New Histories of the Cold War: Violence, Structural Change, and Absences

There are so many possible topics I’d like to cover in our discussion, including how these books add to earlier works of Cold War history by John Lewis Gaddis and Odd Arne Westad and how they address current initiatives to “re-center” the United States in the conflict’s history, and how they take into account the growing accessibility of archival materials from places like Beijing, New Delhi, and Belgrade. If you are interested in books on humanities and social sciences, feel free to reach out to us.

Given that a pandemic has nearly completely stopped typical research trips to archives, they appear against this backdrop. As the historical profession considers the benefits of digitalization and the environmental costs of long-distance travel, I believe there may also be an opportunity to consider whether there is a future for these kinds of large, multi-archival, synthetic books.

Last but not least, I would like to talk about how you view your work in the context of these works and what you can learn from Spohr’s, Lüthi’s, and Chamberlain’s interventions as you work on your own projects or think about future ones. There are, in essence, countless directions that I would enjoy steering our audio chat.

I’d want to start by concentrating on two themes, specifically how Cold War historians conceptualize violence and structural change, which are present in Spohr’s work and Lüthi and Chamberlain’s volumes. The prominence of Latin America in Cold War histories—and its almost complete absence in these histories—might be one entry point to these problems. Chamberlain bases his geographic emphasis on the Cold War-era violent arc that resulted in the most fatalities and the patterns of international help that went to “the Asian rim.” According to Chamberlain, during the Cold War, the Middle East or Asia received 79 cents for every dollar the United States sent to the non-Western world; comparable figures apply to Soviet aid. While mentioning that Asia, the Middle East, and Europe “stood at the geographic frontline of the Cold War, where the biggest number of disagreements and the most lethal ones occurred,” Lüthi follows Chamberlain’s logic and adds that “primarily these three regions [were] responsible for generating the structural changes that enabled the superpowers to end the global Cold War in the late 1980s.” For her part, Spohr focuses on the interactions between the Bush Administration and the governments of Asia and Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was rendered powerless, protested events like the American invasion of Panama by denouncing Washington’s discriminatory policies toward regime change. She agrees with Lüthi that in the 1980s, minimal structural change came from the area.

Although I find many of these arguments persuasive, I also believe that we should investigate how these three works weigh various forms of mass violence and how they either implicitly or overtly conceptualize the causes of structural change. For example, a conflict like the Salvadoran Civil War did not result in as many fatalities as the Soviet-Afghan War (which claimed about one million lives) or the Iran-Iraq War (680,000 killed). However, 80,000 deaths equated to about 1% to 2% of the total population in a small nation like El Salvador. Beyond these questions of proportionality, the bloodshed perpetrated in Chamberlain’s “killing fields” frequently crossed ideological, sectarian, national, and other lines when perpetrators and victims were involved, as in the massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party or the Lebanese Civil War. These elements can overlap, as evidenced by the civil wars in Central America. Wars between extremely different socioeconomic classes that seemed to be driven by ideologies were frequently driven by mestizo or indigenous interests. How closely should Cold War historians monitor the total number of fatalities, and how much more should we focus on wars like El Salvador or East Timor with higher per-capita mortality?

We should consider how we conceptualize the structural forces that ended the Cold War in light of Latin America’s inclusion or exclusion in recent Cold War histories. These contemporary histories, together with Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History, serve as a helpful reminder that not all of the events that occurred between 1945 and 1989 were directly related to the Cold War. The systemic disagreement between the Soviet Union and the United States was not the same as late-20th-century developments like financial globalization, the rise of political Islamism, or the changes in the Roman Catholic Church. Still, they all had an impact on it. This is a requirement for any meaningful definition of the Cold War.

However, I wonder how our accounts of the Cold War might alter if they focused on not only the fall of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965, which Chamberlain and Lüthi both regard as crucial, but also the events that followed the 1973 coup d’état in Chile that toppled Salvador Allende. The massacre in Indonesia lowered Chinese revolutionary hopes for Southeast Asia, particularly in Chamberlain’s account. While other more recent histories, like Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, note how the fall of Indonesian Communism inspired left-wing parties worldwide to abandon gradualist conceptions of political transformation in favor of coups. However, if Lüthi is correct in emphasizing the importance of the fall of the left in regional powers like Iran (1983) or Indonesia (1965), I question why the fall of Chile’s “smooth route to socialism” might not also be included in this narrative. The Chilean coup d’etat affected Southern European political parties, and leftist groups in Latin America viewed political change. And in the late 1970s and early 1980s, attitudes of the Soviet Union and the United States regarding the course of the Cold War were affected by the success or failure of these movements. The way these works conceptualize structural change within the Cold War and the relative importance or marginality of particular regions in bringing about that change is thus one topic we might address. I believe deconstructing those presumptions could lead to an insightful conversation about the relationships and distinctions between area studies, local histories, and global Cold War histories.