Illiberal deliberation: Communist regime travel controls as state capacity in everyday world politics

DOI10.1177/0010836718815522
AuthorAstrid Hedin
Published date01 June 2019
Date01 June 2019
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718815522
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(2) 211 –233
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836718815522
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Illiberal deliberation:
Communist regime travel
controls as state capacity in
everyday world politics
Astrid Hedin
Abstract
Much social theory takes for granted that transnational people-to-people dialogue is inherently
liberal in process and content – a haven of everyday authenticity that shelters ideas of human
rights and democratic reform. In contrast, this contribution shows how communist regimes built
and institutionalised an encompassing administrative state capacity to control and shape micro-
level professional contacts with the West. This extensive but secret system of coercion, which
was brought to light only with the opening of former communist regime archives, set a markedly
illiberal framework for everyday East–West deliberations during the Cold War. Effectively,
the travel cadre system may not only have delayed the demise of Soviet bloc communism, by
isolating the population from Western influences. It was also intended to serve as a vehicle for the
discursive influence of Soviet type regimes on the West. The article provides one of the first and
most detailed English language maps of the administrative routines of a communist regime travel
cadre system, based on the East German example. Furthermore, drawing on social mechanisms
methodology, the article sets up a micro-level ‘how it could work’ scheme over how travel
cadre systems can be understood as a state capacity, unique to totalitarian regimes, to help sway
political discourse in open societies.
Keywords
Cold War, everyday life, state capacity, strategic narratives, travel cadre
Introduction
According to Charles Tilly, states respond to the international system by developing their
capacity for competition, conflict and war (Tilly, 1992). State capacity is the administra-
tive framework and ability of the state to force individual citizens into compliant behav-
iour, to serve the state’s efforts at international rivalry (Lindvall and Teorell, 2016; Mann,
Corresponding author:
Astrid Hedin, Department of Political Science, Lund University, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden.
Email: astrid.hedin@svet.lu.se
815522CAC0010.1177/0010836718815522Cooperation and ConflictHedin
research-article2018
Article
212 Cooperation and Conflict 54(2)
1984). Examples of state capacities are coercive forces, such as the police and military,
and bureaucratic infrastructure, geared to tasks such as taxation and information and
statistics collection (Skocpol, 1985).
This contribution documents how, during the Cold War, communist regimes built and
institutionalised encompassing bureaucratic procedures to control, shape and instrumen-
talise all individual professional contacts with the West, and argues that these travel
controls were an important state capacity for waging the global war over hearts and
minds, discourses and state self-identities, narratives and ontologies of the international
system, by shaping micro-level interactions – the ‘microfields’ or the ‘quotidian’ – in
everyday transnational deliberation (cf. Barnett and Duvall, 2005: 55). Crucially, due to
their illiberal coercion of the individual – and due to the travel cadre system’s reliance on
the communist regime’s unique degree of control over domestic society, state, public
sphere and economy – travel cadre systems were, and are, unavailable as a policy option
for lesser authoritarian regimes, as well as for liberal democracies.
In the domestic terminology of communist regimes, the travel controls over profes-
sionals was termed a travel cadre system (Macrakis and Hoffmann, 1999: 264–265;
Niederhut, 2005; Wolle, 1999). The article is based on archival materials from the East
German state administration, a university, and the regional secret police, including the
classified rules and regulations, and routines for screening, instruction and reporting
requirements.
As is well known, the East German political system was built on the Soviet template,
and it is likely that other communist regimes – past and present – had and have similar
systems of travel control. Hence, the East German case prompts questions concerning
how travel cadre systems affected all East–West dialogue during the Cold War – but also
how the foreign policy efforts of contemporary communist regimes are organised today
(cf. Edney, 2012; Nathan, 2015; Varrall, 2017).
The historical East German travel cadre system served several types of purposes,
including industrial and technological espionage (Macrakis, 2018), the prevention of
defections to the West (Stirn, 2011), and the defence of the communist political system
against foreign influence. Importantly however, East German bureaucratic planning
shows that the travel cadre system was conceived primarily as a foreign policy institu-
tion, aiming to spread and stabilise a regime-friendly world-view among Western pub-
lics. In effect, the travel cadre system may not only have delayed the demise of Soviet
sphere communism by blocking everyday democratic dialogue and influence from the
West (cf. Risse, 2000; Risse et al., 2013). The travel cadre system was also intended as a
vehicle for the reverse direction of discursive influence of Soviet type regimes on the
West. For the sake of illustration, the article exemplifies these ambitions in the context
of East German contacts with Sweden – which was a GDR priority and a pivotal polity
in the context of the Cold War.
The elaborate procedures of the travel cadre system show that communist regimes
attached great importance to everyday transnational conversations between communist
regime subjects and their Western colleagues, and institutionalised the efforts to win
hearts and minds in the West, and shape Western discourse. Notably, this state behaviour
is largely incongruent with realist assumptions concerning the means and goals of com-
petition and war in the international system. Indeed, through the lens of a narrowly realist

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