Cold War Globalization--Neal Rosendorf--Encyclopedia of the Cold War

8/7/2019 Cold War Globalization--Neal Rosendorf--Encyclopedia of the Cold War

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OFTHE COLD WAR

Volume 1

A - J

Index

Ruud van Dijk

William Glenn GraySvetlana Savranskaya

Jeremi SuriQiang Zhai

Editors

I~ ~ ~ o ~ ! ! ~ n ~ ~ ~ u pNEW YORKAND LONDON


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Lib ra ry o f Congress Cataloging- in -Publica t ion DataEncyclopedia of the Cold War I Ruud van Dijk, editor.

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GLOBALIZATION

GLOBALIZATIONThe Cold War was both a product and manifesta-tion of globalization, in multiple ways. The term,though widespread since at least the 1990s, isnotoriously mutable. Broadly speaking, globaliza-tion refers to linkages on a multi-continental levelthat increase in the extensiveness and density ofnetworks over time; and with the great technologi-cal advances since the nineteenth century in long-distance transportation, communications andweaponry, increases in speed have become animportant factor as well. The perceived character-istics, and the temporal parameters, of globaliza-tion tend to vary by the scholarly discipline andresearch focus of the term's user.

Diffe rent schola rly takes on g loba lization

Economists generally mean the term exclusively toinclude the forging and operation of a worldwide,interconnected global economic network. By thisdefinition globalization in its initial form was theproduct of technological advances of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, such as steam shipping andglobal telegraphic networks, which combined withliberal free trade ideas to facilitate trade on aglobal scale, under-girded by the capacity to movemoney, raw materials, finished goods, and peoplefreely around the world. Through this lens globa-lization had a heyday from the 1870s to 1914,ground to a halt with the advent of World War I,did not begin to recover until well into the post-World War II era, and only became once again trulyascendant with the winding down of the Cold War.

"World systems theory," a concept that origi-nated with the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein,similarly focuses on economic processes to describethe global process of modernization (itself afraught term) and how it advantaged the West vis-a-vis the rest of the world. But this approach takesa significantly longer historical view, as it locatesthe roots of modernization in the sixteenth century.Moreover, despite the economic emphasis, worldsystems theory integrates into its analysis a dis-cussion of the global spread and impact of poli-tical, social, and to a lesser extent cultural forces.

Cultural theorists tend to focus on global cul-tural linkages and networks, environmental scien-tists on world-wide ecological and environmental

processes. Some historians push back the startpoint of globalization as far as the time of theRoman or even Alexandrine Greek empires andthe Silk Road that connected, albeit tenuously,Europe, Africa and Asia; although how they define

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the nature of the term depends, at least to a point,on their sub-fields.

A comprehensive defin it ion of globaliza tion

For purposes of our discussion, we will define glo-balization on a comprehensive basis, using the

parameters that were developed in 1999-2000 by astudy project on the subject at the John F. Ken-nedy School of Government (in which the authorof this entry participated). Globalization is theexpansion over time, both in terms of distance anddensity, of multi-continental networks or relation-ships. Globalization is a multi-faceted phenomenon.It encompasses economic, military, environmental(including both anthropogenic and naturallyoccurring world-wide environmental phenomena),and social--cultural (including political networks)dimensions-for example, concerning the latter, theglobal spread of Marxist ideology since the nine-teenth century, or the development and dissemina-tion of modern popular culture around the world.

At various times different dimensions have beenthe driving force of globalization. Yet thesedimensions do not operate in isolation from eachother: for example, the world-wide telegraph net-work was a great facilitator of global trade, butalso of global imperial administration, global mili-tary coordination, and the global diffusion ofinformation and ideas.

Globalization is as ancient in its origins as thediffusion of homo sapiens from Africa to all of thecontinents save Antarctica. We have seen degloba-lization, or the shrinking or even elimination ofnetworks and relationships, as well as expansionduring this time as well, sometimes of naturalorigin, sometimes man-made.

Still, more common than total deglobalization,particularly over the past half-millennium, is thedecline of one or two dimensions of globalizationwhile others ascend or continue to flourish. A per-fect example is the period of the two world wars.As noted earlier, economists tend to view theadvent of the Great War as the end of a half-century period of globalization that didn't even beginto recover for more than fifty years. True enough,perhaps, if we think in terms of economic globaliza-tion. But World War I was itself a manifestation ofmilitary globalization, in which the Great Powers'huge armed forces, in part composed of colonial

troops, faced off on land and sea around theworld. Moreover, World War I brought in its wakeboth heightened social--cultural globalization inthe form of the first comprehensive effort at globalgovernance, the League of Nations, and a dramatic


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episode of environmental globalization via theglobal influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which wasgreatly abetted in its spread by the movement oftroops across the world.

