Lost Time: The Forgetting of the Cold War
Mini Teaser: Forgetting the Cold War means distorting the lens through which we view the present. Consciously or unconsciously, it is an act of denial and repudiation, asserting or imagining that what was, was not, and that what was not, was. It is un-remember
The end of the Cold War was the beginning of its long journey into
history. Countless records in many media insure that its total
disappearance from human consciousness--the fate of the wars of what
we call pre-history, and of some of the darker periods of recorded
history--is inconceivable. People who take the trouble will always be
able to learn about the Cold War, analyze its events, and interpret
it in ever-changing historical perspective.
But knowledge and memory are different. To remember--not merely in
the sense of personal recollection, but in the sense of remembering
the fallen, remembering Munich, or even remembering Ozymandias--is to
endow knowledge with meaning. Individuals and societies alike are
influenced in their decision-making and their behavior by the lessons
they draw from history and the importance they attach to their own
inheritance. History remembered is history active on the political
stage of the present. Although we know about the Cold War, and will
continue to study, explain, and understand it, I shall argue that it
is in this sense a war we have already begun to forget.
Forgetting recent history is not the same as forgetting the distant
past--say, the Punic Wars, which took place in a world so totally
unlike ours that it is impossible to conceive of them being
meaningfully remembered. Forgetting the Cold War means distorting the
lens through which we view the present. Consciously or unconsciously,
it is an act of denial and repudiation, asserting or imagining that
what was, was not, and that what was not, was. It is un-remembering.
How We Forget
There are two ways of forgetting recent history: conscious state
forgetting and unconscious social forgetting. State forgetting is the
deliberate silencing of a particular part of the past for political
purposes. In its extreme form, it is the Stalinists' airbrush.
Totalitarian regimes can use the apparatus of repression to control
information and silence dissent to the point where people profess to
believe, and frequently actually do believe, that experiences within
their own lifetime did not in fact happen. The Chinese Cultural
Revolution, for example--perhaps the most comprehensive and violent
attempt ever to disown history--would itself have been much more
difficult to launch had not the desperate famines of the Great Leap
Forward, and Mao's personal role in inflicting them, been the subject
of some effective state forgetting.
But it is not only totalitarian regimes that engage in state
forgetting. England decided during the First World War to forget the
Germanic origins of its own royal family, smoothing the path of
jingoism by removing an inconvenient reminder of a pre-nationalist
history. Fifty years after the Second World War, Japan has finally
half-decided to start remembering its own war crimes. Time will tell
whether the democratic, bureaucratic state forgetting in the
schoolroom lessons and political speech of the postwar decades has
done lasting damage to the new Japan or not.
In these milder forms, which do not involve altering records or
punishing remembering, the state acts rather as an initiator and
facilitator of social forgetting: a gradual, collective loss of
interest in a part of the past that conveys an undesired self-image.
The democratic state, creating power by working with the grain of
society, chooses and is chosen to manipulate symbols in a popular
manner, elevating one period of, or episode in, history to exemplary
importance and consigning another to forgotten irrelevance.
Nothing better illustrates the extraordinary power of combined state
and social forgetting than post-colonial nationalism in the Third
World, which turned its back on a whole pre-colonial age of
non-national, largely boundary-less history. Surviving as proudly
non-European nations in a world where Europeans had defined
nationhood--and mapped, counted, and recorded your nation with scant
regard for pre-existing realities--required forgetting on an heroic
scale.
It is this combination of state and social forgetting that is
beginning to erode the meaning of the Cold War in contemporary
European and American politics. To a degree that
varies--significantly--from country to country and region to region,
we have begun to treat the era of the Cold War as lost time,
imagining continuity where in fact there has been change, denying and
disowning the reasons why we are where we are. There is probably
nothing to be done to prevent this process.
The Illusion of Resumption
What does it mean to say that the era of the Cold War is becoming
lost time? One of the things it means is that the business of
international politics is being conducted as if there were continuity
between the years before and the years after that era, as if history
were being resumed. This idea is usually conveyed in the language of
freeze and thaw. The structure of international relations is said to
have been frozen by the Cold War, the natural processes of growth,
evolution, and decay chilled into motionlessness by the dead hand of
superpower confrontation. The year 1989 brought the thaw, the release
of this icy grip on history, the return of spring after winter, light
after darkness, awakening after sleep.
