6 - CRITICAL SUBSYSTEMS

Summary

[T]he existing complex of economic, politico-military and other common interests of the three centers of power [i.e., US, Western Europe, and Japan] can hardly be expected to break up … But within the framework of this complex, Washington should not expect unquestioning obedience …

Mikhail Gorbachev

INTER-IMPERIALIST RELATIONS

Perhaps the most significant development in the entire Soviet study of international relations is the shift in the place assigned to relations among states with capitalistic economic systems in the international system. Whereas once, the nature of international behavior could be understood, and the future of international relations predicted, on the basis of an understanding of the dynamics of “inter-imperialist contradictions,” this is no longer the case. Increasingly, and indeed, one may now say decisively, inter-imperialist contradictions have been relegated by Soviet analysts to second-order phenomena of a sub-systemic character. No longer capable of shaping the basic paths of the international system, though it may have considerable impact on particular aspects of that system, the conduct of relations among “imperialist” countries is analytically subordinate, for the comprehension of that system, to relations among different socio-economic systems. That is to say that there is “a profound qualitative [printsipal'noye] difference between the existence of three centers of capitalism and the division [raskol, lit. “schism”] of the world into two opposing socioeconomic systems.”