Historical conditions of the Cold War

The end of the Second World War is thought to mark the end of an epoch. Not only were the ultra-nationalist ideologies of Fascism, Nazism, and racism defeated, but 1945 also marked the beginning of the end of imperialism. This last was not fully accepted by European imperialists, who made several last ditch efforts to retake their colonies, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa. But by 1960 there were few Europeans who believed in the need for colonies.Footnote ⁴ The decolonization movement had triumphed and the post-war world order was enshrined in the United Nations ideal of national self-determination and global development. Yet, whereas the UN world order was enshrined in theory, the real world order was determined by the two superpowers and their rivalry. I turn to the longer-term history in which this real order should be seen.

While the nation-state (if not ultra-nationalist or fascistic) was deemed in the UN ideal to be a model of self-governance, through most of its history it had been inseparable from imperialist domination of other peoples and societies. By the nineteenth century, it was already established in the major imperialist societies of Britain and France. The nation-state along with its capitalists became the principal player in the inter-imperialist rivalry for colonies and resources. British imperialism dominated the world for much of the nineteenth century, but from the last third of the century this dominance came to be increasingly threatened by the rise of new nation-states with imperialist ambitions, including Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States. Most of these states sought to modernize and compete globally by creating and mobilizing the nationalist – even hyper-nationalist – sentiments of their citizenry.

‘In theory’, wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice it can and has been bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism.’ Imperialists appeared as the best nationalists because they claimed to stand above the reality of national divisiveness and represent the nation’s glory. The symbolic power of nationalism to subordinate and discipline all manner of difference to a greater cause is a characteristic not simply of imperialist nationalism but even of nationalism without colonies. Nonetheless, there may be little better to focus the national mind than dominance and glory at another’s expense.Footnote ⁵

The end of the First World War led to yet another change in imperialism, undertaken not by the old European imperialist powers but by new powers such as Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. This is an imperialism that I call the ‘imperialism of nation-states’, and its first expression may be seen in the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo established in north-east China (or Manchuria) from 1932 to 1945. Responding in part to the increasing demands for economic and political parity made by the new anti-imperialist movement in the colonies, and in part to the economic competition with and between the new imperialists, imperialists sought to create regional formations or economic blocs. These colonies or subordinate territories were often reconstituted as nominally sovereign nation-states, although they remained militarily in thrall to the metropole. Thus the imperialism of nation-states reflected a strategic reorientation of the periphery to be part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power. As Albert Lebrun declared after the First World War, the goal was now to ‘unite France to all those distant Frances in order to permit them to combine their efforts to draw from one another reciprocal advantages’.Footnote ⁶

With the simultaneous rise of rights consciousness in the colonies and dependencies and the increased need for resource and social mobilization within them, it was more efficient for the imperialists to foster modern and indirectly controlled institutions in them. The arrangements typically granted or retained the sovereignty of the dependency in nominal or partial terms; control over them was exercised by dominating their institutions of mobilization, such as banks, the transportation infrastructure, and political institutions, which were created to resemble those of the metropole (for example, legislative councils, institutions of political tutelage, and political parties such as the communist parties or the Concordia in Manchukuo). In short, unlike British free-trade imperialism, several interwar imperialists attended to the modernization of institutions and identities. They often espoused cultural or ideological similarities – including sometimes anti-colonial ideologies – even while racism and nationalism accompanied the reality of military-political domination.

Subordinate states were militarily dependent upon and economically mobilized for the sake of the metropole. Nevertheless, it was not necessarily in the latter’s interest to have them economically or institutionally backward. This imperialism thus occasionally entailed a separation of economic and military-political dimensions. In some situations, as in the Japan–Manchukuo relationship (and later, as we shall see, in the Soviet case), massive investments and resources flowed into the client states, thereby breaching the classical dualism between an industrialized metropole and a colony focused on the primary sector common to colonial imperialism.Footnote ⁷

The question of whether this type of domination can legitimately be called imperialist is debatable. Michael Doyle distinguished ‘imperialism’ from ‘hegemony’ by suggesting that the latter refers to dominance over external policy (by military, economic, and other means) of clients and allies, whereas imperialism additionally entails interference and intervention in their internal development. Note, however, that Doyle’s usage of hegemony differs from mine in that I use the term in its ideological aspect as the ability of power structures to constrain the imagination. In contrast to Doyle, there is also a point of view traceable perhaps to Heinrich Triepel, and argued most fervently by Chalmers Johnson and others, which doubts whether the internal and external dimensions of military, economic, and political dominance can be kept strictly separate. Be that as it may, as I will attempt to show below, both the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War acquired considerable power over the internal affairs of their allies and developing countries, which they sought to stabilize by military and economic means.Footnote ⁸

Imperialism and the Cold War

In its ideal expression, the Cold War represented a logical culmination of the new imperialism. Two superpowers sought to gain the loyalty of theoretically sovereign nation-states that would be militarily dependent upon the hegemonic power and subject to its political, economic, and ideological strategies. Reality was much messier. First there were rivalries within each camp, and the British did not give up hope of superpower status until the Suez crisis of 1956 and the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1958.Footnote ⁹ In this respect, the Soviet–PRC split was of much greater consequence in realigning the balance of power. Second, there was the historical force of nationalism operating not only within each bloc but also outside them through the non-aligned movement (the rhetoric of which was more powerful than its politics), which resisted the hegemons and their strategies. Finally, the very polarization of the hegemons themselves permitted a few key players such as Hong Kong and Ghana to exploit their status as intermediaries between the two powers.

