contemplate, i think, new meanings and implications of the cold war for us today so this is basically a summary of the questions and the argument of my book if anyone is interested in hearing more, of course, well, i'm happy to visit your college or institutions or talks and i'm located in singapore but i come to the u.s. quite often for my research so it wouldn't be difficult to talk about my book in the u.s. or if you are really, really interested in details of the --

[ laughter ] -- the book is available for purchase at major book stores like this. and actually we have books on sale outside our room today thank you very much for listening to my talk. [ applause ] >> i'll now introduce our first discussant, ryan irwin, who writes about the intersection of international law and global power during the 20th century. his first book "apartheid and the unmaking of the liberal world order" examined this intersection against the backdrop of african decolonization. he's won several writing and research prizes from the society of american foreign relations and he's currently writing a book about legal realism's influence on american liberal internationalism during the early cold war. he is an assistant professor at the university at albany at the state university of new york.

>> so one place to begin unpacking professor masuda's book is its research question, which was meaty. what was the cold war? his answer, as you've just heard, is that the cold war was "an imagined reality." a gigantic social mechanism that operated to tranquilize chaotic post-war situations worldwide by putting an end to social conflicts and culture wars at home. whose home? well, professor masuda is interested in east asia and north america specifically and he's focused on this period between world war ii's end and the korean war which he explains is when this imagined reality started to feel more and more real to more and more people in these various locales. now, it's not easy to say something original about the 1940s and the early 1950s but

"cold war crucible" pulls it off and i'll do two things. first, i'll make a pair of observations about the book and second i'll ask professor masuda some questions which will hopefully get our q&a rolling. so opt separation one is that the book is simultaneously original and very familiar. if you are a political scientist, one label to toss at professor masuda's work is constructivism. if you're a historian, it probably makes a little more sense to cite someone like benedict anderson and michele foucault but cold war's starting point is instantly recognizable, that power makes reality. what does this mean? well, professor masuda is inviting us to think about the cold war not simply as a series of events, a blockade here, a war there, events that build logically on each other, events with self-evident meaning.

no, for professor masuda, the cold war was a man made reality. method logically, he's nudging us to see this man made reality through the prism of social and culture history but his bigger claim is that the process of reality making can be historicised. you can actually look at how more and more people in this case americans, chinese, japanese, korean people, accepted the cold war as something that was "real." so this is a very capacious starting point for a book: folks have used some of these tropes to criticize special cold warrior, mark silverstone's examined a comparable dynamic in the anglo american context but very few monographs on my radar begin "i'm going to show you how the cold war became real." or how it became imagined as real in several places over a

ten-year period. and my favorite part of the book is that professor masuda tell this is story in a very tangible way. the conceit here is that no one is driving this reality-making process. which makes professor masuda's actual narrative more straightforward than you might expect. "cold war crucible" basically explores how different actors or ordinary people came to explain their own claims in their local worlds vis-a-vis communism and anti-krichl. these folks were not necessarily communists or anti-communists but they invoked the cold war for their own reasons, mostly to get ahead, which resulted eventually in the creation of this shared nativist fantasy world with transnational purchase. so observation number one is that professor masuda is arguing a familiar point, a point as old as richard hoffsteader, in a new

way, which sets up a second observation because the research, as chuck said, is very, very good. ten countries, lots of archives, lots and lots of languages. some international history tends to repackage old stories with new footnotes but professor masuda is writing about people you have never heard of and he's telling stories that you probably don't know. i'll admit i assumed that the book's narrative would be disconnected. that there could be too many people saying too many things but the three sections hang together well and the chapters are divided in a logical way. this is a story that could have been too complex and tidy yet professor masuda to his credit delivers something unexpected, something very hard which is a beautifully written messy story that actually make sense. now, if i had to critique the book, the jargon is probably the lowest hanging fruit. the word reality is in quotation marks a lot. so much so that some of the

