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By David J. Craig

	William Keylor Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

In 1976 the international pages of American newspapers were dominated by stories about Pol Pot’s ascension as ruler of Cambodia, the implications of Mao Tse-tung’s death, and Lebanon’s civil war. There wasn’t much coverage of the decade-long struggle that began that year between Morocco and Algeria for control of the Western Sahara, which William Keylor calls one of the “longest and most intractable territorial disputes in postcolonial Africa.” The CAS history and international relations professor says the reason is in part because Western journalists during the Cold War tended to slight events that didn’t have implications for U.S.-Soviet relations. That bias, he says, is shared by historians today.

In his new book, A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945 (Oxford University Press), Keylor devotes a section to the struggle for the Western Sahara. He describes how upon Spain’s departure from the area, its indigenous people were shut out of official talks to decide their future, and how the United States and France helped Morocco, which controls the territory today, suppress independence movements. The account is just one example of Keylor’s attempt in A World of Nations to carefully treat events that he says get short shrift in many popular history texts.

“ When you start digging into 20th-century world history, you realize that there are lots of stories that haven’t been told,” says Keylor, who directs BU’s International History Institute. “Many of the stories are known to specialists in a particular niche of history but haven’t been told in general works, which tend to focus on the superpowers and assume that all important conflicts in the second half of the 20th century were an extension of U.S.-Soviet relations. Some of them were, of course. But there are plenty of other shows in town.”

In the shadow

Keylor’s decision to treat regional conflicts on their own terms in A World of Nations as well as provide an exhaustive overview of post–World War II diplomatic history results in a 450-page book of startling scope. Aimed at educated laypeople, advanced undergraduates, and graduate students, the book is decidedly readable and free of academic jargon. Moreover, its 13 chapters — on broad topics such as Europe’s ideological divisions, Latin American revolutions, African independence movements, and the Middle East peace process — are organized neatly into two-to-three-page sections that make it useful as a reference source.

Few survey texts of its kind, Keylor says, provide detailed accounts of conflicts that took place in the shadow of the Cold War, such as the one surrounding the formation of Malaysia in the early 1960s. It involved Indonesian raids against the young country between 1963 and 1965, and according to Keylor, was “an extremely important conflict” that threatened to destabilize southeast Asia. He says the crisis is rarely discussed today, and poorly understood.

History texts also commonly breeze over inter-Arab tensions, like that between U.S.-backed Iraq and left-leaning Syria and Egypt before the Iraqi revolution of 1958, he says. The crisis gets several thousand words in the book, which presents evidence that the Eisenhower administration inadvertently stoked pan-Arabism in Middle Eastern nations by threatening to use force to combat communism there, even though the Soviet Union had little influence in the region. “By 1958 the Middle East had therefore split along Cold War lines . . . ” writes Keylor. “It was not long before the increasingly tense political situation in the region exploded in a chain reaction of political instability with far-reaching consequences.”

New twist

A World of Nations also draws on Soviet and Chinese intelligence documents disclosed since the Soviet Union’s collapse. Keylor, who has taught at BU since 1972 and is the author of five books, says such materials have dramatically improved historians’ understanding of Cold War–era diplomacy, but that the insights generally have not filtered down to popular history texts.

Best known for his writings on 20th-century France and the Cold War, Keylor scoured hundreds of secondary sources that drew heavily on the one-time confidential documents, and integrated their lessons into fresh overviews of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other Cold War hot topics. His book argues, for instance, that the Soviet Union helped prepare North Korea to invade South Korea — just as early Korean War scholarship suggested, but later histories attempted to refute. Similarly, A World of Nations postulates that the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive of 1968 was not “the brilliant military success” it is generally perceived to have been. Rather, the huge casualties suffered by the North during the campaign crippled its military for years, even while the fighting’s intensity bolstered opposition to the war in the United States and sent the Johnson administration into disarray.

The key to advancing understanding of events that have been the subject of countless written histories, Keylor says, is simple. “You have to open yourself up to all possibilities, weigh the evidence, and then bite the bullet and make the best critical judgment you can make,” he says. He regards ideologically charged academic work as a “terrible threat” to knowledge. “I have a very deeply felt conviction,” Keylor says, “which some of my colleagues may find naive, that honest and genuine historians can move toward historical truth.”

17 October 2003
Boston University
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