During the post-Second World War era, the Soviet Union’s creation of a regional system of militarily dependent states in eastern Europe reflected many features of the new imperialism. A shared anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology sanctioned a centralized economic and political system. The Soviet Union combined economic leverage and military threat to integrate states that were often more economically developed than itself into a regional economy. In some ways, the imperialism of the Soviet Union revealed the counter-economic consequences of this logic of empire. Not only were the client-states of the Soviet Union in Europe often more developed, but the USSR may also have subsidized their economies by supplying them with cheap oil and raw materials while importing finished products from their economies. This was the price paid by the imperial power to create and maintain dependence and assure its security.Footnote ¹⁰

In part because of the consciousness of its own colonial past, the United States had long practised imperialism without colonialism, with the exception of a few places, most notably the Philippines. After the Spanish–American War in 1898, the United States created a system of client states around the Caribbean basin in Central America. These nominally independent states became increasingly dependent on the US, which accounted for more than three-quarters of the region’s foreign trade, as well as the bulk of foreign investment. During the decade of the 1920s, when Japan was experimenting with indirect imperialism in Manchuria, the United States, similarly, was seeking to develop and refine informal control over Central American countries, especially as it faced revolutionary nationalism in the region. Officials, diplomats, and business groups stressed means such as US control of banking, communication facilities, investments in natural resources, and the development of education (particularly the training of elites in American-style constitutions), ‘free elections’, and orthodox business ideas. However, the threat and reality of military intervention remained close at hand.Footnote ¹¹

American imperialism was characterized not only by the Monroe Doctrine but also by the Open Door policy. Although there were contradictions and tensions between the two approaches, there were also continuities, most importantly in the practice of using sovereign or nominally sovereign polities to advance American interests. In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson pointed to the continuities when he declared that the nations of the world should ‘with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world … no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people’. But this clearly did not exclude using military force against recalcitrant nations: just two weeks before, Wilson had sent troops to the Dominican Republic and committed US military forces in Haiti and Mexico as well.Footnote ¹² The United States sought to foster an ideological and economic hegemony among its client states by creating them as reliable emulators subject to external economic and military constraints. Note, however, that this imperialism did not become developmentally oriented until the early 1960s, when it was forced to respond to the Cuban revolution.

The tensions between American interests and global enlightenment were to be contained not only by military power but, perhaps more importantly, by the notion of a limited self-determination, with the idea of tutelage. As the Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane wrote in 1922: ‘What a people hold they hold as trustees for the world … . It is good American practice. The Monroe Doctrine is an expression of it …. That is why we are talking of backward peoples and recognizing for them another law than that of self-determination, a limited law of self-determination, a leading-string law.’Footnote ¹³ Little wonder then that the Japanese representative at the League of Nations hearings on Manchukuo repeatedly insisted on the Asiatic Monroe Doctrine as Japan’s prerogative in Asia.

In the post-Second World War period, this combination of interest, enlightenment, and military violence developed into what Carl Parrini has called ‘ultraimperialism’. This term refers to US efforts to maintain cooperation and reduce conflict among imperialist nations who were busily scrambling to create monopolistic or exclusive market conditions in various parts of the world during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Ultraimperialism is secured by a chain of military bases around the globe – and by structures such as the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the World Bank – to enable the conditions of cooperation among advanced capitalist powers and to facilitate the new (developmental or modernizing) imperialism in the decolonized world. With the Cold War, the US developed a global empire employing a vast system of ‘political and military vassalage’ and fostering a ‘functional specialization between the imperial and vassal (nation) states’.Footnote ¹⁵ In this respect, the post-war United States represented the apogee of the imperialism of nation-states.

My point is not that the Cold War represents the essence of imperialism but that we cannot understand the Cold War fully without analysing how the historical relationship between imperialism and nationalism came to be configured anew in post-war circumstances. Imperialism no longer emphasized conquest on the basis of racial or radical differences among peoples and their inevitable destinies of superiority and exploitation. It was often development-oriented, and there were considerable opportunities for states and societies to move up the economic ladder. The imperialist factor lay in the imposition through clientelistic, and frequently unpopular, ruling structures in developing nations of designs for enlightenment by an enormously superior military power. While recognized as worthy ideals, these designs were often shot through with paternalism, national interests, and covert racist prejudices that constantly produced contradictions and tensions. Indeed, one could argue that it was this configuration of national imperialism that led to resistance to both the Soviet Union (contributing to its decline) and the United States in many parts of the world.

The Cold War and nations

Although it was the rivalry between the two camps for power and allegiance of the rest of the world that shaped the global landscape, the relations within them were not symmetrical. The description of the US empire as ‘political and military vassalage’ indicates a hierarchical coalition around a military superpower, rather than pure clientage. Thus Britain, Japan, France, and Germany developed a close partnership of interests and were important beneficiaries of US strategies and investments.

The reduced power and severe indebtedness of the British produced by the Second World War not only increased their dependence upon the US but also renewed their need for empire to service the American debt. The chief mechanism used was to increase the dollar earnings of British colonial and dependent states and exchange these at an imperially mandated, below-market, sterling rate. Although the US was not necessarily keen on the imperialist sterling zone, the onset of the Cold War made it much more favourably disposed to maintain the status quo with regards to the old empires. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson have detailed the ways in which the British empire was rescued and transformed as part of the Allied front in the Cold War, especially in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹⁶

During the Suez crisis in 1956, the US refused to back British and French military efforts to prevent nationalization of the canal by Egypt’s President Nasser. Particularly after a brief exchange of nuclear sabre-rattling between the two superpowers, Britain saw the virtue of the American perspective on independence of the colonies. It settled into its role as junior partner to the US in order to maintain its economic interests in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia by seeking to control the independence movements and keep them away from Soviet influence. Britain and the European powers increasingly began to rely on American finances, investments, and, most of all, strategic concerns in Africa to protect their own interests.Footnote ¹⁷

US dominance within its camp was characterized first and foremost by a chain of about 1,700 military bases in over a hundred nation-states that had varying degrees of clientelist ties to it. These garrisons were strategic enclaves supervised by the Pentagon and sustained by, as much as they sustained, a vast military industrial complex. The bases were often highly privileged enclaves that frequently fostered arrogant attitudes towards the surrounding population, particularly in the non-European regions.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, entire townships or camptowns in the Philippines and Korea, with the sex trade as their main industry, sprang up around the bases.Footnote ¹⁹

