Author Interview: UVA's Paul A. Cantor on zombies and liberty in popular culture

Professor Paul A. Cantor

Speaking at the Mercatus Center on the Arlington campus of George Mason University last November about the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” University of Virginia English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001.

Cantor is also co-editor, with San Diego State University professor Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture. He and Cox (who is also editor of Liberty magazine, now an on-line publication) are perhaps the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and a discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to me why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Falling Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.)

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Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism’

Paul Kengor teaches foreign policy and twentieth century history in the department of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, a history of the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Paul Kengor at CPAC, February 2011

Kengor also wrote The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which examines how Ronald Reagan planned for and stimulated that collapse.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor spoke to me about The Crusader and how he came to write that book.

The process of researching and writing The Crusader “began when I realized that a lot of people in academia – and, really, generally -- didn’t realize, didn’t know, didn’t understand that Ronald Reagan actually intended to undermine the Soviet Empire,” Kengor said.

In a sense, he explained, “they knew from his rhetoric and his speeches,” such as the June 1982 Westminster address, the May 1981 Notre Dame speech, and the so-called “Evil Empire” speech before the religious broadcasters in March 1983 that “he thought that Soviet Communism was evil. They knew that he predicted it would end up on the ash heap of history.”

At the same time, however, these observers “thought that might have been rhetoric” rather than an expression of intention.

“What they didn’t realize,” Kengor went on, “is that behind all of that was a very specific campaign on multiple fronts, probably about a dozen to maybe two dozen different things, where Reagan actually intended to peacefully undermine the USSR.”

To back up his thesis, Kengor looked directly at recently declassified government documents, particularly NSDDs, or national security decision directives.

He contrasted his research with that of other academics who have not availed themselves of these documents.

“If academics are going to be scholars,” he complained, “they need to read primary sources, like they tell their students to do. But they don’t. They read each other and they cite each other. They don’t learn anything.”

The proof of Reagan’s intentions is in these documents, Kengor said.

“All this information has been declassified. You look at NSDD 32, NSDD 66, NSDD 75, and you see here a clear intent to roll back, undermine, and as one of the documents says, bring political pluralism – [it] actually uses that word, pluralism – to the Soviet Union.”

The collapse of the Soviet empire, Kengor asserts, “was intended and there’s a paper trail to prove it.”

His research did not end with the documents, however.

“Beyond the paper trail,” he explained, “all the people who were involved in this are either still alive or died in the last 10 years” and were available to tell the story.

“I’ve interviewed all of those people,” he said. “I mean everybody that I could find: Bill Clark, Cap Weinberger, George Shultz, Richard V. Allen,” naming, respectively, the director of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor of the Reagan administration.

Those people, he noted, “will tell you this, that [undermining the Soviet system] was the intention.”

The title of the book, The Crusader, emerged from research Kengor did in the Soviet archives.

As Kengor was reading the Soviet documents, he explained, such as Pravda, Izvestia, and transcripts of a TV program called Studio 9 (“the Moscow version of 60 Minutes”), and memoirs of Soviet officials like Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, he discovered “they called Reagan ‘the crusader.’”

The Soviets, he said, “understood better than American liberal academics that Reagan, beginning in the 1950s, had signed up for groups like General Lucius Clay’s Crusade for Freedom [and] Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.”

Reagan himself, Kengor noted, “had been using that word. He didn’t mean it in a religious sense, although Reagan was religiously inspired to undermine this viciously atheistic empire. (As Gorbachev said, the Soviets pursued a war on religion.) But Reagan meant the word crusade in the sense of crusade for freedom, a crusade to undermine” the USSR.

The now-declassified documents that Kengor used in his research were not kept hidden from the Soviets during the 1980s.

“They were classified at the time,” he explained, “but there was some leaking. I think it might have been intentional leaks, to get out some of the NSDDs” into the Soviets’ conversation.

According to interviews released a few years ago, NSDD 75, which was written by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes while he served on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House, was intentionally but only partially leaked.

“When the Soviets heard that that was out, they were apoplectic. They wanted to find out, what’s in that document? They badly wanted to know what was in that document because the Soviets knew that Reagan had drawn crosshairs on their empire. They were in the crosshairs of the crusader,” Kengor said.

The Soviets, he continued, “were hungry to find out what specifically the Reagan administration was doing and they knew that Reagan was coming at them from multiple angles,” something that became clear to Kengor through interviews with former Soviet officials.

Beyond the history analyzed in his book, Kengor said, he wanted to express a criticism about scholarship.

“I would tell young people, in particular,” he said, that “if you run into a liberal professor who denies that Reagan had anything to do with the Soviet Union [collapse], that professor needs to know that the Soviets disagree with him, that the Poles disagree with him, that the people behind the former Iron Curtain disagree with him.”

That professor, he pointed out, “needs to know he is in a very tiny minority and doesn’t have evidence for his assertions.”

Kengor offered the theory that “maybe that’s why they avoid the primary source documents. They’re afraid that it will dispel a lot of their sacred cows about how Reagan allegedly had nothing to do with” the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

(This blog post has been adapted from two articles previously published on Examiner.com on February 23, 2011.)

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Author Interview: Colin Dueck on Libertarian and Conservative Approaches to U.S. Foreign Policy

Colin Dueck teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is associate professor of public and international affairs.  He is also the author of a new book, Hard Line:  The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II.

On October 28, on the eve of an election that brought a new Republican majority to the House of Representatives, Dueck addressed an audience at the Heritage Foundation in Washington about his book.  In his lecture, he argued that the Republican approach to foreign policy has been remarkably consistent over the past six decades.

