The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times: Volume 129 (The Macat Library)
Page 1
An Analysis of
Odd Arne Westad’s
The Global Cold War
Glen Patrick
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Contents
Ways in to the Text
Who Is Odd Arne Westad?
What Does The Global Cold War Say?
Why Does The Global Cold War Matter?
Section 1: Influences
Module 1: The Author and The Historical Context
Module 2: Academic Context
Module 3: The Problem
Module 4: The Author’s Contribution
Section 2: Ideas
Module 5: Main Ideas
Module 6: Secondary Ideas
Module 7: Achievement
Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work
Section 3: Impact
Module 9: The First Responses
Module 10: The Evolving Debate
Module 11: Impact and Influence Today
Module 12: Where Next?
Glossary of Terms
People Mentioned in the Text
Works Cited
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Critical Thinking and The Global Cold War
Primary critical thinking skill: CREATIVE THINKING
Secondary critical thinking skill: REASONING
For those who lived through the Cold War period, and for many of the historians who study it, it seemed self-evident that the critical incidents that determined its course took place in the northern hemisphere, specifically in the face-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe. In this view, the Berlin Wall mattered more than the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary was vastly more significant than Soviet intervention in Korea. It was only the fine balance of power in the northern theatre that redirected the attentions of the USA and the USSR elsewhere, and resulted in outbreaks of proxy warfare elsewhere in the globe - in Korea, in Vietnam and in Africa.
Odd Arne Westad’s triumph is to look at the history of these times through the other end of the telescope – to reconceptualize the Cold War as something that fundamentally happened in the Third World, not the First. The thesis he presents in The Global Cold War is highly creative. It upends much conventional wisdom and points out that the determining factor in the struggle was not geopolitics, but ideology – an ideology, moreover, that was heavily flavoured by elements of colonialist thinking that ought to have been alien to the mindsets of two avowedly anti-colonial superpowers. Westad’s work is a fine example of the creative thinking skill of coming up with new connections and fresh solutions; it also never shies away from generating new hypotheses or redefining issues in order to see them in new way
s.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK
A multilingual historian who writes and lectures in English, French, Chinese, German, Russian, and Norwegian, Odd Arne Westad was born in Ålesund, a port town on Norway’s west coast, in 1960. As a young aid worker, he witnessed first hand the effects of United States and Soviet Union interventionist foreign policies in countries outside Europe. These experiences shaped Westad’s enduring interest in the Cold War period and its overlooked global impact.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE ANALYSIS
Dr Patrick Glen is received his doctorate from the University of Sheffield. He currently works as a member of the faculty of the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford.
Dr Bryan Gibson holds a PhD in International History from the London School of Economics (LSE) and was a post- doctoral research fellow at the LSE’s Centre for Diplomacy and Strategy and an instructor on Middle Eastern politics in the LSE’s Department of International History and the University of East Anglia’s Department of Political, Social and International Studies (PSI). He is currently on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
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Ways in to the Text
Key Points
Odd Arne Westad is a Norwegian-born historian whose academic work focuses on the effects of the Cold War* in what he refers to as the Third World.*
Westad’s book, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, aims to shift research on the Cold War away from Europe and toward the Third World.
The Global Cold War taps previously inaccessible Cold War archives—from China, the Soviet Union,* and the United States—in its unique historical approach.
Who Is Odd Arne Westad?
Odd Arne Westad was born in 1960 in Ålesund, Norway, and raised by working-class parents. As a young man he worked as an aid worker in Pakistan and Southern Africa* in the late 1970s and early 1980s, gaining personal insight into the ways the Cold War affected the Third World—that is, the former colonial* or semicolonial countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that were subject to European, American, and Russian economic or political domination. Westad describes his book, The Global Cold War, as both the result of his academic work, and “a residue” from the years he spent in South Asia and Africa, where “I was an excited witness to the social and political changes taking place.”1
Westad graduated from the University of Oslo with a degree in history, philosophy and modern languages before earning a doctorate in international history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There he studied under professor of history emeritus Michael H. Hunt,* who helped shape Westad’s approach toward Cold War study. Before he became a professor in the late 1990s at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Westad held academic posts at UNC–Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the University of Oslo. He also held visiting fellowships at University of Cambridge, University of Hong Kong, New York University, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
From 2004 to 2008 Westad was head of LSE’s Department of International History, and in 2008 cofounded LSE IDEAS, a center for international affairs, diplomacy* (the activity of managing international relations), and strategy. Westad—a fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and the social sciences—was slated in the summer of 2015 to assume the S. T. Lee Professorship of US-Asia Relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Westad is proficient in a number of languages, including Chinese, English, French, German, Norwegian and Russian.
Westad’s growing prominence as a scholar of the Cold War, combined with his role in convincing colleagues to draw upon multiple archives in their research, has spurred a flurry of scholarship that re-examines the Cold War through the prism of the Third World.
What Does The Global Cold War Say?
Westad argues that the intervention of superpowers* across the Third World during the Cold War continues to have a destabilizing effect on international affairs today. He defines an intervention as “any concerted and state-led effort by one country to determine the political direction of another country.”2 Westad cites as examples the direct military action of the United States and Soviet Union in countries such as Afghanistan,* Angola,* Cuba,* Iran,* Korea,* and Vietnam.* His case studies show that direct military intervention by the Cold War superpowers had a destabilizing effect not only on specific countries, but also on entire geographic regions.
Westad also cites countless numbers of covert (secret) actions undertaken by both superpowers throughout the Third World. Overt and covert intervention, according to Westad, was critical to what was called the zero-sum game* in which one superpower’s loss was seen as the other’s gain.
Westad traces the reasons for intervention to the aftermath of World War II,* which brought about the military and ideological defeat of the radical, right-wing political theories of Nazi Germany* and Fascist Italy.* When the war ended there was a rush to fill the ideological vacuum between the capitalist* West (represented by the United States) and the communist* East (represented by the Soviet Union), heightening global competition for influence and power.
Relations between the superpowers had deteriorated since the end of the war, during which they were allies, and each country had embraced competing concepts of world order. Westad’s detailed examination of the ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union found that both countries saw themselves as natural successor states to the Enlightenment*—the European intellectual movement from which arose concepts of freedom
and social justice—even though the superpowers disagreed over the very meaning of the concepts.
In short, at the end of World War II a geostrategic* contest for influence in the Third World began between the United States and Soviet Union. Geostrategy is the term for strategy that is adopted through the study of how geography and economics impact on politics and relations between states.
A decade after it was published, The Global Cold War is recognized as a pioneering study and a key text in the school of thought known as the “New” Cold War History. In its first 10 years the book has been cited in more than 725 academic works. William Hitchcock,* a professor of history at the University of Virginia, writes: “The Global Cold War is the most original and path-breaking work of Cold War history to have been published since the end of the Cold War itself.”3
Why Does The Global Cold War Matter?
Published in 2005, Westad’s book matters because it makes a very bold challenge to a core belief that had lasted for decades. This was the understanding that the Cold War was essentially a struggle for global dominance between two largely Eurocentric* states, the United States and the Soviet Union, that was played out primarily in Europe. According to Westad, Third World conflicts of the era should no longer be seen as peripheral, nor as mere extensions of both states’ political, military, and ideological struggle for control of Europe. Rather, the Cold War was at its heart a struggle for the Third World.
While The Global Cold War did not offer a comprehensive examination of the role of the Cold War across all of the Third World, it nonetheless served as a model for future research. The book introduced a new method of analysis that calls on scholars to identify and use research from beyond their respective fields of study (for example, history, political science and sociology).