Welcome to Peaceful Spain: Football, Cinema, and Soft Propaganda Across the Iron Curtain

February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 179 THE EARLY “IRON CURTAIN” Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4l6, Canada stevenm@mcmaster.ca Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xvii, 488. isbn 978-0-19-923150-8. £18.99 (hb); £12.99 (pb). In his famous Westminster College address on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri , Winston Churchill Wred one of the opening salvos of the Cold War by proclaiming that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain” had been lowered across Europe. Patrick Wright’s intriguing and provocative book does not examine the phrase “iron curtain” in its popular Cold War context. Instead, he maintains that many characteristics of this metaphor, “including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the Second World War” (p. 18). Wright divides Iron Curtain into two primary chronological sections, the Wrst covering the period from 1914 to 1920. An iron curtain originally referred to the steel safety screen that descended in English theatres, beginning in the lateeighteenth century, to separate the audience from the often catastrophic Wres that broke out on the stage. The phrase entered the lexicon of international relations in January 1915 when British author and paciWst Violet Page (writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee) published an article lamenting that “War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain” (p. 80) had alienated European nations such as England and Germany sharing a common cultural heritage. But the barrier quickly moved east in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and “took the form not just of exaggerated political rhetoric, but of an economic blockade enforced by naval power” (p. 171), as the Allies sought to contain the infection of Bolshevism. Wright devotes most attention in this section to documenting the 1920 visit to Russia by the British delegation jointly sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which sought to penetrate the dense fog of Allied anti-Bolshevik propaganda and validate the delegation members’ own preconceived views about the nascent socialist utopia in Russia. British delegates witnessed images both of progress carefully stagemanaged by their hosts and of terrible economic dislocation and poverty caused by the Allied blockade and the civil war, which allowed the majority of them to return home to lavish praise on the Soviet experiment that would, in their minds, inevitably fulWl its potential once the Bolshevik government became stable. February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 180 Reviews 1 “The Future of Europe”, European AVairsz 1, no. 1 (April 1949): 3. The second section of Wright’s book examines Western reports of life behind the iron curtain between 1920 and 1939. Here, the author focuses heavily on the theatrical nature of Soviet attempts to create modern-day Potemkin villages that werez—zwith a limited number of exceptionsz—zaccepted as reality by an endless parade of left-wing visitors. A second British Trades Union Congress delegation in 1924, for example, received a dramatically embellished picture of Soviet economic progress that included a train journey past a long-abandoned factory belching smoke created by burning wet straw frantically provided by Russian peasants; the resulting report of the delegation “repeatedly collapsed into the most abject conformity with the Soviet view of reality” (p. 245). The most tragic examples of Western visitors’ blindness to the truth occurred during the 1930s famine deliberately induced by Stalin, and Wright exposes a wide cast of characters who adopted a blinkered view of conditions in the ussr. Among intellectuals , Wright documents the 1931 visit of George Bernard Shaw, who cavalierly dismissed reports of widespread food shortages while dining sumptuously in Moscow’s Hotel Metropole. Among journalists, Wright develops the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Timesz correspondent who knuckled under to demands of Soviet censors to produce sanitized accounts denying or ignoring the famine in order to protect his privileged place in that...

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . .’ With these words Winston Churchill famously warned the world in a now legendary speech given in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Launched as an evocative metaphor, the ‘Iron Curtain’ quickly became a brutal reality in the Cold War between Capitalist West and Communist East. Not surprisingly, for many years, people on both sides of the division have assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain began with Churchill’s 1946 speech. In this pioneering investigation, Patrick Wright shows that this was decidedly not the case. Starting with its original use to describe an anti-fire device fitted into theatres, Iron Curtain tells the story of how the term evolved into such a powerful metaphor and the myriad ways in which it shaped the world for decades before the onset of the Cold War. Along the way, it offers fascinating perspectives on a rich array of historical characters and developments, from the lofty aspirations and disappointed fate of early twentieth century internationalists, through the topsy-turvy experiences of the first travellers to Soviet Russia, to the the atricalization of modern politics and international relations. Ultimately, as Wright reveals, the term captures a particular way of thinking about the world that long pre-dates the Cold War. In reality, the iron curtain was never just a frontier-it was a psychological state, and it did not simply disappear with the Berlin Wall.

