Cold War & Decolonization

What was proposed, and to whom

Woodrow Wilson set out his Fourteen Points in January 1918. Point Five dealt with colonies, and its wording repays slow reading: it called for an impartial adjustment of colonial claims in which the interests of the population concerned would carry equal weight with the claims of the government whose title was being decided. That is a promise of consideration in a dispute between empires. It is not a promise of sovereignty, and it does not say the population decides.

The Paris settlement of 1919 then did two different things in two different places. In Europe, the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman and German states was resolved by drawing new sovereign countries onto the map, among them Poland, Czechoslovakia and the kingdom that became Yugoslavia. Outside Europe, Germany's colonies and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were transferred to the victorious powers under a new name.

That name was the mandate. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant declared the well-being and development of these peoples a sacred trust of civilization, sorted the territories into three classes by how soon they were judged fit for self-government, and assigned each to an administering power that reported annually to a Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva. Class A, the former Ottoman provinces including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan, was described as provisionally close to independence. Class C, including South West Africa and the Pacific islands, was administered as part of the mandatory power's own territory.

Read as an instrument rather than a label, the mandate does three things at once. It transfers territory between empires. It re-describes the transfer as a trust held for the inhabitants. And it creates a supervising body with a file, a schedule of reports and a petitions procedure, but with no timetable for independence and no power to compel anything. The administering power was, in every case, a state that had wanted the territory.

What the interwar movements learned

In 1919 a young Vietnamese man living in Paris under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc submitted a petition to the peace conference on behalf of the Vietnamese people. Its demands were mostly for legal equality, civil liberties and representation within the French system rather than for independence. He received no hearing. He helped found the French Communist Party the following year, studied in Moscow, and returned to Asia as an organizer. He is better known by the name he took later, Ho Chi Minh, and he appears again in three chapters of this volume.

That sequence is worth stating as a mechanism and not as an irony. Exclusion from the liberal settlement was one major route by which anti-colonial organizers moved toward the Communist International, which was the one body in the 1920s offering them a platform, training and money. It was not the only route, and plenty of nationalists never took it. But it is a large part of why so many independence movements after 1945 arrived already carrying a Marxist vocabulary, and therefore why they were legible to Washington as Cold War problems.

Elsewhere the interwar decades were spent building organizations. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 as a debating body of professionals, was rebuilt in the 1920s under Mohandas Gandhi into a mass party with paid membership, provincial committees organized on linguistic lines and a repertoire of campaigns it could switch on: non-cooperation from 1920, the Salt March in 1930, Quit India in 1942. Pan-Africanism built a parallel network through a series of congresses, the fifth of which met in Manchester in 1945 and included Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, both of whom led their countries to independence within twenty years.

So by 1939 the movements existed, were organized, had leadership and had a documented standard to argue from. What they did not have was a weakened adversary. That is what the second war supplied, and it is the subject of section 02.

The argument

In February 1946 George Kennan, a diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow, sent Washington a very long cable analyzing Soviet conduct. His claim was that Soviet hostility came from internal sources, a system that needed an external enemy to justify itself, rather than from any specific dispute that could be negotiated away, and that it was therefore not appeasable but also not reckless: it would advance where it met no resistance and stop where it did. The policy conclusion, published under a pseudonym in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, was patient, firm, long-term containment of Soviet expansive tendencies.

Note what that argument makes possible and what it forecloses. It rules out negotiating a general settlement, because the hostility is not about a settlement. It also rules out attacking, because a system with internal problems will eventually mellow or break. What it licenses is an indefinite, expensive, global holding action, which is what the next forty years consisted of. Kennan himself later objected that his argument had been read as a call for military containment everywhere, when he had meant political and economic support at a few decisive points, and that dispute over what containment ought to have meant runs through the whole period.

In March 1947 Truman asked Congress for 400 million dollars for Greece and Turkey, where Britain had just announced it could no longer afford commitments, and framed the request in general terms: it would be the policy of the United States to support free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure. That framing, the Truman Doctrine, is what turned a regional aid bill into a standing global commitment, and it is why later administrations could describe interventions in places nobody in 1947 was thinking about as continuations of an established policy.

