A world divided

The Cold War: A New History
By John Lewis Gaddis
Penguin, 333 pp., illustrated, $27.95

This one-volume history of the Cold War by its preeminent historian contains an outstanding analysis of the origins and conduct of the nearly 50-year conflict between communism and capitalism. It is the most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written. But the importance of John Lewis Gaddis's new book lies not in the uncovering of a new document from a dusty archive in Moscow or Minsk. Nor does it lie in some profound new historiographical observation. Rather, this book is notable for teaching a simple historical lesson with great relevance to the world today: that the spread of democracy is a bottom-up phenomenon; it rarely happens from the top down.

This lesson comes as a surprise. Gaddis often cautions against drawing such conclusions from contemporary history. ''Humility is in order . . . when trying to assess the Cold War's significance: the recent past is bound to look different when viewed through the binoculars of a distant future" is the accompanying disclaimer in ''The Cold War: A New History." Even this doesn't stop the message from shining through.

The author has covered this historical ground before. Gaddis founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute at the University of Ohio, where he taught for years before becoming Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale. His previous book on the Cold War, ''We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History," published in 1997, is the gospel of international relations and diplomatic history programs around the globe. And his 1982 book, ''Strategies of Containment," remains the work of record on the most important US foreign policy of the 20th century.

Perhaps Gaddis's most remarkable trait, however, is that he has risen to prominence within the academy while at the same time largely shying away from the limelight. He is apparently content with letting Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other popular historians of his generation answer the calls from ''Nightline," ''Hardball," and ''The O'Reilly Factor." He has even gone so far as to scold rising academic stars for seeking too much publicity, once accusing Harvard historian Niall Ferguson -- history's new ''it" boy -- of ''authorial overstretch" in the pages of The New York Times. Gaddis, for better or worse, has always appeared to ascribe to the theory that historians, like foreign policies, are best judged on the basis of their durability through the years.

So it comes as no surprise that, in his previous writings, Gaddis has shown a reverence for bold foreign policies and powerful personalities. He has closely allied himself with the theory that, as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, ''the history of the world is but the biography of great men." And in ''The Cold War," an entire, requisite chapter is dedicated to what he calls ''actors," with particular deference paid to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. In recent years, Gaddis has put President George W. Bush under his great-man umbrella, calling Bush's vision of democratizing the Middle East ''right on target."

That's why ''The Cold War" is perplexing. It departs from the great-man perspective of history. In fact, it reads like a shot across the bow of elitists who would export democracy in a managed and manipulated fashion.

The number of democracies in the world quintupled during the last half of the 20th century, Gaddis says, thanks to increasing levels of education, the spread of ''transparency" via the information revolution, and, most important, ''because they generally outperformed autocracies in raising living standards." Did Reagan help? Certainly. Was Mikhail Gorbachev a catalyst for change? Without question.

But, Gaddis says, it is ''ordinary people" who make democracy happen. Who ended the Cold War? ''The Hungarians who declared their barbed wire obsolete and then flocked to a funeral for a man who had been dead thirty-one years; the Poles who surprised Solidarity by sweeping it into office; the East Germans who . . . climbed embassy fences in Prague, humiliated [Erich] Honecker at his own parade, persuaded the police not to fire in Leipzig, and ultimately opened a gate that took down a wall and reunited a country."

It has become de rigueur in some circles to tout China and other semi-authoritarian regimes as an example of how to cultivate democracy by elite decree. Fareed Zakaria's much-heralded 2003 book, ''The Future of Freedom," laid out just such an argument at length.

With democracy now dawning in some of the most benighted corners of the globe, ''The Cold War" offers a reminder that ordinary people have a way of leaving world leaders, in Gaddis's words, ''astonished, horrified, exhilarated, emboldened, at a loss, without a clue." It's a lesson that elites in China and the Middle East would do well to remember.

Michael C. Boyer is associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine.