Cold War Blocs Research Articles

Forging the Indian Steel Industry: How Soviet Designs Won the Day

ABSTRACT Indian politics tried to benefit from the competition between the two Cold War Blocs by gaining beneficial terms for economic cooperation and assistance. At times, Soviet and Central and Eastern European designs could prove more successful on the ground than their direct competitors from the West. This paper analyses cooperation schemes in the steel sector and scrutinises the reasons why this was the case. Economic cooperation between East and South was vibrant and could be mutually beneficial during the whole period of the Cold War, thereby calling into question a narrative of steady decline inherent in state socialism.

Biographical Study of Johannes Virolainen and Transnational Politics of the Cold War

This article explores how a systematic study of a person’s life can be revealing of larger political processes, for instance the dynamics between states and political actors during the Cold War period. The biographical method utilised in this article – the study of Finnish long-term politician Johannes Virolainen’s archive – enables the discerning of illogical and contradictory features in the behaviour of the Soviet Union. The article highlights multipolar-multilevel interactions of the Cold War: 1) how the Soviet Union could not ignore medium level political actors from small states, such as Virolainen, and 2) how the balance between Cold War blocs in Europe was truly a conundrum for the Soviet Union, which created interesting scopes of action for political actors.

YUGOSLAVIA AND DE GAULLE’S REVISION OF THE COLD WAR

This paper will analyze France’s attempted foreign policy strategy in Yugoslavia and in Eastern Europe during the 1960s, beginning with the various positions of de Gaulle’s France and Tito’s Yugoslavia and the numerous similarities in how the two countries’ diplomacy functioned. In both countries, the course of foreign policy was determined according to the authoritarian characteristics of their systems and of their central figure–the president. Both countries were also interested in transcending the Cold War division of Europe, and they based their strategies on attempts to marginalize the United States and pacify the Soviet regime. De Gaulle’s attempt at a détente, which Yugoslavia was very sympathetic toward and had also committed itself to similar goals, failed due to unrealistic illusions of overcoming this bipolarity by forging a middle way between the two opposing Cold War blocs. Faced with an overestimation of their own influence, along with the Warsaw Pact’s aggression toward Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s complete lack of interest in pacification, and the US’s unwillingness to withdraw, end of de Gaulle’s attempts at détente, in which Yugoslavia would play an important role, came to an end. Nevertheless, similar European and global policy goals brought France and Yugoslavia closer together, and this established the principles on which a cooling down period in the mid-1970s became possible.

The age of fuzzy bifurcation: Lessons from the pandemic and the Ukraine War

AbstractAcademics, decision‐makers and policy makers have suggested that COVID and the war in Ukraine represent an ‘inflection point’. The consequence will be ‘the end of globalisation’, ‘a bipolar Cold War 2.0’ and a return to Containment. In reality, the emerging world order is much messier. The logics of geoeconomics and geopolitics, largely aligned during the Cold War, are now in tension, ruptured by decades of globalisation, America's decline, and China's ascent. Consequently, US security allies now often wrestle with the fact that their economic ties link them to US rivals, notably China, or adversaries, like Russia. The pandemic and war have wrought geopolitical and economic adjustments, but any resemblance to Cold War blocs is superficial. What is consolidating is an era best described as fuzzy bifurcation. Unlike the Cold War, alliances will be tenuous across policy domains. With this greater latitude, even small and medium‐sized states may band‐wagon on security but will balance, hedge and even pursue strategic autonomy in others. Terms like ‘allies’, ‘competitors’, ‘rivals’, and even ‘adversaries’ become contingent on the policy issue. It is a world that American and Chinese policy makers will find challenging, indeed frustrating, because of the inconstancy of allied behaviour.

Italian Physicists and the Bomb: Edoardo Amaldi’s Network for Arms Control and Peace during the Cold War

This article investigates the contribution of the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi to the anti-nuclear peace movement at national and international level. Amaldi (1908–89) was one of the leading nuclear physicists of the twentieth century. He grew up in the extraordinary environment of the ‘Via Panisperna Boys’, a group of young physicists active in Rome during the late 1920s and 1930s, under Enrico Fermi’s leadership. Yet Amaldi was not only a renowned academic but also an avid supporter of the movement against the nuclear arms race. He advocated the peaceful and industrial use of nuclear energy and tenaciously opposed its military exploitation. The only Italian invited to the first Pugwash meeting in 1957, he soon played a leading role in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and other similar events throughout his life. During the 1970s and 1980s, Amaldi – and many others among his colleagues – campaigned for a different security policy based on détente and broad transnational dialogue across the Cold War blocs. This essay focuses on some practical initiatives of the Italian community of physicists, underlying the political and civil use of their scientific expertise.

