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In hindsight the Cold War was an elaborate confection, a set of institutionally carried Manichean comparisons, which served to legitimate the military division of Europe into two camps. The Cold War comprised a set of mutually directed institutionally carried actions and claims which assisted the control exercised by respective lead nations over their territories; such activities/claims involved diplomacy, economy, politics, the military and culture. Thus, in respect of culture, the division of Europe into blocs was accompanied by an elaborate system of bloc-think, the creation of two sets of mutual characterizations and two sets of domestic discipline: overt, with politicians, soldiers and policemen, and covert, with propaganda, official deceit and the apparatus of low-level subversion and spying, with the one celebrating liberal democracy, the other state socialism. In the West, and thus in Britain, some elements of these activities became familiar parts of the public sphere, sometimes serious, thus, say, reactions to the construction of the Berlin Wall, and at others less so, thus the vogue for spy novels and later films, but, in all, the Cold War entered popular consciousness as variously expressed Manichean division. Now, decades later, it is clear that it has left its legacies: sometimes with significant political import, thus the habit of state-security machines, now turned to new putative enemies, presently, Islam; at others, merely as cliché, thus the reflex criticism of Russia, or, more popularly, the continuing recourse to certain cultural themes expressed in film and novels of spying: deceit coupled to moral and class betrayal.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137023834_4

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