Melvyn P. Leffler

The Cambridge History of the Cold War

The Cambridge History of the Cold War is a comprehensive, international history of the conflict that dominated world politics in the twentieth century. The three-volume series, written by leading international experts in the field, elucidates how the Cold War evolved from the geopolitical, ideological, economic and socio-political environment of the two World Wars and the interwar era, and explains the global dynamics of the Cold War international system. It emphasises how the Cold War bequeathed conditions, challenges and conflicts that shape international affairs today. With discussions of demography and consumption, women and youth, science and technology, ethnicity and race, the volumes encompass the social, intellectual and economic history of the twentieth century, shedding new light on the evolution of the Cold War. Through its various geographical and national angles, the series signifies a transformation of the field from a national – primarily American – to a broader international approach.

Origins of the cold war : an international history

Introduction: The International System and the Origins of the Cold War David S. Painter and Melvyn P. Leffler Part 1: Soviet and American Strategy and Diplomacy 1. National Security and US Foreign Policy Melvyn P. Leffler 2. Stalin and Soviet Foreign Policy Geoffrey Roberts 3. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War Martin J. Sherwin 4. Stalin and the Bomb David Holloway Part 2: Three Cold War Crises: Iran, Turkey and Greece 5. The Iranian Crisis of 1946 and the Origins of the Cold War Fernande Scheid Raine 6. The Turkish War Scare of 1946 Eduard Mark 7. The Greek Civil War Thanasis D. Sfikas Part 3: Europe and the Cold War 8. British Policy and the Origins of the Cold War John Kent 9. The European Dimension of the Cold War David Reynolds 10. The Russians in Germany Norman Naimark 11. Communism in Bulgaria Vesselin Dimitriov 12. Stalin and the Italian Communists Silvio Pons 13. Hegemony and Autonomy Within the Western Alliance Charles S. Maier Part 4: The Cold War in Asia, Africa and Latin America 14. From the Marshall Plan to the Third World Robert E. Wood 15. Revolutionary Movements in Asia and the Cold War Michael H. Hunt 16. Stalin and the Korean WarKathryn Weathersby 17. Mao and Sino-American Relations Chen Jian 18. The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough 19. The United States, the Cold War and the Color Line Thomas Borstelmann. Epilogue: The End of the Cold War David S. Painter and Melvyn P. Leffler

Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened

Only three or four years ago, historians of the Cold War worked without knowing what was in Soviet archives. They relied heavily on Western records, inferring the motivations and goals of Soviet foreign policy. But the Russians and their former Warsaw Pact allies have begun to open their records for research. The Chinese, too, have opened selected materials, espe cially ones that illuminate the duplicity and depravity of the men in the Kremlin. Regime changes and liberalization in many countries have made former offi cials more reflective and more willing to write about their years in power. Pondering the archival documents, memoirs, and new assessments, one asks how they might affect debate about the origins and evolution of the Cold War. They reveal a Soviet system as revolting as its worst critics charged long ago. Some scholars go further, asserting that the archives confirm not only the genocidal actions and fundamental brutality of the regime but also its ideological underpin nings and hegemonic aspirations. The highly publicized 1994 television docu mentary Messengers from Moscow resusci tated the old claim that Stalin planned to conquer the globe for Marxism-Leninism,