Dueck says in his book that “despite apparent oscillations between internationalism and isolationism, there has in fact been one overarching constant in conservative and Republican foreign policies for several decades now, namely, a hawkish and intense American nationalism.”

After his lecture, Dueck spoke briefly me about his book, about libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy making, and prospects for free trade after the election.

McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft
Dueck said he was motivated to write Hard Line as he “was reflecting on some of the changes that had taken place in U.S. and, specifically, Republican foreign policy after 9/11 -- the arguments for war in Iraq, the Bush doctrine, and so on.”

His original manuscript, he said, was 600 pages long and “started with [William] McKinley," he said.  “Then I talked to my editor,” who told him, “’This is totally out of control.’”

The first version of the book had chapters on McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, but, Dueck said, he “decided the story would hold together a little better with a start in World War II.”

He explained that the “main storyline is the decline of that anti-interventionist trend represented by Robert Taft.  That’s the big story in the Forties and Fifties.”

Anti-interventionist and Libertarian Strains
Taft represented what Dueck calls an “anti-interventionist” strain in foreign policy, with origins in libertarian thought.

Libertarian thinking, Dueck explained, “was prominent in the sense that for Taft and, actually, for most conservatives and most Republicans, the belief was that if the U.S. intervened, for example, in World War II, that you would get an expanded national security state -- big government, in a way.  So for Taft, the priority was ‘let’s avoid that at all costs.’  Therefore, that’s the argument for staying out of war.”

History, however, intervened.  As Dueck put it, “Obviously, Pearl Harbor settled the issue.”

That anti-interventionist tendency, he continued, “still persisted after the war and for somebody like William F. Buckley [it was a] major theme, but what trumped it eventually in the Fifties was a concern over Communism.”

What happened was, said Dueck, “in practical terms a lot of libertarians or libertarian-leaning conservatives [and] Republicans embraced this new consensus over the course of the Fifties, which was a more hawkish, anti-communist, cold war policy.”

Dueck did note that there were “important exceptions” to this trend, such as economist Murray Rothbard, “who was strictly libertarian.”

Rothbard, he said, “stuck to this anti-interventionist position throughout the Cold War and in that way, almost ended up having more in common with the New Left, beginning in the Sixties and Seventies.”

While Rothbard and his circle represented “an interesting strain,” Dueck said, “it was clearly not, politically [or] in practical terms in Congress, a major force in the Republican Party,” either in the Sixties and Seventies or “in the later Cold War period.”

Free Trade Policy
One foreign policy issue that generally divides Republicans and Democrats is free trade.

Asked whether a new Republican majority in Congress will affect the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, Dueck replied:

“Well, that will really be up to President Obama.  There’s been no sign that he’s going to make that a priority.”

If Obama wanted to make free trade a priority, Dueck noted, “he might get more support from the next Congress than from the last one.”

The reason, he said, is that “at the end of the day, new Republican Members are going to be friendlier to these trade agreements than most Democrats have been.”

(This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com on October 28, 2010.)

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'Mad Dreams, Saving Graces'

Although I believe this book review was published in the International Freedom Review in 1989 or 1990, I have been unable to find that particular volume in my library. What did turn up in a file box was a typescript that shows its age simply by the fact that it was produced on a dot-matrix printer.

Mad Dreams, Saving Graces – Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy, by Michael T. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1989. Pages: 270. Price: $19.95 (hardcover). 

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

For the Polish people, the month of September 1989 resonates with history — past, present, and future. It was fifty years ago this month that Hitler’s forces, in cooperation with Stalin’s Red Army, dismembered Poland less than twenty years after it had achieved independence upon the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. September 1989 will be the first full month in more than forty years that Poland’s government is headed by a non-Communist, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The new prime minister is an unassuming intellectual, a newspaper editor who only a few years ago was jailed by the order of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who last month requested that Mazowiecki form a government under the umbrella of Solidarity, the free trade union movement banned from 1981 until last year. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but given the rapidity of events that were unpredictable even eighteen months ago, for many people, optimism hard to avoid.

Michael T. Kaufman, an American reporter born of Polish parents in exile just before the Second World War, returned to his ancestral land as a New York Times correspondent in 1984.

What he discovered was a country living in conspiracy -- consciously, surreptitiously, historically living in a conspiracy designed to show that no totalitarian government whether Nazi orCommunist can keep the Polish people down.

Kaufman’s account of the underground Solidarity movement in the years following the declaration of martial law in December 1981 is full of tales of personal heroism. The heroes, however, are modest. What they do, they say, is only what is necessary to maintain their own dignity and that of their nation. Whether running from gun-toting secret police or editing underground newspapers, the conspirators felt that their conspiracy was nothing out of the ordinary, only the honest efforts of honest people to keep their heads above water. In Polish, writes Kaufman, “the word conspiracy has absolutely no negative connotation. A Pole will say, ‘I was a conspirator,’ in the same way a Frenchman might say, ‘I was with the wartime resistance.” It is a matter of pride.

It has become a commonplace among both travel writers arid political analysts to describe a nation as being filled with paradox. For Poland, however, this cliché is undoubtedly true. Kaufman writes that Poland’s “social landscape” is dominated by “tragic though sometimes ludicrous paradoxes. Almost everyone in Poland knew that what was economically necessary was politically impossible, that what was required was forbidden. The government knew this, the party knew this, the nation knew it.” He cites a Polish writer whom he had called absurdist in the tradition of Eugene Ionesco. The writer’s reaction to this characterization? “I am a realist like Zola. It is just Poland that is absurd.”

