Remembering the Cold War

Global Contest and National Stories

David Lowe, Tony Joel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415661539
• eBook ISBN: 9781317912583
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Remembering the Cold War examines how, more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in defining national identities and shaping international relations around the globe. Given the Cold War's blurred definition – it has neither a widely accepted commencement date nor unanimous conclusion - what is to be remembered? This book illustrates that there is, in fact, a huge body of 'remembrance,' and that it is more pertinent to ask: what should be included and what can be overlooked?

Over five sections, this richly illustrated volume considers case studies of Cold War remembering from different parts of the world, and engages with growing theorisation in the field of memory studies, specifically in relation to war. David Lowe and Tony Joel afford careful consideration to agencies that identify with being 'victims' of the Cold War. In addition, the concept of arenas of articulation, which envelops the myriad spaces in which the remembering, commemorating, memorialising, and even revising of Cold War history takes place, is given prominence.

1 Conceptualizing Cold War remembrance

The Cold War shapes our memory of change and international relations in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the politico-ideological lines that divided most of the postwar world into two polarized blocs were drawn so deeply that, more than two decades after the end of that era, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in (re)defining national identities and (re)determining international relations around the globe. Owing to both its peculiar nature and lingering contemporaneity, the Cold War presents certain challenges that set it apart from other more popular or ‘conventional’ subjects for examining war memory and commemoration. Memory studies fixated on the First World War, for instance, can explore ways in which a single event lasting the comparatively short time frame of 1914–18 has been and continues to be remembered. Or studies of phenomena that tend to occur in isolated and typically unrelated cases — acts of genocide, leading examples of sporting triumphs and tragedies, or prominent episodes of terrorism etc. — readily lend themselves to collections of ‘stand-alone’ chapters linked by an overarching theme. By its very definition of being ‘cold’, however, in strict terms the imagined ‘war’ at the centre of this book — a major conflagration, most likely nuclear, between the opposing power blocs — never actually broke out. This means that, on the one hand, it has neither a universally accepted commencement date nor a unanimously acknowledged conclusion (beyond partial agreement that it spanned from the 1940s up to around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of eastern European communism, and dissolution of the erstwhile superpower the Soviet Union). Notwithstanding the heat surrounding several notable flashpoints, on the other hand, its failure ever to become truly ‘hot’ accounts for why the Cold War endured for more or less a half-century. Yet the absence of apocalyptic conflict presents something of an anomaly when it comes to remembering a ‘war’ that, in essence, failed to ever materialize beyond more localized wars and acts of violence. Put another way, if the Cold War is defined as a sustained period in which political and military tensions between the two superpower-led blocs always simmered but never reached boiling point, then what is there left to remember? Indeed, is it even possible to remember something that, viewed a particular way, never actually happened? As discussed in more detail below, at least one influential memory scholar has argued that the Cold War lends itself to very little — if any at all — memorialization and commemoration. Contrariwise, while acknowledging that to date it has remained a largely fallow field of war memory and commemoration, we argue that the Cold War promises to be increasingly rich terrain for memory scholars in future.¹ As a way of signalling wider interest in this emerging topic we offer the present study as the first book-length memory study dedicated to international coverage of Cold War remembrance.

No single volume, of course, could possibly cover the subject of Cold War memory and commemoration in its entirety. It would be folly to attempt such a task, which perhaps explains why existing memory studies have tended to home in on examining specific foci such as events, nations, or themes.² Whereas this book aims to survey how the Cold War has been and continues to be remembered in a wide range of temporal and topical settings, there are obvious limitations to what can and cannot be covered. Selectivity, then, needs to be recognized — indeed, embraced — as an obvious and unavoidably limiting starting point. What should be included in such a study and what can be overlooked? It is pertinent to add here, too, that historical amnesia — so often a highly politicized and state-sponsored endeavour — plays a crucial role in determining why and how certain episodes or experiences seem to more readily lend themselves to memory at the expense of other apparently less usable aspects of the past.³ Accordingly, the following study is partially influenced by questions concerning why particular facets of the Cold War have emerged more prominently than other less covered themes.⁴ Ultimately, though, it focuses on acts of remembering rather than spending too much time wondering about what may have been forgotten.

In addition to our scholarly, linguistic, and cultural limitations, three key issues underpinned the reasoning and decision-making behind what to include and exclude. First, what inspired this study? Second, what core questions drive this project? And, finally, what are its chief objectives? Beyond its close linkages to the wider series on Remembering the Modern World, this book was inspired by a curiosity to explore the manifold and often competing ways in which a worldwide struggle like the Cold War is remembered within more localized parameters — hence the book’s subtitle ‘Global Contest and National Stories’. From the outset, it was decided that a ‘broad-brush’ approach would be needed in order to paint as wide a picture as possible. Some basic questions that have fundamentally shaped this work include: how has the Cold War been remembered? When and where, by whom, and, of course, why has this taken place? How the recent past is told and who is doing the telling can be very instructive when it comes to matters such as cultivating ‘collective identity’, myth-making (or debunking), and nation (re)building exercises including the universal principle of national self-determination. Remembering is a fluid rather than static activity and so it is imperative to consider how and why some practices change or vanish altogether while others remain more or less the same, thus becoming entrenched as rites or traditions. What acts of Cold War remembrance have come and gone? What developments are unfolding now? What, most likely, looms on the horizon? Drawing on all these considerations, the following study is especially interested in probing the political, social, cultural, and historical factors that help to account for topical variances and temporal shifts in memorialization and commemoration of the Cold War around the world. Approaching a quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, this work’s main objective is to offer a timely, narrative-driven exploratory account of how this global contest has been and is being remembered under the rubric of localized or national stories.

