Cold War Europe Research Articles

Effective Participation of National Minorities as a Tool for Conflict Prevention

This article examines the relationship of the public participation of minorities in post Cold War Europe to conflict and conflict prevention through the lens of developing more effective approaches to participation. lt posits that public participation can be a means of preventing conflicts from becoming violent. Stares and inter-stare bodies have used a variety of incentives to address the insecurities of minorities and a range of factors influencing the degree to which minorities are able to participate in the political life of a stare are considered. Despite advances in adherence to standards, often as a result of incentives provided to stares, there remain severe challenges to effective participation for minorities. However, the article comments that the lack of participation per se and not just for minorities can exacerbate problems. This is particularly acute in peace processes, which present particular opportunities to adress public participation in a manner that can contribute to the sustainability of transitions to peace and development. While there are dilemmas in promoting public participation, a failure to be generous to minorities can undermine efforts to prevent conflicts.

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

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

The origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War

How and when did the Cold War manifest itself in Southeast Asia? More particularly, how are we to understand the connections between global great power rivalry and the specific regional problems and tensions which marked Southeast Asia in the five years after the end of the Second World War? What were the connections, if any, between the global powers and the nascent political forces of the region during this period? These are some of the issues which the five contributors to this collection address as they explore the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. These contributions challenge existing interpretations of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. They employ new evidence gleaned from party archives and memoirs, and from Soviet, British, Australian, Dutch, Indonesian and Vietnamese state archives. They use this evidence to suggest that Southeast Asian communist parties, far from being totally autonomous on the one hand, or pliant tools of larger powers on the other, interacted with changing international communist lines as proactive agents. This interaction is the key to understanding why a regional pattern of increasing violence, and of decreasing cooperation with non-communist parties and democratic politics, emerged in 1948; while also allowing us to understand the uniqueness of the individual parties' paths to revolution. Discussion of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War inevitably involves examination of the policies pursued by the colonial powers returning to the region post-World War II, their relations with the great powers, as well as the agendas pursued by the local nationalist forces and communist parties of the region. One of the key issues which has exercised scholars minds in this area has been the switch to armed conflict by communist parties in 1948. The switch was rapid. In 1947 communist parties in this region were generally engaged in broad united fronts, and with the exceptions of China and Indochina, were mostly committed to participation in open political activity and trade union work. Then, in 1948 almost every regional communist party abandoned the broad united front policy and the emphasis on trade union work and legal political activity, and began pursuing a policy of armed revolt. Communist revolts occurred in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines in this year, and there were key changes to communist party policy in Indochina. Not surprisingly, people have long asked: Was this a calculated policy of extending the Cold War in Europe to a new front? It is suggested both here and in the papers comprising this collection that existing answers to this question, and explanations of this change, have failed to fully capture the complex interactions between international and local communisms, offering instead 'one hand clapping' explanations which emphasise either international directives, or very local and national factors. Orthodox Cold War historiography held that Moscow issued instructions, which were disseminated at two 1948 conferences held at Calcutta in India: the South East Asia Youth and Student Conference hosted by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Moscow-controlled movement (19-24 February 1948); and the Second Congress of the Indian Communist Party (28 February-6 March). According to the orthodox interpretations written in the late 1940s to 1950s, these instructions sparked revolts in the following few months of 1948. (1) Revisionist scholarship soon challenged the orthodox position. By the late 1950s, some academics were already arguing that there had been no clear instructions from Moscow, that the Calcutta Conferences were of debateable significance, and that the revolts were above all locally motivated and uncoordinated. The classic expression of this line was Ruth McVey's The Calcutta Conference and the South-East Asia uprisings. (2) This re-examined the impact of the 'two camp' line being promoted by Moscow and the newly formed Cominform in late 1947 to 1948. …

East German Music and the Problem of National Identity

Caught between political allegiance to the Soviet Union and a shared history with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied an awkward position in Cold War Europe. While other countries in the Eastern Bloc already existed as nation-states before coming under Soviet control, the GDR was the product of Germany's arbitrary division. There was no specifically East German culture in 1945—only a German culture. When it came to matters of national identity, officials in the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) could not posit a unique quality of “East Germanness,” but could only highlight East Germany's difference from its western neighbor. This difference did not stem from the language and culture of the past, but the politics and ideology of the present: East Germany was socialist Germany.

Back to the Future?

This article evaluates different theoretical frameworks for understanding both the nature ofthe NATO alliance and the evolution of NATO- Russia relations since the end of the Cold War. It argues that the evolution of relations between the alliance and Moscow is best accounted for by the realist analytical perspective, while liberal and social-constructivist perspectives fail to capture the most important aspects of the alliance. Despite the establishment ofthe NATO-Russia Council in 2002, a balance-of-power logic, dictated by an international system that has remained to a large extent anarchical, continues to shape relations between the alliance and Moscow. The article proceeds in four sections. It begins with a short summary of NATO-Russia relations since the end ofthe Cold War. It then lays out the main theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain relations between the alliance and Moscow: liberal, social-constructivist, and realist ideas about - and prescriptions for - NATO-Russia relations. The next section applies all sets of perspectives to the record of key post-Cold War NATO -Russia relations. The article concludes with a section explaining why realism is the strongest explanatory paradigm.NATO-RUSSIA RELATIONS DURING THE 1990SAlthough during the Cold War, and particularly in the period of detente, NATO had shown it could adapt to the evolution of east-west relations, the collapse of the USSR in December 199 1 marked the beginning of a new and uncertain phase in the alliance's history. Many scholars and decision-makers alike saw in the disappearance of the original catalyzing threat, which had led to west European calls for a US defence commitment to Europe in 1947, the risk that the alliance might soon become obsolete - unless its members were able to craft a new role for NATO. While the failed Soviet conservatives' coup in August 199 1 served as a warning that NATO's original purpose could not be completely disposed of, western leaders were swift to recognize the need for a rapid update in this institution's role. The declaration on a transformed North Atlantic Alliance that was adopted by the North Atlantic Council in London in July 1990, while reaffirming the basic principles on which the alliance rested, also identified a first set of initiatives aimed at reforming NATO's role in post- Cold War Europe. At its Rome summit in November 1991, the alliance adopted a new strategic concept in which, alongside restating the defence dimension, prominence was also given to economic, social, and environmental issues. In addition, the new strategic concept envisioned a peacekeeping role for NATO outside the borders of its member countries. These changes reflected a consciousness that, unless the alliance was willing to reform, it risked drifting towards gradual irrelevance and marginalization.1The efforts to revitalize the alliance and assert its relevance in the postCold War international system also kicked offa new phase in relations with Moscow. After the end of the Cold War, Russian decision-makers expected NATO somehow to atrophy and championed the emergence of a new European security structure; at the same time, however, they did not reject the alliance's offer of cooperation and declared their identification and wish to align with the west. After the establishment in December 199 1 of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council to discuss issues of common concern between NATO and former Soviet bloc states, Moscow joined the newly launched Partnership for Peace program in June 1994. However, the Kremlin insisted that Russia would not let itself be treated as a country on a par with other nonmembers of the alliance, but required an arrangement that was qualitatively different from those offered to other former Soviet bloc states. Following the alliance's intervention in the Balkans and the signing of the Dayton peace agreement in November 1995, Russian troops participated in the implementation and stabilization forces that were deployed in BosniaHerzegovina with the aim of supervising the application of the agreement, and in May 1997 Russia entered the Euro- Atlantic Partnership Council. …

Gerhard Wettig, Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: The Emergence and Development of East-West Conflict, 1939–1953

Gerhard Wettig, <i>Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: The Emergence and Development of East-West Conflict, 1939–1953</i>

The Coproduction of Neutral Science and Neutral State in Cold War Europe: Switzerland and International Scientific Cooperation, 1951–69

Abstract Neither science nor state has ever been transcendentally “neutral,” but they have sometimes been made neutral, together, as this paper shows in the context of cold war Europe. The paper explores how the Swiss government tried to “depoliticize” and “demilitarize” new international research institutions in the fields of high‐energy physics (CERN), space research (ESRO and ELDO), and molecular biology (EMBL) in order to make science neutral. Conversely, this paper investigates how participation in “neutralized” scientific institutions supported Switzerland’s neutrality policy and strengthened this essential element of its national identity. It thus addresses symmetrically the coproduction of neutral science and neutral state.

:Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: The Emergence and Development of East‐West Conflict, 1939–1953.(The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series.)

A distinguished German historian, Gerhard Wettig has written a solid and important study on the Soviet road to the Cold War. His book summarizes archival findings in Moscow and Berlin as well as literature in German and Russian. Wettig disagrees with those who take the United States and Great Britain to task as the initiators of Germany's division and depict Joseph Stalin as a vacillating, indecisive, and even marginal decision maker. The book contributes to the growing consensus that one cannot understand the Cold War's origins without considering Stalin's personality and policies, his intentions and miscalculations. The Kremlin leader is central to the book and Wettig's version of the Cold War. Stalin emerges as a control-obsessed leader, mistrustful of anybody and bent on “forceful territorial expansion” for ideological, but mostly imperial, motives. Stalin “saw himself as a Russian leader who had inherited the tsars' empire and would follow in their footsteps” (pp. 10–11). In 1939–1941, Stalin preferred to deal with Adolf Hitler, who seemed initially willing to share his appetite for aggrandizement. After Hitler's attack on the USSR, when the grand alliance emerged, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins did not oppose Stalin's desire to turn Eastern Europe into a “security belt” to protect the USSR. Stalin soothed U.S. concerns by verbally pledging to respect principles of national independence, non-intervention, and democratic freedom. This, according to Wettig, was just a mask. Stalin's design was from the start the systemic transformation of Eastern Europe. After a brief period of multiparty “people's democracy” to sooth Western fears, Stalinization would follow. Stalin did not anticipate any serious resistance from his temporary capitalist partners, expecting them to be engulfed in internecine struggle and postwar economic problems.

:A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe.(Harvard Historical Studies, number 153.)

:A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe.(Harvard Historical Studies, number 153.)

L’urbanisme et l’architecture des villes d’Europe centrale pendant la première moitié du xxe siècle

L’Europe centrale du début du xxe siècle était un espace que ne définissaient pas tant ses frontières nationales qu’un réseau complexe de métropoles transnationales. Ces sociétés urbaines ont développé des approches et des techniques innovantes pour la construction des villes. Cependant, le réseau polycentrique que favorisait l’Empire a disparu avec sa culture dynamique dans le sillage de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, puis de la domination soviétique sur l’Europe de l’Est.Victime de la division binaire de l’Europe résultant de la guerre froide, la ville d’Europe centrale a cessé d’être considérée comme un objet d’étude et a été éclipsée de l’histoire de l’architecture moderne. De 1945 à 1990, les recherches sur le modernisme en Europe centrale ont suivi deux lignes géopolitiques et idéologiques différentes clairement définies : les travaux poursuivis à l’Ouest se sont concentrés principalement sur Vienne et la culture architecturale cosmopolite de la capitale impériale ; à l’Est, les recherches se sont axées sur les territoires compris dans le bloc soviétique et sur la « lutte pour l’autonomie nationale » telle qu’elle s’exprimait dans les discours architecturaux et les projets des groupes nationaux de l’ancien Empire.Avec la chute du communisme en Europe, les informations et les idées ont recommencé à circuler librement. De nouvelles perspectives ont transformé non seulement l’histoire de l’architecture de l’Europe centrale, mais aussi les discours dominants sur le modernisme international. Depuis une dizaine d’années, de nouveaux sujets de recherche portant sur les régimes territoriaux, les conditions frontalières, les continuités temporelles et spatiales, les structures institutionnelles et les circonstances de cette transition elle-même ont permis l’apparition de méthodologies historiographiques et de critiques novatrices pour comprendre la ville et l’architecture moderne dans l’Europe conçue comme un tout.

Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: the emergence and development of East-West conflict, 1939-1953

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Prelude to Postwar East-West Conflict Chapter 3: Failure of Interallied Cooperation, 1945-1947 Chapter 4: Outbreak and Culmination of the Cold War, 1947-1949 Chapter 5: Struggle for Peace, 1949-1953 Chapter 6: Stalin's Role in Cold War Interaction

A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (review)

Reviewed by: A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe Michael Doidge A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe. By Michael Creswell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-674-02297-3. Notes. Sources. Index. Pp. xv, 238. $49.95. Sharply refuting contemporary historiographic claims that France’s role in shaping early Cold War Europe was minimal, Michael Creswell’s work, A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe, concisely argues that the French role in European Cold War policy endeavors was paramount. France’s unique position as a European continental power and its special historic role as the three-time victim of German military aggression ensured that all U.S. policy roads towards West Germany’s rearmament for use as a buffer against Soviet communist expansion went through France. Playing on the phrase “balance of power” in his title, Creswell definitively argues that in order for postwar security to come to Europe, the U.S. had to balance its desires to protect Europe cheaply with France’s desire to protect itself from the threat of German and Soviet aggression. Striking the balance between the United States and France would not be easy, as both nations had powerful domestic factions that strongly influenced their differing international agendas and limited their respective abilities to achieve policy accommodation with one another. In the U.S.’s case, enormous domestic pressure to demobilize following World War II came just as the rising specter of the Cold War demanded a global U.S. presence to protect the free world. With the onset of the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. attempted to deter Soviet expansion by way of its nuclear arsenal, rather than with a troop presence. To offset the U.S.’s lack of troops, it expected Europe, which included France and West Germany, to pick up the slack by mobilizing conventional forces. Saddled with enormous war debt, constant political turnover, an ailing colonial war in Indochina, and largely dependent on U.S. economic aid, France found the U.S.’s desires to lessen its presence in Europe unacceptable. While not against the idea of German rearmament, the French found little comfort in U.S. desires to maintain a defensive perimeter off the main continent, providing a nuclear shield in the interim. Having found their homeland [End Page 981] the battleground for three wars in a seventy year period, the French wanted no part in seeing Europe become the potential battleground for a conventional and possibly nuclear exchange. They demanded British and American continental commitments to prevent both a return of German militarism in addition to bulwarking against the Soviet threat. Carefully and copiously footnoted, and written with an uncanny amount of nuance in this relatively brief work, Creswell persuasively argues that despite all obstacles the French achieved their goals. Creswell’s work definitively shows that by the mid-1950s, with characteristic diplomatic subtlety and activism, France had secured all of the British and U.S. assurances it desired from the outset, to include permanent continental commitments to Europe as well as limitations on German militarization. Creswell’s superb study is recommended to all scholars of the Cold War, even across disciplines. In addition to its historiographic value, Creswell’s findings challenge many previously held notions within International Relations Theory regarding the nature of the bipolar system, including the role that domestic politics play in determining international policy and the role “secondtier” powers can play in influencing the bipolar system. Michael Doidge Hattiesburg, Mississippi Copyright © 2008 The Society for Military History

Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe.

Mark Carroll, <i>Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe</i>.

A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe By Michael Creswell

<i>A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe</i> By Michael Creswell

Foreign Policy, Domestic Fiction: Government-Sponsored Documentaries And Network Television Promote The Marshall Plan At Home

At the 42nd New York Film Festival in 2004, an enthusiastic audience viewed a selection of propaganda films rarely seen in the USA. The exhibit, ‘Selling Democracy—Welcome Mr. Marshall. Films of th...

Editorial

With this issue, AJEC returns to its original format as a journal with, for the time being, two issues per year. When the first issue was published in 1990 by the European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures (ECTARC), Europe was a different place. As the director of ECTARC, Franz-Josef Stummann (1990: 7), explained in his introduction to that issue, the ‘magical date of 1992’, heralding the Single European Market as a significant step towards European integration, had ‘a substantial bearing’ on the foundation of the journal. Moreover, the Berlin Wall, symbol of the political divide that cut right through Cold War Europe, had crumbled the previous year. German unification was imminent, but very little else seemed predictable. Eighteen years and two Gulf Wars later, not only has the European Union acquired fifteen new member states, ten of them former Communist countries, but we have also been told to perceive a new divide – between a ‘new’ Europe and an ‘old’ one.

A question of balance: how France and the United States created Cold War Europe

A question of balance: how France and the United States created Cold War Europe

Meritums, Spectrums and Narrative Memories of ‘Pre-Virtual’ Computing in Cold War Europe

The paper describes narrative interviews with 12 first generation users of home or personal computers (PCs) in Poland and the UK. Insights are gained into how computers were perceived and interpreted on either side of the Cold War divide in the decade prior to the end of the socialist system and the period of transition in the early 1990s. The narratives are suggestive in their implications for contemporary social theory, much of which has tended to implicate widespread use of PCs in the idea of an aesthetic regime distinctive to a new, informational kind of capitalism. This aesthetic regime attaches importance to visual experience and to the idea that increasingly we operate in environments that are ‘virtual’. Although the sample in the study is very limited, its findings are suggestive for theorists who have tended to take the salience of this aesthetic for granted as if it were a necessary consequence of widespread computerisation, rather than viewing its construction and maintenance as themselves sociologically problematic. The interviews subvert this, as subjects remember different uses of computer technology, including some that are suggestive of possible alternative aesthetic regimes.

Europe (Un)Divided: How Peace Was Won and the War Never Lost in Wim Wender's Lisbon Story (1995) and Emir Kusturica's Bila Jednom Jedna Zemlja/Underground (1995)

The Berlin Wall not only divided Cold War Europe, but also unified it. Serving as a projection screen, it allowed each side to project the other as a continuation of the Nazi regime and itself as the opposite of that grim reign, the vindication of history incarnate. Given the way a basically cinematic apparatus facilitated these memory politics, film-makers on both sides of the former divide probed the historical depth of the present while seeking to redeem their medium from ideological compromise. Yet, what could be understood as a common project yielded very different results, as a comparison of Wim Wender's Lisbon Story and Emir Kusturica's Underground: Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, two German co-productions released on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, shows. While Wenders portrayed Europe as having overcome past struggles through its unification, in Kusturica's uncannily integrated Europe genocide continues. Revealing are the different responses both films elicited. While Wender's touting of EU ideology was taken for granted to the extent that Lisbon Story was perceived as apolitical, Kusturica's film was, after a sharp outcry by ideologues, practically banned on the grounds that it allegedly violated the NATO embargo against Serbia.

Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War

It has often been remarked that the victors do not merely harvest the fruits of war, but are then situated by virtue of their position to write the ‘real’ history of how that war began, who fought it most ethically, and the key part they then played in bringing it to a victorious and just end. This article argues that this pattern of writing the past, and thereby defining it, has been much in evidence in the wider American historiography on the end of the Cold War in Europe. This is not to reduce a complex literature to a single narrative. It is to suggest however that many Americans – politicians, policy-makers and academics alike – have too readily adopted the politically convenient view that it was America (and in some cases America alone) that through dint of effort and skill of diplomacy effectively changed the world by actively ‘winning’ the Cold War on the continent. As I argue, this not only makes for a one-sided triumphalist history; it has also had the effect of writing others – especially Europeans – out of the events that finally led to the overcoming of Europe's 45-year-old division. I then go on to point to the many important, and sometimes forgotten, ways in which Europe and Europeans helped make their own history. By so doing, I not only seek to redress the intellectual balance, but challenge American writers to reflect more critically on their own ways of viewing what, by any measure, still remains the most important event of the last part of the twentieth century.