Ideology and the origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962

Russia’s Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 triggered a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States that would last much of the twentieth century. In its early years, each side aimed to transform the other. American–Soviet conflict became global only in the 1940s, at which point it shaped the international system and every nation in it. In addition to competition over markets or territories, this new form of struggle – the Cold War – was at its root a battle of ideas: American liberalism vs. Soviet Communism. The ideologies animating the Cold War had centuries-long pedigrees, emerging by the early twentieth century as powerful and compelling visions for social change. These ideologies – explicit ideas and implicit assumptions that provided frameworks for understanding the world and defining action in it – were not antithetical to material interests, but often shaped the way foreign-policy officials understood such interests. Ideologies were lenses that focused, and just as often distorted, understandings of external events and thus the actions taken in response. Ideologies in conflict and in common Though American leaders typically proclaimed their immunity from ideological temptations, this self-perception ignored a rich tradition of American thought and policy that developed, defined, and acted upon a clear set of ideological premises. The foreign policy of the United States, like so much else in that country, drew on a long tradition of liberalism originating in the ideas of John Locke. As the etymology suggests, Lockean liberalism was, its core, a theory of liberty, one that viewed liberty as defined for the individual, based in law, and rooted in property. The Declaration Independence paraphrased Locke in proclaiming human beings “endowed by their Creator” with rights to “life, liberty and [where Locke had emphasized property] the pursuit of happiness.” Liberty could be protected only by a system of laws in a polity guaranteeing popular sovereignty. A government, furthermore, should provide only formal freedoms (protecting the rights of property and participation), not substantive ones (equality of condition).

Decolonization, the global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962

In 1900, most of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East were ruled directly or indirectly by the Euro-American colonial powers. As late as the outbreak of World War II, almost a billion of the world’s people lived under direct colonial rule. But in the two decades after 1945 imperial order collapsed. At times peacefully, but often after protracted warfare and violence, the imperial powers eventually ceded independence to most of South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East by the mid-1950s. Independence movements ruptured much of the rest of the imperial world over the next decade. In Africa, the year 1960 alone brought independence to seventeen former colonies. Ten more African states would gain their independence over the next several years, as would former colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. One dramatic measure of the rapidity and scope of this shift in the constitution of world political order was the enlargement of the United Nations. At its founding in 1945, the UN included 51 member states. In 1965, the number had more than doubled to 117, with a majority of the increase made up of states in the global South that formerly had been colonies. Making sense of these complex events and processes — which crossed time, space, and cultures and were just as much highly contingent and local as they were part of larger shifts in global power and sensibilities — has presented conceptual difficulties for historians. The very terms by which to analyze the phenomena of decolonization have been unusually vexed. For historians of Euro-American empire, decolonization marks the final chapter of high imperialism. It is often viewed through the lens of actors in the metropole and colonial administrators on the ground, emphasizing the ways they shaped both the timing and the trajectories of independence. Historians of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, more concerned with the experiences of the colonized than the colonizers, have argued that such a narrative risks reinscribing patterns of Western imperial power and denies agency to local actors. In this view, independence was not so much given as taken, and anticolonial actors and their construction of postcolonial states and society become central elements of the story. More recently, the meanings of empire and its dissolution have been seen as overlapping and intertwined processes in which the historical experiences of metropole and colony, albeit under considerable differentials of power, mutually constituted one another.

The Cold War and human rights

Neither the course nor the ending of the Cold War can be understood without some reference to the impact that human rights ideas had on East–West rivalries. Whereas Communist governments regarded civil and political rights as bourgeois trappings, stating a preference instead for the collective rights appropriate to the social and economic goals they propounded, Western liberal capitalist governments gave priority precisely to those rights that the Soviet bloc derided. These divisions in interpretation were crucial because of the way they related to the broader contest. They were ’not mere preferences which outsiders could take or leave’, but were powerful emblems of success on the ideological battleground. The gaining of adherents to one interpretation over another signalled victory for one and defeat for the other – outcomes that, in turn, could strengthen or undermine the domestic legitimacy of their competing political systems. This particular aspect of the Cold War struggle had both positive and negative results for the promotion and protection of human rights. Rhetorical arguments about the priorities to be given to certain values helped to sustain attention to the human rights idea, even as actual behaviour could prove devastating for human rights protections. Similarly, some of the seeds of the ending of the Cold War germinated as a result of the disillusion of those who experienced the double standards and the failures to promote the conditions under which those protections could advance.