Solidarity within the socialist camp was much weaker within society and across nations. From the early period, there was considerable disaffection with the tight state controls of life and economy produced by the generalization of the Soviet state’s Stalinist model, which was built not only in Soviet republics and eastern Europe but also in Asian countries such as China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. There were many outbursts of resistance in these societies, and the severe and violent repression that followed ensured that disaffection would continue to fester. Among the earliest uprisings against Soviet power was the 1953 workers’ uprising in Berlin, which began with protests against increased worker production targets but escalated to demands for political reform. More serious was the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in which Soviet forces killed thousands and imprisoned many more thousands, while hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled their country. Soviet military repression climaxed with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which snuffed out the economic and political reforms known as the Prague Spring led by the Slovak communist reformer and leader, Alexander Dubček.Footnote ²⁰

However, the socialist bloc was not just about repression and resistance. Socialist revolution had brought large classes of the poor and disenfranchised a better material life, especially in the Soviet Union and China, and the all-pervasive ideology of socialist personhood and moral superiority over capitalism constituted an important source of identity for many people. But socialist egalitarianism and collectivism were not the only ideological instruments fostered to build solidarity. The other powerful ideology of the time developed and utilized by the Soviet state was the idea of nationality rights.

While the idea of national rights goes back to the French Revolution, and the Chinese Republic of Five Nationalities was instituted in 1912, Bolshevik theorists developed the idea of a federated state of nations in the Soviet Union as an alternative to the imperialist domination of ‘backward’ peoples or races.Footnote ²¹ In the process, what developed was an idea of nationhood as constituted by the cultures of different nationalities, which could theoretically be seen in opposition to assimilative ideas of nationhood, such as the model of the ‘melting pot’ in the US. Interestingly, the US was to develop its version of this idea – multiculturalism and respect for the variety of national cultures both within and outside the US – only with the advent of the Cold War.

In contrast to the European socialists of the Second International, the Bolsheviks – and even Stalin, who would famously work from the 1920s to curtail their autonomy – were theoretically committed to the rights of nations to self-determination based on the right to secede.Footnote ²² Their strategy of integrating the national idea into the administrative structure of the Soviet Union was also strongly motivated by their desire to hold on to all lands of the former Russian empire. The communities of the erstwhile Russian empire were identified, with the help of local elites and ethnographers, within a definitional grid of nationalities informed by evolutionary categories. Note that the different degrees of their nationhood were attributed not to inherent racial qualities (as in earlier forms of imperialism) but to socio-historical circumstances.Footnote ²³

The goals of the Bolsheviks were to grant these communities ‘nationhood’ and to facilitate centralized rule by defining the categories of identity and by control of the party structure. The Soviet strategy was to subordinate these national loyalties to ‘proletarian’ interests, that is to the communist parties in the non-Russian territories. They sought to contain, control, and even harness different sources of dissent by creating national-territorial structures of administrative control and by fostering loyal national elites through the Party. Incidentally, Japanese empire-builders in the 1930s were quick to apply the Soviet model of the multinational state to Manchukuo. To these observers, Soviet nationality policy fulfilled the goals of federalism and protected minority rights while at the same time strengthening the power of the Soviet state and the military in relation to separatism. Thus, nationalism was not suppressed but utilized positively for the goals of the state.Footnote ²⁴ However, for different reasons, the strategies of using nationality policy for state control failed in both Manchukuo and the Soviet Union.

In the words of Francine Hirsch, the Soviet strategy was to generate a ‘double assimilation’: to make the peripheral peoples into nationalities, but also ultimately to make them into a Soviet narod (people) where they would be merged together under communism. Insofar as the minority nationalities did use the Soviet system, the rules, the language categories, and the common media, the Soviet strategy seems to have worked.Footnote ²⁵ According to Rogers Brubaker, they did a great deal to institutionalize territorial nationhood and ethnic nationality as fundamental categories of political and personal understanding. The Soviet state may be said to have produced both quasi-nation states and ethnic nationalities where there were often none before.Footnote ²⁶

The Soviet Union practically prevented secession until the very end, but the strategy tended to backfire. Narratives about the formation of these nationalities became much more popular than narratives of their destined disappearance and ultimate merger into the Soviet narod. Nationality membership was made the basis for land and other economic and cultural rights. A nationality passport system spread throughout the USSR in the post-war period and, as the rhetoric of nationality became embedded within Soviet life, local leaders learnt to speak the language of ‘natsionalnost’.Footnote ²⁷ Soviet state leaders appear not to have been very successful or energetic in generating a narrative or symbolism of ‘Soviet-ness’.

I have argued that nationality was crucial to the Cold War order. The imperialist powers had to acknowledge and embrace the formal equality of nations, while at the same time utilizing national institutions to further the imperial agenda and goals. We have seen how the Soviets sought to extend claims to land and nationality through Party control. This use of the elite Party as an instrument of intervention in a situation of increasing national consciousness often had undesirable effects. Consider the Soviet efforts to ‘enlighten’ local communities and reform gender relations in the Central Asian republics. In Uzbekistan, the Soviet party-state sought to achieve its dual goals to modernize society and to extend its power by enlisting the support of Muslim women to reform such practices as polygamy and bride price. However, these policies generated resistance from Uzbek men, and Uzbek national identity came to be interwoven with resistance to such enlightenment campaigns, particularly over the symbolism of veiled women. Uzbek women, whose stories are recorded by Douglas Northrop, found themselves painfully caught between their patriarchal society and the Soviet state.Footnote ²⁸

The party-state’s instrumental use of nationalism appears to have both fostered and resulted in an exclusivist nationalism, not only in the Soviet republics but also in the Eastern bloc generally. Although official nationalities existed only in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia (after 1968), Katherine Verdery argues that ethnic nationalism intensified and became closely intertwined with socialism in all the other eastern European socialist republics. Despite the official ideology of trans-ethnic class politics, in the absence of other civic organizations, ethno-nationalism mirrored the monolithic nature of the party-state. Just as the party’s image of the ‘People as one’ cast all who disagreed with it as enemies of the People, so, too, could ethno-nationalists depict those outside the pure nation as its potential enemy. This kind of politics became particularly nasty with the collapse of the system, when ethnic leaders scrambled to create new states dominated by their group, thus reproducing through still more vicious ways – such as ethnic cleansing – the older, intimate connection between (imperialistic) domination and nationalism.Footnote ²⁹

