Editorial

Dreams of a Cold War Kid

A new year has arrived, and we are now somehow in the year 2024. As a child of the Cold War, I never expected to reach the millennium, let alone 24 years after it. The Cold War is now long past, coming to an end in the wake of the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989–1991. The Soviet Union, born in the flames of the First World War and the collapse of the Tsarist system, was no longer the great opposition to the United States that it had become following the Second World War. At the time, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article that considered whether the (then) imminent collapse of the Soviet Union represented the triumph of Western liberal ideas, the end of totalitarianism, and the end of utopianist ideologies crushing the individual citizens under the weight of notions of a common good (Fukuyama 1989). However, as Fukuyama reiterated in his book The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama 1992) and a later article (Fukuyama 1995), he was not saying that there would henceforth only be liberal democracies, but that the direction of travel in the progress of History was towards liberal democracy as the dominant form of government.

In the past quarter of a century, this has become more and more questionable. Peace is as far from our grasp as ever, while populism has ripped through the world’s liberal democracies leaving a legacy of ‘strong man’ leaders who claim that they are acting in the interests of ‘the people’ against the shadowy elites that are holding people back. As Fukuyama did allow, nationalism has become a stronger force than in the decades following the end of World War II, bringing its camp followers of chauvinism and bigotry in its wake. In the forthcoming US elections, one of the more prominent positions of the Biden campaign is that voting for Trump is voting for the end of democracy and the installation of a populist dictator. If Biden and his camp are correct, then US democracy is hanging by a thread, which was certainly not what Fukuyama envisaged in his work.

There are many reasons why things have not gone the way Fukuyama expected in the quarter of a century since the end of the Cold War, not least the fact that some of his positions was as hopefully naïve and unrealistic as any utopian ideology. The power of populism to appeal to those who can see that society is giving them nothing or leaving them far adrift is another reason. Such populism can work in a democracy, but there tends to be a deep disdain for democracy, along with a strong feeling that the government should be able to do what it wants because it is the government. Donald Trump is currently arguing for presidential immunity to cover issues such as sexual assault, insurrection, and corporate fraud. Boris Johnson improperly prorogued Parliament in 2019, a move which was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (Supreme Court 2019), while Rishi Sunak introduced the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in December 2023 because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was illegal (Parliament 2023); this has been characterised as the erosion of the rule of law with the judiciary being overruled by a political instrument. None of this sits well with the notion of the triumph of liberal democracy as the dominant form of government, when two of the most influential and powerful liberal democracies are behaving as illiberal and anti-democratic.

Beyond the general shape of the world, there are events and situations that do not feel very different from the period of the Cold War, and if there are differences, for the worst. Sweden and Finland are now members of NATO, and the border between the NATO states and Russia seems more closed than ever. Russia and its allies are facing off a NATO collective that is apparently preparing for war. Bellicose statements are made by retired officers about the need to prepare for war against invading Russian forces, while Donald Trump has stated that he would let Vladimir Putin do what he wants in Europe (apparently because the European NATO states are not paying enough money):

I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills. (The Guardian 2024)

Naturally, given the speaker, there is a level of hyperbole involved; Trump does not necessarily want to abandon NATO to the Russians, but is determined to reduce the cost of NATO to the United States. While he has made several comments about leaving NATO to look after itself, it is consistent with a negotiating tactic of threatening to withdraw aid unless the recipients comply with the required actions. Whatever the case, and with Trump, there is no way to know until he acts, this is far worse than the Cold War where anyone opposed to the Soviet Union was a friend to the United States.

The paranoia over Russia and Putin’s intentions is very much driven by the continuing invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Despite horrendous losses and a campaign now bogged down in a slow but deadly drift to stalemate, Putin continues to press the attack against Ukraine, with missile attacks across the whole of the country, focusing heavily on the infrastructure to cripple the nation but with plenty to hit civilian targets as well. The coverage of Ukraine has diminished with the longevity of the conflict, but it needs to be kept to the forefront of thinking in case anyone is reckless enough to cut aid to Ukraine and leave them to the mercies of the Russians. At the same time, Israel is in flames with a merciless campaign in Gaza that has killed far more civilians than Hamas terrorists; whichever perspective is taken, that is a simple and horrific fact. On the West Bank, Israel has continued to expand illegal settlements on Palestinian land alongside the military operation in Gaza (BBC 2024) while also exchanging fire with Hezbollah in the north. The situation now is frightening for many people across the world, and some of the fears echo those of the Cold War. No peace has emerged from the end of the Cold War, no greater understanding between NATO and Russia, while the threat of extremist Islam has added to the feeling of power blocs facing off against one another.

In this environment, understanding conflict and its impact on society is more necessary than ever. Conflict needs to be studied in all its different facets. It requires a multi-disciplinary approach and a recognition that all the different disciplines are as important as the others in providing material to understand conflict. Conflict Archaeology is no less important than History or International Relations in studying conflict, yet there is far less funding available and far fewer people interested in the results we produce. However, the more that we carry out projects that provide insight into the motivations and outcomes of conflict, the more notice will be taken of what the sub-discipline can produce. It requires us to understand our place in these wider issues and to ensure that we are not creating bubbles of irrelevance around ourselves. It is far too easy for us to become an interesting side note, sidelined into providing ammunition for QI and pub bores everywhere by undermining traditional narratives of battlefields. What we can provide is far more than this, with evidence from the past of how people coped with the horrors of war (both civilian and military); the impact of war on the individual; the impact of war on the landscape; the impact of war on the Home Front; and on the processes of reconstruction in the aftermath of the fighting. We can provide a narrative that is divorced from the curse of chauvinism and of national pride, that is much more at the level of the individual than of the polity; we can provide the street shrine of WWI as a supplement to the Cenotaph of the official narrative.

