Odd Arne Westad, one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Cold War, creates a truly global panorama of the conflict in his latest book. He traces its fault-lines back to the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution gave birth to both modern capitalism and socialism, and when the rise of Russia and the United States as global powers began. While Westad's earlier study of the Global Cold War focused on superpower interventions in the Third World, The Cold War: A World History is a grand narrative for a broader audience of the causes and ramifications of Soviet and US power and ideology. Europe is back in the picture, if relatively passive: devastated, hungry, and supinely waiting for answers and relief from either Moscow or Washington. Western Europe from the late 1940s was changed just as much as the east by the Cold War. Political and cultural ties with the US created the notion of a western world, and the foundation of the European Community was, as Westad puts it, “a Cold War project from the very beginning” (216).
The great strength of the book lies in its immense wealth of truly international empirical material and insight. It takes the reader on several trips around the world, from Norwegian villages near the Russian border to execution grounds in communist Hungary; from post-war devastated Japan to Angola and Ethiopia, where Cuban soldiers fought in the name of socialist internationalism; from China, where seventy-seven million people died violent deaths in the country's political struggles to Paris, where the New Left took to the street with Mao posters; and to Soviet Moscow, where the Polish Communist leader Bolesław Bierut suffered a fatal heart attack upon hearing Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech condemning Stalin in 1956. The emergence of the Asian Tigers is linked to the Cold War, too: their political alliances with the US meant preferential access to US markets, and the wars in Indochina crated the necessary demand for their export-led growth. The Cold War, often seen as a division of the world, in fact also connected countries and continents in multiple new ways.
Westad locates the beginning of the Cold War in Poland, where the Stalinist Soviet Union imposed its political system, breaking earlier agreements with the Allies. While Westad also sees some fault with the United States, which as the far stronger power failed to entice Moscow to forms of collaboration after 1945, this is a rebuttal of the revisionist views that blamed NATO and its encirclement of the USSR for the conflict. As for the end of the Cold War, Westad is very critical of US post-Cold War triumphalism. Instead, he provides a very convincing contextualization of the disintegration of the Soviet empire in the global transformations from the 1970s. Manifold processes fed into this historical outcome: economic and technological change, a new generation of political leaders, the rise of human rights discourses, and, most importantly, years of closer association that had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other.
In such an all-encompassing panorama, there will always be aspects that some readers will find less convincing: the Chilean Marxist President Salvador Allende, whose often unconstitutional governing brought about economic disaster and antagonised Chilean society, is portraited as a principled democrat. The Soviet Army is called “Red Army” throughout the book, a name that it had discarded before the beginning of the Cold War. That re-united Germany encouraged Slovenia and Croatia to declare full independence from Yugoslavia is a popular myth amongst Serbian nationalists and western leftists that lacks historical evidence. The view that the Cold War ended because ordinary people in eastern Europe rebelled and Mikhail Gorbachev did nothing to save the communist regimes will not satisfy those numerous scholars who have lately emphasized the crucial role of communist elites in the transformation process. Historians with an interest in the reflections of the Cold War in culture, architecture, science, or changing concepts of gender and race will object to Westad's mostly diplomatic history of great men. But the voices of ordinary people and their perspectives on the Cold War, from letters by US teenagers to Soviet jokes to the memory of political violence in South East Asia, are made heard throughout the book. And as opposed to many traditional accounts of the Cold War, Westad's gripping narrative is more about political ideas than about rockets, more about the intertwinedness of politics and economics than about nukes, and more about contemporary legacies of the conflict than about spies and tanks.
