ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first case study of the performance of democratic peace, focusing on the onset of the Cold War. It takes at its point of departure an historiographical debate about a 1945 meeting between American president Harry Truman and the Soviet Union's foreign commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, which some historians have interpreted as thoroughly uneventful, but other historians have interpreted as a (very) early manifestation of the Cold War. On the basis of a selection of archival documents pertaining to that meeting, and by embedding that episode in the accounts of cultural historians of the American/Western way of “doing, thinking, and feeling” peace during and immediately after the Second World War, the chapter shows how Truman's conduct during the meeting with Molotov can meaningfully be interpreted as a manifestation of the doing of democratic peace. In addition, the chapter shows how the doing of peace during these (very) early stages of the Cold War displayed all of the features identified in the previous chapter. It involved combative stance-taking, the creation of republican institutions, and the assumption of republican leadership but also the fostering of intimate relations and the staging of sacredness. Interestingly, the performance of democratic peace during the early Cold War, while clearly elite-driven, nonetheless centrally involved the participation of ordinary people, too.
