The Cold War: A World History

Abstract

Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History is a difficult book to review because it is so good. It is well-conceived, well-researched, lucidly written and argued, and reflective of the many decades of Westad's ongoing engagement with the subject of the Cold War in its many facets. It is hard to imagine another scholar writing a massive, 700-page synthesis of the Cold War with the talents and accomplishments that Westad brings to the subject. He knows the history and culture of both the Soviet Union and China and has a firm grasp of Russian and Chinese. Originally from Norway, Westad possesses the kind of sensitivity to the division of Europe, the central “act” of the Cold War, that sometimes eludes both U.S. and Russian scholars. He has been involved with U.S. and British scholarship for many decades, was one of the earliest participants in the Woodrow Wilson Center's pioneering Cold War International History Project, has long been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cold War Studies, served as a coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), and presently teaches at Yale University. Among his many fine publications in the field is his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), which explores in depth how the Cold War reverberated throughout Africa, South America, and South and Southeast Asia.Two major themes infuse the narrative of Westad's latest survey: the prominent role of ideology in the Cold War and the global reach of the standoff. He argues that the Cold War was above all an ideological struggle that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century as exemplified in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Together with the socialist labor movement they promoted on the European continent, they experienced the social and economic dislocations of the development of industrialization and capitalism. In Westad's view, this conflict was intensified first of all by the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in November 1917 and then again with the victory of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain over the Axis powers in 1945.Westad's focus on the longue durée of ideological conflict invites the counterargument that the ideological contradictions between Communism and capitalism in the nineteenth century, though certainly part of the general backdrop of the Cold War's ideological character, should not themselves be considered part and parcel of the Cold War. Militant labor struggles in Europe and the history of the First and Second Internationals laid some of the grounding for what was to come, but they also presaged the development of Social Democracy, which itself was more wedded to parliamentary democracy, support of patriotic causes (like voting for war credits in World War I), and staunch anti-Communism than it was to ideological opposition to capitalism. Marx and Engels were as much the ideological forefathers of such diverse Socialists as August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Kurt Schumacher, the Russian Mensheviks, Julius Martov, and Paul Axelrod—and of the anti-Leninist Communist Rosa Luxemburg—as they were of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin or Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck. The Russian Revolution did not have to happen, and it certainly did not have to happen in the way it did. The contradictions inherent in European industrialization and capitalism could have led to different results.No doubt the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the episodic revolutionary upheavals in Europe following the catastrophe of World War I increased the general fears of worldwide ideological struggle. But by the end of the 1930s, Soviet foreign policy had quickly adjusted to the norms and demands of the international system. Stalin curbed the revolutionary activities of the Communist International (Comintern), joined the League of Nations, and endorsed the policy of “collective security” in an effort to protect Europe and the Soviet Union against the rise of Nazi Germany. The United States and the West had generally not yet succumbed to exaggerated fears of Communism, as they did during the Cold War. Communists and Communist sympathizers in and out of government were barely noted, and most attention was directed toward appeasing and containing the aggression of Adolf Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific.The Second World War only increased the sense in the West that democratic capitalist countries could deal with Communist dictatorships. Doubts and questions emerged here and there during the conflict about Stalin's intentions, but they seldom reflected the profound and rancorous hostility that characterized the emergence of the Cold War after World War II. Franklin Roosevelt and even the “hardline” Winston Churchill believed they could work with Stalin to establish a peaceful postwar settlement. Parenthetically, one could similarly question Westad's suggestion that “the first Cold War era” in Latin America, which, despite the emergence of small Communist parties and the organization of labor and landless peasants in the 1920s and 1930s “against privilege and oppression,” played nowhere near the central role in the political life in the region that it did during the real Cold War from the late 1950s to the 1980s (p. 343).Westad himself at times appears to support the counterargument that the Cold War was the product of the breakup of the “Grand Alliance” when he describes the growing hostility between Moscow and Washington over the European settlement. Containment, he writes, “made postwar conflict into a Cold War.” “Stalin would have probably chosen isolation anyway,” he adds, but “the intensity of the conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had been made by the stronger power [the United States] to entice Moscow towards forms of cooperation (p. 69).” He notes elsewhere that the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe was all but inevitable: “the Soviet regime could not have introduced democratic elections in eastern