Cold War In East Research Articles

The “special relationship,” and the overseas Chinese: the Information Research Department (IRD) and the United States Information Agency (USIA) cold war partnership in East Asia, 1950s-1970s

ABSTRACT From the 1950s to the 1970s, Britain’s strategic role in the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia shaped the post-WWII contours and ramifications of what Winston Churchill famously dubbed the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. Through its clandestine Information Research Department (IRD), Britain targeted anti-communist propaganda, focusing on neutral nations and the overseas Chinese communities. The IRD assessed communist influence among emigrant Chinese communities along with their views of the United States. The IRD served to support American goals while bolstering Britain’s regional influence. Despite occasional divergences, the IRD and the United States Information Agency (USIA) coordinated efforts to counter communist expansion, reflecting the adaptability of their ‘special relationship’.

Private Military Companies, Foreign Legions and Counterterrorism in Mali and Central African Republic

The exacerbation of terrorism in Sahelian West and Central Africa and the presence of foreign legions in aid of counterterrorism has generated research interest in private military companies (PMCs) as legions, including drone legions. This article discusses the French Legion in Mali, PMC Wagner in Central Africa Republic (CAR) and United States (US) drone legions in Sahelian West and Central Africa which is entirely francophone. French Legion disengagements from counterterrorism assignments in Mali and CAR due to increasing operational challenges compounded by policy disagreements with host governments or political disenchantment, also ushered in PMC Wagner, while US drone PMCs provided surveillance and intelligence. The choreography between France’s hard-line policy not to negotiate with terrorists and Mali’s decision to negotiate with terrorists, points to a gradual development across governmental, non-governmental and military circles home and abroad rather than an overnight policy switch against the French. The consensus going forward is a cautious dialogue with the terrorists. Meanwhile, Wagner incursions across Africa have re-ignited Cold War East–West competition for African alliances. With the proliferation of legion presence, African militaries have become actors in the foreign policy agendas of whichever legions they host, whether French, Russian or American. However, there are no guarantees yet that drone operators would protect drone hosts from terrorist backlash.

<i>Das unsichtbare Visier</i> – A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too

This article addresses a franchise of intelligence films in the former Communist East Germany. Under the general title Das unsichtbare Visier—The Invisible Visor—they were produced for television and very popular. In general, the Cold War East produced a rich array of its own intelligence heroes, which cannot be reduced to mere derivatives of Western models. Yet there were commonalities and interactions across Cold War divides. One of these common features that Visier shared with many intelligence films globally was the depiction of abroad as both an “invisible front” of dangers and temptations and an exciting realm of adventure and consumption. Visier could not but also be a fantasy about East German citizens encountering, withstanding, and also enjoying the dangers and temptations of the Western Cold War Other. This included their facing two peculiar challenges: a degree of international mobility unlike anything the vast majority of ordinary East Germans could experience and the West’s consumerism. Visier addressed both these issues through what we could describe as an essentially playful—and dis-playful—practical cosmopolitanism. A careful look reveals Visier as a rich artifact of Cold War popular culture, with complex messages. The image of the heroic East German agent included a running comment of compensatory wish fulfillment. Here were ideal East German citizens doing their duty and yet also getting a fair slice of the capitalist good life abroad that most of their compatriots could not reach. They also consistently punched above their weight vicariously for East Germany as a whole. Like Britain’s James Bond, these were agents of an at-best middling power doing major things in the world at large. And finally, perhaps most satisfyingly of all, they turned into gentle, benevolent guardian angels of hapless West German cousins, neatly reversing West Germany’s claims of superiority.

Researching the European Cold War: Nationalism, (Anti-)Communism and Violence

In her introduction to the themed cluster “Nationalism, (Anti-)Communism and Violence in the European Cold War,” the author contextualizes the issue's research contributions on Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. She introduces the methodological rationale and highlights what binds the three case studies together: They explore how nationalism was woven into Cold War societies. The authors employ, as analytical prisms, both physical and symbolic violence in order to visualize empirically the workings of nationalism in the service of both communism and anti-communism. Hitherto, few scholars have focused on the interconnections between nationalism, (anti-)communism, and violence in Cold War east central and southeastern Europe.