There is a lot of truth in this. At least in Europe, where a managed
system of confrontation without conflict was developed, the Cold War
certainly did inhibit change in international politics, as I will
discuss further below. But the broad sweep of the metaphor carries us
too far, into the dangerous territory of forgetting. Consider two
significant features of the post-Cold War scene: the empowerment of
the United Nations and the resurgence of nationalism.
One of the few comparatively clear things about the muddy concept of
the "new world order" is that it involves a substantial role for the
UN as the active agent of the will of the international community.
Since the end of the Cold War, recourse to the UN has become a
prerequisite for the legitimacy of any international
political-military initiative. Operations by UN forces or under the
authority of a UN Security Council resolution in Iraq, Cambodia,
Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Haiti have left the Cold War UN far behind,
and have pursued much more ambitious goals of making or enforcing
peace, settling state borders and supporting efforts to constitute or
reconstitute legitimate governments.
This empowerment of the UN rests on a metaphor of thaw and a reality
of forgetting; it is deeply problematic. The development of the UN at
the end of the Second World War may in some ways have been a
repetition of the fallacy of collective security inherent in the
failed League of Nations, but there were at least deliberate and
skillful attempts to correct some of the deficiencies of the League
in constituting the new version. The resurrection of the UN at the
end of the Cold War repeats the fallacy but without the
reconstruction. The failure of the UN during the Cold War--its
immobilization by superpower veto, its transformation into a
powerless sounding board for the grievances of the Third World--is
blamed entirely on the Cold War itself, rather than explained in
terms of the subordination of the logic of internationalism to the
logic of power politics, a subordination that is inherent in a system
of sovereign states. Thus, newly thawed, the UN is expected to take
up where it left off before it vanished into the freezer.
This cannot succeed. The UN's moment of true credibility as a
representative world body was indeed only a moment--the moment of
creation at the end of World War II, when the distribution of power
in the organization reflected the apparent strength and apparent
unity of the victorious allied powers, the helplessness of the
defeated, and the willingness of the other members to take a
subordinate role. In contrast, the unity of the great powers since
the end of the Cold War is a transient phenomenon. The consensus
behind the UN's authority structure no longer exists. The General
Assembly is no more than a parody of democracy, while the Security
Council is a sort of antiquated and unrepresentative directoire of
some of the great powers, including several who are in decline but
excluding some of the major actors. As the UN extends its scope of
operations into ever more controversial territory, its shallow
legitimacy will crumble in the face of renewed ideological or
geopolitical stand-offs among the key players.
The phenomenon of nationalism resurgent is, if anything, even more
closely bound up with the rhetoric of freeze and thaw and the
amnesiac mind-set. In Europe, there is a worrying tendency to see the
emerging post-Cold War settlement as a continuation and completion of
the aborted post-World War II settlement. Then, borders were adjusted
and populations shifted (only in the central areas, and only where it
suited the Big Four, of course) to achieve a close alignment of
nations and states. Poland became ethnically homogeneous for the
first time in its history. The Sudetens and other German minorities
were sent packing to a shrunken Germany. Now, with the Cold War
freeze ended, the process can continue. The Germans can be reunited,
and--when the Cold War finally ends there too--so can the Koreans.
Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Bosnians, and Croats can all
claim their states from the wreckage of repudiated Cold War
federations.