REVIEWS 359 Cowen, Eleanor. Animation Behind the Iron Curtain: A Guide to Animated Films from Russia and Eastern Bloc Countries During the Cold War Era. John Libbey, New Barnet, 2020. viii + 215 pp. Map. Illustrations. Chronology of selected political events and animated films. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £24.99: $32.00 (paperback). Eleanor Cowen’s Animation Behind the Iron Curtain is a welcome book on traditional animation. In a contemporary digitalized animation world, the author’s main objective is to draw attention to traditional animation films that have not been widely available to Western audiences. As stated on the cover, the book intends to be a ‘guide to animated films from Russia and Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War era’. It comprises two parts. The first contains three chapters which briefly illustrate the main issues at stake during the Cold War years. In these introductory chapters, Cowen gives some simplified background information about the positions of the two states involved — capitalist USA versus Communist Soviet Union. The second part focuses on Eastern Bloc animation and dedicates each chapter to a specific area: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. For each country Cowen describes a selection of directors and films and briefly defines some of their key animation techniques. The book offers neither an in-depth study of animation of the Cold War, nor a thorough analysis of issues of representation and propaganda, but instead aims to spotlight exemplary films made in the Soviet Bloc. The context provided serves as a rudimentary introduction to the Cold War as well as to animation techniques. The overall structure of the book is not always linear. The division of chapters in the first part, which attempts to introduce the Eastern and Western Blocs, leads to a few repetitions; while the second part has a tendency to digress, giving snippets of historical fact or explanations of animation techniques, which divert the focus of the discussion. The historical background is rather simplistic and, at times, only vaguely relevant to the films in question, but it might nevertheless be helpful for students utterly unfamiliar with the context. Cowen’s descriptions of animation techniques are presented more as an aside than an integral part of her discussion of the development of national film production. The techniques she examines are cel animation, stop-motion, paper cutout, rotoscoping, sand animation, editing, transition, narrative structure, plaster panel technique, mise-en-scène and sound design. While a brief introduction to these techniques might be welcomed by students not versed in film studies, a more harmonious discussion of their significance in relation to Cowen’s film selection would have resulted in a more compelling SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 360 treatment of the cartoons. Moreover, rather than being analysed, the films are mostly delineated by plot details and only a few general aesthetic characteristics. Instead of a conclusion, the book presents a chronological table of selected political events, Western animation and Eastern Bloc animation. This chronology serves as a useful tool for locating the films in time and reorganizing the contextual information in a linear way. The chronology is accompanied by a map of Europe showing the division of the countries before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The map would presumably be valuable for students, especially non-European, unfamiliar with the geography of the region, and perhaps it would have sufficed to portray each country’s location visually in this way without the superfluous descriptions at the beginning of each chapter. Lastly, the reader might wish to know the method Cowen used to choose the films featured in the book. Most of them are unquestionably representative of some of the tendencies in each country, but the selection criteria adopted are not made clear. In the first part, Cowen selects only a few films that illustrate the main stances of the two sides of the Iron Curtain, while many other propaganda films go unmentioned. The same can be said for the discussion of animation in each country; quite a few influential masters are neglected and important films ignored. However, the book does not claim to offer a comprehensive study of Eastern...