Technology has un surprisingly played a majorrole in most realms of globalization. Advances intransportation and information/communications

transmission have been great facilitators ofincreasing both the distance and density of multi-continental networks and relationships. Con-tinental rail systems, ships that could reliably spanblue water, steel-hulled steam ships, aircraft, andtelecommunications networks, have enabled moreand more goods, people, information, and ideas tocirculate to and remain in contact among everfurther-flung corners of the world. Technologicaladvances have also allowed the threat or reality ofwar to become ever more destructive and mobileon a global scale, and the speed and totality withwhich destruction can be rained down raised everhigher. At no time, as we shall see, was this moresalient than during the Cold War.

Globalization and the Cold War-through thedimensions

Having established a basic definition of globaliza-tion, we return to our initial assertion that theCold War was a manifestation of globalization.This is least true-but still fundamentally opera-tive-in the realm of economics. The global econ-omy was clearly more integrated, more open, andmore interdependent in 1910 than it was in 1950,1960, or 1970. The communist bloc largely cutitself off for most of the Cold War from participa-tion in a capitalist trading system dominatedthroughout the period by the United States. TheSoviet Union greatly, perhaps fatally, injured itselfby its policy as the U.S.-dominated West graduallyretooled and rebuilt a global economic structurearound the USSR and its Warsaw Pact clients. Bythe 1980s, multinational corporations, mainly butnot exclusively of American origin, were operatingon six continents; the General Agreement on Tar-iffs and Trade, initially a product of the World WarII-era Bretton Woods conference, embarked on the"Uruguay Round" of negotiations that would laterresult in the creation of the World Trade Organiza-tion; and the People's Republic of China made thefateful decision to cast its economic lot with the

capitalist economic system. Thus, when the SovietUnion collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, theinfrastructure was in place for a rapid expansion ofeconomic globalization arguably well beyond thatof the previous zenith prior to World War I.

GLOBALIZATION

If globalization during the Cold War was at itsrelative weakest in the economic dimension, argu-ably it was strongest in the military dimension,despite the fact that the U.S. and the USSR, theprime antagonists in the struggle, never fired a shotin anger at each other. The threat of general warwas omnipresent, although it would flow and ebb

over time. The potential battlefield ultimatelyencompassed virtually every populated spot onearth. The strategic policy of the U.S. perceived thethreat and the response in global terms. And theavailable weaponry ultimately had the capacity towipe out civilization, and perhaps humanity itself.The Cold War was of course born out of the ashesof the most destructive episode of military globali-zation in history, World War II, in which over sixtymillion people perished, the only inhabited con-tinents that avoided direct experience of violencewere North and South America, and nuclearweapons made their first appearance. The U.S.policy of containment, especially in its post NSC-68 form, blurred if not eliminated the distinctionbetween strategic center and periphery, embodiedin the 1950 blueprint's well-known formulation,"The assault on free institutions is world-wide now,and in the context of the present polarization ofpower a defeat of free institutions anywhere is adefeat everywhere." Military crises could crop upin Latin America, Northeast or Southeast Asia,the Middle East, or Africa just as readily as inEurope, and always with the capacity to spin outof control, up the escalation ladder. And at the topof the ladder was full-scale thermonuclear war.Once hydrogen weapons were combined by thesuperpowers with intercontinental ballistic missiles,war promised to be exceedingly brutish-withdeaths in the tens or hundreds of millions andeventually in the billions, once the number of war-heads reached into the thousands and the numberof targets increased accordingly-and just asexceedingly short-ICBMs fired by either sidewould take all of thirty minutes to hit their targets,demanding a counter-strike within fifteen minutesof the enemy's launch.

The world came to live under the omnipresentshadow of Armageddon, which brings us to social-cultural globalization, and an illustration of howthe various dimensions can impact each other.During the first decade and a half of the Cold War,the superpowers rattled their nuclear sabers at each

other, and sometimes other states. This processinfamously culminated in the near-miss of the 1962Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the aftermath ofthe crisis crystallized a sense of global commonalitythat exceeded differences of ideology or geostrategy.

