Reshaping Our Sense of the Past: The Cold War and Détente Reappraised

Looking back on the Cold War, historians are beginning to discern new patterns and meanings to replace the familiar picture of a world dominated by bipolar superpower confrontation. The collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and still more the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, ushered in a period of instability such as usually follows a major war. Any such dramatic changes necessarily affect perceptions of what has been replaced. Reevaluative scholarship on the Cold War already reflects contemporary priorities in reinterpreting the years between 1941 and 1990. This does not mean that consensus has suddenly broken out on such vexed questions as when the Cold War began, a debate at which Nelson hints in his first chapter. Nor does it mean that there is a newfound unanimity about why the Cold War emerged and why it proceeded as it did. There are, however, signs of new orthodoxies which the two very different books reviewed here illustrate. Both, for example, stress the limits of American and Soviet influence, perhaps not surprisingly in the aftermath of the collapse of one and the obvious limits on the power of the other in the 1980s and 1990s.

These two books are written in the knowledge that the Cold War was not a stable international system. Crockatt reminds us that scholars, strategists, and politicians had, by the 1980s, come to regard it as a system that was entrenched for the foreseeable future and that had the virtues (in Western eyes) of predictability and stability. This view depended on assumptions of symmetry in superpower relations and that the Cold War was functional for each side. The events of 1989–1991 have highlighted the significance of asymmetries in Soviet-American competition throughout as well as the need to explain the Cold War “system” as dynamic and mutable. They have, for example, cast new perspectives on the history of resistance to Soviet domination from the Baltic states in the late 1940s to Solidarity; of independence from Moscow’s foreign policy by Yugoslavia, Albania, or Romania; of economic heterodoxy in Hungary and Poland; and, of course, of the Chinese Communists’ independence from Moscow. These developments seem very different now than in the days of the Brezhnev doctrine. Similarly the relative significance of the different “baskets” of accords made at Helsinki in 1975 has changed dramatically in the light of the disappearance of East Germany and Czechoslovakia and the presence in the Hradcany Castle of a cofounder of Charter 77.

If the two alliance systems were dynamic forums for compromise and negotiation internally and externally, we can now see that as early as the Eisenhower/Khrushchev period globalized confrontation was ceasing to be straightforwardly bipolar, if it ever had been. Crockatt notes that from the mid-1950s polycentrism challenged bipolarity in both camps. This was true of developments in Europe and the northern Asian Pacific rim, just as it was with regard to the Third World. In nuclear matters bipolarity survived longer, but even in that regard the development of British, French, and Chinese nuclear forces limited simple assumptions of bipolarity by the 1960s.

Despite different approaches the two works reviewed here present many similarities, not least this emphasis on polycentrism in the Cold War system. They also share a concern with what Crockatt terms “the oscillations between periods of confrontation and détente” that were a fundamental pattern within it (p. 6). His book tells the story of “the United States and the Soviet Union in world politics, 1941–1991” in a global context. Nelson’s is a study specifically of the origins of détente, but methodologically there are numerous common points. Both authors have produced works of international history rather...