In Poland, merely not to lose is to win. This seems a paradox to us, because, as Kaufman explains, “For those brought up in pragmatic Western cultures, a system that accepts stalemate as the best possible substitute for success seems like a Wonderland absurdity.” Kaufman reminds us of the modest aspirations apparent in the Polish national anthem, which unlike national hymns that lay claim to God’s bounty or military victories, merely states, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela" [“Poland has not yet perished”].

Poland is a police state like other Communist countries. It is just that the police are not quite so effective at stifling dissent and the underground conspiracy. The police are held in widespread disdain. One common joke in Warsaw asks: “Why do policemen here walk in threes?” Answer: “Well, the first is there because he can read, the second, because he can add, and the third, to keep tabs on the two intellectuals.” And are Poles proud that one of their countrymen, Feliks Dzierzynski, founded the Soviet secret police (forerunner of today’s KGB) arid participated in Stalin’s bloody purges? Well, in a manner of speaking. In one story about the monument to Dzierzynski in Warsaw, “an old peasant visits the statue, crosses himself, and tells a passerby that Dzierzynski was one of the greatest Poles who ever lived. When the stunned stranger asks why, the peasant tells him, ‘Because he killed more Communists and more Russians than vodka and winter.”

Poles are more aware of their history than perhaps any other European society. A university lecturer told Kaufman that “everywhere else, people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to our mothers and fathers and what is happening to us and our friends.”

What is happening now is the gradual transformation of a Communist police state into a democratic republic. The underground movement that arose spontaneously after martial law was declared in 1981 was not violent but intellectual. Said Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak, “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.” The underground consisted of “firms” of people engaged in political propaganda activities: newspapers, books, plays, musical performances, debates. The result was stimulation of political ideas and, finally, forcing the government to hold genuinely free elections in which Solidarity candidates won every seat that they contested.

Although Kaufman’s book necessarily ends its chronology of events some months before the most recent occurrences, it is interesting to note his guarded optimism about Poland’s future. Polish hopes for economic rescue by the West, he says, are “politically unrealistic. Some limited growth in capital from abroad [is] probable, particularly if state and society established a truce, but full-scale rescue by a consortium of benefactors seem[s] a chimera.” Moreover, the Polish example poses a threat to Soviet domination over its own republics, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where clamor for independence is loud today, and in the Ukraine and elsewhere farther down the road. How far will Gorbachev allow the Poles to go before saying “Enough!”?

It is far too early to make an accurate assessment of Poland’s economic and political future. What is clear to me, at least, is that the hard-won status now enjoyed by Solidarity is Solidarity’s to lose. Economic or political failure is the unfortunate likely outcome for a government made up of people who have never before held responsible public offices. The hard choices necessary to reform the Polish economy will come down most severely on Solidarity’s own constituents, the workers: higher food prices, layoffs, closing plants and industries. In fact, it may be necessary, on the basis of economic realities, to close down the inefficient and archaic Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which besides being totally non-competitive with foreign shipbuilders, is the birthplace of Solidarity. What an ironic, paradoxical grace note to accompany Solidarity’s triumph!


Richard Sincere, a Washington-based issues analyst, is an American of Polish descent.

'Europe's Neutral States: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?'

This book review appeared in the Fall 1987 edition of Strategic Review, a publication of the United States Strategic Institute. A shorter version was published in the Spring 1988 edition of Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1).

Balance-Sheets of Nonalignment

EUROPE’S NEUTRAL STATES: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?

By Stephan Kux
London: Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies
1986. 42 pages. $8.00

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What is the role played by neutral states in the international political system? Is the concept of neutrality still a truly meaningful one in contemporary international politics? Or has neutrality become merely a narrowly legal (and convenient) concept bereft of any real political cutting-edge?

If, as Professor Roderick Ogley asserts, neutrality is “an enormous subject, almost coterminous with world politics as a whole,” these questions deserve further exploration. What surprises the student of international relations today is the absence of relevant material. While descriptive analyses of the politics of individual neutral states are plentiful, no substantial, book-length study of neutrality has been published during the past twenty years — at least in the English language. There certainly have been no new challengers to Philip Jessup’s comprehensive, four-volume study of neutrality published in the mid-1930s.

This short monograph by Stephan Kux, a Swiss political analyst, makes a concise contribution to the literature on neutrality by focusing on Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. He asks if these four countries are getting a “free ride” for their security on the back of the Western Alliance. He concludes that, except for Switzerland, none of them can adequately provide for their own defense, and that they lean instead on mutual nuclear deterrence between the superpowers and their alliances as their principal pillar of security.

Two of Kux’s examples best illuminate the phenomenon. One is Ireland. There is broad domestic-political support for Ireland’s neutrality, and public opinion in its favor hovers around 85 per cent. Neutrality is not rigorously defined in Irish law or politics, however, and it has “come to be regarded by the general public as an essentially nationalistic symbol, fraught with nostalgia toward a hard-won independence and with a persistently anti-British flavor arising from its irredentist claim to a united Ireland.”

Ireland is much too weak to defend its territorial integrity in the event of a major war. This is clear from the “strength” of the Navy of this island nation, which consists of approximately 1,500 men in 7 offshore patrol vessels and 3 helicopters, operating from a single base in Cork with a mandate to cover all of Ireland’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The Air Force features less than 900 personnel manning but 15 combat aircraft. According to Kux, “by far the greatest part of the country’s defense expenditure” — amounting to only 1.8 per cent of the gross national product and 3.1 per cent of the government budget — “is devoted to assistance of the civil power in policing the Irish conflict,” with much of the rest going to sections of the 12,000-strong Irish Army seconded to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Ireland’s hope for resisting invasion is vested not in the military defense of its integrity and neutrality but in the presumption that its territory will not be considered a prize by either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in the event of war. There are two geostrategic perspectives on Ireland’s importance. One argues that the country is unimportant and that any needs that NATO may have in the region are covered by permanent access to British bases in Northern Ireland. The second perspective sees Ireland as a “missing link” in the defense of the North Atlantic, because the country could “provide the opportunity for extending the reach of electronic surveillance systems, anti-submarine warfare and air defense systems.” The island would also provide a useful logistics base for resupplying NATO forces in the event of a protracted conflict on the continent.

