Frostbitten

Author Edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad

Publisher Cambridge University Press

Year 2010

Pages 1976 pp.

ISBN 0521839386

Price $395.00

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As the years pass, the Cold War increasingly appears as an undifferentiated chunk of history that stretched across time and space, with a vast cast of characters and occasional moments of drama. It is presented as a curious concatenation of summits and negotiations, alliances and clients, spies and border posts, ideological dogmas and underground resistance, and a combination of arcane theories about deterrence and some nasty actual wars.

Because the most important feature of the Cold War was that it stayed cold -- and did not become the third in the twentieth century's series of world wars -- it is often recalled almost fondly as a time of calm and stability. The standoff between the West, led by the United States, and the Soviet Union and its satellites has taken on an institutionalized, ritualized quality that rarely seems to have posed any danger of giving way to the chaos and catastrophe of total war. It is now common to talk of the reassuring rationality and predictability of the old Soviet adversary, with unfavorable comparisons to Washington's current enemies.

Yet it did not always feel that way. The sense of danger and uncertainty ebbed and flowed. Besides the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, many of the Cold War's more alarming moments are fading from memory. Few remember, for example, that as late as 1983, the geriatric leadership of the Soviet Politburo began to panic that the United States was planning a surprise nuclear attack, and so they dangerously raised the alert level of their own forces.

The character of the confrontation was shaped by the shared fear of total war, which was reinforced by nuclear weapons and by sharp ideological and geopolitical divisions. As both sides searched beyond their core alliances for strategic advantage, the Cold War began to affect the trajectories of states and political movements across the globe. Since the Cold War touched on all aspects of human affairs, it came to define a whole epoch. In this way, the term "cold war" became a convenient label for more than four decades of international history.

Although convenient, this label is misleading. It exaggerates the importance of the superpower confrontation. The Cold War is a central part of the story of its time but not the whole story -- in retrospect, other parts, particularly the process of decolonization, may turn out to have had more of a long-lasting impact. At the same time that the two superpowers were vying for influence, Europe was dismantling its empires in Africa and Asia, Western Europe was beginning its long process of integration, Japan and South Korea were discovering economic growth, the oil-producing countries were joining together to influence supply, and Islam was developing new political forms.

The Cambridge History of the Cold War tends toward the epochal view. As Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, the editors of The Cambridge History, write, their aim is to provide a "comprehensive, systematic, analytic overview of the conflict," with a study of social, intellectual, and economic history. The goal, they explain, is "to clarify what mattered to the greatest number of people during the Cold War." In such a course of study, they add, it is necessary to "discuss demography and consumption, women and youth, science and technology, culture and race" -- and indeed they do.

Such a broad scope reflects not only the wide range of human affairs that comes under the roomy heading "The Cold War" but also changing approaches to the Cold War's study. As Westad explains in his opening essay, during the early decades after World War II, the central questions of Cold War studies never went beyond making sense of Soviet expansionism: Was the Soviet empire a manifestation of Bolshevik ambition or a continuation of traditional Russian foreign policy? Then, fueled by anger over the Vietnam War, revisionists began to blame the dire state of international affairs on the United States, where the reactionary forces of anticommunism had combined with an aggressive capitalist agenda. Over time, historians stopped assigning blame and began to view the two superpowers as locked in a mutually reinforcing system. Westad shows how Cold War historiography has been influenced by changes in intellectual fashion and by distinctive regional perspectives.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the editors decided to opt for an inclusive, maximalist approach. This encourages an admirable comprehensiveness in The Cambridge History, although such breadth at times can be overwhelming. The editors have gathered the top scholars on each topic, and many do not disappoint, even if only by offering succinct reprises of their own books. The contributions on diplomacy are consistently strong. But with so much to cover and 75 contributors, the editors seem to have struggled to cope. They opted for a light touch, accepting the impossibility of imposing a systematic and coherent framework. As a result, these are volumes to consult for illumination on particular topics rather than read from cover to cover. In the end, the Cold War does not come sharply into focus but instead remains a blur.

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