What the Marshall Plan actually did

Secretary of State George Marshall proposed the European Recovery Program at Harvard in June 1947. Congress passed it in April 1948, and it delivered roughly 13 billion dollars to Western Europe over about four years. Describing it as generosity or as reconstruction aid both miss how it worked.

The mechanism has three parts. First, the dollars were largely spent on American goods, food, fuel, machinery and raw materials, which solved the specific problem Europe had: it needed to buy from the United States and had no dollars to buy with. Second, when a European government sold those goods domestically, the local currency it received went into a counterpart fund used for approved domestic investment, so one dollar of aid did work twice. Third, participation required recipient governments to plan jointly and to open their trade with each other, which pushed Western Europe toward the economic integration that later produced the European institutions.

And the political purpose was explicit at the time rather than a later interpretation. Communist parties in France and Italy were large, disciplined and electorally serious, with real prestige from wartime resistance. The judgment in Washington was that hunger and stalled recovery were their best recruiters, and that restoring living standards quickly would cost less than any other way of keeping those countries in the Western camp. Marshall aid was containment carried out with freight and credit rather than with troops.

The Soviet response completes the picture. Marshall's offer was formally open to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe. A Soviet delegation attended the Paris talks in 1947, objected to the requirement that recipients disclose economic data and coordinate plans, and walked out, and Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had shown interest, were required to withdraw. Moscow then built its own arrangements, the Cominform in 1947 to coordinate communist parties and Comecon in 1949 for economic relations within the bloc. Whether the American offer to the East was sincere or was framed in terms Moscow was certain to reject is one of the sharper disputes in the origins debate the Topic 8.1 chapter sets out.

What each side supplies

From the outside came four things, and it is worth separating them because they have different effects. Weapons, usually small arms, artillery, armored vehicles and eventually aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles. Money, which pays soldiers and buys the food an army in the field consumes. Training and advisers, which is the item that converts a militia into a force capable of holding ground. And diplomatic cover, above all a veto at the United Nations Security Council, which is why a client of either superpower could rarely be sanctioned or disarmed by the international system.

From the inside came the things no outsider can supply: knowledge of the terrain, a population willing to feed and hide fighters, a political claim that recruits people, and the willingness to take casualties. That inventory is the reason the outside patron is not in control. The Vietnamese, Angolan, Ethiopian and Nicaraguan movements in this chapter had aims that predated their patrons and that they pursued when the patron would have preferred otherwise.

Now the mechanism this chapter exists to state. A civil war fought with local resources has a natural ceiling: it ends, or freezes, when one side can no longer field, feed and arm a force. External supply removes the ceiling. Both sides can be resupplied indefinitely, so the conflict runs until a patron withdraws, which typically happens for reasons in Moscow or Washington rather than reasons in the country fighting. That is why so many of these wars ran for a decade or more, and why several ended within a few years of 1989.

Why the labels were often locally chosen

A second-order effect matters as much as the first. Once both superpowers were buying allies, calling yourself communist or anti-communist became a way to get funded. A movement seeking land redistribution had reason to describe its program in Marxist terms when Moscow was the plausible supplier, and a rival faction had reason to present itself in Washington as the anti-communist option, whatever either believed. Some of the ideological alignment in this chapter is genuine, some of it is a funding application, and telling them apart in a specific case requires evidence about what the movement did before it had a patron.

The position before the war

The Qing dynasty fell in 1912 and no government replaced its authority for a generation. Regional military commanders held real power through the 1910s and 1920s, which is the period called warlordism, and the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek reunified much of the country by 1928 without ever fully displacing them. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, was initially an urban party of workers and intellectuals, and it was very nearly destroyed as one when the KMT turned on its communist allies in Shanghai in 1927.

The survivors went to the countryside, and that relocation is the most consequential thing that happened to Chinese communism. Pushed out of their southern base, they made the retreat of 1934 and 1935 that became known as the Long March, a journey of thousands of miles that most of the participants did not survive and that ended with a much smaller party established at Yan'an in the northwest under Mao Zedong's leadership. The march is remembered as an epic, and it functioned as one: it gave the party a founding story, a settled leadership and a rural base area to govern.

