European integration and the Cold War were separate but intertwined. Chronologically, the two share the same formative decades – although the basic idea of uniting the separate states of Europe into a single political and economic entity long predates the East–West conflict. Both European unity and the course of the Cold War became, moreover, central preoccupations of Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1947–89 period. Yet more often than not, European integration and the Cold War have been studied in near total isolation from one another, the subject of separate journals, academic conferences and books, and the primary interest of two distinct groups of specialist scholars who have rarely exchanged ideas. This chapter will hence begin with a brief explanation of why this separation has occurred, before going on to argue that the interaction between the evolution of the Cold War and the gradual development of today’s European Union (EU) was so intimate as to make it vital for historians to break down the barriers between the two fields.

One of the reasons why the two historiographies have diverged is that the most consistently successful forms of European integration have been primarily concerned with economic matters rather than military or political cooperation. Of the two economic and military plans launched within months of each other in 1950, the Schuman Plan – intended to pool the coal and steel industries of France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries – succeeded in bringing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) into being in 1952.

The Cold War is one of the handful of subjects that can keep hundreds of historians busy all their lives. The literature already authored fills many a bookcase and website, with no end in sight. But little has been said about the environmental dimensions of the conflict. Perhaps for Cold War historians the fate of fish, forests, and so forth seems beside the point when examining an era replete with apocalyptic risks to humankind. It certainly seemed so to the great majority of people in power at the time. Meanwhile, of the squadrons of environmental historians at work on the years 1945–91, almost none have seen fit to link their work directly to the Cold War. This chapter will address some of the linkages between environmental change and the Cold War.

The analysis here focuses on three aspects: agriculture, especially the Green Revolution; transportation infrastructure, especially roads; and weapons production, especially nuclear weapons. Cold War geostrategic priorities shaped state efforts in these arenas, and those efforts brought significant, usually; unintended, environmental changes. Obviously, not all environmental change in the years 1945–91 should be attributed to the Cold War. Indeed, with a few exceptions, such as radioactive pollution from nuclear-weapons production and testing, the ecological tumult of the post-1945 era resulted from confluences of multitudes of causes, among which Cold War considerations normally played only a part.

By 1962, the once robust Sino-Soviet alliance had cracked up, revealing serious conflicts beneath the façade of Communist solidarity. This split was a remarkable development in a Cold War context. It was not the first time that the Soviets had fallen out with their allies: the Yugoslavs were thrown out of the “camp” in 1948; Hungary had tried but failed to leave in 1956; Albania quarreled with Moscow in 1961. But, in spite of their intrinsic importance, these issues were small compared to the red banner of Sino-Soviet unity, the symbol of the power and appeal of socialism worldwide. The demise of the alliance represented the broken promise of Marxism. Ideological unity and conformity were so essential to the Soviet-led socialist world that a quarrel between its two principal protagonists – the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China – undermined the legitimacy of the socialist camp as a whole, and of the intellectual notions that underpinned its existence.

So inexplicable did the split appear from a Marxist perspective that both Chinese and Soviet historians in retrospect would blame the debacle on the other side’s betrayal of Marxism. But from a realist perspective, Marxism had nothing to do with the rift: the Soviet Union and China were great powers with divergent national interests. No amount of Communist propaganda could have reconciled these competing interests, so it was not surprising, indeed it had been predictable, that the Soviets and the Chinese would fall out and the alliance would crumble.

If one takes a long-term view of the Mediterranean region between 1960 and 1975, it is characterized by its transition from one defined by the European colonial system and menaced by Soviet encroachment to one that became, fifteen years later, a vital conduit of communication and a channel for shipping Middle Eastern oil into a wider world dominated by the United States. The convergence of Mediterranean history with the global dynamics of the Cold War inspires the consideration of the longue durée. From the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire had exerted continuous pressure from the Black Sea toward the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union inherited this geostrategic imperative. The messy decolonization of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the Balkans in the early part of the twentieth century, and subsequently that of European empires in Northern Africa after World War II, added further complexity to the region. As a result, newly independent Mediterranean states faced the problem of developing foreign and commercial policies compatible with their own interests while recognizing the influence of often distant naval powers that dominated their coasts. During the period considered here, the global rivalry of the two superpowers – with the United States always being the strongest, with unprecedented capabilities to project its power – gradually imposed itself on complicated regional dynamics with roots going back to the ancient world.