Geopolitics of decolonisation: The subaltern diplomacies of Lusophone Africa (1961–1974)

This paper addresses the global engagement of certain African intellectuals who strove for the independence of Lusophone Africa. It does so using geopolitical lenses based on new and multilingual archives. Extending current scholarship on subaltern geopolitics, cultures of decolonisation, and critical development studies, I show the performance of the subaltern diplomacies deployed by political leaders such as Amílcar Cabral, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, and Marcelino dos Santos in capturing international sympathy for their cause from other scholars, activists, and politicians at different levels (from grassroots movements to state leaders and international organisations) across the divides between Cold War blocs and the fields of the ‘First’, ‘Second’, and ‘Third World’. I argue that these endeavours disrupted mainstream narratives of development and Euro-centred ideas of assimilation, partly due to their emphasis on education and the production of subaltern histories and geographies that were instrumental to the national construction of new decolonised countries from so-called ‘Portuguese Africa’. In the 1960s and early 1970s, these intellectuals used the weapons of culture, public communication, and transnational networking as devices that were as important as the accomplishments of their fellow guerrilla fighters in the battlefield. Additionally, these stories confirm the importance of the archive for tracing cosmopolite, multilingual, and diasporic networks and their spatiality, as well as for doing critical geopolitics from perspectives other than Anglo- or Western-centred ones, thus decolonising geography.

Introduction: Burdens and Beginnings: Rebuilding East and West Germany after Nazism

AbstractThe introduction discusses the state of the current research on the post-1945 history of East and West Germany, explains the agenda of the special issue and discusses its main topics. The focus is the politics of survival in the chaos of collapse and the controversial debates about the agenda of the reconstruction. In these discussions different visions competed, from the restoration of traditions to efforts of a post-fascist modernization. The introduction questions the postwar success narrative by discussing the “burdens” of the Nazi past, such as Nazi perpetrators, displaced people, expellees and refugees, including the returning German-Jewish survivors. It also engages with the problems of the Cold War division by exploring the “new beginnings”, which were debated in relation to the past of Nazi, Weimar, and Imperial Germany, among them: cultural diplomacy, welfare policy and eldercare, family policy and gender roles, and popular culture. The essay calls for more comparative and transnational research of the postwar era, especially in the areas of the integration into the Cold War blocs, the postwar shifting of borders and peoples, narratives of victimhood, and memory tropes about the war and postwar.

Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War

This essay introduces a special issue focused on "Other Bandungs," which moves away from the focus on the high diplomacy of the 1955 Bandung conference to examine other conferences and gatherings across the Afro-Asian world. These gatherings speak to a broader participation of activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, and political leaders in the Afro-Asian moment. This collection thus disrupts hard divisions between state and non-state and warring Cold War blocs, while pointing to the changing social dynamics of internationalism in the Afro-Asian world. This essay points to the material dimensions enhancing and undermining transnational activity, from air travel and passport restrictions to the political economy of conference financing and Cold War patronage. Taken together, this essay frames these articles as an interconnected story of the multiple pulls of cultural and intellectual traffic in the post-colonial era.

Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War

This essay introduces a special issue focused on Other Bandungs, which moves away from the focus on the high diplomacy of the 1955 Bandung conference to examine other conferences and gatherings across the Afro-Asian world. These gatherings speak to a broader participation of activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, and political leaders in the Afro-Asian moment. This collection thus disrupts hard divisions between state and non-state and warring Cold War blocs, while pointing to the changing social dynamics of internationalism in the Afro-Asian world. This essay points to the material dimensions enhancing and undermining transnational activity, from air travel and passport restrictions to the political economy of conference financing and Cold War patronage. Taken together, this essay frames these articles as an interconnected story of the multiple pulls of cultural and intellectual traffic in the post-colonial era.

