Ideology
can play a huge role in historical narrative, but rarely does ideology become
the theory upon which the history is grounded.
World renowned historian of the Cold War and the 20
th
century, Odd Arne Westad, tackled ideology as the linchpin of Cold War agency
and causality with his book
The Global
Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
The tradition of world history got a unique
experience with Westad’s work; a narrative where ideology—not nationalism, not
military strategy, not economic conditions—took center stage as the catalyst
for activity by the two dominant superpowers from 1945-1991.
Westad achieved this perspective by widening
the lens of Cold War history, which he believed was and is “still generally
assumed to have been a contest between two superpowers over military power and
strategic control, mostly centered on Europe.”
[i] By a widened lens, I mean the investigation
of aspects of the Cold War that “were neither military nor strategic, nor
Europe-centered, but connected to political and social development in the Third
World.”
[ii] It is only by this shift—from the First and
Second worlds to the Third—that we are able to see the importance of ideology
with regard to world history in the post-WWII contemporary period.
The
Cold War is commonly seen as a unique, or new type of conflict. Cold
in the sense that it is not a hot war
like World War II; War in the sense
that there existed an obvious conflict between dominant groups. Ideology
was never ignored, it should be known, by previous historians and scholars of
the Cold War—but it never took primary agency.
With ideology as the cause and rational explanation for agency among
counterpoised groups (Communist and non-Communist regimes), Westad suggested
that the Cold War was, in fact, a much more common story. In his own words:
“In a historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the
Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means. As a process of conflict, it centered on
control and domination, primarily in ideological terms. The methods of the superpowers and of their
local allies were remarkably similar to those honed during the last phase of
European colonialism: giant social and economic projects, bringing promises of
modernity to their supporters and mostly death to their opponents or those who
happened to get in the way of progress.”[iii]
By South, Westad
referred to the Southern Hemisphere of the world, which for the most part
remained relegated to the Third World throughout the 20th
century. The South, Westad contended,
was historically left out of Cold War histories because of previous scholars’
contention that the Cold War as a narrative “conceptually and analytically does
not belong in the South”—a contention that Westad finds false for two primary
reasons.
The
first reason for the relocation of agency in the Cold War rested on Westad’s
observation of “interventionism” by Soviet and US governments and the profound
influences these actions had on the social development of Third World cultures
and people.
Interventions by both
superpowers “shaped both the international and the domestic framework within
which political, social, and cultural changes in the Third World took place.”
However, Westad rests his logic on the
counterfactual presumption that “Africa, Asia, and possibly Latin America would
have been very different regions today” had it not been for the interventionism
of the Cold War.
[iv] The second reason for the agency shift is a
much more palatable one:
That ruling
elites in the Third World used the United States and the Soviet Union as models
upon which to judge, rationalize, and implement “high modernity.”
This
second contention shares many philosophical tints as my own perspective on the
Cold War, which is a vying of control by two similar but ideologically divided
forms of the modern Republic (something I call the State-Form thesis). The “state-forms” generated in the consciousness
of citizens and foreign cultures existed as abstract models by which the rest
of the world was expected to conform.
The dialectical struggle between West
and East would result in a victory of
one state-form over the other. The
battleground for this struggle, however, was the Third World. The cultivation of high modernism by Third World nations was their means for
legitimizing rule and take the supposedly correct
steps toward international development and integration into the world economic
order. David Harvey explained this
concept of high modernism, and was
also quoted by Westad in his conclusion:
“High modernism is the belief in linear progress, absolute
truths, and rational planning of ideals and social orders under standardized
conditions of knowledge and production.”[v]
Rather than see the Cold War period as a unique segment of
world history however (which my State-Form thesis does seek to do), Westad saw the
Cold War as a component of the longue durée
history that we more commonly understand as European hegemony and domination.
Westad’s
text, which uses
interventionism as a
primary crux, sees the actions of the Soviet and US governments as extensions
of civil wars; where ideology is the dividing line between civil forces.
This is chiefly because “the extraordinary
brutality of Cold War interventions…can only be explained by Soviet and
American identification with the people they sought to defend.”
[vi] Iconic examples mentioned in the text are
Vietnam and Afghansitan, but also include conflicts from Africa and Southeast
Asia, such as intervention in the Congo in 1960 and the actions taken against
Sukarno in Indonesia.
All of these
conflicts can be understood individually, but the Cold War as a whole cannot be
understood without incorporating these smaller histories of struggle which were
defined by the ideological confrontation of
East
Versus West.
It
would be great to see Westad’s argument extended to a logical conclusion—a linking
of Cold War narratives with the histories of colonialism to generate a “Long
Cold War” narrative. For those
interested in knowing the harsher, and in many cases more realistic, side of
the Cold War….look no further than Westad’s The
Global Cold War.
[i]
Westad, Odd Arne.
The Global Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 396
[v]
Harvey, David.
Quoted in Westad, 397
