“I don’t believe in seeking distance from your own time”. A talk with Odd Arne Westad about the limits of the Cold War and the challenges of Popular History

Abstract

Odd Arne Westad is a historian whose work largely focuses on the Cold War as well as on Chinese and East Asian history. He is best known as a key voice of ‘new Cold War history’, an expanding field which, since the turn of the century, has sought to interpret the Cold War through an approach described by Westad as “multiarchival in research”, “multipolar in analysis” and “multicultural in its ability to understand different and sometimes opposing mindsets”. Shortly after the launch of Arne Westad’s latest book, The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017), Rui Lopes interviewed him about the ways in which each era’s external conditions affect historians and their subjects. They discussed the challenges of both engaging with the past through the lens of the present and engaging with the present through the lens of the past.