Economics

Abstract

In the earliest accounts of the cold war, historians either largely neglected or over-emphasised economic factors. Written in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the East-West confrontation, ‘traditionalist’ works on the cold war focused on the political and strategic causes of the cold war. Traditionalist historians blamed the expansionist foreign policy of the Soviet Union for the origins of the conflict. On the contrary, self-styled ‘revisionist’ historians argued that Soviet foreign policy was cautious and defensive. In their eyes, it was the economic ‘open door’ policy of the United States that led to the breakdown in cooperation between Washington and Moscow after the Second World War. The revisionists asserted that national economic interests drove US foreign policy and American intervention in Europe and East Asia could only be explained by Washington’s quest to preserve capitalism and locate foreign markets for the country’s burgeoning exports. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a more complex picture of the economic dimension of the cold war emerged. Drawing on multinational archival sources, scholars began to set economic issues, such as trade and foreign assistance, within the context of the political, strategic and ideological aspects of the cold war. This research demonstrated that economics, ideology and security were inextricably linked with respect to both the origins and evolution of the East-West conflict.KeywordsMost Favour NationExport ControlSoviet BlocSoviet EconomyMarshall PlanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.