Cold War Diplomacy Research Articles

Army Orientations and Student Handbooks: Two Perspectives on Student Exchange during the US Occupation of Japan

In 1951, the largest cohort of Japanese exchange students in history arrived in the United States. Between 1949 and 1952, around 787 Japanese nationals received Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) scholarships, intended to cultivate a learned group of people to spread American ideas in Japan. The purpose was to provide Japanese university graduates with first-hand experience of US democracy; earning advanced degrees was secondary. The Army produced elaborate orientations and films to explain this goal to GARIOA recipients, who were among the only Japanese able to travel abroad and attend US universities. Because students found Army materials insufficient in preparing them for the challenges of studying and living in the United States and because they wanted to use the GARIOA program to their own ends, they wrote their own handbooks. A prime example is A Handbook for Japanese Students Going to America (Beikoku seikatsu sama zama), 1956, by the Exchange Student Association (Beikoku ryūgakusei kai). This article argues that Army orientations and student handbooks described Occupation-era educational exchange from two different perspectives and helped both groups to achieve their version of success and to engage in a larger conversation about the political role of exchange students in Cold War diplomacy.

Sharof Rashidov's Role in Cold War Diplomacy: A Soviet Uzbekistan Perspective

After World War II, the Soviet Union gained significant international prestige, which required a comprehensive approach to foreign policy. Newly liberated nations in Africa and Asia, seeking to break free from enduring colonial legacies, became a crucial battleground for Soviet propaganda. Over time, this trend gained momentum, leading to new approaches in Soviet diplomacy. Satellite states and non-Kremlin individuals played an active role in shaping Soviet foreign policy. The case of Soviet Uzbekistan, led by Sharof Rashidov, is particularly notable. Rashidov's exceptional diplomatic skills allowed him to play a prominent role in key events during the Cold War era, guiding his country for 24 years. The main goal of this study is to determine if there was a powerful and semi-autonomous actor outside of the Kremlin, shedding light on the complexities of decentralized involvement within the Soviet geopolitical landscape.

An African Looks at America: Picturing Racial Integration for Africa, 1956–68

The global tour of Edward Steichen’s 1955 photographic exhibition The Family of Man, sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA), has long been viewed as the defining moment for the medium’s engagement in US Cold War diplomacy and propaganda. Yet the attention garnered by this single exhibition has served to obscure an extensive programme of photographic diplomacy developed by the USIA during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and largely overlooked by photographic scholarship. One strand of this programme was shaped by the twin concerns of racial conflict at home and decolonisation in Africa and Asia. As the US government cultivated audiences in the newly independent nations of the emerging Third World, it became clear that it would need to adapt its message. Racial integration became a pervasive theme in the agency’s photographic output as it sought to picture America for its international audiences and visually refute accusations that the USA was an inherently racist society. In contrast to studies of US propaganda output of the early 1950s, which have suggested a limited repertoire for the representation of African Americans, the photographic records for this period provide evidence that the USIA paid close attention to the micro-politics of racial interaction and endeavoured to create a richer and more complete set of representations. Seen in the context of the time, the carefully choreographed portrayals of interracial interaction that emerge from the USIA archives are remarkable, if always highly partial and selective.

Book review:Castro and Franco: The Backstage of Cold War Diplomacy by Haruko Hosoda

Book review:Castro and Franco: The Backstage of Cold War Diplomacy by Haruko Hosoda

Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World by Benjamin R. Young

<i>Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World</i> by Benjamin R. Young

Choreographing neutrality: dance in Cambodia’s Cold War diplomacy in Asia, 1953–1970

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of dance in Cambodia’s Cold War diplomacy in Asia from 1953 up until the establishment of the Khmer Republic in 1970. It explores how Sihanouk leveraged Cambodian dances to enact Cambodia’s neutral stance during the Cold War and forge cordial relations with other Asian states. Through an examination of the myriad of dance performances of the Royal Ballet and other Khmer dance troupes within the context of Cambodia’s diplomatic relations in Asia, this paper demonstrates how dance afforded a space for Inter-Asia referencing amidst the Cold War tension in the region. Premised on an interdisciplinary approach, this paper underscores dance as an active political space where two historical phenomena merged: decolonisation/nation-building and the Cold War. In doing so, it places dance as inevitably entangled with diplomatic history and sheds light on its role in reifying the newly constructed, albeit nebulous, national identity of postcolonial Cambodia.

"A Light Bulb in Every House": The Istanbul General Electric Factory and American Technology Transfer to Turkey.

