Transnational Coalition-Building and the Making of the Cold War in Indochina, 1947-1949

Abstract

One of the most striking contributions of recent scholarship on the origins of the Cold War has been to demonstrate the significant role played by smaller, ostensibly peripheral states on both sides in the creation of the bipolar world. Neither Moscow nor Washington, we now know, controlled developments within their blocs to the degree that historians once assumed; “satellite” regimes, like dog-wagging tails, sometimes wielded considerable influence at the centers of their emerging alliance systems and dictated policies ultimately embraced by their superpower partners. On the Eastern side, for example, new studies show that Polish, East German, and Hungarian communists enjoyed more agency in the creation of the Soviet bloc than historians have usually assigned them.1 Similarly, on the Western side, scholars have demonstrated that Great Britain, France, and other European governments sometimes held the initiative in their relationship with the United States and drove policymaking during the Cold War's formative stages.2 Geir Lundestad advanced this idea forcefully in a landmark 1986 essay, asserting that the extension of U.S. economic and military power to Western Europe in the years following World War II amounted to “empire by invitation,” since Washington, in assuming a major role across the Atlantic, was merely responding to what Europeans wanted.3 More recently, John Lewis Gaddis has placed a multivectored vision of power within the Western alliance at the center of a new master narrative of the Cold War. In We Now Know, Gaddis argues that while Moscow relied on coercion to build and manage its empire in Eastern Europe, the U.S. “empire” was characterized by a remarkable amount of give and take among its members, thus ensuring relative harmony within the alliance and facilitating its long-term victory in the Cold War.4 Gaddis and the numerous younger scholars on whose work he draws have done Cold War history a great service by putting to rest the notion that Washington unilaterally imposed a distinctly American set of policies to remake the world after 1945. On the contrary, it is now clear that the Western economic and security system that came into being after World War II was the work of multiple like-minded governments.