passages give you flash backs to that famous scene in the movie "matrix" with the pills and the rabbit holes and all the rest and throughout the book i find myself wrestlingle with the question of whether or not i was reading a transnational social cultural history of reality making in the early cold war or was a reading a political history of the cold war's or gins told from a multinational grass roots perspective? now this is pedantic, i admit, and i imagine the choice you'd take, professor masuda, is option c, all of the above. but this opens up space for a few questions. to start, walk us through your relationship with the methodology that you take up here. why tell this story this way? this question has a mechanical side. why were you drawn to these particular archives and not others? did the project start small and become really big or was it always scaled as a comparative

study? and this question has a slightly abstract side because a few things surprised me. if someone asked me to write a look like this one i think i would have looked at technology or international organizations, i'm talking about the radio, public diplomacy, about reality making as an intellectual and institutional phenomenon and i would have taken this approach because that's what other scholars who were interested in this process have done already. so what are the stakes of anchoring this story in the experiences of ordinary people? what are the stakes of anchoring this story in the experience of ordinary people? more pointedly, do you think the study of technology in these regions or a history about folks who interfaced with newly built institution institutions would undercut the pre-supposition that this was an evolutionary story that in no one directed this process.

does that claim still stand up if you adjust the frame? after all, some people incented it and others used them. some people make institutions, others join them. focusing on technology or institutions nudges us toward a different place, perhaps a distorted place. so this point is probably more compelling as a question. what does cold war crucible reveal about power? this has to be something you wrestled with constantly as you wrote this book. the accomplishment here is the way professor masuda gives agency to people who are often overlooked. so there's a natural tension between this panoramic approach and the asymmetry of global power after world war ii and i'd love to see you bring your conclusions that you just articulated into dialogue with some of the more classic his store graphical riddles of this time period. was the u.s. government weaker

than we think? were peasants and workers in asia stronger than we imagined? if the cold war reality requires quotation marks, what passes for truth when we talk of power in an international context? now i'm getting rhetorical so i'll wrap up. my final question is straight forward and self-serving. how should i teach the cold war to my students? what would this story look like in the classroom? in my classroom. does cold war crucible advance the cold war's decomposition or does it it bring it to mid-century world history? you walk this line with admirable subtlety but i think you're challenging scholars like me who push against the cold war's monopoly of discourse after 1945 and are experimenting with alternative ways to teach

mid-century geopolitics. so stretch this story out. explains what it looks like on a semester-sized canvas. what does this story look like if we stretch it into the 1960s? the 1970s? how long did the cold war reality last if defined on your terms? how might the incorporation of alternative regions complicate or affirm the interpretation you've outlined for us today? does k the dynamic at the heart of your story be replicated in other periods? regardless, there's no doubt "cold war crucible" should be on your bookshelf. buy a copy. it reframes the cold war's origins in an interesting way and it sets a new con start. so congratulations to professor masuda for a thought-provoking first book. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. so our second commentator is

andrew rotter who is the charles a. dana chair in history at colgate university where hi has taught since 1988. his most recent book is "hiroshima, the world's bomb" and he's at work on a study of two empires, the british and india and the americans and philippines and the five senses. professor? >> thank you. thank you for coming thank you professor masuda for inviting me to comment on your book. i'll begin by saying that this book is a paradigm rattling study. a couple months ago i had a conversation with a colleague i'd identify him, david angerman of brandeis university in which he said, i thought too casually, that within a generation or less historians would no longer see the cold war as central as a useful category of analysis. i really was stunned to hear him say that and i pushed back and while i think professor masuda

would agree with me that the cold war remains an event, a thing with which historians must continue to come to terms, he has so thoroughly problem lem tides it had concept of the cold war as to make it nearly unrecognizable to those of us who are more conventionally trained or inclined. as you have heard, professor masuda renders the cold war a constructed imaginary. locally generated. in his formulation, the cold war sprang less from ideology or geopolitical contest than from political or social or cultural circumstances within nations the cryian conflict of the book's subtitle was an agent, in his word a catalyst rather than a single knowable event. it indicated to all parties that world war three might be immine imminent. at the same time, as you heard,

elites sought to contain or suppress populist movements within nations as diverse as the united states, the people's republic of china and the philippines in this way did a local story become global or nearly so. mccarthyism, the anti-hook campaign in the philippines, all of which followed closely the outbreak of conflict in korea indicated the presence of small cold wars both similar and different that constitutes or constructed the big cold war. in the end, professor masuda concludes "people translate it had meaning of the korean conflict through local lenses." and in this way created the entity that we have called the cold war. listeners and readers will recognize how challenging and even provocative professor masuda's interpretation is.

