Introduction: How Do We Understand The Cold War?
What is the Cold War?
The year is 1945. On a sunny August afternoon in the city of Potsdam, Germany – recently captured by the Allied forces – “the Big Three” have gathered to reach an agreement, aptly dubbed after its locational namesake, on how to proceed with German administration following its unconditional surrender. Chancellor Adolf Hitler was dead, and the Allies needed to partition the world to establish post-war order. Only, there was a significant roadblock preventing progress; neither American President Harry Truman nor British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who the British voters had determined to replace wartime savant Winston Churchill mid-way through the conference, could find mutual ground with Soviet Secretary-General Joseph Stalin on any save for the most negligible matters. A relationship characterized on the back of mistrust and enmity.
Potsdam, unlike its predecessors, Tehran and Yalta, was unable to mitigate the tensions between its participants, and a noticeable divide began to form on the international stage, in turn. A divide that was perhaps most prominently encapsulated by the Truman Doctrine (1947), which notified the world of American intent to offer political, military, and economic aid to any and all democratic nations facing authoritarian intimidation, internal or external alike.
In a mere two years following the defeat of Nazi Germany and the culmination of the Second World War, American and Soviet anxieties toward each other had manifested into hostility. An international battle of opposing ideologies. George Kennan succinctly captured this relationship when he opined that the Soviet Union was a “political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi.”[1] It was the last lap of a tight race between the two remaining global superpowers for hegemonic influence over the world. One which would not be decided on the shores of the United States nor the battlefields of the Soviet Union but would span the length of the globe. One which would involve an abundance of divergent participants and local conflicts far removed from the offices of Washington and Moscow.
Indeed, before the world could recover from the deadliest war of all time, a new one was about to begin.
But what, exactly, was the Cold War? It seems ridiculous to consider, but historians themselves are still trying to agree upon an answer. Since the original “orthodox” school of Cold War studies in the 1950s, scholarship has always understood the phenomenon as a global process along a Washington-Moscow Axis [2]. Utmost focus is placed upon the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union; meanwhile, the rest of the world receives minor acknowledgement concerning more prominent worldwide endeavours. They are merely indisposible pawns in the Cold War chess match between the two larger combatants. In this light, the actions of smaller nations, in turn, are not effectively given their just due.
By lazily bundling together hundreds of individual states into larger global processes, a multitude of defining local contexts are ultimately lost in translation. Local actors are also robbed of their agency, and attitudes and actions that may otherwise be completely outside of a Washington-Moscow axis are instead being misunderstood as within.
Reframing the "Cold War Lens"
The purpose of this exhibit is to validate and testify to the fact that the orthodox Gaddesian school of Cold War analysis neither sufficiently accounts for, nor properly explains the actions taken by third-world decolonial actors in Africa during the Cold War. Instead, I argue that a Westadian epistemology of removing the “Cold War lens" achieves a more comprehensive understanding of the dense local ideological nuance at play behind third-world interactions with the United States and the Soviet Union outside of a Washington-Moscow axis, and that these interactions outlined the crucial core-periphery relationship which would come to characterize imperial post-colonial policy.[3]
To achieve this goal, I first consider Cuban internationalism in Africa between 1963-1991. This achieves two major goals. First, it gives us a wide range of actors to investigate, from Algeria to Angola and again to the Horn of Africa. Such a diverse set of encounters naturally, in turn, provides a proportionally diverse set of interactions, all of which provide the opportunity for deeper analysis outside of the “Cold War lens.” Additionally, as Cuba was itself a former colonial state who had beaten the influence of the United States, it is traditionally understood that this thereby necessitated close ideological proximity with the Soviet Union. Although this is partially true, Soviet-Cuban relations are far more complicated than to be condensed into simply a relationship of master-servant of the former over the latter.
To unpack these complexities, I turn to the case study of Cuban intervention during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002), where Cuban troops remained for a remarkable sixteen years until 1991. A growing body of recent literature on Cuba in Angola has begun to drastically challenge the outdated idea that Cuba, a satellite state, was acting in Soviet interests. Cuban-Angolan interaction serves, instead, as a prominent example of South-South cooperation outside of the Washington-Moscow axis, seeking to emphasize a reframing of the "Cold War lens."
The exhibit will then conclude by considering how historians can rethink perhaps otherwise cemented conceptions of the Cold War from a new Westadian perspective. What other instances of South-South cooperation can potentially present new conclusions when the epistemology is reframed?
Ultimately, readers will come away with a deeper understanding of Cold War historiography and how it has altered since its beginnings in the 1950s. Similarly, readers will likewise develop a comprehension of the nuances behind Cuban involvement in Africa, and, third and finally, how a Westadian approach to Cuban participation in the Angolan Civil War serves as a model by which other South-South interactions may be understood.
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[1] George Kennan, "The Long Telegram" (1946). Retrieved from https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/george-kennan-long-telegram-1946/
[2] For an overview of Cold War historiography, see John Lamberton Harper, "The Cold War as History," in The Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83-89; Raymond L. Garthoff, "Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War," Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 2 (2004): 21-56; Jeremi Suri, "Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?" Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 4 (2002): 60–92; Samuel J. Walker, "Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus," in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 207–236; and Odd Westad, Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (New York: Frank Cass, 2000).
[3] See Odd Arne Westad,The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; see also Matthew Connolly, "