Some real calamities--themselves sure to be remembered by the
participants--have been suffered thanks to this forgetting of recent
experience and reading back into the past. The nationalists have
thrown down the gauntlet in the name of national self-determination,
and responded to resistance and rejection by re-inventing ethnic
cleansing, the elementary and brutal method of establishing the
national state by throwing non-nationals out or killing them. But
these are yesterday's ideas, as their generally hostile reception
suggests. Major historical changes during the Cold War, some of which
happened because of that conflict, some despite it, have quashed the
legitimacy and relevance of nationalist and ethnic politics. Among
the most important of these changes are the increased permeability of
borders to information, capital and labor; the successes, partial
though they may be, of the integrationist European Communities (now
European Union); the collapse of Western empires and the appearance
of over a hundred new "Third World" states for whom ethnic and tribal
self-determination constitutes a real threat to a fragile
sovereignty; the collective international repudiation of apartheid
and racism in general; and the declining long-term viability of
repressive methods of control and subordination. Hypnotized by the
rhetoric of release, remembering historical injustices and
grievances, and forgetting the transformations of the intervening
years, the nationalists fight on into the past.
Disowned Causes--Disappearing Effects
Thus the freeze/thaw rhetoric encourages a misguided belief in the
continuity of history from before the Cold War to after the Cold War,
an illusion of resumption and returning that neglects the realities
of change in the intervening years. The result of this amnesia is a
distorted perspective, the consequences of which can be grave.
But there is a second way in which we have begun to treat the era of
the Cold War as lost time: by denying and disowning the reasons why
we are where we are. Some of the major changes in international
society that took place in the Cold War period were brought about as
a direct result of that phenomenon--were indeed effects of Cold War
causes. The sudden end of the conflict and the implosion of the
international structure it supported may lead to an unravelling of
these changes. As we forget the Cold War, we slide gradually into the
assumption that the international society it shaped is a starting
point, a given, and that these recent changes are features of its
basic structure, abstracted from the vanished causes we do not wish
to remember. Of course, effects can outlive their causes, but it is
unwise simply to assume that they will.
Easily the two most important such changes were the move toward
inviolability of borders, and the re-limitation of violence. Before
the Cold War, international boundaries were not inviolable. Changing
them was not a trivial matter, and frequently led to or resulted from
major international wars. But changes happened regularly, whether
through Metternichian deals to manage the balance of power, Wilsonian
conferences to give peoples the citizenship they wanted, or unequal
treaties, appeasement, military conquest, and imperial expansion. The
criminalization of aggression, despite its long pedigree and its
significant advance at the Nuremberg trials and in the Charter of the
United Nations, remained essentially aspirational law, a hope rather
than an established and generally observed norm in international
society.
The Cold War changed this, and established the inviolability of
borders as one of the first principles of international order.
Borders arrived at more or less by accident, like the inner-German
border or the Taiwan strait, came to have the future of the world
staked on them. Borders were locked in place by a pervasive climate
of fear. Above all, the superpowers and their allies feared the bomb.
The imminence of global catastrophe was so terrifying, and the
dangers of escalation in a bipolar, ideological confrontation so
great, that the superpowers stood in constant and imperative need of
readily available, mutually tolerable formulae for cutting off
conflict. Fear led to crisis resolution through "Schelling points,"
points of convergence devoid of any inherent merit but which had the
virtue that they could end a crisis. The Schelling point of crisis
resolution is hardly ever a solution to the underlying problem, but
simply a grudging return to the pre-existing balance. Thus the status
quo, the boundaries that already happened to be lying on the map,
acquired an unprecedented authority. The Korean War, a bloody battle
from an arbitrary starting point to the same arbitrary finishing
point, did a lot to teach this lesson.
A different fear, the security paranoia of the Kremlin, pushed in the
same direction. Constantly anxious to assert the legitimacy of their
illegitimate empire, Moscow first created a metaphorical iron curtain
and later made it concrete in Berlin in order to insist on the
permanence of a contested European map. This appearance of permanence
later gained wider acceptance through the Helsinki Final Act, which
made explicit the bargain of détente: a softening of the harshness of
Europe's division in exchange for recognition of its legitimacy.
The inviolability of borders is now regarded as fundamental to the
new world order, a cornerstone of international society. Saddam
Hussein's aggression attracted near-universal opprobrium--to the
quite remarkable extent of lining Arab troops up with Americans
against fellow Arabs attacking Israel--because it violated Kuwait's
borders and sought to extinguish its sovereignty. The Bosnian Serbs
have become the villain of the piece in the complex Balkan war
because they represent both an internal insurrection against the
borders of the Bosnian state and an external imperialist attack on
them. Wherever borders are in question, from Ireland to Israel, the
determination at least to say that force will never move frontiers is
a required theme of political discourse. And the hapless states
manqués that have not made it into the club--Tibet, East Timor,
Kurdistan--still get short shrift.
