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ABSTRACT
This article considers the role of dissent in the making and remaking of contemporary international relations. The immediate aftermath of World War II was a period of interregnum. Prior security paradigms were exhausted while the three major political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, and left radicalism competed around the world. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 was meant to facilitate the creation of a new global governance model for the sake of peace. However, when in 1947 U.S. President Harry S. Truman made a speech to Congress in which he inaugurated a unilateral foreign policy doctrine premised on Soviet containment, he escalated ideological differences into security concerns. The Soviet Union responded by intensifying their investment in the U.N. and by developing a rhetorical playbook meant to aid smaller nations and oppressed peoples in challenging Western racism and colonialism. I examine the Soviets’ dissent at the United Nations to highlight (1) how dissent figures differently across political ideological paradigms; (2) the connection between dissent and institutional forums in the development of global security models; and (3) the role of dissent as a form of material rhetoric that makes possible the creation of novel political alliances.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Interestingly, while rhetorical studies has paid due attention to expressions of dissent in relation to foreign war, the role of dissent in triggering or resisting civil war is underexamined in the extant scholarship. See, for example, Robert L. Ivie, Dissent from War (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007).
2 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2015), 22.
3 Agamben, Stasis, 8.
4 Haig A. Bosmajian, ed., Dissent: Symbolic Behavior and Rhetorical Strategies (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1972), 3. Since the 1960s, much rhetorical scholarship has been interested in the persuasive effectivity of dissenters’ seemingly nonoratorical activities such as marches, boycotts, etc. See Edward P. J. Corbett, “The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist,” College Composition and Communication 20 (1969): 288–96.
5 Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (New York: Fordham UP, 2018), 121.
6 For an analysis and critique of various attempts to supplant the “rhetoric as symbolic action” paradigm with materialist models, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21–40.
7 Erik W. Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public Life: Consensus, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 4 (2000): 339.
8 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 6–7.
9 Rhetorical studies’ engagement with ideology mostly focuses on the character of persuasion and critique. For a summative discussion, see Paul Elliott Johnson and Raymie E. McKerrow, “Ideology’s Absent Shadow: A Conversation about Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1/2 (2021): 69–87. In contrast, political theorists have pursued a more rigorous interrogation of the connection between ideological discourses and political forms and behaviors. Notably, along with other authors writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell made the claim that ideological divisions in Western parliamentary democracies were becoming less prominent, but the trend was the opposite in developing nations. The Cold War and the Soviets’ push into colonial territories, which produced different paths toward social modernization, may explain that disparate development and its current re-evaluation. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). See also Chaim I. Waxman, The End of Ideology Debate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968). For a subsequent rethinking of Bell’s original thesis, see Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology Revisited (Part I),” Government and Opposition 23, no. 2 (1988): 131–50; Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology Revisited—Part II,” Government and Opposition 23, no. 3 (1988): 321–31; Ira Katznelson, “Does the End of Totalitarianism Signify the End of Ideology?,” Social Research 57, no. 3 (1990): 557–69; John T. Jost, “The End of the End of Ideology,” American Psychologist 61, no. 7 (2006): 651–70.
10 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (1973): 75.
11 Robert L. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 46–59; Robert L. Ivie, “Democratic Dissent and the Trick of Rhetorical Critique,” Cultural Studies<->Critical Methodologies 5, no. 3 (2005): 276–93.
12 The debates over the democratic character of global governance in the context of globalization are rich, fertile, and well beyond easy summary. Touchstones include Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” Theory, Culture Society 24, no. 4 (2007): 7–30; Kate Nash, ed., Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014); Jan Aart Scholte, ed., Building Global Democracy? Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011); Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Benjamin Moffitt, “Transnational Populism? Representative Claims, Media, and the Difficulty of Constructing a Transnational ‘People,’” Javnost-The Public 24, no. 4 (2017): 409–25.
13 Rúrion Melo, “Public Sphere and Transnational Democracy: A Critical Theoretical Response to Nancy Fraser,” Perspectiva Filosófica 42, no. 2 (2015): 24.
14 Further reasons to differentiate between domestic and international security discourse are explored in Gordon R. Mitchell, “Public Argument-Driven Security Studies,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (2002): 57–71.
15 President Harry S. Truman, “Address before a Joint Session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Recommending Assistance to Greece and Turkey,” House of Representatives, 80th Congress, 1st Session, Document 171 (March 12, 1947).
