GILES SCOTT-SMITH. Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale

Over the last several years the international historiography has witnessed a burgeoning of contributions that delve into the cultural and social dimensions of the Cold War. This new wave questions the primacy of the dominant political and diplomatic paradigm, for its most relevant achievement is to place the bipolar confrontation in a relative perspective by emphasizing the normative value that the Cold War was given in different places and times, and by highlighting the gap between its ideological assertion and coeval developments on a global scale. Giles Scott-Smith deserves credit for his contribution to this renewal process, with several essays and books written and edited over recent years, ranging from public diplomacy to epistemic communities, from East-West “dreamworlds” to “cultural crusades.” His recent monograph deals with the experience of Interdoc, the International Documentation and Information Center based in The Hague between the early 1960s and mid-1980s. For more than two decades Interdoc pursued a twofold goal. Interdoc established itself as a private (i.e., non-governmental) center of a transnational anti-Communist network operating between “the …