The ambiguity of this geostrategic role has to some extent made Ireland’s neutrality a bargaining chip for Dublin. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill suggested that unification could be the reward for Irish participation in the war against Nazi Germany. The offer was repeated, sotto voce, upon the formation of NATO. On the latter occasion, the Irish refusal was accepted easily because it appeared that the Alliance’s strategic needs could be fulfilled without Irish membership in the Alliance.

Yet, the topic continues to be raised. Enoch Powell, the former Conservative Member of Parliament for South Down in Ulster, told a reporter for the Financial Times in May 1987:  “Without the island of Ireland there is a yawning gap in NATO.... NATO strategists have never been satisfied that Ireland is absent from their ring.” Powell believes that the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (the so-called Hillsborough Agreement) was the consequence of pressures from Washington designed to get the British to disengage from Northern Ireland, speed up the process of Irish unification, and in the end deliver a united Ireland for membership in the Atlantic Alliance. That none of this was discussed publicly by either Dublin or Westminster escapes Powell’s argument, which thus rings hollow. Nevertheless, the fact that the point is raised at all indicates both the sensitivity and continued liveliness of the issue.

Kux’s other telling case study is Sweden. Since 1815 Sweden has managed to stay neutral in all wars and to follow a policy of what is now called nonalignment. In the Twentieth Century invitations to join military alliances have never found a strong resonance among Swedish political leaders. Membership in NATO was firmly refused by Sweden. Immediately after the war, serious consideration was given to Swedish participation in a Nordic neutrality pact, but the idea was stillborn when Norway and Denmark joined the Atlantic Alliance


Swedish national security policy is geared to military defense of the nation’s neutrality and territorial integrity. It seeks to employ a defense force adequate to deter any potential attacker. Whether or not Sweden has that capability is moot.

The series of violations of Swedish territorial waters by Soviet submarines over the past six years has brought some of the inadequacies of Swedish territorial defense into focus. It has also brought an impetus to defense spending. There will be a rise in spending over the next ten years to begin to compensate for the steady decline between 1966 and 1986, when defense spending as a proportion of gross national product fell from 4.2 to 2.9 per cent. Nonetheless, Swedish Commander-in-Chief General Bengt Gustafsson has quipped: “We are still going to become gradually weaker, but more slowly than before.” He expects defense spending to rise to 3 or 3.5 per cent of GNP in the 1990s.

In response partly to the intruding Soviet submarines but also other developments, the recognition has grown in Sweden that its northern region holds more strategic value than it did twenty or thirty years ago. Indeed, George Richey of the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies has posited that “Sweden is the key to the northern flank, and the northern flank is the key to Central Europe.” This view reflects the Soviet buildup in the Baltic and on the Kola Peninsula, and the construction of the world’s largest naval base at Murmansk.

Pending the proposed increase in defense spending — and provided that it is allocated to an optimal mix of manpower and weaponry — it is unlikely that Sweden will be capable of a viable defense of its neutrality in any general European conflict. As former Commander-in-Chief General Lennart Ljung has admitted: “There is a growing gap between the demands which have been placed on us and our actual capabilities.” An annual increase of 3 per cent over five years, he told a parliamentary committee, would be sufficient to redress the erosion of the past two decades. Certainly the infrastructure is there to inspire confidence — an arms industry of growing sophistication, a civil defense program that is nearly the equal of Switzerland’s, and 30 new Gripen multirole aircraft now on line. The details remain to be debated and implemented.

Notwithstanding these defense deficiencies and their strategic implications for NATO — which apply also in one measure or another to the other neutrals — any effort to steer these countries into an explicit embrace by the Atlantic Alliance may not be wise, let alone promising. Kux notes that “to exert direct pressure upon them to develop a closer relationship with NATO and the European Community could well prove counterproductive.” It is better, he believes, to accept the neutrals as “very much a part of the wider Western community.” As long as they share Western political values and practices, “the Western democracies should assist them in every appropriate way to maintain robust and credible defenses, and to pursue assertive but realistic foreign policies based upon a mature and informed public opinion.”

One drawback to this study is the author’s choice not to include Finland as one of Europe’s neutral states. The relations of Finland with the Soviet Union on the one hand, and with the West on the other, have strongly influenced some views of Europe’s future evolution. Indeed, Helmut Sonnenfeldt has spoken of possible “Finlandization of Eastern Europe,” just as other Western analysts have speculated fearfully about a subtle process of “Finlandization” in Western Europe. At any rate, Finland certainly meets the criteria of neutrality, and thus should have been included in Kux’s lineup.

This omission notwithstanding, Stephan Kux has given us a good, if brief, introduction to the problems and prospects of neutrality in Europe in the late Twentieth Century. Hopefully it will inspire more comprehensive and searching inquiry into these important but neglected factors of Europe’s geostrategic and political equation.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam'

This book review was originally published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, January 17, 1990.


RICHARD SINCERE
Colby Makes Late But Stylish Entrance With Vietnam History

Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam, by William Colby with James McCargar, Contemporary Books, $22.95, 448 pp.