16 Public address scholars have long been interested in the significance of the location or place of oratorical acts. For example, see Marie Hochmuth, “The Criticism of Rhetoric.” In A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. III, ed. Marie Kathryn Hochmuth, W. Norwood Brigance, and Donald Bryant (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 1–23. For discussion of the significance of the location from which U.S. Presidents spoke during the Cold War, see Allison Prasch, The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).
17 Torbjørn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Manchester UP, 1997); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
18 In tracing the distinctions and interactions between the three major ideologies of the last two hundred years (conservatism, liberalism, and communism/radicalism/socialism), I follow Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory which highlights the cyclical pattern of hegemonies and the way transitions from one historical system to another occur. Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1991). See also, James Alexander, “The Major Ideologies of Liberalism, Socialism, and Conservatism,” Political Studies 63 (2015): 980–94.
19 It is impossible to provide in the span of an article a comprehensive list of the numerous rhetorical scholars whose perspective on dissent has implicitly or explicitly relied on liberal democratic theory. Some examples include John Gastil and Katherine R. Knobloch, Hope for Democracy: How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics (New York: Oxford UP, 2020); Robert L. Ivie, “Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America,” Javnost-The Public 11, no. 2 (2004): 19–35; Robert L. Ivie, “Toward a Humanizing Style of Democratic Dissent,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 454–8; William O. Sass and Rachel Hall, “Restive Peace: Body Bags, Casket Flags, and the Pathologization of Dissent,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 2 (2016): 177–208; Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Griner, “A Democratic People’s Dissent from War,” Javnost: The Public 24, no. 3 (2017): 199–217; John M. Murphy, “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides,” Communication Monographs 59 (1992): 61–78; Kevin Cummings and James K. Stanescu, “Argumentation and Democratic Disagreement: On Cultivating a Practice of Dissent,” Controversia 5, no. 2 (2007): 55–76; Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits of the Rhetoric of Revolutionary Dissent,” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 3 (1993): 292–313. A notable exception and a cautionary note against uncritically subsuming the practice of dissent in the routine processes of liberal parliamentary democracy can be found in Darrin Hicks and Ronald Walter Greene, “Managed Convictions: Debate and the Limits of Electoral Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 98–112.
20 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1962/1991).
21 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Gadflies in the Public Space: A Socratic Legacy of Philosophical Dissent (Roman & Littlefield, 2016), xiii.
22 Michel Foucault, The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collége De France, 1982-83, trans. Graham Burchell; ed., Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011), 229. Kendal Philips explicitly considers the Foucauldian challenge by drawing attention to the conditions that make dissent possible. Kendal R. Philips, “The Event of Dissention: Reconsidering the Possibilities of Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 60–71. See also David R. Gruber, “The Theatricality of Lion Rock: A New Materialist Theory for Events of Dissention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 4 (2020): 453–769.
23 See, for example, Steven R. Goldzwig, “Demagoguery, Democratic Dissent, and ‘Re-visioning’ Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (2006): 471–8.
24 See Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 327–31.
25 Jerome M. Gilison, “Soviet Elections as a Measure of Dissent: The Missing One Percent,” The American Political Science Review 62, no. 3 (1968): 62.
26 See Zornitsa D. Keremidchieva, “The Organic Crisis of Internationalism and the Challenge of Remembering Alternative Futures: Woman Suffrage, Parliamentarism, and Anti-Colonial Critique in the Communist International,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 299–309.
27 A. Y. Vyshinsky, The Soviet Electoral Law: Questions and Answers (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 7.
28 John N Hazard, “The Soviet Union and the United Nations,” Yale Law Journal 55 (1945): 1016.
29 Western scholars who attempt to analyze the Soviets’ performance at the U.N. with some level-handedness and desire for better understanding often acknowledge upfront that “in the present climate of opinion it is customary to view the attitudes and actions of the U.S.S.R. in the U.N.—as elsewhere—as dictated only by malice and evil.” Rupert Emerson and Inis L. Claude, Jr., “The Soviet Union and the United Nations: An Essay in Interpretation,” International Organization 6, no. 1 (1952): 1. See also Alexander Dallin, “The Soviet View of the United Nations,” International Organization 16, no. 1 (1962): 20–36.
30 Geoffrey Roberts, “A League of Their Own: The Soviet Origins of the United Nations,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 2 (2019): 303–27.
