What is "new" about the new international Cold War history, and how does it differ from previous accounts? One basic differentiation, of course, as John Lewis Gaddis has duly noted, is that the new "post-Cold War" Cold War history differs from the old in a temporal sense in contrast to past authors, who wrote in the midst of an ongoing conflict, historians can now write from outside the period, knowing its duration and ending, which is in fact a more "normal'' way to write history in the first place.
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This would be true even if the East-bloc archives remained off-limits. But the unprecedented availability of Communist-side documents as well as additional Western sources (including materials such as intelligence intercepts whose release, or even existence, had been previously taboo), makes possible a different type of history in substantive and perceptual terms, transcending from the inevitable tendency, exacerbated by reliance on English language, preponderantly American, primary sources, to view the Cold War through the perspective of Washington. Recognizing the need for collaboration among scholars working in different languages, archives, countries, and for that matter, disciplines, the new Cold War history not only admits but requires a diversity of viewpoints as a basic precondition for attempting to describe international events involving multiple actors and multiple realities. To a great extent, this renewed attentiveness to utilizing the sources and appreciating the perspectives of competing sides in order to understand better their interactions simply marks a return to the traditional way diplomatic history was written before the secrecy of the Cold War era, on both sides, precluded such access. Like the U.S. govemment's Cold War classification restrictions, most of which originated during World War II and the Manhattan Project and never really "demobilized," the writing of Cold War history based on (partial) access to only one side's documents what Gaddis Smith once aptly described as the diplomatic history equivalent of "one hand clapping"
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over time became accepted as normal, inevitable, acceptable "standard operating procedure" rather than the aberration from past practice it actually represented. While this multi-perspectival approach thus merely brings Cold War history closer to its roots in international diplomatic history, it also tries to exploit some of the insights of "post-modem" attention to text and culture. It recognizes, as Michael Hunt noted in his study of crises in U.S. foreign policy, that international events also represent an intersection of narratives, sometimes seldom overlapping narratives, when viewed from the often dramatically diverging perspectives of the various actors involved.
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One may even argue that to a considerable degree the very idea of the "Cold War" as the descriptive term applied to post-World War II international relations represented an attempt to impose a single coherent narrative frame-
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