Polycentrism and Western Policy

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, January 1964

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Summary:  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.

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.

The historical development of the process of polycentrism, particularly as it has manifested itself in the growing differences between the Russian and Chinese Communists, is a subject to which a great deal of careful study has recently been devoted and on which there is already an excellent body of analytical literature. There is no need to attempt to recapitulate here the conclusions-remarkably unanimous, in the circumstances-at which leading scholars have arrived concerning the causes and course of this process. Suffice it to recall that it had its origins, generally speaking, in two great events of the year 1948: the forced defection of the Jugoslavs, and the Communist seizure of power in China. The unity of the bloc never fully recovered from the shock of the Jugoslav defection. Had the Jugoslavs undergone something like a counterrevolution-had they shaken off their own Communist dictatorship, adopted a form of government which permitted democratic freedoms, and relaxed the governmental hold on the economy to a point where the system would have been no longer classifiable as a Leninist- Marxist one-the effect on bloc unity would have been less; for then the defection could have been regarded simply as the loss of a position to the capitalist world: a regrettable setback but not unprecedented, and no fit cause of doubt or questioning for a movement which had always prided itself on its ability to pocket losses and to recover from them. But when the Jugoslavs failed to do any of these things-when the Jugoslav Communist Party remained in power, and Jugoslavia did not go over to the capitalist camp but carried on much as before, claiming to be a Communist state and talking like one but not recognizing the discipline of the bloc or accepting any political obligations toward it-this was really unsettling for those who had remained faithful; for it raised the appalling question whether monolithic unity and discipline were essential at all to the development of Marxian socialism: whether one could not be a perfectly good Communist without taking orders blindly from Moscow and without following slavishly the pattern of institutions and methods established by the Soviet Union.

And since the strains of Stalinist rule were greater in the more Westernized states of the satellite area of Eastern Europe than in Russia itself, this suggestion-that there might be more than one path to socialism- was particularly insidious in its effect on the satellite ...

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