Writing sometime around 1330 in the general prologue to his first literal commentary on the Bible, the Franciscan biblical scholar, Nicholas of Lyra, summarizes what he understands to be the patristic and medieval consensus concerning the interpretation of Scripture. Any scriptural text may, he says, contain four senses, the “literal” (also “historical” or “narrative”), the “moral” (sometimes called “tropological”), the allegorical and the “anagogical” (aka “mystical”). “And these four senses,” he adds, “may be explained by way of illustration by the word “Jerusalem”. In its literal sense it refers to a certain city which was once the capital of the kingdom of Judea, founded in the first instance by Melchisedech and later expanded and fortified by Solomon. But in its moral sense it refers to the faithful soul; it is in this sense that Isaiah says: Rise up, Jerusalem, take your seat (52:2). But in its allegorical sense it refers to the Church militant, as when it says in Revelation 21:2: I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, like a bride dressed for her husband. In its anagogical sense it refers to the Church triumphant, as Galatians 4:26 says: She who is above is Jerusalem the freed-woman and she is our mother. We have given as an example a single word; in the same way a single passage could be given, and as in the one case so in others.” / At least verbally, Nicholas is right: his account of the “four senses of Scripture” thus schematically set out would have been acceptable at any point in the western Christian tradition in the period from late antiquity to his own day in the fourteenth century.

Like their predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adhered to the major tenets of post-World War II US foreign policy. They saw the Cold War as a long-term struggle played out in military, ideological, political, economic, scientific, and cultural arenas. All three leaders sought to contain the Soviet Union while advancing US influence around the globe. They agreed that radical revolution threatened US interests, and that such upheavals were instigated by the Soviets, “Red China,” or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. All three presidents believed that Western-style modernization – and particularly American values and institutions – offered the best model for developing nations. They also concurred on the strategy of tightening links with European allies in order to win the Cold War, head off potential problems with Germany, and compensate for the relative decline in US economic predominance. Kennedy (JFK) and Johnson (LBJ) differed from Eisenhower, however, in embracing an exuberant activism that “Ike” distrusted. In their respective presidencies, Kennedy and Johnson saw greater opportunities and threats than Eisenhower perceived in his time. While Kennedy and Johnson differed in background, style, and the relative emphasis each placed on domestic or foreign initiatives, they shared similar ideological assumptions and policy goals. Both had competitive personalities.

Intelligence is probably the least understood aspect of the Cold War, sometimes sensationalised, often ignored. It is also the only profession in which a fictional character is far better known than any real practitioner, alive or dead. Cold War intelligence was, of course, not usually as exciting as the career of James Bond. Like all forms of information, the impact of intelligence is more often gradual than dramatic – though it does from time to time suddenly produce such spectacular revelations as the Soviet acquisition of the plans of the first US atomic bomb or the Soviet construction of missile sites in Cuba in 1962. Sometimes intelligence adds information of real importance to what is available from more conventional sources. Sometimes it adds little or nothing. But, whether intelligence is used, abused or simply ignored, historians of the Cold War can never afford to disregard it. The many studies of policy-making in East and West which fail to take intelligence into account are at best incomplete, at worst distorted.

Signals intelligence (SIGINT)

The starting point for any attempt to assess the role of intelligence during the Cold War is to recognise how much we still do not know. Signals intelligence is perhaps the prime example. Though SIGINT was far more voluminous than intelligence from human sources (HUMINT), it is still entirely absent from most histories of the Cold War. At the end of the Second World War, GCHQ (the British SIGINT agency) wanted to keep secret indefinitely the wartime ULTRA intelligence derived from breaking the German Enigma and other high-grade enemy ciphers but expected the secret to be uncovered within a few years.