he has read everybody. he's read the usual suspects on the cold war. he's read gatt thys and melvin lefler. but he's taken to heart the work of people likian a kwan and mary caldor among many others. his debt to those who have insisted on the privacy of domestic politics in the formation of cold war discourse, thomas christian son, jeremy surrey is obvious. professor masuda's contemplation of cold war epistomology is, however, largely his own and it is remarkably bold. his claims are bus interpreted by a wealth of evidence drawn from a breathtaking array of sources in at least three languages. many of his sources are local, not in national archives. professor masuda has gone where few have gone before. the auburn avenue research library in atlanta, the vermont

historical society. how on earth did he imagine those would be good places to find cherl? and he found it. the book teaches us not to read the cold war backwards. men and women in 1945 did not know from cold war, as my grandfather might have said. their most recent and terrible experience of conflict was world war ii, which shaped them profoundly. that the cold war ought to be decentered seems to me an idea whose time has come. professor masuda decenters the cold war here artfully and confidentbly. this is a wonderfully assured first book. like ryan, i would raise several questions for professor masuda's consideration. first, he argues that the reality of the cold war was less salient in some places than in others. it had low valance, for example, in latin america and africa. this was the result, he says of

the relative remoteness of these contin continents of the ravages of the cold war. yet if you extend the story a few years out, you find critical exceptions to this rule. think of cuba and the congo where issues concerning decolonization surely shared space with cold war conflict. and one could as easily say that latin america and africa were farther from the strategic front lines of the cold war regardless of their position during world war ii. in short, it isn't clear to me that the relative lack of interest in these areas by the great powers demonstrates that the cold war was locally sourced. i hoped this book expecting a fresh interpretation of the korean war and was delighted to find that it was more than that. still the centrality of korea, even as a catalyst of social transformation in asia, europe,

and the united states seems to me uncertain. professor masuda argues that et made the cold war real because it reminded people of world war ii. yet it was unlike that war fundamentally in that it stayed limited in participation and scope. was it more important as a cold war catalyst than, say, the nuclear arms race which we preceded and followed it? the atomic bomb doesn't make much of an appearance in the book. you saw the wonderful colliers title but this is imagining a future nuclear attack and it's represented pretty much only in the form of national or local response to the atomic bomb. the sound of axes grinding is audable in the room. sorry for that. if korea was a watershed, why did social formations look pretty much the same before as

after it? i've fallen into one of the misconceptions that professor masuda located among his crickets before and i'll let him answer it again or ignore it if he likes. so in britain, the austerity program, including the devaluation of the pound in 1949 set off what a newspaper described in june of that year of 1949 as a wave of industrial unrest for which the korean conflict cannot claim responsibility. in the united states repression preceded mccarthyism. in the philippines, the battle against the hooks anti-dated 1950. the assassination of caisson who was assassinated by the hooks took place in 1949. to( what extent then did korea solidify or even cattalize the reality of a cold war? it struck me here as it did when reading jeremy surrey's "power and protest" and a later period

that there is a presumed commence rabbit between the various social protests and repression of them. thus the suppression of labor strife in japan, the red scare in the united states, the january fan movement in china are rendered morph logically the same. you heard professor masuda in this earlier and what he does in the book very cleverly is allow for the possible objections of critics. he'll say i understand these things are not exactly the same but then he'll go on for several pages to prove that in fact they largely were. it seems there is an air of scale here. as bad as the first two, that is the suppression of labor, unrest in japan and the red scare in the united states were, neither resulted in the mass killing that characterized the jan fan movement in china. japan, the united states and the prc had profoundly different political cultures. professor masuda ingeniously

uses letters to local newspapers to demonstrate that chinese citizens criticized the regime as late as 1950. this is amazing stuff. this is accounts of jan fan rallies suggest to me that the party's orchestration of the executions of non-conformists, ideological and otherwise, were done from the top down. these examples do not seem to be evidence of a common mortarfulology of protest and/presentation but of separate and unequal social and political pathologies. in claiming the cold war was at first a thing imagined, professor masuda is granting implicitly post-structuralist argument about the social constructiveness of things. that suggests a preference for representation over causation, though i acknowledge what ryan said is that he's walking very subtly and cleverly a fine line between these. whatever it is, it may rankle those for whom the cold war's

