The Struggle against Imperialism: Anticolonialism and the Cold War

243 Pages·2018·2.2 MB·English

by  Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon

The Struggle
against Imperialism

The Struggle
against Imperialism
Anticolonialism and
the Cold War
Edward H. Judge
and
John W. Langdon
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Copyright © 2018 by Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-4422-6583-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4422-6585-1 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
List of Maps vii
Preface ix
1 Introduction: The Struggle against Imperialism, and Its
Cold War Connections 1
2 Empires, Ideologies, and Nations: Imperialism,
Anti-Imperialism, and the Cold War 5
3 “Long Live the Victory of People’s War”: Anti-Imperialism
and the Cold War in Asia 37
4 “We Are Today Free and Independent”: Anti-Imperialism
and the Cold War in the Middle East 71
5 “Scram from Africa!”: Anti-Imperialism and the Cold War in
Africa 99
6 “So Far from God . . . So Close to the United States”:
Anti-Imperialism and the Cold War in Latin America 121
7 “Every Country Decides Which Road to Take”: The End of
the Soviet Russian Empire 145
8 “Empires Wax and Wane”: Overview and Conclusions 173
v
vi Contents
Notes 197
Glossary 203
Suggestions for Further Reading 211
Index 221
About the Authors 231
Maps
Map 2.1. European Boundary Changes and Occupation
Zones, 1945 25
Map 2.2. Divided Germany and Divided Europe, 1945–1955 28
Map 2.3. Divided Europe: NATO versus Warsaw Pact,
1955–1991 31
Map 3.1. The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1949 41
Map 3.2. The Korean War, 1950–1953 44
Map 3.3. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 1954–1975 57
Map 4.1. Arab-Israeli Conflicts, 1945–1960 76
Map 4.2. Arab-Israeli Conflicts, 1960s–1980s 91
Map 5.1. Postcolonial Africa 103
Map 6.1. Cold War Clashes in Central America and
the Caribbean 123
Map 6.2. Cold War Clashes in Latin America 134
Map 7.1. European Boundary Changes and Soviet Satellites,
1945–1948 154
Map 7.2. Divided Europe: NATO versus Warsaw Pact,
1955–1991 156
vii
viii Maps
Map 7.3. The Disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, 1989–1992 170
Map 8.1. Decolonization and Cold War Clashes in Africa and
the Middle East, 1945–1990 180
Map 8.2. Conflicts and Crises in the Middle East, 1960s–1980s 186
Map 8.3. The Disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, 1989–1992 191
Preface
For more than two decades, at our typical liberal arts college, we have
team-taught a variety of courses on the history of the Cold War era. Dur-
ing that period, we also developed and published a Cold War history text
(A Hard and Bitter Peace: A Global History of the Cold War) and a Cold War
documents reader (The Cold War through Documents: A Global History), and
both are currently in their third edition. We have increasingly sought to
make both our courses and our texts more global, incorporating not just
the Cold War conflicts between the Communist East and capitalist West,
but also the concurrent struggles against imperialism by peoples and na-
tions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. On the whole,
we have been very pleased and satisfied with these courses and texts,
and with their highly favorable reception by our students and colleagues.
In recent years, however, we have become increasingly convinced that
the Cold War and the struggle against imperialism can and should quite
profitably be studied and taught together, not as distinct developments
but as interwoven aspects of a complex global conflict involving old co-
lonial powers, anti-imperialist movements, emerging national states, and
the Cold War superpowers. Inspired by this conviction, we decided to
devise and develop a new text that focuses on the Cold War era from the
perspective of the struggle against imperialism and the complex interac-
tions between imperialism and anti-imperialism, rather than mainly on
the superpower conflict.
We do not, however, intend for this approach to replace the old one,
nor do we intend for this new text to supplant or replace our more tradi-
tional offerings. We intend it instead as a supplement to those offerings
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