Czechoslovakia’s Cold War Arms Towns as Sites of Military Globalization

War has often been posited as the antithesis of globalization. This article, however, follows historian Paul Chamberlin in considering how the Cold War might be viewed instead as a moment in which new global linkages, revolving around “flows of arms, capital, technical knowledge, soldiers, and political ideologies,” were cemented. Focusing on the town of Martin—the biggest producer of tanks in socialist Czechoslovakia—it shows how military production simultaneously integrated the town and its citizens into transnational financial and intellectual networks and explicitly anti-Western alliances such as the Warsaw Pact. It pinpoints how exactly international linkages shaped processes of tank production, the experiences of tank producers, and indeed, the tanks produced themselves. A study of “military globalization” in Martin between the 1950s until the late 1980s reveals a complex patchwork of new openings and closings, as well as how enmeshed Eastern Europeans’ Cold War experiences were with the hot wars that “weaponized” the conflict outside Europe. It ultimately lays bare the role that military industries have historically played in processes of globalization, both within socialist Eastern Europe and beyond.