Globality and Entangled Security: Rethinking the Post-1945 Order

3.1 The Globality of the Cold War and Its Post-Cold War Consequences

Traditionally the term “Cold War” has been understood to refer to the deep, long-standing, and intense security competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that emerged at the end of the Second World War and ebbed and flowed until the collapse of the USSR nearly 50 years later. This bipolar world order is often studied as a system of interstate alliances, principally in the Global North, which enabled a period of global stability, commonly referred to as “the Long Peace” (Gaddis 1987; Waltz 1979). Even today, this period continues to be widely viewed and analyzed in the Global North as a contest between two superpower states and as a largely bloodless competition at that, since the two contenders largely managed to avoid coming to blows directly and averted nuclear catastrophe. Yet, this perspective is one that is only possible if one ignores the globality of the Cold War – something mainstream historians would acknowledge – a period marked by 30 interstate and extra systemic wars and 251 international crises and not a single year free of war (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1991, 86; Hanhimäki and Westad 2003; MacMillan 2020; Westad 2017). Moreover, a goodly number of these conflicts featured deep and sustained superpower involvement. Throughout the Global South, the ideological and power positional battles of the North raged in internal, transnational, international and deeply entangled wars that were anything but cold.

The ideological nature of the Cold War meant the conflict was omnipresent, and the security competition that played out was truly global, in both physical and figurative senses. The conflict touched every region of the world, with effects that reverberated through every other region in interconnected and reinforcing ways. Indeed, the Cold War – rather than the “world war” that preceded it – was the first truly global armed conflict. Like World War I before it, World War II featured fighting across multiple continents and encompasses many regions of the world. Yet broad swaths of the globe – including Latin America, North America, South Asia and much of sub-Saharan Africa – were not significant theaters of combat. This was not the case during the Cold War. Previously protected regions were theatres of fierce and sustained fighting in which millions died.

Moreover, the ideological dimension, vast geographies and perceived global stakes of the Cold War also meant that leaders of the superpowers became even more than usually preoccupied with issues of credibility, reputation, and metaphorically-falling dominoes. Both US and Soviet leaders became fixated on the idea that if one state fell to the other side, so would its neighbors, and then the neighbors of the neighbors and so on. Such apprehensions led the superpowers to intervene around the globe, sometimes with their own troops, sometimes with advisors and proxies, and sometimes through non-military means of support, in support of both states and non-state actors.

The worldwide preoccupations of the superpowers in turn offered significant leverage and opportunities to less powerful players. A wide range of actors in the Global South, including leaders of newly-formed states, various types of liberation and opposition movements, (would-be) insurgents and other non-state actors took full advantage of superpower concerns to lobby for such support. The global political economy of the Cold War had lasting effects on state-society relations and state-formation trajectories across the Global South, as Cold War military aid shifted the balance of civil-military relations towards increased militarization and internal repression (Tilly 1992, 192ff). Fortified and emboldened if they received aid, some incumbents used outside military assistance to ruthlessly strengthen their hold on power, while non-state actors launched new challenges to domestic governance.

Indeed, a growing body of recent scholarship posits that actors in the South were often less the victims of superpower machinations than the other way around (see e.g., Lüthi 2020). As Chamberlin (2018, 3) pithily put it, “While the drive to contain their rival’s influence dragged Washington and Moscow into the postcolonial world, Third World revolutionaries and political leaders fought to realize their own visions of decolonization and liberation. Local forces joined the struggle along the Cold War frontiers in complex patterns of collaboration, co-optation, and resistance in bids to assert their own influence while manipulating superpower anxieties to win vital assistance for their local struggles. As they did so, regional powers disrupted superpower designs and redirected currents of international power.” This, in a nutshell, describes the globality of Cold War dynamics.

