Cold War Historiography Research Articles

Peeking under the Asian Iron Curtain: Socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial modes of friendship between Pakistani and Tajik poets

ABSTRACT While Cold War historiography often foregrounds severed or frayed political ties, this article ethnographically explores unexpected friendships forming across apparent Cold War divides between Soviet Central Asian and Pakistani intellectuals – most notably, Muhammad Iqbal, Mirsaid Mirshakar, Mirzo Tursunzoda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. These exchanges were initially made possible by Soviet agendas to build anti-colonial relations abroad by sending Soviet Central Asian intellectuals to international, anti-colonial conferences. Progressive communists like the Pakistani poet Faiz attended these forums too and formed rich friendships with Soviet Central Asian writers like Tursunzoda. I show however, that while Soviet agendas facilitated these friendships forming on shared socialist and anti-colonial grounds, their depth must also be attributed to a shared Persianate heritage. At least three modes of friendship were therefore formed between the same sets of people (socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial), which were made possible by the multiple subjectivities these figures inhabited as simultaneously socialist, Persianate and anti-colonial selves. Through this intersubjective affective relation, high-profile intellectuals found ways of connecting across and beyond Cold War divisions. I thus conceptualize friendship as multiple and generative, whereby two people can form more than one mode of friendship, each premised on markedly different social values and conceptions of self and Other. Despite their differences, these multiple, overlapping subjectivities and affective relations were not incompatible, allowing these intellectuals to connect in other-than-socialist ways at the height of the Cold War.

Oppressed, Resistant, and Revolutionary

This article analyzes the Third Worldist project of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) by focusing on its graphic production. OSPAAAL was founded during the Tricontinental Conference in 1966 and existed until 2019, based in Havana. I argue that the organization played a prominent role in the dissemination of images about the so-called Third World, allowing a certain interpretation of its meaning – associated with the notions of oppression, resistance, revolution, and solidarity – to be visualized at an international level. Different strategies used by artists who worked for OSPAAAL to visually approximate different contexts, in order to sustain this narrative, will be examined. This study is part of the so-called new Cold War historiography and aims to highlight the role played by actors from the Global South in the (re)elaboration and circulation of narratives about the world order in the second half of the twentieth century.

From peaceful coexistence to the War of all the People: Cuba and the Cold War in Central America and the Caribbean (1975-1983)

ABSTRACT Building on recent scholarly interest in Latin America’s Cold War, this paper breaks new ground in using a broad range of original documents from previously largely overlooked voices – the foreign ministries, parties, and security services agencies of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Romania – in discussing Cuba’s Cold War involvement in Central America and the Caribbean from the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party until the U.S. Grenada invasion. The candid reports provided by contemporary East European observers help us attain a more nuanced picture of Havana’s complex policy dilemmas as it sought to negotiate and navigate between its vast ambitions, limited abilities, Soviet bloc restraint, and the ever-present threat of a U.S. invasion. Finally, further in line with the latest advancements in the globalized Cold War historiography, in hearing the voices of Moscow’s junior partners, this article casts the events surrounding the tumultuous period in a broader Transatlantic setting beyond the shadows of the superpowers.

Wasana Wongsurawat. The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation.

Wasana Wongsurawat’s The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation reexamines Thai narratives of modernization, the process by which a feudal kingdom was transformed into a nation-state. Conventional histories of Thailand credit the monarchy for the country’s development, depicting the king either as an astute diplomat fending of Western intervention or an internal colonizer imitating European models of state building. Cold War historiography explains Thai history as a journey, in fits and starts, toward the elusive goal of liberal democracy. The Crown and the Capitalists makes an important contribution to this scholarship by adopting a transnational approach, focusing on both the country’s long-standing relationship with China and the sizable Chinese diaspora within its borders. As the title suggests, the book is centered on the uneasy partnership between royal elites and the immigrant community of Chinese businessmen, which Wasana argues is the key to understanding the historical trajectory of the Thai nation-state. In so doing, the author seeks to create space for Chinese immigrant voices within the story of Thai modernization.

The Origins of the ‘Third World’: Alfred Sauvy and the Birth of a Key Global Post-War Concept

ABSTRACT In 1952, French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term ‘Third World’, a neologism that expanded globally and became a key category of post-war thought. After the term's decline in the 1980s, decolonial studies and the new Cold War historiography revisited it, using it to ‘provincialize’ Cold War history. Although these approaches rightly note the Third World's historical importance as a concept, they neglect its genesis. This article contends that we cannot fully grasp the concept's global success without tracing it back to Sauvy's initial semantically rich conceptualisation. First, Sauvy gave the concept a hybrid political and scientific content, allowing both activists and social scientists to adopt the term. Second, Sauvy associated the ‘Third World’ with other key Cold War concepts (anticolonial revolution; underdevelopment; third way), which successfully expressed contemporary concerns. This article sheds light on an apparent paradox: although Sauvy was a French pro-colonialist, he developed a concept that underscored the agency of the ‘wretched of the earth’, enabling anti-colonial activists to appropriate the concept. However, Sauvy presented the Third World as a protagonist of post-war revolution in order to oppose the US notion of ‘underdevelopment’, which depicted ‘underdeveloped’ nations as the passive victims of colonial powers.

Towards a critical geopolitics of China–US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts and transnational connections

AbstractThe deterioration of bilateral relations between the US and China heralds a new chapter in geopolitics increasingly characterised by competition and confrontation. We introduce insights from contemporary Cold War historiography, which we suggest can help deepen our understanding of the present. Historians have largely rejected the notion that the Cold War was a bipolar struggle between great powers. Instead, the ‘Global Cold War’ is increasingly interpreted as an era, order or context whose diverse localised manifestations necessitate multilingual research around the world. This scholarship draws attention to the conflict's ‘pericentric’ nature, its diverse regional manifestations and the transnational connections it enabled. We demonstrate that these concepts can inform research on contemporary China–US rivalry and suggest a multi‐scalar and multi‐sited research agenda in line with approaches of feminist political geography and critical geopolitics.

The Cold War: A World History

The Cold War: A World History

Inter-firm convening and organisational power: How American multinationals mobilised the Venezuelan business community to adopt CSR practices, 1961–1967

In the 1960s, political threats drove petroleum multinational corporations in Venezuela to deploy highly sophisticated defense strategies. The American industry leader, Creole, wanted the local business community to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) identities and practices as a buffer against state intervention and communist uprising. How would Creole instigate such field-level organisational transformation? By addressing this question through theoretically informed historical narration, I endeavour to extend institutional theory into the world of inter-firm mobilizations for institutional creation and change. Such mobilizations are organised through inter-firm convening: a mechanism through which organisations mobilise – based on the establishment of a special-purpose meta-organisation – to address external challenges by modifying collective identities, remodelling forms of organisation, and diffusing practices in their field. (In Venezuela, this meta-organisation was called Dividendo.) By using this centrally coordinated form of mobilisation, the project’s agenda setters can exert transformative influence on the identity and behaviour of potentially numerous other organisations. I discuss implications for the study of institutional work, organisational power, and global diffusion. The article promotes a corporate and management-centred perspective on CSR, Latin American, and Cold War historiography.

