The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Suggested reading

Weeks (1999, Chs 5 and 8).

Cold War The period of international diplo-

matic, political and military rivalry between

the United States of America (USA) and the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR),

conventionally understood as lasting from the

end of the Second World War in 1945 to the

fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As with other

periods of international transformation, the

Cold War is subject to a variety of different inter-

pretations, each highlighting different causes.

The conventional historiography of the

Cold War understands the period as one of

realistgeopolitics, in which the balance of

power and spheres of influence were historical

necessities (Halle, 1991). Although allies dur-

ing the defeat of Nazi Germany, the USA

and the USSR approached the postwar order

with different visions, the USA backing a

market-oriented liberal order (seecapitalism;

democracy), while the USSR sought friendly

regimes on its borders and the spread of

communism internationally. At the 1945

Yalta summit, President Roosevelt, General

Secretary Stalin and Prime Minister

Churchill outlined plans for zones ofmilitary

occupationin defeated Germany, with the

liberated territories to be democratic. But with

Soviet forces occupying the east and the allies

dominant in the west,europewas divided by

what Churchill called an ‘Iron Curtain’. This

produced two competing military alliances –

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO, est. 1949) organized by the USA in

the west, and the Warsaw Pact (est. 1955),

dominated by the Soviets in the east, with

the former seeking to contain or roll back

the latter.

These ‘ideological blocs’ (see ideology)

became the basis for the organization of inter-

national politics for more than 40 years, with

their enmity symbolized by the nuclear arms

race and materialized in a number of global

events, including the building of the Berlin

Wall in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of

1962, amongst many others. Although many

flashpoints were in Europe, the Cold War was

a global geopolitical formation that produced

the ‘third world’ as a non-aligned group of

states that declined to side with either the

‘First World’ (the USA and its allies) or the

‘Second World’ (the USSR and its allies).

Although the Cold War did not erupt into

direct ‘hot’warbetween the two superpowers,

there were numerous proxy conflicts between

their allies, largely inafricaandasia, often

piggybacking on indigenous struggles, in

which millions perished. The enmity between

the blocs was eased by diplomacy, especially

the period of ‘de ́tente’ in the 1970s, and ended

by the early 1990s when a variety of forces

intersected to remove the Soviet hold over

eastern Europe and the eventual demise of

the USSR as a superpower.

Revisionist accounts of the Cold War have

detailed the economic forces driving American

expansionism, with the conflictualimagina-

tive geographiesof capitalism and commun-

ism having existed prior to the geopolitics of

the post-Second World War era. Perspectives

fromcritical geopolitics(e.g. Campbell,

1998; Glassman, 2005) argue that the Cold

War was a discursive formation as much as a

geopolitical condition. This ‘architecture of

enmity’ (Shapiro, 1997) materialized political

identities that have survived the demise of the

Soviet Union and helped constitute new

enemies. dca

Suggested reading

Gaddis (2006); Gregory (2004b).

collective consumption Basic public ser-

vices such as schools, health services and util-

ities, usually provided by thestate, which

facilitate or enable the reproduction of labour

power (Castells, 1977) (seesocial reproduc-

tion). The notion of collective consumption

developed within Marxist urban theory, with

the spheres of production (of goods and ser-

vices) and labour reproduction as defining

elements (Pinch, 1989). It is an effort, there-

fore, to theorize social relations in capitalist

space; specifically, the means by which labour

is reproduced ‘on a daily and intergenerational

basis’ (Pinch, 1989, p. 47). Castells (1977)

identified collective consumption as the basis

for a framework for the analysis of labour

reproduction in a specific sphere of social

and spatial life, that of the urban (Saunders,

1986, p. 172). According to Castells’ (1977)

framework, since housing, recreational and

health facilities, for example, are provided to

people in specific locations on the basis of

their collective use, investigation of collective

consumption constitutes a fixed territorial set-

ting for empirical analysis (Saunders, 1986).

Thus, Castells (1977) argued that he had

identified a specifically urban space with the

specification of the labour reproductive and

collective consumption processes. However,

these processes do not occur exclusively in

urbanplaces, and the challenges of reproduc-

tion and collective consumption are also evident

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 93 31.3.2009 9:45pm

COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION