The East—West Conflict in Historical Perspective — An Attempt at a Balanced View

Extract

The conflict between East and West had its origins in diverging views of how society should be organised which emerged in the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialisation: the contrast between the pluralism of ‘Western’ civilisation, which in principle permitted a multiplicity of ways of life and patterns of power, and the centralised all-powerful state with its ‘Asiatic’ imprint; the contrast between capitalist means of production and socialist planning; the contrast between a parliamentary state under the rule of law and a totalitarian state. Such contrasting attitudes appeared to be irreconcilable, but they were indissolubly linked, at the latest, from the time of the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution of 1917. Furthermore, the Bolshevik's seizure of power in Russia turned these conflicting views into an international political problem. By claiming to be the vanguard of an historically necessary world revolutionary movement the leadership of the Soviet Union tied a particular combination of socialist and anti-Western attitudes to the advancement of Soviet national interests, thus introducing into the international system a specific conflict between ‘Western’ industrialised nations and the Soviet state.