31 A 1965 amendment to the U.N. Charter increased the number of nonpermanent members of the Security Council to ten.
32 L.I.O.is the common term used in reference to the emergence in the modern period of the international system of states and the development of international institutions tasked with developing norms of multilateralism, human rights, free economic exchange, international law, and other mechanisms for sustaining world peace and prosperity. See Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order,” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 179–96.
33 John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security 43, no. 4 (2019): 7–50.
34 U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Truman Doctrine, 1947,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/truman-doctrine#:~:text=With%20the%20Truman%20Doctrine%2C%20President,external%20or%20internal%20authoritarian%20forces.
35 Basil Kondis, “Aspects of Greek American Relations on the Eve of the Truman Doctrine,” Balkan Studies 19, no. 2 (1978): 327–43.
36 Stavros B. Thomadakis, “The Truman Doctrine: Was there a Development Agenda?,” The Journal of Modern Hellenism 5 (1989): 23–51.
37 Thanasis D. Sfikas, “Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations Commission of Investigation in Greece, January–May 1947,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 3 (1993): 244.
38 Eric Foner, Give me Liberty! An American History, 2nd ed. (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2008), 892.
39 Robert Frazier, “Kennan, ‘Universalism,’ and the Truman Doctrine,” Journal of Cold War Studies 11, no. 2 (2009): 3–34.
40 Robert L. Ivie, “Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1999): 570–91. Martin Medhurst, “Truman’s Rhetorical Reticence, 1945–1947: An Interpretative Essay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 52–70.
41 Denise M. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms (College Station, TX: Texas A&M, 1998), 16.
42 Stephen M. Underhill, “Prisoner of Context: The Truman Doctrine Speech and J. Edgar Hoover’s Rhetorical Realism,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 20, no. 3 (2017): 453–88.
43 Emerson H. Tiller and Frank B. Cross, “What Is Legal Doctrine?,” Northwestern University Law Review 100, no. 1 (2006), 517.
44 Ronald Walter Greene and Kevin Douglas Kuswa, “From the Arab Spring to Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow”: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2012): 271–88.
45 Roxana Stöstedt, “The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine: Norms, Identity, and Securitization under Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy Analysis 3 (2007), 235.
46 President Harry S. Truman, “Address before a Joint Session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Recommending Assistance to Greece and Turkey,” House of Representatives, 80th Congress, 1st Session, Document 171 (March 12, 1947).
47 Andrei Y. Vyshinsky, “For the Peace and Friendship of Nations, Against the Instigators of a New War:” A speech Delivered at the Second Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 18, 1947 (Washington, DC: The Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1947), 4.
48 Augusto Lopez-Claros, Arthur Lyon-Dahl and Maja Graff, Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 37.
49 RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic bomb was internally code-named First Lightning (Первая молния, or Pervaya Molniya) and its first detonation test took place on August 29, 1949. It was code-named by the Americans as Joe 1. The design was very similar to the first U.S. “Fat Man” plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. Houston T. Hawkins, History of the Russian Nuclear Weapon Program. No. LA-UR-13-28910 (Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos National Lab, 2013).
50 The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki 3 days later. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, citing this “new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives” as a key factor in his decision. Japanese Emperor Hirohito, “The Jewel Voice Broadcast,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/jewel-voice-broadcast/#:~:text=On%20August%2015%2C%201945%2C%20Japanese,the%20speech%20formal%2C%20florid%20Japanese.
51 Roxana Stöstedt, “The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine: Norms, Identity, and Securitization under Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy Analysis 3 (2007): 235.
52 Vyshinsky, 11.
53 Vyshinsky, 24.
54 Vyshinsky, 24–5.
55 Vyshinsky, 29.
56 Daniel Chomsky, “Advance Agent of the Truman Doctrine: The United States, The New York Times, and the Greek Civil War,” Political Communication 17 (2000): 415–32.
57 Vyshinsky, 20.
58 Hedley Bull, “The Great Irresponsibles? The United States, the Soviet Union, and World Order,” International Journal 35, no 3 (1980): 437–47.
59 It is important to note, at the same time, that for Aijaz Ahmad, “[s]ocialism in one country has never been possible.” Saeed Rahnema, ed., The Transition from Capitalism: Marxist Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 110.
60 Voijtech Mastny, “NATO in the Beholder’s Eye: Soviet Perceptions and Policies, 1949-56,” Working Paper No. 35, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: Cold War International History Project, p. 19, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ACFB01.pdf
61 Vyshinsky, 12.
62 Claire Clark, “Soviet and Afro-Asian Voting in the U.N. General Assembly, 1946-165,” Australian Outlook 24, no. 3 (1970): 296–308.