Documenting disappearance: self-forgery and dissimulation as a means of mobility

ABSTRACT How have migrants and other displaced and internally excluded persons used dissimulation and self-forgery in service of mobility? How can we read an aesthetics of disappearance as more than just an aesthetical choice but as a source of activism? Following Jacques Rancière [The politics of aesthetics (G. Rockhill. Trans.). Continuum. (Original Work Published in, 2000)], I understand that such aesthetic acts are capable of creating ‘new modes of sense perception’ and, in doing so, produce alternative forms of political subjectivity. In this essay, I compare migrant self-representations and creative tactics of camouflage, mimicry, and dissembling with public practices, while looking at the extraterritorial space of the makeshift camp as a paradigm for preserving invisibility and anonymity. And yet, it is not just that aesthetic acts have the potential to produce novel forms of political subjectivity, as Rancière understood, but that, in order for the latter to be true, the equation needs to be reversed: political subjects must first be recognized as aesthetic subjects. As I place the multimedia work of Cold War East German artist Cornelia Schleime in conversation with the contemporary glitch art – drawings, paintings, video – of Kon Trubkovich, who was born in Moscow and left, at age eleven, following the Chernobyl disaster, I argue that to reorient the terms of visibility, it becomes necessary for subject-producers to stage the gaze that would otherwise objectify them.

Rethinking the Political Economy of Development in Mao's China

AbstractThis article examines two theoretical frameworks used to evaluate Maoist development. The first is based on neoclassical economic theory, and the second is rooted in the idea that the Chinese Communist Party made China into a state capitalist regime. Both these theoretical frameworks presume to know what economic practices the CCP should have engaged in and fault the Party for not conforming to their standards of judgment. This article finds this normative approach to analyzing Maoist development to be wanting for four reasons. In its drive to depict China as acting anomalously, this normative standpoint insufficiently attends to the empirical specificities of economic activities of the Mao era. It does not take enough into account how China's socialist identity shaped the CCP's economic initiatives. Nor does it dig deep enough into how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War influenced Chinese development. This way of writing the history of the Mao period also overlooks similarities between China and other developmental states in Cold War East Asia. This article calls on historians to adopt a different approach to the study of Chinese development and scour available documentation with the aim of comprehending the economic practices of Mao's China on their own terms.

Chairman Cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s cotton trade with African countries during the early Cold War (1946–70)

AbstractThis article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

Legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction

ABSTRACT This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trumpeting anti-communism while promoting American-style capitalism. While the path-dependence of this historical moment has not by itself bequeathed Asia’s current crop of authoritarian governments, the authors argue that the current situation cannot be fully understood without reference to Cold War legacies. This introductory article contextualises the pieces in the special issue by providing a broad overview of the variety of Cold War political and economic legacies for the region. It concludes by noting the importance of the kinds of detailed, critical, theoretically informed and empirically rich research that Journal of Contemporary Asia has encouraged since its inception.

Projecting Poseidon’s Trident: America’s East Asia and the shifting contours of 1950s post-war naval policy

ABSTRACT While the US obtained control of the seas in maritime East Asia after the dissolution of the Japanese empire in 1945, the Truman administration did not link its international security with maritime space in the immediate post-war period. The outbreak of the Korean War and the First Taiwan Strait Crisis drove the US to rethink the significance of international waters and gradually adopt a sea-oriented strategic command. This development altered the defence structure in Cold War East Asia and such perimeters of maritime defence remained in place until the US ended official relations with Taiwan in 1979.

Eleven Nigerian Students in Cold War East Germany: Visions of Science, Modernity, and Decolonization

This article follows the story of the first African students in the German Democratic Republic, 11 Nigerians who arrived in 1951. Thousands of other African students followed them in the years leading up to the GDR's dissolution in 1990. My work is the first to chronicle the Nigerians' story, and how East Germans received and reacted to these Africans living among them. I focus on what each side hoped to gain from the exchange. East German government officials and university administrators were intent on using the Nigerian students to promote socialism as an alternative in a British colony quickly moving towards independence. Meanwhile, the students wanted scientific educations to help boost their economic standing and class status when they returned to Nigeria. Although Nigeria would never become aligned with the Soviet Bloc after decolonization, in the 1950s East Germans imagined that a socialist future was possible. Drawing on their country's sizable scientific expertise, officials argued that the GDR offered the ideal blend of technological and Marxist knowledge to attract exchange students like the Nigerians into the communist orbit.

The non-contemporaneity of György Lukács

This paper traces the complex relations of György Lukács to visual art and aesthetics, from his early writings through his engagement with artistic politics in the post-World War II ‘people’s democracy’ transitional period and during the Stalinist dictatorship. In one sense, Lukács seems obsolete for contemporary art and aesthetics, as a philosopher and critic with an out-of-fashion aesthetic theory, justifying a canon of works opposed even to the mainstream of the 20th century modernism, and deployed in the service of a cultural politics of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism now seen as historically superseded and discredited. In another sense, Lukács’s non-contemporaneity may been seen through the dispersed reception of his work, particularly across the Cold War East–West divide, in which different moments of Lukács’s oeuvre were picked up and developed in divergent ways. Given these multiple contexts of reception, the author and thinker ‘György Lukács’ could never be wholly contemporary with himself, but always signified a variable complex of his current writing as well as the afterlife of earlier phases of his work. Lastly, there is an additional sense of ‘non-contemporaneity’ that is associated especially with Lukács’s one-time friend and ally Ernst Bloch, for whom being non-identical with one’s time implied a reserve of potentiality not yet realized, but latent within the inheritance of culture. With reference to László Lakner’s works based on Lukács’s books, I conclude with the possibility that the ‘non-contemporaneity’ of Lukács may yet have something to offer contemporary art and aesthetics.

