Politics, Paradigms, and Intelligence Failures

Why So Few Predicted the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Ofira Seliktar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317462439
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Washington's failure to foresee the collapse of its superpower rival ranks high in the pantheon of predictive failures. The question of who got what right or wrong has been intertwined with the deeper issue of "who won" the Cold War. Like the disputes over "who lost" China and Iran, this debate has been fought out along ideological and partisan lines, with conservatives claiming credit for the Evil Empire's demise and liberals arguing that the causes were internal to the Soviet Union. The intelligence community has come in for harsh criticism for overestimating Soviet strength and overlooking the symptoms of crisis; the discipline of "Sovietology" has dissolved into acrimonious irrelevance. Drawing on declassified documents, interviews, and careful analysis of contemporaneous literature, this book offers the first systematic analysis of this predictive failure at the paradigmatic, foreign policy, and intelligence levels. Although it is focused on the Soviet case, it offers lessons that are both timely and necessary.

1

Theories of Political Change and
Prediction of Change

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Methodological Problems

Starting with Aristotle and Plato, the search for principles that underlie political change has been a staple of Western philosophy. This quest has been made especially perplexing because of the seemingly inexplicable nature of political change. One scholar wrote that “ideologies stand for centuries and then one day the temples are empty” (Boulding 1962, 281). Much of this change is precipitated by a crisis of legitimacy, defined as an alternation in the core values of the collective belief system of a society. Socrates speculated that alternations in legitimacy formulas precede political change, setting off a long quest to uncover how communal norms crystallize into a collective belief system and a corresponding political structure, only to be eroded by further changes. Discovering the indices of legitimation and delegitimation is especially important to the predictive endeavor since it can signal to observers that the legitimacy of a given regime is “eroding below … some danger line” (Rothchild 1979, 48). However, analyzing legitimacy has been problematic, prompting Samuel Huntington (1991, 46), a leading authority on political change, to note that legitimacy “is a mushy concept that political scientists do well to avoid.” Indeed, there are a number of problems that face students of legitimacy. As Claus Mueller put it, the task is comparable to “a surgical probing for that which is unseen, but nevertheless crucial for survival” (quoted in Bialer 1986a, 418).

Methodological Problems of Tracking Changes in a Collective Belief System

Tracking legitimacy norms poses considerable methodological problems. Most important is the unit of analysis problem—namely, the question of who are the ideational bearers of the collective belief system. Ontologically, the answer divides political science into macrosociologial holism and microsociological individualism. The former holds that a society is whole and cannot be reduced to the sum of its individual parts; the latter postulates that a social collective is the sum total of individual beliefs. A related question deals with the kind of knowledge that should be used to probe for political beliefs. Epistemologically, the division runs between positivism, an assumption that the only admissible knowledge is based on scientific methods of investigation, and antipositivism, which holds that such knowledge is essentially subjective, relativist, or spiritual.

Thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Mannheim (1955, 264–311) have subscribed to the holistic approach. Macrosociologists have insisted that the collective belief system should not be confused with the arithmetic sum of “individual consciousness” of a group. However, they are less clear as to what the appropriate unit of analysis should be. One view conceives of the “belief carrier” as an abstract, almost metaphysical “super-societal entity” resembling the “general will” of the Enlightenment. Marxists and some neo-Marxists hold that a self-appointed intellectual vanguard should represent the “general will.”

Reacting to the methodological muddle of holism, the rival school of ontological individualism is committed to the view that beliefs of individual members of a group are the only legitimate unit of analysis. Among its earliest proponents were behaviorally oriented political scientists such as Almond and Verba (1965, 13), who defined a collective political belief system as the “particular distribution of orientations toward political objects among the members of the nation.” In other words, the statistically derived psychological modalities of a given population could be used to discern patterns of political change.

In spite of its popularity, ontological individualism has not escaped serious criticism. One prevalent complaint is that microsociologists neglect the distribution of power in a society (Converse 1987; Frey 1985). The inadequacies of both approaches have bred the interactionist perspective. Interactionism is based on the assumption that neither the group nor the individual can be accorded “unqualified primacy,” and both are “mutually constitutive” in the ongoing process of creating social reality. Interactionism can be traced to the work of George Simmel and George Herbert Mead, who argued that societal belief systems constitute complex symbolic sets and should be seen as a product and a determinant of individual beliefs generated through continuous social interaction (Burrell and Morgan 1985, 69–78; Seliktar 1986).

