The Other Cold War by Heonik Kwan (review)

This is a challenging, insightful, and provocative book. Since the 1970s, the insights of anthropology and ethnography have radically altered the discipline of history, leading scholars to emphasize the lived experience of diverse populations and to think about large-scale political and economic transformations in new and far more productive ways. The field of diplomatic history and the study of the Cold War, by contrast, have remained largely untouched by that phenomenon. Focused on large-scale questions of state-to-state relations, geopolitics, and international economics, realists and their opposing revisionist counterparts paid little attention to questions of how local communities interpreted and lived through the Cold War’s complex effects. Starting in the 1990s, a younger generation of scholars raised important questions about the Cold War’s intellectual and cultural history, widening the field of vision. As Kwon convincingly argues, however, scholars have largely ignored the social history of the Cold War, and in doing so have failed to explore the truly global dimensions of a conflict that even now continues to transform millions of lives.

Much of the problem, Kwon observes, has to do with the tendency to foreshorten our understanding of the Cold War both spatially and temporally. Following the criticisms made by scholars like Walter LaFeber and Bruce Cumings, Kwon notes that John Lewis Gaddis’s influential conception of the Cold War as a “long peace” largely ignores the parts of the world in which much of the most visceral, unrelenting violence of the Cold War took place—the Third World. It is not the “periphery,” after all, if you happen to live there. More originally, Kwon also raises the surprising extent to which morally charged arguments about the origins of the Cold War rage without ceasing, while the end of the Cold War is treated as a closed question. Rather than accepting 1989 as an obvious kind of terminal point, demarcating the start of a decidedly “post–Cold War era,” Kwon instead puts forward “the decomposition of the Cold War” (p. 8), a corporeal metaphor suggesting a slow, lingering, ongoing process in which contests over meaning and memory persist well into the present. Studies of the way that conceptions of race and ideology were intertwined, he argues, provide a particularly promising line of inquiry. Just as racial segregation was often legitimated through the idioms of the Cold War, matters of ideological difference were also embedded in familial and racial terms.

To illustrate his point, Kwon draws on his own ethnographic research regarding commemoration and kinship in Vietnam and South Korea. In central Vietnam, he explains, the lines of decolonization and ideological division continue to shape communities in which ancestors fought on different sides of the war, raising important social debates as families challenge state policy by commemorating the lives of those who opposed the revolution. Popular memory and the social order of villages in that region, Kwon notes, were further complicated by colonial conscription of Vietnamese to work in France’s metropolitan industry during World War II. Although many joined the resistance against the Germans during the war, those returning from forced expatriation were distrusted by the revolutionaries even as some who remained in Paris eventually became outspoken opponents of the war against Hanoi. State-endorsed rites to commemorate the death of revolutionary veterans, Kwon observes, also provided occasions for families to incorporate memories of those swept up in a multifaceted conflict, expanding understandings of citizenship and sacrifice. Kwon finds similarly complex dynamics at work in South Korea. In 1948, on Jeju Island, a Communist-led uprising against U.S. attempts to crack down on radical nationalists resulted in widespread atrocities on both sides. For decades those events were banished from public discourse by a South Korean state determined to impose its own historical narrative. Over the past ten years, however, the government’s investigation and documentation of the counterinsurgency campaign that followed the uprising, including the excavation of mass burial sites, has created an opening for reconciliation as families recount their own lived experiences...