The Cold War and Countercultural Origins of Globalization

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to describe how the crises of nation-centric paradigm during the post–World War 2 period had led to the formation of neoliberal globalization. The United States and Soviet Union at least since the 1950s faced similar crisis of nation-state and national economy and most importantly the crisis of modern vision of human life and society. While this crisis development had its own characteristics in both countries defined by the historical legacy as well as by different patterns of capitalist and socialist modernization, it required a similar solution: a transition from nation-centric paradigm to globalization. To this end, it was crucial to reconsider the very foundations of social order that were formed during Roosevelt New Deal in the United States and Stalin's modernization in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The challenge of the 1960s counterculture and 1970s economic recession in the USA had eventually led to formation of neoliberal and postmodern paradigms that laid basis for the capitalist globalization. At the same time, the Soviet authorities failed to reconsider nation-centric legacy of Stalin period in a proper way to promote its own version of socialist globalization that had eventually led to the collapse of the USSR and its integration into global capitalism.