In 1946, Turkish entrepreneur Vehbi Koç signed an agreement with the U.S. firm General Electric to build and operate its first light bulb factory in the Near/Middle East, in Istanbul. This private joint venture introduced new manufacturing techniques, business practices, and consumer habits to Turkey, opening channels of postwar technological exchange. Closer examination of the GE-Koç partnership reveals that during the early Cold War, the transfer and embedding of American technologies in Turkey was a politically complicated process of innovation that required constant adaptation. Fraught with unforeseeable obstacles, it also required cautious negotiation with multiple transnational actors. The story of the GE-Koç partnership thus adds a new dimension to historical understandings of the Turkish Cold War experience and the Americanization of the region. It illustrates how transferring a nonmilitary, soft-power, domestic technology-the light bulb-played a significant role in Turkish-American relations and therefore contributes to studies of U.S. Cold War diplomacy through transnational investment in innovation.

“Velvet Steel” Ministers for God and America: Eleanor Lansing Dulles and the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of Christianity and Nationalism

The political impact of Dr. Eleanor Lansing Dulles has not been assessed in her capacity as a power broker who brought her theological understandings to Cold War United States policy. The deep influence of both her brothers—Allen, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Foster, Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower—on global affairs and diplomacy has been the topic of myriad studies. Works draw extensively on family biography, noting that both “nature and nurture” brought religion to US foreign policy. Including Dr. Dulles in the analysis provides nuance and complexity to definitions of Christian nationalism and underscores the legacy of both missionaries and religious thought in US foreign relations during the early Cold War. Contextualizing religiosity through a study of gender and the Dulles family legacy of female missionaries into the Cold War narrative builds upon the existing literature of the Dulles family, religion, and Cold War diplomacy to challenge concepts such as Christian internationalism, Christian nationalism, and Left–Right binaries. Diplomacy is revealed as her form of Christian missionary work in the secular sphere. Eleanor Lansing Dulles became a missionary not for a religion, but for a nation.

Nehru’s Bandung moment: India and the convening of the 1955 Asian-African conference

ABSTRACT This article explores Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in convening the 1955 Bandung Conference. Drawing upon previously embargoed Indian and Western government records, it sheds light on a largely overlooked aspect of Nehru’s Cold War diplomacy. By doing so, it shows that Nehru did not attach, at least initially, much importance to Indonesia’s calls for an Asian-African conference. Only in late 1954 did he show more interest in the Indonesian proposal. Three factors pushed Nehru in this direction: his reluctance to embarrass Indonesia, his concerns about American regional policy and his desire to exploit China’s support for peaceful coexistence. Confronted with renewed regional tensions but able to capitalize on Beijing’s new-found reasonableness, Nehru threw India’s diplomatic weight behind Indonesia’s proposal with the view to furthering his vision of “areas of peace.” Nehru’s “Bandung moment,” however, was short-lived. Although the Bandung Conference appeared to have advanced India’s national interests in the short term, its benefits were more questionable in the long run. In the end, India was unable to tie China down to its regional vision and protect itself against Chinese belligerence. Faced with a mounting Chinese challenge, Nehru’s strategy, centered upon nonaligned peaceful coexistence, manifested all its limitations.

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Newborn Screening in Latin America: A Window on the Evolution of Health Policy

Investigating the historical origins of a well-accepted health program across a region, such as newborn screening in Latin America, has the potential to reveal the role of historically-specific drivers in shaping national health policy. We reviewed published reports on NBS in Latin America and interviewed newborn screening experts with experience in the region. We found trends suggesting that the decrease in infant mortality may be a prerequisite to investing in nationwide screening for rarer conditions. We also note the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in boosting newborn screening programs in developing nations as a legacy of Cold War diplomacy to promote peaceful uses of atomic energy. Further research in charting demographic trends and in contrasting nations that engaged with the Agency with those that did not has the potential to reveal critical issues in health policy development.

U.S.-Soviet Handshakes in Space and the Cold War Imaginary

Abstract This article examines the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 as an instrument of diplomacy and as a catalyst for East-West détente. The topic has received little attention in either the general literature on the Cold War—which has only recently begun to address the political significance of science and technology more generally—or in the literature on space history, which has focused mostly on the earlier race to land on the moon and has devoted little attention to the collaboration in space that has dominated crewed space missions from the 1970s, leading up to the International Space Station. The article connects two previously separate spheres of study—space history and diplomatic history—to shed light on the importance of space exploration in the bigger story of Cold War diplomacy.

With strings attached: Gift-giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US foreign policy

In 1958 the United States of America offered two mobile radioisotope laboratories to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as gifts. For the USA, supplying the IAEA with gifts was not only the cost of “doing business” in the new nuclear international setting of the Cold War, but also indispensable in maintaining authority and keeping the upper hand within the IAEA and in the international regulation of nuclear energy. The transformation of a technoscientific artefact into a diplomatic gift with political strings attached for both giver and receiver, positions the lab qua gift as a critical key that simultaneously unlocks the overlapping histories of international affairs, Cold War diplomacy, and postwar nuclear science. Embracing political epistemology as my primary methodological framework and introducing the gift as a major analytic category, I emphasize the role of material objects in modeling scientific research and training in a way that is dictated by diplomatic negotiations, state power, and international legal arrangements.