The interactionist perspective had recast the quest for the ideational bearers of the collective. In this view, changes in legitimacy norms can be best discerned by following the discourse of a society. Proponents of the interactionist tradition argue that tracking the group discourse provides the best measure of changes in its collective belief system. Among other things, they advise to look for “concrete language practices to identify the actors and parameters of discourse” (Shapiro, Bonham, and Heradstveit 1988).

The Dimensions of a Collective Belief System: Existential Imperatives as Validity Claims

Much of the insight into discursive practices comes from anthropological studies. Linton (1945) postulated that in order to survive, a group legitimizes parts of its perceptional-ideational beliefs into an all-encompassing worldview. Such a collective belief system forms the parameters of social order in a given society at a given period of time. The discursive perspective holds that norms of legitimacy are internalized by group members and translated into actions through a repetitive performance of roles. In due course these roles crystallize into structures—institutions and processes—that shape and bind the collective through an endless stream of politics. The widely used concept of regime—meaning a set of governing arrangements that include networks of rules, norms, and procedures—reflects this idea most closely.

Douglas (1992, 43, 133–34) has posited that in the process of a normative debate societies work out their existential imperatives. The three dimensions that require some type of consensus are rules for gaining membership, principles for establishing an authority system, and rules for distributing wealth. The discourse produces normative validity claims, namely “reasoned elaborations” intended to persuade individuals that they need to obey the principles of political practice (Matheson 1987; Misztal 1996, 251). These validity claims are used to build the three axes of the collective belief system. The first axis is horizontal and comprises the principles of group boundary—criteria for granting membership and acquiring territory—known as group membership/territorial legitimacy. The second axis is vertical and denotes the principles upon which the authority system rests, defined as authority system legitimacy. The third axis is diagonal and articulates the principles of distributive justice that bind group membership and authority system together.

Membership/territorial legitimacy has evolved from the Gemeinschaft community where validity claims were based on kinship in Gesellschaft association that ties members through a “feeling of interdependence” and a “community of fate.” Nationalism, which puts the loyalty to the nation-state above primordial attachments, has become increasingly popular in the past few centuries. As long as a relatively homogenous group occupies a well-defined national territory, few challenges to membership/territorial legitimacy occur. However, in cases of polycentric nationalism, where disparate ethnic groups reside under one national roof, tensions are never far from the surface. A dominant group may treat members of other groups as inferior or try to “homogenize” them by suppressing more primordial expressions. Religious divisions have added vast complications to the membership formula, especially when religion is used to relegate minority groups to second-class citizenship. The genesis of a polycentric state plays an important part in generating challenges to national validity claims. Dutter (1990) noted that if coercion was used to incorporate a group, this “primordial encroachment” typically reinforces a sense of “ethnohistorical grievances” that are perpetuated in its collective memory. By the same token, ethnic entrepreneurs, that is politicians who manipulate ethnic sentiments, often exploit such grievances as a way of attaining power.

Authority system legitimacy comprises a set of validity claims that justify the creation of a system of controls over a group residing in a defined territory. Since controls involve an exercise of power, validity claims help to ensure members’ compliance. According to one definition, this type of legitimacy is “the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right” (Kirsch 1982, 111). Max Weber’s analysis of authority system legitimacy is well known. He identified three pure types of validity claims: (1) rational grounds—a belief in the legality of rule; (2) traditional grounds—based on the sanctity of traditions and the legitimacy of those who exercise authority according to certain traditional tenets; and (3) charismatic ground—resting on the commitment to a certain individual and the order revealed to him. Weber’s taxonomy has generated an enormous critical literature, not the least because of the ambiguity surrounding rational legitimacy. To those who have maintained that rational legitimacy translates into a civic or contractual agreement, legitimation involves popular sovereignty as discharged in periodic elections. But others felt that authoritarian regimes, which have not institutionalized democratic procedures of choice, should be also considered legitimate, a stand that was sanctioned by Weber himself (Herz 1978; Berki 1982; Epstein 1984).

