6. Cold wars at home

Abstract

‘Cold wars at home’ highlights the domestic repercussions of the Cold War. The Cold War exerted so profound and so multi-faceted an impact on the structure of international politics and state-to-state relations that it has become customary to label the 1945–90 period ‘the Cold War era’. That designation becomes even more fitting when one considers the powerful mark that the Soviet–American struggle for world dominance and ideological supremacy left within many of the world’s nation-states. The Cold War of course affected the internal constellation of forces in the Third World, Europe, and the United States and impacted the process of decolonization, state formation, and Cold War geopolitics.