She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Nicaragua Must Survive brings us to the middle of chapter 3. It discusses how Western European solidarity activists and the Nicaraguan revolutionaries of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) responded to the election of the anticommunist hardliner Ronald Reagan, who became president of the United States in 1981. The Sandinistas – as the Nicaraguan revolutionaries were called – realized that Reagan would try to undermine their government and encouraged Western European activists to build an anti-intervention movement. Rather than focusing on the Sandinista Revolution’s domestic accomplishments, as the solidarity committees had done since the revolution’s triumph on 19 July 1979, they would now focus on Reagan’s foreign policy and the long history of U.S. imperialism in Central America. This also meant that Nicaragua solidarity groups needed to collaborate more closely with groups advocating for revolution and social justice in El Salvador and Guatemala. To make Western European audiences and politicians aware of the danger of U.S. military interference, the activists aimed to unite all individual Central America committees into a transnational anti-intervention network.Learn more about Nicaragua Must Survive at the University of California Press website.
The second half of page 99 analyzes the Sandinista decision to collaborate with the Salvadoran solidarity movement in more depth. It argues that:To some extent, the decision to join forces with other Central America committees was motivated by Sandinista ambivalence about the growing strength of the El Salvador movement in Western Europe. Even though the FSLN and FMLN were allies in the Central American context, as we have seen above, there was also an element of rivalry to their relationship since the two revolutionary organizations competed for public recognition and sympathy in the international arena. At a time when the Salvadoran civil war received extensive media coverage, the FSLN and its allies struggled to hold the attention of Western European audiences.Indeed, the page continues, Sndinista representative Raúl Guerra specifically told solidarity activists not to switch allegiance to other committees, arguing that the best way to assist national liberation movements was by defending and publishing information about the Nicaraguan Revolution.
The Page 99 Test works quite well for Nicaragua Must Survive. One of the book’s main objectives is to show that the revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinistas targeted not just government officials but also non-state actors, most notably solidarity activists. The page clearly demonstrates that transnational activists were crucial for the implementation and development of the Sandinistas’ revolutionary diplomacy. The page also highlights some of the difficulties that the Nicaraguans encountered in Western Europe, most notably how difficult it was to keep audiences interested in and optimistic about the revolution. One West German activist, for example, is quoted saying that it was simply more exciting to support a guerrilla movement still “fighting for freedom” than a revolutionary group already in power. This quotation also hints at some of the tensions that existed between the FSLN and the solidarity activists, as the latter were sometimes more concerned with their own experience and participation in a revolutionary process that was ultimately not their own, than with the actual concerns and needs of the Nicaraguan people.
Yet, based on page 99 alone, the reader would also get the impression that the book is only about solidarity activism, and that is not the case. Other sections of the book deal with the Sandinistas’ outreach to politicians and government leaders, the situation in Nicaragua itself, and the formulation of a distinct Western European foreign policy towards Central America. Moreover, page 99 does not explain why the Sandinistas thought it was worth reaching out to Western Europeans in the first place. This is an important aspect of Nicaragua Must Survive, as the Nicaraguan revolutionaries believed that Western European involvement in Central America would undermine the regional hegemony of the United States, thereby altering the Inter-American power balance in the FSLN’s favor. Page 99 thus shows how creative and ambitious the Sandinistas revolutionary diplomacy was, but to get a better sense of its rationale and implications for the Global Cold War, the reader would need to read the rest of the book, too.
--Marshal Zeringue
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