In the absence of universally binding guidelines, political scientists have adopted two approaches. One, which includes the writings of a large number of historians and traditional political scientists, has been based on a variety of subjective and highly intuitive criteria for estimating legitimacy in any of the three dimensions. The resulting disagreements among these observers have filled pages of academic publications. Largely as a reaction, behavioral scientists proposed a functional definition of a regime’s legitimacy based on an objective compatibility between the collective belief system of a society and governmental “outputs” (Jackman 1976; Perlmutter 1980; Dixon and Moon 1986). Yet in spite of the strong faith of behavioralists that a value-free evaluation of authority system legitimacy is possible, precious little consensus has emerged. One of the critical questions is how to define illegitimate regimes. In his classic taxonomy, Richard Rose (1969) contended that regimes that are very low on public support and high on coercion should be considered “repudiated” or illegitimate. Although Rose did not include communist regimes, many of the Sovietologists used this type of reasoning to brand the Soviet Union as an illegitimate system. To confuse matters further, the disagreements on how legitimacy of a communist authority system should be evaluated had become intertwined with issues that pertain to distributive justice.

Distributive justice is part of a larger domain of social justice, defined as a series of principles for assigning particular things to particular individuals (Galston 1980, 5). Distributive justice is focused on the more limited question of “who distributes to whom, in virtue of what criterial characteristics, by what procedures, with what distributive outcomes” (Lane 1986). To satisfy the requirements of social justice, distributive schemes have been based on a number of validity claims. Three pure types can be identified: (1) ascriptive-traditional claims that underpin traditional economies; (2) utilitarian-productive claims that underline market economies; and (3) egalitarian principles that inform communist economies.

Ascriptive claims, based largely on birthright, have been prevalent in traditional societies whose constitutive domain was nonfcconomic. Following the emergence of economics as the constitutive domain in modernizing societies, efficiency rather than birth generated a utilitarian-productive validity claim used in distributive justice. As a result, economically meritorious individuals, defined as those who possess scarce factors of entrepreneurship and skill, were deemed worthy of receiving a share of resources commensurate with their contribution. Although the market economy has been highly efficient in generating wealth, it has created large inequalities among social classes and “boom and bust cycles” to which the poorer strata are particularly vulnerable.

It was left to Karl Marx, in his well-known critique of capitalism, to argue that general principles of justice demand an egalitarian distribution of resources. At a later stage of communist economy, Marx envisioned a distribution based on human needs, a notion that various neo-Marxist thinkers developed more than a century later. To ensure that the principles of egalitarian distributive justice are not violated, Marx urged the abolition of private property and the creation of a command economy run by the state on behalf of its citizens. Such a centralized economy was expected to generate sustained and even growth, thus providing material benefits to all and eliminating the cyclical recessions of capitalism. Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the popularity of egalitarian validity, once considered an unworkable Utopia, had gained steady appeal in the West. Indeed, as will become apparent, egalitarian distribution came to be increasingly applied to evaluations of authority system legitimacy, much to the detriment of capitalist democracy.

Changing the Collective Belief System: The Process of Delegitimation

The legitimation discourse serves as the arena for an exchange of symbolic and substantive arguments in favor of accepting or rejecting validity claims in the three legitimacy dimensions identified above. However, efforts to predict possible change by tracking an amorphous and ongoing discussion pose several difficulties. The first pertains to the locus of the discourse. Much of the research on political communication reflects the habits of equating discursive practices with Western-style rational and institutionalized political procedures (Nimmo and Sanders 1981). Critics have pointed out that such a perspective trivializes the role of cultural, nonrational, symbolic, and mythical elements. Still, following broader intellectual trends can be confusing, since there are precious few rules of recognition that would allow observers to determine well in advance which of the cultural ideas circulating in the communal discourse will alter an important legitimacy formula. To remedy this, Turner and Killian (1972) articulated an “emergent norms” theory, which holds that normative challenges emanate from individuals or groups and “chain out” to larger and larger segments of the population.

