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ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

One's interpretation of how and why the Cold War began will depend, in large part, on which of two views of the meaning of the Cold War is given greater credence: was it fundamentally an ideological conflict, or a balance-of-power struggle? Was it a unique dialectic event in history - a collision of belief systems that can never recur in the same way again? Or was it one instance of a recurrent pattern in the history of states?

Halle places himself firmly on the side of the balance- of-power viewpoint:

It is essentially true, them, to say that since the end of the eighteenth century four great wars have been fought to maintain or restore the European balance of power. The fourth was the Cold War, which began almost immediately

after World War II (Halle, 1967, p. 2).

In this view, ideology was more a system of internal justification for governments than a driving force in the conflict. Had Soviet Russia been, say, social-democratic, the Cold War would still have happened more or less as it did, simply because the U.S. and the Soviets were the only big boys left on the block after World War II.

The alternative argument is that ideology is indeed a driving force - that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argues, ideology plays a "persisting and important role" in shaping Soviet policy (Graebner, 1976, p. 77). This ideology, to Brzezenski, drives Soviet policy to an

. . . apocalyptic image of the future and the belief in the inevitable triumph for their form of social organization . . . . (Graebner, 1976, p. 78).

Most broadly, perhaps, the two views can be seen as corresponding to the "Hellenic" and "Hebraic" strands in Western thought. The balance-of-power doctrine is consistent with what Carl Gustavson (1955, p. 5) calls a historical-minded mode of thought. The stress is on continuity of historical experience, and on a "value-free" judgement of the conflicting ideologies; it is a way of thinking that comes ...

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ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:46, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681123.html