Abstract

This chapter studies the global circulation of the bunker since the end of the Second World War and the ways its spaces and imaginaries continue to be adapted as global responses to various legacies of the Cold War today. What remained consistent were the spaces afforded for mobilizing national political imaginaries against outside forces and for either debate or attempts to limit debate over the identity of those imaginaries. Confined to the figurative lineaments of the nation-state, the bunker fantasy as geopolitical imaginary remains restrictive in its capacity to account for difference within national identity. The first section brings out the broad stakes of the global bunker fantasy through a survey of bunkering and civil defense in Europe, Russia, and Asia. The following sections deepen this survey through case studies of two small nation-states: Albania, where the totalitarian leader Enver Hoxha had 700,000 concrete bunkers constructed during the 1970s, and democratic, capitalist Switzerland, which regularly votes to continue mandating shelter facilities in every building constructed in the country. The apparent eccentricities of these smaller-scale extremes of civil defense illuminate the bunker fantasy in ways less openly visible within the dominant American Cold War imaginary. They show us, differently than the speculative visions from within the American model in the 1960s and 1980s from which the survivalism studied in Chapters 1 and 2 emerged, what could go wrong and what might plausibly go right in the bunker fantasy, and how the latter always existed inseparably from the former.