What the party did in the villages, and why it worked

In the areas it held, the CCP reduced rents and interest, redistributed land from large holders to tenants, and organized peasant associations that took over local decisions from landlord-dominated village authorities. State the mechanism precisely, because this is the answer to the question. A landless tenant who receives land from a party has a direct material interest in that party not losing, since a returning landlord will want the land back. That produces volunteers, food for the troops, porters, and, decisively, intelligence: a village that supports you will tell you where the enemy column is, and a village that does not will tell the enemy where you are. Land reform is how a party with no treasury and no foreign backer builds an army in an agrarian country.

Then Japanese aggression changed the terms. Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and invaded China proper in 1937. The KMT, as the recognized government with a conventional army, bore the main burden of fighting a modern military and lost the wealthy coastal cities that generated its tax revenue, retreating inland. To keep paying for the war it printed money, and by the later 1940s inflation had destroyed the savings of the urban middle class that was its natural constituency. Communist forces, operating in the countryside behind Japanese lines, fought a guerrilla war that cost them far less, expanded their base areas substantially, and let them present themselves as national resisters as well as social reformers.

Civil war resumed in 1946 and was over quickly. The People's Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949, and Chiang's government withdrew to Taiwan. So the causal statement the success criteria want has two strands that reinforce each other: internal weakness in the KMT, made much worse by inflation and corruption, and Japanese invasion, which imposed the cost of conventional defense on the KMT while giving the CCP room to grow.

The Indian National Congress, and mass organization

The Congress founded in 1885 was a small annual gathering of lawyers, journalists and officials petitioning for greater Indian participation in government. What Gandhi did after returning from South Africa in 1915, and especially in the reorganization of 1920, was convert it into a mass party: a nominal membership fee anyone could pay, provincial committees drawn on linguistic rather than administrative lines, a working committee that could take decisions between sessions, and a program that gave village members something to do.

That structure is what made the campaigns possible. Non-cooperation from 1920 asked Indians to withdraw from British institutions: to return titles, boycott courts and schools, and refuse foreign cloth. The Salt March of 1930 selected one law, the government monopoly on salt production, walked to the sea over about three weeks, and broke it in public. Quit India in 1942 demanded immediate withdrawal in the middle of a war and led to the arrest of the entire leadership. The Topic 8.7 chapter analyzes why nonviolence was chosen and what makes it work; the point here is that each campaign was an organizational achievement before it was a moral one.

The colonial response, over the same decades, was a series of constitutional concessions intended to be final and never accepted as such: expanded councils, then provincial autonomy under the Government of India Act of 1935, under which Congress won most provinces in the elections of 1937 and governed them. That is a mechanism worth naming, since it recurs across the empire. Each concession gave nationalists real administrative experience, real patronage and proof that they could govern, which strengthened the demand the concession had been meant to satisfy.

Three other models

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. Founded in 1941 as a front organization combining nationalists and communists, the Viet Minh built armed base areas during the Japanese occupation and declared Vietnamese independence in Hanoi on 2 September 1945, in a statement that opened by quoting the American Declaration of Independence. France did not accept it, and war followed from 1946. The model here is the armed political front: a movement that governs territory, collects taxes, runs schools and fights, all at once.

Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party. Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 after a decade of study in the United States and Britain and the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945. He broke from the existing lawyer-led organization and founded the CPP in 1949 on the slogan of self-government now, building support among younger, less wealthy urban constituencies. In 1950 he called Positive Action, a campaign of strikes and boycotts explicitly modeled on Gandhi's methods, and was imprisoned. The CPP won the 1951 election while he was in prison, the governor released him and invited him to lead the government, and the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana on 6 March 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to do so. That sequence, prison to prime minister in a year, is the clearest single illustration that a colonial administration will negotiate with whoever can actually deliver a population.

Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt had been nominally independent since 1922 while British troops remained, especially along the Suez Canal. The Free Officers, a conspiracy inside the army, overthrew the monarchy in 1952, and Nasser emerged as leader. His model is neither mass party nor guerrilla front but the military coup followed by populist consolidation, and his instrument of confrontation was ownership: the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in 1956, discussed in section 03.

