Few contemporary historians have attracted more attention and praise from American conservatives than the Hungarian American scholar John Lukacs.1 Much of this praise has been attributable to two works, Historical Consciousness and The Passing of the Modern Age, Lukacs’ examinations of the nature of historical knowledge and contemporary society. On the other hand, Lukacs’ reputation is founded primarily on his writings about post–World War I Europe. And that reputation is in part well-founded, for Lukacs has produced at least two brilliant works—The Great Powers and Eastern Europe (1953) and The Last European War (1976)—as well as three lesser, deeply flawed, but highly interesting works—1945: Year Zero (1978), The Decline and Rise of Europe (1965), and A New History of the Cold War (1966—an expanded and updated version of a book originally published in 1961). Much of Lukacs’ work has dealt with the Cold War and the relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. When Lukacs’ writings on these matters are examined, many of his views and judgments seem highly unsound, and the admiration that many conservatives feel for him seems a bit mysterious. His general outlook on social matters is conservative, and he has often expressed contempt for notions congenial to the left. All the same, Lukacs’ writings on the Cold War and related issues—especially A New History of the Cold War—were influenced by the zeitgeist of the 1960s, notwithstanding Lukacs’ revulsion for many of its aspects. Many of his views seem to be far removed from those of most American conservatives—a group Lukacs has frequently deprecated. These things, however puzzling, are less important than the fact that the Lukacs version of the Cold War is in many respects contradictory, confused, and unreliable. Lukacs’ Cold War is a struggle divested of many of its unique and most threatening aspects. It is a struggle seen from a narrow and distorted perspective by an understandably bitter East European refugee.
In Lukacs’ view, the Cold War is not a struggle between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies for the destiny of the world, but a conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The struggle between the two powers was a result of the last world war, specifically of the division of Europe. The “principal condition of contemporary history,” for Lukacs, “is not the Atomic Bomb and not Communism; it is the division of Germany and of most of Europe into American and Russian spheres of influence. The so-called Cold War grew out of this division.”2