Another problem pertains to the identity of the participants in the legitimation discourse. Theoretically, all members should be counted among the “ideational bearers” of their respective society. In reality though, crucial elites form “ideational clusters” that have a disproportional impact, a fact well recognized by the numerous studies of political elites. Less scrutinized are nonpolitical leaders such as writers, students, and other free-floating intelligentsia. Such elites, especially if they turn confrontational, can challenge extant legitimacy norms and the political institutions that are built around them (Said 1978; Coser 1964; Brinton 1965, 39). One taxonomy grouped people into “members,” “contenders,” and “challengers”; another identified “ruling,” “accepting,” and “opposition” groups (Tilly 1978, 52; Moshiri 1985, 188). More recently, the “second pivot” theory has gained recognition. It refers to a process whereby an elite splits into two pivots. The “second pivot” forms a change-oriented counterelite that is prepared to collude with likeminded outside elements in order to establish itself as the “sole pivot” (Rowen and Wolf, Jr., 1990a; Shtromas 1988). Whether the collective belief system would change in any particular direction along the three axes—membership/territory, authority system, and distributive justice—depends on the complex interplay among all these actors.

In order to discern how such changes take place, the process of delegitimation needs to be analyzed. Since the discursive perspective involves both holistic and microsociological factors, a discussion of the systemic and individual level is in order.

System-Level Mechanisms

The system level analysis is most closely associated with Talcott Parsons’s (1951) structural-functional approach to the study of political change. In essence, Parsons and his followers like David Easton (1953, 1965) adopted the mechanistic-deterministic properties of Newtonian physics to describe a closed and orderly political system where change was measured in linear terms. Some critics warned that social organizations, like other living organisms, are better represented by an open system analogue. However, the behavioral fever that gripped the discipline in the 1960s put a premium on linear-deterministic models of change and the high predictability that they offered (Von Bertalanffy 1956; Burrell and Morgan 1985, 65–67). Almond (1966), the then incoming president of the American Political Science Association, commented that such exactitude in studying political development was “exhilarating.”

With the decline of behaviorism in the 1970s, alternative, nonlinear ways of modeling political change made their ways into the discipline. One promising analogue came from thermodynamics, which includes the concept of entropy. Growing entropy in the system indicates an increase in disorder. This disorder, which is normally prolonged but subterranean, is not noticed by observers, leading one historian to describe it as the “lost moments of history” (Trevor-Roper 1988). At a certain point, known as the “threshold of stability,” the system reaches a “bifurcation point,” that is, a stage in which it has to choose between two spatial distribution paths. In political terms, such a bifurcation results in a stochastic choice between diametrically opposed directions (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 106; Cnudde 1973; Ward 1983).

Another promising analogue is based on catastrophe theory, which accounts for sudden and dramatic changes in the behavior of a system that previously functioned in a continuous and smooth way. Mathematical modeling indicates that, as a result of unnoticed stimuli, the behavioral surface reaches a cusp where the system becomes destabilized or even chaotic. Although chaotic systems are essentially unpredictable, they can be described by a number of laws, the most important of which is the “butterfly effect.” Accordingly, even some very small events can send the system into an avalanche, producing enormous changes (Tucker 1996). A variant of this theory has been popularized as the tipping point theory. Based on the work of Thomas Schelling, a tipping point is reached when a critical ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Predicting Political Change
• 1. Theories of Political Change and Prediction of Change: Methodological Problems
• 2. Oligarchic Petrification or Pluralistic Transformation: Paradigmatic Views of the Soviet Union in the 1970s
• 3. Paradigms and the Debate on Relations with the Soviet Union: Détente, New Internationalism, and Neoconservatism
• 4. The Reagan Administration and the Soviet Interregnum: Accelerating the Demise of the Communist Empire
• 5. Acceleration: Tinkering Around the Edges, 1985-1986
• 6. Perestroika: Systemic Change, 1987-1989
• 7. The Unintended Consequences of Radical Transformation: Losing Control of the Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1990-1991
• 8. Reflections on Predictive Failures
• References
• Index
• About the Author