Change

Understanding the place of the Cold War within the overall history of the twentieth century is very much about understanding global processes of change. The latter half of the century, in which Soviet-American rivalry shaped the international system of states, grew out of a first half during which wars and crises had made many question the very promise of modernity. The superpowers’ post-1945 models of development seemed, each in its own way, to rescue two key aspects of that promise: individual freedom and social justice. Indeed, the attempts of the superpowers to go beyond control of the international system and toward influencing global social and economic change bear witness to the centrality, for each of them, of changing other people’s lives into an image of their own. The intensity of the conflict between them was created by each side’s (and its supporters’) conviction that they represented the last, best hope for the rescue of a rational, transcending modernity from the horrors of war and nationalist conflict.

But at the same time as the placing of the Cold War within a larger twentieth-century context helps explain the centrality of the conflict during its heyday, it also helps in understanding its demise. Three key shifts in human societies originated in the first decades of the century, but were coming to fruition only in its final decades. Together, these shifts changed the world to a sufficient degree for the Cold War to become obsolescent.

The first, quite simply, is the right to vote. Restricted by gender, privilege, and race in the nineteenth century, by the late twentieth century voting rights had spread to a very large number of people across the globe, most often followed by widening political participation and the building of democratic institutions. Even though constricted and often undermined by economic forces, the vote is a powerful weapon of the weak, which can transform states and societies (although not always - as one could have wished for - in the direction of less conflict and more cooperation). The attainment and exercise of voting rights undid Communism in Eastern Europe, and continue to break systems of control and servitude on a global scale.

The second, plainly put, is the triumph of the capitalist market. As Karl Marx foresaw in the middle of the nineteenth century, the expansion of capitalism has led to an increase in both conflict and cooperation on a global scale. Alongside the worldwide growth of industrial society throughout the twentieth century, the centers for capital and production have shifted from Europe to the United States to East Asia, widening the stakes of everyone involved in the global economy. Economic globalization, developing throughout the twentieth century (though, tellingly, with its most rapid expansion at the beginning and the end thereof), led to the gradual integration of global elites in the quest for economic gain. Tied to the centers by similar patterns of consumption, information, and communication, the Third World outpost of this system created a potential both for further economic growth and for growth in global social inequality.

The third fundamental change that defeated the Cold War was the end of colonialism. Although resistance to colonial rule was on the increase throughout the century (the first nationalist organizations in the main Third World countries were all formed between 1900 and 1914), it was in the aftermath of World War II that the system as such broke down. In the thirty years after 1945, seventy-five new countries were created out of colonial territories, a process that changed international politics forever. While the final battles against colonialism and the first attempts at constructing new states sometimes favored oppositional ideologies and alliances with the Soviet Union, by the late twentieth century most newly independent countries were moving toward market economies and more inclusive political systems.

These changes privileged those societies that were poised to take advantage of them, but seriously challenged those that were not. The Soviet Union, in this sense, was among history’s losers, as was the Cold War international system itself. Even though the attempts in the 1990s at strengthening international society and preventing unilateral interventions ultimately failed, numerous trends from the late Cold War era point toward such attempts being relaunched in the future. One is the continued growth of nationalism, which makes understandings between states a sine qua non for the absence of war. Another is the changing role of the state itself in a world increasingly dominated by markets. And a third is demographic and ecological changes, in which the combination of an aging population in the industrialized world and a mounting number of global ecological challenges pushes us toward a policy of compromise.

The Cold War conflict forms a significant part of the history of the twentieth century and is an important ingredient in most of its other parts. Its course and content were shaped by a continuum of international history reaching even further back in time, certainly to the social upheavals of the middle of the nineteenth century and perhaps to the French and American Revolutions two generations earlier. As an ideological confrontation with two powerful states at its center, the Cold War defined patterns of alliance, models of state-building, and discourses on society on a global scale during the fifty years between the US entry into World War II and the Soviet collapse in 1991. And, by threatening the world with annihilation through massive use of nuclear weapons, it created one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition toward the end of the century: fear of the future and a rising uncertainty about that perfectibility of humankind which the opening of the twentieth century had seemed to promise. The end of the Cold War provided an opportunity for dealing with some of these fears and uncertainties. But it did not end history, or even that part of it which the bloody twentieth century had birthed.