Polycentrism and Western Policy

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, January 1964

George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was later a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

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 régimes. Many were the satellite Communists who, in the years following Tito's break with Stalin, groaned under the necessity of pursuing Stalinist policies obviously unfitted to the traditions and psychology of their country and stole envious looks at the Jugoslavs, who could now cut their cloth to suit their own figure and yet maintain the claim to be good Marxian socialists. It is instructive to reflect that precisely that feature of Jugoslav behavior which so many Americans today find it impossible to forgive, namely, that the Jugoslavs did not, so to speak, "go capitalist," but carried on as a Marxian-socialist state, was the factor which more than any other proved disrupting in its effect on bloc unity.

So long as Stalin remained alive, the effects of the Jugoslav defection could be reasonably well contained by the Moscow headquarters. But after his death, this proved no longer possible. The de-Stalinization campaign of the mid-fifties implied at least a partial justification of Tito's earlier defiance of Stalin's authority. It was awkward, in these circumstances, to leave the Jugoslavs wholly outside the camp; and Khrushchev felt it necessary to try to draw them back again -- something which could be done only by conciliatory means. But this, implying as it did at least a willingness to forgive the earlier Jugoslav defiance of bloc discipline, proved unsettling in its effect on the other satellites, particularly the Poles and Hungarians, and had a good deal to do with the events of 1956 in those two countries. For the Polish and Hungarian Communists had to ask themselves: if Tito is to be forgiven and treated with deference, where are the rewards of obedience? Why should not we, too, select our own path?

As for China, rivalry between the Soviet and Chinese Communist régimes was latent from the beginning, but it began to appear on the surface only after Stalin's death; and it was not until 1957 that it began to assume forms which threatened seriously to disturb bloc unity. It is interesting to reflect that it was in part differing reactions to these same events of 1956 that caused the Chinese-Soviet disagreements to become acute. For what the Russians found necessary in absorbing the shock and the lessons of Hungary proved intolerable to the Chinese, whose revolution was in a different stage and who had different political needs. Here is seen how one thing leads to another, how the threads of causality lead on from the original Jugoslav disaffection and the Chinese Communist conquest of China in 1948 -- the one considered at the time a loss to world Communism, the other a victory -- to the polycentrism of today. If there is any lesson in this, it is the demonstration of how poor we all are, even the Communists, at knowing what is a victory and what is a defeat.

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. And beyond this framework, there are a large number of Communist parties not in power which are greatly torn and bewildered by this division; and some of these parties have an important voice in bloc affairs, even though they lack the prestige that comes of being in power in their respective countries.

Barring unforeseen disturbances in international affairs, I think this state of affairs should be expected to endure, in its essential aspects, for a long time. Efforts will be made, of course, at one point or another, to patch up Soviet-Chinese differences and to restore something like the previous unity. The Poles, who have always had a special hankering for close relations with the Chinese Communists, are apt to be particularly assiduous in trying to assuage the Chinese-Soviet differences. Perhaps at some point changes of personalities in Moscow and Peking will help. But such tendencies can scarcely go beyond a point. An attempt to establish either Moscow or Peking as the unchallenged center of the movement would today involve prohibitive strains. Communism has now come to embrace so wide a spectrum of requirements and compulsions on the part of the respective parties and régimes that any determined attempt to re-impose unity on the movement would merely cause it to break violently apart at one point or another. There can scarcely be any meeting ground today between, say, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of Italy that would not be disastrous to one or the other.

A complete restoration of unity seems therefore to be out. But a total break, to the point of all-out hostilities and the alliance of one or the other faction with parts of the non-Communist world, seems equally improbable. Excruciating as are the differences which have now developed within the world Communist camp, all of the disputants are aware that they have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by tearing themselves to pieces. Chinese and Russians, furthermore, are both highly skilled at the delicate gradating of hostilities of every sort; and while it would not be surprising to see at some point the development of armed conflicts along the Soviet-Chinese frontier comparable in seriousness to those that developed between the Russians and the Japanese along the same frontier in 1938, it would be surprising to see them develop, any more than did those of 1938, into a full-fledged state of war between the disputants.

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