Doctrine as a political force

I've been doing some research into the prominent philosophical disputes in the early years of Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR in its German initials). Some of the disputes that became actually political issues and thus part of the history of internal dissent in the DDR seem pretty arcane at first glance. For instance, did Karl Marx derive his dialectical method from Hegel, or did he derive it from his study of Ludwig Feuerbach and other materialist philosophers and then reject Hegel's dialectic based on his own, independently-developed version?

With particular reference to the history of the world Communist movement, Stephen Walt in Birds of a feather: flocking together or flying apart? Foreign Policy Online 10/28/09 suggests that political movements that give a central place to doctrine are particularly subject to splits based on doctrine which may override the pragmatic political common interests that might otherwise be perceived:

Unlike liberalism, which emphasizes the need to tolerate a wide range of political views, political ideologies that rest on a single authoritative interpretation of "truth" are inherently divisive rather than unifying. In particular, ideologies that call for adherents to obey the leadership because it wields the "correct" interpretation of the faith (whether in Marxism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) tend to foster intense rivalries among different factions and between different leaders, each of whom must claim to be the "true" interpreter of the legitimating ideology. In such movements, ideological schisms are likely to be frequent and intense, because disagreements look like apostasy and a betrayal of the faith. Instead of flocking together, these "birds of a feather" are likely to fly apart. [my emphasis]

This is a huge generalization, of course. And it may look banal at first glance.

But it's especially notable because Walt is one of the leading figures in the Realist school of foreign policy thinking. And here, he's pointing to how ideological factors can and do override conventional power politics at times. Realists usually are found emphasizing how generic power considerations are the drivers of the behavior of states much more than their official ideological positions. But the examples Walt gives include cases where he apparently sees doctrine as such throwing around its own weight pretty heavily:

During the Cold War, for instance, hawks repeatedly worried about a "communist monolith" and were convinced that Marxists everywhere were reliable tools of the Kremlin. In reality, however, world communism was rife with internal tensions and ideological schisms, as illustrated by the furious Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the deadly battle between Trotsky and Stalin, and the subsequent rift between Stalin and Tito. China and the Soviet Union became bitter rivals by the early 1960s -- on both geopolitical and ideological grounds -- and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ended another yet another period of illusory communist unity and quickly led to wars between communist Vietnam, communist Kampuchea, and communist China. [my emphasis]

I'm assuming that Walt is pointing here to an interaction between ideology and power politics, in which ideas actually matter to people and to some extent drive events, rather than ideologies being simply tools in the course of political struggles driven by other considerations. I suppose in the case of Communist powers it would be more appropriate to say there is a dialectical interaction between doctrine and power considerations.

In the case of the DDR, both internal and international politics affected the role of doctrine in the political life of the DDR. The Soviet Union insisted in the early years of the Soviet occupation that their German allies emphasize the primacy of Soviet philosophy, especially in the form of Marxism-Leninism as canonized by Stalin. And in Communist governments, not just those within the Soviet orbit, mastery of Communist doctrine was considered important. Communist Party members were expected, along with more prosaic political skills, to know something about Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And for leadership roles, it was necessary to display some proficiency in it. Stalin published philosphical treatises as the leader of the USSR, even including a book on linguistics, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950). The lasting significance of that particular work has proven to be neglible. But it illustrates the extent to which philosophical doctrine played a major role in Communist politics.

So challenges to the official view on even seemingly abstract philosophical issues could be taken as threatening. Partly that was because of the importance of doctrine in Communist politics, so that deviation from the true doctrinal path could genuinely be seen as a threat to the health of the movement. It was also partly because in a society in which competitive democratic politics was forbidden and political orthodoxy was extensively enforced, expression of dissent often had to take the form of seemingly abstract or hair-splitting issues. And empowering a dogmatic view of a prevailing philosophy creates the opportunity for rivals in personal and institutional power struggles to seize on nuances of ideological purity as potentially potent political weapons against their opponents.

Tags: ddr, stephen walt