apparent constructedness did not prevent it from wrecking their lives or their societies and it's hardly a logically parsimonious argument. race, jend herb, religion, culture generally, what category of analysis is not socially constructed? if the point is to add geopolitics, strategy and ideology to the list of imaginaries, well and good, though in that case to cold war was hardly unique. finally i wonder if in trying to establish the novelty of his approach professor masuda has not chucked out the baby with the bath water, or at least has the baby dangling precariously by one leg outside the window. sorry, that's terrible -- forget i said that. [ laughter ] i sort of like it. he writes that we should "see the cold war world as a eye ban i can social construction of an imagined reality in which many

people participated in restoring order and harmony through marginalizing disagreements at home." might it be instead that the cold war was a dynamic process between the ideological and geopolitical on one hand and social cultural and local on the other? or, more specifically, is it possible to understand local cold war conflicts as mapped or inscribed on international ones rather than at odds with them or different from them? that may be more of an amendment to his thesis than professor masuda is willing to permit, but if this question -- if all of my questions are meant to be searching it's because the arguments of "cold war crucible" are so brit yantly unsettling and i must say i look forward eagerly to professor masuda's next project, whatever it is. thank you. >> thank you. [ applause ]

>> would you like to take a few minutes to respond. >> sure. [ laughter ] >> then we can open it up. >> lots of good questions. >> usually i'm a very slow thinker. i need time and usually i'm good at coming up with good answers like tonight or tomorrow night. [ laughter ] but i'll try to answer questions. so thank you first of all for your questions and points. one is about technology and the second one teach iing and third are long term culpability. the first one, technology. actually, at the time of this

project it has a chapter on technology and cultural stuff, but i didn't do -- include it in this time in this project for two reasons. one is obviously there has been quite a lot of work done on this topic. and the second, if i focus on technology and the radio, usually scholars focus on maybe i have to focus on their -- of course creator, sender of information rather than the receiver of the information. but in my book, my focus is more like receiver side so if i can focus on technology and, for instance, the radio stuff, it's more to focus on the receiver side.

yeah, this time, yeah, i didn't include. probably i could have made another border to the argument if i included this because i do think that many of -- studies are focusing on propaganda, radio europe or stuff foe cushion so much on the produceable propaganda and but that doesn't look at how it works. but i think propaganda, the new technology works when only the receiver decides to accept it. so it would be great if i can find more sources on how people

used the new technology or how people use the radio but, yeah, that may be my future. how should we teach the cold war? that's a difficult one, too. but this one, let me slightly change this question more about why study hisry. because this question, i think, will connect to more fundamental questions about why we study history. and the reason i am saying this is i think we are observing some shift over the -- this is in my opinion, but a shift over the meaning of the studying of history or teaching of history, that is i think in the 20th century, maybe until the '60s,

of course, we can more confidently say we study history because we can listen and learn from the past. but i think this kind of claim is, in my opinion, getting more and more difficult and to me it's more important thing to ask why particular sets of fact remain as history and why another particular set of facts are not included in history. so in other words there is always the politics of inclusion and exclusion in history. so i think we are more and more conscious about not just lessons of history but more conscious about the politics of history and the politics of reality making. so that's why i think that

connects to my main topic of the book, what is the cold war, what is history and what is reality. so i think what we can teach in the classroom is, well, it's kind of undermining our teacher or historian standpoint but i think what we can teach to our students is more like to say do not believe history so much and think about yourself and what kind of history and why particular narrative appears in the books. so i think teaching the cold war is really really good opportunity to talk about political reality and politics of history instead of just narrating what happened in the past. i think that's kind of -- that

shift we have been observing in the past several decades in the field of history, i think. and third, whether my approach can be used like other periods or can we take a longer perspective. i think that's another book project probably, i don't know. hopefully my fourth or fifth project because i already have a second and third project. but saying this is here in "cold war crucible" i raised sort of the new perspective to look at the cold war, to look at the cold war from a social point of view, political ideological

