The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times: Volume 129 (The Macat Library)
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Westad also pioneered another new approach, which was the study of historical documents from multiple countries. While conducting his research for The Global Cold War, Westad used texts from a wide range of different sources. He examined archives from all over the world and studied documents held in America, Britain, China, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and South Africa. By examining recent historical events from such a wide range of perspectives, Westad identified important factors that previously had gone unnoticed. His multidisciplinary and multi-archival methodology has since emerged as the standard in the field of international history, contributing to the role of The Global Cold War as arguably one of the most significant historical texts since the end of the Cold War in 1991.
NOTES
1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.
2. Westad, The Global Cold War, 3.
3. William Hitchcock, “The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times Roundtable Review,” ed. Thomas Maddux, H-Diplo 8, no. 12 (2007): 4.
Section 1
Influences
Module 1
The Author and the Historical Context
Key Points
The Global Cold War is central to the ongoing debate over Cold War* interventions* in the Third World*—those parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that were subject to European, American, or Russian economic or political domination.
Odd Arne Westad’s experiences as an aid worker in Africa and Asia during the Cold War shaped his understanding of the long-term consequences of Third World interventions.
The recent US interventions in Afghanistan* and Iraq* can be traced to US and Soviet* interventions during the Cold War.
Why Read This Text?
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, published in 2005, is a ground-breaking study of the geopolitical* competition between the United States and the Soviet Union* in the Third World during the Cold War. Geopolitical is the term used to describe politics heavily influenced by geographical factors. Matters of geography—such as the proximity of one state to another, and control over important waterways—were central to the strategies of both superpowers as they jockeyed for global influence.
Westad turned to newly opened national archives in his search for materials from all sides of the conflict that might yield a new understanding of the Cold War.1
“[Having] spent much time in Africa and Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s … I was an excited witness to the social and political changes taking place. I sympathized profoundly with those who attempted to achieve a more just and equitable society, and with those who defended their communities against foreign interventions.”
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Westad’s research, laid out in The Global Cold War, countered the traditional view among Cold War scholars such as John Lewis Gaddis* that the conflict was primarily a struggle for control over Europe.2 While Europe was an important political, military and ideological battleground, Westad argued that scholars had paid too much attention to Europe, and too little attention to the battle for control over parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and, to a lesser degree, the Middle East. Westad also examined the beliefs behind the superpowers’ direct and covert—that is, secretive—actions in the Third World, asserting that their legacies influence global politics today.
Author’s Life
As a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Odd Arne Westad left his working class family, and his hometown, Ålesund, Norway, to serve as an aid worker in Southern Africa* and Pakistan. He later would point to his experiences abroad as the source of his insight into Third World peoples’ struggles.
After returning to Norway he graduated from the University of Oslo with a degree in history, philosophy and modern languages before once again leaving the country, this time, to pursue a doctorate in international history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. There he studied under Michael H. Hunt,* a respected historian who influenced Westad’s trailblazing approach to the Cold War. Westad carried out research in the formerly closed archives of various countries, gaining perspectives that reflected a fuller, fairer picture of the Cold War. Westad’s talent for languages came in handy: he is proficient not only Norwegian, but English, Chinese, French, German, and Russian.3
Westad held academic posts at a handful of institutions—including UNC–Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and the Nobel Institute and the University of Oslo in Norway—before joining the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1998. Prior to settling at LSE he also held visiting fellowships at New York University, Peking University, Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge. By then he had begun putting his research to the test, even debating with such Cold War historian heavyweights as Marilyn Young* and John Lewis Gaddis.
In the summer of 2015 Westad was in line to take up the S. T. Lee Professorship of US-Asia Relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.4
Author’s Background
The Cold War had a profound impact on Westad’s life. As an aid worker, he saw how the Cold War affected the lives of the people he was trying to help in Africa and South Asia.
As a young scholar, Westad decided that most of what he was reading about the Cold War was too focused on Europe—too Eurocentric.* He found that his predecessors had failed to consider the wider impact of the conflict in other parts of the world. After all, he had seen the international effects himself.