How the decision was reached

The Muslim League, founded in 1906, argued through the 1930s that Muslims would be a permanent minority in an independent India governed by majority rule, and its Lahore Resolution of 1940 called for independent states in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and northeast. Under Muhammad Ali Jinnah the League's electoral position strengthened sharply during and after the war, and by 1946 it was able to claim, on the basis of that year's elections, to speak for most Muslim voters.

Congress, and Nehru in particular, wanted a single strong federal state and rejected the constitutional arrangements that might have held one together with substantial provincial autonomy. Communal violence in Calcutta in August 1946 and in Bihar and elsewhere afterward killed thousands and convinced many on all sides that a unitary settlement had become impossible. Lord Mountbatten, arriving as viceroy in March 1947, moved the date of British withdrawal forward from June 1948 to August 1947, which compressed everything that follows.

The mechanism of the violence

Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India, chaired the two boundary commissions and arrived in July 1947. He had about five weeks, outdated census and land records, and deadlocked commissions in which the Congress and League nominees could not agree, which left the decisions to him. His awards, dividing Punjab and Bengal, were completed before independence and published on 17 August 1947, two days after it.

Now state the mechanism precisely, because this is what a checkpoint rewards. If you live in a district and do not know which country it will be in, and you know that being on the wrong side may leave you a minority in a new state with no protection, then leaving before the announcement is a rational decision, and so is attacking the neighbors you expect to be protected by the other side. Uncertainty about the line, not certainty about it, is what produced the movement, and the withholding of the award until after independence maximized that uncertainty at the exact moment the state was weakest.

Three further conditions turned movement into massacre. The Indian Army, the only force capable of protecting refugee columns across the whole area, was itself being divided between the two new states, and its units were being reassigned by religion at the same time. The princely states had to choose which country to join, which left Kashmir's status unresolved and produced war between India and Pakistan within months. And the new governments were days old, with divided civil services, split treasuries and no administrative capacity to manage a migration of this size.

The scale is very large and genuinely uncertain. Estimates of the number of people displaced run from roughly ten to twenty million, and estimates of deaths from several hundred thousand to around two million. Both ranges reflect the absence of reliable registration during the movement itself and the political stakes attached to the numbers in both countries. Use a range and say why it is one.

Gandhi: choosing the law you break

Gandhi worked the method out in South Africa, not India. From 1906 he organized Indian residents of the Transvaal against a registration law, and by the time he left for India in 1914 he had a name for it and a body of practice behind it. Satyagraha translates roughly as holding to truth, and Gandhi insisted it was the opposite of submission: noncooperation, organized and disciplined, carried out in the open by people prepared to be arrested for it.

The Salt March shows the strategy at the level a student can reuse. In 1930 the colonial government held a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of salt and taxed it, and Gandhi chose that law rather than a land law or a franchise law for three reasons. Salt is used by everyone, so the tax reached the poorest household in India and the grievance needed no explaining. Breaking the law took no weapon and no organization beyond walking to the coast, so hundreds of thousands of people could do it at once. And a government defending a tax on salt argues from a weak position in front of any audience at all.

He walked about 240 miles from Sabarmati to the coast at Dandi over twenty-four days and made salt on 6 April 1930. Then the dilemma closed. Enforce the law and the state is arresting people for boiling seawater, tens of thousands of them, filling its own jails and its opponents' newspapers. Decline to enforce it and the law is dead and so is the principle that colonial law is obeyed. The British administration chose enforcement, arrested Gandhi in May, and at the Dharasana salt works watched police beat column after column of marchers who did not raise their hands.

That is the mechanism, and notice what it is not. It is not that suffering changes an opponent's mind. It is that visible suffering, deliberately accepted, transfers the argument to a third party, and the campaign wins if that third party can impose a cost. Within a year Gandhi was negotiating with the viceroy in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931 and sailing to London for a constitutional conference. The tax was not repealed then, and that is worth saying plainly, because the win was positional rather than legislative.

