1990 Reports

The Continuing Importance of Ideology in Soviet Foreign Policy

Lynch, Allen

The “end of ideology,” proclaimed by sociologist Daniel Bell and many others in the fifties in their analysis of political trends within the Western world, has now come to East-West relations as well. Or so one would believe from the numerous pronouncements in Soviet and Western capitals about the “deideologization” of Soviet foreign policy and East-West relations, the relegation of “class values” to a second order of significance in Soviet international policy, and the exceptionally pragmatic thrust of contemporary Soviet policies, foreign and domestic. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze has time and again made clear to internal Soviet audiences composed of the Foreign Ministry staff and Soviet diplomatic corps the priority of what he has termed “common sense” over the reduction of phenomena and interests to ideological considerations.' Soviet political observers, who have always encouraged the borrowing of Western technical accomplishments, now speak openly of “the need to assimilate the entire positive baggage of [Western] political thought...all of the humane and effective forms of its social structure, its entire rich experience in solving social and national problems.” Has not Gorbachev himself forcefully stated that the Soviet leadership is striving “to expunge ideological prejudice from our policy”?