Question: I would like to begin with some questions about the meaning and the impact of the peace movement in the 1980s, not only as an instrument in changing politics, that is low politics changing high politics, but as a social phenomenon.

Thompson: l think that during the 1980s, there was a growing emphasis on the very heavy statism which was developing, always under camouflage. We found the evolution towards Thatcherism was taking place within the State. Not only within the political parties. And then the rising profile of the Cold War which came at that moment. People put the two things together; they saw that civil liberties and rights were not independent of the international situation, they were two necessary and adjacent pieces of the jigsaw. That was very important at the start of the peace movement. The people one had seen around civil rights protests were also among the first to become active in the revived peace movement.

I think the other thing that was very interesting about the peace movement is that in a sense it was a pre-modern movement -- it was a movement founded on a pre-modern infrastructure. For a long time we had been told that you could not do anything -- that the media, the new media in particular, had got people's minds wrapped up; and yet the peace movement used all the old-fashioned, traditional methods of marching, village halls, street-corner campaigning, as it were, and succeeded in getting a response. Now, maybe we were under the illusion that this would go on. Sooner or later, they figured out how to handle it. In fact, it is a fascinating story how they did handle it: first of all, they totally ignored it, treating us as if we were on another planet; then the movement got so big that they had to admit it was there. And, of course, they had to make the image one that they could live with.

I had a very interesting discussion once, in an unnamed television studio, where they had recently been talking to Michael Heseltine [former Defence Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's government] about his recollection of these movements. Heseltine was asked: "How did you manage to beat the peace movement in the early 80s?" He said: "By changing the questions." So long as the questions were about cruise missiles, the peace movement always won; if the questions changed to "Do you want to be totally undefended?" or "Do you want to go unilateral?", then the ground shifted. The media managers, specifically the Tory managers of the media, created this bogey of unilateralism, and the Labour Party capitulated by separating it totally from foreign policy and any constructive policy that an alternative government could bring in.

Question: There had been a peace movement in Britain for a long time already. What was the new element, or ingredient, in the 1980s? I am thinking particularly of END [European Nuclear Disarmament] here.

Thompson: If we are speaking of END, the discussions that led up to its founding started at the very end of 1979, and apart from being a more clearly internationalist platform than what CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] had become -- it had had moments of this before, particularly around Greece, but nothing like a deliberately European program -- it decided to distinguish itself very sharply from World Peace Council operations. That was very explicit; we did not want to be used as an accomplice of official Soviet foreign policy. We were putting forward independent demands. One of the central demands was that we should start to behave as citizens of a post-Cold War world before it came. In that sense, we decided to blaspheme against the holiest notions of the Cold War State, that is the primacy of security.

Yet END was a tendency within the peace movement, but it was also a part of the ongoing debate on the British left. It was part of a lineage...

It had a long inheritance. My own personal association with this particular "line" was pre-CND. It stemmed from the impact of the 1956 events in the world communist movement -- the Hungarian insurrection and so on. There was an attempt to join hands with the people who have now triumphed -- or seemed to be triumphing in 1989. We knew that these people were there, and we had confidence that they would become stronger, and therefore the anti-war left in the West could join hands with a dissident democratic movement in the Soviet Union and the East. And this, in a sense, would bridge the Cold War politically. The first attempts to do this were very, very difficult, because the dissidents in the East had got themselves into such a mirror view of the world, such a knee-jerk anti-Sovietism, that they could not see any way out. And they were so pro-American, it was breathtaking sometimes.

So yes, "peace" was for a long time a very dirty word in Eastern Europe. I think of an essay by Vaclav Havel, in which he describes the word as lobotomizing, kitsch, and crypto-totalitarian. In something he wrote or said in 1990, he expressed some second thoughts, but there was that view.

At its most simple, there was a sort of ideological block. You could be for peace, and keep silent about democracy, about freedom, or you could be for freedom, and in fact be allowing this huge war engine, this double war engine, to build up without any serious opposition. You had to be either for peace or for freedom. I know that is a simplification; I know there were middle voices -- but there were no middle movements, movements that were looking for a third way, though there had been before.

I think that is quite clearly what we were trying to establish. Remember that it was all based upon earlier political work -- the Russell Foundation had quite a large network of people in Europe and America to build on. And there was an unusual political thirst for this sort of political lead, among people in this country especially. They were fed up with the old typologies. They were suspicious of being made into the followers of a pro-Soviet peace campaign, but they wanted a peace campaign. Therefore, I think we found the right formula.

There was an analysis lying behind the attempt to put a hyphen between peace and democracy, or a plus sign. As far as I understand it, there was thought to be a compatibility, in the beginning, between socialist forces East and West; by the mid-80s, this had become a compatibility of democratic forces. The old idea that out of this encounter could come some new synthesis -- that seems to have come to nought with the events subsequent to 1989. Was the analysis flawed all along?