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

With Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Tanya Harmer delivers a brilliant book that offers new and needed perspectives on the apex of the Latin American Cold War. This thorough biography of a prominent activist and key link within the multilayered regional Left expands far beyond the life of an individual and explores various Cold War patterns and dynamics. Owing to an extraordinary array of previously unconsulted primary sources, this book is a masterful example of how, by exploring one person's life and surroundings, researchers can scrutinize broader phenomena—in this case, “a particular revolutionary moment in Latin America's Cold War” (p. 16).A major asset of the book is Harmer's methodical examination of how the Eduardo Frei administration (1964–70) influenced the Chilean Left. There is a regrettable trend in Cold War historiography to disregard Chile's Christian Democratic experience, which fostered a “climate of reform and voluntarism” that had a strong impact on a younger generation of revolutionaries (p. 88). Frei's reformist agenda, which included rapprochement with the socialist sphere, helped set the scene for new patterns of mobilization and activated mounting hopes that forged a dynamic of radicalization by expectation. This concatenation had a lot to do with the rise and fate of Salvador Allende's socialist project. Thus while the Popular Unity period has received the bulk of academic attention, Harmer convincingly invites us to further delve into the years preceding it, in order to reveal those hard-to-grasp mechanisms that led to the growth of revolutionary awareness.A second major strength of this book is its incorporation of a gender approach across the entire volume. This approach demonstrates how decisive gendered political divisions were in determining (and stymieing) women's aspirations and political possibilities. The book probes episodes in both Chile and Cuba in which Beatriz Allende's ambitions were repeatedly hampered by well-entrenched, masculinist revolutionary imagery. This is aptly presented as evidence of how Latin American women were constrained in the political sphere.But despite these nearly insurmountable constraints, Allende played a pivotal role as key mediator among multiple revolutionary groups, often with clashing proclivities. She was able to navigate across several factions and managed—sometimes successfully—to build ties within the complex Latin American Left: among Cuban and Chilean officials under Salvador Allende, radical and moderate Chilean leftists, and local and exiled revolutionaries in Chile and Cuba. Far from simply an idiosyncrasy, Beatriz Allende's astounding ability to assume “different roles and personalities depending on the situation” contributed to shaping the hemispheric Left's progression (p. 104). By highlighting Allende's position as a bridge between factions—with constant and revealing illustrations of this peppered throughout the book—Harmer underscores the role of Cold War intermediaries and, by doing so, exposes why a transnational outlook is fundamental to a fuller picture of the Latin American Cold War.However, even though Harmer has long been a key proponent of the concept of the “global Cold War”—coined by her doctoral dissertation director, Odd Arne Westad—this book lacks a wider discussion of the appropriateness of a transnational history approach to Allende's biography. The book is punctuated with personal episodes of Allende's multifaceted and tormented life that exerted an impact on her political posture. While the book evinces both inner and transnational dynamics, it does not provide a broader debate on the main factors that ultimately played the greatest role in defining Allende's trajectory and, by extension, the nature of Latin America's Cold War. Can personal stories sometimes outshine global trends? Are people's political mobilization and choices molded by personal experiences? Or should we rather focus on the grand ideological narratives and developments? Harmer presumably has a clear answer to these queries, but a more straightforward discussion of this in the book would have been desirable in clarifying her intellectual approach.While the book certainly delivers an eloquently multidimensional view of the Left, the Right is barely considered for its ideological ramifications in the global Cold War. Undoubtedly Allende and her political entourage “faced terrible odds” in confronting “powerful, foreign-backed opponents” (p. 265). But beyond its repressive apparatus and sinister alliance with the United States, the Latin American Right, as Vanni Pettinà has pointed out, also had a political project, one that garnered significant support from the economic elite as well as large portions of the regional middle class. Harmer is well aware of this, but her depiction of the Right without its ideological distinctiveness (which ultimately motivated violence) is one slight flaw in an otherwise formidable and indispensable book for both contemporary Latin Americanist and Cold War experts.

Promoting the Socialist Community: Efforts and Effects of the Socialist Camp’s Cultural Diplomacy

Based on an analysis of modern Cold War historiography, the article considers current discussions, topics, and perspectives in the chosen research landscape. Taking into account the modern circumstances, the author concludes that in the latest publications, there is a tendency to reconsider the dichotomic model “Sovietisation vs Americanisation” and, instead, take a closer look at the representations of socialism and the structures and actors of cultural diplomacy in Eastern Europe. Referring to propaganda projects of socialist integration and intercultural spaces, the author demonstrates what was specifically socialist about the forms and instruments of representations of the Eastern Bloc, the conflicting spheres of collaboration, and independent initiatives of people’s democracies in the sphere of cultural diplomacy. The author concludes that at the end of the Second World War, the propaganda system in the Soviet Union was integrated into a larger scheme of presenting the world system of socialism where the Eastern European states became symbolically appropriated spaces and promising symbolic resources. The cultural initiatives of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe at the international level testify to the cultural pluralism in the Eastern Bloc. The independent steps the countries of the socialist camp took for self-realisation on the international arena testify to this cultural pluralism. The effectiveness of their symbolic messages was facilitated by the geographical proximity to borders, integration into the contexts of western culture, and better developed information resources. In the article, the author’s own analysis is preceded by a review of materials thematically related to the section of the journal on the cultural diplomacy of socialism. Articles referred to in the study and devoted to the projects of the socialist camp prove the thesis that the Eastern Bloc that emerged during the Cold War and the hybrid identities developed under its influence survived the breakdown of the bipolar order and are important for modern culture.