But force can change borders. It always has and probably always will
be able to do so. The Cold War was a particular, static system of
coercion which locked boundaries in place. It is too soon to say how
quickly or in what way force will reassert itself, whether we will
see the re-emergence of the border war as a standard feature of
international politics or whether the inviolability of international
boundaries will be re-established on new foundations. Clearly,
however, international efforts to manage the evolution of this
principle will not be helped by forgetting the particularity of its
Cold War causation.
The Cold War also brought back limits to violence. It is an age-old
moral idea that war is subject to its own complex set of principles
and rules aimed at preserving human dignity and limiting destruction.
The wars of the first half of the twentieth century took a terrible
toll on this idea. National, ideological warfare pursued to the
bitter end with ever more destructive and indiscriminate weapons
brought us by 1945 to a point where war was experienced as an
all-consuming and brutal chaos of unlimited violence. Non-combatants
had been deliberately slaughtered in enormous numbers by both sides
in the Second World War, and the Axis powers had committed genocide
and abused prisoners of war. The mobilization of nations and empires
meant that, in the right conditions, violence escalated and
multiplied rapidly from a single flashpoint, penetrating throughout
societies and spreading over most of the globe.
The Cold War was different in a significant way. While both
superpowers committed shameful crimes, they both also collaborated in
a system of restraint that prevented any recurrence of unlimited war
and re-invented limited war, fought in other peoples' lands, as an
instrument of policy. Continental conflagrations were avoided and
international wars discouraged, while internal wars in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America--so-called "proxy wars"--were deliberately fueled
for geopolitical purposes. This re-limitation of violence, it is
vital to understand, was due not to a rise in moral standards but to
a structural change in international relations.
It is difficult to say which were the most important factors bringing
this about. Nuclear weapons undoubtedly played an important part,
both by making victory in superpower war all but impossible and by
giving both sides a sense of themselves as global custodians. So too
did the new techniques of summitry and crisis management that were
developed, in part out of the imperative to signal accurately about
the nuclear balance and one's intentions. But other factors, harder
to assess, may have counted for much too. For all its ideological and
rhetorical frenzy, the Cold War was waged between two states with
little objective reason to interfere in each other's spheres of
influence, and whose leaders and peoples never looked on each other
with the depths of hatred and contempt reserved for traitors,
neighbors, and ethnic rivals.
This measured and disciplined approach to conflict has become such an
accepted part of normal international behavior that it is hard to
swallow the idea that it might be ephemeral. But perhaps the
principles of restraint that the world abandoned in the first half of
the century were revived only because of the Cold War system, and
will not survive without it. Nuclear weapons are still around, but
the iron discipline of the nuclear balance is gone. Great powers
still exist, but their capacity and their willingness to impose
restraint on others is much diminished. Reluctant to acknowledge that
the bad old Cold War system might actually have been a positive moral
agent, people revert to the pre-World War I illusion. Unfortunately,
there is no basis for this belief, and the horrors of Bosnia and
Rwanda are a stark reminder that often the most bitter memories run
deepest.
It is a truism that the Cold War world was more stable than the
post-Cold War world. Yet statesmen continue to act as if it ought not
to be so, as if the (non-existent) "peace dividend" should include a
more manageable, law-abiding world. The fact is that the reasons the
world was manageable during the last half century were the Cold War
reasons we choose to forget and put behind us, and no amount of
wishing or assuming will project an uncaused stability into the
post-Cold War void.
Regional Memory
Images and memories of the Cold War vary from country to country and
region to region, reflecting differences in the degree and character
of that conflict's impact and the different ways it is settling into
peoples' idea of their own past. This spectrum of memory deserves
detailed research in a range of source materials in many languages.
What is offered here is only an impressionistic survey of the
situation in Europe and America.
