A New Cold War?

As the geo-political situation in Ukraine hots up, many in the media have begun to claim that this is the start of a new Cold War. If this were the case Britain’s position would be less certain than previously, with a huge amount of Russian investment in the City. Whilst the Russian sell-off of state resources in the 1990s largely excluded foreign owners, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world and the global economy is much more integrated than it was in the late Twentieth Century. Many might suggest that this would prevent a hot war – in the same way that they claimed the threat of mutual assured destruction did so last time round. But there is nothing to prevent the political brinkmanship and obvious differences in ideologies that characterised ‘the Cold War’.

Britain’s position in any new Cold War hinges on its economy, which is heavily centred on global finance and ever increasing property prices. The mass seizure of Russian owned property seems laughable and could cause more trouble to Britain in terms of loss of wealth than it might to Russia. Would Belgravia mansions be seized? How about the Independent? Surely not Chelsea football club! Britain as a member of the G7 (as it then was and as it soon might be) encouraged the mass sell-offs which were funded by Russian state-money loaned to its former party apparatchiks. These same people now dominate the housing market in London. They regularly spend millions on a single home and own chains of rented houses (perhaps economic sanctions would see new affordability of London homes). Little wonder that The Onion published a post from an imagined Putin thanking the West for being ‘so cool about everything‘. The folly of neo-liberal triumphalism has cut off the option of engaging in Brinkmanship.

However, this does not necessarily mean that we are not involved in a ‘new’ Cold War, albeit one waged against a Russian rival as opposed to a communist one. The geo-political posturing that characterised the first Cold War (or Cold Wars depending on your definition) was just one aspect of a multi-faceted conflict that appeared to define an era. Culture, society and domestic politics all played a role in ensuring that Russian-style communism would lack appeal in the UK. The weapons of the Cold War were not only the Polaris missiles that were ready to be fired from Britain’s submarine fleet. Books like George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), journalists like the Observer’s Edward Crankshaw, and films like Our Man in Havana (1959) carried the predominant anti-soviet messages of British society and helped to wage the Cold War in Britain and abroad. Indeed even Britain’s welfare system might be argued to have been designed to lessen the appeal of Soviet communism.

The current crisis has not yet have become embedded enough to cause a repeat of the cultural and political mobilisation of the first Cold War. Yet it has caused people to ask ‘will there be a new Cold War?’ For many that is as much a declaration of Cold War as is needed.

Nick Barnett