From a security entanglements perspective, all parties to the Cold War – not just the US and the USSR – were consequential, with exercise-able and exercised agency, while operating within a broader structural context defined by large-scale and entrenched inequalities. Radical variations in the distribution of power, resources, and access to their employment obviously meant that some states and some actors exercised more and greater control over events and outcomes than others. But the Cold War strategic chessboard was a global one, and the superpowers were sometimes the exploiters, sometimes the exploited, and more influence and agency resided outside of the US-USSR dyad than the conventional wisdom suggests. Even actors who officially claimed they were at a remove and uninvolved – for instance, members of the Non-Aligned Movement – in effect acknowledged involvement, while qualifying and delineating the ostensible nature of their role(s), by publicly asserting their lack of alignment.

Cold War battlefields served as environments in which the superpowers, local governments, insurgents, and social revolutionaries (re-)introduced and “refined techniques of mass violence, rewrote the politics of revolution, and reshaped the structures of world power, [forging along the way …] many of the greatest geopolitical transformations of the 20th and 21st centuries” (Chamberlin 2018, 3). One obvious example, as discussed further below, was the consolidation of a new system of postcolonial states – which, in many cases, remained shot through with informal colonial ties and structures that continue to exercise material effects on the politics, economics and societies of ostensibly independent, but not fully untethered states (Getachew 2020). The evolution of these post-colonial relationships also transformed key domestic and international political processes and their meanings and manifestations. As Getachew argues, for instance, by the mid-1970s, the concept of self-determination fell out of favor in some circles, including the US, as a consequence of the battle between “anticolonial nationalists” who viewed the United Nations as a site of “postcolonial revolution” and those who viewed the institution as “a forum for cooperation, collective security and American-centered consensus” (ibid., 178). The knock-on effects of this disagreement on the health, robustness and efficacy of the UN and other multinational organizations continue to redound in the contemporary global.

Another transformative consequence of Cold War entanglement was the emergence of counter-hegemonic religious movements and ideologies that emerged during the Cold War, but continue to dominate security concerns and discourse today. These include the United States’ funding of the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters during the proxy war in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s and the globalization of anti-hegemonic forms of jihadism that followed, which in turn inspired the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. The actors that planned these attacks – as well as some of their sponsors and safe havens, including Afghanistan – then in turn became the target of the subsequent Global War on Terror in the first two decades of the 21st century. Some of those targets formed the backbone of jihadist movements that expanded their battlefields across swaths of Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia (Cooley 2002).

A third very significant example of globally entangled security consequences surrounds the interconnections, backlash. and blowback between covert interventions by the superpowers into the domestic affairs of states in the South. Consider, for instance, the CIA-backed 1953 coup that resulted in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq. For the Iranian leader and his party, the key issue at play was Iran’s right to nationalize a British-owned oil company (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) that held exclusive rights to the country’s petroleum. For the newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration, in contrast, a possible Soviet takeover was at stake. Many Iranians – aware of American involvement from the outset – viewed the coup as a betrayal by the US of its own values, in facilitating the deposition of an elected leader and abetting the undemocratic ambitions of Shah Mohammed Pahlavi (within the US, in contrast, the CIA’s role in the operation remained classified and unknown to most Americans until well after the end of the Cold War).

While the Iranian domino did not fall to Communism, and the covert action was viewed as a policy success by the Eisenhower Administration, an array of significant regional and global consequences meant the coup’s cost over the longer-term would prove quite high. One such consequence was the rise of political Islam, which led directly to the 1979 revolution and still ongoing acute hostility in Iranian-U.S. relations. More broadly, as Zahrani concludes, “So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motives for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of [globally entangled] history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran” (Zahrani 2002: 93, passim). That contemporary historians (as well as intelligence analysts at the time) agree that fears of a Communist takeover were overblown at best makes the implications of this apparently local, but deeply globally entangled, Cold War event particularly noteworthy (see e.g. Gasiorowski 2019).

3.2 Neocolonialism and Enduring Forms of Postcolonial Entanglement

The globality of the Cold War provided the broader backdrop for a second process that accelerated and defined the post-1945 period; namely, decolonization. In the three decades that followed WWII, struggles for independence throughout Africa, East and South Asia, and the Middle East were fought and won, sometimes peacefully, but often in the form of wars of national liberation. Membership in the United Nations grew from 51 to 144 countries between 1945 and 1975, reaching 192 states a few decades thereafter (Getachew 2020). This is often interpreted as a period in which the nation-state system spread from Europe to the rest of the globe, resulting in the emergence of a global society of autonomous and sovereign states and hailing a new era of political, economic and, to a lesser degree, cultural decolonization and disentanglement.

