Penny M. Von Eschen. Paradoxes of Nostalgia

In Paradoxes of Nostalgia, Penny Von Eschen provides a kaleidoscopic critique of US foreign policy and culture in the post–Cold War era, one that is colorful, wide-ranging, and multifaceted, but also one that leaves the world beyond its many fascinating fractals less than clear. She begins with a conviction that is both powerful and, at this point, widely shared in the academic community: that the United States was so intoxicated with the validation of victory in the Cold War that it refused the opportunity presented by the collapse of communism to fundamentally rethink its national identity, foreign policy, and the international order as a whole in the early 1990s. Rather than embrace calls from visionaries like Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel, and Nelson Mandela to replace the Cold War with “a new world order based on multilateral cooperation and demilitarization” (12), Von Eschen contends that US leaders instead took both inspiration and fear from Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” According to “the convoluted logic of Cold War triumphalism” that soon emerged, “(white) Americans [were] a morally superior, if not chosen people who [had] vanquished communism,” but they were also “potential victims always vulnerable to outside threats” (302). This contradictory mélange formed the cultural foundation on which the US post–Cold War experience of forever wars, social and economic alienation, post-truth politics, rising populism, and eventually insurrection was built.

Cold war · Political science · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies