Published book, a cold war of global history. Im from George Washington university and im the cochair of the washington History Center along with christian arneson of the policy program. The seminar for those of you who dont know is a collaborative effort of the national History Center which is part of the American Historical Association and Woodrow Wilson enters nationalcenter for scholars. We meet on monday afternoon at 4 pm though today for our fall lunch , we made an exception and it shows a beautiful friday afternoon to get this started. So normally we meet on monday afternoons, market down, 4 pm. If you have gotten the schedule already, we can go to the washington history seminars website and national History Center and download a copy of all the talks all season. I think our programming this fall is particularly exciting. Seminars like this dont happen by themselves. On the logistics front, peter stecker of the Wilson Center and amanda perry work behindthescenes to ensure that the seminars come off without a hitch. We also rely upon the generous National Support of a number of institutions, particularly schaefer, the society of historians in an election chips which helped to underwrite the seminar for a number of years as well as George WashingtonUniversitys Department of history and a number of anonymous donors whose right inside you is joined at your convenience. One piece of business, if your cell phone is not already on silent or vibrate, if you could put it in that mode now, it would be very much appreciated. Now my cochair Kristin Altman will introduce our speaker. Asked eric. Great to see so many of you here despite the wonderful weather. Lots of familiar faces and a lot of new ones as well so im absolutely delighted. Let me welcome you and staff to the Wilson Center to this washington history seminar. Its a privilege to introduce professor odd arne westad, ads friend, a longtime project partner and distinguished colleague. He is a household name is National History profession and beyond. And an intellectual giant in thefield of history. Among his many books , this global cold war, the third world interventions and the making of our times, published in 2005. It was considered the Gold Standard in the field. It has been translated into 15 languages and made in an academic rockstar with a global following as todays tanning room only crowd can attest as well. Global cold war won the bankruptcy prize, an important history prize given in this country and many other awards. He served along with Melvin Leffler as coeditor of tax breaking, the three volume cambridge history of war and is the author of the penguin history of the world, now its sixth edition. The 2012 the rest with empire, china and the world in 1750 exemplifies the other area of expertise, china. Is one the ages Society Award for 2015. Arnie is the st leave professor of us asiarelations. He teaches at the Kennedy School before coming to harvard in 2015, he was professor of interNational History. There he codirected, directed lsd, a leading center for National Affairs and diplomacy and strategy and for many years prior to that, he was the regional director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute where he hosted a terrific Fellowship Program that many of us, many folks in the room have been benefited from. snew book the cold war a World History as we will speak today, he returns once more to the conflict that shaped much of the 20th century and still reverberates powerfully today. For your information, its great to have here. Congratulations and you have the floor. I think i shall speak from up here. [applause] thank you very much. Wonderfully generous introduction. Mister johnson is sometimes faulted when he was introduced in a wonderful fashion at the gathering and he said if his father he would have been very proud and if his mother had been here, she would have given him. [inaudible] so there is something to be said for good introductions. Which has certainly made my parents very proud. The book is dedicated to my parents so there is a connection here. Even outside the storytelling. Now i want to take a moment and thank the motion sensor for inviting me to do this talk and i want to start really where the book ends and the book ends at technology. And here i want to the specialists are here at the Wilson Center. A book like this in reality has many orders. Anyone who thinks that he or she could be the ultimate judge of what goes on in a very long time period that i have described as the cold war on a world scale, would be rather foolish. You have to build on the work of others. In this book a few exceptions is a work of sections and the reason ive been able to do that is because of the people who have worked in this field, often in under difficult circumstances around the world. Ive made it possible to access the kind of information that most historians of my generation in this profession could only dream about getting access to. And at the forefront of that process here in washington dc, the cold war interNational History project and the National Security office over at tw. Without institutions like that and particularly on the low end of our interNational History project and the predecessors, i would never have been able to do the work in the field that i do now. So much of what is most important when it comes to research on the cold war, on the standing in a broad sense is i collect an enterprise and brought it together more than anyone else have been, the cold war at the National History project so im not just grateful, im entirely committed to the kind of project that this is. Its collaborative but also because it has a need for Public Access to government sources of information, that absolutely have become instance, thats the significance of this project. Let me talk a little bit about the book. And how i constructed it. So i started out thinking about this book,maybe about six or seven years ago and as much of what i do , it came out of teaching. So in teaching students first that i know for a few years, i started getting a certain idea of how i wanted to present this context topic to a broader audience. By, i was quite certain that the audience that i was aiming for would be a general audience. There are lots and lots of folks in the cold war written for specialists, some people would say too many. And if i was going to try my last on the subject would have to be for a general so that was a given and then i started struggling with how to get a handle on it and i was joking with christian and eric that most of what was difficult about this book was to conceptualize it, to write this wasnt all that difficult. When i figured out how i was going to do it. So let metell you about how i have tried to conceptualize my approach. This is a history of the cold war, as an ideological conflict to capitalism and socialism. It goes back even 100 years, it starts in the 1890s but with the first Global Market crisis and the realization of significant sorts of the movement in europe in europe and north america and the expansion of the state and russia as confidence themselves. And it ends with the collapse of the soviet union in the 1990s so it covers 100 years back of interNational History. Now, some of you immediately will say its a little bit audacious. There are a lot of other things that happened during that hundred year. [inaudible conversation] despite what i have defined as the cold war and they will undoubtedly be right area two world wars, the great depression, decolonization, integration, the rise of china. Lots of things happening during this period and its not just, my book is not an attempt at trying to consume thesedevelopments. Under a framework of an ideological cold war. It is rather to try to stimulate the cold war within this broader history of the world in the 20th century because my contention in the book is that the only way we can understand the conflict. If we tried to reduce it simply to an state system or a framework in which countries in directed with each other, then i think we are losing out on a great deal of what made conflict so important. But also made it very territorial. I think without going deeper into the situation, that the cold war lived when and was created within, we cannot understand that even the Younger Generation today cannot understand the dedication absolute, that came through the cold war, the reason why people of goodwill on both sides, intelligent people could take this so seriously and such a competition that they were willing to sacrifice not just themselves or their own countries and families but the future of the world based on what they believed in. Now, one thing that is important and this is something that will explain the timetable that i write this within, is how the cold war was experienced by the people who lived through it. You have to understand it to some extent generationally so i think helps getting to this issue of why it mattered so much and so many people in different settings across the world. But if you were born in the 1890s, a lot of people who came to drive the cold war were born around that time. And whether you were born into it, you are bound to have a completely different view of young adults. And really things were not going well in the early part of the cold war, the first world war, great depression, but only listen, i could only listen, lots of things in most countries that seem to go very wrong. And i think this help in understanding why the states were so high. If you have this kind of background, you are more likely i thinkto dedicate yourself to big ideals about how you wanted to set the world right. Everett not everyone during the cold war acted for idealistic reasons. The more that i found i was working on this, the recently high number of people did on all sides, and i think the generational aspect was to attempt to tell us something about why the states were so high, why they were so wrong. But like girly historians are dedicated to trying to collect the time period im working on, its possible for us to digest whats going on. Or the prioritization and we are dedicated, we cant avoid it. Let me give you a certain sense or the sake of discussion that i have in a minute, of how i divide this war into different eras. The first one goes roughly from the1890s to 1970 through the Russian Revolution. This is the creation of the ideological confrontation. This is when the framework of new kinds of states which the United States already was compared to what existed in europe before and the soviet union of the north and 17, how these were created ideologically. And the second is from 1917 to 1941, the development of a soviet union as a great power and the attraction of these International Economic suppressions that contributed in my view significantly to the soviet union and as an alternative, having the kind of position that it had internationally. So the third goes from 1941 of the early 1970s. And that is perhaps what most people would immediately associate with the term cold war. What i would argue is that theres a different time period in which the ideological cold war is framing, the fundamentalsthat i am talking about , it became an International System and im going to talk moreabout that. Then finally, the period in the early 1970s to the early 1990s which was the slow demise of the cold war as a predominant international. Which im also going to talk more about. But before that, a couple of points about how the cold war figures when you think about very Broad International is three. InterNational History of the long of eight. One of the things thats striking in my Political Science friends have been helpful in pointing this out on a number of occasions is how relatively rare popular International Systems of the cold war kind are in human history. Most systems are either united polar or mineral. You either had one great power at the time or internals roaming in eastern asia for 1000 years. All they had a number of countries that competed, think europe. From from the 1500s and through the early 20th century. So there are only a few examples. Few real examples of International Systems that are a little like the cold war. Pressure in the third century bc and the First Century a. D. , its a little bit like this. The competition for power that involved most of the mediterranean and the middle east into it, that was pulled through that process that had very strong ideological confrontation at its core. The best example that i know of is the chinese example, the United States in the 11th century which was states that also had a very strong confrontation that competed for the same territory that did much of the fighting through proxies and allies. And then of course the most useful example in a way, england and spain in the mid60s to early 17th century which was mostly a religious conflict. And anna concern about the future but its actually quite hard to find bipolar International Systems and thats something that i found quite interesting when i wrote the book on this. Now, i talk about a different difference between the cold war as a globalizing ideological component and the cold war as an International System. I think its important in order to understand in this book, they are connected to each other but theyre not odds. So in order to understand how the cold war became a global International System, you have to understand where it came from. It starts by thinking about the world in the late 1940s as other historians right in the cold war do, you dont get it. You dont understand why its a confrontation and why ideology was so clearly connected to the purpose. On both sides. On the other hand, you also have to understand and systems. And i dont think that is really all that hard to explore. And as most changes in history, it was, a product of structural acts that would get in this direction. Ideology as i already pointed out but also this falsely superior access to resources. That the United States andthe soviet union had. This system they controlled over other countries that competed on an International System. In a way its not surprising from 1945, it is these two countries that are the largest in the International Area so conflict has been moved to the ideological differences. That didnt in itself produce the International System but when the outcomeof the Second World War was the soviet union and the United States became the privileged international powers, then the ideological bipolarity pointed in that direction. So what i say in the book is if i think that conflict was very likely and it was pushed in a direction that would not be surprising,wasnt surprising for anyone who lived through that period but the cold war as an International System, as a fullfledged work , that is perhaps the surprising, even perhaps avoidable part and i discussed this at length in the book. More about it later on. Part of the reason why im so preoccupied with the early part of the 20th century, link to outcomes is that i think its necessary for any text that is written today with a general audience in mind , students in mind as well , in a way to resurrect the soviet union, thats the real ability in intellect. And that of course has a lot to do with how the cold war ended. But it also have to do i think with fairly in prudential tendencies among scientists who worked on this who tend to read the cold war backwards. Ignore the outcome, we know that in the book the United States wins the cold war. But we read into that in terms of the weakness of the soviet union. And some more reason that counts, the soviet union becomes an early date version of russia today. Power on the outside of the International System and its really been excluded, pushed to the edges which is an explanation in the framework that we dont agree with that the soviet union acted through the cold war for its own reasons. It was not a kind of foil for what was happening in american politics, it had its own significance, its own anticapitalists lodging. X written for a very long period of time or for three generations worked well. The problem from the ideological perspective was shooting of course. But its important that if we dont get into that kind of understanding of the other side , the whole idea about why this conflict was superior gets lost. Let me talk a little bit about what i see as a turning point in the cold war. Although there are many turning points but one i think that was particularly important and could be interesting todays so one of the very early impressions of the 20th century, even before the