Title: <i>Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World</i> by Masuda Hajimu
Abstract: Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and Postwar by Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. vi, 388 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). The time has long past when 1950-1953 conflict in Korea could be called the forgotten Of course, war has never been forgotten on Korean peninsula itself, where a heavily fortified armistice line still separates two mutually hostile regimes more than sixty years after ceasefire. In China, Aid Korea, Resist America as it is called, remains a source of pride for People's Republic even if relations with both Korea and America have changed radically since war. In West, including United States that contributed by far largest number of United Nations forces to conflict (followed by Britain and Canada), scholarship and memorialization of war has recently come into its own, after decades of being overshadowed by World War II and Vietnam. Masuda Hajimu's Cold War Crucible is a unique and valuable contribution to historiography of Korean War--or more precisely, to history of Cold War and Korean War's central place in emergence of that global conflict. Masuda Hajimu, a US-trained Japanese historian based in Singapore, admits that his book is not about Korean War itself. Rather, it explores how war functioned as a catalyst in crucible of postwar and contributed to materialization of Cold War world (6). Hajimu reverses usual logic about relationship between Korea and Cold War: rather than see Korean War as an effect of emerging Cold War, Hajimu argues that Korea in important ways produced Cold War. As Bruce Cumings and others have long pointed out, Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950 justified rapid and long-lasting expansion of US forces around and hardened geopolitical lines of Cold War conflict between Soviet Union and China, on one side, and United States-led Free World, on other. But Hajimu is not primarily interested in Cold War geopolitics. He focuses instead on effects of Korean War on domestic societies in Asia, North America, and Europe. The Korean War, Hajimu claims, turned domestic societies into battlefields in which people were forced to choose sides in a global conflict expressed at local level. Cold War Crucible is interested less in geopolitical realities than in discursive imaginings. The Korean War created bipolarity within societies on both sides of East-West divide, and bipolar division of Cold War became a simplified prism for seeing a postwar, decolonizing, post-imperial whose realities were far more multi-dimensional and complex. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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