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

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

Engineering Education in Cold War Diplomacy: India, Germany, and the Establishment of IIT Madras*.

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT) was set up with assistance of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1956 and 1974. It became the largest, and finally, a successful techno-scientific education project undertaken by the Federal Republic outside of Germany. In this paper, I argue that the engagement of the Federal Republic at IIT Madras has to be understood primarily as a project of Cold-War science and technology diplomacy, which on the German side was aimed at preventing an Indian recognition of the German Democratic Republic as a sovereign nation. In aiding the establishment of IIT Madras, the Federal Republic came into direct competition with the Soviet Union, which supported IIT Bombay but also with the United States of America, which supported IIT Kanpur. The assistance to establish IIT Madras and its governance followed mainly political guidelines, to which educational and scientific aspects were rendered subordinate. When the project was in a crisis after the first State Treaty to establish IIT Madras expired in 1963, the political flagship project of the Federal Republic was not allowed to fail. Instead, the cooperation was reorganized and support increased.

The Books in the Bunker: Global Flows of Meaning and Matter in Academic Assemblages

Under United States Public Law 480, a major hallmark of Cold War diplomacy, India received millions of dollars in loans from the US during the 1950s and 1960s in the form of food and agricultural products. A portion of the interest due on this loan was repaid by India partly in the form of books in about two dozen languages which were collected from across South Asia and sent to the Library of Congress and several universities in the country during the heyday of the development of Area Studies. The object of this paper is a large deposit of written material—books, periodicals and ephemera—that was sent to the University of Texas at Austin over a period starting in the 1960s under the PL 480 programme. Most of these materials were added to the library collections, but a large number of them remained uncatalogued for about fifty years in an underground library storage facility in downtown Austin. The history of these materials, and the moment when they reappeared provides a case study of how books are appropriated (or not) into academic, library and political assemblages, and the way disciplines and their canons have been shaped by politics and infrastructure from the Cold War into the neo-liberal age.

BOOK REVIEW: FOREIGN INTERVENTION IN AFRICA: FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR

The book was published in 2013 and was written by Professor Elizabeth Schmidt, who is currently working at Loyola University Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in African history, holds Masters Degrees in African History and in Comparative World History, and a Certificate in African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is well regarded in her field and has written extensively on issues such as West African Nationalism and Politics, Women’s Issues, and the Cold War Diplomacy and its impact on Africa. She has made significant contributions to well-respected journals such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of African History

Death in Philadelphia, 1958

In 1958, In-Ho Oh, a foreign student from South Korea, was beaten to death in West Philadelphia by a group of black youths. The brutal murder shocked people all over the nation who wrote hundreds of letters to the newspapers and the mayor about the incident. Some letter writers focused on the implications of the murder for Cold War diplomacy, while some believed there were moral lessons to be learned from the generous actions of Oh’s family. Yet other letter writers focused on race and juvenile delinquency and constructed an idealized “model” minority in the Korean student, contrasting him to the young suspects. The death of In-Ho Oh came to have different meanings to different groups and challenged America’s self-perception about racial equality and exceptionalism.

Cold War, Culture Wars, War on Terror: the NEA and the art of public diplomacy

ABSTRACT This article reframes the conversation on the National Endowment for the Arts’ loss of funding during the 1990s. It argues morality and fiscal responsibility have been overemphasised and instead suggests one must consider the agency’s relationship to the Cold War and cultural diplomacy. Born of the Cold War, it charts the NEA’s development of international programming, its partnerships with the State Department and United States Information Agency, and the financial impact of the Cold War’s end. It extends this analysis to the agency’s resuscitation after 9/11, as the War on Terror gave new life to old approaches.

Sociability in International Politics: Golf and ASEAN's Cold War Diplomacy

AbstractSociability or “the play form of association” appears in a range of interactions in world politics sited at banquets, drinking gatherings, golf courses, and even the sauna. Notwithstanding this salience, the form and effects of sociability are poorly understood in International Relations. This article fills this gap. It conceptualizes sociability—its distinct sociological structure; its variations along class, race, and gender; its effects on social interaction—and argues that sociability matters in world politics. Specifically, sociability contributes to identity formation and community maintenance, enables learning, produces social capital, and generates a “backstage” where actors can manage disagreement. I substantiate this argument by examining the sociability fostered from playing golf in the diplomacy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). I explain why golf emerged as a sociable practice in capitalist ASEAN's diplomacy in contrast to socialist and nonaligned circuits of Cold War Southeast Asia; examine the elite and male-homosocial character of this sociability; suggest how it influenced the Associations’ diplomacy; and outline the structural shifts that have led to its post–Cold War decline. This article contributes to the study of sociability in world politics, international practice theory, the political sociology of leisure, and the international politics of Southeast Asia.