Introduction: Reviewing the Cold War History

Reviewing the Cold War History

Abstract

The end of the Cold War created the most profound impacts upon not only the world politics, but also the trends of historical research of the international political period which had lasted for more than forty years since the end of the Second World War.
The vast amount of top secret documents of the former member states of the communist bloc have been declassified since the 1990s and now avail the Cold War historians. This has paved the way to writing histories of the Cold War as more empirical international histories and resulted in attracting more attentions of historians to regional diversity of the Cold War and in generating the tendency for them to produce more about intra-alliance international political process among the central actors of the Cold War world politics. This expanding interest to the regional diversity also has led many to the studies on historical roles of the actors located at the peripheries of the Cold War, such as the third world countries.
Simultaneously, the end of the Cold War has stimulated the historians to turn their eyes to its multidimensional nature. A notable trend to shift the focus onto interrelations between transformation of societies and the development of the high political dimensions of the Cold War has saliently emerged particularly within the British and American circles of the Cold War historians.
According to the abovementioned emerging trends, this volume is divided into the following three parts. The first part contains four papers covering historical developments of intra-alliance international politics, the second consists of detailed accounts on the involvements of ‘peripheral’ actors, and the third part covers the Cold War international politics related to societal dimensions. All of the papers are the results of extensive research of newly declassified documents, and many of them can be characterized as precursors of new Cold War histories.
We are still struggling to grasp a clearer picture of the post-Cold War world politics, and, if so, the Cold War history has now a new academic mission. As far as the transformation process of the previous age usually prepares initial conditions of the following new one, the Cold War historians are now faced with the difficult but essential tasks to find how the initial conditions of the post-Cold War world had been generated and what dynamisms had operated in the transformation of the Cold War. As an editor, I hope that this volume could be a significant initial step to meet this new mission.