In the US, the imperial–national relationship was by no means identical to the Soviet configuration, but it also had important social ramifications within the country and in its attitudes and policies abroad. Historically, a paternalistic attitude towards smaller and weaker nations was exemplified, as noted above, by the ‘leading-string law’. While the US had distanced itself from European racial imperialism since at least the First World War, it continued to erect racist barriers to citizenship – for instance against Asian immigrants – until 1942. Moreover, the decolonizing world noted a distinct ambivalence of the US towards the ability of darker-skinned people to govern themselves through the early post-war decades. Indeed, the US sometimes became implicated in efforts by European powers to restore their imperial claims in the colonies. Once the doctrine of containment became fully developed and anti-communist feeling hit fever pitch, particularly with the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, the US began to be seen increasingly as a neo-imperial power, especially in the non-aligned nations of the decolonizing world.Footnote ³⁰

In fact, US attitudes towards race and the colonial world in the era of United Nations multinationalism underwent a fundamental change. Although the roots of change were probably connected to wartime developments, especially the alliance with China, the post-war attitudes were influenced by the decolonizing movement in the context of the rivalry with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of these nations. In other words, the circumstances of the Cold War itself induced many of these changes. Christina Klein has shown in her exploration of ‘middle-brow culture’ in the US how the fear of the loss of Asia to communism led to radical changes in the image of American nationhood as premised upon a multicultural society. She uses the idea of cultural hegemony to show how representations of Asia and the Pacific reinforced the ‘Cold War consensus’ that supported US expansion of power across the world through the 1950s. Through these representations, ‘structures of feeling’ were created, which worked to channel ideological configurations into the field of the emotions, experience, and consciousness of ordinary people. What Klein calls ‘Cold War orientalism’ did not merely seek to contain communism; it sought to integrate Americans sentimentally with Asians who had not yet been made communist, both within the US and internationally.Footnote ³¹

The image of the US as ‘the nation of nations’ comes through particularly well in James Michener’s enormously successful historical novel, Hawaii (1959). As a land of diverse cultures, Hawai’i could emerge as the model of racial utopia with its flows and mingling of Polynesians, Japanese, Chinese, and New England whites. It is perhaps not too surprising that the Civil Rights movement also began to develop in this environment. At the same time, Russel Wright, among the foremost American designers from the 1930s to the 1950s, also became deeply involved with promoting the idea of ‘Asian Modern’. This was based on his promotion of folk arts in the ‘Japanese Modern’ for American consumer culture, lodging it as a part of modern American cultural identity. Ceramic, wooden, woven-grass, bamboo and lacquered artefacts for dining ware and furniture were adapted to American tastes and designed to create an ‘international modernism’ in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘which suited the American taste for friendly comfort and distanced itself from the cold European modernist style’.Footnote ³²

This new-found appreciation for non-Western and non-communist nations and cultures, however, continued to be channelled through the paternalistic designs of enlightenment for the unfortunate and childlike Asians and other backward peoples. Klein notes that the image of Asians as metaphorical children to American parents, as well as the post-war phenomenon of adoption of many Asian children pioneered by Pearl Buck’s organization, justified American intervention in Asia.Footnote ³³ She describes a discourse in which the world is normatively peopled not by inherently limited races or cultures but by a ‘family of nations’.

The family metaphor worked well for the new configuration. Family members were theoretically equal. As Lassa Oppenheim, one of the fathers of the study of international law, declared: ‘In entering the Family of Nations a state comes as an equal to equals.’Footnote ³⁴ At the same time, families not only incorporated hierarchies but also distinguished duties and obligations on unimpeachable moral grounds. Notably, during the Pacific War, the Japanese had appealed to their Asian ‘brethren’ to resist the US and European imperialists. This appeal, which had justified Japanese intervention in East Asia, extended the imperial Japanese metaphor of the Confucian family-state to all Asians as part of a family of nations. The Russians, too, sought to reinforce their solidarity in the communist bloc by appealing to their younger socialist brothers in China and elsewhere during the 1950s. Towards China this kind of patronizing attitude was accompanied by a communist evolutionary narrative of history, in which the Chinese were seen as backward and in need of help because they had been caught for so long in the stagnant Asiatic mode of production. Needless to say, these euphemisms of dominance backfired, most clearly in a newly resurgent and proud China, which in 1968 labelled the Soviets as ‘social-imperialists’.

Militarization and new states

By the time of the Cold War, the nation had become an over-determined concept, but it continued to play a critical role. Its nineteenth-century role as the vehicle for rights of a people, and as the impetus for territorial maximization, continued to fan out on a global scale. In the twentieth century as a whole, its power derived from its advocacy by the anti-imperialist movement, from its role as the only legitimate principle of sovereignty the world over, which was expressed most fully in the UN, and from its emergent function as part of a new imperialist strategy. During the Cold War, the new imperialist advocacy, based on modernizing designs of enlightenment, reached a peak, fostering new discourses of multiculturalism, development, and modernization.

But perhaps what was most unique to this period was the type of nation-state that emerged in much of the ‘developing world’: an undemocratic, authoritarian, if not military, ruling structure committed in varying degrees to building a developmental nation-state. This structure was in no small measure an outcome of the Cold War order. The equilibrium of Cold War rivalry tended to congeal political structures of nation-states organized in the two camps. The territorial boundaries and institutional arrangements established to the superpower’s advantage in the new nation-states often had its military support; the superpowers sought to preserve or acquiesce in the dominant groups that had formed the client nation-state, often because any change or destabilization might strengthen the other side. Thus these new states were frequently built upon the suppression of old and new aspirations.

