Northern Europe in the Cold War, 1965–1990: East-West Interactions of Trade, Culture, and Security ed. by Poul Villaume, Ann-Marie Ekengren, and Rasmus Mariager (review)

The ritual of portraying the Cold War as an epic global struggle—expressed through U.S.-Soviet bipolarity—inevitably downplays its cooperative and multilateral features. Northern Europe in the Cold War, 1965–1990 seeks to counterbalance this "bias in international historiography" (p. 12) and to offer a more inclusive interpretation. Edited by Poul Villaume, Ann-Marie Ekengren, and Rasmus Mariager, it centers on East-West interactions and collaboration—from the 1960s until the 1980s—in general, and on the role of (Northern) European multipolarity during this period in particular. Moreover, it emphasizes smaller national and transnational actors at the expense of great powers to give "neglected" Cold War themes and topics the attention they deserve. As Villaume points out in his introduction, this perspective is consistent with what scholars at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki—the publisher of the volume—have termed a new Cold War research paradigm based on interpretive frameworks of East-West transfers and interactive communications.

There are advantages to such an approach, which is a welcome corrective to a simplistic reductionist binary with an exclusive focus on the United States and the Soviet Union. The book underscores the ambiguity that frequently characterized East-West relations, with diverse state and non-state actors, motivated by different interests, seeking to mitigate or resist Cold War dichotomies. Yet, this approach also has some potential drawbacks. First, the reification of particular local, state, or regional perspectives or of marginal/neglected topics runs the risk of not only offering one-sided or skewed perspectives of events but also of exaggerating their historical significance. One is reminded of the controversial scholarly reappraisals that followed public access—in the 1980s—to British documents on the early Cold War. Riding on "source fetishism," some historians went so far as to put Britain on a par with the United States and Soviet Union in the debate over Cold War origins. Second, in focusing on collaborative narratives, some scholars might be tempted to go too far in this direction and to deemphasize the return to Cold War confrontation in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On the whole, the contributors do not fall into these traps. Many of them highlight continuities in East-West interactions—from the period of détente to that of the "Second Cold War"—and examine bridge-building influences on political decision-makers. But they are careful not to pretend that such efforts overshadowed the resumption of East-West hostilities or that they led to the end of the Cold War. Instead, the activities of national and transnational actors are usually described in terms of being facilitators or "lubricants" in promoting pro-détente policies in a shifting geopolitical climate.

The book succeeds in introducing new topics, ranging from science diplomacy, dissident contacts, and transnational military cultures to efforts by the Socialist International and neutral and nonaligned states to keep détente alive in the early 1980s. Some contributions are more ambitious and engaging than others. But what they show is that cooperative narratives can exist alongside—or in opposition to—confrontational orthodoxies. The book is also a reminder that perceived historical paradigm shifts are often less clear-cut than they may seem. As Fredric Jameson has stressed, radical breaks between periods do not necessarily involve complete changes of content; rather, they entail the reconfigurations of preexisting elements. Thus, characteristics of an earlier period or a system that were subordinate become dominant, and features that had been dominant become secondary.

To be sure, the book is not free of a bias of its own. Although the introduction includes much talk of "Northern Europe," the majority of the contributions have to do with Scandinavia in general and Finland in particular. Britain is more or less absent, and the same can be...