Rethinking the Cold War
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Edited by:
The series offers books that illuminate the multifaceted history of the Cold War in both its European and Global dimensions, across and beyond the Iron Curtain. It focuses on the interactions, interdependencies and co-operation of Eastern state socialist countries (and their citizens) with Western capitalist, Latin American, African and non-aligned states (and their citizens), as well as with China. The series aims to transcend the classical fields of high politics, government, and diplomacy. It pays special attention to transnational actors, entangled processes and events, as well as transcultural encounters and mutual representations across and beyond the Iron Curtain. From social, political, economic and/or cultural perspectives, the volumes in the series explore the ways in which individuals (as leaders or simply as citizens), civil society, institutions, and states reached across Cold War boundaries and, in the process, prepared the way for the convergence, conversion or interactions that helped create the post Cold War world. These contacts and connections constituted spaces where intermediary, non governmental actors like friendship societies, scholars, artists, sportspeople, tourists as well as top leaders and other more visible political and diplomatic actors impacted international relations and the realities in their own societies. In the process, these volumes also look, in new ways, at the problems on the home fronts on all sides of the Cold War as they were and are reflected in everyday culture, ordinary local perceptions of the Cold War, and the various Cold War mentalities.
During the Cold War, and despite the contrary image of relative seclusion suggested by states and political blocs, diverse groups of workers crossed for professional reasons not only national borders, but also moved from one political system to another. For shorter or longer periods of time, different kinds of workers crossed from Eastern European Communist states or from right-wing dictatorships in Southern Europe to Western Europe, but also from Western Europe to the East and South of the continent. These workers were part of transnational networks across otherwise (relatively) closed political borders and can be interpreted both as seemingly unpolitical in the ordinariness of everyday work life and as extraordinary in their defiance of the political order of national isolation.
Covering cases as diverse as migrant workers, academics abroad, professionals on a foreign deployment or informal border crossings, this edited volume concentrates on personal and group experiences of these cross-border workers, on transnational networks, or on national labor policies. This focus on cross-border workers during the Cold War sheds light on the intricate entanglement of the East, South and West of Europe beyond political ideologies.
During the Cold War, an invisible “iron curtain” divided the Western world from Maoist China. What motives lay behind the façade of educational exchange? This book explores the experiences of Western students in China from 1949 to 1976, revealing how education functioned as a strategic tool of people’s diplomacy. Through an analysis of the PRC’s educational policies, tailored curricula, and student memoirs, it reconstructs the landscape of studying in Maoist China. The study shows how the Chinese state sought to shape Western students’ understandings and attitudes through an education grounded in proletarian politics, a curriculum combining open-door schooling with productive labor, and a management system that differentiated between insiders and outsiders. It also examines how these strategies shaped Western students’ perceptions and influenced their retrospective reflections. Offering a fresh perspective on Sino-Western encounters, this book demonstrates how state-led diplomacy was intertwined with personal, unofficial interactions through education. These connections enriched the state-centric narrative of Cold War diplomacy, serving as reference for scholars of public diplomacy, international relations, and educational exchange.
Who organized numerous exhibitions of American art in the Cold War Soviet Union – and why? Did Americans truly want to “subvert” the Soviet regime with abstraction, and were the Soviets really “afraid” of non-figurative art? And, most noteworthy, can we adequately assess the role of art as a “weapon” of the Cold War? The significance of Shared Images lies in its revision of what, to date, has been a biased, politicized approach to American art and Soviet cultural policies during the Cold War. Shared Images proposes that we write Cold War art history without merely projecting political events onto the art historical timeline and interpolating the logic of Cold War politics into cultural history. Instead, the monograph presents a careful narrative which, along with major political events, also considers individual agencies, affective regimes, and, of course, formative contexts other than the political. Exploring American art as an essentially global phenomenon, the monograph employs the concept of a “shared history” to analyze interconnections and mutual dependence of Soviet and American art histories from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Shared Images, thus, revises narratives on Soviet and American isolationism, allegedly a distinctive feature of Cold War cultures.
Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War’s role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe’s Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.
Until the end of the Cold War in 1990, building projects and architectural icons played an important role in the self-portrayal of the competing systems. However, as the current research shows, we also find a large variety of forms of cooperation between the East, the South, and the West, not to forget the manifold cross-border entanglements within the South or the East. This book explores the intersection of two strands of research. On the one hand, interaction in the field of architecture and construction between actors from socialist countries and from countries of the Global South have increasingly won interest amongst historians of architecture and planning. On the other hand, in the context of the strongly emerging Cold War Studies, scholars have explored cooperation and circulation across the Iron Curtain with a focus on economic and research planning.
This book connects perspectives of planning, construction and architectural design with those on economic interests and conflicts in projects and networks. Furthermore, it opens the view to the hubs of communication and exchange, and on patterns of longterm transformation and appropriation of architecture.
This book is aimed at presenting fresh views, interpretations, and reinterpretations of some already researched issues relating to the Yugoslav foreign policy and international relations up to year 1991. Yugoslavia positioned itself as a communist state that was not under the heel of the Soviet diplomacy and policy and as such was perceived by the West as an acceptable partner and useful tool in counteracting the Soviet influence.
Eleanor M. Wheeler, a correspondent for the Religious News Service, wrote letters from Prague to her friends in the USA from 1947 to 1957. Her husband, George Shaw Wheeler, was a colonel in the US Army and the chief of the de-Nazification section of the Manpower Division of the Office of the Military Government (OMGUS). While in Germany in 1946, Wheeler’s contract was not renewed, mainly due to suspicions that he was disloyal to the US government and had connections to the communist movement. Afterwards the entire family moved to Prague, where in 1951 they applied for political asylum.
The correspondence depicts ten years of life in Czechoslovakia—from the rise of communism through high Stalinism to the de-Stalinization of the country—from the perspective of pro-Communist–minded Americans. Thematically, the correspondence covers a wide range of political, cultural, and social topics, including the Cold War, the Korean War, the role of Christians in mediating dialogue between East and West, McCarthyism, and topics focused on the internal politics of Czechoslovakia.
Performing Peace and Friendship tells the story of how the Soviet Union succeeded in utilizing the World Festival of Youth and Students in its cultural diplomacy from late Stalinism through the early Khrushchev period. Pia Koivunen discusses the evolution of the youth gathering into a Soviet cultural product starting from the first festival held in Prague in 1947 and ending with the Moscow 1957 gathering, the latter becoming one of the most frequently referred moments of Khrushchev’s Thaw. By combining both institutional and grass-roots’ perspectives, the book widens our understanding of what Soviet cultural diplomacy was in practice, re-evaluates the agency of young people and provides new insights into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War. Koivunen argues that rather than simply being orchestrated rallies by the Kremlin bureaucrats, the World Youth Festivals also became significant spaces of transnational encounters for young people, who found ways to employ the event for overcoming the various restrictions and boundaries of the Cold War world.
Founded by the Free Europe Committee, from 1954 to 1971 the ACEN tried to lobby for Eastern European interests on the U.S. political scene, in the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Furthermore, its activities can be traced to Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. However, since it was founded and sponsored by the Free Europe Committee (most commonly recognized as the sponsor of the Radio Free Europe), the ACEN operations were obviously influenced and monitored by the Americans (CIA, Department of State).
This book argues that despite the émigré leadership's self-restraint in expressing criticism of the U.S. foreign policy, the ACEN was vulnerable to, and eventually fell victim of, the changes in the American Cold War policies. Notwithstanding the termination of Free Europe’s support, ACEN members reconstituted their operations in 1972 and continued their actions until 1989. Based on a through archival research (twenty different archives in the U.S. and Europe, interviews, published documents, memoirs, press) this book is a first complete story of an organization that is quite often mentioned in publications related to the operations of the Free Europe Committee but hardly ever thoroughly studied.
In this book, authors showcase the worldwide spread of Workers’ Faculties as an example of both cooperation between socialist countries in education, and globalization processes in the field of education. Based on extensive research carried out in Cuban, German, Mozambican, and Vietnamese archives as well as expert interviews, it combines detailed case studies of educational transfers and policy implementation with a discussion of theoretical approaches to the study of globalization in and of education.
Research on Workers’ Faculties provides an especially interesting example for the study of educational transfer between socialist countries as well as for the interplay of such transfers with processes of globalisation for two reasons. On one hand, the first Workers’ Faculties were established already shortly after the October Revolution in Russia, and Workers’ Faculties continue to exist in Cuba until today. A study of these institutions therefore provides a dynamic perspective covering the whole period of the existence of the socialist camp. On the other hand, the spread of the Workers’ Faculty idea to four continents allows for an analysis that takes into account widely differing local contexts.
This book offers an analysis of general trends and particularities in the history of the global spread of the Workers’ Faculty idea and its implementation in local contexts. Finally, it discusses the results with a view towards theories of globalization in the field of education as well as of specificities of processes of “socialist globalization”.
Town twinning refers to the postwar phenomenon of administrative exchange between analogous municipalities. Cold War-related research has mostly interpreted it as an instrument to pursue European integration, or to solidify détente "from below". However, municipalities were not only administrative, neutral actors, but also bearers of political content. This is particularly visible in the case of Italian towns located in the Western bloc, guided by socialist-oriented administrations, and their "twin" counterparts in the German Democratic Republic.
This volume explores the connections initiated by such towns in the 1960s-1970s, focusing on socialist-specific conceptions which fueled the policies implemented by "red" municipalities, in managing local economies and social policies, but also in maintaining a lively and interconnected transnational microsociability among grassroots activists. Despite the increasing ideological divergences between Eastern and Western communists, and between Italian democratic communists and the more dogmatic and repressive, strictly pro-Soviet ones in the GDR, communication continued to flourish on the local level. The book explores what still linked the two worlds together, the "bright side of socialism": in this case, a common symbolism related to the past, practical exchanges in the present dimension, and a shared future imagination and conception of the town on the basis of a socialist horizon, built around welfare and services for citizens and workers.
Traditionally, privacy studies have focused on the liberal democratic societies of the global West, whereas non-democratic contexts have played a marginal role in the discussion of the private and public spheres, not in the least because of the political stances of the Cold War era. This volume offers explorations of highly diversified performances and discourses of privacy by various actors which were embedded into the culturally, economically, and politically specific constructions of late socialism in individual states of the Warsaw Pact. While the experience of socialism varied across the Bloc, there were also some reactions to socialism and some reverse responses of socialist regimes to these reactions that one can trace through all states. Contributions to this volume take us across the Eastern Bloc and beyond it—from the Soviet Union, into late socialist Poland, Romania, and East and West Germany. While looking at specific countries, they provide a glimpse into a broader perspective that reaches beyond the borders of individual late socialist states. Together, these articles document a palette of paradigms of the construction and transformation of the private spheres that overcame the national borders of individual states and left an imprint across the Eastern Bloc, thereby contributing to rethinking Cold War rhetoric in regard to these states.
This volume focuses on cultural diplomacy and artistic interaction between Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It aims at providing an essentially European point of view on the cultural Cold War, providing fresh insight into little known connections and cooperation in different artistic fields. Chapters of the volume address photography and architecture, popular as well as classical music, theatre and film, and fine arts. By examining different actors ranging from individuals to organizations such as universities, the volume brings new perspective on the mechanisms and workings of the cultural Cold War. Finally, the volume estimates the pertinence of the Cold War and its influence in post-1991 world.
The volume offers an overview on the role culture played in international politics, as well as its role in the Cold War more generally, through interesting examples and case studies.
Over the last two decades, public diplomacy has become a central area of research within Cold War studies. Yet, this field has been dominated by studies of the United States' soft power practices. However, the so-called 'cultural dimension' of the Cold war was a much more multifaceted phenomenon. Little attention has been paid to European actors' efforts to safeguard a wide range of strategic and political interests by seducing foreign publics.
This book includes a series of works which examine the soft power techniques used by various European players to create a climate of public opinion overseas which favored their interests in the Cold war context.
This is a relevant book for three reasons. First, it contains a wide variety of case studies, including Western and Eastern, democratic and authoritarian, and core and peripheral European countries. Second, it pays attention to little studied instruments of public diplomacy such as song contests, sport events, tourism and international solidarity campaigns. Third, it not only concentrates on public diplomacy programs deployed by governments, but also on the role played by some non-official actors in the cultural Cold War in Europe
The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis.
During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes.
First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries.
The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War.
Sport during Cold War has recently begun to be studied in more depth. Some scholars have edited a book about the US and Soviet sport diplomacy and show ow the government of these two countries have used sport during this period, notably as a tool of "soft power" during the Olympic games.
Our goal is to continue in this direction and to focus more on the sport field as a place of exchanges during the Cold War. Regarding this point, our aim is to show that there were events "beyond boycotts"many and that unknown connections existed inside sport. Morevoer, many actors were involved in these exchanges. Thus, it is important not only to focus on the action of States, but also on private actors (international sporting bodies and journalists), considering that they acted around sport (an "apolitic" field) as it was tool to maintain links between the two blocs.
Our project offers a good opportunity for young scholars to present original research based on new materials (notably the use of institutional or personals archives). Morevoer, it is also a step forward with a view to conduct research within a global history paradigm, one that is still underused in sport academic fields.
