Shifting Perspectives on the Cold War

Abstract

Shifting Perspectives on the Cold War Corinna R. Unger Lorenz M. Lüthi, Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe. 756 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108407069. $34.99. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, historians interested in the conflict face both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to find new angles in a field that has been studied for decades and with high intensity, to critically deal with the epistemological legacies of historical research produced under Cold War conditions, and to define what "Cold War history" means at a time when the field has branched out in a variety of directions.1 The opportunity is to break free from older views anchored in ideological debates of the pre-1989 period and to develop fresh perspectives that benefit from and contribute to developments in other fields, especially global history and his new international history. One of the most influential publications in this regard has been Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War, which was decisive in turning the gaze from Europe to parts of the world that, until then, had been considered merely venues in which the superpowers competed with each other. The Cold War term "proxy wars" captured this older view—which, by and large, denied any kind of agency to countries, governments, and people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.2 Lorenz M. Lüthi's new book presents a continuation of the effort to decenter the history of the Cold War. Lüthi does so by offering an account of regional Cold War conflicts as they played out in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and by investigating what he calls the "connections and spillover effects within" those three regions (2). The book consists of seven parts. The [End Page 181] first part, on "elusive unities," looks at the relations of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union with the Arab League, the "Free World," and the socialist countries, respectively, from the 1940s to the 1980s. This is followed by a section in which the regional conflicts in Asia and the Middle East are covered in one part each. The parts deal with the place of Europe between the superpowers; European détente; and, finally, with the "end of the regional Cold Wars." Lüthi's aim is to challenge the traditional interpretation of the Cold War as a conflict between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and as having taken place predominantly on the European continent. He argues that this interpretation is misleading in that it ignores the developments in other parts of the world—trends that cannot just be dismissed as derivatives of the superpower Cold War. Among the most important of these processes are decolonization and the emergence of independent nation-states in Asia and the Middle East, which have often been presented as taking place in parallel to the Cold War rather than preceding and shaping it. By paying close attention to the histories of these regions as such, rather than treating them as satellites whose histories were shaped by Moscow or Washington, Lüthi makes an effective argument about the need to rethink not only the geographical center but also the chronology of the Cold War. As an effect of Lüthi's shift in focus and his attention to "structural change at the regional and national levels, and to horizontal connections among different world regions" (1), the image of a singular, homogenous Cold War is replaced by an interpretation that highlights the pluralistic, heterogeneous nature of the conflict. In this context, the author demonstrates how in many cases existing political and economic conflicts between neighboring countries, ethnic factions, or religious groups contributed to and got caught up in Cold War dynamics but were not the result of the Cold War. This is perhaps the most important achievement of the book: it convincingly challenges the traditional account of the Cold War as a conflict determined and defined by the two superpowers, demonstrating that the Cold War was inextricably tied to events in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe that existed independently of the Cold War but...