Lost time: the forgetting of the Cold War.

• Author: Gambles, Ian

The end of the Cold War was the beginning of its long journey into history. Countless records in many media insure that its total disappearance from human consciousness -- the fate of the wars of what we can pre-history, and of some of the darker periods of recorded history -- is inconceivable. People who take the trouble will always be able to learn about the Cold War, analyze its events, and interpret it in ever-changing historical perspective.

But knowledge and memory are different. To remember -- not merely in the sense of personal recollection, but in the sense of remembering the fallen, remembering Munich, or even remembering Ozymandias -- is to endow knowledge with meaning. Individuals and societies alike are influenced in their decision-making and their behavior by the lessons they draw from history and the importance they attach to their own inheritance. History remembered is history active on the political stage of the present. Although we know about the Cold War, and will continue to study, explain, and understand it, I shall argue that it is in this sense a war we have already begun to forget.

Forgetting recent history is not the same as forgetting the distant past -- say, the Punic Wars, which took place in a world so totally unlike ours that it is impossible to conceive of them being meaningfully remembered. Forgetting the Cold War means distorning the lens through which we view the present. Consciously or unconsciously, it is an act of denial and repudiation, asserting or imagining that what was, was not, and that what was not, was. It is un-remembering.

How We Forget

There are two ways of forgetting recent history: conscious state forgetting and unconscious social forgetting. State forgetting is the deliberate silencing of a particular part of the past for political purposes. In its extreme form, it is the Stalinists' airbrush. Totalitarian regimes can use the apparatus of repression to control information and silence dissent to the point where people profess to believe, and frequently actually do believe, that experiences within their own lifetime did not in fact happen. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, for example -- perhaps the most comprehensive and violent attempt ever to disown history -- would itself have been much more difficult to launch had not the desperate famines of the Great Leap Forward, and Mao's personal role in inflicting them, been the subject of some effective state forgetting.

But it is not only totalitarian regimes that engage in state forgetting. England decided during the First World War to forget the Germanic origins of its own royal family, smoothing the path of jingoism by removing an inconvenient reminder of a pre-nationalist history. Fifty years after the Second World War, Japan has finally half-decided to start remembering its own war crimes. Time will tell whether the democratic, bureaucratic state forgetting in the schoolroom lessons and political speech of the postwar decades has done lasting damage to the new Japan or not.

In these milder forms, which do not involve altering records or punishing remembering, the state acts rather as an initiator and facilitator of social forgetting: a gradual, collective loss of interest in a part of the past that conveys an undesired self-image. The democratic state, creating power by working with the grain of society, chooses and is chosen to manipulate symbols in a popular manner, elevating one period of, or episode in, history to exemplary importance and consigning another to forgotten irrelevance.

Nothing better illustrates the extraordinary power of combined state and social forgetting than post-colonial nationalism in the Third World, which turned its back on a whole pre-colonial age of non-national, largely boundary-less history. Surviving as proudly non-European nations in a world where Europeans had defined nationhood -- and mapped, counted, and recorded your nation with scant regard for pre-existing realities -- required forgetting on an heroic scale.(1)

It is this combination of state and social forgetting that is beginning to erode the meaning of the Cold War in contemporary European and American politics. To a degree that varies -- significantly -- from country to country and region to region, we have begun to treat the era of the Cold War as lost time, imagining continuity where in fact there has been change, denying and disowning the reasons why we are where we are. There is probably nothing to be done to prevent this process.

The Illusion of Resumption

What does it mean to say that the era of the Cold War is becoming lost time? One of the things it means is that the business of international politics is being conducted as if there were continuity between the years before and the years after that era, as if history were being resumed. This idea is usually conveyed in the language of freeze and thaw. The structure of international relations is said to have been frozen by the Cold War, the natural processes of growth, evolution, and decay chilled into motionlessness by the dead hand of superpower confrontation. The year 1989 brought the thaw, the release of this icy grip on history, the return of spring after winter, light after darkness, awakening after sleep.

There is a lot of truth in this. At least in Europe, where a managed system of confrontation without conflict was developed, the Cold War certainly did inhibit change in international politics, as I will discuss further below. But the broad sweep of the metaphor carries us too far, into the dangerous territory of forgetting. Consider two significant features of the post-cold War scene: the empowerment of the United Nations and the resurgence of nationalism.

One of the few comparatively clear things about the muddy concept of the "new world order" is that it involves a substantial role for the UN as the active agent of the will of the international community. Since the end of the Cold War, recourse to the uN has become a prerequisite for the legitimacy of any international political-military initiative. Operations by UN forces or under the authority of a UN Security Council resolution in Iraq, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Haiti have left the Cold War UN far behind, and have pursued much more ambitious goals of making or enforcing peace, settling state borders and supporting efforts to constitute or reconstitute legitimate governments.(2)

This empowerment of the UN rests on a metaphor of thaw and a reality of forgetting; it is deeply problematic. The development of the UN at the end of the Second World War may in some ways have been a repetition of the fallacy of collective security inherent in the failed League of Nations, but there were at least deliberate and skillful attempts to correct some of the deficiencies of the League in constituting the new version. The resurrection of the UN at the end of the Cold War repeats the fallacy but without the reconstruction. The failure of the UN during the Cold War -- its immobilization by superpower veto, its transformation into a powerless sounding board for the grievances of the Third World -- is blamed entirely on the Cold War itself, rather than explained in terms of the subordination of the logic of internationalism to the logic of power politics, a subordination that is inherent in a system of sovereign states. Thus, newly thawed, the UN is expected to take up where it left off before it vanished into the freezer.

This cannot succeed. The UN's moment of true credibility as a representative world body was indeed only a moment -- the moment of creation at the end of World War II, when the distribution of power in the organization reflected the apparent strength and apparent unity of the victorious allied powers, the helplessness of the defeated, and the willingness of the other members to take a subordinate role. In contrast, the...