Efforts during the cold war to dominate countries in asia, africa, and latin america. The event was cohosted by the Woodrow Wilson center and the National History center. It is about an hour and a half. It is my privilege this afternoon to introduce our speaker, jeremy friedman, who is an assistant professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business school. Previously he was the associate director of the Brady Johnson program and grand strategy at yale university. After he received his phd from princeton in 2011. In addition to his current book, shadow cold war, the sinosoviet competition for the third world which was published by the university of North Carolina press, he has published articles in such journals as and chinaistory studies. His current project modeling revolution looks of the attempt to find a workable model of socialism for developing countries. And today he will be speaking on , shadow cold war, the sinosoviet competition for the third world. Jeremy thank you. First, thank you to eric, amanda, and kristin. I thank you everybody for coming. So the cold war. The cold war has been generally studied as a competition of , aslogies, great powers projected by the superpowers onto the world. Certainly the competition between the United States and the soviet union for influence and power elsewhere. I think a lot of what the book is about is looking at the impact of the world on the cold war, especially the developing world, what was known during the cold war as the third world, and how the war sort of shakes the rest of the world going back to the superpower. In particular the question of decolonization. Decolonization seems to me to be important Inflection Point in history both of the cold war and the history of war more broadly in the attempt to define a Development Model alternative to 19th century capitalism. So how did decolonization influence the socialist revolution . I thinkkes this it is actually a very relevant question right now. Has echoes in the present women talk about economics related to politics. A lot of those are echoes that you see in this book and come out of this. Period in the 1960s and the transformation of the left. Because marxism has a fundamental problem. Marxism is the ideology of 19th century industrial europe. Marxism relies on factories, a workingclass. And it relies upon these things not only for the mechanism of political struggle that you have to have class struggle for the military to take over proletariat to take over, but in order to construct a society that will exist after the revolution. So without the sort of capital into the it is difficult to imagine how you apply marxism as a model to an agrarian preindustrial state, a formal former colony without factories or industry, workingclass, large urban centers, without much political infrastructure where religion still holds sway. Where oppression perhaps is seen as primarily being the result of race or ethnicity or last sorry race or ethnicity or , religion as opposed to classbased. There is a difficulty in adapting marxism to the d colonized world. So the 1930s, kind of the golden age of international communism, there was the potential for the sort of oldfashioned marxist model to work. There was a depression in the capitalist world. It was not going very well. Democracy was falling. There was the great depression. Maybe stalin did have the model of the future. You can imagine perhaps workingclass revolution in the centers of global industry, new york, washington, london, paris, and berlin. But both the west, the americans and especially the british, and the soviets, expected the world to go back into depression after world war ii. And that didnt happen. Essentially the west failed to go back. That was sort of what the soviet postwar plan was built upon. Instead you have you know this 30 glorious years that goes from 1945 and 1973. What happens is that lennon always claimed that the capitalists would not allow the workingclass to share in the consumption economy. But yet we have the social worker. We have unions, welfare, and the workingclass is actually benefiting from economic growth. They are buying into the system. And they had a workingclass revolution in the developed world. They became more and more remote during the 1950s and 1960s. Harder to imagine a workingclass in washington and london and paris, so on and so forth. But there are revolutions happening in the they are 1960s. Happening in cuba, algeria, vietnam, congo, all over, not in the industrialized capitalist world. And so this is where marxists face the problem. How do you adapt marxism tway to a revolution of the battleground is now in these preindustrial, post colonial states . And so that really opens up the marxist world to what i would call kind of a marxist reformation. It is like the 16th century catholic reformation. Once upon a time moscow had tried to present itself as the keeper of the holy writ, the vatican of marxism. With greater or lesser degree of success, they never managed to completely eliminate challengers. But it is that problem that marxism is facing the world it was not designed for that leads to all sorts of other contenders. Challenging moscows domination. The first one was the chinese, mao. Mao was sort of like the Martin Luther of the marxist reformation. You can imagine you want to pick out john calvin, ho chi minh, people all over the world, but now is the big mao is the big challenger. If you look at the history are e history auger fee history of the split it tends to be focused on bilateral relation. Who is going to be the leader of the communist bloc mao thinks it is his turn. Or great power conflict, border conflict in central asia, on the river these are the kinds of things that come out. The vast majority was written before the end of the cold war. So most of it is written without the benefit of much time. If you look at it bilaterally, the ideological debate seemed almost besides the point. It is almost like the ideology it is phenomenal, it is the head of a pen. But from the perspective of the world, if you are sitting not in moscow or beijing, but in havana, or in dar es salaam, or in delhi or jakarta, the important. The ideological debates are important. From that perspective they are the most. The reason is because they are not angels dancing on the head of a pen. Their fundamental debates about about how you adapt marxism to this new world. The question is, it is important to you if youre trying to build an economy in a former political state. If you are trying to build a political system in jakarta or havana or dar es salaam. Those of the questions theyre debating. So they are important. My arguments in the book is that let me just, i have slides here. Here you go. There is the postcolonial world. Ok. Thank you. Jeremy friedman can everybody see the slide . No . Is this good . Ok. A little more. Jeremy friedman a little more. I was told i could not move too far because of the camera. Let me know if im in trouble. Yes. This is actually better. I can stand up and see that too. This is the postcolonial world. So the argument of the book is that there are two different revolutionary agendas, two different revolutionary programs that are being confused here, an anticapitalist and an antiimperialist they have one. Different genealogies. One comes from the marxist. One is from opposition to capitalism the 19th century europe. One comes from opposition to the colonial world. And they get confused because of this. Imperialism and capitalism, the very famous example put up by lenin in 1916, this was the example of not only communist political strategy but communist doctrine. To be antiimperialist is to be anticapitalist. To be anticapitalist is to be antiimperialist. They are one in the same struggle. This is why the soviets and chinese it is not the case of the soviets they both think they are both. To be communist means that york you are antiimperialist, anticapitalist, you identified as the same thing. In reality, they are different. They have different priorities. That reveals itself as the soviets and chinese attempt to deal with the developing world. And so that is really what matters is how marxism pushes these two together, even though they are actually different, and the soviets and chinese fight out essentially for the leadership because of this. So the first main issue is the issue of war and peace. That divides the soviets and chinese. So this is a poster. This is a soviet poster. Good morning, africa. This is 1960. This is a soviet view of africa being born as a newborn child. This is a remarkably and peaceful and optimistic view of the end of colonialism. This is maybe applicable to some parts of africa but certainly not to others. The soviets embraced the doctrine called peaceful coexistence. They embrace peace in 1956. The simple reason being that nuclear war is unthinkable. Lenin believes war was inevitable. Khrushchev says we cannot have nuclear war, therefore there must be a way to resolve this peacefully. His solution is peaceful coexistence. That means we exist peacefully compete peacefully in the military spear but compete economically. At the same time the soviet economy wanted to prove themselves to be superior over time leading people to adopt communist economics. People in the developing world will come to adopt socialist policies because they will understand the superiority of the system. And this is khrushchevs idea. He is not in favor of any local wars. He is afraid local wars could beat desperately to big war. That meant vietnam algeria, all , sorts of places. The soviets did not support these wars. The chinese so this is the chinese view. This is a chinese propaganda poster from the 1960s. The bottom says [speaking chinese], which means firmly support the asian african, latin American People antiimperialist rivals. This is a picture of asia and america uniting with guns in their hands fighting imperials. This is the chinese version of anticolonialism. The chinese said that the soviets basically were using peaceful coexistence. This promotion of peace, coexistence with the west, as a main way of maintaining white power in the world. The soviets are fundamentally a white imperialist country. They are an industrialized country. They will always prioritize the interests of europeans and americans over the developing world. So there really betraying the postcolonial world. The only way the postcolonial world will ever be free is by fighting for their freedom. This is the chinese story. Algeria is a perfect example. I will talk more about this later, but algeria is kind of the best case of fighting for your freedom an actual war , against the colonial power that is successful. The soviets do not support the fln, the National Liberation front of algeria. They do not recognize the algerian government. The reason is is that they were afraid of supporting the government would support the communist party in paris. They prioritize the interests of the french communists over the people in algeria. The chinese recognized the flight. They are training the fln. So this is the distinction. One supports fighting algerians, one prioritizes the french communist power coming to party in paris. The division between war and peace is where it starts. Eventually most of these countries become independent. Some militarily and some peacefully more or less. But the question does not end there. After they are independent the question becomes, how do you build society . What do you do first . Have you build an economy . How do you build an Economic System . Independence was not necessarily its own reward free and for asians and africans. The idea is with it comes prosperity. Independence meant more poverty, and they assumed that was keeping them for. Legitimacy of the government depended upon the illusion of prosperity. It is important to realize when we talk about the cold war as the clash of ideologies and a clash of systems, it is a situation in which you have motivated sellers, like the americans, soviets, chinese, and others trying to push models, but also motivated buyers. Dozens of newly independent states in the market for a socioeconomic political system. And that is what creates the dynamic. The market between the buyers and sellers. Not to say the market is equal. There are powerful oppositions. There is also violence. But then, how many markets really are equal . In Business School we talk about economist like there is perfect information, but that is not