The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad (review)

Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History is a difficult book to review because it is so good. It is well-conceived, well-researched, lucidly written and argued, and reflective of the many decades of Westad's ongoing engagement with the subject of the Cold War in its many facets. It is hard to imagine another scholar writing a massive, 700-page synthesis of the Cold War with the talents and accomplishments that Westad brings to the subject. He knows the history and culture of both the Soviet Union and China and has a firm grasp of Russian and Chinese. Originally from Norway, Westad possesses the kind of sensitivity to the division of Europe, the central "act" of the Cold War, that sometimes eludes both U.S. and Russian scholars. He has been involved with U.S. and British scholarship for many decades, was one of the earliest participants in the Woodrow Wilson Center's pioneering Cold War International History Project, has long been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cold War Studies, served as a coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), and presently teaches at Yale University. Among his many fine publications in the field is his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), which explores in depth how the Cold War reverberated throughout Africa, South America, and South and Southeast Asia.

Two major themes infuse the narrative of Westad's latest survey: the prominent role of ideology in the Cold War and the global reach of the standoff. He argues that the Cold War was above all an ideological struggle that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century as exemplified in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Together with the socialist labor movement they promoted on the European continent, they experienced the social and economic dislocations of the development of industrialization and capitalism. In Westad's view, this conflict was intensified first of all by the Bolsheviks' rise to power in November 1917 and then again with the victory of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain over the Axis powers in 1945.

Westad's focus on the longue durée of ideological conflict invites the counterargument that the ideological contradictions between Communism and capitalism in the nineteenth century, though certainly part of the general backdrop of the Cold War's ideological character, should not themselves be considered part and parcel of the Cold War. Militant labor struggles in Europe and the history of the First and Second Internationals laid some of the grounding for what was to come, but they also presaged the development of Social Democracy, which itself was more wedded to parliamentary democracy, support of patriotic causes (like voting for war credits in World War I), and staunch anti-Communism than it was to ideological opposition to capitalism. Marx and Engels were as much the ideological forefathers of such diverse Socialists as August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Kurt Schumacher, the Russian Mensheviks, Julius Martov, and Paul Axelrod—and of the anti-Leninist Communist Rosa Luxemburg— as they were of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin or Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck. The Russian Revolution did not have to happen, and it certainly did not have to happen in the way it did. The contradictions inherent in European industrialization and capitalism could have led to different results.

No doubt the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the episodic revolutionary upheavals in Europe following the catastrophe of World War I increased the general fears of worldwide ideological struggle. But by the end of the 1930s, Soviet foreign policy had quickly adjusted to the norms and demands of the international system. Stalin curbed the revolutionary activities of the Communist International (Comintern), joined the League of Nations, and endorsed the policy of "collective security" in an effort to protect Europe and the Soviet Union against the rise of...