King: the same technique, and the campaign that showed it can be escaped

Martin Luther King Jr. did not borrow Gandhi's vocabulary as decoration. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 was a year-long withdrawal of fare revenue by people who had to organize their own transport to work, which is noncooperation in the Gandhian sense and cost the participants a great deal. King traveled to India in 1959 and studied the method where it had been used. What he brought back was a theory of political pressure, set out in the Letter from Birmingham Jail in April 1963: nonviolent direct action exists to create a crisis and a tension that force a community which has refused to negotiate into negotiating. He said, in effect, that the method manufactures the emergency it then resolves.

Now the case that proves the mechanism, because it is the closest thing this topic has to a controlled test. In Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, the same organizations ran the same kind of campaign and got very little. The reason was the chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who had read about Gandhi's methods and instructed his officers accordingly. He arrested demonstrators politely, in large numbers, and dispersed them to jails across surrounding counties so that no single facility overflowed. He arranged for King's bail so that a jailed leader did not become a photograph. There was no fire hose and no dog, so there was no image, so there was no national audience, so no federal cost was imposed on anybody.

Birmingham in 1963 was chosen with Albany in mind. Eugene Connor, the city's commissioner of public safety, could be relied on to do what Pritchett had refused to do, and on 3 May his officers turned fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators, many of them schoolchildren. The photographs ran nationally and internationally within a day. A local agreement followed on 10 May, President Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights on 11 June, and the Civil Rights Act passed in July 1964. Same method, same movement, twelve months apart, and the variable was the opponent's choice of response.

There is a Cold War audience here too, promised in the Topic 8.1 chapter and paid off now. The legal historian Mary Dudziak documented how far American segregation had become a foreign policy problem once Soviet broadcasts could report it to audiences in newly independent African and Asian states whose alignment both superpowers were courting. The federal government's own brief to the Supreme Court in 1952 in the school segregation case included a statement from the Secretary of State on the damage segregation was doing to American foreign relations. That is the displacement argument of this volume running backwards: a global rivalry reaching into the domestic politics of one of its two participants.

Two kinds of growth, and three mechanisms

Economists distinguish extensive growth, which comes from adding inputs, from intensive growth, which comes from using the same inputs better. Soviet industrialization from 1928 was extensive on an enormous scale: peasants moved into factories, new coalfields and ore bodies were opened, and output of the things the plan measured rose fast enough to win a war. The problem with extensive growth is that it ends. By the 1970s the labor force was growing slowly, the accessible resources had been used and the new ones were in Siberia at high cost, and the war's demographic hole was still working its way through the population.

Three mechanisms explain why the second kind of growth was so hard to produce, and each is worth a sentence in an essay. The soft budget constraint. A Soviet enterprise could not go bankrupt: if it lost money the ministry covered it. An organization that cannot fail has no reason to economize on anything, so it hoards labor, materials and machinery against the day the plan changes, and the economist Janos Kornai built an account of chronic shortage on exactly that point.

The ratchet. A factory that beat its target this year received a higher target next year, so the rational manager hid capacity and negotiated the plan downward, which means the planners were bargaining with people paid to misinform them. The measurement problem. A target set in tons produces heavy goods, a target set in units produces small ones, and prices fixed administratively carry no information about what is scarce, so a planner cannot tell an efficient factory from a wasteful one by looking at the accounts.

Put together, these produce a system that hits its targets and misses the point. Shortage was not a series of mistakes, it was what the arrangement produced when working normally, and Soviet citizens experienced it as queues, waiting lists for apartments and cars, and a large informal economy of favors and connections that people relied on to obtain ordinary things. That is the ground the public discontent in the third criterion grows out of, and it long predates 1985.

Oil bought twenty years

A country with those problems still needs to eat and to import machinery, and from the late 1960s the Soviet Union found a way to do both. The great West Siberian oil fields came into production, output rose steeply, and then the world price of oil rose sharply after 1973 and again after 1979. The hard currency that produced paid for imported grain, which the country had begun buying in quantity from the early 1970s, and for Western machinery and technology.