As a survey study, a good deal of this book is innovative synthesis that necessarily draws on other scholars’ work — even if we regularly differ in our interpretations and conclusions. Whereas standing on the shoulders of others proved to be a favourable vantage point, by no means is it the only locality from which we obtained materials and insight. On the contrary, research conducted specifically for this project has accessed primary sources ranging from commission reports and political speeches through to recent textbooks for school children. Extensive field research was conducted in Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, the United States, and Vietnam, with several interviews conducted with fellow academics, museologists, archaeologists, cultural heritage practitioners, and tour guides along the way.

The ‘frozen bloc’ as an idiot’s tale?

In his thought-provoking introduction to the 2002 edited collection Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, Jan-Werner Müller observed that, within the first decade of the post-Soviet new world order, a ‘fiercely contested “New Cold War History”’ already had emerged. Conversely, though, Müller then argued that no such similar memory work on the Cold War had started to develop:

… it almost appears as if now for us the entire period had become a ‘frozen bloc’ between the end of the Second World War and the ‘return of history’, a meaningless distraction or even a communist tale told by an idiot. One reason might simply be that unlike ‘hot wars’, the Cold War does not lend itself to memorialisation and, at least in the West, to the tales of suffering and mourning which are familiar from the world wars. Moreover, since the Cold War often blurred the line between war and peace, it became very difficult to define the beginnings and endings of conflicts which are central to the emergence of topographical and temporal sites of memory.⁵

In Müller’s defence, at the time he made these remarks the Cold War was hardly subject to serious scrutiny with the two world wars and the Holocaust already dominating the ‘memory boom’s’ morbid fixation on manmade death and destruction.⁶ Nonetheless, Müller clearly could not foresee the Cold War becoming a popular topic for memory studies any time soon. In fact, he further mused: ‘Whether or not this period, and its memories, can be “unfrozen” remains to be seen — it might take another generational interval of forty years.’⁷ In other words, around the turn of the century it seemed plausible to a leading memory scholar like Müller that it may take until at least 2040 or thereabouts before the Cold War could or would lend itself to widespread public memory and commemoration. A decade later, a number of important works already have dismantled the misguided notion that the Cold War supposedly was some kind of ahistorical ‘frozen’ void destined to remain unsuited to memorialization or remembrance until the era’s participant-observer generations pass away. Even so, another key aim of this study is to provide further evidence that the Cold War has engendered dynamic and diverse memory cultures in virtually every corner of the globe that experienced this contest in a significant manner. Furthermore, as our coverage of the continuing mnemonic struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and East Asia indicates, for a whole slew of reasons the idea that the Cold War era was a ‘meaningless distraction’ or some idiot’s tale is anathema to the countless individuals and groups actively engaged in bringing the past to life in the present.

The challenges of immediacy and lingering contemporaneity

Writing a book like this would be an ambitious undertaking at the best of times; tackling such a project a little more than two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall posed some daunting challenges. Reflecting on his monumental synthesis One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945, Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds warns: ‘Any contemporary historian must accept the risk that he [sic] will soon be reading his [sic] book with a wry, toothless grin.’⁸ Prior to commencing this study, we abandoned all grandiose visions of producing a, or perhaps even the, definitive account of Cold War remembrance. We are under no illusions that, as time passes, future studies — armed with both the benefits afforded by extra time and space plus the groundwork laid by earlier works including this one — will come to offer more developed interpretations. In other words, our time for wry, toothless grins surely awaits! From the outset we heeded Reynolds’ sage advice and never aspired to reach the lofty heights of ‘definitiveness’.⁹ Instead, we accepted that the enormity of the subject matter coupled with our own scholarly, linguistic, and cultural limitations meant that we should embrace the fact that this study, by necessity, has been shaped by our combined capabilities along with our individual and shared views on the subject. By extension, then, we also must acknowledge that our lived experiences as ‘survivors’ of the Cold War era have impacted on our approach to this study. Eric Hobsbawm, in his seminal work The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, warns:

For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life … The length of this zone may vary, and so will the obscurity and fuzziness that characterizes it. But there is always such a no-man’s land of time. It is by far the hardest part of history for historians, or for anyone else, to grasp.¹⁰

For Hobsbawm, born in 1917, the age of empire he was writing about formed the earliest phase of his personal ‘twilight zone’. For the present authors, born more or less a half-century after Hobsbawm, the Cold War dominates this obscure and fuzzy ‘no-man’s land’ between history and memory. On the one hand, we were far from ever morphing into Cold War Warriors — in this respect, like most ordinary citizens living through this era we counted among the observers rather than participants and so this provides at least some level of personal detachment. And our antipodean upbringings meant that we were as removed from the northern reaches of US—Soviet sparring as was geographically possible. Again, this can help to engender a little ‘outsider’ detachment given that the Cold War, while undeniably global, was largely rooted in the northern hemisphere. On the other hand, however, there is no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Remembering the modern world
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing Cold War remembrance
• 2 Nuclear world
• 3 Cities and sites
• 4 Defining our times
• 5 Endings?
• Bibliography
• Index