Westad’s main intellectual influence was Michael H. Hunt, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Westad earned his doctorate. Hunt had helped develop the so-called post-revisionist* school of Cold War history, which put forward the view that states act in their own interests, and can use strategy and diplomacy to achieve their ends. Post-revisionists like Hunt drew on concepts from international relations, such as realism*—the idea that states share the goals of survival and security—to bring a more nuanced view to the Cold War.
Post-revisionists didn’t merely blame the conflict on either the United States or the Soviet Union,* but began to consider other factors, chiefly in the Third World, that lead to a different approach to Cold War studies.
This new approach was gaining traction at around the same time Russia, China, and some Eastern European countries opened formerly closed archives. By the early 1990s huge sheaths of documents, previously unseen by scholars, were suddenly available for research. The new information gleaned from the archives prompted researchers to question accepted fact, especially with regard to the actions of the Soviet Union and China. Armed with new material and a new approach, Westad was among the scholars who embraced a new school of thought that came to be known as the “New” Cold War History.
NOTES
1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2.
2. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. LSE IDEAS, “Profile: Odd Arne Westad,” October 7, 2014, accessed March 24, 2015, http://www.lse.ac.uk/internationalHistory/whosWho/academicStaff/westad.aspx.
4. LSE IDEAS, “An Interview with Arne Westad,” accessed October 23, 2014, http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/people/directors/arneWestad/Interview-with-Professor-Westad.aspx.
Module 2
Academic Context
Key Points
International history is a broad field that examines events through the lens of international affairs. Research ranges from macro-history (long periods of time) to micro-history (specific events).
The Global Cold War falls into the category of Co
ld War* studies, a field that is divided into several schools of thought: orthodox (traditional), revisionist,* post-revisionist,* and “New” Cold War History.
Westad’s work is part of the “New” Cold War History school of thought.
The Work in its Context
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War falls into the broader category of Cold War studies, a field that emerged at about the same time as the conflict itself. The first known publication on the Cold War was US diplomat George Kennan’s* secret “Long Telegram” of 1946, which argued that the deterioration of US-Soviet relations after WorldWar II* was due to the Soviet Union’s* tendency to seek security by expanding its influence and territory.1 The document, sent by Kennan from Moscow, coincided with spiraling tensions between the superpowers over the continued Soviet occupation of Iran after the war.
The field of Cold War studies has continued to grow ever since the war itself ended in 1991. After all, the all-encompassing nature of the conflict permeated nearly every aspect of life—political, social, and cultural—for more than 40 years. The field has attracted not only historians, but specialists in the fields of international relations, sociology, politics and political philosophy. The work of scholars from such diverse disciplines, coupled with greater access to new sources of information, has served only to reinforce Westad’s multidisciplinary approach toward academic research, contributing to new methods of analysis.
“First and foremost we need to situate the Cold War within the wider history of the Twentieth Century in a global perspective. We need to indicate how Cold War conflicts connect to broader trends in social, economic, and intellectual history as well as to the political and military developments of the longer term of which it forms a part.”
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Overview of the Field
There are competing interpretations of the Cold War. Supporters of the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, have tried to portray the conflict in their favor.
Initially, British historian E. H. “Ted” Carr,* a Marxist* scholar who helped establish the modern realist* school of thought,2 argued that the Cold War was a byproduct of the West’s inability to empathize with the Soviet world view.3 And Kennan, the US diplomat, argued that the Cold War was a byproduct of Soviet expansionism*.4 Kennan convinced US leaders to adopt a policy known as containment,* which sought to limit Soviet expansion through a global system of alliances.
By the early 1960s, scholars began to challenge the so-called “orthodox” (traditional) point of view that the Soviet Union started the Cold War. In 1963 William Appleman Williams* wrote The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, which argued that the war was a by-product of American, not Soviet, expansionism.5 Williams’s revisionist* account (that is, one which challenged the mainstream view), led to the emergence of a post-revisionist* school of thought in the 1970s. This school was promoted by noted scholars like American historian John Lewis Gaddis, who argued that neither superpower was to blame for the Cold War.6
Since 1991 the “New” Cold War History school of thought— based on the documents available in previously closed Soviet, Chinese and Eastern European archives—has held sway. And Westad’s The Global Cold War stands at the forefront of this “New” Cold War History.