Writing from the perspective of a millennium of state formation in Europe, Charles Tilly has noted that the form of nation-state building that took place among the decolonizing states of the post-Second World War era was dominated by militarism and civil war. Between 1960 and 1987, per capita military expenditure in the world increased by almost 150%, while GNP per capita rose by about 60%. In a dozen rich states, including the USSR, the military budget declined from 6.9% of GNP in 1960 to 5.5% in 1984. In the ‘developing world’, however, this proportion rose from 3.6% to 5.6%, indicating a larger spend from much smaller incomes. Even in the 1980s, 40% of ‘Third World’ states, not including Latin America, were military states, and civil war took the greatest toll on human life and refugee displacement.Footnote ³⁵

In many parts of Asia and Africa, the superpowers became involved with the different sides of the anti-colonial struggles that had developed in the first half of the twentieth century. The prime example is the Vietnam War, in which over a million Vietnamese were killed (a conservative estimate), and in which the US spent US$111 billion between 1965 and 1975 (equivalent to US$686 billion in 2008).Footnote ³⁶ The principal socialist power backing the Vietnamese (until around 1969) was not the USSR but the People’s Republic of China. Between 1965 and 1969, China provided considerable support to the Vietnamese, dispatching over 300,000 engineering and anti-aircraft troops to North Vietnam. China had also been the more active socialist power in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953.Footnote ³⁷ As for the US, the Vietnam War strained its financial and moral power and contributed to the relative weakening of US economic strength vis-à-vis Japan and Europe. By and large, the Cold War had a deeply divisive impact on the ‘developing world’, weakening what counter-hegemonic potential it possessed.

In many places, everyday life itself became militarized. In his study of Quemoy (Jinmen) island on the Taiwan Straits, Michael Szonyi discusses how the routine militarization and ‘geo-politicization’ of life on both sides of the Taiwan Straits led to a heightened and perpetual state of preparedness of the populace, which was to be available for mobilization at every turn and task.Footnote ³⁸ Superpower support and involvement, particularly through the transfer or sale of arms, in exchange for resources and political support in the Cold War, were evidently among the most important factors behind militarization. For instance, US military aid (including sales and loans) to Latin America rose from US$450 million in 1953–63 (or US$45 million a year) to about US$112 million per year in 1964–67. At the same time, US training of military personnel in Latin America increased rapidly. In 1969, the Rockefeller Report could declare that the Latin American militaries were ‘a progressive force able to carry out social change in a constructive way’. As late as 1980, two-thirds of Latin American people lived under military or military-dominated rule.Footnote ³⁹

In fact, Latin America became one of the most militaristic and ‘dirty’ battlegrounds of the Cold War. The 1959 revolution in Cuba played a significant ideological role as model and exporter of revolution, but the militarization of the region far exceeded the revolutionary threat. Indeed, the history of Latin America differed from that of the new nations of the mid twentieth century, where the Cold War appeared simultaneously with decolonization. This region had already had well over a hundred years of independence from European powers. During the interwar years, most Latin American societies were launched on the path of democratic movements for citizenship rights, franchise extension, and economic justice. According to Greg Grandin, by 1946 all but five countries could call themselves democratic. Popular movements could often be said to have a home-grown, social democratic tilt, focused on greater working-class participation in politics, but they were mostly not communist.Footnote ⁴⁰

The first direct US military intervention in Latin America during the Cold War was launched with the successful coup against the popularly elected leader Jacob Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala in 1954. While no communist, Guzman sought land redistribution, which would have affected 40% of the land owned by the United Fruit Company. In the years after the coup, the Guatemalan military were said to have killed at least 200,000 civilians in this small country, even though the US government believed that there were no more than 1,000 real communists.Footnote ⁴¹ During the intervention in Guatemala, the State Department threatened to halt credit and trade concessions to other Latin American countries unless they acceded to US plans for Guatemala. It was also from Guatemala that the US launched the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.Footnote ⁴²

The action in Guatemala was followed by an overt coup in Brazil in 1964, and then by military interventions in the Dominican Republic, Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. By 1976, despite having billions of dollars supposedly poured in to support middle-class societies through the Alliance for Progress, there were only three democratic regimes left in Latin America. Moreover, the infamous Operation Condor, the military intelligence consortium of South American regimes with US backing, was responsible for deaths, torture, and disappearances. The effects of these wars, known originally within the Argentinian military junta as the ‘dirty wars’, are still being felt.Footnote ⁴³

The case of Latin America reveals how the most local struggles became embroiled in Cold War politics. The US perceived the rise of powerful populist democratic movements as communist threats, and also as deeply injurious to US capitalist interests. By assimilating this popular movement into the rhetoric and violence of the Cold War, the US believed that it could secure its own interests by shoring up military and authoritarian regimes, as it did in Asia and Africa. The rise of popular left-wing movements in Latin America in recent years suggests the reassertion of a popular democratic tradition that was broken by the Cold War.

One of the cruel ironies of the Cold War was that, while the US and its allies championed democracy and freedom as their goals, more often than not in the ‘developing world’ they ended up supporting undemocratic military regimes, dictators, and monarchies alienated from the aspirations of ordinary people. The frequent intervention of Western powers to protect their interests in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, in addition to US operations in Latin America, polarized and radicalized large segments of the population in these societies. Driven by the need to secure oil supplies in the Middle East, AngloAmerican interests sought to develop the pre-war system of mandates and protectorates by establishing military bases and reliable clients, who were both anti-Soviet and anti- democratic. In 1953, the CIA engineered the coup in Iran that overthrew the elected government of Muhammad Mossadeq, who had nationalized Iranian oil, and restored the Shah as an American protégé.

