The Download of the Week is Unlimited War and Social Change: Unpacking the Cold War's Impact by Mary L. Dudziak. Here is the abstract:
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This paper is a draft chapter of a short book critically examining the way assumptions about the temporality of war inform American legal and political thought. In earlier work, I show that a set of ideas about time are a feature of the way we think about war. Historical progression is thought to consist in movement from one kind of time to another (from wartime to peacetime, to wartime, etc.). Wartime is thought of as an exception to normal life, inevitably followed by peacetime. Scholars who study the impact of war on American law and politics tend to work within this framework, viewing war as exceptional. This conception of war does not capture the predominant nature of American war, at least since World War II, characterized not by cataclysmic battles and great military victories, but by “small wars,” surveillance, and stalemate.
The ambiguity of the Cold War might have signaled that the conventional categories no longer fit – that wartime and peacetime coexisted or had melted together. But rather than viewing the Cold War years as rupturing the older categories of war and peace, contemporary thinkers find ways to fit the experiences of that era into pre-existing conceptual boxes. The Cold War becomes for some writers a “wartime,” complete with a dramatic ending.
This paper examines historical and contemporary thinking about the Cold War. Turning to scholarship on war and rights, my focus is not on the way particular rights or lines of case law develop, but instead on the way writers conceptualize the world within which rights are framed. Ultimately I argue that a wartime frame persists in our thinking about the Cold War, and this obscures our understanding of the impact of war on domestic law and politics. It reinforces the idea that war is a discreet historical experience, and that “peacetime” is the norm, when instead ongoing limited war has become the American experience. The years of the Cold War are one moment in a longer pattern of ongoing war.
And from the paper:
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To fully grasp the impact of war on rights in this era, we need to see it as this double- layered phenomenon, in which the imaginary (World War III and the idea of Soviet domination)103 drives the cultural reaction as much or more so than the state of any particular battle. The homefront experience comes from the way war touches everyday Americans.104 While this is tied to the deployment and deaths of loved ones, it comes also from the way the story of a war is told, the way it is understood on the street corner. Long before the Cold War, the U.S. government understood this dynamic, and worked to create favorable wartime domestic climates. During Korea and other wars along the periphery of American global power, the domestic culture and politics of war has been more important to law and rights at home than what happened in any foxhole.
With the U.S. government public relations apparatus and political elites working to convince the American public that Korea’s importance lay in the broader Cold War struggle, it is not surprising that this hot war’s impact has been collapsed within a longer, colder conflict. Korea’s importance for examining social change and limited war is that it helps us to focus on the dynamic that would drive domestic reaction to war through the rest of the century. From Korea, to Vietnam, to Iraq, and to the forgotten stops along the way, the “war” that affects rights during the Cold War era and after is not the war of Clauswitz, but the war of Paul Virilio. What matters is not dynamics on the battlefield, but the perceptions of war at home.
Highly recommended.