Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era

Abstract

The wave of nationalism that swept through the “Third World” after World War II toppled centuries-old empires and remapped the planet. First in the late 1940s and again around the turn of the next decade, clusters of new nations emerged in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Some had been waging the anticolonial fight for decades; others drew on a long-churning race consciousness to assert nationhood; still others pointed to archaic imperial economic relationships to press their case. All of these nationalist leaders sensed that the long era of formal empire in human history was coming to a close. They invoked the Wilsonian watchword of “self-determination” and did what they could to quicken progress toward that end. Among the most important elements shaping this struggle for Third World decolonization was the overarching Cold War context in which it unfolded. The East-West superpower clash presented both threats and opportunities to those in the Third World during what nationalists there conceived instead as a crucial moment in “North-South” relations.1 Nor was this conception limited to imperial subjects. The redefinition of racial dynamics within nations intertwined with evolving political dynamics among nations new and old. Nonwhite minorities inside the metropoles fought battles for the rights of citizenship, battles that paralleled the concurrent struggles of nonwhite majorities outside the metropoles for the rights of self-rule. The repercussions of these battles did not always alter the strategic calculations of the superpowers, but more than once these struggles overlapped with the bipolar competition that shaped the postwar era.