Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence
Author(s)
Connelly, Matthew
Abstract
Matthew Connelly critiques the tendency of scholars to analyze imperialism as either discourse or elite decision-making. The result of doing so, he argues, is that an arbitrary distinction is drawn between imperalism’s cultural and its political and economic elements. Instead, Connelly asserts, both approaches must be used to understand the nature and extent of critical issues such as decolonization. He makes that case through an analysis of Algeria’s War for Independence that reveals how ideas and imagery of modernization and conflicts among civilizations shaped policy debates among French and American elites. While these discourses were intended to consolidate Western authority, Connellly demonstrates that they ultimately proved divisive and self-defeating. Indeed, he shows that Algerian nationalists managed to harness them to their own agendas. More generally, Connelly argues that the specter of North-South conflict preoccupied policymakers at a time when most historians assume that they viewed the world only through a “Cold War lens.” By reexamining the period through different optics, he contends, scholars can see how and why people in the First and Third Worlds began to reject “us versus them” dichotomies that did not effectively represent their lived experiences. Connelly’s thought-provoking essay makes a persuasive case for the need to de-center the Cold War in post-World War II diplomatic history and to bring together diplomatic history and postcolonial studies.
