The Other Cold War

Heonik Kwon

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231526708
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history.

Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.

1

THE IDEA OF THE END

After the end of World War II, many communities in Greece were divided between the supporters of the Communist partisan forces and supporters of the government’s anti-Communist drive.¹ In one village seized by the chaotic civil war, in the country’s northeastern region, a partisan supporter was arrested in his home and subsequently sent to a prison camp on a remote island. The arrest was carried out by a group of men from outside the village, including one who was wearing a hood. The villagers later learned that the masked man was the arrested man’s brother. Many people left the village after the civil war and now live in distant places. When these people later returned to their homeland for a visit, the remaining villagers organized a welcoming feast. The two brothers joined these gatherings if the visitors happened to be their close relatives or friends. However, the villagers never heard any greeting or conversation exchanged between these two men on that occasion or during many such occasions in subsequent decades.²

The civil war in Greece (1946–1949) was intimately connected to the civil war in Korea (1950–1953) in the international history of the cold war. They both were an “international civil war,” in part driven by the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and in part grounded in each society’s polarization into radical nationalist forces and anti-Communist nationalist forces.³ The Truman Doctrine announced the active global leadership of the United States in the struggle against international communism, and the two civil wars marked the militarization and globalization of this struggle.⁴ President Harry S. Truman in fact referred to Korea as “the Greece of the Far East” when a war broke out on the peninsula and said, “If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to [the Communists] like we did in Greece three years ago, they won’t take over the whole Middle East.”⁵ In the southeastern region of the peninsula, there is a village once known as the region’s Moskva (Moscow)—the wartime reference for a Communist stronghold.⁶ Each year, people originally from this village return to their homeland in order to join the ceremony held on behalf of family and village ancestors. On these periodic occasions, the relatives from distant places are pleased to meet each other and exchange news—but not always.

When a man cautiously suggested to his lineage elders recently that the family might consider repairing a neglected ancestral tomb, this suggestion broke the harmony of the family meal held after the ancestral rite. One elder left the room in fury, and other elders remained silent throughout the ceremonial meal. The man who proposed the idea was the adopted son of the person buried in the neglected tomb, having been selected as the deceased man’s descendent by the family elders for a ritual purpose, and the elder whom the man offended happened to be a close relative of the deceased. The ancestor had been a prominent anticolonial, Communist activist before he died at a young age without a male descendent; the offended elder’s children were among the several dozen village youths who left the village together with the retreating Communist army in the chaos of the civil war. The elder believes that this catastrophe in village history and family continuity could have been avoided if the ancestor buried in the neglected tomb had not brought the seeds of “Red ideology” to the village in the first place.⁷ Beautifying the man’s neglected tomb was unacceptable to this elder, who believed that some of his close kin had lost, because of the ancestor, the social basis on which they could be remembered as family ancestors after their own deaths.

The morality of ancestor worship is as strong in Vietnamese cultural tradition as it is in Korean tradition. These two countries also share the common historical experience of being important sites and symbols in Asia for America’s leadership in the global struggle against the threat of communism.⁸ Since the end of the 1980s, when the Vietnamese political leadership initiated a general economic reform and regulated political liberalization in the country, there has been a strong revival of ancestral rituals in Vietnamese villages. The state hierarchy had previously discouraged these rituals because it regarded them as backward customs incompatible with the modern secular, revolutionary society.⁹ In the communities of the southern and central regions (what was known as South Vietnam during the Vietnam War), a notable aspect of this social development has been the introduction to the ancestral ritual realm those identities and persons previously excluded from public memory. The memorabilia of the former “counterrevolutionary” South Vietnamese soldiers and other hitherto socially stigmatized historical identities became increasingly visible in the domestic and communal ritual space. Before the reform, the Vietnamese public ritual space was limited exclusively to the memory of the fallen revolutionary combatants from the Vietnam–American war. It is now increasingly becoming open to memories of the dead from the other side of the war and is therefore in conflict with the state-controlled public institution of commemoration, where one sees no records of deaths from what the Vietnamese call ben kia (“that side,” meaning the American side).¹⁰

These communal developments and conflicts are common in societies where people experienced the cold war in forms other than the “long peace”—the idiom with which the historian John Lewis Gaddis characterizes the international environment in the second half of the twentieth century, partly in contrast to the war-torn era of the first half.¹¹ Gaddis believes that the bipolar structure of the world order, despite the many anomalies and negative effects it generated, contributed to containing an overt armed confrontation among industrial powers. As Walter LaFeber notes, however, this view of the cold war speaks a half-truth of bipolar history.¹² The view represents the dominant Western (and Soviet) experience of the cold war as an “imaginary war,” referring to the politics of competitively preparing for war in the hope of avoiding an actual outbreak of war, but the identification of the second half of the twentieth century as an exceptionally long period of international peace would hardly be intelligible to most of the rest of the world.¹³ The cold war era resulted in forty million human casualties of war in different parts of the world, as LaFeber mentions; how to reconcile this exceptionally violent historical reality with the predominant Western perception of an exceptionally long peace is a crucial question for grasping the meaning of the global cold war.¹⁴ According to Bruce Cumings, it is necessary to weigh the dominant “balance of power” conception of the cold war, on which the idea of the “long peace” is based, against the reality of the “balance of terror” experienced in the wide world.¹⁵

The cold war was a global conflict. Yet this does not mean that the conflict was experienced on the same terms all over the world. One way to think about the cold war’s encompassing but variable political realities is implicated in its name. The term cold war is both the general reference for the global bipolar conflict and the representation of this conflict from a particular regional point of view. Societies varyingly endured the political history of the cold war either as an imaginary war or as other than imaginary, either without or with large-scale violence and human suffering. Cold war politics permeated developed and underdeveloped societies, Western and non-Western states, and colonial powers and colonized nations: in this sense, it was a truly global reality. However, the historical experience and the collective memory of the cold war are radically divergent between the West and the postcolonial world. The cold war experienced as a long peace and the cold war experienced as a total war may not be considered within a single framework unless this framework is formulated in such a way that it can accommodate the experiential contraries and deal with the semantic contradiction embedded in the idea of the cold war.

The political history of the cold war has been the concern primarily of diplomatic history and international relations. In places where the cold war was waged as a civil war or in other forms of radical and violent bifurcation of social forces, however, its history may not be relegated merely to the specialty of these disciplines. In these places, bipolar politics permeated national society, traditional community, family relations, and individual identity. Diplomatic history alone, in such contexts, cannot do justice to the complex, multilevel reality of political confrontation unless it is creatively combined with social history. The bipolar conflict evolved not only according to the superpower state actors’ intentions but also on the basis of existing, locally specific structural and normative conditions and orientations. The popularity of Communist partisans in post–World War II Greece was related to their moral strength as an active nationalist resistance force against the German and Italian occupations during the war; the same can be said about the Vietnamese and Korean Communists with respect to their resistance to the colonial occupations by France and Japan, respectively.¹⁶ If the bipolar conflict involved a mass destruction of human lives, its wounds may still be vigorously alive in communal existence even though the superpower contest of power is declared over and done with. In these communities, these historical wounds were largely invisible in the public space under a self-consciously anti-Communist or revolutionary state, and they began to be acknowledged only after the cold war as a geopolitical contest was over and when the structure of power within a political society began to change accordingly (see chapters 4 and 5). For this particular history of the cold war, waged as the “balance of terror” rather than as the “balance of power,” the narrative strategy that focuses primarily on the state and interstate actions is inadequate. We need to develop an alternative mode of narration, one that incorporates but does not exclusively privilege the state’s perspective and agency.

