Undeclared Empires (USA & USSR) in the Cold War
The Cold War and the postwar world order emerged in a struggle between two undeclared empires - the USA and the USSR - in an unstable, decolonising world.
We have seen, in this series on the post-1945 world order, how the postwar world was defined by the partition of Eurasia and the process of decolonisation. Under the claimed leadership of the USA, the world broke apart in an ideological partition. The central actors in this conflict of the post-war world order were the USA and the USSR. After 1945 the USA developed, in partnership with the old West European empires, an undeclared empire, not a free world and not a world of equal nations. Its claim to lead the world, however, was challenged by the union of socialist republics that Americans decried as the ‘evil empire’ of communism.
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Rethink geopolitics with the great French historian. Is the West headed to a strategic defeat? Why? And what happens next?
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**** BACK TO UNDECLARED EMPIRES ****
The world crisis of 1910-45 had witnessed the fall of two kinds of imperial regimes, in the fireball of World War Two. The ‘old colonial’ imperial regimes were the West European empires that clung on for dear life after 1945: Britain, France, Netherlands, and Portugal. The ‘new imperialist’ empires were the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
The defeat of the ‘new imperialist’ empires in WW2 was not, however, the last imperial war. It weakened the old colonial empires, but did not destroy them. It created the theory of the ‘world of nations’, institutionalised in the United Nations, but left behind the salted earth of discredited colonialism. It opened a door to the rise of new forms of global empire. As Darwin writes, in After Tamerlane,
“It was the near simultaneous fall of both these imperial regimes - the ‘old colonial’ and the ‘new imperialist’ - that cleared a space for the emergence of new world empires, with new ideologies, new methods, and new aims and objects.” (p. 468)
The post 1945 world was not defined by a liberal rules-based order or the struggle of democracy versus communist tyranny. The Cold War to define this world order was an unstable contest across the entire world between two ‘undeclared empires,’ the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America.
The Cold War between these two undeclared empires escalated after the failure to establish a ‘world of nations’ after the ‘last imperial war’, Richard Overy’s new term for the Second World War in Blood and Ruins: the Last Imperial War 1931-1945. The partition of Eurasia and the patchy decolonization of the world “set the scene for new kinds of empire.”
These forms of empire have damaged the world’s people as much as European nineteenth century colonialism. John Darwin wrote:
Indeed, it could have been argued that the collateral damage of late-twentieth-century imperialism - the destabilising effects of covert intervention, the financial succour lent to authoritarian rulers, and the militarization of politics encouraged by the cast traffic in weapons - was at least as great as that of its late-nineteenth-century version.” (p. 477)
Below I present for paid subscribers my reading guide to the account of the ‘undeclared empires’ of the post-1945, Cold War world order presented in John Darwin, After Tamerlane. You will get:
My reading guide to the section “Undeclared Empires” (pp. pp. 468-479)
My tips for further reading on the American and Soviet Empires and the Cold War
My audio-mini reading and commentary on this chapter of John Darwin, After Tamerlane and the great essay by Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilisation (1941).