Importance of the Cold War

Known as the only war where no guns were fired, the Cold War is a historical process or phenomenon of tremendous importance for understanding the reason for the events that took place during the second half of the century xx.

The elements that generated a unique historical event

The Cold War has been a long historical process generated by a myriad of causes. First of all, we must point to it as the most direct consequence of the resolution of the Second World War. In the context of a destroyed Europe and with very few winners, the powers of the United States and the Soviet Union (which, although they had participated in said war, they had not ended up as decimated as other countries) began to emerge as the leading territories in a world that was now divided into two.

Each of these countries also represented a different socioeconomic system (a capitalism ferocious versus the most radical communism, respectively), also meant two very different ways of understanding the new international context and the world as a whole.

The conflicts between two powers open a new framework of dispute

After the disaster caused by World War II, which included a tragic and cruel Holocaust, the powers that arose as the United States and the Soviet Union did not find a favorable framework to continue the confrontations warlike. For this reason, from the end of that war and its subsequent years (1950s) until the the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany in 1989 we will talk about a tense and latent conflict that could have broken out but never did.

This conflict meant the confrontation more than anything diplomatic between the two indicated powers, without assaults or warlike actions but full of suspicions, intrigues, spies and betrayals that have strongly contributed to the literature universal. It is precisely from the absence of warlike and armed conflicts that the name of this phenomenon comes from: a cold war is a war that has never exploded.

The relevance of absent warfare in the 20th century

It is impossible to think about the 20th century without thinking about the Cold War and its effects on populations around the world. Thus, the symbolic division of the planet into two camps or into two different spheres of reality has permeated the life of the social actors who, without consciously wishing to, found themselves caught up in this diplomatic struggle. Both Western and Eastern societies have suffered its effects are limitations, prohibitions, control, propaganda policy, patterns of consumption and behavior linked to the model in which he had to live and that he fervently wanted to impose on the other.

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