Détente and the global sixties

This chapter discusses the basic drivers and fundamental contradictions of the process of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union of the late 1960s and 1970s. Its main argument is that détente was driven by a Eurocentric logic that stemmed in part as well from global processes and had important, although often inadvertent and unforeseen, global implications. Détente was thus in its own way connected to the global sixties: a driver and a consequence of them. ¹