The Regional Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East: Crucial Periods and Turning Points

This book systematically explores the mutual interconnections of events in diverse regional Cold War theaters—both the horizontal connections between regions and the vertical connections of each regional conflict to the global Cold War. “How do we understand the Cold War,” writes the editor, Lorenz Lüthi, “if from one direction, we narrow the focus of inquiry from the superpower conflict to the level of regional struggles, and widen the focus from individual country case studies to the subsystemic level of the Cold War?”

The Regional Cold Wars covers Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East in the crucial periods 1953–56, 1965–69, 1978–83, and the late 1980s—beginning with Stalin’s death and ending with the end of US-Soviet antagonism. Contributions are based on documents from China, India, the Arab Middle East, Serbia, the former Soviet Union, former East Germany, former Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and its contributors include many of the leading scholars in international Cold War history. Their work reveals the agency of smaller powers in the development and end of the Cold War, including regional powers Egypt, Iraq, and Vietnam.

Lorenz M. Lüthi is an associate professor of the history of international relations at McGill University.

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
Lorenz M. Lüthi

2. Agency, Structure, and Interdependence: Reflections on the Regional and Global Cold Wars
Robert J. McMahon

Part I: 1953–1956
3. Changing Historical Trajectories at the Nexus of 1953–1956
Christopher E. Goscha
4. A Window of Opportunities in Europe
Lorenz M. Lüthi
5. China’s Emerging Role on the World Stage
Qiang Zhai
6. Constructing Nasser’s Neutralism: Egypt and the Rise of Nonalignment in the Middle East
Jovan Čavoški

Part II: 1965–1969
7. The Great Transition: From Geopolitics to Geoeconomics
Andrew Preston
8. Europe and the Making of Détente
Vojtech Mastny
9. China’s Turn to the World
Lorenz M. Lüthi and Chen Jian
10. The Cold War in the Arab World
Guy Laron

Part III: 1978–1983
11. Shadow Boxing: Or, Pretending to Wage Cold War in a (Nearly) Postideological Era
David A. Welch
12. The Second Cold War in Europe: The Paradoxes of a Turbulent Time
William R. Keylor
13. Strategic Shifts in East Asia
Lorenz M. Lüthi
14. A Crescent of Crisis: The Middle East and Persian Gulf
Craig Daigle

Part IV: The Late 1980s
15. End and Ends: The Cold War in International History at the Systemic and Subsystemic Levels
J. Simon Rofe
16. Gorbachev in Europe and Asia
Sergey Radchenko
17. In a Blind Spot: Eastern Europe and the Superpowers in 1989
Constantine Pleshakov
18. From Reconciliation to Estrangement: Relations between China and Eastern Europe
Péter Vámos
19. The International System and the Middle East Regional System: Interactions during the Transition from Bipolarity to Unipolarity
Yair Evron

“This is an outstanding edited work. The contributors are first-rate, and it brings much new information to the table.”—Odd Arne Westad, London School of Economics

“It merits the attention of scholars for its perceptive lines of reasoning and keen insights into the ways in which regional cold war theaters in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East intersected with each other and with the broader superpower conflict. The editor, Lorenz M. Lüthi, has put together a volume that both expands and complicates our knowledge of the Cold War and its constituent parts.… It is common for reviewers of edited volumes to introduce a caveat about the uneven quality of essays in collected volumes. Fortunately, this is not the case here.”—Christopher R. Dietrich, H-Diplo