'There is no such thing as Shakespearian tragedy,' a distinguished critic has declared, 'only Shakespearian tragedies.' One reason for the remarkably various character of the plays customarily assigned to this genre is that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had no very clear prescription for the kind of work a tragedy ought to be, beyond the simple working assumption that it would be concerned with death and the downfall of the mighty. The term itself was derived from Greek and Roman practice, but like so much else in the European Renaissance, most tragedies of the period were less recoveries of ancient forms than radical reinventions cloaked in classical authority. In this they resembled the playhouses for which they were written. When the entrepreneur James Burbage erected London's first purpose-built playhouse in 1576, he dignified it with a grandly Latinate name whose pretensions were reflected in the 'gorgeous' architectural ornament that reminded contemporaries of 'Roman work'. Looking now at the strange architectural amalgam in Johannes de Witt's sketch of the Swan (see Figure 1), we may be struck less by the classical pretensions of the two great columns that support the 'heavens' over its platform stage than by the vernacular form of an auditorium that strongly resembled the wooden animal-baiting arenas that preceded the playhouses on the Bankside in Tudor London. But, associated as they were in the official mind with such riff-raff as 'Fencers Bearwardes . . . Mynstrels Juglers Pedlers [and] Tynkers', the players sought to advertise the prestigious ancestry of their craft in every way they could.

In The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan’s 1963 attack on domesticity – the author describes how she “gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while…came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.” Despite the outward appearances of wealth and contentment, she argued that the Cold War was killing happiness. Women, in particular, faced strong public pressures to conform with a family image that emphasized a finely manicured suburban home, pampered children, and an ever-present “housewife heroine.” This was the asserted core of the good American life. This was the cradle of freedom. This was, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, the “assignment” for “wives and mothers”: “Western marriage and motherhood are yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society. Their basis is the recognition in women as well as men of the primacy of personality and individuality.

Friedan disagreed, and she was not alone. Surveys, interviews, and observations revealed that countless women suffered from a problem that had no name within the standard lexicon of society at the time. They had achieved the “good life,” and yet they felt unfulfilled. Friedan quoted one particularly articulate young mother:

Wars have been around for a very long time. Grand strategies for fighting wars – if by “grand strategy” one understands the calculated use of available means in the pursuit of desired ends – have probably been around almost as long; but our record of them dates back to only the fifth century BCE when Herodotus and Thucydides set out to chronicle systematically how the great wars of their age had been fought. We do have, however, in the greatest of all poems, mythologized memories of a war fought centuries earlier, none of whose participants appear to have known how to write. But they did know about the need to connect ends with means: “Put heads together,” Homer has wise Nestor admonishing the Achaeans at a desperate moment in the long siege of Troy, “if strategy’s any use.”

The ancient Greeks made no sharp distinction between war and peace. Wars could last for years, even decades; they could pause, however, to allow the sowing and harvesting of crops, or for the conduct of games. The modern state system, which dates from the seventeenth century, was meant to stake out boundaries that did not exist in the era of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides: nations were either to be at war or they were not. But the boundaries blurred again during the Cold War, a struggle that went on longer than the Trojan, Persian, and Peloponnesian wars put together. The stakes, to be sure, were higher. The geographical scope of the competition was much wider.

Soviet acceptance of the collapse of East European Communist regimes in 1989 must be considered the single most significant event leading to the end of the Cold War. It provided the most compelling evidence of the magnitude of changes that were going on inside the USSR in 1989. Until then, the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms was doubted in many places. Soviet behavior in 1989 in Eastern Europe was the definitive reality check of the “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy.

Provocative as it may sound, it is not so much what happened in Eastern Europe itself in 1989 that was historically significant. The fragility of the Communist regimes there had been on the historical record for many years. It was Soviet tolerance for change that made the difference. Until Gorbachev’s reforms, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe had been internalized both in the East and in the West as an inescapable fact until some indeterminate future time. That is why the complete emancipation of Eastern Europe in 1989, while Soviet power was still intact, came as a breathtaking surprise in the West, in Eastern Europe itself, and even in the Soviet Union. The central argument of this chapter is that, while each revolution had specific national characteristics, their pace and scale were largely shaped by the gradual discovery of the scope of Soviet tolerance.

