Red Internationalism: Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies, By Salar Mohandesi

Salar Mohandesi has written an important and daring work. Laurent Jalabert and Bethany Keenan have discussed the origins of May 1968 in France in the actions of committees supporting the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam, but Mohandesi takes this problematic much further in his study of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and far-left movements in France and the United States during the long 1968.

Daring is the word that occurs to me to describe the book because Mohandesi recognises and takes seriously the embrace of Lenin’s concepts of imperialism and national self-determination—the subject of a chapter zero at the beginning of the book—by the DRV and the far left in France and the United States. The DRV was fully internationalist in its strategy and aspirations. It saw the fight for national self-determination in Vietnam as a fight for the oppressed around the world, who were in turn expected to support the struggle in Vietnam. The universal appeal to Vietnam in turn structured the thought and practice of anti-war activists in the United States and France. Mohandesi offers a keen critical analysis of Leninism, but this does not lead him to discount its importance, a problem with some histories of the period which interpret Leninism in terms of a later perspective whose origins Mohandesi recounts.

Opposition to the war and support of the NLF brought a diversity of radical movements around the world together and gave them the sense of participating in a common struggle and a common language to speak about their struggles. Radicals in the West joined the fight for national liberation against capitalist imperialism, but the struggle of those in the world outside the West against capitalist imperialism was in turn understood as crucial to achieving the revolution that radicals sought in the West.

Mohandesi explains how human rights displaced anti-imperialism and national self-determination as a dominant progressive ideology in the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Human rights advocates turned their attention to the political repression of individuals by states, many of which had been born of movements for national self-determination. Most histories of this change point to events like the experience of French Maoists in prison, studied by Julian Bourg in his excellent From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (2007), and the impact in France of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973). Mohandesi sees the move to human rights as occurring as well in some cases in the actions of men and women thinking in Leninist terms and not solely as an unmediated rejection of Lenin. He shows how the campaign against the abuse of political prisoners in South Vietnam in 1973 can be interpreted as providing one bridge from Leninist internationalism to an ideology of human rights.

Throughout the book, Mohandesi keeps the focus on Vietnam, site of conflicts which mobilised a broad range of men and women in support of national self-determination and later of human rights. Doing so allows Mohandesi to show how the war which opposed the DRV to Khmer Rouge Cambodia and the People’s Republic of China in 1978–9 was explained by each of these states in terms of their adherence to Lenin’s theory of anti-imperialism and national self-determination, and the problems and opportunities this presented.

In an innovative analysis, Mohandesi examines how French Maoists’ critique of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 in terms of Cambodians’ right to self-determination influenced the dominant mainstream discourse in France to interpret Vietnam as practising genocide in Cambodia rather than as liberating the nation from the genocidal Khmer Rouge. If Vietnam had been the place where national self-determination was the key to the struggle against imperialism, it was now interpreted as pursuing imperialism in the interests of an ethnic nationalism. The ‘internal contradictions’ of Leninism revealed in Vietnam dealt a crushing blow to support for the Leninist model of national self-determination as the key to defeating imperialism.

The saga of the boat people, refugees from Vietnam, in which anti-war activists in France and the United States played a leading role, and the appeal of Doctors without Borders, launched by one-time far left internationalists like Bernard Kouchner, are often taken as the moment when human rights displaced anti-imperialism as the new international progressivism. Human rights advocates in the West took the place of Third World guerillas in this new internationalism. If they also addressed abuses in the West, there was no sense, as in Leninist anti-imperialism, that fighting for human rights in the world outside the West was essential to the success of the struggle for human rights in the West.

What sets Mohandesi’s work apart from most previous scholarship is that he does not view his far left subjects as exemplary, exotic, evil or unaccountably misguided. By taking their thought and actions seriously, he writes better history and offers in-depth critiques in the place of dismissals. Mohandesi does not reject the goals of anti-imperialists, but instead highlights the ways that Leninist ideology, whether explicit or present as the common sense of radicals of the long 1968, was premised on ideas like the right of national self-determination that played a central role in the collapse of the radical left as a political project of the long 1968. Mohandesi sees anti-imperialism as presenting political openings and challenges to engaged radicals today, much as another stalwart ideology of the twentieth century, anti-fascism, does. To make anti-imperialism great again may require a re-reading of Rosa Luxemburg, whose one page in Red Internationalism reminds readers of her prescience, but this, Mohandesi recognises, is only a first step for activists operating today in a different world than Lenin and Luxemburg knew a century ago.