Cold War II: the Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization

jason parker Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Reperiodization of the Postwar Era* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 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 antico- lonial fight for decades; others drew on a long-churning race consciousness to assert nationhood; still others pointed to archaic imperial economic relation- ships 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 *Earlier versions of this material were presented at the 2003 University of San Diego conference on “Eisenhower and the Third World” and at the 2003 SHAFR meeting. The author would like to thank his fellow SHAFR panelists, USD organizers Andrew Johns and Kathryn Statler and USD commenter Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, along with Matthew Jones, Robert McMahon, Kenneth Osgood, Jeff Taffet, and the anonymous Diplomatic History review- ers for their insightful suggestions. Special thanks are due as well to the Eisenhower Library Foundation and to West Virginia University for research travel support, and to Abilene archivists Tom Branigar and David Haight. A portion of the text also appears in the Eisenhower conference volume edited by Andrew Johns and Kathryn Statler, and is reproduced here with the gracious permission of Rowman & Littlefield. 1. As Thomas Borstelmann reminds us in Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993), for most of the Third World the postwar issue was not the superpower conflict but Western colonialism. Matt Connelly also argues for the importance of the “north-south” dimensions of the Cold War, in “TakingOff the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 ( June 2000): 739–69. Diplomatic History,Vol.30, No. 5 (November 2006). © 2006 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK. 867 868 : diplomatic history Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 Figure 1: During the April 1955 Afro-Asian Peoples Conference, Bandung was crowded from morning till midnight by thousands of Indonesians trying to catch a glimpse of the delegates. (Source: Bettmann/CORBIS.) 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. Aside, however, from the clear and anodyne conclusion that both the long wars against colonial rule and white supremacy on the one hand, and the East-West Cold War competition on the other, exerted a mutual influence on one another unevenly over time, it has been difficult to say much more. The relationship between the two wars varied enormously by time and place. True, in some locations, such as Vietnam and Algeria, they merged in violent, tragic, and relatively straightforward fashion, and have received exhaustive scholarly attention. Beyond cases like these, the link is less clear. Many areas only visibly joined the fight when the Cold War was in midlife. Some then found themselves the object of intense superpower competition; others found themselves all but ignored. Almost all saw their individual struggles culminate within a span of two decades during the Cold War. Yet nuanced, compelling explanations of the link between that conflict and the great wave of Third World decolonization—one more sophisticated than mere chronological coincidence—have only just begun to emerge. There thus remains a great challenge facing any effort to write an international history of the Cold War, or indeed of the twentieth century: discerning the precise, subtle, and intricate connections between the Cold War, the global postwar “race revolution,” and the course of Third World decolonization. An emerging critical mass in foreign relations scholarship, as well as sugges- tive findings in new primary-source research, makes this an opportune moment to take up the challenge. The literature on the role of race in U.S. foreign Cold War II : 869 relations, including its role in the diplomacy of decolonization, has grown impressively in breadth and sophistication over the last two decades.2 These studies explore the subject widely, from a variety of angles and a range of times and places. Measuring the shape and extent of race’s role in American diplomacy is the conceptual challenge this literature addresses. Most authors find that that role’s shape was recognizable and its extent considerable. Although there remains important work to be done, this scholarly corpus in toto leaves little doubt that race played an influential role in postwar American foreign affairs. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 Indeed, understood this way, this still-growing body of work offers a new perspective on the Cold War itself, as a protean conflict whose fluctuating “East-West” dynamics slowed, stalled, and then sped the “North-South” decolonization and race revolutions during the Cold War’s first two decades. What we might call capital-R “Race” issues—defined maximally to encompass the end of white supremacy, the end of formal European empire in the “Third World,” and the rise of nonwhite consciousness and nationalism—are, to build on W. E. B. DuBois’s insight, signal themes of the twentieth century.3 The historically constructed nature of such constituent terms as “race” and “empire” need not impeach an effort to integrate these themes into the big picture of the Cold War. The above literature cumulatively traces Race, and allows us to group its key episodes together according to their chronological and thematic coher- 2. Gifted practitioners such as Michael Hunt, Thomas Noer, Paul Gordon Lauren, and more recently Brenda Plummer, Thomas Borstelmann, Penny Von Eschen, Mary Dudziak, and Carol Anderson, among others, have made important contributions to this literature. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987); Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, CO, 1988); Thomas Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia, MO, 1988); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York, 2003). See also Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, NY, 1986); Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy (Boston, 1992); Michael Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Policy, 5 vols. (New York, 1998) and Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department (Armonk, NY, 1999); Brenda Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); and James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 3. I am indebted to Frank Costigliola for the observation that even “defined maximally” in this way, Race is a yet more expansive concept than this formulation permits. Limiting the present analysis to First-Third World relations, for example, omits racialist thinking in First- Second World affairs, as in the 1940s Anglo-American imagery of Stalin as the head of an “Asiatic,” quasi-Yellow Peril. This essay relies on the insights of such scholars as Ivan Hannaford, Kenan Malik, and Nikhil Pal Singh—and on the need for conceptual practicality in advancing its thesis—for its construction of “Race.” See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996); Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996); and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 870 : diplomatic history ence. Doing so indicates that an international history of a broadly unified Cold War is a problematic undertaking. While we may safely keep the idea of a single, overarching Cold War more or less unified by its core elements—the strategic and ideological U.S.-Soviet clash, the nuclear standoff, and the like—Race obliges a different picture and periodization.

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