I think that the analysis, when it was expressed optimistically, not to say euphorically, underestimated certain things. We never foresaw the planeloads of German businessmen going over with candy in their hands, or the lack of preparation among socialists in the West. Neither East nor West was prepared to understand the sort of moment of consciousness that would arise. There was a sense in the West that, oh yes, capitalism has won the Cold War; there was a sense in the East that what they wanted was an uncurbed market economy. That was quite unexpected. I would say, however, that it is a rather short-term view. I think we have to give it a good five years before we see how it works out. Here are societies which did not have formal democratic practices, and which now are getting some rude shocks. The consequences for those countries, like Poland, which are attempting to make a bolt toward the market economy, are only now starting to show. People will need to revive forms of grassroots struggle that are in many senses traditional.

Question: Your thesis of exterminism, laid out in your New Left Review article of 1981 or 1982, has received some rather literal-minded criticism.

Thompson: Well, I had a good bit of my tongue in my cheek talking of "exterminism" as a mode of production, because New Left Review was a rather pious Marxist journal, and the only way to get them to listen to the formulation was to put it in these Marxist terms. I was always surprised that of the two things I wrote at that time, one of them, "Exterminism" -- because it was put in this pat Marxist formulation -- was taken very seriously. The other one, "Beyond the Cold War", was not read widely at all, really. They need to be read together. "Exterminism" sets out a scenario of mutual exacerbation of the Cold War. "Beyond the Cold War" suggests that there might be another resolution, and sketches out what it might be. It can be read partly as a prospectus of what happened in 1989.

I said that the overwhelming characteristic of the second Cold War is that it is an ideological structure, and if it was destroyed, it would happen very quickly, and it would give rise to a very open situation. We would not really know how it would develop, except that it would develop very fast, and we would have no maps to tell us where we were going. And that is exactly where we are now.

The matter came up last year with an exchange, again in New Left Review (No. 180), with Professor Fred Halliday. He wrote an article saying very firmly that what had happened in Eastern Europe was a triumph of the West, of Western capitalism. The end of the Cold War had no doubt been fueled by many legitimate resistances to Brezhnevism, but the ultimate result was the loss of all the traditional left positions and regenerated capitalism.

I challenged this view (New Left Review, No. 182). First of all, I said that it was too soon to tell what the long-term results of the events in the East would be. Secondly, I challenged it on the grounds that Halliday was sharing the basic Cold War assumption that there was no third way, or for that matter fourth, fifth, or sixth ways. No alternatives. You had to have either a distorted form of socialism or the triumph of capitalism. I was suggesting that this whole mode of thought was now passed by, and that in a sense what we were hoping to see was the supersession of the post-communist societies, and that we were now in a new and open space where it was reasonable to try to implement alternative combinations of economic relations and institutional forms. These have yet to be imagined, and one should effect no closure.

Halliday was effecting this closure by saying, "Right, socialism failed. Now we can go back into the framework of capitalism." But I feel that the great disaster of 1989, which I have said in several different places [including Tallinn, Estonia, addressing the 9th END convention], was the failure of response in the West. The peace movement has to question itself about this, too. I envisaged the possibility that the Cold War could, as it were, just exhaust itself, that the structures would collapse. But I thought that if it did, it would happen on both sides, that it would be a mutual collapse of Cold War positions, an opportunity for which arose in the East last year. And the response from the West was just pitiful -- pitiful from Western statesmen and politicians, while the peace movement seemed to be looking for a leadership that it did not get.

In my view, it is absolutely outrageous that the Warsaw Pact should be dissolved and NATO should continue. But what was quite extraordinary was that when Germany was reunited, the united Germany came out of the Warsaw Pact but stayed in NATO. At first, when this was proposed, I thought it was a Cold War gambit which could not possibly succeed. Perhaps we did not take it seriously enough. When it did take place, we could not believe that the Soviet Union would accept it.

And I think that is one reason why, even though members of the peace movement were not exactly pro-Soviet, they took the position that, well, if the Soviet Union does not object to having East Germany in NATO, then we will not. I think it is quite dangerous for the future, as long as that old structure is one-sidedly weakened, with the other side effectively strengthened. It gives wonderful ideological propaganda to the Soviet regime's most conservative internal critics and opponents. I am sure that if they throw out Gorbachev, this is one of the first things the military and their allies will change.

Anyway, the peace movement should have its own policy -- not the Soviet Union's policy at second remove. This was the moment -- 1989/90 -- when we could have dissolved the structures on both sides, and had an all-European security system. We could then have built secure East-West relations. I think the peace movement really has to examine itself about its failure to make an all-European intervention at that time. It is not too late. The machinery exists in the Helsinki system.

