Decolonisation and the Cold War

The violence of the Cold War, such as that which inflicted enduring wounds and crises on these families, was typically intertwined with the process of decolonisation. In this sense, we may start thinking about the Cold War's globally encompassing yet regionally and locally variant histories, in terms of two broad realities: the imaginary war in Europe and North America on the one hand and, on the other, the postcolonial experience of bipolar politics in which the very concept of the Cold War becomes problematic and contra­dictory.

Indeed, as LaFeber notes, the era of the Cold War was far from a peaceful time when seen in a broad perspective; it witnessed over 40 million human casualties across territories.^{[800] [801]} The experience of bipolar politics certainly varied in intensity and in temporality across regions. The most violent manifestation of the global Cold War took its earliest tolls in South-East and North-East Asia, represented by the outbreak of the First Indochina War (1945-54) and the Korean War. In the following decades, while a new total war was being waged in Vietnam and its neighbouring countries, the Cold War's political violence became much more transnational and generalised, engulfing many nations and communities in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America during what Fred Halliday, historian of the Middle East, calls the Second Cold War.11 It is against this historical background that the celebrated Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that nations in Central and South America did not have a moment's rest from the threat and reality of mass violence during the so-called ‘cold' war.^[802] The reality of mass violence endured in Latin America may have been different in intensity and in character from that suffered by the Koreans in the 1950s and by the Vietnamese in the 1960s, which incorporated a totalising war as well as systematic state political violence.

The claim that the Cold War was a global conflict should not mean, therefore, that the conflict was experienced in the same terms all over the world. Cold War politics permeated developed and underdeveloped socie­ties, Western and non-Western states and colonial powers and colonised nations alike; in this sense, it was a truly global reality. However, the historical experience and the collective memory of the Cold War contain aspects of radical divergence between the West and the postcolonial world. This has indeed been one of the key questions in recent developments in Cold War studies. For the past decade, enquiries into the plurality of the Cold War human historical experience have been mostly focused primarily on the comparison between the postcolonial world, on the one hand, and Western Europe and the larger transatlantic world, on the other.^{[803] [804]} Grounded in the observation that Asia's postcolonial experience of political bipolarisation was far from an ‘imaginary war' - a warlike condition that is nevertheless contrary to an actual condition of war - a reasoned considera­tion of this question has been pivotal to the advent of new Cold War historical scholarship in recent years and has provoked a number of innova­tive studies of the zone of historical field that is often referred to as decolo­nisation and the Cold War.1⁴

The emerging interest in the postcolonial Cold War shows that we can no longer think of the history of the Cold War, and the broader political history of right and left that in the mid twentieth century became entrenched in the form of what some observers call the confrontation between the empire of liberty and the empire of equality, without thinking of the history of mass violence and mass death.

The recognition that a Cold War with mass human casualties and a Cold War without them are different entities, however, should not be taken to mean that these two histories are not comparable or commensurable. Dissecting the whole of the global Cold War into different constituent parts is for the purpose of creating a new image of the whole rather than dismantling the image of the whole. Even within the history of mass death, there are elements of diversity. The US experience of the Cold War does not collapse to the paradigm of the imaginary war or the long peace as easily as does the dominant European experience. The United States has a memory of mass sacrifice of American lives from the era, not least in relation to the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. This collective memory of mass sacrifice, however, is not the same as the memory of mass death kept in Vietnam or in Korea. Consisting principally of the heroic death of armed soldiers, the American memory distinguishes the United States from the rest of the West, whose dominant memory of the Cold War encompasses a painful but largely deathless confrontation between political groupings, but it is also distinct from the collective memories of death in the wider world during the Cold War, chiefly the tragic mass death of ordinary civilians. In the sphere of the history of violence and the related realm of death commemoration, there­fore, we cannot easily say that Europe and America constitute a single community of shared collective memory called the West.

Although the recent development in Cold War studies has made a notable contribution to diversifying Cold War narratives, an equally important question remains critically unexplored. The plurality of the Cold War experi­ence is not merely an issue of comparative history between Asia and Europe; instead, it may be discussed as part of a specific regional history.

Witnessed in the relatively narrow sphere of East Asia, the early Cold War was manifested differently among the societies that constitute this regional entity. For instance, Japan experienced the early Cold War in a manner that is closely akin to how nations in western Europe underwent the era: with the imperative post-World War II socio-economic reconstruction, a growing economic prosperity and an unprecedented era of international peace. In the late 1960s, Japanese society underwent forceful social protests and gen­erational upheaval, which Immanuel Wallerstein dubbed a ‘revolution in the world-system’.^[805] Provoked by the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the West's role and complicity in it, the multi-sited, simultaneous civil protest in 1967-9 transformed the social fabric of Japan as well as that of the United States and several western European nations. However, the so-called world revolution hardly had any ramifications elsewhere in Asia or in Japan’s neighbouring societies.

We can apply the same idea of Cold War historical plurality to other political societies in Asia. The fate of Korea in the 1950s, which involved a destructive civil war, is not that remote from the experience of political societies in the Middle East and in Africa in the 1970s and the 1980s, during which many of them were swept into a civil war or a similar crisis. The behaviour of some of the East Asian states (such as China and North Korea) in the 1970s comes close to that of some of the Western states during the general crisis of the early Cold War in the 1950s: maintaining the peace of an imaginary war at home while playing a role in the escalation of a total war crisis elsewhere in the postcolonial world.