The “Orientalization” and “de-Orientalization” of East Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula

This article first explains how Western “Orientalization” of East Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula and the Russian Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in crude and demeaning “Western” caricatures of “East Europe(ans)”. After 1945, such stereotypes were reinforced by the Cold War East–West divide. From the 1980s to 2007, European integration brought about substantial “de-Orientalization” of most of Europe’s former communist states. Since 2008, unfortunately, further headway in these directions has been seriously jeopardized by recent “wrong turns”, crises and setbacks in the European integration process, above all by the ill-conceived Eurozone project.

Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West

Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West

Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. 277 pp. $90.00 / £45.00

Mark Fenemore, <i>Sex, Thugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany</i>. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. 277 pp. $90.00 / £45.00

Sex, thugs and rock 'n' roll: teenage rebels in Cold-War East Germany

Mark Fenemore's ambitious yet admirably compact...provides a wide-ranging, richly detailed, nuanced, and insightful cultural and social history of (predominantly male) youth nonconformity in the GDR...this book belongs in the latest generation of pioneering cultural and social histories of the GDR that suggest new approaches and future paths for comparative study. * American Historical Review ...an insightful, constantly thought-provoking and engaging analysis of the tension between the young people of the GDR and the SED's state system. While historians of the GDR will undoubtedly find a great deal to interest them in Fenemore's work, his insights into neo-Nazism, youth culture in general and the relationship between gender and the state mean his book deserves an audience beyond those interested just in the GDR. * Cultural and Social History ...a wonderful book on the relationship of masculinity discourses of working-class culture, working-class conservatism and pop culture. Fenemore shows that youth culture is not left just because it deviates from the norm. * H-Soz-u-Kult [The volume] offers a stimulating overview that widens our understanding of the socio-cultural dimension underlying National Socialism. * Historische Zeitschrift A fascinating and highly readable account of what it was like to be young and hip, growing up in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Living on the frontline of the Cold War, young people were subject to a number of competing influences. For young men from the working class, in particular, a conflict developed between the culture they inherited from their parents and the new official culture taught in schools. Merging with street gangs, new youth cultures took shape, which challenged authority and provided an alternative vision of modernity. Taking their fashion cues, music and icons from the West, they rapidly came into conflict with a didactic and highly controlling party-state. Charting the clashes which occurred between teenage rebels and the authorities, the book explores what happened when gender, sexuality, Nazism, communism and rock 'n' roll collided during a period, which also saw the building of the Berlin Wall.

What we have discovered about the Cold War is what we already knew: Julius Mader and the Western secret services during the Cold War

Throughout the Cold War East German propagandists churned out books and articles denouncing the West. One, Julius Mader by name, was particularly active in claiming to expose the aims, methods and organizers of Western espionage. More than five million copies of his books were sold, chiefly in Soviet Bloc countries. If his information were true, it had to come from East Germany's Ministry of State Security (MfS, or ‘Stasi’). To date, despite the scarcity of primary source material on espionage during the Cold War, Mader's status as a Communist propagandist has meant that his works have been little used by Western historians. However, by consulting the MfS' records it is now possible to find out whether or not his allegations were true. If they were, the MfS blew significant holes in the secrecy of Western espionage for decades, starting more than 40 years ago, and Western historians have been very neglectful in not referring much more to Mader's books. Many of his allegations were indeed true and his works, though very obviously products of an ideology, represent a valuable resource for the historians of today. Moreover, they show that during the Cold War the Communist regimes were talking more sense than we thought and were telling us much that our own governments did not want us to hear. The Cold War over, we surely have a right to know what secret activities the Western governments undertook during their struggle with the Communist Bloc and should make use of every reliable source.

Latin America, Chile and East Asia: Policy-Networks and Successful Diversification

Latin American countries have a long tradition of attempting to diversify their external relations. In this context, since the end of the Cold War East Asia has gained increasing importance. However, despite the rising interest in improved political and economic links, these attempts at diversification showed only modest results, Chile being a noteworthy exception within this overall trend. The following analysis presents an empirical overview of the development of relations between Latin America and East Asia with special emphasis on Chile, demonstrating how domestic transformation has affected the Asia-Pacific policies of Latin American countries. The main conclusion is that while in most countries domestic conflicts over the future course of political and economic development have hampered the creation of a consistent Asia-Pacific policy, the elite settlement in Chile has enabled strategic actors to create a policy network which provides the institutional basis for successfully diversifying external relations to East Asia.