Clash of civilizations and the impact of cultural differences on trade

This paper studies the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis from an economic perspective. Using data on bilateral trade and measures of culture, we evaluate how the impact of cultural differences on trade evolves over time during and after the Cold War. Evidence suggests that the negative influence of cultural differences on trade is more prominent in the post-Cold War era than during the Cold War. For instance, ethnic differences reduce trade by 24% during the Cold War, whereas this reduction is 52% in the post-Cold War period. We also suggest a channel for the differential impact of cultural differences over time. By studying the evolution of the effects of cultural difference and cold-war blocs on trade, we provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that cold-war blocs have trumped cultural differences during the Cold War. Thus, cultural determinants of trade replace cold-war blocs as a major impediment to international trade only after the end of the Cold War.

The Druze Community and the Lebanese State, between Confrontation and Reconciliation

The Druze Community and the Lebanese State, between Confrontation and Reconciliation

IN THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE: REFLECTING ON THE POLITICAL-STRATEGIC POSITION OF THE SMALL STATES IN EUROPE AND THE CARIBBEAN BASIN DURING THE COLD WAR

Revisionist takes on the Cold War have entered public discourses and rendered understanding of the lead-up to, and unfolding of, the long game of brinkmanship between the US and USSR unintelligible. While this work does not seek to redress the meta-problems of current treatments of the Cold War, it does seek to examine some of the undercurrents during that period of international relations history. Specifically, this work presents a theoretical assessment of the small states that comprised the rank and file members of the Cold War blocs. The states of the Caribbean Basin, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe are used to illustrate the theoretical underpinnings of this work. Ultimately, this work deviates from more conventional understandings of the Cold War by intellectually reflecting on the manner in which small states were treated by their bloc leaders.

A Nordic Country with East European Problems: British views on post-war Finland, 1944–19481

Documents published in the latest volume of the series Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO) reveal interesting shifts in British views on Finland's odds of survival in the changing post-war geopolitical situation. In 1944–1945, the British government put the maintenance of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union first and identified its interests in Finland, considered to lie in the Soviet security sphere, very narrowly. However, after this initial period of marked pessimism over Finland's fate, the Foreign Office identified factors and trends which indicated that the Finns could carve a distinct position for themselves in the no-man's land between the emerging Cold War blocs. By 1948, careful, yet guarded, optimism of Finland as a Nordic country capable of retaining its sovereignty and Western connections superseded an earlier view of Finland as an East European country, bound to fall under complete Soviet domination sooner or later. As Finland's position improved, so Britain's interests gradually widened. Were Finland now to fall under Soviet domination, the United Kingdom and the West had more to lose. In the absence of means to match Soviet influence in Finnish foreign policy and domestic affairs, British policy was defined in terms of applying ‘soft power’ to preserve Western interests: cultural and economic relations, propaganda and information campaigns, and the cultivation of personal contacts with leading Finns. Subsequently, pessimism and optimism oscillated in British analyses of the situation in Finland and assessments of how well this soft power worked, or what means of influence were available. At the same time, a determined effort was made to contain the expansion of Soviet influence in Northern Europe to Finland.

Feature: Modern British History * The State of Modern British History

��� It is a pleasure to be here on this occasion, to celebrate Gareth Stedman Jones’s work together with the festschrift edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence that is being launched in his honour, and to take this opportunity to think with others about the state of modern British history. 1 I am very aware of the varied routes that historians have taken in these decades, the proliferation of sub-disciplines and the scale of professionalization, much of it driven by the exigencies of higher education. It is quite impossible to ‘know’ the full field of modern British history but I do know the particularity of the routes that I have taken. My reflections are necessarily partial and cannot do justice to the range of work represented in the book, which provide a very welcome sign of the diverse approaches being actively pursued by modern British historians. I first met Gareth in a garden in Richmond in 1963 when he was playing cricket – not an occasion which I imagine he would remember but etched on my memory – a hot summer’s day and a group of young men, scions of the New Left, taking their game quite as seriously as their politics. Gareth and I are the same generation – shaped by the politics of the early 1960s, the beginnings of the disintegration of the Cold War blocs, the emergence of new social movements, the events of 1968, the development of the women’s movement, the failures of both socialism and labourism. We have shared a broadly similar political and intellectual project – reacting both to the narrow political and constitutional history that dominated the professional agenda in the 1960s and to the group of British Marxist historians who were so formative for us. We share the view that history matters, that it is never confined to the academy, that the historical imagination flourishes in diverse spaces, that history writing is always theoretically informed, and that the task of the historian is to bring the past into the present – finding ways, as Gareth has put it, ‘of challenging greed, exploitation and misery’. 2 One of the early fruits of that political moment was History Workshop – both the journal and the movement that was connected with it. The historical vision it celebrated was an opening up of the subject, not