Academic Influences
Westad’s work is heavily influenced by the work of other historians, most notably that of his doctoral supervisor, Michael H. Hunt.* In Hunt’s key 1987 book, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, he writes that “ideology has figured prominently in virtually all attempts to account in broad, interpretive terms for American entry into the thicket of international relations.”7 Westad was influenced, too, by the work of historian Anders Stephanson,* who argued that the Cold War was driven mainly by American ideology—whereas the Soviet Union, conscious of its relative weakness, reacted to US interventions.8 In fact, this point of view is explored in the first two chapters of Westad’s The Global Cold War.
Westad also was influenced by the work of his friend, historian Melvyn Leffler,* who called for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of history.9 Both men co-edited Cambridge History of the Cold War. Finally, Westad responded to Gaddis’s call for Cold War scholars to explore newly available sources in China and the former Soviet bloc— work for which Westad’s language skills were especially helpful.10
Westad found inspiration, too, in sociology,11 specifically the work of American scholar Theda Skocpol,* who argued that “international contexts” could help make sense of much about the “social-revolutionary regimes” in the Third World*—notably notions of class and concepts of modernity.12
It is unsurprising, given Westad’s influences, that The Global Cold War is steeped in ideological analysis, and driven by a multidisciplinary, multi-archival approach.
NOTES
1. George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23331/x/the-sources-of-soviet-conduct.
2. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: an Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), established Carr as a realist. On his Marxist views, see Tamara Deutscher, “E. H. Carr: a Personal Memoir,” New Left Review 1, no.137 (1983): 79.
3. Hillel Ticktin, “Carr, the Cold War, and the Soviet Union,” in Michael Cox, ed., E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 145–61.
4. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”
5. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing Company Inc., 1962).
6. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–47 (Columbia University Press, 1972).
7. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 5–6.
8. Anders Stephanson, “The United States,” in The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, ed. David Reynolds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
9. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 13.
10. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 1(1993): 1–16.
11. Odd Arne Westad, “Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World,” Journal of Peace Research 29, no. 4 (1992): 455.
12. Theda Skocpol, “Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization,” World Politics 40, no. 2 (1988): 158.
Module 3
The Problem
Key Points
When The Global Cold War was first published in 2005, Cold War* scholars were locked in a debate over the causes of the conflict.
The three main positions were: The Soviet Union* caused the Cold War (orthodox); the United States was at fault (revisionist*); and neither side was at fault (post-revisionist*).
When national archives were opened after the end of the Cold War, a new school of thought emerged called “New” Cold War History.* Westad, who supported the post-revisionist view of the conflict, sought to shift the debate away from Europe and toward the Third World,* where, he argued, the effects of the Cold War lingered.
Core Question
When Odd Arne Westad wrote The Global Cold War, a major debate was taking place over the very nature of the Cold War. Was it simply a European conflict that expanded beyond Europe’s borders? Or was it, in fact, a global conflict? Inspired by his experiences in the Third World as an aid worker during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Westad was convinced that the conflict was global, and he sought to reframe the debate by shifting the discussion toward the Third World.
The central question Westad asks in The Global Cold War is straightforward, yet wholly original: why did the United States and the Soviet Union—the superpowers of the day—intervene so aggressively in the Third World during the Cold War? The answer cuts to the main th
rust of Westad’s research, namely the role that the two superpowers* played in shaping the dynamics in the Third World today.
“This is a book about the creation of today’s world, about how the great powers of the late Twentieth Century—the United States and the Soviet Union— repeatedly intervened in processes of change in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and through these interventions fueled many of the states, movements, and ideologies that increasingly dominate international affairs [today].”
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Westad argued that interventionism* was relevant because decolonization*—the period between 1946 and 1975 when European imperial powers granted independence to their colonies— had fundamentally changed the relationships between powerful European states and their former colonies across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Already ideological differences over the nature of the modern state had fostered a tense and polarized global political system.
The United States viewed its interventions as defensive: they saw themselves as preventing the spread of communism* to the Third World. This also reflected the Soviets’ own view of its interventions, which was to spread communism to the Third World. Soviet enthusiasm would waver, however, as the costs of intervention spiraled. Both superpowers agreed on one thing, however: they believed that Third World peoples were not sufficiently “developed” or “civilized” to swiftly adopt either democratic (and capitalist*) or communist systems on their own.