of individuals in the electoral pro cess; and an economic system, capitalism, that pro
vided opportunities to individuals to pursue what was eco nom ically rational with
minimal government interference. At the international level, this translated into support
for other demo cratic regimes and support of liberal cap i tal ist institutions and pro cesses,
including, most critically, free trade.
Soviet communist ideology also influenced that country’s conception of the inter
national system and state practices. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848 cast Marxist
theory into crisis; Marxism insisted that peasants and workers would spontaneously
rise up and overthrow their cap i tal ist masters, but this had not happened. The crisis in
Marxist theory was partly resolved by Vladimir Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat”
amendment, in which Lenin argued that the masses must be led or “sparked” by
intellectuals who fully understand socialism. But the end result was a system in
which any hope of achieving communism— a utopian vision in which the state with
ered away along with poverty, war, sexism, and the like— had to be led from the top
down. This result meant that to the United States and its liberal allies, the Soviet sys
tem looked like a dictatorship, bent on aggressively exporting dictatorship under the
guise of worldwide socialist revolution. Pop u lar sovereignty vanished in every state allied
to the Soviet Union (e.g., Czecho slo va kia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Esto
nia, Poland, and so on). For their part, Soviet leaders felt themselves surrounded by a
hostile cap i tal ist camp and argued that the Soviet Union “must not weaken but must
in every way strengthen its state, the state organs, the organs of the intelligence ser
vice, the army, if that country does not want to be smashed by the cap i tal ist environ
ment.”^13
These “bottom up,” “top down” differences were exacerbated by mutual mispercep
tions. Once distrustful, each side tended to view the other side’s policies as necessarily
threatening. For example, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Or ga ni za
tion (or NATO) became a contentious worldwide issue. On the Western side, NATO
represented a desperate effort to defend indefensible Western Eu rope from the fully
mobilized Soviet Army; while from the Soviet perspective, NATO seemed clearly an
aggressive military alliance aimed at depriving the USSR of the fruits of its victory
over the Third Reich. When the USSR reacted in ways it took to be defensive, Britain
and the United States interpreted these actions as dangerous escalations.
The third outcome of the end of World War II was the collapse of the colonial sys
tem, a development few foresaw. The defeat of Japan and Germany meant the imme
diate end of their respective empires. The other colonial powers, faced with the real ity
of their eco nom ically and po liti cally weakened position, and confronted with newly
power ful indigenous movements for in de pen dence, were spurred by the United Nations
Charter’s endorsement of the princi ple of national self determination. These move
ments were equipped with leftover small arms from World War II, led by talented com
manders employing indirect defense strategies such as “revolutionary” guerrilla warfare,46 CHAPTER Two ■ Historical context of international relationsESSIR7_CH02_020_069_11P.indd 46 6/14/16 10:02 AM