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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2011
In the last decade, influenced by current economic trends, Cold War historians have made an effort to de-center the story of the Cold War. They have shifted their gaze from the center of the conflict—the face-offs in Europe between the Soviet Union and the United States—and cast an observing eye on the Third World. Unlike many Middle East historians who seek to understand the Middle East in terms of its unique cultures, languages, and religions, Cold War historians treat that area as part of a revolutionary arc that stretched from the jungles of Latin America to the jungles of Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the region's singularity, they focus on the themes that united guerilla fighters in the West Bank and the Makong Delta as well as leaders from Havana to Damascus: anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles, the yearning for self-definition, and the fight against what Third World revolutionaries perceived as economic exploitation. The sudden interest in what was considered, until recently, the periphery of the Cold War has undoubtedly been fueled by the zeitgeist of a new century in which the so-called peripheral regions are set to become more dominant economically. Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have a surplus of young skilled workers who are increasingly in demand by the global economy as the growth of world population slows and more prosperous countries in West Europe and North America are graying fast. The Third World consists today of the very regions where most of the economic growth in coming decades will take place. Dependency theory has gone topsy-turvy: leading economists now look with hope at countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Egypt and expect them to become the new engines of global growth. It is not surprising, then, that historians are now taking a stronger interest in the tangled history of the Cold War in the Third World and discovering the agency that these countries always had.
1 A series of papers published by Goldman-Sachs analysts during the last decade alerted scholars and policymakers to the coming shift in the economic balance of power. See especially Jim O'Neill, “The World Needs Better Economic BRICs,” Goldman-Sachs Economic Research, Global Economic Paper no. 66 (2001); and Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Goldman–Sachs Economic Research, Global Economic Papers, no. 99 (2003).
2 Ramin Toloui, “‘Region of Reverse Command’: Consequences of the Industrialized Country Debt Explosion,” PIMCO, Emerging Markets Watch, April 2010; “Counting Their Blessings,” 2 January 2010, The Economist.
3 For samples of the new “Third Worldist” Cold War historiography, see Gleijeses, Piero, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Statler, Kathryn C. and Johns, Andrew L., eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)Google Scholar; and Joseph, Gilbert M. and Spenser, Daniela, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 Westad, The Global Cold War, 288–330.
5 Yaqub, Salim, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Connelly, Matthew, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. In a manner typical of the new Cold War historiography, Samuel E. Crowl implicitly claims that Algeria was merely following the footsteps of another Third Would country, Indonesia. See his “Indonesia's Diplomatic Revolution: Lining Up for Non-Alignment, 1945–1955,” in Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962, ed. Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann (Washington, D.C., and Stanford, Calif.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2009).
6 The virtual archive section of the Cold War International History Project website (http://www.cwihp.org) has many valuable documents (translated into English) that were culled from these East European archives, some of which are highly relevant to Middle East historians.
7 Trentin, Massimiliano, “‘Tough Negotiations’: The Two Germanys in Syria and Iraq, 1963–1974,” Cold War History 8 (2008): 353–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Modernization as State Building: The Two Germanies in Syria, 1963–1972,” Diplomatic History 33 (2009): 487–505.
8 Döring, Hans-Joachim, “Es geht um unsere Existanz,” Die Politik Der DDR gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Musambik und Äthiopien (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1999), 57–86Google Scholar; Zídek, Pter and Sieber, Karel, Československo a Blízký Východ v letech 1948–1989 (Prague: Ústav mezinárodních vzthů, 2009), 199–217Google Scholar.
9 See Nathan J. Citino's contribution to this roundtable.