Cold War and World Order

By Zhongjing Liu

Extract: The main standard for winners and losers depends on how long your timeline is. The short-term winners are often the long-term losers, and no one is an eternal winner, except that you can say that God is an eternal winner. No one in the mortal world is truly a permanent winner. If we set the timeline according to the methods used by ordinary secular historians to judge the question, then we can define these timelines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zhongjing Liu
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463253809

Zhongjing Liu

Historian, ex-medical examiner, author of Canons and Chronicles: China's Historical Construction | 《經與史》作者,曾刀下閱屍、現筆下論史

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Cold War and World Order

Published by Zhongjing Liu at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Zhongjing Liu

Lecturer: Zhongjing Liu

Time: 18 February, 2017

For Chinese version,

Transcriber: xqmxqm

Proofreader: Three Horses

For English version,

Translator: Simon of Cyrene

Cover maker: Fuyukawa Mame

Note:

1. In case of any discrepancy between the Chinese version and the English version, the Chinese version shall prevail.

2. For Chinese version, please look at: 世界宪制史5：冷战与世界秩序

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Contents:

Lecture

Q&A

Lecture

The concept of the world order is very old. Where there was a formal civilization system, there would be the concept of corresponding world order. However, before the First World War, especially in the late 19th century, the concept of the world order actually fell to the lowest point in the last five hundred years. Although Russia inherited the Byzantine world order, it had shelved and compressed this concept since joining the European-style secular monarchy. After the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Russia tried to impersonate an ordinary European monarchy. This was the basic reason for the division of the soul within Russia. Of course, Russia also had its reasons in this regard. From the Orthodox Church itself, we can think of it as a combination of two parts. One part was the producers of the order, which were the Orthodox church organizations, village communities and so on. Their order production capacity was not strong. In the absence of contact with the outside world, in principle, only some primitive lords and close guards could be generated. The Mongolians imported a superstructure into Russia, greatly enhancing their ability to drain resources. However, because of the strengthening of the ability to drain resources, it had hindered the further development of the Orthodox communities in the primary level of the society. As a result, when Peter was in contact with Europeans, in order to compete with European powers, he found that the dynasty system that the Orthodox traditions could support was incomparable with the absolute monarchs in Europe and adopted a policy to import the political structure. The input policy is specifically reflected in the introduction of German Protestants, the Swedes, and other European counselors, etc. Throughout the 19th century, most of the people Russia attracted from Europe were German technicians. Without this extremely small number of counselors, who were even less than 1% of the Russian population, the Russian Empire could not maintain a European-style appearance.

At the same time, the nineteenth century was also the lowest point of the European world order system of the Holy Roman Empire. From the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War and the Westphalian system, the basic trend was: the largest investors for the world order sacrificed the most, while actors serving the nation-state system at the cost of the world order such as Richelieu and France had taken a lot of advantages. Therefore, the end of the 19th century was the highest peak of the nation-state in Europe itself. The nation-states accumulated many dividends and stimulated the further development of the small ethnic groups. The concept of the world order as a whole was at the lowest point. The disappearance of the concept of the world order was one of the most important reasons for the outbreak of the two world wars. Thus, the four major world police and collective security measures proposed by Wilson and Roosevelt were tantamount to making up for the nation-state system and the Westphalian system in the secular sense. To be precise, the Westphalian system was the mother of the nation-state system and not the nation-state system itself. The essence of Wilsonianism was to complement the nation-state system with the world order system that was weakened and nearly eliminated in recent centuries. Roosevelt's four major police theories were the further implementation of Wilsonianism.

Nevertheless, when the theories were proposed, the Soviet Union had already been established. The Soviet Union was the biggest stimulator of the 20th-century world order system and the largest consumer of order. We should note that the Soviet Union was not the same as the former Orthodox-Church Russian Empire because its basic goal was to establish a world empire. Therefore, it adopted a policy of pure consumption in Russia itself and treated the cores that supported the Russian imperial dynasty, the Orthodox Church and the village communities, as their arch enemies and tried to get rid of them. After the world revolutions in Europe and West Asia suffered a total setback in the 1920s, the importance of uniting other available forces began to rise. The building a socialist country in one country group defeated the world revolutionists in Moscow. In easier terms, it was like the persons who burned the fuel found that it took too long to obtain the fuel and failed to burn the whole world by taking the world itself as the fuel as they had originally planned. Now they had only Russia as their basement, so they must be careful. The result of this kind of policy was the adjustment of the world revolution policy of the Communist International in the 1930s. The external reflection of the adjustment was the united front strategy. The Popular Front policy in Europe was the main embodiment of this united front policy.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had the greatest opportunity to introduce foreign orders, which directly led to the dissolution of the Communist International itself. The main motive to dissolve the Communist International was to show targets of the united front policy, the capitalist world with the U.K. and U.S. as the major players, that Russia would later become a normal country, stop its policy of burning up the existing order, and imitate as much as possible the former Tsar regime. The reason for this was that the Soviet regime in the first few decades was not the same as the absolute monarchy of Peter the Great. Although the order-burning capacity of the absolute monarchy of Peter the Great exceeded the ability of the Orthodox society to produce order, Peter did not go too far. The balance between the imported European order and the order production of the Orthodox society itself could largely maintain the situation. However, while the Soviet system continued to undermine the original social foundation of the Orthodox Church, things imported from Europe were not many. After the war with Germany, the main order exporter before the Second World War, Germany after the Treaty of Rapallo, stopped its output to Soviet. In this case, the Soviet Union would not last long and must replace Germany with the new exporter, the U.S.

Therefore, the Soviet Union in the Stalin era demonstrated the so-called restoration characteristics named by the Trotskyists or the Western leftists. The restoration features were reflected in many details, such as the restoration of the military-rank system, the single-head system in the state-owned enterprises, the re-activation of the Orthodox Church in society, the cancellation of having sex like drinking a cup of water to restore marriage and family, and so on. In the opinion of true Leninists and true leftists, this meant that the Soviet Union’s battle against capitalist society or the entire exploiting class society had seriously retreated, even adopting a compromised, Thermidorian approach. From Stalin's point of view, he took an experimental approach. As the most hillbilly person in the Bolshevik Party, he was different from the Old Bolshevik Guards. The Old Bolshevik Guards did not have to bear the responsibility of actual management, but he must bear responsibility for cultivating and managing the cadres. He inevitably felt that after the revolution, especially after the collective farms destroyed the last remnants of the Orthodox society, the social order production capacity of the Soviet Union could not keep up, and the expansion of the ranks of cadres was equal to increasing consumers of the order. If producers were greatly reduced and consumers were greatly increased, it would be hard to maintain the system if he did not make some compromises. However, under the conditions of internal and diplomatic difficulties, wars, and heavy pressure on domestic heavy industry construction, he could only adopt exploratory and groping methods. In other words, he had to utilize the part with the most imported elements to fill out the gaps first. It was not so much that he had a tendency to design a Stalinist system that was different from the Leninist system. Instead, it is