ABSTRACT
This collection reveals a wide range of authoritarian state structures; each experienced significant changes through the course of the Cold War and afterward. These regimes exercised varying degrees of centralized control and suppression of dissent. They shared priority for rapid acceleration of heavy industry and market agriculture, at the expense of environmental concerns. Internal rivalries and policy disagreements were common, especially between the science and technology of rapid development and the less advanced science of ecosystems analysis.
None of these regimes was closed to outside influence, even under Cold War conditions. Their environmental policies were shaped by the rivalry between state socialism and international regulated capitalism. Soviet republics’ policies, including elements of environmental planning, were shaped by Moscow’s military–industrial priorities. Latin American regimes were supported by Washington’s Cold War strategies in important ways. But as the global era of environmental concern evolved from the late 1960s onward, international environmental institutions and international non-governmental movements gave increasing support to environmental efforts within each regime.
The end of the Cold war marked the end of many authoritarian regimes, including Latin American dictatorships. But the transition to more open systems varied in degree, as the recent movement toward conservative hyper-nationalist regimes indicates. This trend is also ominously evident in some African and Southeast Asian countries, where the earlier transition from Western colonial rule to independent governments was as important as their links to the Cold War.
