Capitalist Encirclement; A Russian Obsession--Genuine or Feigned?

T HE PROGRESS, SPATIAL and otherwise from limited and local state systems, in Italy, Europe, the Western hemisphere, to a world-wide system and world politics, Weltpolitik, has been accompanied by a progress in Weltangst, to use a term of German existential philosophy.' Much of grosse Politik, so-called, is conditioned, if not driven by grandes peurs, several of which, if one were to undertake a genealogy of fears and anxieties, would prove far from new ("Yellow Peril," etc.), and so are domestic politics.2 Both are anxiety-affected-in the extreme: anxiety-driven-fields. Some of the participation of the citizen in world politics takes place through a primary, unanalyzed anxiety, through what is sometimes called "an unhealthy interest," some through a rational, "healthy" interest in a problem presenting itself, newly or recurrent. Only to a limited extent would we be justified in calling the existence or the play on such anxieties characteristic of totalitarian regimes; not all leaders of democracies give or even promise "freedom from fear." The basic difference in this respect is rather this: that totalitarian regimes establish monopolies for the supreme anxifer, the fear maker, while in democracies anxiety-producers have to compete with one another as well as rationalizers of fears. One of the forms which anxiety about world politics assumes by preference, sometimes on slight, at other times on more massive, objective or subjective, provocation, is the encirclement complex, the concern about Einkreisung, kapitalistickeskoe okruzhenie, the fear of, the anxiety about one's own nation being ringed in system