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GLOBALIZATION

As U.S. president John F. Kennedy famously put inhis 1963 American University commencementaddress, "[I]n the final analysis, our most basiccommon link is that we all inhabit this small planet.We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our chil-dren's future. And we are all mortal."

Moreover, international consciousness concern-

ing the threat of global nuclear holocaust was bothreflected and stoked in popular culture, via books,cinema and television, with Hollywood leading thecharge. For example, in 1954 Japan's Toho filmstudio released the somber Gojira, in which a hugeprehistoric creature is reanimated by u.s. nucleartesting in the Pacific, and then goes on to decimateTokyo; released in a different form in the U.S. asGodzilla, the film became the progenitor of a seriesof unique monster films that allegorized nuclearweapons and Japan's status as the only nation tohave been the target of a nuclear attack. In 1957the Anglo-Australian author Nevil Shute wrote theelectrifying best-selling novel On the Beach, aboutAustralia awaiting extinction via a radioactivecloud released by World War III, which hasalready killed the rest of humanity; two years laterShute's work was made into a Hollywood film thatwas a sobering world-wide hit. In 1964 directorStanley Kubrick filmed the mordant satire DoctorStrangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and

Learned to Love the Bomb, which featured, in anonly modestly exaggerated form, the ideas ofnuclear strategist Herman Kahn, with whomKubrick had met in preparing his film. Two dec-ades later, during a resumption of heightened ColdWar tensions, such works as the meta-historicalbook The Third World War.' The Untold Story(1982), astronomer Carl Sagan's study The NuclearWinter.' The World after Nuclear War (1985), andeven film comedies like War Games (1983) pro-vided evidence of public preoccupation withnuclear superpower conflict. But arguably no pop-ular culture product during this "Cold War II"period was more influential than the televisionproduction The Day After (1983), which depictedthe effects of thermonuclear war on survivors inLawrence, Kansas. President Ronald Reagan wrotein his diary after an advance viewing of the TVfilm that he was "greatly depressed" by its depic-tion of the inexorable death of civilization in theaftermath of World War III. And when Reagansigned the Intermediate Range Nuclear ForcesTreaty in 1987, he sent a telegram to The DayAfter's director that said, "Don't think your moviedidn't have any part of this, because it did."

Staying with the social-cultural dimension, weshould not boil down the Cold War era to the

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threat and reality of military conflict. While theUnited Nations, like Bretton Woods, was for-mulated during World War II, it developed duringthe nearly half-century of U'Si-Soviet rivalry. Andthough it has been claimed with some cogency thatthe Cold War limited the effectiveness of the UN,it did not snuff the organization out. Indeed, the

General Assembly was the scene of some of the ColdWar's most dramatic moments, and at the sametime it was a significant vector for undramatic butuseful ongoing dialogue between the superpowersand their close allies. It was also the venue inwhich the developing world found a place tovoice their concerns and stake their claims.Moreover, UN-related entities such as the WorldHealth Organization and UNESCO could claimsuccesses, even if the Security Council was moreoften than not deadlocked on key issues. TheUN did not become the "World Capitol" that itsearly supporters prophesied; but the cause ofglobal governance moved forward during theCold War era.

Additionally, the "Space Race," although it hadmore than a whiff of potential military threatabout it, shaped up largely as a peaceful andbenign manifestation of the superpower competi-tion that captured the imaginations of people allover the world-the historic first moonwalk of

Apollo 11 in 1969 was telecast across the globe,with an estimated audience of some 700 millionpeople (although the USSR declined to broadcastlive images). And a half-decade later, the mannedspace effort became a dramatic venue for demon-strating detente to the world, with the 1975Apollo-Soyuz orbital mission.

To make one final, important point concerningsocial-cultural globalization, the Cold War did notsignificantly impede a global process that had beenongoing for much of the twentieth century: themarch of an American-inflected modernity. Themost evident avatar of this process was in therealm of popular and consumer culture. JosefStalin had once enviously declared, "If I couldcontrol the medium of the American motion pic-ture, I would need nothing else to convert theentire world to communism." The Soviet dictator,a great fan of Hollywood, never did gain control(the ineffectual efforts of the Communist Party-affiliated writers or the claims of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the black-list notwithstanding). As a result, the United Statesmaintained a unique competitive advantage in therealm of "soft power," the power of persuasion orthe attractiveness of one's system. The makers andpurveyors of American popular culture, which has