Doing Moscow’s Bidding in Europe: Populist Political Movements in a Historical Continuum

Abstract From the fissures of Brexit and the recent results of pan-national European Union (EU) elections, insurgent political parties are becoming a force to be reckoned with. For all their disparate centers of gravity, nearly all of them converge on the question of Euroscepticism and the liberal international order. The primary consternation, it is routinely said, is not so much their dogged populism, but that most of them are unwittingly setting themselves up to do Moscow’s bidding in Europe. Drawing on Cold War historiography, this article sets out to critique how this thesis evolved along a consistent prism of ideological meta-narratives. Its key focus is highlighting how missing links in some of the seminal moments in the history of Soviet-Western relations continue to filter into explaining contemporary political developments in the EU. This article thus makes two basic conclusions. First, that there is something to be said of the insurgent political movements as committed players in the competition for the balance of power in the political berth of Europe. And in that regard, their rhetorical association with Moscow’s positions is a pragmatic step in the grand strategy of national and pan-European politics. Second, Moscow, contrary to being the adversarial vector of liberal Europe, has historically identified its best interest with cooperating, if not outrightly, aligning with the Western-led postwar international liberal order.

북한을 역사화하기 — 국가사회주의, 인구이동, 그리고 냉전사학

북한을 역사화하기 — 국가사회주의, 인구이동, 그리고 냉전사학

Western journalism in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War: themes, approaches, theses

ABSTRACTRecent Cold War historiography has increasingly put the spotlight on the many different ways in which the Iron Curtain was perforated before the Berlin wall fell. One factor which arguably played a key role in that respect was the East-West communication that took place thanks to radio, TV, and other media. Mass communication during the Cold War, however, is still an under-researched theme. This article will introduce the reader to themes, approaches and theses in the extant literature about Western journalism in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, and it will also identify areas which call for further investigation.

Freedom Over Seas: Eileen Chang, Ernest Hemingway, and the Translation of Truth in the Cold War

Abstract This article examines Eileen Chang’s 1953 translation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea into Chinese as Cold War propaganda for the United States Information Service (USIS). It argues that this translation, meant to show the truth of democracy through its high modernist form, directly influenced the writing and translating of The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), the novel Chang wrote next for the USIS to expose the truth of famine in Communist China. I show that Chang’s translation practices connect US and Chinese literary modernisms in a showdown of literary forms and their disparate claims to the truth. Chang navigates political ideologies by eschewing linguistic equivalence to favor equivocation instead, ultimately transforming Hemingway’s modernist form via her own. It thus adds to transpacific studies and Cold War historiography by revealing the intimate relationship between political ideology and literary form, and their cross-fertilization in the process of translation.

Unique connections. Uses of the transnational social capital of Czech pastors in the Cold War 1940s–1960s

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyse the genesis of the transnational professional network of Czech pastors from the second half of the nineteenth century with the main emphasis on its functioning and instrumentalisations on different levels in the context of the Czechoslovak Communist dictatorship caught in the dynamics of the global Cold War. It is close to the attempts to reintegrate reflection on religion in the history of globalisation. Furthermore, it adopts a perspective related to the ‘new Cold War historiography’ emphasising considerable interaction and exchange irrespective of seemingly insurmountable political divisions and conflicts.

Danish Cold War Historiography

Abstract For decades, little research on Danish Cold War history was conducted either inside or outside Denmark. The relevant archives were closed, and generations of Danish contemporary historians were primarily interested in what happened during World War II. This is no longer the situation. Over the past 35 years, especially since the end of the Cold War, researchers have scrutinized Danish Cold War history in great depth. By now, scholarly research in Denmark on the Cold War, especially in the area of Danish national security affairs and foreign policy, has reached a level that merits international attention, and this survey article provides an overview. The article encourages Danish Cold War scholars to promote comparative research that incorporates Danish Cold War history into the wider international Cold War scholarship, to the benefit of both Danish and international research.