63 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000), 13–14.
64 Erik Doxtader, “Learning Public Deliberation through the Critique of Institutional Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 31 (1995): 185–203.
65 Scholars of early Soviet political culture have noted its strong logocentrism. As Olga Velikanova testifies, “[d]esired norms were imposed on society via rhetorical tools like assigning names (‘democracy,' ‘socialism,' ‘kulak,’ enemy of the people), monopolizing the power of naming and producing political ideas, or inculcating speech, behavior, and thinking patterns to enforce the state’s agenda. Discursive strategies structured social reality by encouraging language patterns in line with official ideology, such as ‘achievements of socialism,’ and discouraging ‘wrong’ patterns.” Olga Velikanova, “Nominal Democracy in Stalinism: The Soviet Constitution of 1936.” In Planting Parliaments in Eurasia, 1850-1950: Concepts, Practices and Mythologies, Ivan Sablin and Egaz Moniz Bandeira, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 267–8.
66 This principle is traced historically and analytically in Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “The US Congressional Record as a Technology of Representation: Toward a Materialist Theory of Institutional Argumentation,” Journal of Argumentation in Context 3, no. 1 (2014): 57–82. See also Bruno Latour, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat, trans. Marona Brilman and Alain Pottage (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009).
67 See, for example, Barbara Adams and Lou Pingeot, “Strengthening Public Participation at the United Nations for Sustainable Development: Dialogue, Debate, Dissent, Deliberation,” Study of UN DESA/DSD Major Groups Programme (2013), http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php
68 Sirimavo R. D. Bandaranaike, “The Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations,” The Black Scholar 8, no. 3 (1976): 27. A productive retracing of the “anticolonial” and “anti-imperialist” rhetorics that ultimately converged in the U.N. “salt water thesis” on decolonization after World War II appears in Barbara Arneil, “Colonialism versus Imperialism,” Political Theory (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231193107
69 U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Bandung Conference (Asian-African Conference)”, 1955, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/bandung-conf
70 Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, “The Non-Aligned Movement and International Relations,” India Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1977): 139.
71 Erez Manela coined the phrase “the Wilsonian moment” to describe the way the rhetoric of self-determination, which was invoked in President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech at the end of World War I to appeal to his European audiences, found enthusiastic following among non-European and colonized communities. James R. Martel reads this moment as a case of strategic misinterpellation. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford UP, 2007); James R. Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017). The U.S.S.R.’s own policies toward these developments were at best contradictory. See, Eric Loefflad, “The World Revolutionary Origins of the Crime of Aggression: Sovereignty, (Anti-)Imperialism, and the Soviet Union’s Contradictory Geopolitics of Global Justice,” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 12, no. 1 (2019): 1–54. On the rise of ethno-nationalism, see Abhik Roy and Robert C. Rowland, “The Rhetoric of Hindu Nationalism: A Narrative of Mythic Redefinition,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 3 (2003): 225–48.
72 Roland Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968,” Journal of World History 19, n. 3 (2008): 275–96.
73 Burke, 287.
74 Burke, 292.
75 For example, Ned O’Gorman, “‘The One Word the Kremlin Fears’: C. D. Jackson, Cold War ‘Liberation,’ and American Political-Economic Adventurism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (2009): 389–427; Jason Edwards, “Out of the Shadow: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (2009): 655–8; Valery Lynn Schrader, “Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (2011): 575–8; Travis Cram, “‘Peace, Yes, but World Freedom as Well’: Principle, Pragmatism, and the End of the Cold War,” Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 3 (2015): 367–86; Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Reagan’s Strategy for the Cold War and the Evil Empire Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 3 (2016): 427–64; Laura A. Stengrim, “One World: Wendell Willkie’s Rhetoric of Globalism in the World War II Era,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 21, no. 2 (2018): 201–33; Randall Fowler, “Lion’s Last Road, Eagle’s First Flight: Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20, no. 1 (2017): 33–67; Timothy Barney, Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Ned O’Gorman, Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2012); Prasch (2023).
76 Dayan Jayatilleka, The Fall of Global Socialism: A Counter-Narrative from the South (New York: Palgrave, 2014); Robert Strayer, “Decolonization, Democratization, and Communist Reform: The Soviet Collapse in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 375–406.
77 David M. Crowe ed., Stalin’s Soviet Justice: “Show” Trials, War Crimes Trials, and Nuremberg (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
78 Vyshinsky, 36.