Introduction: The Spatial Turn in Cold War Studies

The limitations of these two dominant paradigms became increasingly apparent by the late 1980s and early 1990s, as newly declassified archival materials and post-Cold War geopolitical shifts revealed the profound role of spatial ordering in structuring the global conflict. Traditional great power political narratives, which framed the Cold War as a linear, Eurocentric confrontation between two superpowers negotiating spheres of influence through summit diplomacy, nuclear brinkmanship, and proxy wars, treated geopolitical space as a static, given container for political action. These accounts, while invaluable for reconstructing the chronology of crises from the Berlin Blockade to the Cuban Missile Crisis, systematically marginalized the experiences of the Global South, reducing non-Western societies to passive battlegrounds for superpower competition rather than active agents shaping the spatial order of the Cold War. Social history narratives of the 1970s and 1980s corrected this bias by centering the experiences of ordinary people, social movements, and non-state actors: from anti-nuclear protesters in the United States and Western Europe to anti-colonial liberation movements in Africa and Asia, from dissident intellectuals in the Eastern Bloc to civil rights activists framing domestic racial justice as part of a global struggle against imperialism. Yet even these pathbreaking works rarely treated space itself as an active variable in the conflict, instead taking pre-existing national and continental boundaries as unproblematic backdrops against which social and political action unfolded.

The Intellectual Roots of the Spatial Turn in Cold War Studies

The “spatial turn” that reshaped Cold War historiography from the 1990s onward drew on three overlapping intellectual traditions, each of which challenged the taken-for-granted status of geopolitical boundaries in Cold War analysis. The first emerged from critical human geography, particularly the work of French theorist Henri Lefebvre, whose 1974 *The Production of Space* laid the conceptual groundwork for analyzing space as a socially constructed, politically contested product rather than a neutral physical container. Lefebvre’s tripartite framework of spatial production distinguishes three interconnected layers of space: (1) *spatial practice*, the everyday, perceived space of ordinary life (e.g., the streets of divided Berlin, the rice paddies of the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone); (2) *representations of space*, the abstract, planned space designed and enforced by state and military elites (e.g., the military demarcation lines carved by the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the export control zones of the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or CoCom[^1]); and (3) *spaces of representation*, the lived, experienced space where ordinary people contest, subvert, and reappropriate the spatial orders imposed by power. For Cold War studies, this framework provided a tool to move beyond treating boundaries as fixed lines on a map, and instead analyze them as dynamic products of ideological and political struggle.

The second intellectual tradition came from the study of borders and borderlands, a field that expanded dramatically in the 1990s as scholars turned attention to the “borderlands” of the Cold War—not just the Iron Curtain dividing Europe, but the DMZ in Korea, the 17th parallel in Vietnam, the Green Line in Cyprus, and the ideological fault lines running through Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Unlike earlier studies that framed borders as passive lines of separation, borderland studies highlighted their role as sites of both conflict and exchange: the Berlin Wall was not just a barrier to movement, but a site of smuggling, dissident communication, and ideological performance, where East German border guards and West Berlin protesters negotiated the meaning of “freedom” and “security” on a daily basis. The third tradition emerged from Cold War cultural studies, which demonstrated that the conflict was as much a battle for hearts and minds as it was a military standoff: from Voice of America radio broadcasts to Soviet propaganda films, from CIA-funded abstract art exhibitions to Chinese model opera performances, cultural production was a core tool for drawing and contesting the cognitive boundaries of the Cold War order.

> [📱 电子版侧边栏：核心术语解释] > 空间转向（Spatial Turn）：1990年代兴起于人文社会科学的跨学科思潮，核心主张是“空间不是被动的社会活动容器，而是被权力关系不断生产、同时反过来塑造社会关系的能动性变量”。这一思潮被历史学、政治学、社会学、文化研究等学科吸收，彻底改变了学者对冷战、殖民主义、全球化等进程的分析方式。 > 经互会（Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, Comecon）：1949年苏联主导成立的社会主义国家经济合作组织，是冷战时期与西方布雷顿森林体系并列的两大全球经济秩序核心，通过计划经济协调成员国的贸易、投资和技术合作，是冷战经济边界的核心载体。

Core Research Framework: Ideology as the Primary Variable of Spatial Division

This book builds on these intellectual traditions to advance a central argument that has been underdeveloped in existing Cold War scholarship: ideology was not merely a rhetorical tool used by superpowers to justify pursuit of material interests, but the core variable driving the division and ordering of global geopolitical space during the Cold War. This argument pushes back against two dominant, competing interpretations of Cold War spatial order. The first, rooted in classical realist international relations theory, frames all Cold War boundary-making as a product of material power competition: the 38th parallel dividing Korea, the 17th parallel dividing Vietnam, and the Inner German border dividing Europe were all presented as pragmatic, temporary compromises between the United States and the Soviet Union, with ideology serving only as a post-hoc justification for spheres of influence carved out by military and economic power. The second, rooted in post-colonial studies, frames Cold War spatial order as a direct continuation of European imperial boundary-making, with the superpowers simply redrawing colonial borders to suit their own interests, leaving Global South societies with no agency in the process.

Both interpretations miss the distinctively ideological logic of Cold War spatial ordering. To take the example of the Inner German border: the 1945 Potsdam Conference agreement to divide Germany into four occupation zones was indeed a pragmatic compromise born of military necessity, as the Allied powers could not agree on a unified post-war German government. But the transformation of that temporary occupation boundary into a permanent, militarized border sealed with a concrete wall in 1961 was not driven by material power competition alone. For the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its Soviet backers, the border was a necessary defense of the socialist project: East Germany’s leadership framed West Germany as a “revanchist, fascist state” that sought to undermine the socialist transformation of the East, and the border was presented as a “anti-fascist protective rampart” shielding East Germans from capitalist exploitation. For the United States and its Western European allies, the border was framed as a line of defense for the “free world” against Soviet totalitarianism, and West Berlin was deliberately cultivated as a “showcase of capitalism” to demonstrate the superiority of the Western system to Eastern Bloc citizens. The physical boundary between East and West Germany was thus not just a product of power balancing, but a materialization of competing ideological claims about what a just, modern society should look like.

This ideological logic extended even to boundaries that had no basis in pre-existing cultural or geographic divisions. The CoCom export control regime, for example, drew a “boundary” between the “West” and the “East” that had no geographic logic: Cuba, located 90 miles from the U.S. coast, was placed in the same “enemy” export control zone as China, located on the other side of the Eurasian continent, while Yugoslavia, a socialist state that broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, was gradually removed from the CoCom lis