Historicizing North Korea: State Socialism, Population Mobility, and Cold War Historiography

Abstract The Cold War is far from over on the Korean Peninsula. Korean history—especially for the northern half—remains deeply shaped by the legacies of transnational anti-communism even as historians who study socialism in other settings have shed many of the Cold War–era assumptions about the extensive power of the state. By putting North Korea in a comparative perspective with other socialist countries such as the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the German Democratic Republic, this article suggests ways of integrating the constitutive power of social forces beyond the state into our histories of North Korea, as seen through an examination of population movement. Beginning with the dissolution of the Japanese Empire, the mobility of people has always been a politicized issue between the two Koreas. Historians have taken up this issue, yet dependence on sources produced by the North Korean state has led many narratives—however harshly critical of the regime—to reproduce within their own analytical frameworks key assumptions originally produced in Pyongyang in support of the personality cult. The result has been a cartoonish depiction of the North Korean state. By using a diverse set of public media as sources, this article shows that due to conflicting interests of migrants, factory managers, and central economic planners, many North Koreans moved into the cities despite administrative injunctions and the admonishments of Kim Ilsung. Asking questions about the limits of the state, rather than assuming its totalitarian capacity, becomes one way of escaping the historiographical legacies of the Cold War even as the politics of division continue to rage on the peninsula.

The Cold War as comparative political thought

The aim of this article is to provide a programmatic statement for a research agenda in the comparative political thought of the Cold War. As an innovative methodology for the study of political ideas, the author contends that comparative political theory connects up very well with the ways in which Cold War historians have come to frame their questions: systematically applying its principles therefore offers an interesting opportunity to take the recent scholarship forward. The first section reviews the treatment of ideas across phases of the Cold War historiography, and proposes that an approach styled on comparative political theory potentially brings out two general qualities of Cold War ideas, which are often missed: what the author calls their granularity and embeddedness. At the same time some prospects are raised for reconciling the political and cultural histories of the Cold War. The second section focuses on the aspect of comparison, and situates the research programme in the context of the recent trend towards the study of international history. The third section is the most constructive. An indicative series of projects is offered which such a programme might pursue. The concept of the Cold War ‘thought-practice’ is proposed as the most promising unit of analysis by which the figure of the political theorist might contribute to the interpretation of Cold War history.

Cold War Mnemonics: History, Melancholy, and Landscape in South Korean Films of the 1960s

Abstract This article examines the way that cinematic mnemonics of 1960s South Korean films ciphers the heterogeneous and conflicting experiences regarding two entangled wars: the Korean War and the Cold War. In a close reading of Kim Suyong’s Mist (An’gae, 1967) and Yi Sŏnggu’s The General’s Mustache (Changgun ŭi suyŏm, 1968), the article argues for the multifaceted aesthetics of Cold War mnemonics, which illuminates a binding and unbinding technology of affective memories in which the traumatic experience of the Korean war parallels the dominant narrative of Cold War historiography. In Mist and The General’s Mustache, historical trauma and the experience of loss take up important positions in relation to melancholic landscape and mnemonic devices. Visualizing the interstice between melancholy and mourning, between memory and history, and between landscape and interiority through the devices of flashback, widescreen, montage, and metanarrative structure, the exploration of mnemonic technologies is inextricably linked with the postwar Korean subject’s dual efforts to remember historical loss and to incorporate shameful memories. While Mist shows the male protagonist’s short visit to his countryside hometown, during which he is troubled by memories of the past and, thus, his encounter with the unfinished work of mourning, The General’s Mustache, beginning with a photojournalist’s suspicious death, assembles the fragmentary pieces of modern Korean history’s secrets through multiple frames of testimony and confession. Produced during the time of Cold War turmoil as well as at the height of global modernization, these films release alternative thinking about time, memory, and history, asking us to remember what is left behind in Cold War historiography.

Teaching Students about the Vietnam War: The Case for Balance

ABSTRACTThis work examines how the American role in the Vietnam War has been portrayed in standard college- and university-level textbooks dealing with American foreign policy. It argues that this topic has been presented in a manner that leaves an incomplete understanding. This conclusion is based on scholarship that has been available for decades as well as much Cold War historiography that has appeared since 1975. I conclude that the distortions need to be addressed for several reasons. Their propagation produces bad scholarship, gratuitously alienates Americans from their institutions of government, and justifies anti-Americanism and authoritarianism elsewhere.