how markets work anywhere in the world. So what does it look like when you start to build a system . What do you do when you get past this stage, independence, now you have to build politics . Competing models. They developed a model for what you are supposed to do. One says, dont go after capitalism. You are fighting a cold war. These countries do not want to be capitalist as they believe capitalism is what enslaved them for 100 years or more. You have to make socialism work to skip the capitalist stage. The soviets are focused on anticapitalist. They want socialist economies. These priorities reflect that. First of all, peaceful coexistence, that means you dont fight for independence, that is too risky, coexist. So once you do get your independence, you want to focus on heavy industry. What you need to do is build mythological factories metallurgical factories mining, geology this is how you get a heavy industrial base. This space would produce a working class which would produce a communist party, and then you have the proper political and social. You do that with state ownership. There is no reason to have private investment. There is not enough in the country anyway. If youre going to build industry, you might as well put them in the control of the state. If you do it with foreign aid it is easy. The building of industry is what is primary. And so they will allow foreign investment. In many of these postcolonial states, you have british companies, french companies, Dutch Companies portuguese, west , germanamerican companies as well that owned industrial concerns. Let them stay in place. You want to keep your industrial base. It is more important to have a workingclass and a capitalist economy that it is essentially to have control autonomy over , your own economy. This is the soviet economy. This is how i postcolonial state should develop. At the chinese priorities. First of all armed struggles, fight for independence. The chinese are very suspicious of any government that comes to power that did not have to fight for independence instead of first. Going right away to build iron and steel, first textiles, Food Processing right . The kinds of things get people choose. The kinds of things that improve peoples living standards. The reason for this is that the chinese are fundamentally concerned with making that government that took power popular. The way to win peoples hearts is to raise the living standards. That will give you the Political Capital you need to stand up as a country. Light industry and agriculture, smallscale private trade. This sounds a lot like the net of the 1920s. The chinese say the best way to get the economy going at first is to allow private trade. This will produce more food in the market, more clothes. The kind of goods people need. So instead of these state ownership models, the chinese are ok with smallscale. The most and port in thing is to eliminate western influence. You have to get the imperialist out of the country. You want to take over the assets come up within put them in the hands of locals, allow market trading. This is a model where priority is to get the imperials out of the country. The soviet model is about how the economy is structured. Even if colonialists are still in there. You want the economy still to be largescale heavy industry. So this is sort of a model that the soviets and chinese work with. They are selling to various countries in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a photo of the largest one in the soviet world, the aswan dam in egypt. Those are egyptian schoolchildren posing. This is the largest chinese aid project in the developing world, this railway, which is antiimperialist and almost a literal form. The reason the railway was built was to allow zambian copper to find a way to port without going through rhodesia which had declared for white role. The chinese were enabling zambia to stay away from the imperialists by building their largest aid project in africa. So this is the general structure. I want to talk about what happens in individual cases. I want to talk about two regular case studies. This conflict reached its peak in 1965. It does so for a number of reasons. One reason is because it is the first full year of the new soviet leadership after khrushchev in office after 1964. Second, this is the year that american involvement in vietnam really gets going at a large scale. The third reason is the second conference. It was a conference of heads of states of the newly independent countries of asia and africa. And so china was going to hold a second meeting of 1965, which was going in theory, to cement africaeader place in the and asian countries. So the peak comes in 1965. I want to talk about these two countries, algeria and indonesia, in 1965. The two are, both countries fought for independence. They are countries led by leaders who become basically icons of the independence movement, jakarta. Both leaders will be overthrown before the end of 1965. On the second band letstogether, the original meeting in jakarta decided to hold it in algiers, then it was canceled. The second conference revolves around these two countries. And the two of them, if you look at their stories carefully, illustrates what happens with the sinosoviet competition. Algeria, this is a picture of the flm. It is the classic case of fighting for independence. It seems like a perfect case for the chinese. So the soviet favor their rent french communist party. Algeria becomes independent. It seems like a perfect case for the chinese. It is proof that you have to fight. Lonnes,n the french co many of them leave. The algerian government decide to give out land to algerians. So instead of nationalizing them, they divide up the property of the imperialists. The following year the remaining French Properties are parceled out to algerians. And so it seems to me they are following the antiimperialist model, the chinese sort of model. Theyre looking for Light Industry, agriculture, smallscale trade. Not really worried about heavy industry yet. Initially china seems to have the upper hand with algeria. The soviets will ultimately win. And by wind, i mean china is pressuring the algerians not to invite the ussr to the second conference in 1965, and the