There are many ways of undertaking conflict archaeology, and much has been done in the area of battlefield archaeology. We have learnt much about the weapons and munitions and how they behaved in combat. We have made distribution maps of artefacts to attempt to reconstruct areas of fighting on battlefields, and studies have been made into the marks made on musket balls from being fired or from the material that they impacted. We have examined battlefield landscapes with soil science, geophysics, map regression, LiDAR, infra-red photography and so on. We have examined those landscapes with GIS models of visibility, but all of these are approaches to understanding individual battles and individual actions. We have looked beyond the battlefield to army camps, training trenches, defence systems, prisoner of war camps, and concentration camps. We have looked at trade networks represented in the materials relating to the detritus of army camps. We have looked at trench art, at memorialisation and commemoration, at subterranean graffiti, and at drawings made by combatants and bystanders alike. This is what the project ‘The War spoke to us Noisily with Explosions and Quietly with Things’ is about (Banks 2023; The Herald 2024), and it shows that conflict archaeology has something of relevance to say about the world around us even today.

As a Cold War Kid, although there were conflicts across the world as the USA and the USSR fought through proxies across the Third World, for me international politics was bound up in the world of espionage. Direct conflict was to be avoided at all costs, but others paid the ultimate price to keep up the pretence of peace. It was a time of paranoia, of dreams filled with the four-minute warning. Today’s youth have open warfare raging, an impending environmental disaster that the rich and powerful ignore, and a world where it no longer seems unbelievable that people would accept fascism. Perhaps there are few real differences between the Cold War and now, but the lyrics of one of my favourite songs, Only the Dead Dreams of the Cold War Kid (Calvert 1978) now seem nostalgic for a simpler and more binary time.

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Turning to the issue, we have three important papers spanning three conflicts. The first, led by Duncan Williams as part of his doctoral research, is a look at the different geophysical methods being used to investigate battlefields in Europe. It takes a rather liberal approach to the term ‘early modern’, which includes nineteenth century battlefields, and it focuses on the battle of Waterloo. This is the core of Williams’ work as part of Waterloo Uncovered and it continues the publication of research relating to Waterloo that the Journal has undertaken. For me, as someone who carried out geophysical research in the 1990s and 2000s, this is of particular interest because of the shift to a landscape approach using survey instruments on tractors, with the prospect of surveys carried out using drones in the future. The old perspective where the world consists of 20 metre grid squares has been entirely superseded by instruments that can survey dozens of hectares without a single blister on the heel. This is a very useful paper in looking at the different techniques and instruments, while commenting on their efficacy in the field. The most impressive aspect of the paper is that it is written in terms that do not require a degree in Physics to understand, and it should become a standard reference in future research papers on battlefields. It should also be a standard reference for those non-geophysicist researchers planning fieldwork as it will answer many questions about the most effective ways of approaching battlefields.

The second paper is by Adam Andersson, who previously published in the journal in 16(1); that was an assessment of a civilian shelter in Sweden, built to protect the inhabitants of an apartment block in the event of war breaking out during the Cold War (Andersson 2021). This first paper was written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which explains the title describing the Cold War as the war that never came. At that time, the shelters provided by the Swedish government for its population seemed a white elephant and were poorly maintained, largely filled with storage items. They were little more than a curiosity, an echo of a world that had been left behind. Three years later, and that attitude is itself a curiosity; this second article describes ‘the war that came’. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, there could no longer be any pretence that the end of the USA/USSR stand-off had brought the assurance of peace to Europe. The intention of this second paper is to look at the changes that followed the Russian invasion and how it has impacted Sweden. We are all aware of the successful applications of Finland and Sweden to join NATO following the Russian invasion of 2022, and there has been an important opportunity to see how public attitudes have changed by seeing how perceptions of the built environment (ie the shelter) have changed, if at all. This paper demonstrates how a research project can develop over time, and how it can become more significant as it takes on a wider relevance than it originally possessed. From an anachronistic annoyance for landlords to a potentially life-saving sanctuary for the apartment-dwellers, it is fascinating to see how societal attitudes are reflected in interactions with the built heritage of the Cold War.

The final paper in this issue of the Journal, written by Tim Clack and Tony Pollard, looks at the physical traces of the Falklands War fought between the UK and Argentina in 1982. This project is something that Professor Pollard has been working on for a very long time, since at least 2010, and it is good to see it coming to fruition. There have been previous reports on this project (Clack and Pollard 2022; Pollard 2014), but this is the first focused account of the project beyond the collected papers in the 2022 edited volume. The project is very significant in many ways, not the least of which has been the involvement of Argentinian archaeologists and historians. It is the first coherent mapping project carried out on the remnants of the 1982 war, which has been getting removed pretty much since 1982 with no record. It is the first time that veterans have been a part of recording the landscape of the battle in which they fought, and the mental health of the veterans has been a major focus of the project. It is not the first time that veterans have been involved in projects investigating their war experiences, but it is the first time that they have been actively involved in the fieldwork on a battlefield that they fought over. Whatever benefits the fieldwork may have had for PTSD and other conditions, their presence on the battlefield 40 years later is a testament to the fact that they survived, while the project means that their experiences as individual soldiers are being validated and treated as important. Too often, the meta-narrative erases the individual from their own story and all the focus is on whether Britain remained a world power, or whether the war was a colonial enterprise or a reinforcement of self-determination. These veterans could see that their own stories, which were about the mud and blood on the field of battle, are just as important and valid as the ‘bigger picture’. This is an excellent paper, and we are privileged to have it.

This is the first paper in volume 19, and I hope that the quality of these papers makes up for the delays in getting to publication. We have many more papers in the pipeline, and look forward to bringing through more examples of what Conflict Archaeology can achieve.