In the nearly 15 years since the war in Vietnam ended with a communist victory, innumerable books have been written to describe the conflict, its origins, and its aftermath. These have ranged from the theoretical (On Strategy by Col. Harry Summers Jr.) to the epic (A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan) to the microcosmic (The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972 by Amb. Martin F. Herz).

Now we have the personal Vietnam memoir of William Colby, whose first official visit to the country was in 1959, under President Dwight Eisenhower, long before the first U.S. combat troops arrived. Colby’s service in Vietnam spanned the terms of five presidents; during that time he moved up the ranks to become President Ford’s director of Central Intelligence.

Such attention was not paid to these matters when the war had just ended. Colby notes that the reaction in April 1975 to Hanoi’s conquest of Saigon was one of relief that “avoided a repetition of the 1950s dispute over ‘Who lost China?’ Politically, the subject of Vietnam quickly dropped into oblivion,” he writes. Strangely, it was that same year the ‘the Vietnam Syndrome” affected American judgment so severely that the United States allowed the communists to take over Angola, even though pro-Western forces were within easy reach of victory, and communist governments also took over Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Benin — to look just at Africa.

Colby points out that there are lessons to be learned from the “lost victory” of Vietnam that are applicable today. He examines the two fatal errors of U.S. involvement in the conflict that in retrospect seem like bookends of a shelf-full of history books marked “Vietnam, Republic of — Lingering Death, 1963-75.”

The first was Washington’s willful participation in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s president, in 1963. The overthrow, argues Colby, “left a legacy of anarchy in South Vietnam to [President Lyndon] Johnson.” America’s role in the coup “clearly was crucial,” yet, Colby adds, “the basis for that role seems almost incomprehensible.”

Somehow, American policymakers believed that getting rid of the stable, if troubled, Diem, would lead to greater “democratization and effectiveness,” even though the new Vietnamese leadership would be assumed by “an unidentified general or generals.”

The second fatal error — not to say that there were not other errors along the way — was the abandonment of the Vietnamese people by the U.S. Congress in March and April 1975, when North Vietnam launched its final military assault against the South. When a similar North Vietnamese offensive had occurred in 1972, “the Americans provided massive logistical support” and U.S. forces deployed “American air power directly against North Vietnamese military targets in massive and effective doses.” Three years later, these elements were missing. “The difference,” Colby says, “was the major factor producing the collapse of morale and discipline that led to the end.”

Colby attributes this undermining of the free people of South Vietnam to Congress, although others have argued that the weakened presidency in the wake of Watergate was the major factor. “The cause [of the fall] is more clearly identifiable in the Congress’ refusal of the monetary and material components of American assistance, reflected in its sharp reductions in appropriations for the military aid South Vietnam needed and in the adoption of the 1973 War Powers Act limiting the authority of the president to employ American military force abroad.”

Colby argues that the lessons of Vietnam have been both absorbed and ignored. He says that for American diplomatic and military efforts in support of a beleaguered ally to succeed, the support of the American people is necessary. “To be willing to give their support,” he argues, “Americans must be confident that the results are commensurate with the involvement,” In other words, the government must make clear to the electorate what precisely is at stake, what will be the cost, and how long will the effort take (approximately).

In El Salvador, Colby asserts, the lessons of Vietnam are being heeded. “The American military presence has been limited to 55 advisors, quite unlike the 550,000 American soldiers who went to Vietnam. In an effort to win the hearts and minds of the people (as the infamous phrase goes), “assistance to the security forces has been matched by programs to strengthen economic development and social growth for the population.” President Bush’s recent firm support or the government of President Cristiani in the face of massive urban guerrilla assaults on the Salvadoran people should, in these terms, be commended.

In Nicaragua, however, Colby argues that the “lessons of Vietnam have been ignored or not learned.” He says the Reagan Administration “put the cart before the horse” by relying on the military force of the contras rather than engaging in fundamental political organizing to create internal, popular opposition to Sandinista tyranny. He believes that “impatience with this long and difficult process led the administration to seek the seemingly quicker solution of direct military action. In so doing, it condemned its efforts to futility and to the loss of the American people’s support.”

To an extent, Colby is correct. However, the constant pressure of the contras has forced the Sandinista junta to call for elections next February. Moral and financial assistance to the political opposition. led by Violeta Chamorro, is coming from the United States. If, as several observers on both right and left have said, the Nicaraguan elections are free and fair, there is a better than.average chance that Chamorro’s democratic opposition will win.

Colby recognizes this (although clearly this book was drafted before current events had run so far along their course) when he singles out for praise the National Endowment for Democracy, which he says is “able to focus on those political forces and institutions on whose success or failure rest the hopes of democratic rather than totalitarian solutions of the serious economic and social challenges so many nations face.”

As examples of success of this approach, he cites our assistance to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, and our help in the plebiscite that led to the peaceful exit of Gen. Pinochet as head of Chile’s military regime.

We`will probably be debating the “lessons of Vietnam” in classrooms and the Capitol Chambers for generations to come. There will also be the ‘‘lessons of’’ Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Angola, South Africa, Poland, Hungary… the list goes on.

Colby’s years of experience lend a special perspective on America’s wrenching national trauma in Vietnam. Lost Victory will take its place alongside many other worthy and not so worthy works that attempt to explore what happened and why — and if it will happen again,



Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

'Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years'

This book review was first published in the monthly Journal of Civil Defense in June 1989.


DANGER AND SURVIVAL: CHOICES ABOUT THE BOMB IN THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS by McGeorge Bundy. New York: Random House. Publication Date: December 12, 1988. Pages: xiii + 735 (including bibliography, notes and index). Price: $24.95 (hardcover).

— Reviewed by Richard Sincere.

McGeorge Bundy, who gained national prominence as President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor more than twenty-five years ago, now is a professor of history at New York University. As a historian, he has produced a readable if lengthy chronicle of the nuclear age, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years.

Because of the book’s sheer length — over 600 pages of text alone — it is difficult in a short review like this to do it justice. For that reason, let us look at just two topics that Bundy handles that have special interest for readers in 1989: civil defense and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

For a Kennedy administration alumnus, Bundy’s discussion of civil defense is surprisingly spare. After all, in real dollar terms, federal spending on efforts to protect civilians against enemy attack reached its peak in the Kennedy years and has steadily fallen since. President Kennedy had a genuine commitment to civil defense, as he noted in several public statements. “To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age,” Kennedy said in June 1961, ‘without our citizens knowing what they should do or where they should go if bombs fall, would be a failure of responsibility.”

Bundy notes that he agreed with Kennedy on the need for civil defense as a sort of “insurance policy” against the dangers of nuclear war. He also says that both he and Kennedy underestimated the political realities of trying to get an effective civil defense program off the ground. Kennedy was troubled by his failure to establish a good program, and Bundy reports the president attributed this failure to the ebbs and flows of politics: “These matters have some rhythm,” said Kennedy in a 1962 press conference. “When the skies are clear, no one is interested. Suddenly then, when the clouds come. . . then everyone wants to find out why more hasn’t been done about it . . I think the time to do it is now.”

Similar views have been expressed from time to time by other national leaders: Nelson Rockefeller, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. For some reason (sociological? political?), their opinions in favor of civil defense have not influenced national policy. Bundy notes — although some strategic thinkers, including myself, might disagree with him — that “civil defense is not a reinforcement of deterrence; it is not a tool of crisis management; it certainly does not demonstrate will or confer superiority. But” — and here I do agree with Bundy — “neither is it belligerent or provocative.”

Bundy’s discussion of civil defense ends with the Kennedy administration, despite the fact that civil defense became a controversial national issue during both the Carter and Reagan presidencies. He neglects the creation (under Carter) of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the sometimes comic events under Reagan that led to a diminished commitment to civil defense in spite of repeated promises of support from the White House. Perhaps Bundy has fallen prey to his own assessment of why civil defense lacks public support: “The subject may be too dreadful for rational discussion.”

Professor Bundy compares Ronald Reagan’s March 1983 decision to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative with Franklin Roosevelt’s October 1941 decision to embark on the atom bomb research program. Yet, advancing from the historic nature of these decisions, Bundy remains skeptical. “What is clear,” he writes, “is that any limited defense will leave essentially unchanged the strategic stalemate we now have — one that rests in the end on mutual vulnerability. The leakproof space shield that is Ronald Reagan’s dream will not become real for decades, if ever.”

Bundy’s skepticism is based on the testimony of technological and scientific experts who downplay the possibilities of SDI and emphasize its shortcomings. Although he discusses extensively the political play that has accompanied the strategic debate since 1983, he seems to ignore certain implications of the evidence that he brings up himself. The conclusion I draw — and others, too — from such evidence is that the practicability of strategic defense is more a function of political will than of technical advance.

I expect that McGeorge Bundy’s Danger and Survival will find its way into many college classrooms as a basic text on the history of nuclear weapons. An interesting and enjoyable work, it will probably be very useful to students of diplomatic history, the Cold War, and strategic thinking. It does not, however, tell the whole story. No single book could.

'South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?'

This book review first appeared in the New York City Tribune on August 10, 1988.  Historical note:  Walter Kansteiner later became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the administration of George W. Bush (2001-05).


RICHARD SINCERE
Reconciliation the Key Word In Hopeful Book On Troubled South Africa

South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, by Walter H. Kansteiner, Washington: Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1988, 175 pp., $8 paperback (foreword by Richard John Neuhaus).

Contrary to popular perceptions, the troubles in South Africa will continue to haunt us beyond the turn of the century. This is despite the dire warnings (or hopeful announcements) that “revolution is just around the corner.” There is little possibility that satisfaction for all will come to South Africa within this generation.

Leon Louw, a South African lawyer and advocate for a free market economy, told me recently that when he was a boy, he persistently heard the news that “the revolution is less than five years away.” That was more than 30 years ago, and the revolution has not yet come. Yet each succeeding political generation — both here and in South Africa — has viewed revolution there as both inevitable and imminent. On both counts, the would-be prophets and seers are wrong.

Walter Kansteiner, trained in economics and theology, has written a useful overview of the “revolutionary” situation in South Africa. Beginning with a thorough review of the traditional just war/just revolution doctrine that was formulated through the ages by such thinkers as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, he continues with a particular examination of current conditions in South Africa and asks whether the criteria for just revolution are met there.

The answer is no, primarily for two reasons. One of the major just revolution standards is that violent revolution must be initiated as a last resort. In the South African case, where the ferment of reform and nonviolent political change characterizes the present moment, violent revolution is clearly not the last resort. Advocates of change can still participate in party politics. The press, though circumscribed by emergency regulations, can freely criticize apartheid policies and call for reform. Even the most strident opponents of the government, such as Desmond Tutu, are free to leave South Africa and return without fear of arrest.

Let me give an example of this ferment, if a minor one. During a visit to Johannesburg in July, I observed the debate in the newspapers about the recent desegregation of railroad cars. Conservative Party members decried the reform as a further step away from rigid apartheid, liberals praised it as a step forward, and pragmatic black leaders complained that most of their constituents still cannot afford the price of anything better than a third- class ticket. Political cartoonists portrayed opponents of the reform as buffoons; the government’s response to white complaints was, basically, “either accept the change or stop riding the trains.”

