The present and visions of the Cold War: changes and continuities in the interpretation of a long-lasting conflict

The history of the Cold War has been a subject widely addressed during the last three decades and its research has been boosted by the opening of the archives of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the declassification, albeit partial, of tens of thousands of files in the United States. This fact has encouraged professionals from all areas of the social sciences and humanities to approach the study of this period.

The studies appeared after this “boom” have been remarkable, not only because of the research generated around the New Cold War History project coordinated by John Lewis Gaddis (2011), but the new historiographical perspectives can be noticed in research such as those of Odd Arne Westad (2007), Melvin P. Leffler (2007), Jian Chen (2010), Tania Harmer (2014), Vanni Pettinà (2018) or Carole K. Fink (2021). This works has succeeded in creating a narrative that has imposed among specialists’ new notions to approach this period where we highlight ideas such as a long-lasting confrontation and the rescue of the conflict between Soviets and Americans as a product of a clash between models of modernity and its regionalization.

The readings of the aforementioned authors have drawn our attention to the global/regional tension, to the influence of the great powers on the internal policies of  the periphery or to the presence of the anti-communist discourse as a constant in a good part of the period. In spite of the great transformation that has taken place in historiography, the Cold War continues to offer paths of interpretation, useful for understanding not only the closing of the 20th century but also the shaping of the contemporary world, whose foundations now beginning to be questioned (Díaz Guevara, 2023: 142-143).

The increasingly debated unipolarity, the protests against the escalation of privatizations unleashed after the disappearance of that “big Other” that was represented by the red terror, has led to a growing social instability that has tried to be diverted towards internal enemies, such as migrants (Carrillo García, 2023: 168). The dimensions of this crisis have been of such magnitude that in order to put a stop to it from different media spaces it has also been necessary to return to the construction of an external enemy that allows the construction of a system similar to that of the post-war bloc conflict where China has received from the media —and from a good part of the academy— the baton that previously belonged to the Soviet Union.

In view of this, we wonder about the Cold War as a scenario for the actors in the last century, because more than an economic, political or modernization dispute, we believe that this conflict provided at the time coordinates that allowed these actors —ranging from social organizations and political parties to small and medium-sized states— to take clear positions that legitimized those who were in favor, against or in opposition, to the policies of both superpowers[1]. Will this attempt to reinstate the Cold War international system be enough to calm the crisis facing Western democracies? This call for papers we are convening will attempt to explore answers to these possibilities.

 

 

Aims and objectives

The objective of this call for papers is that researchers interested in to discuss the interpretations over the Cold War, his changes and continuities, send us their contributions to discuss this process. We with this dossier of the Revista de Estudios Globales want to construct new interpretive coordinates to allow to us understand the reasons behind to the transformation proposals and visions launched from different parts of the world that finally crashed, or not, in front of the reality imposed by a series of grand strategies that overlap them. We are interested, more than in a revision of the new declassified files –what in the most of the cases cannot show us new information “then, will not change the broad picture dramatically” (Judt, 1997)— our call is to gather new visions over the actors, whether state ones or not, and how they choose in they benefit the tools given by the Cold War; finally, we want call to the reflection about the mutations of this conflict and the risk of this transposition to a hegemony crisis like the one we lived today.

Thematic Focus and chronology

Based on the previous reading, we want to privilege studies that provide us narrative keys to create a historiography that considers the interests and actions of the actors —even the non-state actors— within the Cold War, and the unipolarity that followed the Berlin's wall fall, to facilitate the understanding of these phenomena in the regions and do not see them as isolated or linked only to the interests of the great powers from the Soviet-American conflict to the actual economic and technological Sino-American confrontation a for the maintenance of the unipolar order.

Suggested areas of application of the thematic focus

• The historical relevance of the Third World today: the South-South dialogues.
• Red or blues by convenience: the local movements and the support in the Cold War legitimacy markers.
• The narratives about the Cold War today: unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity.
• The dispute for the modernity: from the modernization theories in the sixties to the Belt And Road development initiatives and they western alternatives today.
• Changes and continuities in the media discourse about the left and the anticommunism in the last fifty years.
• Changes and continuities in the role of the multilateral organizations (onu, nato) in the last fifty years.

 

Author guidelines

The submission rules are in the “About the journal” and “Submissions” sections of the Revista de Estudios Globales website, which can be consulted at the following link: https://revistas.um.es/reg/index

Articles sent to the magazine cannot be in parallel evaluation process in any other medium.

Any submission that does not comply with the journal's standards will automatically be rejected.

 

References

Carrillo García, G. (2023). “Los enemigos de la democracia”. Revista de Estudios Globales. Análisis históricos y cambio social, 2(4), 101-177.

Chen, J. (2010). Mao's China and the cold war. Univ of North Carolina Press.

Díaz Guevara, H. H. (2022). Los cóndores que cazaban tigres de papel. Una historia comparativa del maoísmo durante la Guerra Fría en Colombia y Perú (1964-1993). Morelia: iih/umsnh, tesis de doctorado.

Díaz Guevara, H. H. (2023). “Más allá de la Guerra Fría: cambios y continuidades en la disputa ideológica y tecnológica por el tercer mundo entre Estados Unidos y China”. Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 63(248), 141-170.

Fink, C. K. (2021). Cold War: an international history. Routledge.

Gaddis, L. (2011). Nueva Historia de la Guerra Fría. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Harmer, T., & Riquelme Segovia, A. (2014). Chile y la Guerra Fría global. Ril editores.

Judt, T. (1997). “Why the cold war worked”. New York Review of Books, 9.

 

 

 

Leffler, M. P. (2007). For the soul of mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Macmillan.

Pettinà, V. (2018). Historia mínima de la guerra fría en América Latina. El Colegio de Mexico A. C.

Westad, Odd A. (2007). The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.

 

 

[1] To guide us in this process, we have used the legitimacy markers of this conflict to think about the actions of some of these small actors in the Cold War from a new perspective. Legitimacy markers are a methodological tool that “allow us to see the way in which a narrative is constructed that contains a particular vision of modernity, linked to the international politics of the second half of the twentieth century. They are relevant because it is from them that we can trace how the actors studied manage to legitimize their local actions within a larger struggle, which allows them to connect their regional problems within the great theater of operations constructed in the international system of the Cold War” (Díaz Guevara, 2022: 15).