Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989

University of Virginia historian Von Eschen (Satchmo Blows Up the World) delivers a scattershot study of how the end of the Cold War brought about “a powerful sense of loss and longing for stability, status, and the predictability of everyday life” in the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and other countries. She convincingly argues that the West’s understanding that capitalism had “won” the Cold War contributed to a sense of “triumphalism” that resulted in insufficient responses to the Bosnian and Rwandan massacres and forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Less persuasive is Von Eschen’s argument that America’s Cold War nostalgia was rooted in a longing for an era when “people trusted government to provide such agreed-on necessities as quality public education and affordable health care,” which overlooks the Reagan administration’s dismantling of the social safety net. Elsewhere, Von Eschen unconvincingly claims that the loss of Eastern bloc adversaries “emboldened” American conservatives to place “the onus for systemic racism on oppressed people of color,” and cites the closing of a James Bond–themed restaurant in Berlin as evidence that Western nostalgia for the Cold War is “jealous” and “defensive” and can’t match the “melancholy allure” of Eastern nostalgia. In its eagerness to puncture U.S. hubris and spotlight the virtues of socialism, this revisionist history misfires. (June)