Consider four regions: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Western
Europe, and the United States. For Russia, rocked in a turbulent
present of political and economic uncertainty, contrasting memories
of the Cold War era turn and collide in the political wind, and serve
competing purposes. On the one hand, the Cold War was part of a
monstrous communist plot that has only recently been exposed: an
economy wrecked by collectivization and militarization, a needless
severing and souring of Russia's engagement in Europe, a fruitless
saga of distant foreign entanglements that cost money and lives. On
the other hand, the Cold War offered a recognition of Russian
greatness that has now been suddenly lost. Rival of the United States
on the world stage, master of a great Eurasian empire and hegemon of
half of Europe, leader and lynchpin of a worldwide political
movement, the Russia of the Cold War would have had no trouble
dealing with handfuls of rebellious Caucasians. Least forgotten in
Russia, the Cold War nevertheless is not remembered clearly, as a
victory or a defeat might be. A swiftly and puzzlingly vanished
order, the Cold War's image is already sufficiently clouded for it to
be recreated in competing ways in a fetid political imagination.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the combination of forgetting and
re-imagining is nearer to producing a consensus. The Cold War is
remembered as a period of order and repression, and an initial
tendency to forget about the order has given way to a tendency to
forget about the repression. A curious unreflective forgiveness has
taken hold in many countries, allowing reconstructed socialists to
(re)gain power from the bewildered parties of liberation. Forgetting
breeds more forgetting--the attempt to write off forty years of
society's history as one enormous foreign crime, and to hark back to
pre-Cold War political parties and pre-Cold War property and
privilege, encourages the losers from that process to forget their
complaints against the fallen regime.
Political differences of this nature, however, can be comfortably
accommodated within the framework of democratic debate, and their
impact is softened by a collective sense of self-liberation. A
perfectly legitimate pride in the popular insurrections which ended
Soviet-communist domination leads to a striking supposition in
Central and Eastern Europe of the essential irrelevance of the Cold
War itself. The ups and downs of East-West relations, the crises of
superpower summitry and alliance politics, the proxy wars and the
endless brinkmanship are all swept into the trash with the Soviet era.
In Western Europe, the Cold War is remembered only as a burden, and
its role as a political guide-rail is forgotten. Glad to be rid of
it, people relegate to recesses of the mind the memory that their
neighbors to the east were callously cut off from them, that massed
armies faced each other at the heart of the continent where exercises
and encampments pitted the landscape, that Europe was the "theater"
where the nuclear winter would begin. The dislocation of West
European politics in the 1990s at both the national and the Community
level--the loss of identity, agenda, and constituency on both the
right and the left, the loss of drive in the EU project--is closely
related to the fading of these memories. Clinging only to the basic
Cold War distinction between poverty and repression, prosperity and
liberty, them and us, Western Europe seems unable to remember either
what it was fighting for or the substance of the real socio-political
debate that flourished before "the end of history." (There is at
least enough truth in Fukuyama's audacious--and fundamentally
false--proposition that political actors in liberal democracies have
found themselves increasingly at a post-dialectical loss for anything
to say.) The very phrase "peace dividend" seems to imply that a
long-term investment has suddenly come good, the stock can be sold,
the books closed, and a rich retirement enjoyed. The issues of the
intervening years can be quietly forgotten.
It is worth noting that the most powerful country in Europe, Germany,
must accommodate both East and West European memories. The sharp
discomforts of Wessi/Ossi politics may be primarily economic in
origin, but they surely also owe something to a sort of national
cognitive dissonance, an incompatibility of memories.
In the United States, the Cold War is being forgotten in the most
familiar sense of the word. In a country historically sheltered from
international upheaval, geographically oriented to a continent
between two coasts and two oceans beyond them, and politically
absorbed in the short term, the anomaly of intense and prolonged
engagement in an essentially European conflict can be quickly erased.
Except for the many losers in the military-industrial complex, the
American way runs smoother without the Cold War, which was an
obstacle to worldwide business and trade, and a pretext for the
aggregation of power and revenues in the hands of the federal
authorities.