Europe even if it had wanted to. It was not of that kind” (p. 52). Then he writes, slightly contradicting his earlier statement about the need for the United States to induce Soviet cooperation, “it is likely that a Sovietization of eastern Europe would have happened at some point whatever the policies of others had been” (p. 87).These statements and others demonstrate that Westad aligns himself with the main thrust of Cold War historiography that emphasizes the importance of the increasingly antagonistic push and pull between the Soviet Union and the United States, between Stalin's speech on the inevitability of war in February 1946 to the Czechoslovak coup in February 1948 and the Berlin Blockade starting in June 1948. During this period, which included the articulation of the Truman Doctrine (March 1947), the announcement of the Marshall Plan (June 1947), and the foundation of the Communist Information Bureau (September 1947), the escalating rhetoric and antagonism between the victorious Great Powers made normal relations less and less possible.As Adam Ulam wrote in his pioneering studies The Rivals (1971) and Expansion and Coexistence (1973), the real issues that separated the Soviet Union and the United States that emerged after the victory over Nazi Germany became increasingly lost in the fog of ideological hyperbole and rhetorical hostility. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the establishment of the two German states in 1949 essentially froze the Cold War in place. From that point until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cold War dominated the international system. Westad is no doubt correct that the ideological divide “made the Cold War special and hyperdangerous'' (p. 626). But his own analysis of the crucial post-1945 origins of the Cold War does not support his insistence that the Cold War “was born from the global transformations of the late nineteenth century” (p. 5) or his conclusion that “the ideological Cold War, which predated this state system by almost two generations, disappeared [in 1991] only in part” (p. 617). If the Cold War was indeed the product of increasing Soviet and U.S. rivalries over the post–World War II settlement, then it ended in the period 1989–1991 with the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The way the Cold War ended, not its partial continuation, prompted the current conflicts between Moscow and Washington.Westad's analysis of the way the Cold War spread from Europe to the rest of the world and how it “connected different parts of the world in ways and purposes that had not been obvious in the past”—the second major theme of the book—is fully convincing (p. 129). In part, it was the “universalist heart of the Cold War” that “drove Americans to have strong views on countries and territories that had, only a few years earlier, meant little to Washington” (p. 133). One could say the same for the Soviet Union, especially after the death in March 1953 of Stalin, who was little interested in the world outside the Eurasian land mass and was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. By this point, a “zero-sum game” between Washington and Moscow was operative in many places around the world. “The Soviets,” writes Westad, “seemed more preoccupied with acting as a spoiler to US or British interests than developing a long-term policy of its [sic] own” (p. 156). Meanwhile, the United States had the additional benefit and burden of leading “the global capitalist economy” as part of its self-defined Cold War mandate (p. 223).During the period of accelerated decolonialization in the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War's influence spread throughout the world, engendering conflict and resistance to incursions in Third World countries. Westad takes more seriously than most Cold War scholars the development of the initiatives of the subsequent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in his description of Nehru's ideas “to defeat the Cold War” (p. 433), and he firmly places the Vietnam War in an international context in which both sides—the Vietnamese Communists and their Chinese and Soviet backers versus the United States—viewed the war in terms of potential gains and setbacks in Europe and in the Third World. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East, Soviet and U.S. officials too frequently missed the general character of the “long-term struggle between colonialism and its opponents” and ended up subsuming “complex local realities into shallow Cold War frameworks” (pp. 449, 457). Yet these countries were drawn into the conflict if for no other reason than they were threatened by the potential of nuclear war, which all too often seemed to loom large.Frequently bullied by the great powers into participating in Cold War politics, Third World countries also sometimes manipulated and even rejected these powers to pursue their own interests. They themselves were also ideological, but more often than not they were driven by postcolonial goals of national liberation and the struggle for sovereignty over their own affairs. Sometimes, they sought that sovereignty by subsuming their policies to those of the major blocs; sometimes they rejected both blocs in the name of an alternative system to that of the Cold War (e.g., the NAM).The costs of the Cold War were enormous in human lives and misspent resources. Yet the international system since 1989 has often appeared rudderless without it. The United States, Westad writes, “has lost a global purpose—the Cold War—and not yet found a new one” (p. 619). Todor Zhivkov, the long-time Communist leader of Bulgaria, stated after the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, that “if [he]I had to do it over again, [he] would not even be a Communist, and if Lenin were alive today he would say the same thing.” Zhivkov then emphasized he “must now admit that we started from the wrong basis, from the wrong premise. The foundation of socialism was wrong. I believe that at its very conception the idea of socialism was stillborn” (p. 626). The Cold War was an inevitable struggle in Westad's view, though a terrible waste.