If identities can be shaped by conflict, perhaps one of the root causes of conflict is the need of one or both sides to establish and maintain an identity, which is difficult to do in a relaxed international system. This need could be conscious or unconscious and could arise either from popular pressures or elite manipulation. We should then expect the Cold War to be at its most bitter when identity is under most pressure and, conversely, cooperative policies to be pursued when identities are secure. The argument is not without some plausibility, and we could see the early Cold War years as ones in which each side, having been challenged by world war and domestic upheavals, felt a loss of self and turned to a foreign enemy for confirmation and consolidation. But it is difficult to see later periods of detente as arising from secure identities,20 and counterfactuals illustrate how the supposed connections between posited identity considerations and foreign-policy behavior can all too easily be fitted to any history that unfolded. Had the United States and the Soviet Union reached out to each other in the early period, one could attribute this behavior to the social and psychological security that came from winning the world war, and if the Cold War had coincided with extensive immigration into the United States, this line of thinking would lead us to conclude that American elites conjured up a foreign threat in order to Americanize the newcomers.
If the argument that conflicts are created in order to differentiate between populations and produce unity within them is too Machiavellian, the less extreme claim that conflict induces homogeneity is worth more consideration. This claim implies that conformity will rise and fall with international tensions. There is something to this, especially on the Soviet side. At the start of the Cold War, Iosif Stalin launched a campaign to denigrate the West and ensure that Soviet citizens had no contact with it. But we should not be too quick to accept the common claims for a parallel process in the United States. Although the stereotype of the late 1940s and 1950s is indeed one of conformity, it is far fTom clear that this is accurate. Abstract Expressionism, often held up as an example of the way in which the United States differentiated itselffrom the Soviet Union and sought to win over the Europeans by showing them that it had a significant culture, was transgressive and met with fierce resistance, not least fTom conservatives who strenuously objected to government-sponsored exhibits of it abroad.21 While McCarthyism policed the liberal flank of acceptable views, its success was less attributable to widespread domestic sentiment than to calculations and maneuvers by the mainstream Republican leaders.22 The foundations for the later success of the civil rights movement were also laid down in the early Cold War years, and Cold War concerns were largely responsible for the limited support for racial equality that was provided by the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. International tension did not consistently solidify a narrow identity or slow social change in the United States.
The early Cold War years also saw heightened homophobia, justified in part by the claim that homosexuals were security risks, which was a selffulfilling prophesy because as long as being gay was stigmatized, homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail. But the subsequent changing course of American attitudes toward homosexuality does not track with increases and decreases in international tensions. Here as elsewhere, the influences on American culture were numerous and the Cold War was not the most potent one.
Even more strikingly, the economic policies not only of Harry S. Truman but even of Eisenhower did not maximize the differentiation from socialism. Although the onset of the Cold War may have diminished liberal impulses, the role of the government in the economy in the 1940s and 1950s looks very large from today’s perspective, with vigorous anti-trust measures, a degree of economic planning, the consolidation of the welfare state, and high taxes on upper-income brackets. Many of the measures undertaken to meet the perceived Soviet threat increased federal direction of the society, most obviously the increased role of Washington in education, and an interstate highways project that literally reshaped the American landscape. Two general conclusions follow. First, international competition can lead to measures that do not easily fit with identity or can undermine it. Second, the fact that the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, has a relatively strong society and a relatively weak state means that many of the forces acting on it came internally, and, while not unaffected by the course of the Cold War, had much autonomy from it.
World History
