New Left Review I/147, September-October 1984

Morten Ougaard

The Origins of the Second Cold War

In the seventies writings on the crisis of imperialism proliferated in leftist social science. [1] Their focus of attention was the revolutions in the Third World, the relations between North and South, the incipient economic crisis in the centre, and the sharpening of economic rivalry among the main capitalist nations. For some writers it was precisely the simultaneous sharpening of these contradictions in the capitalist system which constituted the essence of the crisis of imperialism. Today, roughly a decade later, these topics are still being studied, written about, and discussed. But for reasons that are both obvious and impeccable, a new subject seems to have come to centre-stage: the East–West conflict and the Second Cold War. [2] These two trends within Marxist analysis deal to some extent with the same subject, and the crucial inter-relationship between the crisis of imperialism and the Second Cold War has been examined by a number of writers. In this article I intend to take a critical look at how this question is tackled in one of the major new works on East–West relations: Fred Halliday’s The Making of the Second Cold War. [3] [*]

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