point of view. i think this can be the applicable entire 20th century and of course we usually think of world war ii more like a war between freedom and fascism but i think a reason -- recent studies have found even though the ideology was different, freedom, totalitarianism, what both societies are doing is quite similar in terms of total war mobile saigizationmobilizat warfare and welfare state in societies. so i think we have a reason to see like world war ii period, not just from political ideological perspective but from the total war perspective and

the reason i talked about this is i'm wonder iing we can look 20th century not just political ideological perspective but as a struggle between globalization and grass-roots conservatism in many parts of the world. and i think cold war and this project fit into the middle point of this long story of the early stage of globalization in the early 20th century from the spread of immigrants and the beginning of immigrant movement in many parts of the world and i think this sort of wave of globalization on the one hand and the local grass-roots backlash more like social

conservative backlash in many parts of the ward can be seen through -- throughout 20th century. in this way i think maybe we can explain better what's happening since 1990s. the rise of ethnic conflict. religious wars. so manyover them can be looked at as a wave of globalization and grass-roots conservatism. so i think the core perspective i suggested in my book might be applicab applicable to 20th censurery history. that's my fifth book project.

and professor rotter, thank you very much. yeah, latin america and africa. of course i'm more specialist in southeast asia a little by but for europe and africa i used secondary sources, of course. the reason i mentioned latin america and africa has less the cold war phenomena is they were fighting like -- granting has argued, they have argued -- they have fighting much longer battle, like centuries of revolution so it's not really cold war battle but it's more like the -- i think we can

explain better in terms of decolonization when we talk about latin america or africa. so that's why i didn't include america and africa as the stage of stage of cold war world in the early '50s but i agree that the people who were there adapt it had cold war narrative in the 1960s, especially after the cuban revolutions i think the mechanism of this adaptation in the late '50s and '60s is probably different from the mechanism of the late '40s and early 50s. korea, yeah. with korea, the situation is not very clear and that's -- but

maybe i should have thought about the title of the book a little more. but many people think this is the -- this is a korean war book, which it's not. many people think of this as korean war book and actually amazon.com categorized this book as military history of korea war history, which is not so much. not at all. so of course when i say korea, it's -- i'm not talking about the korean military history of korea at -- itself. i don't talk about korea almost at all. when i say about key yarks it's more like korean war period so it's the 1950, 1953. so so for me it's more of a

signifier not geography. so after publishing this book and after seeing some of the reactions for months, i should have put the title of something like this maybe this is not a good one but i have another possible title that means cold war fantasy how ordinary people created post war world. this might be much closer to my book rather than korean conflict in the post-war world. but any wway but, yeah, for you

other point, the other jgin -- oh, did you talk about the difference zpsh. >> the various movements. >> right, right. but japan and -- >> it's a very different political culture. >> right, right. >> emphasizing the difference rather than commonality. did you want to speak to that? >> sure. yes, of course, i agree that there were a lot of differencs,s prc, of course, the communist part y party and their regime is so different. but, still, think maybe we are a

little bit overemphasizing the differences. i mean, of course prc was strong but not as strong as we imagined today so the communist party, of course become almost the -- really strong in late '50s. at the time of the korean war there were lots and lots of sort of anti- -- ccd movements or actions in china and is not particularly strong. that forces them to look at their society and to look at popular attitude. so in that sense even communist regime in the sense that even

communist regimes looked at popular attitudes, they are similar to what politicians did in japan or u.s. so of course the degree of -- the degree that politicians pay attention to, popular attitude, may be different but what they are doing in essence i think is quite a similar -- that's why i treated them more like an equal rather than discussing separate. but thank you very much for your very good questions. >> let's open it up to the floor for some questions and if you could wait for a microphone to come to you and introduce yourself and keep your questions short and to the point. we'll take them in groups of three and you can respond together. so i guess over here?

