After the Cold War: New World, Old Theories?

Abstract

Defining and dating the origins of the Cold War has always been a controversial matter. Those who stress that the Cold War was a struggle for power between the two ‘superpowers’ are inclined to place its origins in the period 1944–1948, when the victorious anti-Nazi coalition — the original ‘United Nations’ — fell apart. Those who stress the ideological side of the conflict are inclined to place the origins earlier — perhaps in 1917–1919, when Leninism triumphed in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Wilson defined liberal internationalism in the Fourteen Points and at Versailles. Those more inclined to see the conflict as between competing versions of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ and competing approaches to the organisation of a modern society will look further back, to the mid- or early-nineteenth century and Marx’s critique of bourgeois liberalism. Dating the end of the Cold War is equally problematic — perhaps the acceptance of a division of Europe in the mid-1950s is crucial, perhaps the recognition of nuclear stalemate in the 1960s, or perhaps a much later date is appropriate. In any event, two points are now very clear. First, the Cold War is now certainly and unambiguously over: between 1989 and 1991, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the de-Sovietisation of Eastern Europe and, finally, the break-up of the Soviet Union itself, ensured that there would be no ‘Third Cold War’ to follow the limited revival of verbal hostilities in the early 1980s.