Between East and West: Memories of the Cold War (original) (raw)
The downturn of the East: The end of the Cold War and the American triumph
This paper seeks to answer the following questions: “Can the outcome of the Cold War be characterised as a triumph of US or “Western” liberalism? Alternatively, is there a more convincing interpretation?”. These questions are a broad and a deep argument to cope with at the same time. This work would try to give an attestable response based on the historical contingencies characterising the end of the Cold War and its long-term consequences: the victory of the West and the advent of its model of civilisation. The range of literature on the topic is extremely diverse. Amongst the scholarship, John Ikenberry, Sergio Fabbrini and Geir Lundestad contributed with excellent interpretations of the pivotal historical changes provoked by the end of the Cold War. They demonstrated how the Western model of civilisation not only affected but also shaped the Eastern hemisphere of the World. The choice of literature has been very mindful: considering the different schools of thoughts in the discipline of International Relations, the interpretations of these historians are constructivist, in the sense that they think leadership as the key factor to describe the outcome of the Cold War. The main matter of this research then would be to what extent they were right by verifying whether History gives greenlight to them or not.
The Cold War as a historical period: an interpretive essay
Journal of Global History, 2011
As a historical period, the Cold War may be seen as a rivalry between two nuclear superpowers that threatened global destruction. The rivalry took place within a common frame of reference, in which a new historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism worked in remarkably parallel ways across the superpower divide. The new imperial–national relationship between superpowers and the client states also accommodated developments such as decolonization, multiculturalism, and new ideologies, thus producing a hegemonic configuration characterizing the period. The models of development, structures of clientage, unprecedented militarization of societies, designs of imperial enlightenment, and even many gender and racial/cultural relationships followed similar tracks within, and often between, the two camps. Finally, counter-hegemonic forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world, namely China and some Islamic societies. Did this portend the beginning of the end of a long per...
Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West
2011
Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. 1 Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, 2 and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East. 3
'Was the Cold War Avoidable? Did the West Seek to Win It?: A Contribution to the Debate'
This article tackles two of the major questions in later twentiethcentury international history, the origins and the end of the Cold War. Historians traditionally assumed that Moscow was determined from the outset to Sovietise Eastern Europe, once liberated from Nazism, and that this made the later confrontation with the Western powers inevitable. It will be shown here that the idea to install Moscow-friendly regimes in a Europe destroyed by war had been formulated by Kremlin officials already a decade earlier. The article also argues that the Western alliance became comfortable with the status quo it had previously denounced, and that it was reluctant to upset the East-West equilibrium of later years. In the aftermath of 1989, several Western politicians have claimed the laurels of victory over Communism, but it was the Soviet bloc countries who liberated themselves, despite pleas of officials in London, Washington, Paris, and Bonn to slow down or even suspend their reforms.
Miscarriages of Revisionist Analysis of the Cold War
This paper attempts to make an analysis of the Cold War revisionism through which it will make a critical appraisal of how revisionist historians interpret the Cold War struggle between the US and the Soviet Union. Though now established as a specific episode in history, the Cold War has always been a subject of intense debate among historians, political scientists as well as scholars of International Relations throughout the past half century, not only for its historical significance in shaping the fate of humanity throughout the “short twentieth century”, but also for comprehending the subsequent political repercussions of its end. Therefore, discussing and thus understanding the Cold War and the debates on it is not only a venture in a historical kind, but such an undertaking seems to provide invaluable insights to understand the contemporary international rivalries and to predict the possible outcomes and prospective evolution of them. This comes to mean that for diagnosing the underlying reasons and forms of the contemporary rivalries within the newly-emerging international order, the task is to reveal to what extent the principles and forms of international rivalries diverge or resemble those of the Cold War international order. In order to make such an assessment, there is an urgent need to make a ground-clearing in our understanding of the Cold War. This study posits itself as a part of such venture.
The Origin of the Cold War: A Historiography
This modest paper argues that the Cold War not only determined the contours of international relations between 1945 and 1991 but also shaped our lives in a variety of ways. The Cold War which is generally regarded as a power rivalry short of direct military confrontation between the two superpowers, the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the post-World War II period in world politics, was also a geopolitical, political, economic, ideological and cultural competition between them. Divided into three schools of thought such as the Orthodox or Traditional School, the Revisionist School and the Post-Revisionist or Realist School, historians are still involved in a never-ending debate about the origin of the Cold War. The Traditional School lays the blame for the origin of the Cold War on the USSR and its leader, Joseph Stalin. On the other hand, the Revisionist School blames both the USA and the USSR for the origin of the Cold War but this school blames the USA more significantly in this regard since the USA, a capitalist-imperial power, wanted a global market for its post-World War II industries. The post-Revisionist school blames the USSR while simultaneously arguing that the Cold War originated because of the breakdown of communication between the superpowers. To be sure, the origin of the Cold War is embedded in multi-causality. However, it is better to be involved in ceaseless debates for better understanding and meaning in this regard.
Students on the Cold War. New findings and interpretations
2019
The Cold War History Research Center was established in December 1998, as the first scholarly institution founded as a non-profit organization in East Central Eurpoe. The Center is specialized in historical research in the Cold War era, focusing on the former Soviet Bloc. Since 2009 the Center has been affiliated with the Institute of International Studies at Corvin us University of Budapest, and beginning in 2017, also with the Centre of Social Sciences, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2010, the Center has uniqely organized an annual twoday English language international student conference on the history of the Cold War, with the participation of BA, MA and PhD students. So far 230 students pressented papers from 26 countries of the first seven conferences between 2010 and 2016. Our center proudly presents these excellent research results by motivated students and we hope that this volume will serve as encouragement and will contribute to the emergence of a new generati...
The Cold War and East-Central Europe,1945–1989
Journal of Cold War Studies, 2017
edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana. The book consists of twenty-four essays by leading scholars who survey the Cold War in East-Central Europe from beginning to end. East-Central Europe was where the Cold War began in the mid-1940s, and it was also where the Cold War ended in 1989-1990. Hence, even though research on the Cold War and its effects in other parts of the world-East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa-has been extremely interesting and valuable, a better understanding of events in Europe is essential to understand why the Cold War began, why it lasted so long, and how it came to an end. A good deal of high-quality scholarship on the Cold War in East-Central Europe has existed for many years, and the literature on this topic has burgeoned in the post-Cold War period. Even so, what makes Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open distinctive is not only the many years of detailed knowledge the contributors bring to bear but also their ability to draw extensively on newly declassified archival sources from the former Soviet bloc and from Western countries as well as recently published memoirs and interviews.
An overview of the myriad circumstances that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the de facto victory of democracy over communism in the geopolitical arena.
Unfaithful Reflections: on Cold War Historiography
2011
Introduction: Post-politics? The use of the postas a prefix has a dubious lineage: in the 1950s Daniel Bell announced the advent of a “postideological” society; shortly after, it was the turn of the “post-modern condition,” which brought with it “post-colonialism” and “’post-industrialism,” along with Francis Fukuyama’s “post-historical” – all equally doubtful claims in hindsight. The use of the “post-“ as prefix seems almost inevitably to mark the triumphalist phase of ideologies – the moment their claim to universality becomes common wisdom. That these moments often coincide with the beginning of the ideology’s demise – like the “invisible hand” of the free market on Wall Street today – is evident from the frequency with which such claims are suddenly and theatrically exposed as shams.