>> is. >> my name is steven shore. i felt somewhat disturbed by the unintentional equivalence between -- that i found in your thesis between one side of the cold war and the other. for example, mentioning it is an intellectual construct. any way of looking at the world is by definition an intellectual construct. but i felt it implied that it was a perceptions but that wasn't there in reality when i think in reality of the cold war was that one side was clearly freer than the other and to call repression things as dispirit as opposition to the labor party in the uk and mccarthyism in the united states with the killings of millions of people be the prc and to a lesser extent in vietnam and yugoslavia as equivalent struck me as really

torturous. granted people suffered under mccarthyism but it wasn't like being denounced by ones neighbors and put to death. >> any other questions people would like to throw out now that professor masuda could responsibility? >> i'm afraid it's not a question, it's also a comment. i'm milton lightenberg, school of public policy. i spent 50 years of my life studying the strategic arms race and the cold war and i just couldn't accept your construct at all from the very base. i wonder what stalin would think of the notion of an imagined reality or everybody in east europe from 1945 to 1950. that's preposterous.

secondly you began by saying that stalin was not president person who started the war and one doesn't have to use that cartoon. outside there's the cold war international history project volume 8. i don't know if that's the one in the papers but i would even criticize charles krauss's lines where he says that this was only due to kim's pleading and it wasn't an initiative of stalin. of course he could plead to the end of time unless stalin said okay there would have been no korean war. the soviet command wrote the invasion plan. the soviet union supplied the weapons for five months. stalin convinced the chinese to supply land support if it would come to that pass. the soviet air force flew. we thought of perhaps in certain

circumstances there was extensive discussion whether we would use "tactical nuclear weapons" which in those days were not very tactical. if you don't think that's real, i'm sorry, i don't live in your world. >> just to make it an even three. i just want to ask going on because the idea of the korean war as a catalyst and particularly to the degree that it struck the imagination about a potential world war iii, did the fact that -- and i'm saying this because going back to berlin and greece and some of the other early events that we generally consider cold war, there was no contemplation of using atomic weapons and that

what i'm suggesting and would like you to comment on is that in suggesting or contemplating using atomic weapons in korea it really brought back the deepest fears of world war ii. >> okay, so, yeah thank you very much for giving me a very candid opini straightforward opinion. the first one. of course degree -- i understand degree of violence is different, of cours in prc. more than, like, one million people, another million people put in prison.

so where mccarthyism maybe you can argue, like one or two died but it's not like millions or killing so of course i agree, but i'm not talking about degree of violence. i'm talking about -- more about pattern which we can see in the development or practice of this phenomena. that is that everyday peoples, ordinary people's participation and use of this cold war west, east confrontation to solve their own local conflicts so what i'm looking at here is more about similar pattern which is appear in china and the u.s. of course we usually think separation will of counterrevolutionary in china as

communist parties and political separation. that's our understanding but when we look at our local documents and when we look at the documents of, for instance, the beijing association they adapted this separation of counterrevolutionaries in their programs. but what they really did in their practice was more like they're solving their daily programs such as the slogan what they did was do not cheat customers or do not pee inside or outside or something like that. so what they really did was more likely used a grand narrative for their own purpose, local purposes and very similar to

what we can see, the victims of separation counterrevolutions are very varied, very, very diverse. so if this separation is communist separation over nationalist sympathizers the victims should be more like a a businessman or intellectual and so on. but what we can see in the statistics like in the execution which i found the shanghai municipal archives, that is very -- well, yeah, i shouldn't be happy to find such a list of executions. but there was a list of executions like name, age, occupation, and we can see what kind of people are executed in the separation of

counterrevolutionary movements and what we can see in this list of execution is not just land road or bunkers or those people but more like gangs or members of religious sects or members of secret societies or the owner -- the owner or even prostitutes and so on, so on. so here's -- when we look at the subject -- such a diversity in the list of executions, maybe we need it in thinking of just a political separation by communist party. and i think many ordinary people also participated and used this violence in order to make the

order at the home. so that's why i compare these very different violence in the u.s. and china. so here, again, what i'm talking about so here, again, what i am talking about is not the real violence. what i am talking about is more the -- over these. thank you. yeah. we look at the shift very differently. that's very much the point i am making. there was a famous -- professor at university of japanese history.

something on -- i don't remember. doesn't know anything about japanese history. their answer, very interestingly. he wants to write history in the way different form of japanese historian. what i want to say is -- different over here is very different.