Cold War Rhetoric Research Articles

The Evolution of the Russian Elites' Perceptions of National Interests, 2012-2016

Since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, Russian-Western relations have experienced rapid decline, with piling ideological resentments, new Cold War rhetoric streaming from both sides, increasing geopolitical confrontation, and greater potential risks associated with future military escalation. The West's growing anxiety over Russia's revised geopolitical ambitions to redraw spheres of influence, on the one hand, and Russia's retaliatory policies, on the other, exacerbate the importance of the study of factors affecting the perception of national interests by Russian elites. This paper offers a conceptual model which links the effects of national identity on the perception of the scope of national interests. The concept of national identity here is composed of such factors as Patriotism, Nationalism, External and Internal Other, and the Soviet past. The conceptual model is tested using the Bayesian Structural Equation Model by drawing the data from the Russian Foreign Policy Elite Perspectives, 2008-2016.

Invading Muslim Bodies in the Era of Trump

Invading Muslim Bodies in the Era of Trump

Combatting the ‘Communistic-Mulatto Inspired Movement to Fuse the Two Ethnic Groups’: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sickled Cells, and Segregationists’ Science in the Atomic Age

Using the correspondence of George McIlhenny and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission records as evidence, this article examines how state-sponsored segregationists manipulated developing knowledge of the genetics of sickle cell anaemia and Cold War rhetoric of American anti-communism to defy the 1954 US Supreme Court decision mandating racial desegregation in schools. The Commission benefitted from this moment when germ theory placed science beyond lay understanding, increasing its authority and potential for misrepresentation. The evidence reveals and enlarges our understanding of the logistics of medicalisation within a racial frame. It demonstrates state-level confidence in appeals to science as a source of authority sufficient to challenge Federal law. It shows how the mere appearance of familiarity with the developing subfield of genetics sufficed to place science in the service of racial segregation. Finally, it illustrates both the potential and the limits of these measures in the changing context of medicine and medical professionalisation.

The five hats of Nina Ponomareva: sport, shoplifting and the Cold War

The 1956 arrest in London of the Soviet Olympic discus champion, Nina Ponomareva, for shoplifting five hats worth one pound became a major international incident. Initially, both sides followed familiar Cold War scripts. The Soviets demanded the charges be dropped, but the British refused to do so. Ponomareva went into hiding at the Soviet embassy. The matter was front page news the world over. Six weeks passed before it was resolved. This minor confrontation demonstrated both the tenacity of Cold War rhetoric and the ultimate ability of the two sides to find compromise.

Prospects for US-China Union Relations in the Era of Xi and Trump

In October 2013, Richard Trumka, President of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL- CIO), visited the AllChina Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to establish formal bilateral relations between unions in China and the United States. This visit signalled an historic shift in labour policy, from Cold War- style hostility to normalisation of relations. Some American labour activists hoped that it might further lead to collaboration on joint activities, such as collective bargaining. That collaboration would be a significant step forward in labour solidarity and building a global labour movement. However since then progress towards building relations has been decidedly slow. There have been only a couple of official exchanges with the AFLCIO , and activities sponsored by Change To Win (CTW), the splinter group of the AFL-CIO that first began relations with the ACFTU a decade ago, have decreased. Some American labour leaders have noted that the ACFTU has become less interested in collective bargaining since Xi Jinping’s campaign against corruption began. Now, given Donald Trump’s election as US President with his agenda to weaken the American labour movement and start a trade war with China, it is fair to ask whether there are any prospects for progress in relations between unions in China and the US, and if so where. A Troubled History The root of American attitudes towards Chinese labour have been shaped by race, class, and ideology. Since the nineteenth century there have been xenophobic fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ represented by Chinese workers, as well as arguments that workers of European ancestry should cast their lot with American business and shut out Chinese workers. These fears were compounded in 1949, when China became a communist state and an ideological enemy, resulting in antipathies that linger to this day. After World War II, the Cold War set in, and the world was divided into two main ideological camps: the communist and the ‘free world’. In 1949, American unions led a split in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) - a global union that aspired to bring together unions from all over the world into a single organisation—to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), an alliance of free world unions. Meanwhile, the WFTU came to be known as the federation of communist unions. The ICFTU consistently criticised the ACFTU for not being a free and independent trade union, and therefore declared that it was not an ‘authentic’ voice of Chinese workers. However, in 1979, when China opened its doors to foreign investment and diplomatic relations with the US were established, the material basis for this divide changed. Multinational corporations raced to China to take advantage of the low-cost labour. Factory conditions were appalling and workers were exploited, causing outcry among international consumer and human rights activists, and drawing criticism of the Chinese government and its unions for not protecting workers. At a time when international labour solidarity might have meant American workers reaching out to workers in China, American unions continued to refuse to have anything to do with Chinese unions, repeating the Cold War rhetoric that they were neither independent nor authentic. Meanwhile, some left-leaning labour organisers worked quietly in the background to coordinate worker-to-worker exchanges between US and Chinese workers, hoping to build solidarity. The Tiananmen Incident in 1989 proved to be a setback for these budding relations. The crackdown on the protests was viewed worldwide on cable news in real time, and its brutality reinforced what many American labour unionists had believed all along— that despite capitalist markets and openness to meeting foreigners, China was still an authoritarian state that did not respect human rights. The AFLCIO response was to support a few Chinese labour activists in exile, and to continue to boycott relations with Chinese unions. At that time, American unions supported campaigns targeting international brands, pressuring these companies to accept corporate social responsibility in their supply chains. The theory was that the brands had power to control labour conditions in factories that manufactured their products. In Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, these cross-border campaigns, mostly led not by unions but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), had...

