Professor Keylor’s chapter on ‘the second Cold War in Europe’ appears in “The Regional Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East”
Professor William Keylor has contributed a chapter to a just published book titled “The Regional Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Edited by Professor Lorenz Luethi of McGill University, the book includes chapters by eminent historians on the major regions of the world that were drawn into the East-West conflict. Professor Keylor’s 26-page chapter, titled “The Second Cold War in Europe: The Paradoxes of a Dangerous Time,” provides an in-depth examination of the years 1978 to 1983. After the collapse of détente (during which tensions between the Communist bloc and the West had eased in the previous five years), Europe was plunged into what Keylor calls “The Second Cold War.” His chapter focuses on the deployment of a new generation of intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the Continent and heightened anxieties in both camps about the prospects of a nuclear confrontation. He shows that the threats to Soviet control of Eastern Europe during the Polish crisis of 1980-81, the rise of Euro-communism in Western Europe where Communist parties rejected Moscow’s domination, and the acute criticism of human rights abuses in the Communist bloc by the formerly anti-American, pro-Soviet intelligentsia in Western Europe, collectively posed an existential threat to the Soviet Union’s sense of security in Europe at a time that China was challenging its position in Asia. He claims that this resurgence of East-West tension in Europe, punctuated by a succession of war scares (such as the downing of a South Korean commercial airliner by Soviet defenses and the “Able Archer” simulated launch of nuclear weapons by NATO in 1983) represented the most serious threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.