History in the Cold War and the Cold War in the Present

This book is on the Cold War and the politics of history. It is a multidimensional subject. On one hand, it concerns the different roles of history in the confrontations called the Cold War. The topic includes, on the other hand, the many-faceted presence of Cold War experiences, interpretations and conclusions in post-Cold-War politics. The very concept of the Cold War should be seen as a historical interpretation that has varied and changed over time. The way in which it has been periodized in post-1990 historical research obviously differs from the ways people between the late 1940s and the late 1980s conceived of their experiences and expectations. For many of them, ‘the Cold War’ was a concept referring to certain phases of the East-West confrontation rather than to this confrontation itself. The Cold War proper had started with the breakdown of the wartime Grand Alliance in the mid-1940s, reached its high point during the Korean War 1950–53, and ended in the so-called fi rst detente in the mid-1950s. As people saw it, the crises of 1958–62 from Berlin to Cuba had brought the world on the brink of an actual war. Then there were phases in which one spoke about a return to the Cold War, or ‘the Second Cold War’, as Fred Halliday provocatively entitled his book in 1982 on the increased tensions in the late 1970s and early 1980s between the United States and the Soviet Union.1