Československo a studená válka v Africe:
Czechoslovakia and the Cold War in Africa. Approaches:

Interpretations and Axes of Research

Summary/Abstract: The Cold War affected to a greater or lesser extent all the inhabited continents. While it reached Africa a little later than other parts of the so-called Third World, it struck the continent all the stronger. Academic research into the Cold War neglected Africa for quite a long time, as it was seen only as a marginal “battlefield” which the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union sometimes affected in the form of proxy wars. A turning point in this approach came with ‘Global Cold War’, a book by the Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad. He does not consider the “struggle” for the Third World as a marginal component of this conflict, but as one of its key axes. American as well as Soviet interventions in the Third World, in Westad’s opinion, were ideologically motivated and were supposed to prove the versatility of liberal capitalism on the one side and state socialism on the other. For each of these two superpowers, possible rule over the Third World, in which most of the world’s population lived, would also mean victory for its ideological concept.

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