George F. Kennan 25: Polycentrism and Western Policy

George F. Kennan, who graduated from Princeton in 1925, is former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Visiting Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. The article condensed below, which originally appeared in the January 1964 Foreign Affairs, is incorporated in Professor Kennan’s On Dealing with the Communist World, published this spring by Harper & Row, for the Council of Foreign Relations. Excerpts are reprinted with permission.

Much of the discussion in Western countries today of the problem of relations with world Communism centers around the recent disintegration of that extreme concentration of power in Moscow which characterized the Communist bloc in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and the emergence in its place of a plurality of independent or partially independent centers of political authority within the bloc: the growth, in other words, of what has come to be described as “polycentrism.” There is widespread recognition that this process represents a fundamental change in the nature of world Communism as a political force on the world scene; and there is an instinctive awareness throughout Western opinion that no change of this order could fail to have important connotations for Western policy. But just what these connotations are is a question on which much uncertainty and confusion still prevail.

We are now confronted with a situation in which what was once a unified and disciplined bloc has disintegrated into something more like an uneasy alliance between two ideologically similar commonwealths: one grouped around the Soviet Union, the other around China. But even that element of order and symmetry which this description would suggest is not complete, because one nominally Communist country, Jugoslavia, is not embraced in either of these alliances, and another, Albania, is nominally and formally embraced in the one (it still belongs to the Warsaw Pact) but is politically closer to the other…

While this state of affairs is…likely to last for some time in its major outlines, it allows of considerable variation and evolution in terms of the relations between various Communist countries and the non-Communist world. This is a point of great flux and uncertainty throughout the bloc…It is not too much to say that the entire bloc is caught today in a great crisis of indecision over the basic question of the proper attitude of a Communist country toward non-Communist ones. The question is whether to think of the world in terms of an irreconcilable and deadly struggle,…or to recognize that the world socialist cause can be advanced by more complicated, more gradual, less dramatic and less immediate forms, not necessitating any effort to destroy all that is not Communist within our time, and even permitting, in the meanwhile, reasonably extensive and profitable and durable relations with individual non-Communist countries.

…[V]ery often both viewpoints struggle against each other in the same troubled Communist breast…

It is important to recognize that the degree to which polycentrism has already advanced means that individual Communist countries now have a far wider area of choice than was the case some years ago in shaping not only their own relationship to the non-Communist world but also their internal institutions and policies. These two things are, in fact, closely connected; for the more internal institutions and policies come to resemble those that once prevailed in Stalin’s Russia and/or prevail today in China, the more one needs a state of apparent tension and danger in external relations, as a means of justifying them.

…At one time there was only one model; today there are a number of them: the Soviet, the Chinese, the Polish, the Jugoslav, etc. And the fact that Moscow and Peking both need the political support of the satellite parties, and are therefore obligated to compete for their favor, means that neither can afford to discipline them, beyond a point, if the paths they choose are not ones that meet with full approval on either side.

On the other hand, the are within which this freedom of choice exists is not unlimited; it has, in fact, certain very sharp limits, and it is important to bear these in mind…

What the satellite regimes can do, and are doing to some extent, is to shape their own internal economic and social institutions along more liberal lines, or at least individualistic lines. They can, furthermore, ease the restraints – as the Jugoslavs have done – on all forms of contact and dealings with non-Communist countries and their citizens. As a part of this process, they can resist – as the Rumanians are doing – efforts to pull them into a tight and exclusive trading association with other Communist countries; and they can insist on the right to expand their trade with non-Communist nations to a point where it constitutes an important element in their economic development.

Finally, while they cannot leave the Communist military alliance, the satellite regimes could, conceivably, if conditions were right, help to de-emphasize the military factor to a point where it would not stand in the way of at least a partial political rapprochement with some of their Western neighbors…

This is a. circumscribed range of choice; but what they do within it is by no means unimportant. It could, conceivably, make all the difference between a Communist orbit with which the West could coexist peacefully and without catastrophe over an indefinite time, and one with which it could not.

Now the West has it in its power, ideally speaking, to influence extensively, by its own policies and behavior, the choices that the satellite regimes make in this connection. It can reciprocate or fail to reciprocate moves to relax tensions and to facilitate collaboration in various fields. It can shape its policies in such a way as to create advantages and premiums for efforts on the part of the satellite governments to extend their relations with Western countries; or it can decline to create such advantages. It can exert itself to de-emphasize the military factor in the mutual relationship or it can take the opposite course. Finally, and of overriding significance, it can show itself reconciled to the existence of these regimes, without accepting responsibility for them; and it can convey to them that they have nothing to fear from it if they will only refrain, themselves, from hostile and subversive policies; or it can hold to the thesis that its object is to overthrow them, and permit them to conclude that any concessions they may make will only be exploited, ultimately, to their disadvantage.

Obviously, in the totality of these choices, the West is confronted by a pervasive and fundamental problem of policy…and there can in my opinion be no doubt that the trend of political decision within the Communist world will be importantly influenced by the answers they find to it. It could be well argued, in fact, that if the major Western powers had full freedom of movement in devising their own policies, it would be within their own power to determine whether the Chinese view, or the Soviet view, or perhaps a view more liberal than either, would ultimately prevail within the Communist camp.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the major Western powers do not enjoy this full freedom of movement. In the case particularly of the United States and Western Germany, but also to some extent of the NATO powers in general, the area in which they could conceivably meet the problem of policy posed by the trend toward Communist polycentrism has been severely circumscribed in recent years either by engagements they have undertaken to one another or to parties outside of Europe or by policies to which they have so deeply committed themselves that any early renunciation of them would scarcely be feasible…

If it is a question of alteration of the internal institutions and policies of the satellite regimes, it is evident, on the example of Jugoslavia, that neither the United States Congress nor the West German Government is inclined to attach importance to this factor.

…A similar disposition seems to prevail in Bonn, if only as a reflection of the Hallstein doctrine, which bars diplomatic relations with any country recognizing the present East German regime. Since all of the satellites do recognize it, they are obliged to see in this doctrine at least a limitation to the possibilities of any future political rapprochement between themselves and the German Federal Republic.

When it comes to economic policy, a similar situation prevails. There are the NATO arrangements for economic controls. There are the various legislative restrictions prevailing in this country. There is, finally, the Common Market, established and being developed on principles that appear to leave no room for anything like the eventual economic reunification of the European Continent…

When it comes to the military factor and the question of its emphasis or de-emphasis, the bald fact is that the Western powers, over a period that now runs back for several years, have committed themselves more and more deeply against…military disengagement in Europe…

These aspects of Western policy are not mentioned for the purpose of taking issue with them. Opinions can differ on the degree of their justification, individually or collectively. But even those who are enthusiastic about them should remember that there is a price to be paid for them in terms of their political effect on the Communist bloc. To the East European satellite leaders, faced with these attitudes, and noting the extreme rigidity with which they are adhered to by the Western governments, anything like a de-emphasis of the military factor in East-West relations can only appear today as discouragingly remote. In present circumstances, they can hope neither for the removal of Soviet forces from those Eastern European positions which they now occupy, nor for any further East-West agreements that could take the heat off military tensions. Particularly discouraging and disturbing to them is the progressive rearmament of Western Germany against the background of a West German commitment to the liberation of Eastern Germany, even though that commitment professes to envisage only peaceful means. The effect which the combination of these two things has had on the feelings of people in Eastern Europe cannot be emphasized too strongly…[It] unites both governments and peoples in Eastern Europe in a common reaction of horror and apprehension; for the Communist leaders there, however little they may like or respect Ulbricht, know that their own stability would not easily withstand the shock of the sudden and violent overthrow of his regime; and the people of Eastern Europe, including the Jugoslavs, see in this eventuality only the beginning of a reestablishment of the German military ascendancy.

It is clear, in these circumstances, that the West has, as of today, only limited possibilities for reciprocating any disposition the satellite countries might evince to reduce the dichotomy of the two worlds and to bridge the gap that divides present attitudes on both sides from the possibility of truly peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence. It is in a sense tragic that this should be the case just at a time when there is so great a longing for a better East-West relationship in the hearts of tens of millions of ordinary people in the East European area, and so important a willingness to move tentatively in this direction even on the part of certain of their…leaders…

[To] deny to the East even the possibility…of a better framework for coexistence is to affect the terms of the argument which goes on within the Communist camp and to forego the advantage which a division of opinion there provides…Communist leaders can only be grateful for a Western policy which slights the values of polycentrism and declines to encourage them: for a rigidly unreceptive Western attitude may eventually enforce upon the bloc a measure of unity which, by their own unaided effort, they could never have achieved.

This was originally published in the June 9, 1964 issue of PAW.