The reality is more complicated, however, as the processes of decolonization and postcolonial state-building were characterized by forms of globality and security entanglement that are often rendered invisible in mainstream approaches to security studies. National wars of liberation and independence, for example, could neither be classified as interstate nor as civil wars, and did not neatly fit the categories used to design conflict datasets that informed quantitative analysis of warfare. Eventually they were included as “extra-systemic” conflicts in datasets such as the Correlates of War (COW) and UCDP data, yet such conflicts nonetheless continue to challenge the state-centric and methodologically nationalist frameworks that have informed quantitative data collection in security studies.^[4]

The spatial dynamics of decolonization itself were also extremely complex and characterized by global strategies that played out across multiple entangled and interconnected sites in both the Global North and Global South simultaneously. For example, the Moroccan independence movement was organized across four continents and included a wide range of transnationally-networked actors, including “British journalists, Asian diplomats, Egyptian Islamists, Coca-Cola executives, Western labor activists, Catholic intellectuals, French socialists, a Nobel Laureate, a US Supreme Court judge, Chilean businessmen, a former American First Lady, and many others” (Stenner 2019, 3). The Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) operated from international bureaus across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, and also had operations and networks in Latin America and developed a global strategy that played the US against the USSR. Their strategy included propaganda efforts that targeted audiences in the United States and elsewhere, and included coordinated campaigns of violence that would maximize media impact in capitals in Europe and North America. For example, the famous Battle of Algiers was timed to coincide with a General Assembly session on the Algerian question in an effort to draw greater attention to the conflict (Connelly 2002, 125ff; Nabuco de Araújo Araújo 2017, 406).

The global strategies that led to formal independence did not, however lead to disentanglement between the colonial centers and peripheries. Instead, there remained in place a structural and material interdependence that in many ways replicated colonial structures. For example, the 1962 Evian Accords, which provided for formal independence of Algeria from France, nevertheless ensured that France would maintain its economic benefits, including all rights related to the petroleum industry. And, while there was an exodus of European settlers from former colonies to Europe following independence, there was also a mass migration of formerly colonized people to the metropoles of Europe (Adamson and Tsourapas 2020; Buettner 2018; Greenhill 2010).

In some cases, the structures of the colonial independence movements operating in France and elsewhere were simply transformed into official state emigrant organizations, with states such as Algeria and Morocco using them as means of controlling and surveilling populations abroad (Brand 2006). This also led to an interpenetration of postcolonial and European domestic politics, resulting in the transnationalization of some internal conflicts in postcolonial states – such as the Moroccan Western Saharan conflict and the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s – to states in Western Europe and elsewhere (Adamson 2005; Bank and Van Heur 2007). In such cases, the conflicts did not simply diffuse from one state to the other, but were deeply embedded in the structural connections and entanglements that had developed over time from shared colonial and postcolonial histories.

3.3 Global Migration and Entangled Security

Global migration connects states and societies in ways that further entangle domestic and international security environments (Adamson 2005, 2006). Migration and mobility inherently create connections across states, yet have often been considered as peripheral to our understanding of global security dynamics. By focusing on issues of migration we shed light on the extent to which different regions of the world are entangled via processes of border-crossing, the emergence of global diaspora populations and other migration-related dynamics.

The 2015–16 European migration “crisis” provides an illustration of the need to think holistically about questions of migration and security. It is estimated that up to 80 percent of those migrants arriving in Europe in 2015 by boat were originally from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria – all countries that had experienced or were significantly affected by US and NATO military interventions.^[5] Libya had also experienced a NATO intervention that hastened its transformation from a largely migrant-receiving state to an unstable transit state that became a hub for migrant smuggling activities (Greenhill 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Pradella and Rad 2017; Sanchez 2020). Rather than treating the NATO interventions and the 2015–16 “crisis” as separate events, an entangled security perspective provides a lens for showing how Europe and the Middle East and North Africa are connected via complex security dynamics. In this case military interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa also created blowback in Europe through the effects they had on stimulating migration flows and empowering repressive non-state actors, which in turn fostered an increasing militarization of Europe’s external borders.