Marianne Moore's Postwar Fables and the Politics of Indirection

Marianne Moore's response to World War II took an unexpected form: her translation, published in 1954, of the fables of La Fontaine. While Moore's project emerged from a wartime effort of European cultural transmission, the fables' indirect speech also served more personal political ends. It afforded a protected means for entering a gendered debate about war and a language for writing about large issues—violence, suffering, injustice—that avoided the oversimplifications and divisiveness of wartime and Cold War rhetoric. Critics have mostly neglected Moore'sFablesalong with her politics, but both are essential to understanding not only her response to war but also the larger goals of postwar American poetry and translation as a political project—one that allowed Moore and her peers to offset the guilt of spectatorship by reclaiming intellectual labor as a mode of war participation.

Russia and the EU’s quest for status: the path to conflict in the post-Soviet space

This article suggests that both the EU and Russia sought to achieve the great power status by enhancing their presence in the post-Soviet space. Conflict has arisen as the status seeking efforts of the two have been transformed into a dangerous zero-sum game. Moscow’s actions in Ukraine prompted the EU to adopt a more conflictual attitude, where it now actively aims to counteract Moscow’s influence. This transformed Russia and the EU’s status seeking efforts into a deep security dilemma. Both actors perceive that maintaining their influence in the region is crucial for maintaining their status. Rather than seeking a mutually and sustainable agreement that would give equal importance to Ukraine’s interests, the EU and Russia draw more red lines, and revert to cold war rhetoric. In the short term this behaviour will put their status seeking efforts even more at odds with each other and deepen the conflict.

From Split Atoms to Spliced Genes: The Evolution of Cold War Fear in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that representations of evolution and genetics in the novels Jurassic Park (1990) by Michael Crichton and The Gold Bug Variations (1991) by Richard Powers depict a shift in American anxieties from nuclear war to genetic manipulation in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, marking an extension of Cold War rhetoric in regard to technology and scientific innovation that remains prevalent in contemporary American literature.

Persevering through Colonial Transition: Nazareth's Palestinian Residents after 1948

Nazareth, the only Palestinian city to survive the 1948 war intact, became the social, economic, and political hub of Palestinian life in the postwar period. As such, it provides the ideal setting to study early Palestinian responses to the creation of Israel. This paper reexamines the ambivalent relationship between Nazareth's political leadership and the newly established State of Israel to argue that the Palestinian citizens of Israel were neither traitors and collaborators, on the one hand, nor passively quiescent, on the other. Rather, as a new national minority, Palestinians overcame myriad forms of control as they negotiated the structural obstacles placed before them by their new overlords. Local Communist politicians, in particular, took a leading role to advocate on behalf of Nazarenes beset by the day-to-day hardships of poverty, hunger, displacement, and unemployment. The Israeli authorities harped on the Communist threat in response, echoing the Cold War rhetoric of the time.

Bumbling idiots or evil masterminds? Challenging cold war stereotypes about women, sexuality and state socialism

In academic writing, facts about the past generally require the citation of relevant sources unless the fact or idea is considered ?common knowledge:? bits of information or dates upon which there is a wide scholarly consensus. This brief article reflects on the use of ?common knowledge? claims in contemporary scholarship about women, families, and sexuality as experienced during 20th century, East European, state socialist regimes. We focus on several key stereotypes about the communist state and the situation of women that are often asserted in the scholarly literature, and argue that many of these ideas uncannily resemble American anti-communist propaganda. When contemporary scholars make claims about communist intrusions into the private sphere to effect social engineering or the inefficacy of state socialist mass organizations or communist efforts to break up the family or indoctrinate the young, they often do so without citation to previous sources or empirical evidence supporting their claims, thereby suggesting that such claims are ?common knowledge.? We believe that those wishing to assert such claims should link these assertions to concrete originating sources, lest it turn out the ?common knowledge? derives, in fact, from western Cold War rhetoric.