Computing Close to the Iron Curtain: Inter/national Computing Practices in Czechoslovakia and Finland, 1945-1970

The development and transfer of computing technology in postwar Czechoslovakia and Finland, two countries lying directly on the border between the two cold war blocs, were shaped by a mix of factors, from the political to the technological, in both countries. This article describes and analyzes the factors influencing the transfer of computing technology in cold war Europe on the basis of comparison of the national histories of these two frontier countries. Although the first computers were put into operation in the two countries during the second half of the 1950s, Czechoslovakia's industrial tradition concealed its gradual lagging behind Finland. During the postwar decade, the possibility of the transfer of computing technology and practices was a crucial factor in the spreading of computing technology in both countries. It was the commercial transfer of computers from the West to Finland that made their availability there, until the mid-1970s, relatively grow to three times that of Czechoslovakia. However, while the physical transfer of actual computers across the Iron Curtain was difficult, the intangible transfer of related ideas, designs, and practices was much easier. Moreover, it was not only politics that affected this technological development, but technology was also used to affect politics and form political ties.

Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from Patterns of International Conflict Involvement, 1946-97

This article offers an empirical test of Huntington's thesis in The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington argues that states belonging to different civilizations will have a higher propensity to be involved in international conflict. This effect should be more prominent in the post-Cold War period. The civilization factor should also interact with membership in different Cold War blocs, border contiguity, regime type, and levels of modernization, magnifying or depressing the basic effects of these variables. To test these hypotheses, a logit specification with King & Zeng's solution for rareness of events is used on the Kosimo data. The Kosimo data allow for an extension of the empirical analysis from both a temporal and a substantive point of view. This study shows that state interactions across the civilizational divide are not more conflict prone. The first eight years of the post-Cold War era also fail to give support to Huntington's thesis. Moreover, while the civilization factor modifies the effects of border contiguity and regime type, this is not sufficient to generate conditions under which differences in civilizational heritage are associated with greater risks of conflict.

West-East Relations in Europe: Political Perspectives*

IT is already clear that the mid1970s will be a unique period in the history of postwar Europe, in that Europeans will be engaged in an active process of institution-building both within Western Europe and in the East-West or 'pan-European' dimension. This period will thus stand in marked contrast to the mid-1940s, with their optimistic hopes for East-West institution-building during the early years of the UN (of which the UN's Economic Commission for Europe-ECE-has survived since 1947 as the sole relic, and is probably destined to play a renewed role in the future); also to the mid-1950s, with their pronounced emphasis on creating institutions within each of the cold war blocs; and again to the mid-1960s, when the main institutional debate was an intra-Western one concerning the relations between the 'European' bodies, notably the European Economic Community (EEC), and the 'Atlantic' ones, particularly Nato. In contrast to each of these previous periods of history, the 1970s are clearly destined to witness the simultaneous pursuit both of Western European integration, and of the attempt to establish some institutional framework for the developing pan-European dialogue. In the former of these processes, the nine member-states of the enlarged Community will be attempting to carry out the commitment made at the Paris summit conference of October 1972 to create a 'European Union' by the year 1980. Although the precise nature of the 'Union ' representing the end result of this process remains shrouded in ambiguity, some of its components including a substantial degree of economic and monetary union and a consolidation of the common commercial policyare already fairly clear. In the years ahead, the Nine will obviously go through very considerable strains and conflicts about the nature of their West European construction, but the degree of consensus on the general direction of development is certainly strong enough to herald a period of Community-building comparable to the experience of the Six between 1958 and 1965.

The Search for Arab Unity

IN a post-war world increasingly geared to interdependence, PanArabism stands out as a tragic and spectacular failure. Since 1945 the emergence of multinational power-formations has become one of the commonplaces of the international scene, not only in the cold war blocs but in the underdeveloped world. There, the necessity of forging cohesive units large enough to survive and develop independently in mid-20th century conditions has been almost universally recognised, and the principle more or less successfully applied in a variety of ways. Thus Africa, while sheering away from the grandiose vision of uniting the entire continent, has already produced several regional groupings, of which this year's proposed East African Federation is only the latest example. In South-East Asia, the foundation of Malaysia points a similar way ahead. As yet, of course, the future of these new enterprises is uncertain, but it is to be hoped they will avoid the fate which has so far overtaken every meaningful attempt to generate union in the Arab community.