The extent of American involvement with the Pakistani military was so great that it completely marginalized the civilian government, even before the first military coup in that country in 1959. The US–Pakistan relationship and the deteriorating relations between India and China, as well as between the Soviet Union and China, led India, despite its official non-aligned stance, to tilt towards the Soviet Union. It received considerable military and industrial support from the latter. Although the US has been careful not to support Pakistan in the wars against India overtly, it is nonetheless ironic that it found itself allied with the wrong side when it came to democracy and the national aspirations of Bangladeshis.Footnote ⁴⁴

The most dramatic intervention in Africa took place after Congo won its independence from Belgium in 1960. Patrice Lubumba, who tried to build an independent nation-state on the socialist model and to align his nation with the Soviet Union, was removed from power and was finally murdered by his opponents, who were backed militarily by the Europeans and the Kennedy administration. Congo became a vast client state of the United States, with huge investments in its mineral resources. Similarly, the coup directed against Sukarno and the communists in Indonesia, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in 1965, had the tacit backing of the CIA.Footnote ⁴⁵

As Odd Arne Westad has shown, Soviet intervention in the ‘developing world’ was not as extensive or committed until the 1970s and 1980s, when it became mired in the arguably fatal occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was more occupied with instabilities in its own camp, requiring extended periods of military occupation in parts of eastern Europe such as Poland and Romania (until 1956 and 1958, respectively), and, more famously, with the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968. While the Soviets supported radical movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, these were largely home-grown Marxist or leftist movements that sought the support of the Soviet bloc. Early Soviet leaders were not entirely convinced that revolution could be truly successful in these societies, even though it was important for Soviet superpower status that the USSR be influential in the emerging nation-states and utilize them for the goals of Soviet socialism. Communist victory in Vietnam, among other developments in the 1970s, however, emboldened the Soviet leadership to intervene more actively in places such as Ethiopia, Angola, and, finally, Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Afghanistan also represented the spread of Islamist radicalism as an alternative to the ideologies of socialism and capitalism and to the legitimacy of the national unit as the boundary of Cold War politics.Footnote ⁴⁶

Modernization and the developmental state

If superpower backing propped up and strengthened unpopular and militarized ‘nation-states’, the Cold War order was theorized in the academic world through modernization theory. As Nils Gilman demonstrates, the US and Soviet sides shared the principal assumptions and agenda of transformation for their less developed allies and the ‘developing world’. One of the chief formulators of modernization theory in the West, W. W. Rostow, even named his principal work The stages of economic growth: a non-communist manifesto, thus mirroring not only the Communist manifesto but also the Marxist idea of stages of growth to measure progress. Both sides took for granted the nation-state and nationality as the vehicle to achieve progress through correct policy prescriptions and state actions. Indeed, a strain in modernization theory even claimed the convergence of socialist and capitalist systems.Footnote ⁴⁷

Modernization and allied theories of political development came to be inextricably implicated with Cold War political realities. Unlike classical liberalism or post-Cold War neo-liberal doctrines such as the Washington Consensus, the state played a central role in these theories. They advocated the role of advanced states to aid and instruct developing states through their stages of growth, thus expanding the power and role of frequently unpopular client states in the Cold War order. Most developing states had not evolved historically, as they had in the West, but had been hastily put together by urban or military elites (including in eastern and central Europe) in highly contested terrains. Faced with the challenge of creating a nation from its diverse, sometimes warring communities, state-builders in the new nations utilized the prevailing territorial model of the nation-state, which granted equal citizenship to all its inhabitants regardless of ethnicity, gender, or religion, as a means of creating a homogenized citizenry. On the ground, however, the dominant ethnic group or military leaders, or a combination of the two, were able to use tacit or overt superpower support to suppress other ethnic or subaltern classes within the new nation-state.

At the same time, these states implemented centralized administrative means to impose large-scale projects upon local communities to bring them into the modern world. The technology, capital, and impetus for these projects often came from the industrialized powers, although the local leadership was very desirous of them. Thus, even while the relatively non-aligned leadership of India sought to develop an alternative or third model of development, it did not turn to Mahatma Gandhi’s conceptions based upon autarkic rural communities. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, shelved these ideas even before they saw the light of day, seeking to develop large projects in a Soviet-style planned economy with elements of free enterprise. Thus India ended the Cold War not with a novel or third system but with a combination of the Soviet and free-market systems (arguably gaining the advantages of neither).

James C. Scott’s insights into the high-modernist authoritarian state in the ‘developing world’ and socialist societies of the USSR and eastern Europe are relevant here. The state that sought administratively to reorder society as ‘legible’ by abstract, measurable, and large-scale scientific and engineering means was responding as much to the perceived backwardness as to the recalcitrance of the population, who often did not cooperate with centralizing and modernizing projects. The designs of enlightenment were imposed upon an often unwilling population, whose life-worlds were being destroyed without evident tangible benefits from the projects.Footnote ⁴⁸

The priority given to the state in Cold War discourses of modernization and political development also accorded it a central role in the new culture. Many of the new states sought to control the means of identity creation in their societies through the development and control of education, media, and cultural policies. New Asian states often attempted to monitor the religious practices of their population by enhancing the visibility of these practices in the eyes of the state. They did so by destroying uncontrollable religious groups, co-opting religious leadership, and segregating religious communities to control their activities better. This seemed to work in large part, not only in East Asia but also in regions that had seen religious volatility earlier, such as Indonesia and South Asia. It is remarkable that, since the end of the Cold War, this ability to channel or subordinate religious identities to national goals has rapidly come undone in many parts of the world.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Cold War order had by no means the same effects across the developing or decolonizing world. In most of these societies, Cold War authoritarian regimes were not able to achieve the goals of modernization. However, East Asian states were able, partly because of their historical legacies, to form the developmental state under military or authoritarian rule and modernize their societies.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the 1960s, the military leadership of South Korea and Taiwan followed the Japanese model of state-led industrialization that included elite bureaucratic planning, alongside strategic intervention and regulation in economy and society. They pursued export-oriented strategies, in contrast to the import substitution strategy that characterized much of the rest of the ‘developing world’, which produced very high growth rates, enabling their transition to industrialized economies. It should be noted that they were assisted by certain favourable conditions: US economic and military aid to South Korea and Taiwan were among the highest to any country, particularly when viewed in per capita terms. Between 1946 and 1979 (although mostly before the mid 1960s), South Korea received about US$7 billion in military aid and US$6 billion in economic aid. Taiwan, under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was the recipient of similar magnitudes of aid. Privileged access to US markets and US tolerance of protected domestic markets made South Korea (which in the late 1940s had become one of the poorest countries in the world) into the twelfth largest economy by the late 1970s, under the military dictator Park Chung-hee.Footnote ⁵¹ It might be noted that he sent over 300,000 troops to South Vietnam to support the US military efforts, and that South Korea had the second largest military presence on the US side.Footnote ⁵²

