Cold War Framework Research Articles

The holy city of holidays: Seven theses on the touristification of Spain

This paper analyses the notion of the ‘city of holidays’ in Spain by means of seven theses. Analysed as a transhistorical construction, valid to narrate the cultural history of modern tourism, the ‘city of vacations’ represents the symbiosis of a constructive model, a nationalist and religious imaginary, and an urban device of patrimonial origin. This construction defines the Spanish tourist paradigm, seen in the long-term, as it constitutes a recurrent- and mutant- fantasy that accompanies the economic and social Modernity associated with tourist development. Although the triumph of the Francoist Spanish vacation model is celebrated in the sixties, it has a much earlier genealogy, which takes us back to the foundational imaginaries of national-Catholicism and its ceremonial places. Born from the romantic discourses of the Restoration, linked to the neo-Catholic sanctuaries, the ‘city of vacations’ reemerges after the Civil War as a central part of the patrimonial discourse of the new Regime. There, the accumulation of capital at the base of the so-called ‘tourist miracle’ comes directly from the violence of Franco’s repression, including slave labour. At the same time, this model responds to the new economic logics of the Cold War framework, where the ecological and environmental cost of this urban model of development, based on itinerancy and mass-circulation, is dissolved. The celebration of the contemporary identity of today’s Spain as a global tourist power is carried out at the expense of this violent genealogy, even though such an identity is probably unsustainable in the eco-energetic and social horizon to which we are collectively heading.

Crossing the Bamboo Curtain: Occidentalism and the English Language in Cultural Revolution Memoirs

ABSTRACT In the late 1980s and 1990s, a stream of Cultural Revolution memoirs written by Chinese dissident writers became bestsellers in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries in the Anglosphere. Travelling through transnational circuits of exchange made possible by a multinational publishing industry, Cultural Revolution memoirs were promoted as authentic cultural productions that documented the hardships of life under Communism. This article situates the Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoir in a global Cold War framework. Drawing on theories of Occidentalism, I discuss how English language acquisition is invoked in Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoirs as a pathway towards achieving individual freedom. Through formalist readings, I demonstrate how two emblematic Cultural Revolution memoirs – Da Chen’s Colors of the Mountain and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans – establish their narrators as liberal subjects through the process of learning English, thereby elevating the central figure of the dissident who crosses the Bamboo Curtain and seeks a new life in the West.

Westerners, Western Power and Polish Society in the Mid-Twentieth Century: The Poznań International Trade Fair as a Complex Frontier

Drawing on Polish, US, French, British and German archival documents, this article examines the encounters between Western and Polish participants at the International Trade Fair in the Polish city of Poznań in the 1950s and 1960s. Challenging the predominant Cold War framework, it shows that Westerners who came to Poznań drew on power and privilege while pursuing personal interests. Consequently, the author both highlights the self-indulgence of the well-known story about the largely emancipatory motivations of Westerners who became involved with Eastern European affairs in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the resulting patterns of interactions are only tangentially related to Cold War political struggles. Instead, the article shows that these encounters are best seen in the context of a relationship between Westerners and East Europeans that spans decades, and even centuries, and that involved encounters fraught with contestation over economic power and cultural dominance.

Japanese Parliamentary Diplomacy on the Eve of the Cold War: Focusing on the Taiwan Channel

This study explores the diplomacy of the conservative ruling party lawmakers in Japan toward Asia on the eve of the Cold War. It shows— based on interviews and latest archival material released in Japan and Taiwan—that a structure for ending the Cold War existed in East Asia on the eve of the Cold War, which is different from the Second Cold War framework centered on the West. This research may also play a significant role in the study of the long-term governments of conservative parties and their foreign policies during the Cold War. Before the Cold War was over, the governments of Nakasone Yasuhiro and Takeshita Noboru in Japan had access to both China and Taiwan, and there were already movements within the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its factions toward a de-Cold War structure and ideology. Pro-Taiwan and pro-Korea factions in the party, which had overlapped since the formulation of the Cold War ideology, diverged. In this context, despite the timely utilization of personal relations between Taiwan and Japan since the prewar Japanese colonial period, an effective systematization of channels between the two governments that could be sustained over the long-term was not achieved.

