government regulation of individuals' lives became a part of each country's makeup. After the end of the Great War the intellectual atmosphere was liberal and this liberalism dominated the inter-war period. Liberal anticommunism, Dr Ruotsila argues, was content with containing the military power of the Soviet Union. The Liberals' real foe remained Conservatives who, they argued, only annoyed the Soviets who then 'over-reacted'.

All this was, of course, a continuation of the Liberal party's opposition to Tsarist Russia, a policy that can be traced back to the 1820s and opposition to Nicholas I. The Russian threat to eastern Europe and to the Ottoman Empire, for which later read Turkey, was part of this agenda and in this Conservatives agreed. Conservatives, however, tended not to get as worked up about the Tsar's domestic policies as Liberals for fear of upsetting the European balance of power.

The Cold War began in the years after 1945, when the West's conservative parties allied their long opposition to the growing power of the state with their dislike of Communist Russia's horrendous policies. Of vital importance was the awesome leadership of Sir Winston Churchill who expressed in language understood by all the real battle that lay ahead: that with Hitler had finished, that with Russia was only beginning. (His views later inspired Ronald Reagan whose policies, as well as his inspired language, did so much to lead to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.)

To a degree anticommunism, and with it a 'strong' defence policy, gave conservative parties an intellectual glue which held them together. (We see now the effects which the end of the Cold War has brought in the disharmony prevalent in the Tory party.) To conservatives, whether in Britain and her Commonwealth, or in America, modem liberalism and Soviet communism were ideological fellow travellers'. It was with the resurgence of the Conservatives' traditional hostility to state power, in whatever form it existed, that the Cold War began. Now, with that 'war' over we see conservative parties in both of the great English-speaking countries floundering for a new role. The 'war' against terrorism may provide the new challenge.

This study, carefully written and well researched -- as one would expect of a doctoral thesis -- will make students of the twentieth century's history re-examine that history. It should make them look again at the role national politics and inherited views played in bringing about the 'cold war' that raged for so long.

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