The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times: Volume 129 (The Macat Library)

by Patrick Glenn

  Third World leaders initially resisted superpower intervention, but they eventually aligned themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union in an effort to resolve domestic social and political problems, according to Westad.

  Until the publication of The Global Cold War, scholars had not studied in depth the interventions by superpowers in the Third World—let alone the ideological reasons behind them.1 But when previously closed archives were opened after the end of the war, Westad mined the sources. Westad’s research enables us to better understand past interventions in the Third World; it has also challenged the belief that the effects of the Cold War ended in 1991 with the victory of liberal democracy—the political system that emphasizes human and civil rights, along with regular and free elections between competing political parties.

  The Participants

  It made sense that early analyses of the Cold War viewed the conflict as an extension of the struggle for influence over Europe between the United States and the Soviet Union.2 In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union had established a series of Eastern European buffer states.* It even imposed communist* forms of government—bound to Moscow—in countries of the Middle East and East Asia. The United States, in an effort to contain the Soviet Union, responded by establishing a series of collective security* alliances, including notably the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).* In such a context it was logical for academics to interpret the conflict as European, because the early phase of the Cold War was focused primarily on Europe.

  Initially US diplomat George Kennan* argued that the Soviet Union, bent on expansion, started the Cold War. Then revisionist* historians, such as Walter LaFeber,* contended that the United States’ fierce anti-communist stance turned regional conflicts into major confrontations, even in the absence of many, or any, Soviet connections.3 By the 1970s scholars known as post-revisionists,* led by John Lewis Gaddis,* argued that both superpowers were equally to blame.4 All the same, the post-revisionists viewed Europe as the main battlefield of the Cold War, and viewed the events of the Third World as marginal.5 Westad’s book, The Global Cold War, refuted that argument by showing that the primary Cold War battlefields were in fact in the Third World.

  The Contemporary Debate

  After the Cold War ended, Westad and some of his colleagues, who had begun to refer to themselves as “New” Cold War historians, focused less on the origins of the war and more on its broader context. These “new” historians, among whom Westad was a pioneer, viewed the war from a neutral perspective in regards to the United States and Soviet Union. The historians also based their research on a variety of academic disciplines. Increasingly, research into the Cold War pointed to small conflicts and interventions in the Third World.

  Among those who embraced the “New” Cold War History approach, Westad was the most successful in shifting the focus away from Europe and toward the Third World. Certainly others, notably historian Piero Gleijeses,* contributed to the body of research showing that the Cold War was about more than US and Soviet interests—that other countries in other parts of the world had interests too.6 In 2003 Gleijeses* wrote about Cuba’s role in the Angolan Civil War, for example.* But Westad explained the nature of the Cold War in the most clear terms, steering readers toward new information that would change the course of academic debate. His resulting book, The Global Cold War, was the launch pad for future Cold War studies in the Third World.

  NOTES

  1. See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  2. George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23331/x/the-sources-of-soviet-conduct.

  3. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War 1945–2006 (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006).

  4. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–47 (Columbia University Press, 1972).

  5. John Lewis Gaddis, What We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): 282–3.

  6. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

  Module 4

  The Author’s Contribution

  Key Points

  Westad believes ideology was the determining factor in the interventions* of superpowers* across the Third World* during the Cold War.*

  The Global Cold War, challenges accepted research asserting that political, geostrategic,* and/or economic factors determined the extent to which the superpowers intervened.

  Ideology had long been an important factor in analyses of the origins of the Cold War, but Westad was the first to point to ideology to explain the actions of both superpowers.

  Author’s Aims

  Odd Arne Westad said he wrote The Global Cold War to find out why the United States and the Soviet Union* intervened as they had in the Third World during the Cold War. He believed his archival research showed that both superpowers acted according to modernist* ideologies—ideas of citizenship, human progress and technological change—while maintaining elements of colonialist* thinking. Colonialism is the creation and exploitation of a colony in one territory by people from a different territory. Social and political developments across the Third World, he found, were more important to the Cold War than military, strategic, or Europe-centered factors.”1

  Westad believed that assumptions about the two hyper-competitive, seemingly anti-colonial* superpowers—combined with a number of lesser factors—motivated decisions to intervene in the Third World. The United States and the Soviet Union both tried to impose their own ideologies on newly independent former colonies as well as trying to prevent the other superpower from succeeding. Westad hoped to show that the United States and the Soviet Union had undermined the political development of former colonies across the Third World even as leaders and elite of the new states turned to superpowers for help in dealing with decolonization.*

  “The Cold War is generally assumed to have been a contest between two superpowers over military power and strategic control, mostly over Europe. This book, on the contrary, claims that the most important aspects of the Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centered, but connected to political and social development in the Third World.”

  Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

  Westad also simply wanted to explain the Cold War more clearly. The behavior of the superpowers, he argued, had destabilized developing countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. For example, US support in the 1980s for Mujahideen*— Muslims who proclaim themselves warriors for the faith—against Soviet-led forces in Afghanistan helped spawn the militant Islamist organization, Al-Qaeda.* Al-Qaeda carried out terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, that are known simply as 9/11.* Westad held that US intervention in Afghanistan during the nine-year Soviet war could be said to have led to subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan* and Iraq* as well.

  Westad’s The Global Cold War shows, for the first time, how interventions in the Third World during the Cold War had a direct impact on global politics today.

  Approach

  Westad shifted the debate among academics studying the Cold War by posing a simple question: why did the United States and the Soviet Union intervene in the Third World? The search for an answer fostered a new school of thought, the “New” Cold War History*, and dashed theories that had been accepted since the 1950s.2

  In The Global Cold War, Westad built upon his research for the 2000 book, Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory. Here, he wrote: “New Cold War History is in its essence multi-archival in research and multipolar in analysis, and, in the cases of some of the best practitioners, multicultural in its ability to understand different and sometimes opposing mindsets.”3 By analyzin
g the Cold War from a single perspective, whether US or Soviet, scholars had reduced a complex conflict to a single point of view. According to Westad, scholars needed to cast a wider net to better understand the recent past.

  For example, relying on US sources to study Iraqi history would yield an American, not an Iraqi, perspective. Such an approach is by no means entirely wrong; some academics specialize in US foreign policy from a US perspective. Westad would argue, however, that the study of Iraqi history would be much more accurate if researchers used a wide variety of sources—not only Iraqi, but American, Egyptian, French, Iranian, Jordanian, Soviet, and Syrian.

  Contribution in Context

  Although Westad’s multidisciplinary and multi-archival approach to research was not wholly original, his belief that Cold War studies needed to concentrate on the Third World, not Europe, was wholly unique.

  Groundbreaking research often happens when scholars apply ideas and concepts from other fields to their own work. For example, Kenneth Waltz,* the prominent American political scientist, developed his neorealist* theory of international relations by combining the study of international relations with the concepts of positivism* and systems theory* developed by French sociologist Émile Durkheim.* The neorealist theory holds that in international relations it is issues of structure—such as anarchy and the distribution of world power—that determine how states behave. Positivism is a theory stating that information (in this case historical analysis) must be based on what is seen and heard in the real world. Systems theory holds that the behavior of units within a system is defined by the characteristics of the entire system, rather than by the particular units alone.

  In the same way, Westad chose to apply methods from other disciplines—ranging from history and political science to sociology and international relations—to make sure his analysis was as far-reaching as possible. And that’s why his approach was so rare for the times. Westad believed that historians needed to look at many different kinds of evidence to build the best-possible explanation of historical events. It helped that he was fluent in at least five languages. Westad could easily navigate multiple countries’ archives by reading, in the original, interviews and other documents culled from secondary sources. Westad’s approach, coupled with his language skills, yielded knowledge of the Cold War that had not been seen before.

  NOTES

  1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 396.

  2. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  3. Odd Arne Westad, Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000), 5.

  Section 2

  Ideas

  Module 5

  Main Ideas

  Key Points

  The key themes of The Global Cold War are the Cold War,* the Third World* and intervention.*

  The central argument of the book is that the intervention of superpowers* during the Cold War destabilized international affairs today.

