So far, Reagan's legacy has found no takers among the Republican candidates, even as they claim with every other breath to be his heirs. The debate question for them would be whether their admiration for their hero extends to his vision of nuclear abolition, and if not, why not?
I found the account very informative, though I'm sure the nuclear hawks who prop up Reagan's image in front of anything they do would, if they found Schell a worthy critic, present their own more equivocal account of the events. On the other hand, I find Schell's continued interest in this issue to be important. Having grown up with nuclear arms as a sort of common sense background to late twentieth century life, discussion about non-proliferation seems like a relic of a time when they made cars with tail fins. It's not for nothing that Kubric shot Dr. Strangelove, made in 1964, in black and white: though we might not all love the bomb, we've certainly learned to stop worrying.
Schell and others help remind us that the current foreign policy crises in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere are not the just random, unconnected headlines, but the historical consequences of a certain decision made by US policy makers to abandon non-proliferation--and a policy that many of the current candidates for US president are likely to repeat. In speaking about Hillary's position, he comments that, "It's hard to imagine a stance more likely to accelerate nuclear proliferation." He goes on to ask, "Wouldn't this matter be as worthy of a few questions in the debates as, say, driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants or Obama's readiness to get verbally tough with Clinton?" The answer of course, is yes, but unfortunately the issue of non-proliferation seems like such a relic. In some ways it's quite remarkable that the current cultural climate is able to make xenophobic claims about being overrun by immigrants seem like a unique, modern narrative while talking about reducing nuclear arms seems like yesterday's news. It isn't, of course, but for some reason the popular discourse in the US makes it seem that way.
For me, it is a reminder of an earlier moment in the US and British Left, a time when one of the biggest issues to unite the left was not labor rights or the war in Vietnam, but the increased production of Nuclear Arms. As Dennis Dworkin discusses in his book on Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, one of the early issues that inspired the New Left "Originating as a force opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons, it came to symbolize a wider discontent with the institutions of modern society. It was the only genuine mass political movement between the Popular Front in the 1930s and the student revolt of the late 1960s." (64) But even the latter was, in part, an outgrowth of the earlier unity in the CND. Specifically, the different factions that eventually became identified with Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson and the journals that they worked on (The Universities and Left Review [ULR] and The Reasoner respectively, which were eventually merged to form The New Left Review) were initially united over the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The ULR, Dworkin contends, "saw themselves as possible mediators between the CND and the mainstream labor movement" while
Even before the founding of the nuclear disarmament movement, Thompson was writing in the New Reasoner about the relationship between nuclear disarmament and socialist strategy: "The bomb must be dismantled; but in dismantling it, men will summon up energies which will open the way to their inheritance. The bomb is like an image of man's whole predicament: it bears within it death and life, total destruction or human mastery over human history."
The issue, in other words, that eventually brought forth the energy of the left that created what became known as Cultural Studies, was the proliferation of Nuclear Arms. Now the latter seem largely to be a hegemonic commonplace and the question is less about whether they should exist than who should possess them. The shift mirrors the shift in the conversation of Cultural Studies more generally. The original concern was with what defined the culture of capitalist democracies and what mechanisms were used to reproduce this culture by the ruling classes of nation states that adopted this as the dominant mode of production. Now this is basically accepted as "the" mode of production; it forms the background of conversations about identity politics which no longer question the dominant organization of commercial media and instead look at the issue of who gets represented and how. This shift is being reversed--or, more accurately, the dialectic of the relevance of the earlier concern with present ones is being realized--but for a time, the acceptance of the status quo was seen as a precondition for critiquing the surface manifestations of more fundamental inequalities.
Whether the issue of Nuclear Proliferation should become some sort of guiding question in Cultural Studies is likely connected to the question of whether one of our major concerns should shift to issues of war--particularly the US war in Iraq (especially for US CS thinkers). Paul Smith said as much at the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference and there is certainly some shift in this direction. Since, for the time being, my work on IPR is dealing with what could be seen as an incidental concern in this kind of global environment I'll defer any grand pronouncement on the issue. But I will note that the current strategy used to counter proliferation faces roughly the same problem which faces interests who hope to create a common worldwide legal regime for intellectual property rights. Namely, that they face a world in which they have done everything they can to tear down states which might protect the interests of their citizens over the interests of the international regime. In doing so they have effectively weakened--both in terms of the institutions of government and their popular legitimacy--the very instruments that might be needed to enforce such a regime. The flipside of this argument could be that the state was never so strong except in the metropolitan center, and either way the attempt to stem what is basically a sort of mercurial flow of knowledge and ideas is a Herculean task even the strongest Leviathan would be hard pressed to execute. Still, it ironically points to the continued need for executive instruments even in seemingly the most immaterial of issues.
