In the summer of 1959, an attractive American-style house was built in Moscow, fully furnished with the amenities that any working American could supposedly afford. But it was not meant for anyone to live in. The previous year, officials from the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to participate in a cultural exchange program intended to foster mutual understanding and, implicitly, measure one country’s standard of living against the other’s. The ersatz home was the centerpiece of the U.S. exhibit, and Vice President Richard Nixon was in the Soviet capital ahead of its opening. Guiding Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev through the installation, Nixon gloated about the prosperity that postwar American capitalism was delivering its citizens.
Khrushchev responded by noting astronomical leaps in development under the Soviet system, pointing out that housing was a right rather than a privilege on his side of the Iron Curtain. In less than a decade, he said, the USSR would best the U.S. in material abundance. “As we pass you by, we’ll wave ‘hi’ to you,” Khrushchev added, “and then if you want, we’ll stop and say, ‘please come along behind us.’”
As historian Fritz Bartel argues in The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism, the early years of the Cold War were defined by the question of whether East or West could offer their citizens the fullest, most comfortable existence. It was not a given that U.S.-style capitalism would win that argument. The furnishings of the model U.S. home in Moscow were props in an elaborate ideological showcase of the good life, a flash point in a broader struggle for credibility. As superpowers vied, they argued in myriad ways that their model could best provide all of the trappings of modernity. Bartel calls this dynamic “the politics of making promises.”
But as the global economy was rocked by crises in the 1970s, these governments could no longer sustain the growth that buttressed their boasts two decades before. The final years of the Cold War became a contest over who could best oversee the transition from a political economy geared toward the creation and dispersal of plenty to the imposition and management of austerity. Bartel dubs this stage “the politics of breaking promises.” As the title of the book suggests, the post–Cold War world would be indelibly marked by a retraction of social democratic commitments. Liberal democracy and neoliberal economies prevailed, according to Bartel, because “they were the best political and economic systems for breaking promises.”