A second reason Kansteiner says no to just revolution is that, according to just war doctrine, those who initiate revolution must have a reasonable chance of success. Given the size and degree of training of the South African Defense Forces, no revolutionary movement can hope to meet that criterion. Since the state of emergency was first declared by the South African government in 1985, the level of violence in the townships violence that was primarily black-on-black and not directed at either the white-controlled government or white citizens — has been reduced to near nothing. The South African police and military have a firm grip that will be nearly impossible to dislodge. Combined with an extensive, regionwide intelligence operation that allows them to stop terrorist incidents before they can occur and with the perception that the South African military possesses “last resort” nuclear weapons, there is little possibility that revolutionaries can succeed in the near term or ultimately.

In South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, Kansteiner concludes that just revolution is not currently an option in South Africa; that peaceful progress toward the end of apartheid is both necessary and possible. He thus focuses on the last word in his title — reconciliation — and urges Americans to aid South Africans in their process of reconciliation and nation-building.

As part of this process, release of this book by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) coincided with the initiation of a new IRD program called BANSA — Building a New South Africa. The program enables Americans to support financially South African organizations helping to strengthen economic opportunities for blacks, improving education and health care, and building democratic institutions. (For more information on this innovative program, readers of the New York City Tribune may write to IRD (BANSA), 725 Fifteenth Street, N.W. Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20005, or telephone 202-393-3200.)

South Africa’s problems are often too complex for Americans to grasp. Our American culture believes that problems always have solutions. This is not the case elsewhere in the world, where “quick fixes” are disdained. To those who hope for revolution, and to those who encourage it through economic sanctions, Kansteiner warns:

“Disaster for South Africa is the easy way out. Joining or encouraging an armed revolution is deceptively simple. So too is acquiescing in apartheid. The hard challenges, the tough tasks, are for those who have enough faith and hope and patience and optimism that South Africa’s future is not the future of a tragedy, but rather the future of a bright, prosperous, and free nation.”

These are not the words of an unguarded optimist, but the judgments of one who has studied the South African situation in detail. Kansteiner mixes his hard-headed reflections on South Africa with compassion. The prescriptions in his book deserve further examination by policymakers in Washington and the constituents they serve throughout the United States.

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a frequent commentator on African affairs.

'With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War'

This book review appeared originally in The Washington Times on Friday, February 4, 1983.  It was also published in The News World (a New York City newspaper) on Tuesday, February 15, 1983.


RICHARD SINCERE / BOOK REVIEW
Shoveling appeasement

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.
By Robert Scheer, Random House, $14.95, 124 pages + 155 pages of 
notes and appendices.

Eugene Rostow’s resignation from his post as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency underlines the pressures inherent in the arms-control process. Battered by both the right and the left, the Reagan administration has spent the past two years trying to bring order out of chaos, attempting to achieve sensible balance in the competition between the superpowers.


In “With Enough Shovels,” Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Scheer shamelessly accuses Reagan and his advisers of wild (just stopping short of insane) views of nuclear war. Resting his accusations on unproven assumptions, Scheer pulls no punches in advancing his theory that the present administration is the puppet of a conspiracy called the Committee on the Present Danger.

Scheer is disturbed, and sometimes amused, at Reagan’s determination to stem the threat of communism. Scheer considers the Soviet threat a hallucination — or more accurately, he finds it a puzzling anachronism that lives on only in Reagan’s memories of Communist subversion of Hollywood trade unions. The few readers who could share Scheer’s conclusions are those who share his fundamental and wrongheaded assumption: The Soviet Union is a benign and defensive superpower.

Despite the many hours of extensive interviews with nuclear weapons specialists and civil defense experts, Scheer closes his eyes in this book to the possibility that there is a defense against nuclear weapons. T.K. Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, is portrayed as a wild- eyed maniac, a man with no human sensibilities. Scheer ignores the extensive empirical data gathered by Jones which demonstrate that, with proper preparations, the devastation from nuclear weapons can be significantly mitigated. He brushes it off with mockery rather than criticism of Jones’s case.

Clearly Scheer has fallen into the trap of believing in the apocalyptic premise preached by Jonathan Schell in “The Fate of the Earth” and by other doomsayers. Nothing will alter his assumptions. All challengers are dismissed as madmen, no matter what their qualifications.

In his criticism of the Committee on the Present Danger, Scheer carefully documents how this group of intellectuals — established in 1976 to study American defense needs and promulgate their findings that a dangerous imbalance in military preparedness exists — has moved its members into influential government off ices. Scheer calls it their “seizure of state power.” He reserves special disdain for committee members because so many of them are former (or present) Democrats from the Hubert Humphrey wing of the party. Scheer argues that they have betrayed their roots.

Yet it is no accident that people like Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Michael Novak support U.S. military strength. They have observed firsthand the usurpation of political and social influence by muddle-headed utopians. They remember the lessons of Munich and are willing to take risks to prevent another global conflagration. A commitment to the liberal values of the Democratic Party — even to the values of Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs — requires a commitment to preserve those values against totalitarianism.

Thus the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger were willing to face public criticism when they rebutted CIA studies on Soviet military power. In asking, “Is the United States No. 2?” they answer an emphatic yes; their purpose was to influence the public debate on how to rectify that dangerous situation.

By concentrating exclusively on how members of the Committee on the Present Danger now are influencing the U.S. government, Scheer begs the question as to whether there is some sort of conspiracy at work. Since committee members helped to get Ronald Reagan elected, have advised him for many years, and since he agrees with most of their views, it is hardly surprising they are now in positions of influence. But to read that as a conspiracy is equivalent to saying that the Brookings Institution exercised conspiratorial control over the American economy during the Johnson and Carter administrations. It smacks of political naivete and fundamental distrust of American democracy.

