least on the margins of the interests of major powers, and neutrality in the full
sense of giving no aid or preference at all was not practised by the Soviet Union
or the USA in any important post-war 20th century conflict.
New Class
New class refers to a theory, usually associated with the Yugoslav politician and
dissident MilovanDjilas, to the effect that the supposedegalitarianismand
classlessness of communist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe nevertheless did
haveclasssystems. The argument is that, although major private property
holdings had been abolished, and a great degree of equality introduced for the
mass of the citizenry, those who held senior positions in the state administra-
tion, and even more, in the Communist Party apparatus (theapparatchik),
had enormous privileges that made them effectively a new ruling class. The
control of power, as well as the material rewards, enjoyed by such people was
indeed incompatible with a fully egalitarian and democratic society, but it is
dubious that they actually constituted anything that could sensibly be called a
‘class’, mainly because their position was dependent on holding specified
offices, and because there could be little or no direct inheritance of such
privileged positions.
New Deal
The New Deal was the name given to the peacetime policies of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, President of the USA from 1933–45. These policies
Roosevelt hoped would end or ameliorate the Great Depression in the USA
which followed the stock market crash of 1929 and which threw millions of
Americans out of work and into poverty. The phrase was first used in his
speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932 and it
consciously echoed the call by his relative Theodore Roosevelt (US president
from 1901–09) for a ‘square deal’ for the American people. Since the New
Deal other American presidents have tried to coin similarly resonant terms for
their policies so that there has been President Truman’s Fair Deal, President
Kennedy’s New Frontier and President Johnson’s Great Society.
The individual programmes contained in the New Deal were very muchad
hocresponses to the problems of unemployment and social dislocation experi-
enced in the USA of the 1930s. Only in retrospect did they seem to embrace
any coherent political philosophy or underlying economic doctrine. The
policies did, however, introduce a significant amount of government inter-
vention to the economy and greatly expanded the role of the federal govern-
ment generally. As a result the New Deal proved to be extremely controversial
and met with substantial opposition both from businessmen wedded to
New Deal