Critiquing the Grand Narrative
In their recent publications, the authors Odd Arne Westad and Akira Iriye each engage in a re-calibration of historical focal points of world history as we (used to) know it. In fact, their critical analysis of the grand narrative of the Cold War reveals and moderates the still widely prevalent Euro/North America-centrism in (world) historical storytelling.
Placing the Cold War in a global context of plural and coexisting agencies and structures, a historical narrative emerges from Westad and Iriye’s research that reveals multiple factors of interdependency at play: In particular, the reconstruction of the enduring coexistence of cooperation, coordination and confrontation during this period challenges prevailing narratives, according to which the Cold War era is characterized by the fact that there were mainly two primary ‘actors’ (alias antagonistic powers), with the ‘Rest of the World’ (RoW) being degraded to the analytical figure of secondary class “re-actors’ to actions of the “actors”.
Focus on Multi-level Ramnifications and Transnational Initiatives
Contrary to this conventional wisdom of bi-polar action and RoW re-action, Westad attempts to write a global history of the Cold War era that focuses on the multi-level ramnifications of governance from 1945-1991. During this time, he argues, it was less the superpowers (US and Sowjetunion) but rather the ideational and hence programmatic conflict between them that had an impact on or that necessitated a reaction to developments in the “Third World”..
This three-dimensional focus on historical events actually allows Westad to establish and describe the historical linkage that existed between ‘Third World revolutions’ and ‘superpower interventions’. Accordingly, the latter often revealed that the superpowers were largely re-acting (rather than acting) to developments in ‘Third World’ countries.
While Westad’s analysis of historical events opens the narrative towards a three-polar perspective of mutual interdependence and re-action, yet pertains a state-centric perspective, Iriye goes even further in his deconstruction of the grand Cold War narrative. He focuses on transnational initiatives that emerged during the Cold War era and that he interprets as phenomena and outcomes of an emerging global community.
In Global Community, he provides a historical account which links domestic and transnational agency issues, with the focus being on non-state actors. Accordingly, the so-called Cold War era was less an era of cold war, but more an era of globalisation with the characteristic emergence of a global community. Iriye critiques that most historical story telling about the Cold War era primarily focuses on the bipolar constellation and confrontation as an explanation of every event, thereby missing to account for developments that took place regardless of or outside of the Cold War paradigm. In fact, most historical accounts of the Cold War tend to completely ignore simultaneous developments such as the rise of international organizations.
Iriye’s focus on issues of mutual interdependence and shared interests rather than bipolar conflict and zero-sum-game of power politics shows that these phenomena developed parallel to Cold War politics, and sometimes even undermined bi-polar world politics by providing an alternative framework that emphasized cooperation over confrontation.
Outlook
Indeed, it seems very valuable to look at the Cold War era from a global perspective that goes beyond the bipolar interstate point of view and incorporates other events, sources of power and agency (in form of (non-)state actors, ideas as well as regional or global alliances) in the analysis.
From this standpoint, the era of Cold War politics then re-emerges as an intermediary period which had a historical ‘before and after’, and which comprised by far more centers of power and agency than the superpower narrative wants to make us believe. Providing an outline of continuities since the 1945, Westad’s and Iriye’s diversified historical account of the Cold War era offers a valuable basis for better understanding the question whether the challenges of world order politics today are new. They do so in revealing the underpinning “world view” of different narratives, i.e. in bringing to the open the particular and distinct historical focal points of existing historical analyses of the era. In this regard, Westad’s state-centric historical account and Iriye’s transnational focus seem to complement each other. Their critical analysis provides for a multitude of perspectives which together make up a multi-polar historical framework. Altogether, this provides not only for a rich reading experience but also encourages reader & research to rethink the traditional bias (alias ‘conventional wisdom’) underpinning most historical accounts of world history, which in the long run hopefully allows for a more comprehensive picture of world politics.
Literature:
- Westad “Global Cold War”
- Iriye “Global Community”