Reviewed by: Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic by Dóra Vargha Donna Harsch Dóra Vargha. Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic. Global Health Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xii + 260 pp. Ill. $105.00 (978-1-108-42084-6). Dóra Vargha's well-documented and clearly argued monograph is a welcome addition to the historiography on polio outside the United States and, more generally, to the history of medicine and public health in Socialist Eastern Europe. The book draws on primary sources from thirteen archives and libraries, including Hungarian repositories, an Albert B. Sabin collection, World Health Organization records, and International Committee of the Red Cross documents. It incorporates eyewitness accounts from fifteen people interviewed by Vargha. It offers a very interesting analysis of the intense coverage of polio by the Hungarian press. Last but not least, it weaves in information and arguments from a multitude of secondary studies. From this material, Vargha reconstructs a many-sided story that covers the epidemiological, cultural, and political history of polio in Hungary after the Second World War, while also situating Hungarian events and discourse within a wider medical context of international and cooperative efforts to develop a cure, on the one hand, and within the global political framework of Cold War ideological hostility and all-round rivalry, on the other. [End Page 633] The history of the fight against polio in Hungary, Vargha demonstrates, actually challenges the view that Cold War antagonisms were ubiquitous and constant in the 1950s and 1960s. The search for a cure and the testing of vaccines, she argues convincingly, were characterized by transnational medical collaborations that crossed the Cold War divide. Polio researchers and public health officials from all over the world, not only the United States and Western Europe, shared medical data and information, presented research at international congresses, and participated in major vaccine trials. Interest in polio peaked at the same time around the world because in the 1950s so many countries experienced frequent and severe polio epidemics. Socialist health officials in Hungary (and the Soviet Union) were eager to learn from and work with research teams from the West in carrying out the decisive trials of the Sabin vaccine, while Western hospitals and medical personnel were happy to help supply equipment and vaccine to Hungary (and other Eastern European states). Transnational exchange and cooperation were actively promoted by the World Health Organization—which, she argues, gained respect and, gradually, participation from East Bloc countries in the 1960s. The book traces the course of multiple polio epidemics in Hungary from the late 1940s through 1961. It discusses the varieties, technology, accessibility, venues, medical personnel, and patients' experience of polio treatment. It tracks the opening and extension of treatment centers and examines the ways in which Hungarian public health officials, doctors, and nurses worked to overcome and/ or circumvent shortages of, most significantly, iron lungs. Beyond the facts of polio, Vargha evaluates change and continuity in public discourse and private opinion about polio in Hungary. She considers why polio elicited considerably more official and popular fear than infectious diseases that were more common and deadlier than polio. As have other scholars, she points, above all, to the dominant demographic of its victims, children, and to the relatively high incidence of paralysis and, from that, long-term disabilities among them. Polio's perverse association with children's beloved summer recreational activities, she suggests, also contributed to the broad and deep anxieties that polio epidemics sparked. Polio's disproportionate impact on innocent children, she argues, is another reason that researchers and, more importantly, governments were willingly to breach the Iron Curtain when solving this international problem. The cooperative and successful effort against polio both represented and encouraged rising global concern about children's welfare. Inside Hungary too, the book shows, anxiety about polio's threat to children crossed domestic political divides and tempered the Communist regime's ideological rigidity. Initially, the repression that followed the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 hurt the efforts of doctors to diagnose and of hospitals to treat polio patients. When a polio epidemic broke out...

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

Notes on Contributors Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction: The Cold War from a New Perspective - Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy 1. The Soviet Union's Acquisition of Western Technology after Stalin: Some Thoughts on People and Connections - Philip Hanson 2. Economic Interest in Soviet Post-War Policy on Finland - Tatiana Androsova 3. CoCom and Neutrality: Western Export Control Policies, Finland and the Cold War, 1949-1958 - Niklas Jensen-Eriksen 4. Knowledge through the Iron Curtain - Soviet Scientific-Technical Cooperation with Finland and West Germany - Sari Autio-Sarasmo 5. Learning from the French: The Modernisation of Soviet Winemaking, 1956-1961 - Jeremy Smith 6. Soft Contacts through the Iron Curtain - Riikka Nisonen-Trnka 7. Internal Transfer of Cybernetics and Informality in the Soviet Union: The Case of Lithuania - Egle Rindzeviciute 8. New Advantages of Old Kinship Ties. Finnish-Hungarian Interactions in the 1970s - Katalin Miklossy 9. Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women's International Democratic Federation - Melanie Ilic 10. Overcoming Cold War Boundaries at the World Youth Festivals - Pia Koivunen 11. Room to Manoeuvre? National Interests and Coalition-Building in the CMEA, 1969-1974 - Suvi Kansikas Bibliography Index

This introduction to the special issue The Cold War of Labor Migrants: Opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond seeks to bring forward the conversation between the history of the Cold War and migration studies. It is the result of a workshop convened by the Working Group ‘Labor Migration History’, of the European Labor History Network. It maps out the academic debate on international labor migration and it critically engages with its western-centric approach. It introduces the seven contributions which, from different geographic and thematic perspectives, reassess the importance of non-Western experiences in shaping the entanglement between international labor migration and the Cold War. Two lines of inquiry feature prominently in this special issue. The first is a reassessment of the relevance of the regulation of international migration as a political terrain on which the Cold War divide was both constructed and deconstructed by different institutional actors, which, at various levels, were empowered by the existence of Cold War rivalry. The second, is the agency of migrants and aims to explore the fluidity, opportunism and creativity in the ways that migrants themselves experienced state control because of the particular Cold War socio-economic and political context.