The mechanism to carry out of this is not that oil made the Soviet Union rich. It is that oil made reform postponable. Revenue from a commodity whose price is set elsewhere let the leadership fund consumption and defense at the same time without confronting the structural problem, and a windfall used that way buys time at the cost of the reason to change. In 1986 the world oil price fell by roughly half, in Gorbachev's second year, which removed the cushion at the exact moment a reform program needed room to fail in. The economist and later Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar made this the center of his account of the collapse. It is an influential reading rather than a settled one, and other historians give more weight to the political decisions of the reform years and less to the commodity cycle.

One more number that a good answer handles carefully. The share of Soviet output going to defense was published officially at around five or six percent. American intelligence estimated it at something closer to fifteen to seventeen percent of a smaller economy, and figures higher still have been given by Soviet and Russian officials since. Whichever estimate you use, the comparison to make is not with the American percentage but with what the same resources would have done in a civilian sector that was already failing to supply its population.

What the words actually divide

The Eastern Hemisphere is Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The Western Hemisphere is the Americas. That is a line of longitude, and it does not care about ideology.

Work through what that puts on each side. The entire European confrontation is Eastern Hemisphere: NATO's European members and the Warsaw Pact, divided Germany, the Berlin airlift and the wall, the Marshall Plan and its refusal. So are the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Chinese revolution, the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union in all its extent, decolonization across Asia and Africa, the Non-Aligned Movement from Bandung, Suez, and Afghanistan. The Western Hemisphere holds the United States and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean: Guatemala in 1954, the Cuban revolution and the missile crisis, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, and the domestic history of one superpower.

Now say the consequence out loud, because it is an argument and not a technicality. One side of this comparison contains three continents, both blocs, all of the alliance system's European core and the whole of decolonization. The other contains one superpower and the region it had regarded as its own sphere since long before 1945. Any claim about how similar the two hemispheres were is being made across units of radically different size and composition, and a good essay says so early, because a finding of difference may be telling you about the units rather than about the Cold War.

The four categories, populated with anchors

KC-6.2.IV.C names four kinds of effect, and the discipline is the one the Topic 7.9 chapter applies to causes: a category is not evidence until an event, a date or a document is attached to it. Here is a starting matrix, and every entry comes from a chapter of this volume rather than from general knowledge.

Economic. Eastern Hemisphere: the Marshall Plan, roughly 13 billion dollars to Western Europe between 1948 and 1952 with conditions favoring open trade; COMECON from 1949 and the terms of trade inside the Soviet bloc; Soviet financing of the Aswan High Dam after 1956; state-led development from India's five-year plans to Tanzanian ujamaa in Topic 8.6. Western Hemisphere: the American embargo on Cuba from the early 1960s and the Soviet subsidy that answered it; the Alliance for Progress; defense spending as a permanent feature of the American budget in Topic 8.7.

Political. Eastern Hemisphere: two alliance systems with automatic triggers in Topic 8.2; governments installed and maintained by occupying armies in Topic 8.1; the partition of Korea, Vietnam and Germany; forty new states whose sovereignty was courted by both blocs in Topics 8.5 and 8.6. Western Hemisphere: the removal of an elected government in Guatemala in 1954 and of another in Chile in 1973 in Topics 8.3 and 8.7; the Organization of American States as a bloc instrument; the missile crisis of 1962.

Social. Eastern Hemisphere: refugee movements out of Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, several million people in the Afghan case alone; the security state and its informers; the Soweto generation and the movements of Topic 8.7. Western Hemisphere: exile communities from Chile and Argentina after the coups; loyalty investigations and blacklists in the United States in the early 1950s; an anti-war movement large enough to be a political force; and the civil rights movement, whose Cold War leverage the Topic 8.1 and 8.7 chapters document.

Cultural. Eastern Hemisphere: state-mandated aesthetics in the Soviet bloc, international broadcasting in both directions, and the space race as a public scoreboard from Sputnik in 1957 to the first crewed flight in 1961. Western Hemisphere: American consumer culture and film as instruments of influence, State Department musical tours from the mid-1950s, and the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984, which each hemisphere hosted one half of.