Abstract:
The analysis of the entanglements between the USSR, Latin America and the USA shall be the basis of a discussion of the premise of the so-called New Cold War History, that the Cold War was not so much an imperial conflict over power and influence as a struggle about concepts of modernity and development in order to win an upspringing global public over. I argue: the two competing models of modernisation, the western democratic and the socialist, did not exist each in and of itself, but rather stood in constant processes of influence taking and delimitation. The intellectual origins of American and Soviet concepts shall be examined as well as the successes and problems in implementing these models in the Third World, regarding also the repercussions on institutions and societies, with Latin America as a paradigm.