Reviews for The Penguin History of the Cold War

The average rating for The Penguin History of the Cold War based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-16 00:00:00 Jimmy Smith In this impressive survey of European power politics since the fall of Constantinople, Brendan Simms builds on a theme familiar from his earlier works on Prussia: the primacy of foreign-policy over domestic politics. However, the main thread running through the book is the thesis that the German-speaking lands of central Europe are the key to the balance of power on the continent and in the wider world. At the outset, Simms puts forward the argument that the Holy Roman Empire and its successor states have been “the principal source of political legitimacy for anybody who wants to speak for Europe”. Consequently, his interpretation of every major conflict in European history over the last 500 years is made through a German prism. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War, is seen not so much as the beginning of the sovereign state system that we still know today, but rather as the vehicle for which the Empire was given a constitution that “would reconcile the political aspirations of Germans with the requirements of the international state system.” The wars of Louis XIV are seen by Simms as a means of ensuring that France would control the resources of the Empire as much as being the product of the Sun King’s quest for grandeur. The outcome of the Seven Years’ War in which the Prussia of Frederick the Great had almost been brought to its knees is seen in retrospect as the point at which “two ideal types of European parliamentary and absolutist regimes, Britain and Prussia” emerged victorious. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were driven as much by the pursuit of a geopolitical agenda centred on Germany as they were by ideology. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, his consequent ejection from Germany meant that the game was up even though the campaigns of 1814 and 1815 were yet to come. Simms’s argument that the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and the European Revolutions of 1848-9 were centred on the destiny of Germany is persuasive. His account of the growing sense of German nationalism which culminated in the Wars of Unification between 1864 and 1871 concludes with the observation that with the mastery of Germany assured, a new phase in the struggle for European supremacy was about to begin. This brings us on to the Hohenzollern and National Socialist attempts to achieve German hegemony in Europe. The story of Bismarck’s posthumous failure to prevent the existence of a powerful alliance against Imperial Germany, the post-war dislocation wrought by the Treaty of Versailles, and Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent aggressive foreign policy to “Germanise” Europe are all familiar. Simms places all of this in a wider context. With the fall of France in 1940, the United States was aware that this had led to a fundamental change in the European and, hence, global balance of power. By the end of the following year, Hitler had contrived to ensure that the most powerful coalition of powers imaginable now opposed Germany making his downfall inevitable. Although Germany was partitioned in 1945, it remained the fulcrum of European power politics during the Cold War. As Simms puts it, each side “sought to win over the Germans, or at least to deny them to the other side. They were also determined to prevent the re-emergence of German power. The parallel projects of NATO and European integration were designed with this twin purpose in mind.” With the end of the Cold War and the re-unification of East and West Germany, the “German problem” has re-emerged in another guise given the nation’s economic superiority. Simms argues that only Britain, “because she possesses the most credible fighting force on the continent at the moment” and Germany “because her economic strength is vital to the functioning of the Single Market and the Euro” can bring about deeper integration in Europe. This would appear unlikely because British Euroscepticism is well entrenched while opposition to the European project is becoming more popular in Germany. Simms concludes that his thesis of the primacy of foreign policy no longer holds in Germany and other western European countries as a result of the “uncoupling of western European state and society from the project of making war” since the mid-1960s. Therefore, it “follows that only a major external threat will unite Europeans today.” Simms postulates that such a threat could emerge through Russia, China or radical Islam. In summary, Simms’s work is an excellent read that should be of equal value to the general reader and to the historian with more of a specialist interest in European power politics during the past half millennium.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-30 00:00:00 Caroline Dey A lot of learning can be a dangerous thing. This is the second recent sweeping history of war and Europe that I've enjoyed thoroughly until the closing pages. As with Ian Morris's "War: What is it good for?" roughly 90% of this book would have received a 4 or even 5 star rating. The problem comes at the end, when these learned historians (of completely different styles and levels of seriousness) attempt to apply their knowledge to the present day and just miss the point entirely. Before my massive problem, one small quibble. The book is billed as telling the story from 1453 to the present. In fact, the first four and a half centuries are done with by the halfway point. I would have enjoyed more coverage of those earlier years, that birthed the nation-state system, and so much of what we consider modern Europe. The narrative throughout was readable, detailed and enjoyable. There is of course vastly more information of contemporary relevance the closer you get to the present day, but I felt a bit cheated. Like I said a quibble, and it only slightly detracted from my enjoyment of the book. When the book makes it to the 20th century grand strategy and wars that I sense Simms actually wanted to write about, the treatment is excellent. He effortlessly dips back and forth between domestic politics and the international struggle of what feels like dozens of countries. He expertly manages to incorporate the planet-wide conflicts that mattered, while sticking to his focus on the struggle for the European continent. The more I think about the feat, the more impressed I am. It's an almost year by year recounting of world events in the 20th century, and it's never boring or flabby. He's got two points that he hammers home repeatedly. One is the way that foreign policy drove all manner of domestic changes, from administrative reform to social legislation, and the Second is the centrality of the struggle to control Germany, the European heartland, over the entire period discussed. These are perhaps not the most ambitious of points, but they are proven well. His narrative of the World Wars and the Cold War is just fantastic. The problems come after the Cold War ends. The timbre of the narrative changes dramatically. Our sober guide to history's greatest horrors and triumphs disappears. Every minor reversal and savage little cold war hangover is described as a "colossal" and or "massive" crisis. The continued "failure" of the European public to take an interest in military aggrandizement and defense spending is lamented in frankly ludicrous terms. Here let me quote a bit: "... the European peoples had failed - even in this hour of crisis - to assert their right to participate in the defense of their common prosperity and security." The crisis he's referring to is I assume either Russia's ridiculous little war with Georgia or the financial crisis that took place in 2008. It's hard to see how defense spending would have helped with the financial crisis, and it's quite easy to see exactly how the NATO saber rattling Simms wants more of led to the war between Russia and Georgia. The point he's missing is this. The pacification of Europe, accomplished at tremendous cost and existential risk to human civilization is one of mankind's greatest victories. I made a video on it once: (). The fact that most of the European public now cares more about quality of life than the petty grandeur of killing the folks the next country over is something to be celebrated. My sense is that like many in the academic branch of the military industrial complex he sees a waning interest in grand strategy and geopolitics as a threat to his job security, or perhaps more important if less tangible, his job significance (I'd imagine that seat at Cambridge is pretty secure). Unlike many of his ilk, Simms does at least acknowledge that Russia expected NATO expansion to stop with Germany after it allowed the USSR to collapse. He acknowledges it with one sentence. It's probably the shortest sentence in the book. The closing pages then lovingly chronicle NATO's relentless expansion, in tandem with the far more useful and benign European Union, with essentially zero analysis or explanation of why this should be so, and why these organizations are so uselessly but seemingly irrevocably connected. (Here's a helpful vid on how NATO started the crisis in Ukraine ) NATO are our guys, so Russia couldn't possibly have a legitimate objection to the expansion to its borders of world history's most powerful military organization, an organization founded explicitly to combat Russia. Objective history is impossible, but this degree of partisanship is just too much. I would have perhaps forgiven this unfortunately common affliction if it weren't for the ridiculousness of the book's final sentences. Keep in mind that in the run up to World War I, the cataclysm that started off Europe's horrific 20th century, the European people marched eagerly off to war. To be sure there was all manner of manipulation by elites, but much of the continent really believed that the war was right and good, and their side, their national blood and steel, would prevail. This is how Simms closes the book, referring to the present day: "In short, at the start of the third decade of the second millennium, [sic, he ain't talking about 1021] Europeans were no less preoccupied by how the vital space at the heart of the continent was to be organized than they had been in times gone by. The German Question, eclipsed for more than a decade after unification, was back." That's simply not true. Angst over a financial management is not the urge to march off and blow somebody up. That's not history.