Reviewed by: West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert Kristin Poling West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. Astrid Eckert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+422, black & white illustrations, endnotes. $105.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1906-9005-2. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-1975-8231-2. In her book on West Germany's eastern borderlands, Astrid Eckert recounts the story of a tourist visiting the border in 1964, who, on being shown where East Germany lay across the Elbe River, cried out, "Why, there is no Iron Curtain!" (95). For this tourist, and not her alone, the global significance and powerful iconography of the Iron Curtain had shaped her expectations and obscured the reality of the border. The German-German border's very prominence as a Cold War frontier made it harder to see. From behind that powerful metaphor, Eckert seeks to restore the 1,400-kilometer border to visibility with all its complexity and materiality, its regional specificity, and its natural environments. Her project, drawing on extensive research in diverse archival and print sources, is to write the history of West Germany's borderlands as a place that provided homes for both people and nonhuman natures, existed before 1949, and continued to exist after 1990. The results are richly rewarding, as a study of the Federal Republic, a contribution to border studies, and an example of an integrated approach to environmental history that incorporates culture, politics, and economics. Unlike other landmark studies focused on the materiality and local experience of the German-German boundary, such as Daphne Berdahl's Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (1999) and Edith Sheffer's Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (2011), Eckert does not zoom in on a single exemplary place to illuminate the dynamics of the border. Instead, she takes as her subject the entirety of the 40-kilometer-wide strip defined as the "zonal borderlands" and eligible for federal borderland aid. Through her six thematic chapters, Eckert shows that while proximity to the German Democratic Republic gave the West German zonal borderlands a unified identity, the border remained a heterogeneous landscape. It included open land and rural areas, but also major cities from Lübeck to Hof. The strip intersected with the Harz Mountains, the Drömling wetlands, the Bavarian forest, and several major rivers, including the Elbe and the Werra. Through borderland [End Page 88] aid (chapter 2), border tourism (chapter 3), environmental diplomacy (chapter 4), landscape and wildlife management (chapter 5), and the controversy over a planned-but-never-built nuclear waste disposal center at Görleben in the northeastern corner of Lower Saxony (chapter 6), West German policies and attitudes set apart the borderlands as an exceptional zone, reflecting attitudes toward division and toward the German Democratic Republic. Eckert also shows, however, the ways in which Cold War politics and culture butted up against the materiality of the region's landscapes and features. The Iron Curtain comes and goes, both shaping and shaped by the environments it traversed. Throughout the book, Eckert attends to how the exceptional conditions of division were grounded in prewar circumstances. In one memorable example, she recounts how the language, planning expertise, and visual iconography used to describe the German-German boundary in the 1950s referenced the loss of territory after World War I. Gruesome metaphors of mutilation on the "bleeding border" resurfaced, and spatial planners like Gerhard Isenberg studied the economics of the newly drawn borders of 1919 in an attempt to better understand the borders of 1949. Justifications for borderland aid even directly referenced the precedent of Osthilfe, the aid provided by the Weimar government to bankrupt Junkers in East Prussia—a reference perhaps all the more telling for its inaptness, since the earlier relief program had aimed to shore up large agricultural estates and had ended in scandal (56–57). The value of Eckert's long-term view is especially evident in the chapters dealing with environmental issues. While inter-German environmental diplomacy made environmental concerns more visible and salient for...

ABSTRACTMore than 70 years ago, on 5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Westminster College in Fulton. The speech immediately attracted worldwide attention and proved to be highly controversial. Most contemporaries in East and West and the vast majority of subsequent historians interpreted the speech as Churchill's call for western resistance to Stalin's expansionist policies and the continuation of the wartime ‘special relationship’ between Washington and London. This article argues, however, that Churchill's speech has been misunderstood. When set in the context of Churchill's other pronouncements on world affairs during his time as leader of the opposition between 1945 and 1951 and in view of his vigorously pursued ‘Big Three’ ‘summit diplomacy’ with Moscow and Washington after he returned as Prime Minister in 1951, the ‘iron curtain’ speech must be seen in a different light. It becomes clear that this famous speech was not Churchill's sabre-rattling call for commencing or energizing the East--West conflict with the Soviet Union. Quite to the contrary, his speech was meant to prevent the escalation of this conflict and avoid the dangerous clash between the world's greatest powers that soon became known as the Cold War.