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long been profoundly syncretic in the manner ithas welcomed myriad influences from around theworld, offered up motion pictures, televisionshows, jazz, and, with far wider popularity, rockand roll. Thus did American popular culture findits way across the globe, helping to create thepostwar international youth culture, includingbehind the Iron Curtain. This in turn helped tostoke anti-authoritarianism within the SovietBloc-the youthful Czech rebels of the 1968"Prague Spring" were similar in appearance andtastes to their contemporaries in Western Europe;and the exuberance of rock music would influenceat least one signatory of the later Czechoslovak"Charter 77" dissident human rights declaration,Vaclav Havel, a fan of the New York proto-punkcult band The Velvet Underground-which in turn

gave its name to the "Velvet Revolution" of1989. Indeed, in 1990, Havel, by now Czecho-slovakia's wildly popular leader, would ask theVelvet Underground's lead singer Lou Reed,"Did you know that I am president because ofyou?"

To be sure, there was a potential dark side toAmerica's commanding lead in popular cultureand the communications networks that enabled itto spread it world-wide. While the Canadian cul-tural theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote hopefully

in the 1960s of the world becoming a "global vil-lage," Zbigniew Brzezinski offered a more pessi-mistic perspective. In 1970 the Polish-Americanpolitical scientist coined the phrase "technetronicera" to describe the unique integration of services,automation, and cybernetics that was helpingwiden the cultural and economic power gapbetween the U.S. and everyone else. While Brze-zinski perceived a strategic advantage, he warnedat the same time that the heightened awareness bydeveloping world regions of American prosperity

and their inability to achieve it could raise a"specter of insatiable aspirations"; the resultantfrustration could have dangerously destabilizingconsequences, not least of which would be intensi-fied resentment of America in the Third World.Arguably, the anti-globalization movement thatarose in the years following the Cold War's endrepresents the delayed manifestation of Brze-zinski's forward-looking Cold War-era analysis.

Finally, we come to environmental globaliza-tion. The Cold War influenced this phenomenonboth in theory and in fact. The threat of thermo-nuclear war brought with it the likelihood of globalenvironmental catastrophe, far beyond massiveblast effects or radiation releases. In the worst-casescenario, scientists such as Carl Sagan postulated

GLOBALIZATION

the phenomenon of a world-wide "nuclear winter,"in which the massive release of particulates into theatmosphere would blot out the sun and therebydrastically lower temperatures, perhaps even trig-gering a new ice age. Fortunately, this theory wasnever properly tested. But it became clear by thelate 1950s that nuclear testing was itself havingglobal environmental effects. Figures such asNobel Peace Prize Laureates Dr Albert Schweitzerand Linus Pauling used their pulpits to warn of thewidespread and increasing contamination of theatmosphere and food chain as above-groundnuclear tests released and dispersed poisons suchas Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. The authorRachel Carson created a sensation with her best-selling 1962 book Silent Spring, which popularizedSchweitzer's and Pauling's warnings and added to

them a jeremiad against the careless release ofchemicals in modern industry and agriculture(such as the insecticide DDT). Carson is creditedwith helping spur the creation of American envir-onmental awareness, which in turn begat themodern international environmental movement,including organizations such as Greenpeace, foun-ded in Canada in 1971, and resultant global envir-onmental accords, such as the 1987 treaty banningchlorofluorocarbons as a threat to the ozone layer.The 1986 explosion of a nuclear reactor in Cher-

nobyl, in the Soviet republic of the Ukraine, boreout the dire warnings of the anti-nuclear acti-vists-to whose ranks was added Dr AndreiSakharov, the "father of the Soviet hydrogenbomb" -as radiation released by the worst nuclearaccident ever contaminated food sources as faraway as Britain and was detectable as far away asJapan and North America.

In sum, globalization was alive and well duringthe Cold War across the four key dimensions ofthe phenomenon. Indeed, we might go so far as to

say that we can only fully understand the ColdWar in the context of globalization. Whetheranalyzing through an economic, military, social-cultural or environmental lens, the Cold War was amanifestation of and contributor to globalizingprocesses, some unique to the period, some thelinear descendant of factors at play in the worldprior to the advent of the superpower rivalry.Finally, as has been the case in past epochs, theCold War's end saw a shift in the relative weight ofglobalization dimensions: most dramatically, adecline in the relative importance of military glo-balization, at least in terms of the threat of anotherworld war, and an increase in economic globaliza-tion as the former Soviet bloc integrated itself fullyinto the global capitalist trading system.

