Since the end of the Cold War new studies of it have proliferated; in part a consequence of access to Soviet diplomatic archives and also due to the fact that scholars can assess the nature and evolution of the Cold War as a finite and distinct historical period. This has led to a range of new assessments of which the so-called “new Cold War” or “global Cold War history” has been one of the most positive developments. It has sought to decentre and relocate the study of the Cold War away from the traditional concentration on the geopolitical concerns of the superpowers, and Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War is a welcome addition to this new Cold War history. Whilst the focus of most of the contributions within it are centred on the traditional geopolitical domains of Europe and the United States, its excavation of materials and information from various, including non-state archival sources, and its bringing to view an array of neglected actors, organizations, and processes centred around the common theme of anti-communism, results in a new perspective on our understanding of how, and who in the “West”, prosecuted the Cold War.
Most of the contributions in the volume derive from a conference held in Fribourg, Switzerland in October 2011 on the theme of the book. The contributors include scholars – such as two of the editors, Giles Scott Smith and Hugh Wilford, who have highly regarded reputations in the study of the Cold War, as well as a number of early career researchers and journalists. Although there are a number of previous studies of transnational actors (e.g. Scott Smith has written on the intelligence gathering and dissemination organization Interdoc − International Documentation and Information Centre), the value of Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War is that it provides, for the first time, not only an examination of a range of actors and organizations already well-known, but also of a number of those that have not really been discussed at all previously in the scholarly literature on the Cold War. In doing so this volume enriches our understanding of the nature of the Cold War and, in particular, the role of private and non-state Western actors as important participants in it. Further, it also refocuses attention on to the issue of the so-called “enemy within” dimension of the Cold War, highlighting how the “battle of ideas” – waged through propaganda and information manipulation – was as much a feature of domestic politics within and across Western liberal-democratic states, as it was a means through which Western agencies sought to undermine and subvert communist power across the Soviet bloc.
The empirical coverage of the individual contributions includes the role of a number of key individuals involved in anti-communist activities, such as the Dutch journalist Sal Tas, the Swiss trade unionist Lucien Tronchet, the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, and Brian Crozier, an influential British anti-communist who was involved in a number of anti-communist organizations over the course of the Cold War. A number of organizations and the role they played are also examined from the Nordic trade-union movement, and the World Anti-Communist League, to the International Council of Christian Churches and the Mont Pèlerin Society.
Although the contributors to the book are careful not to exaggerate the role of these individuals and organizations, nor overstate their autonomy from state and intergovernmental actors such as NATO, they do make a number of important observations, not least that the sources and practice of anti-communism were not the exclusive domain of the US state and its key allies, and further, that some of these private actors also sought to undermine aspects of US or Western diplomacy that they found objectionable, in most instances because they regarded it as not taking the threat of communism seriously enough. In many respects then, these individuals and organizations provided a permanent source of intransigent anti-communist militancy throughout the Cold War ensuring that any move to negotiate, normalize, or seek accommodations with the USSR and/or other leftist states was challenged and undermined. The degree to which these groups prevented a geopolitical/diplomatic accommodation between the superpowers is arguable, but their activities certainly made it harder, and they also highlight the wider sources of anti-communism beyond the national security state and within broader Western civil society.
Thus, the Taiwanese government worked with the World Anti-Communist League and the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League to try to undermine the rapprochement between the US and China initiated by President Nixon (p. 122). Further, Interdoc emerged, argues Giles Scott-Smith, in the context of East–West normalization in the early 1950s with the aim of challenging some of the political and geopolitical assumptions that appeared to be held by Western leaders (p. 132) after Stalin’s death and the initiation of de-Stalinization across the Soviet bloc. There were also the continuing attempts of the foreign policy think tank Le Cercle to influence Western public opinion through criticizing Western moves to negotiate with Gorbachev in the late 1980s (p. 164), based on its assumption that communists could never be trusted.
The volume provides a rich survey of how these groups and individuals – many of whom worked across numerous organizations – worked with and put pressure on their own states to maintain a hard line against the USSR and any other state or movement that they regarded as leftist. Indeed, many of these organizations and individuals were defined by a far-right political vision that extended to social democrats and anyone else who failed to see the need to “roll back” communism and overthrow communist states through the use of force. Many of them also worked with other anti-communist states, as a means of furthering their aims through attempts to build international coalitions, sometimes against the diplomatic positions of the US and its key allies. In a number of cases intellectuals and activists who had either worked with, or been members of fascist organizations, such as Eberhard Taubert, Goebbels’s deputy in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, played key roles in the setting up and running of these organizations, in this case, the League for Peace and Freedom.
While a number of contributions make reference to the role of far-right (and neo-fascist) political forces in the setting up of some of these groups, there would have been scope to give this aspect of these organizations greater consideration in a number of the contributions. In two cases the role of far-right forces as agents of Western anti-communism appear to be downplayed. In Pierre Abramovici’s otherwise excellent discussion of the World Anti-Communist League (pp. 113–129) he appears to overlook its role as a network that facilitated violent “anti-communist” subversion in central America, and in the case of Nicaragua, the weakening of the Sandinista revolutionary government which greatly contributed to its defeat in 1990. Whilst the Sandinistas were formally removed from power by electoral defeat, the background to this event was the over-decade-long armed campaign against it funded and assisted by the United States, but which came also to rely on a range of private individuals and networks connected to the WACL. Indeed, in the context of Congressional restrictions on official US support for the contras, unofficial and non-state networks such as that provided by the WACL were crucial in realizing the objectives of the Reagan administration. And in Niels Bjerre-Poulsen’s assessment of the role of the Mont Pèlerin Society (pp. 201–217) there is a curious silence about not only Hayek’s connection to and defence of the Pinochet dictatorship, but also the importance of the so-called “Chicago Boys”, a group of Chilean economists and politicians trained in Chicago or its partner institution in Chile, in the neo-liberal experiment that the dictatorship imposed after the overthrow of Salvador Allende.
The final comment to make concerns the analytical category of transnationalism: for the editors, this concept privileges the influence and impact of trans-border connections and examines how “these connections both feed back to shape nations and interact and interlink to establish an identifiable field of sociopolitical activity in their own right” (p. 8). However, whilst the contributions to this volume do provide evidence of cross-border connections and interactions and the creation and growth of international non-state actors, the degree to which any of these groups amounted to forms of transnational agency is arguable. As evidenced by the contributions, nation-state actors and/or non-state organizations based and resourced from within a particular nation-state were crucial for the establishment of these groups. Further, many of their activities were less oriented towards the creation of a transnational political space and channel of influence and more concerned with pressing and lobbying particular nation-states where they were located and/or that they regarded as key to securing their objectives. Overall, then, this reviewer was not fully convinced by the explanatory weight given to the transnational dimensions of the argument.
However, this point does not detract from the overall contribution of this volume, which provides a valuable addition to the new Cold War history and which should also spur further research into the fields of counter-revolutionary and anti-communist politics in the Cold War and the role played in these endeavours by non-state actors.
