Relocating Socialism: Asia, Socialism, Communism, and the PAP Departure from the Socialist International in 1976

Abstract

The connections between the Cold War and spatiality, geography, and the geopolitical have seldom been far apart, yet in conventional analyses they have tended to be more ambivalent. On the one hand, the Cold War could not be understood without its location within a territorial, material, and grounded context. For instance, geography allowed intellectuals to visualize where adherents to capitalism or communism were located, make sense of how communist expansionism was taking place, and frame the global extent of the Cold War itself and the annihilist potential of the ensuing arms race. Yet, on the other hand, space and geography have often always been peripheralized, so in this case, all phenomena have been explained as part of an unfolding historical narrative spanning the time of Yalta to Reykjavik, and on to either the liberal triumphalist or civilizationally conflicting present. One does not have to look far beyond the theses of Fukuyama and Huntington to locate the preferred temporal explanations of Cold War phenomena.