Storia della guerra fredda: L'ultimo conflitto per l'Europa (review)

The more the Cold War recedes into history, the greater the challenge of trying to relate its outcome to what has happened since. Successive attempts at synthesizing the history of the Cold War have reflected changing perspectives and expectations—from the unlikely "end of history" to the similarly improbable, if worrisome, notion that history repeats. "The Cold War has been disposed of, but it is not difficult to imagine it being resuscitated in another variation" (p. 3), Federico Romero suggests in alluding to the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 and the onset of the world's economic crisis.

These comments, apparently inserted just as the manuscript was about to go to press, are not typical of what is a level-headed and balanced account of the 40-year confrontation. In tune with most of the recent scholarship, Romero sees the Cold War as neither foreseen nor inevitable. Although determined by ideological and cultural factors, the Cold War was neither an "absolute ideological conflict" nor a "normal" struggle for power but much of both (p. 6). It was a "global conflict, animated by multiple local and trans-national dynamisms" (p. 13).

Romero does not set much store by the Cold War's "secret and mysterious dimensions," such as the activities of intelligence agencies, which, although often exciting to read about, rarely made a difference in the larger picture (p. 14). He rightly regards the public discourse as more revealing of the true dimensions of the conflict. Nor does he spend much time on the arcane details of the superpowers' nuclear policies that so preoccupied contemporaries. He judges nuclear deterrence redundant rather than indispensable for keeping the war cold.

"Bipolar disorder" (p. 173) is the felicitous metaphor Romero applies to the state of affairs brought about by the competition between the two superpowers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This competition fueled "tension between strategic bipolarity and nascent economic, political, and cultural multipolarity" (p. 176). Accentuating security in its nonmilitary dimensions, the tension presaged the international order that would eventually emerge from the Cold War, although hardly anybody saw it that way at the time. But describing that order as a "security community" based on the "indisputable pre-eminence of the United States" (p. 338) may be similarly off the mark.

Romero, Italy's foremost historian of U.S. foreign policy and European-American relations, is resistant to both left-wing and right-wing preconceptions. He knows better than to bash the United States for allegedly making the Cold War its "imperial project" (p. 345) or to indulge in "triumphalism" about America's defeat of its Soviet adversary. At the same time, he leaves no doubt about the superiority of the West's dynamic capitalist system over static, Soviet-style socialism. Rather than see this as a victory of particular Western liberal values, however, Romero considers the outcome a victory of universal human values, most striking in rendering major wars obsolescent and setting an irreversible trend toward multilateralism.

Pointedly subtitled "The Last Struggle for Europe," the book presents a more balanced picture than America-centric U.S. historians prefer to paint. Romero rightly focuses on Europe as the region of the world in which the Cold War both started and ended and in which an all-out war was most likely to be fought. Not surprisingly, the Old Continent is also where the Cold War proved to have the most profound and lasting consequences, epitomized by the rise of European integration as a new security model. On that subject, however, Romero has little to say.

Romero does not share the belief in the centrality of Third World political and social issues in the Cold War, as argued by Odd Arne Westad in The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Instead, he sees the larger conflict as one of the contributing factors in the...