Decolonization Takes Center Stage

The Cold War continues to inspire pioneering historical discovery and reinterpretation. Lorenz M. Lüthi has been at the forefront, and in his new book he steps back to rethink the grand narrative at a global level.

Challenging the conventional story of Soviet-us rivalry over Europe, Lüthi is as concerned with events in Cairo and Hong Kong as he is with Berlin. The peripheral regions of Asia and the Middle East move to center stage; their leaders and publics are given agency. The most important effect is that decolonization emerges as a decisive third factor too often hidden by the framing of a bipolar ideological and geopolitical contest. Lüthi points out, for example, how until the 1960s the Cold

War system included the UK as the British Empire disintegrated, allowing pressures built up over decades or centuries to erupt. In Asia, the story stars three central characters: China, Indochina and India, whose anti-colonial struggles (against the Japanese, French and British, respectively) result in painful territorial division. The inconclusive Chinese Civil War leaves a Communist mainland and Nationalist Taiwan; three decades of war finally end in a unified Communist Vietnam; and sectarianism partitions South Asia into three states, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These conflicts left scars and rivalries that remain regional flashpoints yet are often marginalized in tellings of the Cold War.

In Asia, the Cold War story stars China, Indochina and India as central characters.