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Summer Perritt (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. Jill Ogline Titus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4, 264 pp., paper, $27.95. Jill Ogline Titus’s Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town looks at the evolving memory and meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg during the 1960s Civil War centennial. Titus uses a Cold War framework to understand the battle’s political and cultural uses, arguing that Gettysburg’s “multifaceted identity as an idea, a landscape, and a living community” rendered the small town a useful tool in the fight for and against Black civil rights (2). To craft her narrative, Titus closely reads an impressive array of primary sources such as speeches, newspaper articles, monument dedications, and photographs to demonstrate that historical actors across the board attempted to use the Gettysburg centennial to serve their own contemporary interests. These attempts took the shape of three key narratives: a Lost Cause version of the War that white Southerners used to push back against civil rights agendas, a counter-narrative that suggested the fight for civil rights was the best way to honor the legacy of the Civil War and its fallen heroes, and finally, a Cold War perspective that capitalized on reconciliationist narratives of the War to promote American exceptionalism and democracy abroad. The first part of Titus’s work looks at the historical uses of Gettysburg leading up to the centennial. In the aftermath of the Civil War, tourism quickly became a mainstay for the town, as both white and Black tourists flocked to the site with their own understandings of the battle and its importance in crafting a larger American identity. As the decades passed, however, this understanding quickly became entrenched in contemporary struggles over white supremacy, Black disenfranchisement, and segregation. Beginning in the 1920s, Gettysburg became the key site for Ku Klux Klan activity, and in 1925 it played host to a two-day rally that attracted between twenty and twenty-five thousand attendees. Titus estimates that the Klan’s use of the battlefield [End Page 117] stood as a symbolic gesture intended to reinforce the idea that members of the hate group saw themselves as “modern-day defenders of patriotism and American heritage” and provided a throughline between the battles of the Civil War and what members saw as the ongoing fight for white supremacy (13). In the 1930s, the National Park Service took over management of the battlefield and officially moved Gettysburg into the orbit of Confederate memory, rendering the battle the “High Watermark of the Confederacy” (17). But Titus takes multiple angles into account, examining interpretations of the Gettysburg centennial from the perspective of civil rights workers, politicians, centennial planning-committee members, and local residents, both Black and white. As such, she explores how Black Gettysburgians actively contested white memory of the battle and its contemporary uses. They capitalized on the battlefield’s public status and used it for gatherings, picnics, and exercise. They decorated the graves of Black soldiers on Memorial Day and even refused to participate in commemorative events that portrayed racist reconciliationist narratives of the war. As Titus points out, the years leading up the centennial saw Gettysburg as a contested site where people across the nation came to debate issues of race, citizenship, and belonging. The middle chapters of Gettysburg 1963 explore the pageantry of the centennial and expertly flesh out the varied uses of the battle in a Cold War and civil rights context. A speech made by Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence during the 1961 Memorial Day celebration, for instance, insisted on the Civil War’s importance as a didactic moment in American history, providing a warning to foreign nations that Americans did not shy away from armed conflict when they believed their right to self-determination could be violated. Other politicians and centennial speakers emphasized reconciliation as the major legacy of the Civil War...

Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media

Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media

Advertising Pinochet: The Cold War Limits to a Neoliberal Crusade

In July of 1974, the J. Walter Thompson advertising company signed a contract with the Chilean junta to improve the international image of the dictatorship. Around two months later the agreement was made public, first in the United States and then around the world. Over the next few days, European and American JWT managers began to complain about the agreement. By the end of September, 1974, it was clear that the collaboration would have to be severed, which finally happened in October. In this paper, I show that both the efforts made to sign the contract and its sudden cancellation testify to the early makings of neoliberalism and its contingency. Pinochet’s Chile was an early neoliberal experiment; therefore this paper sheds new light on reconstructing the rising of neoliberalism within a Cold War framework. Most of the new historiography on neoliberalism focuses on ideas and public policy. I build on this recent historiography but change the scope. Here, I tell the story of a contract that provides a glimpse into this fundamental turn in the history of capitalism from the point of view of a multinational company facing the limits imposed by the negative reputation of the junta.

A Logic Beyond Lausanne: A Geopolitical Perspective on the Congruence between Turkey's New Hard Power and its Strategic Reorientation

Turkey’s new expeditionary capability, resting on enhanced naval capacity and new forward bases, is the logical result of Turkey’s post-Cold War strategic reorientation. Moving beyond the Cold War framework, Turkey's strategic goal is to become an interregional power that will set the terms for a new pattern of connectivity between Europe, Africa and Asia. ‘Reclaiming’ a foreign policy prerogative exercised by the Ottoman Empire but discontinued after Turkey’s founding following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey's policymakers are seeking to move beyond the Lausanne orientation that informed Turkey’s 1952 NATO accession and persisted throughout the duration of the Cold War. This study examines Ankara's challenge of calibrating the use of its hard power instruments to serve its post-Lausanne strategic orientation toward establishing a Turkey-centered, interregional connectivity.

