The rise of Mao’s China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 brought the dynamics of the Cold War more fully into the processes of decolonization and increasingly influenced superpower politics toward the global South.740 In Vietnam, the Soviets largely ceded the field to China, whose military and economic support for the Ho Chi Minh government after 1950 was substantial. The United States came to fully support the French war effort in Vietnam, the result of Cold War pressures in Europe and Asia and their impact on domestic politics, ultimately paying for as much as three-quarters of the cost ofthe war. For the Americans and Chinese, however, the financial and military support of their allies was fraught with tension, illustrating the complex ways in which the Cold War could play out in the decolonizing world. American policymakers’ contempt for French colonial methods and military abilities were matched by French fears that the United States was seeking to gain control of Vietnam for its own political and economic purposes. Their Cold War partnership was far from smooth or harmonious.
Tensions and hostilities also emerged in the Sino-Vietnamese relationship. The massive influx of Chinese advisers, weapons, and supplies for the war effort, as well as a Chinese political advisory group that sought to involve itself in the making of DRV domestic policy, seemed to overwhelm the Vietnamese. Disputes over military tactics and strategy quickly emerged, deepened by the personal antipathies between senior Chinese and
Vietnamese military leaders. The fragile contours of Sino-Vietnamese relations in this period were also shaped by the manner in which Chinese national and geostrategic interests could sometimes clash with and supersede fraternal ideological ties. New evidence from Chinese sources suggests that Mao’s willingness to support the Vietnamese against the French was prompted not simply by his ideological commitment to anti-imperialist solidarity but also by his fears of an American-led invasion into southern China at a time when Mao felt his fledgling regime remained vulnerable.741
The deep suspicions that colored the relationship between the Chinese and the Vietnamese did not prevent a Vietnamese victory in 1954 in which Chinese support played a key role in defeating the forces of French colonialism. The psychological resonance ofthe Vietnamese triumph was a powerful one in the decolonizing and postcolonial worlds, emboldening anticolonial actors elsewhere in their struggles against imperial powers. In its wake, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China became more deeply engaged with the processes of decolonization and postcolonial state-making.
Stalin’s death in 1953 prompted a fundamental reassessment of Soviet diplomacy and the place of the global South in it. In his 1956 speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev emphasized that decolonization was a "postwar development of world-historical significance." He intended to support progressive nonMarxist movements for national liberation under the larger rubric of "peaceful coexistence."742 Confident that Soviet anti-imperialism and models of economic growth would appeal to decolonizing elites, Khrushchev began to donate billions of rubles in military and economic aid to states such as India, Indonesia, and Egypt, which would become leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, in an effort to draw them into the Soviet orbit.
For these early recipients of Soviet aid, the economic aspects of the Cold War were frequently more important than its political dimensions. The Soviet Five-Year Plans, along with centralized planning, huge new steel plants and dams, and the mechanization of collective agriculture, offered postcolonial elites alluring strategies for economic growth and rapid industrialization. Indian prime minister Nehru, who visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s
And was deeply impressed by Soviet industrial progress, strongly favored state planning as a model for India’s economic development after independence. Accordingly, in the 1950s, Nehru deemphasized investment in agriculture and small-scale village industries and favored the development of heavy industry and the construction of major steel complexes. In drawing on Soviet models, advice, and money to launch these efforts, Nehru nonetheless rejected Soviet political ideology and pursued an independent diplomatic course. Indonesia and Egypt also received hundreds of millions of dollars in Soviet aid and welcomed aspects of Soviet economic models but remained cool to the bloc politics of the Cold War.
Developments in the global South were increasingly viewed through a Cold War lens in the United States. Like the Soviets, Americans were also actively engaged in efforts to promote development in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.743 Under the guise of modernization theory, US policymakers posited a spectrum from traditional to modern societies in which the American economy, society, and culture provided a universal model for development. Max Millikan, the director of a prestigious think tank, expressed the typical sentiment of the period: "A much extended program of American participation in the economic development of the so-called underdeveloped states can and should be one of the most important elements in a program of expanding the dynamism and stability of the Free World and increasing its resistance to the appeals of Communism."744
For US policymakers in the 1950s and the 1960s, billions of dollars in economic development - whether in the form of miracle rice and agricultural assistance or import substitution and the development of a consumer economy - appeared as a necessary bulwark against Communist-led political insurgency and social engineering in much ofthe decolonizing world. Despite its anti-Soviet cast, modernization theory shared key attributes with Soviet models. It mirrored the Marxist-Leninist formulation of a move upwards from feudalism, albeit to liberal capitalism rather than socialism; it also reflected the Soviet insistence on enlightened elites leading an inevitable historical progression. At the same time, more than a bit of racialized paternalism informed
American conceptions of the divide between developing states and capitalist modernities, recalling the Social Darwinian discourse of high imperialism that pitted non-Western barbarism against Euro-American civilization.
The impact of modernization theory and US economic assistance sometimes replicated the results of Soviet development projects and aid. In Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines, economic aid did sustain deeper political relations even if the impact of American development practices was generally uneven and sometimes disastrous. But for states that sought to remain outside the Cold War divide in the late 1950s and early 1960s - such as India, Indonesia, and Egypt - interest in American economic models did not usually extend to making political and diplomatic alliances.745
Along with greater US attention to economic and social development, the intensification of Cold War pressures prompted a considerably more activist policy of direct intervention in the global South. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration orchestrated the overthrow of the government of Muhammad Mossadeq in Iran. The CIA-led operation was prompted by a number of factors, including Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its ramifications for Great Britain. But US officials also feared the Tudeh Party’s Communist orientation, its seemingly growing strength, and its dependence on Soviet patronage. Although the Tudeh Party was far weaker and considerably more divided than the Americans understood at the time, and although the domestic political situation in Iran was far more complex than a Cold War lens would allow, the Soviet-American rivalry axiomatically shaped US perceptions and policy.
In Latin America, the postwar turn to democracy was reversed almost entirely by 1954 when dictators again came to rule most of the countries in the region. In 1947 and 1948, there was a regionwide crackdown on organized labor and local Communist Parties. Authoritarian governments repressed militant labor leaders, marginalized and disbanded some unions, introduced antistrike legislation and formally outlawed Communist Parties. In subsequent years, reformers and populist leaders who championed social democracy were contained and repressed.
The reemergence of conservative elites and their military allies in Latin America was not entirely driven by the Cold War. They had not been eviscerated by the rise of social democracy after World War II, but had
6. Decolonization in Africa and Asia since 1945.
Been forced temporarily on the defensive. As the Cold War came to dominate US diplomacy in the global South, local developments intersected with the rising concern ofAmerican policymakers over Communism in Latin America. In some cases, US support for the military coups that brought illiberal conservative regimes to power was indirect. In others, direct involvement can be carefully documented, as was the case with the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Although the relationship between the social democratic Arbenz, local Communists, and the Soviet Union was fluid, the Eisenhower administration insisted that the Arbenz government was a beachhead of Soviet Communism. The administration authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) support for the invasion of Guatemala from Honduras and put immense pressure on the Guatemalan army, which proved decisive in the collapse of the Arbenz government. It was followed by a reign of "Cold War terror," in which supporters of Arbenz in the countryside were arrested, tortured, and killed.746 This precursor of the "dirty wars" in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s drew directly on the advice and support of US intelligence operatives. The CIA supported repression in Guatemala through a variety of means, including manuals with detailed instructions on how to torture insurgents.
World History
