Jeremi Suri. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of DÖ©tente. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. vii + 355 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-01031-4; $21.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-01763-4.

Reviewed by Arne Kislenko (Department of History, Ryerson University and International Relations Program, Trinity College, University of Toronto)
Published on H-1960s (July, 2004)

Revolutions Reconsidered

It is hard to imagine a more ambitious book than Jeremi Suri's Power and Protest: Global Revolutions and the Rise of Dtente. As the author reveals in the introduction, this is a book broaching Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the hope and optimism of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, the tragedy of war in Indochina, student demonstrations across the western world, the civil rights movement in the United States, and diplomacy on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. A more complicated collection of related issues and events has seldom been tackled in one monograph.

Against the backdrop of this daunting international context, Suri deserves unqualified praise for dealing head-on with the rise of dtente in the 1960s: one of the most intricate but least understood processes of the Cold War. He should also be commended for developing a truly multi-national approach to the topic, devoting considerable energy to examinations of France and West Germany--indeed, to people in Western Europe and elsewhere as whole--rather than focusing exclusively on the superpowers. Similarly, Power and Protest frames dtente within domestic as well as international contexts, allowing the reader to see that diplomacy is often much more than treaties, great leaders, and power politics. By far the greatest strength of the book is the scope of its primary research, which covers archival materials in France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Russia, and the United States.

Suri lays out Power and Protest in six chapters, beginning with a discussion of nuclear weapons and arms control in the 1950s. Here he discusses how the death of Stalin, Eisenhower's "New Look" policy, and an expanding arms race first stimulated dtente--best reflected in Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States. Suri then examines how the warming trend with Moscow came to an abrupt end in the wake of the "muscular rhetoric" of Kennedy's "Flexible Response" policy as well as the crises in Berlin and Cuba. In the second chapter Suri continues to emphasize the personal charisma of leaders, examining the Cold War nationalisms of Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong. Both, he points out, challenged the superpowers by asserting independent foreign policies, and, in the case of China, implementing radically different--and disastrous--economic policies with the Great Leap Forward. Suri nicely draws out the similarities between France and China in the late 1950s and early 1960s in their respective quests for great power credibility, their flouting of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and their growing alienation within their respective blocs. It was, Suri argues, "their shared resentment of the superpowers" that led France and China to mutual diplomatic recognition in 1964 (p. 75). That event, he stresses, irrevocably shattered the bipolarity of the Cold War, increased the uncertainty of international relations, and encouraged revolutionary developments in both countries (p. 79). Suri even offers interesting parallels between the tumultuous events in 1789 France and Mao's Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s.

Suri then turns his attention towards "the language of dissent," which emerged in the 1960s as result of profound international demographic shifts and the development of an international "youth culture." Focusing on the United States, he emphasizes the impact of education reform in developing a more active social consciousness towards issues like poverty and race relations. Many youth had lost faith in government and were stimulated by powerful indictments of materialism and political apathy in the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith, Daniel Bell, and Herbert Marcuse--men who, among others, Suri refers to as the "Jean-Jacques Rousseaus of the twentieth century" (p. 94). Turning to the Soviet Union, Suri argues that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others pursued a similar "language of dissent" in their samizdat (self-published) writings. He notes that, while not unique to the 1960s, the alienation of youth from the communist establishment was particularly acute in the immediate post-Stalin era, facilitated to some degree by the "liberalization" initially enjoyed under Khrushchev. Even in China, Suri finds this voice of protest in Wu Han--a politician and historian, whose 1961 play, Hai Jui's Dismissal, critiqued the "imperial principle" of central authority. Although set in the Ming dynasty, the play was widely seen as a commentary of the Communist Party's hold on China--so much so that Mao decided to co-opt the play and use it against his enemies in the Cultural Revolution. Suri closes out the chapter by arguing that like Mao, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and de Gaulle all used the voices of dissent to further their political agendas, and in doing so, created a global environment of expectation from which dtente sprouted.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the war in Vietnam--clearly the canvas on which much of the protests of the 1960s were painted. Chapter 5 then focuses on 1968, the pivotal year of "global disruption." Here Suri looks at dramatic developments in Washington, Berlin, Paris, and Prague, linking them together as an international challenge to "the basic authority of the modern nation-state" (p. 211). Chapter 6 tackles the politics of dtente as the collective response of governments to such domestic pressures. Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China, and nuclear disarmament talks are, predictably, the focus of Suri's examination. They represent what he describes in the introduction as a "profoundly conservative response to internal disorder" (p. 5). In this light, dtente of the late 1960s and early 1970s was basically reactive, an attempt by various governments to deflect the pressures of domestic dissent and reassert control. Thus dtente was born more of desperation than inspiration, and could not provide a firm foundation for true peace. The failure of detente, Suri concludes, disillusioned not only activists of the time, but also "contributed to the pervasive scepticism" of today (p. 262).

As provocative and engaging as is Power and Protest, it does have its weaknesses. First and foremost is its scope. Despite his best efforts, the range of issues Suri has chosen seems simply too massive for one book. In this respect Power and Protest provides more of a general overview than an exhaustive analysis of dtente. Some chapters, like the one on Vietnam, are particularly lacking, with over-simplified assessments of American involvement and, in fact, the Vietnamese struggle as a whole. Suri's treatment of the Ostpolitik is also prone to superficial conclusions. Chief among these is the claim that officially recognizing the division of Germany in effect perpetuated Soviet domination of Eastern Europe (pp. 225-226). Equally troubling is Suri's general handling of the "charismatic" leaders, on which he spends so much time. Although he notes their individual excesses and failures, Suri does not sufficiently tackle the frequently ugly complexities of Kennedy, Khrushchev, de Gaulle, and Mao. Much more needs to be made of the significant ways in which each contributed to the tensions of the Cold War. Also missing from Power and Protest is a comprehensive analysis of the economic determinants of dtente. The costs of the arms race and the war in Vietnam had considerable impact on the timing and direction of American diplomacy, just as economic weaknesses invariably influenced decisions in Moscow and Beijing.

To his credit, Suri never presumes or contends that Power and Protest is an exhaustive analysis of international relations in the 1960s. Nor does he claim to cover the globe in discussing the rise of social protest and the "language of dissent." Certainly there is much missing from Power and Protest, and no doubt specialists can and will find serious fault with the obvious omissions or superficial treatment of some topics. However, Suri does succeed in outlining dtente within the rubric of domestic politics. Moreover, Power and Protest helps to further a more international understanding of the Cold War, as well as the interconnectedness between social protest, great power politics, and the dynamics of diplomacy in the 1960s. In this respect, Power and Protest is very useful and important and should be mandatory reading for any serious scholar of international relations in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Citation: Arne Kislenko. Review of Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of DÖ©tente. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. July, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9648

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