The Cold War was a clash of ideas and cultures as much as a military and strategic conflict. Different from the nationalist projects in Europe and East Asia that had led to war in 1914 and 1937-39, the ideas put forward by the American and Soviet contenders in the Cold War were universal in nature - they were supposed to be valid for all peoples at all times now and forever. By 1945, these ideas - individual liberty, anticollectivism, and market values on the US side; social justice, collectivism, and state planning among the Soviets - had hardened into ideologies, in which universalist political ideals mixed freely with older and more specific cultural traits. The elites of both countries believed that the future was theirs, because the world was unavoidably moving in the direction of the aims they themselves had set.
Much of the reason why such a faith could persist for as long as it did (or does, in the American case) has to do with the common lineage that the two ideologies represent. Against traditions of privilege, heritage, family, and locality, both Soviets and Americans offered a modern and revolutionary alternative, in which people could reinvent themselves and help create a new world. In the American case, this alternative meant the globalization of the US immigrant perspective, in which people could choose the communities to which they wished to belong. On the Soviet side, it globalized the Bolsheviks’ hatred for "old Russia," which they considered backward and underdeveloped. For Americans and Russians - and for many people around the world who came to share one or the other of these visions - the global Cold War agenda was to change the world in the image of their ideas.
Many of the core ideas of the Cold War originated with two of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin (albeit often in a form that neither would have recognized as his own). From the reading of Marx came the idea that the development of societies was hierarchical and that the struggle between social classes was a fundamental aspect of the "old societies" the moderns wanted to leave behind. These concepts of historical transcendence had a remarkable degree of influence on politicians and social scientists East and West during the Cold War, be it as a promise or as a specter. Darwin’s biological philosophy was in the twentieth century twisted even further from its origin than was Marx’s social philosophy. To many, Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be thought to mean that human society operated according to the same rules as nature - that societies which filled the biological and ecological space open to them would thrive, while those that did not would fail. The struggle to produce more and better goods as well as the faith in continuous growth and expansion for one’s own society (or form thereof) were based on the pseudo-Darwinian approaches of the early twentieth century.
The political principle of the developmental hierarchy of societies and the economic principle of maximizing industrial production were the twin ideas that connected Soviet and American modernity. The responses to these Marxian and Darwinian challenges were, however, as distinct as they could possibly be between states that shared a common background. Not only were the state formations themselves very different, as noted above, but the ideologies that drove them in some cases emphasized the opposite responses to the challenges ofmodernity. In the perception ofAmerican elites, a modern society based on individual opportunity and the market represented the top of the hierarchy of societies, while the struggle between classes was seen as
A thing of the past, and domestic attempts at returning to class-based politics were feared as anachronistic attempts at polluting American freedom. Success in production was dependent on the defense of that freedom against trade unions, recent immigrants, and the political Left. In the Soviet Union, class struggle was also seen as having come to an end, but only because the Communist Party elites believed that the working class had taken political power and begun creating its own state based on social justice and collective enterprise. While in other countries the struggle between classes was still the vehicle of progress, the advances in production that had taken place inside the Soviet Union had been dependent on the masses being led by the Communist Party within the framework set by the socialist state.
While the ideologies ofAmerican and Soviet elites stayed remarkably intact during the Cold War, entry into the elites was probably more open in social terms in these two countries than in most others. The domestic ideological hegemony that the elites preserved may in part explain the social inclusivity - it made it easier for individuals to willingly seek inclusion and it made the entry ticket in many cases no more than political and social conformity. But while American elites had to seek a wider legitimacy for their projects within a democratic political system, Soviet elites of course had no such constraints, meaning that over time they became increasingly removed from their country at large. While both sets of elites at times feared the people they were at the helm of, the Soviet elites undoubtedly feared their people more. And while elites in both countries saw themselves as managing the troublesome transition to full-fledged industrial societies on behalf of the people, the Soviet Communists mistrusted their countrymen to the extent that they regularly resorted to terror in fulfilling their mission.
These differences in domestic roles and methods were of crucial importance when Soviet and American elites were spreading their message of progress abroad. While the United States, because of its democratic politics at home, was able to forge diverse and pluralistic alliances with elites in Europe and East Asia - alliances that contributed decisively to its predominance during the Cold War - the Soviet alliances failed spectacularly, from Germany to China to Eastern Europe. While American leaders managed to develop strong and functioning transnational institutions together with European Social Democrats or Christian Democrats, and with Japanese conservatives, the Soviets could not even manage links with foreign Communist Parties. In the postcolonial countries these differences played less of a role, since neither Moscow nor Washington - except in their most messianic moments - foresaw real alliances growing out of their links with weak, underdeveloped states. In such relationships the superpowers should lead by the strength of their ideals and by their power to intervene when necessary.
Since the beginning of the Soviet-American rivalry, the main imagined competitors of both ideologies were constructed as "narrow" nationalism and "unreasonable" religion. While advancing modernity would, over time, do away with these relics ofthe past, the Soviet and American role was to identify and support those local elites that would help abolish local concepts of nation and religion the fastest. Ironically, since toward the end of the Cold War the Soviet Union was increasingly fueled by Russian particularism and the United States by American evangelicalism, their support for the steamroller of modernization in the Third World (capitalist or socialist) never faltered as the number of its enemies increased. In countries such as Ethiopia or Iran, the superpower interventions supported wars against the identities and beliefs of the great majority of the local population.
Some of this warfare took place on screens or through the airwaves. The Cold War influenced all forms of popular culture, film, and television.14 By implicitly portraying their own societies as victors in a global struggle, US and Soviet films had a significant influence on the views of their own populations and those of people abroad. By the 1980s, this particular contest for hearts and minds was won by the United States, as US programming filled television schedules across the world. Especially in those states where access to US television programs and film was somehow restricted - by state control or by lack ofmeans - accidental or illicit viewing gave an even stronger sense than in other circumstances of the plenty and beauty of life in the United States. Contrasting the image of a fictional United States with known repression and poverty at home was one of the main inspirations in the rebellions against Communism in 1989.
The cultural Cold War also influenced the physical organization of people’s lives, through the schemes intellectuals designed for the social control and improvement of the populations at large. Both suburbia and the collective farm resulted from ideas of better ways of organizing society, through moving people away from the identities they had grown up with, be it among immigrants in American working-class neighborhoods or peasants in Russian villages. Likewise, Soviet and US city planning took on striking similarities in architecture and planning ideals as a result of the need to regularize and quantify. In linking high modernism in architecture and city planning to defense needs and mobilization oflabor resources, the Cold War became the apotheosis of twentieth-century modernity, visually as well as socially.
While Cold War projects promised progress, their politics in many cases meant rule by experts. In both East and West, national security and national development were regarded as far too important to be left to democratic control. In its Stalinist perversion, the very term "democracy" came to mean party domination. But in the West, too, key projects integral to the Cold War were exempt from democratic control: bases, bombs, shelters, and surveillance were the domains of unelected officials or officers. In many countries this rule by experts extended far into the civilian sector: dams, bridges, highways, and border zones had plans and purposes that were withheld from parliaments and local authorities. While political participation expanded in the West - and in parts ofthe Third World too - Cold War elites often constituted themselves as representatives of the people’s interests, thereby subverting the very ideals that they claimed to fight for. This abrogation is one legacy of the Cold War that people in the twenty-first century will struggle with for some time to come.
World History