While some states in Pacific Asia were distinguished by high economic growth, all of the client states and allies in the region were characterized by military or authoritarian regimes backed by the US. In Thailand, for instance, the anti-communist military, which dominated government until 1982, received extensive aid from the US. Between 1972 and 1982, the Thai armed forces were able to expand their troops from 30,000 to 233,000, not counting the expansion of paramilitary forces.Footnote ⁵³

Even where the Pacific Asian economies developed rapidly, subservience to US military power and interests was socially unpopular. In Japan, arguably the most democratic of US allies in Asia, a popular nationalism identified with an anti-imperialist stance came to be directed against the US. Here the extent of popular disaffection with US policies and ideology was visible during certain periods, for instance during the renewal of the 1951 Security Treaty in 1960 and in the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁵⁴

Meanwhile, among American scholars and intellectuals, Japan had become the paragon of modernization theory. Ironically, Japanese intellectuals held a different view of what modernization should be about. In 1960, the Hakone conference on modernization was organized by US and Japanese scholars. Coming on the heels of the struggles against the Security Treaty earlier in the year, the conference became embroiled in debates over the precise extent and nature of Japanese democracy. American academics promoted an objectivist, value-free conception of modernization, without much role for democratic or participatory institutions. This was contested by leftist and liberal Japanese academics, and Victor Koschman observes that Hakone ‘has been remembered in Japan … as the occasion for disagreement between Japanese and Americans regarding the role of democratic values in modernization’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, for the modernization theorist Samuel Huntington, the experience of the 1960s suggested that modernization was not about democracy but about state power. According to him, the important factor in modernization was not ‘the form of government, but the degree of government’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In the rest of Pacific Asia, the band of military or military-dominated regimes began to be challenged from the late 1970s. Beginning with the student and worker protest movement against the authoritarian rule of the South Korean military dictator Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated in October 1979, democratization movements followed in the Philippines (1986), Taiwan (1987), and Indonesia (1998), and one revolution was recently being fought out on the streets in Thailand. This is not to say that popular movements were always behind this transformation; for instance, martial law was lifted in Taiwan without significant popular pressure. Rather, changing geopolitical conditions more closely connected to the US pull-out from Vietnam and rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China were more important in the collapse of the Cold War order in Pacific Asia, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

We cannot undertake to study the post-Cold War world dominated by a single hegemon and ideology here. Suffice it to say that the redistributive state, and even the civic territorial state model, are considerably weaker than before. With the entrenchment of a global market society, the state is no longer the exclusive or predominant creator of identity. Globalization may not have weakened the state per se, and in some areas it may even have strengthened it, but state nationalism is now only one among several identities created by globalization and localization. We see the transition quite clearly in the flourishing of transnational religion, most evidently in the globalization of Islam. The rise of Hindu nationalism is in fact a transnational phenomenon, largely contained during the Cold War, but flourishing since, in part as a response to the resurgence of Islam. In China, the tremendous growth of religious affiliation and identity is testimony to vastly changed political and social circumstances since the Cold War. While the reasons for the new emergence of religious fervour can doubtless be found in the rampant spread of capitalism in China, the transnational and local orientations of religious life are equally significant. Christianity, mostly built around house churches, is the most rapidly growing religion, and native Chinese religions – most famously, but by no means exclusively, the Falungong – also have universalist aspirations.

Countervailing forces

The Cold War order in much of the ‘developing world’ was generated by the institutionalization of statist models and a national frame of reference that was utilized, manipulated, and shaped by the superpowers. However, there were countervailing forces, emerging from the weak links and the reactions to this domination in the ‘developing world’. These contributed significantly to the end of the Cold War, and two of them are considered below.

China’s role in the Cold War has been a subject of intense scrutiny over the last fifteen years, especially as new archives in the Soviet Union, China, and the US have become available. For instance, we now know that Sino-Soviet cooperation during most of the 1950s was so close that few would have expected it to unravel as quickly as it did. Indeed, the view that relations between the two socialist powers were tense from the start may have been a later and deliberate misrepresentation by Mao of Soviet intent. The leading Chinese scholars of the period, Chen Jian, Shen Zhihua, and Yang Kuisong, reveal that, although there had been historical tensions between the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists before 1949, not only did the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950 resolve these outstanding irritants but Mao was also assured of revolutionary China’s ideology and role in the world by a 1949 secret agreement between Stalin and Liu Shaoqi regarding a ‘division of labour’ for waging world revolution: ‘they decided that while the Soviet Union would remain the center of international proletarian revolution, China’s primary duty would be the promotion of the “Eastern revolution”’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The rapid decline of Sino-Soviet relations from the late 1950s fuelled Mao’s resolve to develop China’s own nuclear power by 1964, but he acknowledged the symbolically important but limited capacity of this power, remarking ‘that we don’t even have one-tenth of what they [the Soviets and the US] have’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) derailed China’s diplomatic efforts to make use of this new power. During the 1960s, Mao consistently overestimated the power of ‘Third World’ revolution to serve as an alternative power base to counter the possibility of Soviet and US collaboration against China. It was only with the Soviet threat of nuclear attack after large-scale military encounters between China and the Soviets in March 1969 that Mao turned to the more deliberate counsel of Zhou Enlai, who initiated the historic talks with the Americans that would significantly alter the future of the Cold War in Asia.Footnote ⁵⁹ The generals invited by Zhou to comment on the dire international situation in 1969 reported: ‘the United States tries to take advantage of the contradictions between China and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union tries to take advantage of the contradictions between China and the United States. So we should intentionally take advantage of the contradictions between the United States and the Soviet Union.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Negotiations with the Americans in the early 1970s marked the shift of China’s role from that of a potentially counter-hegemonic power in the Cold War to a realpolitik player. Nevertheless, in this latter role, the PRC still contributed importantly to the collapse of the Cold War Order. Its nuclear power became meaningful not only as a deterrent but arguably also by undermining the principal superpower rivalry itself. The Reagan administration, with its heightened ideological fervour, recommenced the arms race at a new technological and financial level, especially with the ‘Star Wars’ programme, so that the Soviet Union could no longer keep up while continuing to supply the consumer needs of its population. While it has not been demonstrated that the Reagan administration was emboldened in this effort by the neutralization of China, the administration’s sales of nuclear reactors and high-technology military weapons and equipment to China between 1984 and 1987 suggests that the balance of power had clearly moved back from a three-way to a two-way contest, made newly and highly asymmetrical by the China factor.Footnote ⁶¹

Nuclear power was certainly a necessary factor that permitted China to play the relatively independent role it did, but not a sufficient one. In many ways the Chinese revolution, which was independent of the Soviet pattern, produced a mighty party-state that was able to break away early from Soviet dependence. This was the sufficient factor as well as the precondition driving China to acquire the bomb. The independence and power of the Chinese revolutionary state was the historical condition for the emergence of one of the crucial disequilibrating factors in the Cold War. Agency in such hegemonic systems as the Cold War emerges not only from the attractive power of consumer capitalism but also from alternative and momentous historical developments.

The second case is the globalization of Islam, which is not simply a post-Cold War phenomenon. In many ways it was a result of, even a backlash against, the Cold War order. From the early 1980s the mujahidin, militarily supported by the US and its Muslim allies, played the major role in driving out the Soviets from Afghanistan and bringing the Taliban to power. In turn the mujahidin were encouraged by the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Even though these events preceded the end of the Cold War, they represented a disenchantment with the two Western options of capitalist and socialist modernity.Footnote ⁶²

It is instructive in this context to explore the writings of a relatively obscure Iranian Marxist-turned-Islamist, Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–69), who died a decade before the Islamic revolution but whose work was immensely popular among the youth of Iran at the time of the revolution. Al-i Ahmad’s early Marxism furnished him with a radical critique of the contemporary imperialism of industrialized nations, including Europe, North America, and the Soviet Union, which not only exploited the people and resources of the rest of the world but also patronized those people as objects of knowledge and ‘raw material for every sort of Western laboratory’. In Al-i Ahmad’s view, the socialist camp was no less materialist and greedy, and represented ‘would-be corporate colonists’ who could sit quite comfortably at the same table as their capitalist counterparts. What particularly galled him were the hypocritical designs of enlightenment that strip a people of their culture and identity: ‘Thus only we in our Islamic totality, formal and real, obstructed the spread (through colonialism, effectively equivalent to Christianity) of European civilization, that is, the opening of new markets to the West’s industries.’Footnote ⁶³ Note how the Marxist materialist critique is no longer sufficient to counter the outrages against morality and identity.

Conclusion

I have tried to understand the Cold War as a period in global history by exploring its continuities and discontinuities with the preceding century-long relationship between imperialism and nationalism. While anti-imperialist rhetoric pervaded global political discourse in the interwar years and particularly during the Second World War, the competitive and exclusivist goals embedded in the system of nation-states could hardly be wiped clean by rhetoric or even by the creation of cooperative institutions such as the United Nations. The Cold War developed in the context of the contradiction between domination and self-determination in the relations of the superpowers with their junior partners and client states.

Superpower rivalry emerged as a framework for containment. The effort to contain communism and capitalism (and covertly subvert the other) entailed a larger containment or channelling of the flow of possible change in various areas of political, social, and cultural life within the political imagination. The Cold War rivalry sustained an equilibrium that tended to freeze not only the power relations between superpower and client states but also the political contours of nation-states in the two camps, backed by economic inducements, military power, and nuclear threat. Partly because the superpowers were operating within a competitive framework for world dominance, and partly because they were responding to a common, or globally articulated, set of problems and aspirations in the ‘developing world’, they utilized remarkably similar methods of control and inducing allegiance. Thus, despite the very tangible differences in the political goals and experiences of the two systems, the historical background of national imperialism allows us to observe many shared elements between the camps in the Cold War order.

Nationalism and national rights formed the common framework through which the imperialists sought to exercise domination while retaining the allegiance of client populations. The regimes in the Soviet camp attempted to utilize nationalism through party-state control. In the US case, paternalism and tutelage accompanied the recognition of new nations. The new states and political institutions supported by the superpowers in these nations, however, were much more grimly authoritarian and militaristic. Indeed, the Cold War was cold (non-violent) only in north-western Europe and North America; militarism and war prevailed in most of the rest of the world. Wars, even if not proxy wars, were often enabled by, and inextricable from, the imperatives of superpower rivalry. Finally, while modernization projects represented a welcome enlightenment ideal to much of the world, they also became the means of reinforcing the power of unpopular and undemocratic states.

To what extent was the Cold War order responsible for the imposition of the nation-state model – in particular, the model of the centralizing, and often authoritarian, developmental state in the ‘developing world’? Many of the features of this state model appeared in the pre-war era, but, equally, the advantages found by hegemonic powers in the nation to control, to incentivize key sectors (usually of the elite), and to mobilize support for the goals of the superpower played a key role in the spread of the model. Indeed, the end of the Cold War appears to have significantly transformed the model of the centralizing, developmental state in favour of the ‘Washington Consensus’, which emphasized state withdrawal and redeployment, privatization of public goods, and the model of the consumer citizen. The displacement of national regulatory frameworks by a relatively unregulated global financial system has produced its own crisis. While the nation-state and nationalism have certainly not gone away, our present crisis reveals the replacement of one configuration by another.

In terms of the counter-hegemonic forces that played an important role in bringing changes to the Cold War, China’s role was disruptive of rivalry and political order but it turned out to have been counter-hegemonic only in this limited sense. Indeed, the centrality of capitalism and nationalism in China affiliates it with the victorious capitalist side in which it has become a key player today, albeit with its own developmental path. The role of global Islam may be more powerfully counter-hegemonic. Both of these forces emerged in regions of the non-Western world that were able to recover confidence from their relatively independent historical paths, whether revolutionary or tradition-directed. Does this portend the beginning of the end of a long period of Western hegemony?