Nicholas J. Barnett. Britain’s Cold War

Over the past few decades, cultural histories of the Cold War have increased in number and popularity. While initially they focused on the cultural impacts of the Cold War on the United States, there is now a growing field of work that examines these impacts on other parts of the world, particularly Europe. The two books discussed here focus on Britain, specifically England. Neither of these volumes really engages with geographical variety within Britain; they use a vague notion of “British” that appears to be London-centric in its understanding. Nicholas J. Barnett’s Britain’s Cold War: Culture, Modernity and the Soviet Threat covers the early Cold War beginning in 1951 and ending in 1965. While there is clear discussion of why each issue or event was chosen, the overall reason for this chronology is somewhat obscure. Barnett’s chapters are largely organized chronologically around key events. He argues that the Cold War should not be seen as a “single line of continuity” but instead explores “a number of moments where interest or tensions were raised in the conflict with the Eastern Bloc” (240). These include the period between the Berlin blockade and the death of Stalin, the testing of thermonuclear weapons in 1954, the “thaw” between the death of Stalin and the Hungarian uprising as well as the uprising itself, the advancements in Soviet space technology, including the launching of Sputnik and Laika, and the rise of antinuclear activism. The first five chapters have a specific temporal focus, while the latter four are more wide-ranging in their coverage. The main focus of Barnett’s book is on the British perception of the “other” of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He argues that we need to move away from seeing the Cold War in strictly binary terms, providing a range of examples of British individuals and groups who challenged this view. Each chapter explores a particular issue or event through cultural products, including a number of key novels, press coverage, visual representations from photojournalists and political cartoonists, letters to newspapers and members of Parliament, and advertisements within the press. The novels chosen are deliberately outside of the usual Cold War canon, but it is perhaps his use of visual media that adds the most unique material to the existing historiography. Barnett argues that “Cold War attitudes were not unique to the conflict but were informed by other features of British society such as masculinity, family, religion, nation, social democracy and humanitarianism,” attempting to put British Cold War cultural history within a wider frame (20).

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