The historical background for the Cold War was created by the expansion of capitalist economies in ever-widening circles from the West European and North American cities in the nineteenth century. While offering plentiful opportunities for people to change their own lives, the new economic system also created recurrent social and political crises, such as the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, which were followed by World Wars I and II. Given the many underlying strengths of the economic system, it is reasonable to believe that the utopian and authoritarian alternatives to liberal capitalism - such as National Socialism, Fascism, and Communism - would not have stood a chance of mass popular support if not for these crises. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, for many people capitalism had become synonymous not with progress, but with wars and economic collapse.
The effects of the two great wars of the twentieth century did more than anything else to shape the Cold War. In addition to the impression ofsystemic crisis that the wars created, they removed, through the destruction and economic decline that they caused, much of the primacy that the main West and Central European powers had held in international affairs. The wars also led to an unprecedented emphasis on national security, in which domestic surveillance and international intelligence gained a significance never seen before. Perhaps most important of all, the losses suffered by the powers involved in the wars convinced two generations of leaders that lack of military preparedness and political determination in the future had to be avoided at all costs. After World War II, especially, the lesson many statesmen and ordinary people believed they had learned was that weakness and irresolution unavoidably lead to war.
The great wars of the twentieth century contributed decisively to the creation ofthe modern state. Without the increase in the cohesion, the strength, and the reach of the state that took place in the first half of the century, the form of rivalry that the Cold War took would have been impossible. The sheer expense of the conflict, both military and civilian, would have destroyed states if they had not already been primed for the effort. Also, without the experience of two world wars, states would not have been able to mobilize their citizens for a war that had few big battles and little visible heroism. The extraordinary loyalty to the state was primarily based on the measures governments had taken to curtail the chaos of the market and provide some form of security for its citizens. For all countries, including the United States, which saw fewer such efforts than other nations, the acceptance of the sacrifices that were needed to fight the Cold War was contingent on the social services and educational opportunities offered by the state.
While similar in terms of the state emphasis on big projects, civilian as well as military, the United States and the Soviet Union symbolized two modern extremes in the way politics was conducted domestically. In the United States there were many centers of power, and even though the president’s administration always held the upper hand, the legislature, the courts, and the state governments had significant autonomous influence both on specific decisions and on how politics was conducted. In addition, military leaders and the heads of big companies had their own voice in decisionmaking. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, politics was extremely centralized, in theory and very often also in fact. Intended from the very beginning to be a one-party dictatorship, the Soviet system during Stalin’s terror of the 1930s developed only one universal center of power: the Communist Party Politburo and its general secretary. In most periods, except in the late 1960s and again in the late 1970s, one man at the top had the final say in all matters that were presented to the party leadership. With the abolition of the market and with no independent seats of power, the Soviet Union deliberately presented itself as the antidote to capitalist chaos and confusion. All countries that had to reestablish themselves after the cataclysms of the first half of the century were presented with these two forms of government as ultimate alternatives.
The combination of capitalist crises and world wars was a key factor in the collapse of the European colonial empires, a chain of events that decisively influenced the Cold War, especially in its later stages. By 1945, it had become clear both in the colonial periphery and in the capitals of the imperial centers that colonialism in its late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century form had to go: in Europe, there was neither the political will nor the economic strength to keep it going, and in the colonized countries resistance was on the rise. The United States took a strong interest in what should happen in the colonial territories right fTom the beginning of the Cold War era. Its purpose was both to abolish European colonialism - a form of government that most Americans found objectionable - and to influence the Third World to follow the US example in politics and economics. Increasingly, in the 1950s, with the strengthening of the radical Left and of Soviet influence in the Third World, a key US motive also became to secure these countries against Communism and alliances with the Soviet Union.
By the 1960s, the emergence of new states had done much to intensify the rivalry between the superpowers, and for the rest of the Cold War Asia, Africa, and Latin America stood at the center of the conflict - a key reason, in the view of many historians, why the Cold War lasted as long as it did. The Cold War in the Third World was not just a battle for influence between Washington and Moscow; it was a struggle within the new states for the future direction of their polities and their societies, a conflict between the two versions ofWestern modernity that socialism and liberal capitalism seemed to offer. The globalization of the Cold War that these struggles led to both intensified the superpower conflict through international interventions and increased the cost of the competition, while destroying many of the societies in which the battles were carried out.
As was shown in the Third World throughout the Cold War, the military power and the international involvement of the United States always far exceeded that of the Soviet Union. The whole of the twentieth century - the Cold War included - was characterized by the rise of the United States, as it gradually became the key state in the international system of states. In terms of its economy, already by the late 1940s the United States produced fully half of the world’s manufactured goods, was the world’s largest capital exporter, and dominated the world’s financial markets. And even though its relative economic position was never again as supreme as it had been right after the end of World War II, the centrality of its role became increasingly obvious toward the end of the Cold War. It is hard to exaggerate the consequences of this US ascendancy: for the first time in more than three hundred years the most powerful country on earth was located outside Europe, with values and ideas that in most cases originated in the "old world," but which still - over time - had become recognizably different fTom their source.
As we have seen, this consistent US preponderance has led some historians to conclude that the Cold War was really an American project for achieving global hegemony, rather than a competition between two superpowers. But even though Soviet capabilities overall were more on the scale of Britain and France than on those of the United States, the militarization of the Soviet economy and its society made it a formidable opponent in international affairs. First and foremost it constituted the other superpower as a result of its oppositional ideology: it was the only great power that throughout the Cold War steadfastly opposed US objectives and refused to be integrated into the global capitalist economy. By doing so it carved out a primary role for itself in international affairs, at great expense to its own development over time.
World History