And that is the root of Scheer’s attack on the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons policy. A policy designed to fight and survive a nuclear war, even one designed primarily to deter war (as the Reagan policy clearly is), must — in Scheer’s view — be misguided, because there is nothing worth fighting for. American institutions are not superior to Soviet institutions. American government is as corrupt as Soviet government. Freedom is not preferable to slavery. Scheer’s repugnant view is not unique — it has been expressed in the recent appeasement demonstrations in both Europe and America.

On balance, “With Enough Shovels” presents a strikingly biased, negative view of the Reagan administration. Its only positive value is documentary: Scheer prints informative interviews with several present and former government officials. Unfortunately, Scheer is incapable of interpreting that information in a manner conducive to rational discourse. That would make a worthy addition to the literature of nuclear policy.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Defense Association, a nationwide public education group.

'A German Identity, 1770-1990'

This book review appeared in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 1, 1989, just a few days before the Berlin Wall came down (on November 9 of that year).




RICHARD SINCERE
The Story of Germany: From Principalities to A Divided Nation

A German Identity, 1770-1990, by Harold James, Routtedge, Chapman and HalL 240 pp.

Talk about the reunification of Germany has been suspended for a while; the recent flood of East German refugees across the border threatens to depopulate the entire country, rendering the whole question moot. Barely 40 years after East Germany was founded by its Soviet overlords, its experiment in German state socialism is proving to be a failure.

The almost panicky desire of East Germans to emigrate and to take up citizenship in West Germany is symptomatic of the German nation’s search for identity, a search that has taken up most of the past 200 years of German history. This is the subject of Harold James’ fascinating book A German Identity, 1770-1990.

James, assistant professor of history at Princeton University and until recently a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, argues that in the 19th century a doctrine emerged among German intellectuals and political leaders that drew its justification for the German nation “primarily by reference to the inexorable logic of economic development.”

As a result, Germany’s national fortunes rose and fell so to speak — with the stock market. In periods of economic decline, people lost faith in the nation entirely, leading to political chaos and eventually giving birth to the Nazi era. This is not to say that cultural, linguistic, religious, and other influences failed to contribute to German nationalism and national identity. James’ assertion is simply that until the advent of massive economic growth in the mid-1800s, German national identity did not coalesce. Similarly, the unification of myriad German states and statelets could not take place until a certain level of economic integration had been reached.

This belief was current among German nationalists in the mid-l9th century; the economic drive toward national unity was a conscious one, not merely coincidental with political developments.

After the German empire was proclaimed in 1871, German national identity had ample opportunity to develop, further. One interesting development was the emergence, in the 1880s and ‘90s, of explicitly anti-semitic political parties.

To those who think Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews was a horrible exaggeration of a deviant strain of German thinking learning about these activities of the last century comes as a surprise. James’ report is chilling in light of what came later:

“[The anti-semitic intellectuals] sought in the first place to mobilize hatred,” he writes. “Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, who founded the anitsemitic Deutsche Volksverein, did not care about any broader program or indeed any rationale other than simply a violent dislike. ‘first we waht to become a political power,’ be said, ‘then we shall seek the scientific evidence for anti-Semitism.’”

During this period, several parties arose that actually took “anti-semitic” as part of their name; there was no hiding their agenda. Examples included the Antisemitische Deutschsoziale Partei [Anti-Semitic German Social Party] and the Antisemitische Volkspartei [Anti-Semitic People’s Party].

One reason anti-semitism became so important in the German’s search for national identity stems from a longstanding German habit of defining the German nation in terms of other nations. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Germans adopted the customs, styles, and even languages of others. German intellectuals openly admired English and American systems of government, French philosophy, and Greek civilization. The aristocracy and rising middle classes unashamedly aped styles of dress from Paris.

Of course, some Germans warned against this copycat culturalism. Germaine Necker, better known as Madame de Staël, wrote that “self-abnegation and esteem for others are qualities in individuals, but the patriotism of nations must be egotistical.” Other critics were harsher.

Still, even in modern times the Germans have seemed obsessed with comparisons to other nations and cultures. At the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, one Nazi newspaper exhorted its readers to show the world Germany’s best side; “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more light-living than the Viennese, more vital than the Russians, more cosmopolitan than Londoners, more practical than New Yorkers.”

The most pressing question of German identity we face today is, of course, the division of Germany into two parts at the end of World War II. German reunification has been a cloud hanging over Europe for more than 40 years. The French and the Russians fear a strong, united Germany, having suffered so much at its hands during the two world wars. There has never been a peace treaty signed to bring World War II to an end, primarily because the German question remains unsettled.

To counteract this precarious situation, West Germany and France pioneered the European Economic Community, which now comprises 12 nations. West German prosperity, tied closely to the fortunes of other Western nations, serves as a palliative against the twin shames of the Nazi heritage and the division of the German nation against the will of the German people.

And, as we see each day on the evening news, East Germans — citizens of the most prosperous Eastern bloc country — are dissatisfied with their lot and are willing to sacrifice everything to move to West Germany.

It is clearly not just material prosperity that draws these refugees to the West. They desire freedom, something that even glasnost and perestroika cannot offer and desire a chance to participate in the German nation unencumbered by Moscow.

Harold James’ book, A German Identity, 1770-1990, helps us to understand what these Germans are looking for. Not just a history book, but an interpretive essay that requires of the reader substantial knowledge of German events (and particularly chronology), it belongs on the shelf alongside Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism and Gordon Craig’s The Germans. Its analysis of nationalism is an important contribution to the theoretical literature, and its specific examination of the German people puts it among the best socio-political studies of modem Germany.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.