ABSTRACT
The new global order that emerged in the Cold War era was premised on the sovereign equality of all nation-states, despite the substantial inequalities between and within them. Against this backdrop the nation-state was naturalized as the key unit of (capitalist and socialist) development worldwide. The idea and practice of development was enshrined between the 1940s and the 1970s as a national and state-guided process of modernization. Decolonization and the universalization of the nation-state system brought the leadership (and even the general population) of diverse postcolonial polities in Asia and Africa (as well as the older nation-states of Latin America and Europe, not to mention the mandates and/or nation-states that had emerged in the Middle East after the First World War) into increasingly direct relations with the main protagonists of the Cold War-the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apart from growing links with one or the other (or both) superpowers, the leadership of the new nations interacted with each other in a range of new international organizations such as the United Nations (UN). In the Cold War era, the US was central to the elaboration in many parts of the world of an anticommunist modernization project centered on state-guided national development.
