Cold War

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Nothing so demonstrates the impermanence of political life than the history of the cold war. As a concept, cold war gained popularity shortly after the last ‘hot’ or ‘shooting’ war to involve all the major powers, the Second World War. It describes a state of extreme hostility between the superpowers, associated with arms races, diplomatic conflict, and hostile measures of every kind short of overt military action. The cold war started, at the latest, in 1947 with the Berlin Blockade, and remained intense until the middle 1960s, with incidents such as the Cuban missile crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall. From the late 1960s détente grew, or at least became more fashionable, but the threat of a return to the cold war remained. Some commentators talk of a ‘second cold war’ beginning roughly with the election of President Reagan in 1980; certainly for a few years in the 1980s arms races took on more energy, defence budgets increased, and diplomatic conflict between the superpowers in many areas of the world intensified. However, from 1985, with Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union, and Reagan’s need to curb defence spending to ease the US budgetary crisis, what can now be seen as an inexorable process of winding down this institutionalized, but essentially irrational, conflict began. As reform in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe accelerated, the economic capacity of the Warsaw Pact to compete militarily with NATO declined, as did the political willingness of non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members to participate. At this time, urgent arms control negotiations covering nuclear weapons (Intermediate Nuclear Forces and Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) and Conventional Forces in Europe, were increasingly clearly in the economic interests of all countries. However, there can be little doubt that it was Gorbachev’s shifts in foreign policy, usually demonstrated by arms control concessions, that spelled the long-term end of the cold war. What immediately ended it, however, were the revolutions in Eastern Europe, so that the conflict changed from one between two blocs to a conflict between NATO and the Soviet Union alone. If a single piece of evidence is needed that the cold war finally has ended (there had been failed promises of this every time the détente cycle ‘warmed’), it was the support which the Soviet government gave to the UN-sponsored, but American-led, Gulf War against Iraq. Alternatively, the Soviet Union having to accept that its troops should leave the eastern portion of the now unified German state might be taken as the symbolic ending of the purely military aspect of the cold war.

The fact that the cold war ended essentially by accident is fitting—it began that way. Since the 1970s historians of the period have stressed the way in which mutual misunderstandings and disappointments between the Soviet Union and the USA about what should be done with post-war Europe grew into a structured opposition that neither side had ever intended.

Like most such concepts, ‘cold war’ can only be valid if some ‘natural’ alternative exists; and it is arguably unclear that relations between the major powers have been any worse during the supposed cold war period than has usually been the case in many past periods following destructive wars. What gave the cold war its impetus, and what had usually been missing in the past, was the deeply felt ideological conflict between the East and West. It is because of this that some commentators, almost entirely in the USA, want to see the cold war as a real war which their ‘way of life’ won. In truth, serious analysts on both sides of the iron curtain had, for years, argued both that neither side had any real intention of attacking the other, and also that neither side had the capacity to do so. Nor is it the case that only the Soviet Union lost its hegemony over its junior alliance partners. The intensification of the cold war in the early 1980s was met with very deep opposition among Western European publics, and crucial dissension inside NATO’s own governing councils over the perceived trend towards a return to isolationism in the USA. There was pressure for Europe to be left to fend for itself, a denouncing of European NATO members for failing to spend enough on defence (the ‘burden-sharing’ argument) to such an extent that NATO’s lack of ability to fight a defensive war almost matched the Warsaw Pact’s inability and unwillingness to fight an offensive one. The cold war is over, but this no more guarantees peace in Europe than the cold war itself ever really threatened a hot war. Indeed, one consequence of the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe has been the series of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, making the end of the cold war more dangerous than the cold war itself usually was. What has happened is that the natural and inevitable conflicts in such a complex continent, ones that were frozen by the artificial ‘East–West’ cold war, have returned, and Europe has become as unstable as at any time since 1914. The cold war had two, contradictory, effects: it paralysed international relations outside of Europe so that regional conflicts became mere instances of a European conflict and were artificially heightened; but at the same time it did impose an order and stability in Europe itself.