More generally, security- and economy-driven migration from one part of the globe to another can adversely affect the domestic political and security situations in others. Economic unrest in Cuba has at least thrice (in 1965, 1980, and 1994) served as an underlying antecedent driver of then President Fidel Castro’s decision to open the country’s border and permit Cubans to flee by sea to the US. Once in the US, the presence of Cubans catalyzed riots and domestic unrest, especially in the context of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which then US President Jimmy Carter asserts led to his defeat in the national election that November (Greenhill 2010). Similarly, after a military junta seized power in Haiti in 1991, exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide encouraged Haitians to flee to the US, which – when the numbers grew too large and diverting the fleeing Haitians to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba became untenable – drove the US under President Bill Clinton to threaten to intervene militarily to compel the junta to relinquish power and to enable Aristide to resume power (ibid.). In both cases, the security situations in tiny developing island nations had security-driven reverberations in and for the world’s dominant superpower.

In Europe, demographic trends leading to a greying and declining European population mean that most European countries would benefit from a larger supply of skilled and unskilled labor. Yet, over the last decade the politics surrounding migration has been defined by a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist populism more broadly, within Europe as well as other parts of the globe (Greenhill 2016). These sentiments have thrust leaders with authoritarian bents into power in a number of places throughout the globe and instigated democratic backsliding within specific countries and regions and dramatic declines in freedom in the world. As noted by Freedom House, 2019 was the 14th consecutive year in which global freedom declined, while a number of advanced liberal democracies, including the United States, have seen their degree of democracy rankings fall, according to the Economist’s Index of Democracy, fueled in no small part by policies and behaviors embraced by populist parties and their autocratic-leaning leaderships (Economist 2021; Repucci 2020).

As was the case with Cold War covert interventions, cross-border migration affects security in ways that can be both long- and short-term. For instance, in the short-term mass out- or in-migrations can undermine or bolster the stability of incumbent regimes, depending on the size, character, and nature of the group on the move and how the group is perceived by actors within sending and receiving states (Greenhill 2010). Over the long-term, remittances sent by migrants back to their countries of origin can transform economic conditions while also having a range of effects on domestic political conditions, with various studies showing that remittances can alternatively bolster or challenge authoritarian regimes (Ahmed 2012; Escriba-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright 2018). Shifts in security dynamics could also take the form of diaspora lobbying in favor of (or against) the regime in the sending state, which in turn may affect levels of provision of financial aid, military assistance, or even direct military intervention, such as the aforementioned US-led intervention in Haiti in the mid-1990s (Adamson 2006; DeWind and Segura 2014; Greenhill 2010).

Entanglement and interconnectedness in the context of migration exists in more structural and less broadly understood ways too. One example is the connection between foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration. As Sassen (1988) has persuasively argued, FDI can drive movement towards increases in export manufacturing and agriculture (and away from subsistence-based alternatives), which in turn drive both displacement of domestic workers and increases in the numbers of people engaged in wage labor. This in turn affects incentives to migrate both domestically and internationally, which fosters greater cultural and ideological links with countries of investment as well as a decline in risks of future migration, thus spurring further migration and connections with countries of investment. Not only may these dynamics lead to shifts in the demographic composition of the populations of migrant receiving states, but also to shifts in the security dynamics between these interconnected states. For instance, if domestic economic displacement is not adequately addressed by substitution and migration, and governments in countries of origin are unable to cope, remittances can produce problematic economic effects – in the form of pockets of unemployment, resentments arising from perceptions of economic disparities, and financial instabilities. Such economic problems can contribute to the root causes of various forms of international criminal activities – including drug and people smuggling – a lack of attention to environmental safety, cutbacks in social services, and unregulated large-scale migration and refugee flows, which, as noted above, can engender entangled political, social and security consequences, both global and domestic (Adamson 2005, 2006; Greenhill 2010, 2016, 2018a, 2018b).