“They look at [The Faerie Queene] as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in itsshining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them.” William Hazlitt/Neoclassical writers took a dim and limited view of allegory, insisting that it was most decorous when strictly iconographic and immobile, like a pictorial representation of Justice holding scales. Allegorical “persons” that move and act troubled Neoclassical strictures about the need to separate abstract figures from realist narratives or, indeed, narrative of any kind. Both Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the allegorical episode Satan, Sin and Death in Milton's Paradise Lost were common targets. When the Romantic writer Leigh Hunt suggests that The Faerie Queene is “but one part allegory, and nine parts beauty and enjoyment; sometimes an excess of flesh and blood,” he exposes a dimension of allegory that Neoclassicism rejected. The unaccommodated remainder in this equation registers what his contemporary William Hazlitt wryly suggests readers might safely ignore - the specter of allegorical figures alive and on the move. This essay charts the Romantic understanding of allegory as a genre and narrative figure that tacks between realist narratives and details and the abstractions with which allegory has long been identified. Romantic writers and artists devise allegorical figures whose unaccommodated remainder of “flesh and blood” is a striking index of their “otherness,” an excess defiant of the law of abstraction and the law of genre.

Historians have always believed that good sources make for good studies. When Lord Acton was planning the Cambridge Modern History a hundred years ago, his view of the massive enterprise was much influenced by the sudden and extraordinary access to historical archives that came about in the 1890s. In his instructions for contributors to the vast effort which he organized but never saw completed, Acton wrote:

Many optimistic historians of and in the twentieth century believed that the events of the 1990s made for a breakthrough in historical knowledge similar to that which Lord Acton and his colleagues had perceived a hundred years before. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars began gaining access to the formerly secret archives of states and governments all over the world – not just because of the fall of authoritarian and secretive Communist regimes, but also because many political leaders in many parts of the world believed that “freedom of information,” as it is now often called, had become an integral part of good governance. While very often producing as selective and partial a documentation as that of the nineteenth century had turned out to be, the new access to information in the 1990s meant real advances for historians, especially those attempting to understand events of the late twentieth century.

At the conclusion of Twelfth Night, as part of the long-awaited and heavily overdetermined reconciliation scene, comes a revelation that modern audiences would surely find disconcerting if they paid attention to it. Sebastian, in the course of catechizing his disguised twin sister Viola, gives their age at the death of their father as 13 (5.1.237-41). They cannot be much older than this during the course of the play: they are prepubescent, constantly mistaken for each other; Sebastian's voice has not yet changed, and his facial hair has not begun to grow. Even for Shakespeare's audience, their youthfulness would have been striking, an index at the very least to the precociousness of sexuality in Illyria. Indeed, if they are still 13, it means that, though Sebastian and Olivia have by this time married, the husband has not yet even reached the age of consent, which at this period in Shakespeare's England was 14 for men, 12 for women. We find this moment unnoticeable because Sebastian and Viola, in modern productions, are roles for mature actors, not children. Sebastian's combative energy and erotic readiness suggest at the very least advanced adolescence, and would have suggested it to Shakespeare's audience as well: the physiologists of the age placed the onset of active male sexuality at 15 or 16.

In Late Antiquity a series of ideas emerges that adds a kind of buoyancy to allegorism. Readers' impulses toward other regions of knowledge begin to flow more consistently upward, drawn by various metaphysical currents that guide and support them. A whole manner of Platonist-inspired architectures structure the cosmos in the early centuries of the Common Era, among thinkers as diverse as the well-known Origen and the mysterious Numenius. Plato's understanding of appearances had always insisted on some higher, unfallen level of reality, in which the forms dwell, and to which we have no access through our senses. This other level seems to invite allegorical aspirations. Of course, Plato himself prominently declined the invitation, and it is no small irony that his work should have become the font of such heady visions. He consistently disparages poetry's claims to any kind of truth, let alone the grandiose varieties that allegorical readers tend to ascribe to it. The distance between the sensible world and the real source of truth operates for him as a chastening agent, a message of epistemological caution echoing over a chasm. (Plato typically leaves the task of mediating it to the colorless verb metecho ”participate.”) But his later followers do not feel such stringent compunctions. They will embrace Plato's metaphysics of fallenness, but then shift their emphasis from the distance that separates us and the highest truths to the notion that the world here and now is (somehow) connected to a higher order - a position inarguably Platonic but rarely more than implicit in the master's work.