  To prove his point, Westad traced the motivation for intervention to the respective ideologies of the superpowers* the United States and the Soviet Union.*

  Key Themes

  The primary aim of Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times was to examine US and Soviet interventions in the Third World during the Cold War. He viewed the Cold War as a conflict over competing concepts of European modernity, and said that both superpowers saw themselves as the ideological heirs of those concepts: “The United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics.” To prove the universal appeal of their own ideologies, Westad added, “Washington and Moscow needed to change the world … and the elites of the newly independent states proved fertile ground for their competition. By helping to expand the domains of freedom and justice, both powers saw themselves as assisting the natural trends in world history and as defending their own security at the same time.”1

  Key to Westad’s argument are three main concepts: Cold War, Third World, and intervention. In the opening pages of The Global Cold War, Westad defines each theme in clear terms:

  “It is very unfortunate, though, that much ‘New’ Cold War History sees ideology as first and foremost a Soviet phenomenon. To me it has become more and more obvious that it, using the definition above, was even more important on the US side on the conflict.”

  Odd Arne Westad, H-Diplo Roundtable Review

  “‘Cold War’ means the period in which the global conflict between the United States and Soviet Union dominated international affairs, roughly between 1945 and 1991. ‘Third World’ means the former colonial* or semicolonial countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that were subject to European (or rather pan-European, including American and Russian) economic or political domination … ‘Intervention’ means any concerted and state-led effort by one country to determine the political direction of another country.”2

  Exploring the Ideas

  At the core of Westad’s argument is the idea that both superpowers saw themselves as natural heirs to the Enlightenment,* the European intellectual movement that spawned the concepts of freedom and social justice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From Westad’s perspective, the military defeat of the radical right-wing ideologies of Nazi Germany* and Fascist Italy* in World War II* created an ideological vacuum that both the capitalist* West, and the communist* East, tried to fill. However, the ideological struggle— United States capitalism versus the Soviet Union’s communism— soon became a geostrategic* contest—a competition based on building political allies among nations—for global dominance.

  In 1945 British novelist George Orwell* first used the term, “Cold War,” to describe the undeclared state of war between the United States and the Soviet Union.* By the 1950s the term was being used to characterize the US concept of warfare-—“hot” war implied outright warfare, and “cold” war implied military tension. The United States sought to limit Soviet expansionism* by establishing global alliances and sidestepping direct conflict, a policy termed containment.* Today the term, “Cold War,” is used to describe the period of heightened tensions between the two superpowers from 1947 to 1991.3

  The concept of a Third World emerged in the 1950s to define developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the term itself gained popularity after the Bandung Conference of 1955,* at which leaders of newly independent African and Asian states declared neutrality in the tug of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. By then, the concept of a Third World encompassed the so-called “global south,” which comprised the majority of the world’s population—the peoples Westad said “had been downtrodden and enslaved through colonialism.”* Westad further explained the concept of a Third World as having a “distinct position in Cold War terms, the refusal to be ruled by the superpowers and their ideologies, the search for alternatives both to capitalism and communism, a ‘third way’… for the newly liberated states.”4

  Finally, central to The Global Cold War is the concept of intervention. The United States and the Soviet Union used similar means to transfer their respective visions to the Third World, including economic assistance, development programs, and propaganda.* Consequently, given the aggressive competition for influence, minor squabbles within a country or region could erupt into serious crises if one of the superpowers intervened to protect what it perceived to be its national interests or simply to prevent the other superpower from gaining influence.

  Language and Expression

  The first two chapters of The Global Cold War examine the historical background, ideological development and interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. Westad argues in the first chapter that “discourses on liberty, progress, and cit
izenship already in the early years of the [US] republic’s existence set an ideological pattern of involvement with the Third World that has persisted to this day.” He shows in the second chapter how the Soviets inherited many of the problems that plagued Imperial Russia,* and tried to eradicate them through an “emphasis on a collective form of modernity, which via the Comintern* and Soviet foreign policy they tried to spread to other parts of the world.” The Comintern was a Soviet organization founded to support socialist movements in the overthrow of capitalist governments.

  The third chapter of the book examines the Cold War from a Third World perspective. Westad explains the thinking of Third World revolutionaries, reveals a link between decolonization* and Cold War escalation, and shows how Third World leaders used the Cold War to their advantage by pitting the two superpowers against each other. The remaining chapters comprise case studies: Afghanistan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran, Southern Africa, and Vietnam.

  Ultimately, the clear language Westad uses to structure his argument only enhances the value of his book because it helps a wide range of readers—from undergraduates to established scholars and general readers—grasp complex arguments.