The main problem with which comprehensive forgetting of the Cold War
leaves the United States is that of leadership. U.S. global
leadership did not derive from the Cold War, but from its political
and economic position after the Second World War. The Cold War
intervened--indeed, was deliberately deployed by the Truman
administration--to crystallize the American role as post-war
multilateralism became mired in rising geopolitical tensions. With no
clear pre-Cold War model to recall, and the Cold War role remembered
only as a duty discharged, perhaps the much-discussed crisis in U.S.
leadership has deeper roots than the qualities of particular
presidents.
A quick regional survey, then, reveals a slope of regretting,
remembering, and re-imagining. The further east, the more the Cold
War is remembered, the more its passing is regretted, and the more
drastically its history is reshaped in the imagination. The further
west, the more the Cold War is forgotten, the more it becomes
unregretted, unimagined, lost time.
Why Do We Forget?
This still leaves the question of why the Cold War seems to be so
unmemorable. The most important reason is the dearth of powerful
symbols. There is almost nothing to express the meaning of the Cold
War in symbolic form, a form which simplifies complex realities and
concentrates meaning, a form to which emotional significance can be
attached and communicated across space and time. Chunks of
graffiti-covered wall scattered around parks and living rooms hardly
suffice to fill this symbolic gap.
The opposites of state forgetting and social forgetting are state
memory and social memory, and both are heavily dependent on the
medium of symbols. The state remembers victories, anniversaries of a
decisive battle or a triumphant armistice, which vindicate anew the
nation and its cause. It remembers, sometimes, defeats and
anniversaries of humiliation or loss, which teach fresh lessons of
vigilance or rekindle a unifying national grievance. It remembers
days of independence or revolution, which assert its sovereignty and
its ideological identity. It remembers heroes, occasional villains,
and the glorious dead, to give the clarity of deeds and lives to the
abstracts of honor and infamy, and, perhaps, to bless again "the old
lie--dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." State memory is, even if
individual bureaucrats are not conscious of it, purposive and
manipulative; it seeks out symbols that reinforce its identity and
its claims.
Society remembers things that touch large numbers of people in a
significant, visible, and attributable way. Society remembers mass
death from unnatural causes, death on a scale so large that everyone
knows someone who lost someone. Society remembers atrocities, which
imprint a desire for retribution even on those bound only by the
imagined ties of modern community. It remembers journeys, treks, and
other moments or episodes in which the volk became or re-became a
volk distinct from others and linked to a particular territorial or
political destiny. It remembers events, in themselves modest or even
largely mythical, that triggered or articulated a shift in the
national psyche, a turning of generations--the sinking of the Titanic
for example.
The Cold War offers almost none of these. Because it was essentially
a period of peace in Europe and America, and because what conflict
there was tended to be limited, managed, and elsewhere, the Cold War
did not produce the social shocks, the step changes in the life of
the state that catalyze memory and generate symbols. Moreover, the
Cold War was fought primarily among elites. The "Cold Warriors" of
the West were, mostly, conservative politicians and commentators,
military professionals, and some corporations, opposed by an
intermittently effective peace movement led, mostly, by liberal
intellectuals. The Cold Warriors of the East were high-ranking
Communist Party officials, the military, and their ceaseless
opponents in the various dissident movements. For the most part, the
mass of the people was disengaged from the Cold War. This was true in
many places even at its height, and became almost universally true
during the generation-long atrophy of the conflict after the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis. Excepting only a handful of events, like the
Budapest rising of 1956 and the Vietnam War, the war was not a war
for most people in Europe and America. For most of them, after all,
the decades it covered were ones of unprecedented and constantly
increasing affluence. Of course the rhetoric of confrontation did
seep into their lives and exact its price in terms of heightened
political intolerance, shortages and food lines, lengthy military
service for young men, pervasive enemy images and closed borders. But
the price became lower and lower down the westward slope of
forgetting, and even in Eastern Europe the impact of the Cold War did
not sear the public memory in a manner comparable to the Second World
War. Now it is gone and there are new problems to face.
Symbolic poverty and mass disengagement help explain why there seems
to be so little to remember about the Cold War, why neither state nor
society can focus on it