The Global Cold War

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Odd Arne Westad is Professor of international History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Cold War. His main fields of interests are the international history of the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming video, event photo

Dreams and nightmares of liberal international law: capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally

Europe in an Asian century: Europe between the superpowers: China and Europe: opportunities or dangers?

Just when parts of the European integration project seem to be in significant amounts of trouble, Chinese leaders are beginning to open their eyes to the need for more in-depth cooperation with both the Union itself and with individual European countries. After years of relative neglect, when China’s main priorities have been the United States, the eastern Asian region, and the main developing economies (roughly in that order), Europe is now coming into fashion for discussion in Beijing, both as opportunity and threat. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the global financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed have shown how dependent the Chinese economy is on European markets. The second reason is that some Chinese analysts have begun believing that Europe, in spite of its internal instability, may serve as a genuine balancer in international affairs during a period of US decline, helping smooth the transition to a more multipolar world. There are both possibilities and challenges in these perceptions, but there is little doubt that for some time at least China’s interest in Europe will be at an all-time high

China and Southeast Asia

The most remarkable aspect of China’s international development over the past thirty years has been its re-engagement with Southeast Asia. Until three decades ago China laboured under a self-imposed exile from the continent of which it is a part. In the early 1980s China had just fought a war with Vietnam, in which it lost at least 20,000 soldiers, and the other Southeast Asian states understandably viewed China with suspicion. India, along China’s south-western frontier, was politically close to the Soviet Union and had regarded China as a diehard enemy since the 1962 war. It was an Asian world that seemed to have expurgated China from its midst. The central kingdom was no longer central, but distinctly peripheral to the rest of the continent

Beginnings of the end: how the Cold War crumbled

The long duration and the unexpectedly peaceful ending of the Cold War call for new viewpoints that transcend the established paradigms about its inception. Historians ought to address all those transformations in the international economy, in the networks of interdependence linking together new areas - especially in Asia - and in the ensuing cultural images that gradually narrowed the relevance of bipolarism. Thus the habitual diplomatic and security themes must be enjoined with economic, ideological, technological and cultural ones." "Here a distinguished group of international history specialists discuss the complex relationship between Cold War dynamics, the globalizing of capitalism, and the demise of Soviet Communism. Their controversial and conflicting views, as well as their multidisciplinary approaches, highlight the various factors that constituted (and did not constitute) the Cold War. Thus they help to redefine the concept itself, to map its values and limitations, and to propel historical debate onto new grounds

Restless empire: China and the world since 1750

Over the past 250 years of momentous change and dramatic upheaval, China has proved itself to be a Restless Empire. Tracing China’s course from the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty to today's People’s Republic, Restless Empire shows how the country’s worldview has evolved. It explains how Chinese attitudes have been determined by both receptiveness and resistance to outside influence and presents the preoccupations that have set its foreign-relations agenda. Within two decades China is likely to depose the United States as the world’s largest economy. By then the country expects to have eradicated poverty among its population of more than one and a half billion, and established itself as the world’s technological powerhouse. Meanwhile, some – especially its neighbours – are afraid that China will strengthen its military might in order to bend others to its will. A new form of Chinese nationalism is rising. Many Chinese are angry about perceived past injustices and fear a loss of identity to commercial forces and foreign influences. So, will China’s attraction to world society dwindle, or will China continue to engage? Will it attempt to recreate a Sino-centric international order in Eastern Asia, or pursue a more harmonious diplomatic route? And can it overcome its lack of democracy and transparency, or are these characteristics hard-wired into the Chinese system? Whatever the case, we ignore China’s international history at our peril. Restless Empire is a magisterial and indispensible history of the most important state in world affairs today

The Cold War : a world history

Lecture delivered at the European University Institute in Florence on 13 December 2017A video interview with the presenter was recorded on 14 December 2017In The Cold War: A New History, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. This lecture will sketch a new history of the global conflict between capitalism and communism since the late 19th century, and it will provide the larger context for how today’s international affairs came into being