Gendered Globality as a Cold War Framework

Originally penned by Mao Zedong in 1961 as an inscription on a photograph of female militia, “Bu ai hongzhuang, ai wuzhuang” 不爱红妆爱武 装 (“They love their battle array, not silks and satins”) for many sums up a presumed erasure of femininity in favor of a universalized masculine subject position within socialist China. This article reconsiders the discursive work done by militarized female bodies—physically and representationally—focusing on alternative international and internationalist futures following the Sino-Soviet split of 1960. The article critically engages state-to-state relations and internationally circulating PRC-produced cultural material that articulated feminist ideals as part of Afro-Asian-Latin American solidarity. This article returns to well-known texts of Maoist China to rethink state-produced Chinese feminism as a Cold War framework and gendered globality. It shifts the analytic from Cold War dichotomies that legitimate what most scholars misrepresent as an insular Chinese socialist female subjectivity of the 1960s to focus on the complex global dimensions of Cold War socialist feminism.

A ‘cultural Cold War’?

ABSTRACTThis article examines the development of the Institute of People’s Culture (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, Lekra) in West Java in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on contemporary publications, oral histories and archival documents, the article incorporates views ‘from below’ into an account of what became a vibrant cultural force. It shows how Lekra attracted a cultural elite but also wove itself into everyday life, as part of a web of organisations linked to the Indonesian Communist Party. Lekra in West Java combined an outward looking engagement in cultural diplomacy with efforts to reform Sundanese culture. Some developments in West Java paralleled national trends, including Lekra’s intensifying politicisation and growing cultural polarisation. However, developments in the province also had their own dynamics, manifesting in the contributions of prominent Sundanese Lekra figures to the ‘wayang controversy’ and in the role of a group of Sundanese writers who rejected the choice between Lekra and a rival group supporting the Cultural Manifesto. The article highlights challenges in applying a Cold War framework to cultural life in the decolonising world, and the need to move beyond elites in capital cities to incorporate views from the provinces and the grassroots.

Uneasy Comrades: Postcolonial Statecraft, Race, and Citizenship, Ghana-Soviet Relations, 1957–1966

Abstract This article tells a new history of the Cold War, of Ghana’s early post-colonial foreign policy, and the formation of Ghana’s national identity through its diplomatic, economic, and migratory relationship with the USSR during Kwame Nkrumah’s government (1957–66). Through examining English and Russian sources from American, British, Ghanaian, and Russian archives, this article offers three arguments. First, by analyzing Soviet anxieties over its role in Ghanaian affairs, the article shows that Ghana significantly controlled the economic and diplomatic contours and pace of its relationship with the USSR. Second, that discourses of race and neocolonialism were more central to defining the terms of Ghana’s geopolitical positioning than the Cold War framework. Third, the virulent racism Ghanaians experienced in the United States and USSR helped forge a global Ghanaian national consciousness. The article illuminates an independent black state’s attempts to procure sovereignty against a white supremacist economic and political international order and calls for Cold War scholars to engage seriously with African archives alongside non-African ones to create more dynamic, representational historical accounts.

Music, the Realist Conception of Art and the Materialist Conception of History

AbstractOur fraught political moment is a propitious one for renewing the Marxist approach to music. Because that approach has consistently been folded into a more general Marxist discourse on art and aesthetics, any attempt must begin by revisiting what is essential to that discourse. I take its keystone to be the realist conception of art. This conception holds that artworks are a means by which at least some of their appreciators come to know truths about the world outside consciousness. Insofar as they are representational, painting, fiction, music, and drama potentially constitute vehicles for coming to understand the real world. Artistic representation on this view is understood to be analogous to mental representation.Previous studies of Marxist aesthetics have followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty in making a sharp distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ branches of the tradition. The Eastern, beleaguered by the exigencies of Communist Party rule is often presented as the corrupt twin of the Western. The latter, developed in relative freedom and informed by a Hegelian legacy suppressed by Stalinism, alone commands theoretical, rather than merely historical, interest. This article departs from this Cold War framework in arguing that the Hegelian strand in Marxist aesthetics grows out of its Bolshevik predecessor and, crucially, shares with it a realist conception of art. After reconstructing the emergence and development of this conception (paying special attention to how music is directly addressed in the literature), I evaluate the compatibility of the realist conception of art with the materialist conception of history as it is found in Marx and Engels. I ultimately argue that moving past the realist conception of art is key to renewing the Marxist approach to music for our time.