The Korean War was a seminal event of the early Cold War, both regionally and globally, and of Korean history. The conflict militarized international politics far beyond previous levels, but, in part due to the better-defined superpower commitments that emerged in Europe and Northeast Asia, it also produced a relatively stable military balance, making less likely a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the war solidified China’s division, escalated American involvement in Indochina, and ensured the prolonged estrangement of the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Those developments, in turn, increased the likelihood of future conflict in Southeast Asia. For the short term, the war tightened the Sino-Soviet alliance, but it also sowed the seeds of future animosity between the Communist giants. Finally, while the fighting during the war did not extend beyond Korea’s boundaries, it led to massive destruction on the peninsula and deepened the country’s division.

Origins

The war emerged from an array of Korean and international factors. During the century prior to the outbreak of war on 25 June 1950, Korea was rent by division and foreign encroachment. Contending indigenous groups usually derived their identity from a combination of internal forces and ties to foreign powers. When in the 1880s Korea opened its gates to the Western world, pro-Chinese, pro-Japanese, pro-Russian, and pro-American factions all emerged, each drawing on the ideas and/or maneuvers of the great powers. Internal turmoil joined with the ambitions of more powerful neighbors to produce two major regional conflicts between 1894 and 1905. Japan emerged victorious in both, annexing the peninsula in 1910. Korean activists seeking to end foreign rule looked to other nations for inspiration and support. With the rise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia in 1917 and the emergence of the struggle between Nationalists and Communists in China in the 1920s, Korean exiles inevitably took sides, with traditionalists of a Confucian stripe looking to the Nationalist Chinese, liberals of a capitalist, democratic bent appealing to the United States, and radicals casting their eyes toward the Soviet Union and/or the Communist Chinese. Affiliations were also influenced by regional or family origin in Korea and a foreign power’s or party’s geographic proximity to the peninsula, or hopes of their assistance against the Japanese.

The decade between the death of Iosif Stalin and the Cuban missile crisis was one of great promise and great peril. The promise consisted in the possibility of reversing the Cold War confrontation, the peril in its turning into real war. This chapter attempts to explain why the promise remained unfulfilled and why the peril, despite an initial turn toward détente, subsequently increased rather than diminished. Soviet foreign policy, to be sure, is only a part of the explanation, but it is an indispensable one. Rather than divert attention to other countries, the discussion that follows aims to assess the policy on its own merits. Benefiting from inside evidence that was not available at the time but is now, it will focus on what policymakers wanted to accomplish and what they actually did accomplish.

As Soviet leaders always proudly emphasized, their foreign policy was unlike any other, as was their state. The policy was unique in the extent to which their Marxist-Leninist beliefs determined their perception of why other states behaved the way they did. The unique feature of the Soviet state most relevant to foreign policy was the vast power wielded by the supreme leader, which made its exercise highly personalized. As the following discussion will show, the post-Stalin decade abounds in vivid, and sobering, examples of what a difference a man and a system could make to foreign policy.

A missed chance

Stalin’s legacy left a formidable challenge to his successors, none of whom could hope to fit into his oversized shoes. They inherited from him a sullen empire, which he had acquired by extending his power to Eastern Europe as the main safeguard of Soviet security as he understood it. His manner of doing so, however, had precipitated confrontation with the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, thus making the Soviet Union more insecure. As the Cold War became militarized, the buildup of nuclear weapons, whose supposed utility was but dimly understood, added to the challenge. Tantalizing fragments of evidence suggest that the despot’s timely demise may have saved not only most of his entourage but also much of the outside world from possible destruction because of the far-fetched military schemes he may have been entertaining in the twilight of his life.