Conclusion
If we approach the plurality of Cold War experiences in this way, we may say that Cold War history has a fractal formation. A fractal theory of social structure and political system is very much a part of the development of modern social anthropology.
It posits that the whole and each of the parts that together constitute the whole have an identical structural form - as in the study of the segmentary kinship and political systems of traditional Africa.[807] Concerning the subject matter at hand, this idea conveys that a new way of conceptualising Asia's place in modern global history may be possible. Asia's Cold War experience is in many ways distinct from and even contrary to how Europe underwent the era of political bipolarity. The Cold War in Asia was far from an imaginary war, and we are not sure whether it is over and done with today. Parallel to these differences in form and in temporality, however, Asia's Cold War has elements within it, an attention to which can render the region's experience of bipolar modernity in a similar image of the global Cold War. Considered this way, Asia's Cold War was other than an imaginary war and, at once and in part, very much an imaginary war. We can see in it not only the long peace of Europe but also the turbulent fates of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In the end, it appears that Asia's Cold War is not an Asian history but rather a global history in the guise of an Asian history.If the Cold War was both an imaginary war and at the same time a generalised experience of political terror and mass death, we need to tell its history accordingly, inclusive of the seismic death events experienced by communities, rather than considering the latter as only perfunctory marginal episodes in an otherwise peaceful, balanced contest for power. In regard to the Cold War's duplicity in terms of the presence and absence of mass violence, Mary Kaldor argues that the Cold War ‘kept alive the idea of war, while avoiding its reality.
[No conventional warfare] broke out on European soil. At the same time, many wars took place all over the world, including Europe, in which more people died than in the Second World War. But because these wars did not fit our conception of war, they were discounted.'[808] Kaldor believes that these ‘irregular, informal wars of the second half of the twentieth century' took place ‘as a peripheral part of the central conflict', and she argues that these ‘informal wars' are becoming the source of new postCold War bellicosity. If we follow Kaldor, it appears that Cold War history has a concentric conceptual organisation consisting of a ‘formal' history of relative peace in the centre and ‘informal' violence on the periphery. The Cold War was both an idea of war in the exemplary centre and a reality of revolutionary war and chaotic violence in the peripheral terrains. At the centre, the end of the Cold War was a largely peaceful event and opened a constructive development of transnational integration, whereas in the periphery the same ‘end' gave birth to a new age of aggression. In this view of the Cold War and what comes after it, the Cold War was not only an ambiguous phenomenon, being neither real war nor genuine peace, but also a highly contradictory phenomenon, experienced as an idea of war for some and as a reality of prolific organised violence for others.The above comment from an eminent observer of modern Europe demonstrates that our understanding of the Cold War is still grounded in a concentric spatial hierarchy. In the history of the Cold War as an imaginary war, the history of man-made mass death existed mainly in the form of disturbing memory and a disturbing possibility, being haunted by the morbid events in Auschwitz and Hiroshima and overshadowed by the threat of thermonuclear destruction. As the philosopher Edith Wyschogrod argued, the ‘life-world' in the second half of the twentieth century was suspended between the death events of the immediate past and the fear of an apocalyptic end of the life-world in the uncertain future.[809] Beyond the horizon of the imaginary war, however, death events were not a possibility but an actual ‘unbridled reality' and an aspect of everyday lives.[810]
This chapter proposes that confronting the centre/periphery hierarchy in the conception of the Cold War is critical to a grounded understanding of the political history of the bipolar era.
The effort involves an attention to the violence of the Cold War and its variant forms, real or imaginary. It also involves the recognition that the violence of the Cold War was experienced varyingly within a region as well as between different regional entities. Communities in Asia did not experience the Cold War in an identical way, just as bipolar politics was manifested differently between post-World War II Europe and postcolonial Asia. Orwell's ‘War is Peace' continues to be meaningful for understanding the nature of the Cold War, yet for reasons that depart from what he had in mind when he coined the expression. How to reconcile the radically different historical experiences and related divergent historical memories of the global conflict goes beyond an issue of academic research in significance. Rather, it constitutes a vital, unresolved issue of public policy in the international sphere, relevant to efforts to build up transnational solidarity in the face of common contemporary threats to human security, as manifested in the debates about territorial disputes in East Asia.The real distinctiveness of Asia's Cold War experience is perhaps to be found in a much more minute scale and intimate sphere of human life than in a wide comparative historical sphere. It may be found, rather than in the violent ways in which communities in the region experienced the Cold War, in the ways in which the violent historical legacies are kept alive and its meanings are transformed in the intimate sphere of human life. The humble shrine for the powerful grandmother south of Danang is one example I am familiar with. The grandmother lost her life amidst the crisis of the First Indochina War. She transformed into a powerful spirit at the start of the Second Indochina War, and she listened and responded to many hopes against hope enunciated by numerous people whose lives were turned upside down by the continuing war. Today, her spirit continues to be responsive to a multitude of other human hopes. The history of this grandmother manifests the power of the human spirit to overcome the destructive power of modern history. However, it does so on the basis of a specific religious and cultural tradition, which has long celebrated the vitality of the regenerative human spirit that refuses to give in to the annihilation of violent death.