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In October 1945, George Orwell warned that "the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity." Orwell foresaw how the emergence of two superpowers on the ashes of fascism, the deployment of new destructive technologies, and the manipulation of terror would deprive the postwar world of many promised freedoms. The second half of the twentieth century would be frozen, Orwell predicted, in "a peace that is no peace," when war preparation, con trolled conflict, and targeted repression became "normal." The British journalist famously labeled his global diagnosis "a permanent state of cold war" (i).
Although many contemporary observers did not share Orwell's dark vision, they adopted his terminology. The Cold War was an era of proliferating conflict short of total war. During the decades after 1945, virtually every corner of the globe was enveloped in competition, intervention, and violence due to a clash of two world systems: liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism. The United States and the Soviet Union were the self-conscious embodiments of these respective systems, and they built alliances of similar states and prepared to contain, attract, and, if necessary, destroy their adversaries. Both Washington and Moscow defended their long-term security and prosperity by spreading their "ways of life," and undermining alternatives. The superpowers managed to avoid World War III, but they employed almost every mode of competition short of Armageddon (2).
Yet many of the most significant developments after 1945 reflected dynamics that preceded the CoM War. The break-up of the European overseas empires, for example, followed the identity formation, institution-building, and organized resistances that emerged in the early twentieth century to challenge imperialist power. Decolonization would have occurred even if there had been no Cold War. The same could be said for other vectors of change, including movements for racial and gender equality, the growth of welfare states, rapid environmental degradation, and the political-economic transformation of post-industrial nations. The Cold War was not the universal driver of global change (3).
The historical antecedents of the late twentieth century, however, do not detract from the overwhelming importance of the Cold War to the decades...