The social dimension of the cold war has not been given much room in conventional cold war studies. Until recently, the focus of this academic field has been primarily on international politics, taking states (conceived of as actors or institutions) as its main units of analysis and aiming at explaining the behavior of these units within the sphere of activity called the “international system.”¹⁷ With a state-centric and systemic focus, the dominant approach was that of realism, stressing the importance of power balances and geopolitical considerations. However, the end of the cold war as a geopolitical order has affected the dominance of this realist paradigm in international relations and history. Not least because this paradigm failed to predict or explain the sudden collapse of the Soviet rule in 1989–1991, a number of younger-generation historians have since shifted their analytical orientation and now stress “the significance of ideas and beliefs, focusing on the importance of ideology and culture.”¹⁸ They are engaged in reconsidering cold war history in innovative ways, investigating the diverse sociocultural aspects of the global conflict and exploring ways to reconcile these aspects with the existing contours of diplomatic history. As a result, it is argued, “The story of the Cold War is likely to become more contentious as it becomes more interesting and complex, and it will continue to defy any single narrative.”¹⁹ In this new historiography of the cold war, the expansion of American power is not merely considered in the scheme of balance of power with the Soviet Union but also viewed according to various terms of ideological self-making and construction of social order. Thus, for instance, the idea of containment, which earlier referred to the geopolitical reasoning about limiting Soviet power, now entails diverse aspects of societal ordering with regard to moral purity and dangers.²⁰

The social and cultural dimension of the cold war is a neglected subject in other disciplines, too. In social and cultural anthropology, with which I am familiar, it is rare to find a specialist who addresses the social or cultural history of the cold war as a research question—even a specialist on a geographical area that is discussed among historians as a major site of the bipolar conflict. Mark Mazower, writing about modern Greece, writes bitterly of the almost complete absence of attention to the civil war history and the subsequent political history of anticommunism in the otherwise rich anthropological literature on Greek culture and society. He contends that the anthropology of Greece has instead contributed to establishing an image of rural Greece as “an unchanging, traditional, ahistorical world.”²¹ Geoffrey Robinson makes a similarly critical point about anthropological research on Indonesia. According to Robinson, the area specialists on Bali have neglected the impact of the cataclysmic anti-Communist state terror campaigns of 1965 on the deceptively peaceful, aesthetically rich, and seemingly apolitical Balinese cultural lives (see chapter 7). Against this representational tradition, Robinson says, it is necessary “to demystify Bali, to take the romance out, and to restore to their rightful place the conflict and the violence that have characterized the island’s politics on and off throughout the twentieth century.”²²

Whereas historical scholarship currently shows a growing engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of the cold war, including Mazower’s and Robinson’s pioneering works, it is interesting to note an opposite tendency in other disciplines. In disciplines traditionally associated with cultural history and social analysis, there is now a strong inclination to disengage with cold war history altogether, to relegate it to the status of an old, unfortunate geopolitical episode that has little relevance for research agendas. The analytical break with cold war history is particularly marked in the academic discourse about globalization. The rest of this chapter reviews this trend and investigates how the analytical disengagement with the cold war relates to a problematic, incomplete understanding of the cold war in terms of balance of power.

The end of the bipolar era, according to the sociologist Anthony Giddens, “radically altered the nature of states’ sovereignty,” and in terms of economics it resulted in capitalism’s “quantum leap to a completely different scale from the past.”²³ Giddens observes that in the post–cold war world, capitalism has become a single option for the entire human race, facing no competing mode of economic development. This development has generated a profound sense of encompassment and inevitability, and in this triumphant march of capitalism after the “bloodless” victory over communism, money becomes sure of itself and more ruthless in pursuit of an absolute freedom of mobility.²⁴ Based on this observation, whose relevance is manifested in the recent global financial irregularities and meltdown, Giddens argues that there is an urgent need to reformulate key sociological categories such as state, society, family, and the individual according to the new global reality of a borderless economy and states without enemies (see chapter 5).

In a similar light, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai also proposes “a new architecture for area studies” in the globalizing world after the cold war. He argues that scholars of area studies must redefine their object of inquiry, departing from what he calls the “trait geography”—the conception of localities and culture are...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part: 1
• Part: 2
• Part: 3
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index