The Globalization of the Cold War

Diplomacy and Local Confrontation, 1975-85

This book focuses on the globalisation of the Cold War in the years 1975-85, highlighting the transformation from bipolar US-Soviet competition to global confrontation.

Offering a detailed analysis of this fundamental shift that occurred during this period, as well as the interconnections of this process with the new industrial-technological revolution, this book demonstrates how the United States returned to a position of global economic leadership. In so doing, the book aims to challenge the traditional and misleading paradigm that interprets the gradual development of the Cold War in basic bipolar terms; in fact, most of the factors triggering superpower attitudes and interplay were linked to a complex web of relations with their allies, as well as to the political, economic, social, ideological and military factors structurally intrinsic to the ‘peripheral’ regions where the confrontation actually took place.

Many of the essays in this volume focus on the foreign and security policies of the United States, with the aim of reassessing the Carter administration as the foundation for Reagan’s final show-down with the Soviet Union. The contributors, however, go beyond the traditional patterns of foreign policy analysis, giving due attention to transnational phenomena and institutional histories that better explain the gradual transformation in the years that prepared the world for the post-Cold War globalisation era.

This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War studies, international history, US foreign policy, European politics and IR in general.

Max Guderzo is Professor of the History of International Relations and holds the Jean Monnet Chair of the History of European Unification at the University of Florence.

Bruna Bagnato is Associate Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Florence.