Frequency of under- and overweight among children and adolescents during the economic transition in Poland

A MULTINATIONAL SEEKING IN VAIN A UNION as a counterpart in bargaining; another multinational expelling union representatives from the firm; companies with good and bad labour relations; small and medium-size firms with no unions at all-all these may be found in news items, case-studies and episodes from the near past of labour relations in transformation and development in the post-socialist countries. After five to six years of the political, social and economic transformation can we already speak about a new system in the field of labour relations, or is it still in transformation? Is the experience of this half-decade sufficient to identify the features of the new emerging system with any of the already known patterns of labour relations? In the late 1980s and early 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe there were widespread illusions as to the prospects of labour relations and the new role of employees and their interest associations. The international, economic and social conditions of the real processes of social transformation in these countries, however, framed events differently, and the new institutions of labour relations and social cooperation seem to display unexpected patterns. Social scientists and politicians as well as unionists are now seeking to understand the real logic of the transformation process and the motives and intentions of the social partners within it. Since the social and economic context of the current transformation process varies from country to country in Eastern and East-Central Europe, very different strategies and practices of institution building, combined with national and local traditions of interest representation and participation, are creating a rich variety of new autonomous systems of labour relations. Several elements of the political and economic transformation are closely connected to the shaping of the labour relations system in the post-socialist countries. Some of them are supporting its development, while others are unfavourable to its strengthening. Certain factors are unique in the different Central and East European countries, others represent international trends. This article aims to illustrate the characteristics of institution building in the field of labour relations in Hungary. In Hungary the new democratic political order, its laws and institutions, has finally ensured the existence of an autonomous labour relations system after a long period of reforms since the late 1960s aiming at loosening the subordination of labour relations to a monolithic political order. The political transformation was carried out by social actors and organisations that-even if newly created in democratic processes-were

Reviewed by: Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture James Deutsch Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture. By John G. Cawelti. (Madison: University of Wisconsin/Popular Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 410, acknowledgments, works cited, index.) John G. Cawelti, professor emeritus of English and humanities at the University of Kentucky, is no folklorist, but his pioneering work on genre and formula in popular culture should be of great interest to anyone who has ever looked for tale types or narrative motifs in folk literature. For instance, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), Cawelti's structural and psychological study of the Western film and novel, was one of the first scholarly studies to analyze the popularity of this vital genre. Similarly, his book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1976) is one of the best for understanding and interpreting the universal story types that are commonly found in popular film and fiction. Cawelti's latest contribution, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture, is a collection of twenty-five of his essays written between 1968 and 2003—most of them previously published in journals and anthologies. The volume is divided into four sections: "Evolving Views of Popular Culture," "The Role of Violence in Popular Culture," "Multiculturalism and Popular Culture," and "The Mystery of Mystery." The result is a very handy introduction—almost a "best of " Cawelti—that covers the author's wide-ranging scholarship on fiction, film, music, and television. Like other members of his generation, Cawelti (born in 1930) came to the study of popular culture and genres indirectly. His 1960 dissertation, "The Ideal of the Self-Made Man in Nineteenth Century America" (University of Iowa), included an analysis of Henry James; when a colleague at the University of Chicago suggested the application of Bakhtin to a particular text, Cawelti was perplexed. "Since the only Bactine I had ever heard of at that time was an over-the-counter antiseptic it struck me that this was a very strange comment, indeed" (p. 378). Fortunately, Cawelti quickly assimilated some of the new critical theories into his own work, most notably in The Six-Gun Mystique. One of the highlights of this volume for me is Cawelti's essay "Formulas and Genre Reconsidered Once Again," published here for the first time. Seeking to expand upon his previous work, particularly "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature" (Journal of Popular Culture 3:381–90, 1969), Cawelti cooks up an intriguing analogy for the interrelationship of formula, convention, genre, and experience. He bases the analogy on the logic of recipes, ingredients, and culinary styles. Equally rewarding is Cawelti's essay "Generic Transformation in Recent American Films" (1979), in which the inversion of traditional genres in many 1970s films—such as Chinatown and Young Frankenstein—is explained by his idea of "a life cycle of genres" (p. 208). According to Cawelti, popular genres often "move from an initial period of articulation and discovery, through a phase of conscious self-awareness on the part of both creators and audiences, to a time when the generic patterns have become so well-known that people become tired of their predictability" (p. 208). Whether folk genres ever encounter this same process of "generic exhaustion" is a topic that might be profitably explored (p. 208), particularly with regard to some of the cycles of narrative jokes and riddle jokes collected by folklore scholars over the past half-century. Cawelti observes that formulas are important in popular culture because "they can serve as a [End Page 235] sort of shorthand for speeding up the communication between writer and reader" (p. 134). Similarly, folklorists who study epics, ballads, sermons, and other narrative texts may benefit from Cawelti's ideas in understanding how the formulaic helps to facilitate the artistic and dynamic process of communication among members of small groups. James Deutsch Smithsonian Institution Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ABSTRACTThe disturbing duality of the figure of the Moor as ancestral “other” in Spanish culture was refashioned during the first part of the twentieth century as a result of the colonial campaigns in Morocco (1909–1927) and, most memorably, the deployment of North African troops on the Rebel side during the Civil War. Propagandistic efforts to justify their involvement had a significant afterlife via the symbolic privileging of the Moor and exaltation of Hispano-Arab amity during the early Franco regime when it pursued a “courtship” with newly decolonized Arab states in a bid to counteract international ostracism. Locating this courtship within the wider framework of the promotion of hispanidad, this article investigates the reception of overlapping Francoist discourses on raza and Hispano-Arab identity in a selection of contemporaneous Orientalist romance novels by young Spanish women authors whose engagement with such concerns has hitherto been overlooked. It interrogates the strikingly pro-miscegenation stance evident in their reworking of the more conservative popular 1920s British desert-romance genre and considers the possible meanings of their affective espousal of convivencia in the postwar climate of profound social cleavages and violently prescribed gender identities that intersected with aspects of the regime’s “self-Orientalization”.

INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE NEW HISTORY OF THE COLD WARTHE END OF THE COLD WAR HAS BROUGHT A WEALTH OF MEMOIRS, materials, and revelations from the former Soviet empire that has opened a world that Westerners thought might be closed from view forever. As more of the 'missing pages' of cold war history are found, important questions have been resolved, startling secrets have been revealed, and vexing debates have been settled. What we have found has been on occasion amusing: Leonid Brezhnev's diaries, for example, show that he thought a great deal about his weight, the number of animals he hunted, his naps - and precious little about running a nuclear superpower. Too often, we have encountered the bizarre and tragic: the suspicions about steroid use by the hulking women of the East German Olympic teams turned out not only to be true, but sadly to be only a small part of a larger programme in which innocent children were routinely marinated in dangerous drugs simply for the greater glory of the German Democratic Republic. And at times stories have emerged that are terrifying in their implications: the previously censored pages of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs tell us that even as he was trying to extricare himself from the Cuban crisis in 1962, Fidel Castro was urging him to launch an all-out nuclear attack on American cities.We now have answers - to borrow a phrase from John Gaddis, 'we now know' - but what have we learned? To judge by the reaction of some, particularly in the academic community, we've learned little indeed. While these new revelations have led some to a final overcoming of denial about the dangerous and aggressive nature of Soviet communism, for others they have led to a revisionist retrenchment, in which East and West are somehow both at fault, and that in the end 'we all lost' the cold war. (Obviously, very few Russian communists would accept this relativistic formulation; much of their anger at the regime of Boris Yeltsin is grounded in a distinct feeling that the United States inflicted a humiliating defeat on their Soviet motherland.) Whatever one makes of them, the archival materials pouring out of eastern Europe tell stories of terrible brutality and paranoia behind the former Iron Curtain. Most people seem to have accepted them as establishing beyond doubt the terrible nature of Soviet communism. Those who have not are probably beyond convincing.But there is more to the new history of the cold war than a simple catalogue of Soviet crimes. As morally satisfying as it might be to traditional cold warriors, it is time to forgo debate with the remaining revisionists - who, like the last barricaded Japanese soldiers of World War II, refuse to accept the undeniable - and move on to consider what we might learn, and what lessons we might apply in the future, from the Soviet-American conflict of 1945-91. The end of the cold war does not mean the end of 'cold wars': where conflicting ideologies make confrontation inevitable and nuclear weapons make global war unthinkable, a new cold war can emerge. An obvious possibility is with the People's Republic of China, but there are many other states whose beliefs, combined with the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, could present the West with the need to 'fight' yet another cold war in the near future. It is, therefore, imperative for policy-makers and academic specialists alike to pause at this point in history and to reflect on the origins of the most dangerous struggle in human history and how the West eventually achieved victory in it.LESSONS OF THE COLD WARThree propositions about fighting and prevailing in a 'cold war' emerge from the Soviet-American experience. First, revelations about social and political life, within the Soviet bloc, taken in light of its eventual collapse, suggest that these closed regimes were not only more odious than we knew, but less stable than we assumed. The West, when faced with such opponents, should not miss opportunities to exploit a clear internal weakness: the relationship between the state and society. …