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22 - The Cold War in the longue durée: global migration, public health, and population control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
Matthew Connelly
Edited by
Melvyn P. Leffler  and
Odd Arne Westad
Melvyn P. Leffler
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Odd Arne Westad
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

A three-volume history is an impressive monument to Cold War studies. But could it one day be seen as a tombstone? The grave danger inherent in superpower relations might appear to provide enduring reasons to continue studying them indefinitely. A different outcome, after all, could have changed everything. Yet this argument would base the importance of the Cold War on shifting ground: something that might have happened. Only a handful of crises had truly catastrophic potential, and treating them to ever more fine-grained analyses yields diminishing returns. As the Cold War continues to recede into history, scholars will therefore have to work harder to explain its importance to future generations.

If one instead turns to the history of populations and public health – the kind of “structural” history favored by the followers of Fernand Braudel – the period coinciding with the Cold War can be shown to have witnessed changes that were comparable to the impact of global nuclear war, only these changes unfolded over decades and had nearly the opposite demographic effects. The number of people living on earth more than doubled between 1945 and 1989. By the time Germans were living under one government again, world population was growing by the number of people in the reunited nation – more than 80 million – each and every year. The overwhelming majority of them were being born in Asia and Africa. For the largely Russian leadership of the USSR, the higher fertility of Central Asians appeared to pose an existential threat.

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The Cambridge History of the Cold War , pp. 466 - 488
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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