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GOLDWATER, BARRY

Further reading

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Between Two Ages: America's Role inthe Technetronic Era. New York: Viking, 1970.

De Groot, Gerald. The Bomb: A Life. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2005.

Eckes, Alfred E. and Thomas W . Zeiler. Globalization andthe American Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2003.

Held, David et al. Global Transformations: Politics, Eco-nomics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of InternationalOrganizations in the Making of the Contemporary World.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to2000. New York: Vintage, 1989

Nye, Joseph. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature ofAmerican Power. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

Nye, Joseph and John D. Donahue (eds). Governance in aGlobalizing World. Washington, DC: Brookings Institu-tion,2000.

Reynolds, David. One World Divisible: A Global Historysince 1945. New York: Norton, 2000.

Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and theRise of Detente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2003.

Weart, Spencer. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War.' Third WorldInterventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005.

NEAL MOSES ROSENDORF

See also Arms control; Arms race; Bretton Woods system;Brzezinski, Zbigniew; Capitalism; Charter 77; Chernobyldisaster; Cinema; Computer technology; Consumerism;Cuban Missile Crisis; Environment; Havel, Vaclav; Hol-lywood Ten; Human rights; Literature; Multinationalcorporations; Music; NSC 68; Radio; Science and tech-nology; Space race; Television; Tourism; United Nations;Youth organizations

GOLDWATER, BARRY

A five-term senator from Arizona who opposedLyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential cam-paign, Barry Morris Goldwater (1909-98) sparkedthe conservative movement that fundamentallychanged the Republican Party and revolutionizedpolitics in the United States. Goldwater also per-sonified the virulent anticommunism that drove theU.S. containment policy in the Cold War.

The scion of a wealthy Arizona family, Gold-water attended Staunton Military Academy inVirginia and the University of Arizona beforejoining the family department store business.During World War II, Goldwater flew in the FerryCommand, delivering aircraft and supplies to warzones all over the world. After the war ended,Goldwater entered into local politics in Phoenix,

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first as a municipal reformer and later running fora seat on the city council. He also served as anadviser to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in theDepartment of Interior from 1948 to 1950. In1951, distressed by what he considered to be HarryTruman's "no win" policy in Korea, he decided tochallenge Democratic Senate Majority Leader

Ernest McFarland. He ran an aggressive anti-Truman administration campaign-focusing on"Communism, Cronyism, and Chiseling" andaccusing Secretary of State Dean Acheson ofappeasing Asian communism-and won the Senateseat by seven thousand votes. He immediately dis-played his conservative philosophy, supportingJoseph McCarthy's crusade to purge the U.S. gov-ernment of communists. Although he recognizedthe campaign's excesses, Goldwater believed thatthe Wisconsin senator was performing a publicservice by shedding light on the "fifth column"within the United States and voted against theSenate's censure of McCarthy in December 1954.Goldwater also criticized Dwight Eisenhower forhis failure to balance the budget and for the pre-sident's decision to send federal troops to LittleRock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation.

Goldwater opposed John F. Kennedy's foreignpolicy as "outmoded" and "weak-kneed," and wasdisappointed by Kennedy's failure to remove FidelCastro from power after the Cuban Missile Crisis.He also attacked Lyndon Johnson's Great Societyagenda and conduct of the Vietnam War, callingJohnson's response to Hanoi and the Viet Cong a"policy of weakness, a policy of indecision, a policyof indirection." The Vietnam issue was Gold-water's best opportunity to challenge Johnson inthe 1964 presidential campaign, but an agreementbetween the campaigns took both civil rights andVietnam out of play. As a result, Goldwater wasmarginalized as an extremist by the president-

typified by the infamous "daisy" commercial whichimplied Goldwater would start a nuclear war-andwas defeated in one of the most lopsided electionsin U.S. history. Goldwater remained hawkish onVietnam well into the Nixon administration, andfelt vindicated when Johnson implemented most ofthe 1964 GOP platform on Vietnam. In 1968,Goldwater was re-elected to the Senate and clashedwith Richard Nixon over detente and the pres-ident's visit to China. For most of the Watergatecrisis, Goldwater vehemently defended Nixon pub-licly while privately urging the president to admithis involvement. On August 7, 1974, however,Goldwater met with Nixon in the Oval Office andinformed the embattled president that he had lostthe support of Republicans in Congress and that

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