ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the concept of a history of long duration, and considers inapplicable to the modern world, still applies to it, and applies, moreover, precisely to the sort of history, that of international politics, which Annales historians generally despised. It offers a broad scheme for a history of long duration discernible beneath the mid-range conjunctural level of international history and the kaleidoscopic event level of everyday international politics. The chapter shows how the Cold War and its termination fit into this pattern, hoping thereby to shed light on the elements both of continuity and change, the familiar and the unprecedented, in them. The wartime allies produced the Cold War precisely by trying to construct peace and a new order without first carefully defining what this project meant and what it required in individual and common action.