Question: Still looking back at the 60s, there was another player in the British debate on defence, disarmament, foreign policy -- the Labour Party. The peace movement had an impact there, yet was rolled back in the late 80s. The odd thing about the defence issue in the Labour Party in the 80s, though, is that unilateralism became sort of a symbol or talisman -- a part of the armory in the revolt of the ranks against the leadership. Thinking about defence seemed to stop there -- "Don't ask me, it's all in the resolution."

Thompson: Yes, that was manifest in the Labour Party, but the same thing applies to END -- this cutting-off of defence and foreign policy from each other. So that which was politically the central issue -- the Cold War -- was always discussed in terms of the number of warheads. A lot of peace movement speakers became really pretty expert in the jargon of so-called defence studies -- the throw-weight of this and that. They would mug it all up, and deliver it in speeches; all of us did a bit. It shut off people's minds from the political and foreign policy issues of the Cold War.

Back to the Labour Party. It is just pathetic now. Their main, guiding line is to not in any way offend this mythical, media-created figure of the average voter. They never make any statement about foreign policy without consulting the Gallup polls first.

Which brings us to the current war. The Labour Party decided very early on that it would stick to "bipartisanship", and has kept its criticism to incidentals.

I have not heard Labour saying a great deal about the two key things we should be concentrating our minds on -- that is two things: giving the people of the Middle East a chance to govern themselves, and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It is obvious to me that people should not sow illusions, even when they are selling dreams. To suppress the crimes of Saddam is a lack of solidarity with the Iraqis -- no, with the Arabs, with the Kuwaiti opposition as well.

One of the most hypocritical things about the operation was to pretend that something democratic was going on in Kuwait. I think that to suppress one part of the truth because the other part is not being told and ought to be told, is always a mistake. And it is a mistake that will come back on us. I would call a spade a spade in the case of Saddam Hussein. And there is an Iraqi opposition, albeit fragmented into as many as 46 oppositions!

Question: So can an END approach, combining peace and democracy, be brought to other theatres?

Thompson: Yes. And I do not think it should be so difficult. One of the most disabling things is an automatic feeling of guilt and cultural relativism. I find that the people from India and the Africans I respect most are the ones who get very uptight about the sort of cultural relativism that some of the Western left show. They find it condescending to the Third World. When I was in America, I was speaking to an Indian friend, who said, "Edward, don't you realize that there are more millionaires in India than in the United States?" There are gross inequalities, and there is gross exploitation of and exploitation within the Third World, and there is also gross exploitation of the Third World by the First. If we are not aware of it, and do not take steps to correct it, or if we act as if we deny it, we can stand accused.

I am an old-fashioned rationalist in this sense. One has to have some security of values. I think there has been too much genuflection in the West to every sort of ethnic tradition, so that we go around bowed with guilt for things we never did. In that sense, we show disloyalty to people who are trying to maintain rational principles in the face of extremely reactionary, backward-looking forces in their own countries.

I suppose I grew up in a different tradition, an internationalist tradition. And I am sorry that that has been lost.

Question: Yet that relates to something else. Perhaps it is no accident that this has been lost. Are we living at the end of an era that began in 1914, or rather with the Russian revolution?

Thompson: Yes, I think we probably are. The lack of confidence, the confusion of objectives, are all signs of the end of an era. If you were to poll people on the left, the consensus would be for a greenish socialism, a greenish democracy. But that is not a program.

I have been suspicious all my life of programs that are worked out in offices or in armchairs and then passed down to the masses. I think one has to look at what people are already doing, and build upon that.

But to add something about the possibilities of a "third way". If you talk about a third way, in the sense of one, two, and three, you are falling into the same framework and having a teleological notion of history. It is to think that there are no open possibilities. I think there are. But we have not argued enough about this. What are these third, fourth, or fifth ways? Are they slightly greener social democracy, or are they a new way altogether? Those of us who are on the left -- and of course not everyone in the peace movement is -- ought to put our heads together.

Question: In a more personal vein, how does your work in the peace movement over the years relate to your whole intellectual project? A publisher I spoke to some while back said to me: "All that time that Edward Thompson wasted in the peace movement, when he really should have been working on his book on Blake . . ." How have the two threads worked for you? Have they been parallel, or twined?

Thompson: They have been parallel. They have been twined. And yes, my history did get left behind during much of the 80s, until these last few years. I do in my life put a high value on democratic activity, and the peace movement has been a source of invigoration and pleasure in the sense that one has seen what people can do when they get off their backsides. I hope we do not lose that. On the other hand, I would like to finish a few books before I go around the corner.

I did not pose it as a matter of choice. It has always been a matter of impulse, rather. I thought we were in a very tight corner in 1980. I thought those forces I did sketch in "Exterminism" really do exist and continue to exist. Therefore, one did not really have an alternative.