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley

Reviewed by: Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley Ulrike Wöhr Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. By Jan Bardsley. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 224 pages. Hardcover £58.50/$112.00; softcover £24.99/$39.95. This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes. Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these [End Page 247] controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate. The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...

State of the Union: The Play, the Film, and the Progress of the Isolationist Bogey

This article argues that the adaptation of the play State of the Union into a film made the changes to the original that were necessary in a rapidly developing Cold War political culture. Helpful in this project was the way in which a Cold War culture had borrowed from an earlier form of postwar internationalism. In particular, it appropriated the demonization of isolationists as breeders of a corrupt domestic American political system that threatened republicanism and world peace alike. Indeed, the continuity in the representation of isolationists in the immediate postwar period of the play and the very different period of the film helped to lend legitimacy to the otherwise new Cold War rhetoric. The film, therefore, was able to make only minor revisions to the play and yet serve entirely different ideological purposes.

Nightmares in Disneyland – a note on Andre Wakefield’s critique of non-actors’ terms and alleged Cold War rhetoric

Nightmares in Disneyland – a note on Andre Wakefield’s critique of non-actors’ terms and alleged Cold War rhetoric

Yellows against Reds: Campesino Anticommunism in 1960s Ayacucho, Peru

Peasant activists affi liated with the Confederacion Campesina del Peru (CCP) seized the Pomacocha hacienda in Ayacucho in 1961. The invasion triggered over a decade of serious confl ict between those peasants who supported local CCP activists and those who opposed them. The campesinos who challenged Pomacocha's CCP activists did so using the rhetoric of anticommunism, and they were in turn de- rided as yellows, or conservatives. Peasant anticommunism stemmed from confl icts over money, religion, participation, and especially political rivalries, as the staunchest anticommunist peasants in the community belonged to the rival APRA party. The Pomacocha case shows that landowning elites, the church, government offi cials, and the military had no monopoly on the Cold War rhetoric of anticommunism; peasants likewise mobilized counterrevolutionary discourses to further their own interests. Ul- timately, anticommunism allowed campesinos to pierce through the political neglect that characterized indigenous peasants' relationships with the twentieth-century Pe- ruvian state.

Ambiguous States: Confucius Institutes and Chinese Soft Power in the U.S. Classroom

This article offers an ethnographic examination of representations and perceptions of the Chinese state as manifest through Confucius Institutes in the United States. Confucius Institutes are Chinese language and culture programs that are funded and staffed by the Chinese government. Confucius Institutes are a constituent part of China's soft power policy efforts to communicate to the world that its cultural tradition stresses harmony and that its rise to power will be a peaceful and globally responsible process. Through analyzing parent and student perceptions of “the state” through their experiences with Confucius Institute teachers and pedagogical materials, it is possible to contextualize and problematize the means through which Cold War rhetoric is recast and recirculated in the contemporary “post‐Cold War” historical moment, thus interrogating assumptions about essentialized Chinese difference. This research reveals how understandings of a newly empowered China cast the nation as a threat to U.S. economic and political power in a manner that negates China's soft power efforts, dislocating policy intention and effect. At the same time, this research suggests that as Confucius Institute teachers distance themselves from perceptions of an authoritarian state, parents and students begin to disaggregate perceptions of a monolithic Chinese state in a manner that reinforces the state's soft power goals.

Divided Together: The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945–1965

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Cold War sponsorships: Chinua Achebe and the dialectics of collaboration

Since its publication, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People has been overshadowed by its seemingly prophetic announcement of military intervention in Nigerian politics. In this article I suggest that the novel participates in a circuit of mid-century novels critiquing prevalent cold war rhetoric. It explores the problematic project of an African nation state riven by political alliances sponsored by dominant cold war powers. Within this context of sponsorship competitions, Achebe explores the possibility of a plebeian politics outside the vying east–west cold war constellation.

Between East and West: polio vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary.

