New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War

Why pay so much attention to Albania? Can it seriously be maintained that this smallest, poorest, most isolated, most Balkan, most primitive of all the East European communist states has played any significant independent role in the continuing struggle between the two Communist giants? In my view it can, nor is this the first time it has been true. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. To many students of the Cold War, it may appear that despite the abundant new documentation we have on the period from recently opened Communist archives, there is remarkably little original to be said in terms of rethinking the basic categories by which we conceptualize that epic struggle. To be sure, the evidence that is now emerging is frequently fascinating, often giving us surprising new insights into why events occurred as they did. And it is natural that scholars would want to use this information to settle accounts in terms of who got it right and who did not in the voluminous writing already published on the period. Yet in terms of the analytical frameworks that explain the basic dynamic of the contest, little has changed.