Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente

In a brilliantly conceived book, Jeremi Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. Profoundly disturbed by increasing social and political discontent, Cold War powers united on the international front, in the policy of detente. Though reflecting traditional balance of power considerations, detente thus also developed from a common urge for stability among leaders who by the late 1960s were worried about increasingly threatening domestic social activism.

In the early part of the decade, Cold War pressures simultaneously inspired activists and constrained leaders; within a few years activism turned revolutionary on a global scale. Suri examines the decade through leaders and protesters on three continents, including Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He describes connections between policy and protest from the Berkeley riots to the Prague Spring, from the Paris strikes to massive unrest in Wuhan, China.

Designed to protect the existing political order and repress movements for change, detente gradually isolated politics from the public. The growth of distrust and disillusion in nearly every society left a lasting legacy of global unrest, fragmentation, and unprecedented public skepticism toward authority.

His supporting thesis that "The strength of detente derived from the fact that it addressed the fears and served the interest of the leaders in the largest states," is well and amply proven with reference to original source material from each period he explores. With state documents and memoirs, he dramatically shows the panic of the world leaders as they confront their suddenly, inconveniently active citizens, who, given reason to hope in the early 60s with their leaders' charismatic rhetoric about the "New Frontier," the "Great Society," "Great Leap Forward," "Communist Construction (and DeStalinization)," ironically had their rising expectations dashed by the very same men those who activated these hopes. In their tussle for power, and in their attempts to prove their systems or their insight into world and domestic politics were superior, Mao, DeGaulle, Kennedy, Johnson, Krushchev, Willy Brandt, and others came to fear the chauvinistic idealism they had unleashed in their charismatic rhetoric. Ironically, this leadership cohort, especially the most powerful actors, the U.S. and Soviet Union, felt compelled to reach out to each other, put aside the inflammatory anti-communist and anti-capitalistic rhetoric, and demonstrate to their unruly citizens and client states that as nations they could and would work together in peaceful coexistence. Suri likens these two states to "overmuscled wrestlers" who were constrained by the potential of mutally assured (nuclear) destruction to muzzle their client states' inflammatory rhetoric. The exception that proved the rule, according to Suri, was Vietnam. It was seen by Kennedy and Johnson, as well as by Chinese and Soviets, as a proving ground that would show which set of political arrangements was superior. Far enough away from the U.S., China and the Soviet Union, it met the requirements of a showcase war for all.

As Suri says: "Each of the great powers gained from stability when confronted with the prospect of wide-spread disruption. D?tente assured that the international system would operate smoothly so long as policymakers adhered to their objective 'national interests.' The problem, Suri suggests, is that national interests are "not objective laws, but instead contested ideas," and that "Detente's fatal weakness grew from its inability to address the claims of citizens and small states that refused to accept the status quo because of its perceived injustice." By this he means "From the day that Nixon and Brezhnev signed the Declaration of Principles through the end of the 1970s, the leaders of the great powers suffered repeated criticism for ignoring concerns about national self-determination, human rights, economic fairness, and racial and gender equality."

He notes that "Agitation around these issues had triggered the global disorders in the 1960s that initially made detente appear necessary as a source of stability. Ironically, political leaders reacted to the criticisms of injustice voice in the previous decade by isolating and containing dissent rather than by creating new sources of popular consent." "Detente reflected traditional balance-of-power considerations, but also included a set of policies that deliberately constrained domestic dynamism. Instead of eliminating the suffering and dissatisfaction in the Cold War, it tried to make it all seem 'normal.'"

Global protest, Suri suggests, was given impetus by state programs. College loans and grants, necessary to build a new technocratic citizenry who would through science demonstrate the superiority of their respective political systems, backfired as thousands of young people were herded together in colleges and universities all over the world. There they found a literature of dissent waiting for them by such authors as Solzhenitsyn, Marcuse, Galbraith, and Harrington. Armed with these anti-state and anti-"system" discourses, students around the world developed a common language of dissent and protest, a language soon taken up by the disspossessed all over the world.

Summing up, he says, "Skepticism toward authority is now a global phenomenon" that has grown out of the conservative core of detente and its stepchild, globalization. "Leaders are no longer loved or feared. In some of the largest democracies they are ignored by as much as half of the electorate, which refrains from voting. Leaders are frequently profaned by international media that play on public distrust of politicians. In this cynical environment, we are still living with the dissent and detente of a previous generation."

POWER AND PROTEST is a landmark work of history. Scholarly and highly readable, it is unsurpassed in tracing the roots of dentente as a conservative reaction to the political engagement of the demos across all types of states.


An excellent book on Cold War social and political factors   June 28, 2003
3 out of 6 found this review helpful

In this book, Suri puts a new twist on the period of detente in the late 60's and early 70's. He explains how the social uprisings centering around 1968 forced world leaders in the United States, Europe, and Asia to pursue detente in order to keep reign on their legitimacy domestically. The research and documents used in this book are both credible and excellent. I had Professor Suri for a class and he is an excellent lecturer. This book is like a lecture from him, but he has time to go into even deeper detail on the subject at hand. We were required to read it in his class, but it is a book that I have read twice since then because it is that good. Anyone with interest in the Cold War or US foreign policy will love this book!