In 1950s Hungary, with an economy and infrastructure still devastated from World War II and facing further hardships, thousands of children became permanently disabled and many died in the severe polio epidemic that shook the globe. The relatively new communist regime invested significantly in solving the public health crisis, initially importing a vaccine from the West and later turning to the East for a new solution. Through the history of polio vaccination in Hungary, this article shows how Cold War politics shaped vaccine evaluation and implementation in the 1950s. On the one hand, the threat of polio created a safe place for hitherto unprecedented, open cooperation among governments and scientific communities on the two sides of the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, Cold War rhetoric influenced scientific evaluation of vaccines, choices of disease prevention, and ultimately the eradication of polio.

The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War by Deborah Cohn (review)

Reviewed by: The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War by Deborah Cohn Thayse Leal Lima Cohn, Deborah. The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012. Pp. 264. ISBN 978-0-8265-1805-7. Celebrated, contested, and criticized, the Boom of Latin American literature has been a constant topic of academic debate. Its appeal to intellectual curiosity may be explained by the boom’s peculiar position in the crossroads of literary, cultural, ideological and political events, which makes it a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. In The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War, Deborah Cohn explores this intricate history, investigating the infrastructure and politics behind the dissemination of Latin American literature. Through a remarkable job of exhaustive archival research, the study reveals how the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States became entangled in political interests. Cohn analyses documents from universities, publishing houses, and cultural foundations and their affiliates, demonstrating that Cold War rhetoric pervaded most of these institutions’ efforts to attract sponsorship from both government agencies (such as the CIA and NCA), as well as cultural branches of major capitalist corporations (such as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation). Support for Latin American literature was perceived and justified as a way of instilling a positive view of the United States amongst Latin American writers and intellectuals, a group that had a strong influence on public opinion back in their home countries and which, for the most part, were severe critics of US international policies. Studies focusing on the Boom’s ideological and political background are not uncommon, the most influential perhaps being the memoir Personal History of the Boom (1972) by José Donoso. However, while the Chilean writer and other authors relate the phenomenon to the Latin American political context, Cohn adopts a much wider transnational perspective, which brings forth the competing forces and disparate intentions that were at stake in the circulation, promotion, and reception of Latin American literature abroad. This geopolitically expanded point of view, allied with a contrapuntual approach, allowed the author to consider the purposes and aspirations of the many actors involved in the boom. Cohn contrasts the interest of novelists and their editors in the promotion of their work abroad to the machinery of universities, cultural foundations, and publishing houses, most of which were financed by public and private US institutions concerned with harvesting the sympathy of internationally acclaimed intellectuals. The dialogical analyses applied in the book also prevent it from establishing facile relationships of causality between the success of Latin American writers in the United States and the intentions of their international sponsors. In the introduction, Cohn clarifies that most of the writers, translators, and agents were unaware of government support. Therefore, the goals of cultural patrons were not always met, and writers were able to keep the integrity of their political and ideological views. She further argues that if at times the promotion of Latin American literature benefited from international support, at others, the Cold War agenda interfered in a negative way. Chapter 1, for example, focuses on the contradictions born of US anticommunist strategies that would go from courting left-leaning intellectuals as potential allies to considering them as imminent threats to national security. To illustrate this, the author recounts the infamous stories of writer Carlos Fuentes and critic Ángel Rama in their struggle with the McCarran-Walter act, which imposed visa restrictions to individuals considered “subversive.” The authors faced visa impediments despite having received, on several occasions, sponsorship indirectly offered by governmental agencies. The second chapter also offers an emblematic example of Cold War policy ambiguity and unpredictability, and shows how the 1966 PEN Congress compromised with the establishment proposing themes that fit official US ideology, while also creating an opportunity for authors to publicize the Latin American agenda of mutual cooperation and solidarity. In chapters 3 and 4, Cohn argues that universities and private non-governmental institutions that were invested in the promotion of Latin American literature also acted as indirect agents of cultural diplomacy. These institutions used the growing interest in Latin America after the Cuban [End Page 784] Revolution...

Cold War redux in US–Russia relations? The effects of US media framing and public opinion of the 2008 Russia–Georgia war

This paper examines the Cold War rhetoric in US–Russia relations by looking at the 2008 Russia–Georgia war as a major breaking point. We investigate the links between media, public opinion and foreign policy. In our content analysis of the coverage in two major US newspapers, we find that the framing of the conflict was anti-Russia, especially in the initial stages of the conflict. In addition, our survey results demonstrate that an increase in the media exposure of US respondents increased the likelihood of blaming Russia exclusively in the conflict. This case study helps us understand how media can be powerful in constructing a certain narrative of an international conflict, which can then affect public perceptions of other countries. We believe that the negative framing of Russia in the US media has had important implications for the already-tenuous relations between the US and Russia by reviving and perpetuating the Cold War mentality for the public as well as for foreign policymakers.