SKYHAWK, SKYSHIELD, AND THE SOVIETS: REVISITING CANADA'S COLD WAR

AbstractFor the past two decades, Canadian international historians have largely missed the Cold War, or at least a significant portion of it. Certainly, there has been no shortage of studies of Canadian foreign policy featuring the bipolar struggle, and yet historians have largely confined their attention to Canada's admittedly crucial relationship with the United States, while Canadian–Soviet relations have been ignored. Indeed, in the historiography of Canada's Cold War international relations, the communist powers are largely missing. Hoping to challenge this limited focus, we frame our article around two Canada–US air defence exercises held in 1959 and 1960. While historians have viewed these exercises within the context of Canada's relationship with the United States, we highlight the wider Cold War framework in which Canadian policy was formed. After all, these exercises occurred during the mini-détente of the late 1950s and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960. As we demonstrate, the failure to take full account of the Cold War is a shortcoming of much of the writing on Canadian international relations, and so we offer an example of the need to take seriously Canada's foreign policy toward the communist bloc.

Young Man and War

When The New York Times sent David Halberstam to the Congo in August 1961, he seemed ill-prepared to report on a country betwixt and between its colonial past and its strife-ridden future. Halberstam, however, soon proved to have an instinct for depicting an alien culture from the inside out rather than from the outside in. His determination to prod his readers “to see and sense what the Congo really looks like, what it really is” caused him to discard the Cold War framework through which he had initially viewed the Congo Crisis and adopt a kind of empathetic reporting that resembled what the poet John Keats called “negative capability.” Halberstam learned in the Congo that the truth cannot always be discovered by affixing the right conceptual lenses to the proper equipment. Sometimes the truth is so complex, multi-layered, and culturally elusive that one can discover it only through an act of sympathetic imagination.

国际格局与日本政治大国谋求 / International Framework and Japan’s Pursuit of Being A Major Political Power

作为战败后崛起的国家，日本对国家发展道路的选择深受国际格局的影响。冷战时期的两极格局使日本在美国的支持下重新获得主权国家的身份。在冷战格局的框架下，日本在经济大国基础上提出了谋求政治大国的目标。冷战结束后，世界格局向多极化转变，日本将其视为实现政治大国的“机运”，期望更多地参与国际事务以及在国际秩序和经济体制方面发挥责任和作用；同时，日本在军事力量上也积极突破，为其践行政治大国化目标助力。21世纪后，多极化格局深化，新兴国家群体性崛起，日本谋求政治大国的进程加速，增强自身在区域经济中的领导力和影响力，谋求修改和平宪法，突破战后军事限制，在反恐等国际事务及联合国等国际组织活跃，推动政治大国化目标的实现。当前，日本政治大国的追求仍面临着不少障碍。 The boom of post-war Japan is deeply affected by the international framework when choosing the development path of the state. The bipolar architecture of the Cold War has made Japan a sovereign state again with the support of the United States. Within the Cold War framework, Japan has come up with the goal of being a political power based on its economic strength. After the end of Cold War, multipolar architecture has become the main trend in the world, and Japan has regarded this trend as its opportunity to realize its political dream, expecting to be more involved in world affairs as well as taking responsibilities within the international order and economic system. Meanwhile, Japan has also made a breakthrough within military power and used this to become a political power. Entering the 21st century, the multipolar architecture has deepened, while emerging nations have risen sharply collectively. Japan has speeded up the process of pursuing a political path accordingly, enhancing its leadership and influence in the regional economy, revising peace constitution to breakthrough military shackles, playing a role in counter-terrorism affairs and international organizations, thus making its dream of being a political power come true. Nevertheless, Japan has faced obstacles both at home and abroad.

Accommodating and Confronting the Portuguese Dictatorship within NATO, 1970–4

ABSTRACTDuring the early 1970s, NATO member-states such as Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands repeatedly sought to use the Atlantic Alliance as a forum to confront Portuguese domestic and colonial policies. However, the larger members of the organisation - including the United States, the UK, France, and West Germany - successfully blocked their efforts. While the former expressed concern over the challenges posed by the Lisbon regime to NATO's credibility at home and abroad, the latter sought to preserve their interests and institutional cohesion in view of the challenges posed by détente. This fault line reflected core differences in the allies' perspectives about both Portugal and NATO itself. Drawing on extensive multi-archival research, this article examines the motivations and actions of various member-states on the North Atlantic Assembly and the NATO Council ministerial meetings. It reconsiders the international dimension of the Marcelo Caetano dictatorship and the connection between the cold war framework and the process of Portuguese resistance to decolonisation in Africa.

Containing Conflict and Enforcing Consent in Titoist Yugoslavia: The 1970 Dockworkers' Strike in Koper (Slovenia)

The port of Koper (It. Capodistria) in the Slovenian part of the Istrian peninsula was built in the second half of the 1950s as a socialist modernization project. In 1970, it witnessed the only violently escalating dockers’ unrest in its socialist history. Using the personal archive of Danilo Petrinja, the port's second director, which has been preserved in the Regional Archive of Koper, the author takes a micro-historical approach to this incident, and views it at the historical moment in Yugoslavia between the student protests of 1968 and the ‘Croatian spring’ of 1971. She adds a perspective on the interconnectedness of the early 1970s and the late 1980s, when social unrest was an integral part of Yugoslavia's demise. The episode of public violence in the Yugoslav border city of Koper offers proof of the multi-layered nature of explanatory tropes: the border perspective from Koper is interwoven with the perspective of Yugoslavia as a whole, and a comparison with workers’ violence in neighbouring Trieste during the same years adds yet another twist to a reassessment of the applicability of the Cold War framework to an examination of labour relations and violence.

From Sputnik to Spaceship Earth: American Catholics and the Space Age

Abstract This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive terms. Catholic discussion of these issues revolved around the contributions of two theologians. From the earliest moments of the Space Age, Thomas Aquinas provided a justification for the work of Catholic scientists and astronauts within a Cold War framework. However, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic vision helped American Catholics integrate feelings of wonder and hope with darkly realistic fears about the military consequences of the space race. Thomas and Teilhard, fundamentally optimists, helped Catholics elaborate a vision of a way forward through the very real threats Americans confronted in the “long 1960s,” a vision they developed in books, articles, and speeches, but also in art, liturgy, and fiction. Ultimately, however, both extreme hopes about cosmic unification and extreme fears about total annihilation modulated, and like their fellow Americans interested in space flight during the 1960s, American Catholics turned in the early 1970s to a renewed focus on the Earth.

Italy and Australia: a relationship made and unmade by immigration

Australia's new-found post-colonial ‘independence’ in 1901 initially required it to continue to hold on to the apron strings of its colonial master. After World War II, these needs changed, as did the geopolitical power of the leading nations. For Australia, there would be the need to secure its borders, build its labour power, find security arrangements, and adhere to a cold war framework in its geographical region. The USA and the Asian region fell into Australia's sphere of interest. Italy, on the other hand, was a nation of contrasting interests and perspectives. Besides being located in Europe, the post-war period defined Italy by its participation in the concept of a European community and an entirely different set of allies, concerns and trajectories, which made it position itself in a different orbit than that of Australia. Australia's changing economic and social needs required a new and vast migration program in 1947, which would change the dynamics of its relationships. Enter Italy. The two countries now had common destinies in relation to migration—Australia needed people to help build its country, whilst Italy encouraged its impoverished rural population to emigrate to this distant and foreign land. A relationship was born.

Metabolism and Cold War architecture

In May, 1960, the Metabolist Group made a stunning debut at the World Design Conference held in Tokyo by presenting visionary proposals for future cities. Metabolism has long been understood within what Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co have called an ‘international concept of utopia’ of the 1960s. Metabolism's vision of the future, however, does not neatly fit into a singular category of modernist utopia. For Japanese architects who witnessed the devastation of war in their teens, it seemed nearly impossible to imagine a technology-driven future without considering the mass destruction of the urban environment, the inevitable consequence of the very embrace of technology that post-war Japan sought as a means to brighten its future. This article situates Metabolism within Japan's specific post-war condition, which was closely tied to global Cold War geopolitics. The Cold War framework allows us to examine the dual sensibility of promise and peril inherent in Metabolism's theory and design.