The Marshall Plan and the creation of the West

Few US government programs have had so good a press as the Marshall Plan, which delivered some

The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975

12.3 billion in aid to Europe between 1948 and the end of 1951. The fiftieth anniversary of the plan, in 1997, produced a flood of studies and conference reports that all shared the view, as one Marshall Plan official put it in his memoir, “that Marshall Plan dollars did save the world.” Calls for subsequent “Marshall Plans” for troubled regions such as the Balkans, post-1990s Russia, the Middle East, and Africa reveal the talismanic quality the very name has attained. For some decades now, scholars have been working to historicize the Marshall Plan and to take this legendary program out of the realm of myth and submit it to historical analysis. In doing so, they have significantly revised early accounts that saw the Marshall Plan as a beneficent rescue plan for war-torn Europe. For example, the economic impact of the plan has been significantly downgraded as scholars concluded that the crisis of 1947 in Europe was less grave than American policymakers had thought. Furthermore, the role of the Marshall Plan in exacerbating, perhaps precipitating, the division of Europe is now recognized, despite Marshall’s initial claim that his offer of aid was not directed against any country or doctrine. The role of the Marshall Plan in promoting European economic integration has been questioned, and the demise of the plan in 1951, at a time when European economies were again facing economic crisis, inflation, and budget deficits, suggests a less-than-perfect performance. These critiques must be taken seriously. Yet in focusing narrowly on the short-term impact of the plan, they often fail to capture its historical significance. It was far more than a foreign aid program. It represented the first stage in the construction of that community of ideas, economic links, and security ties between Europe and the United States we know simply as “the West.” Though it grew into an ambitious project for European recovery, the Marshall Plan emerged primarily from the evident failures of American policy in occupied Germany. At the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had agreed to govern defeated and occupied Germany as a single economic unit, even though they also agreed that Germany was to be divided into four zones (the fourth going to France). This contradiction, obvious even then, nonetheless was accepted as a workable program to guide a slow and carefully constrained German economic recovery while also ensuring that no central German administration would emerge to threaten the peace of Europe again.

Science, technology, and the Cold War

In 1958, only one year after his country gained independence from Britain, the Ghanaian prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In addition to a resolute anti-imperialism, he emphasized that two related imperatives would play a crucial role in shaping the orientation of Africa toward the wider world. First, the tremendous “industrial and military power concentrated behind the two great powers in the Cold War” demanded that the new states of Africa pursue a policy of non-alignment. In Africa, Nkrumah insisted, “the opportunities of health and education and a wider vision which other nations take for granted are barely within reach of our people.” To preserve their impoverished continent from devastating violence, African nations would have to remain apart from the Cold War’s military alliances, rivalries, and strife. Second, Africa would have to seek dramatically accelerated development. Colonial overlords had failed to deliver promised advances, but “now comes our response. We cannot tell our peoples that material benefits and growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more. And they will abandon us, too, if we do not in reasonable measure respond to their hopes. We have modernize.”

Western Europe and the end of the Cold War, 1979–1989

History has seen many ferocious ideological conflicts, including the Crusades and the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. What made the Cold War peculiarly dangerous and ubiquitous was the power of modern technology, most obviously nuclear weapons. But other new technologies were equally central: out of a vast range this chapter looks particularly at transistors, satellites, and computers. On both sides, the Cold War spawned massive military-industrial complexes, but the American version was much better integrated with the larger economy and society. The Soviet system, by contrast, suppressed the civilian economy and restricted the flow of information.; In the short term, this enabled the Soviet Union to punch above its economic weight as a military power. By the 1980s, however, technology and information had become the Soviet Achilles heel. The varieties of ‘Big Science’ ‘When history looks at the twentieth century’, wrote the American physicist Alvin Weinberg in 1961, ‘she will see science and technology as its theme; she will find in the monuments of Big Science’, such as huge rockets and particle accelerators, ‘symbols of our time just as surely as she finds in Notre Dame a symbol of the Middle Ages.