The Cold War Geopolitical Order (1945-90)

the American-Anglo-Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan
1. Soviet influence ex- tended over Eastern Europe and into Germany.
  1. American military presence in Europe direct confrontation with the Soviet Union as a military competitor and sponsor of an alternative image of world order
  2. its vision of world order on both its vanquished foes and most of its recent allies.
    1. American dominion was at the center of a remarkable explosion in "interactional" capitalism
      1. Abandoning territorial imperialism, "Western capitalism ... resolved the old problem of over- production, thus removing what Lenin believed was the major incentive for imperialism and war"
      2. The globalization of production through the growth of these Newly Industrializing Countries and the increased flow of trade and foreign direct investment between already industrialized countries finally undermined the geographical production/consumption nexus
        A vital element in allowing the U.S. to have such a dominant presence within the world economy was the persisting yet historically episodic political-military conflict with the Soviet Union.
        For a long time this imposed an overall stability on the world political system, since the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the two major nuclear powers, even as it promoted numerous "limited wars" in the Third World of former colonies where each of the "superpowers" armed surrogates or intervened themselves to pre- vent the other from achieving a successful "conversion
2. Economic and political terms the United States
  1. was without any serious competition in imposing its vision of world order on both its vanquished foes and most of its recent allies.
    1. Roosevelt and Truman administrations
      1. the continued health of the American economy and the stability of its internal politics depended upon increasing rather than decreasing international trade and investment
3. Europe and Japan
  1. had to be restored economically, both to deny them to the Soviet Union and to further American prosperity
4. Achieving this involved projecting at a global scale those institutions and practices that had already developed in the United States, such as: mass production/consumption industrial organization; electoral democracy; limited state welfare policies; and government economic policies directed towards stimulating private economic activities
  1. The axis of capital accumulation now ran through the core rather than between core and periphery.
  2. The key institutions and practices spread rapidly in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
    1. They were eventually accepted in all of the major industrialized countries either through processes of "external inducement and coercion through direct intervention and reconstruction as in West Germany and Japan
      1. there was considerable compromise with local elites over the relative balance of growth and welfare elements in public policy
        the key elements persisted until 1990, although some faded by the 1960s.
        They have been: 1) stimulating economic growth indirectly through fiscal and monetary policies; 2) commitment to a unitary global market based on producing the greatest volume of goods most cheaply for sale in the widest possible market by means of a global division of labor
        3) Accepting the United States as the home of the world's major reserve-currency and monetary over- seer of the world economy ) unremitting hostility to "communism" or any political-economic ideology that could be associated with the Soviet Union; and 5) the assumption of the burden of intervening militarily whenever changes in government or insurgencies could be construed as threatening to the political status quo established in 1945 (the Truman doctrine).
        All states ideally were international ones open to the free flow of investment and trade
The period from 1945 to 1990 was one in which this consensus played itself out
1. sponsor a liberal international order in which its military expenditures would provide a protective apparatus for increased trade (and, less so, investment)
  1. across international boundaries
    1. The expansion of one was seen as good for the other
Unlike in the previous period, the world map was no longer a "vacuum" waiting to be filled by a small number of Great Powers. But the boundaries and integrity of existing states were protected by the military impasse between the superpowers
1. In the end, the Cold War geopolitical order came undone with the collapse of the Soviet Union and not the United States
2. The Cold War Geopolitical Order came to a formal end in 1989-90 with the breakup of the Soviet Union, but the wider spatial and economic logics that it depended upon had been under attack since the mid-1970s. The Cold War Geopolitical Order was designed at Bretton Woods in 1944 as well as at Yalta the next year, and by 1980 very little remained of the
  1. Bretton Woods system: international investment was growing faster than international trade, the EC and Japan were growing faster than the U.S., Keynesianism had been replaced by monetarism and supply-side economics, and exchange and interest rates were being set by so-called market forces.
    1. The breakup of the Soviet Union was not the only sign of an old order in demise; the Cold War geopolitical economy was also in disarray as mounting stagflation, indebtedness, and balance of payments disequilibria clearly and successively indicated.

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The Cold War Geopolitical Order (1945-90)

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	Created by Joel Vieyra Corona about 9 years ago