Cold War Competition Research Articles

The relations of the Russian Federation with the West between 1991 and 2014

The disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has substantially changed the shape of the international environment. The role of the world power shaping international relations fell to the United States. Undoubtedly, it was a result of the triumph in the Cold War rivalry. The Russian Federation, the successor of the USSR, found itself in a diametrically opposite position. It faced the challenge of determining its place in the new international reality. Due to its political and economic weakness, it was doomed to build this position in cooperation with the West. This article deals with the relations between the Russian Federation and the West in the years 1991-2014. The author aims to identify factors shaping those relations and describe the mutual relations, focusing on key events. The study carried out confirms that the mutual Russian-Western relations over the years were characterized by both successes and failures, which, regardless of their character, shaped these relations.

The National Endowment for Democracy at 40: Back to Basics?

The world system is increasingly characterized by a New Cold War competition between the USA, Russia and China, framed as a battle between “democracy” and “autocracy” by the Biden Administration. This article focuses on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a key instrument of U.S. democracy promotion in support of national security over the last 40 years. It analyses the extent to which it will remain a valid and effective actor in U.S. foreign policy during the New Cold War. The first two sections focus on the two structural elements that enable the NED to function. The first section focuses on the conceptual framework which has legitimated democracy promotion as an element of U.S. foreign policy. While this has been a U.S. policy imperative since the foundation of the state, its salience and the methods used to pursue it have been determined by shifts in the power of the United States and American perceptions of threats from foreign actors. The second section analyses the factors that have shaped the institutional and strategic position of the NED in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. When the U.S. foreign policy elite perceives a unitary threat from a political-ideological actor, coupled with a need to transform closed regimes, the Executive and Congress align to empower the NED through provision of support and resources. The third section examines the position of the NED in the Biden Administration’s strategy and argues it is being supported to the maximum as the lead institution for promoting democracy in hostile authoritarian competitors. It concludes that the NED has shown a high level of institutional survivability but that its model of democracy promotion is increasingly challenged by closing political space in other states, and the erosion of the U.S. economic, military, and ideological power.

The Missing Link? Western Communists as Mediators Between the East German FDGB, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and African Trade Unions in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

AbstractIn the interstices of Cold War rivalries and anti-colonial agitation in late 1950s Africa, African workers came into the focus of African nationalist politicians, Western leftists, colonial regimes and state socialist states alike. They were a small, but influential group, increasingly organized in trade unions and capable of bringing whole economies to a halt. European communists on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw these workers not only as part of an inceptive working class but also debated their role as a potential key force in global anti-capitalist revolution – if they had the right concepts. But how could trade union representatives, particularly those ones from Eastern Europe, actually get in touch with their African counterparts? Based on archival materials of the East German Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), this article discusses East-West-South connections in labor education with a special emphasis on the role of Western trade union officials working for or affiliated to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Drawing on their international experience, personal networks and linguistic skills, French and British communists established and intensified links between African trade unions and WFTU affiliates like the FDGB in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their influence facilitated and shaped these East-South connections. First, through their networks in West Africa, Western communists enabled the WFTU and the FDGB to internationalize their concepts of trade union education and integrate it into African political structures. Secondly, we examine the African Workers’ University in Conakry, an East-West-South joint venture between the West African Union Générale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN) and the WFTU, where trade unionists from the entire African continent attended courses between 1960 and 1965 and where European communists broadened their horizons while often holding on to rigid views. Thirdly, the article examines how European trade union functionaries talked about African course participants behind closed doors—building on the transcripts from a 1963 WFTU gathering on education for African trade unionists. Emphasizing their insider knowledge, French communists with experience in African trade union education called for innovative pedagogical concepts including a more practice-related education which acknowledged the heterogeneous conditions in different countries. However, they also promoted Eurocentric stage theories and saw a need to “discipline” Africans. The article concludes that the cooperation between actors from East, West and South rested on some shared assumptions, but encounters also led to reconceptualizations and realizations of ideological and practical constraints in international labor education.

An Anthropologist at Davos

As the triumphant power ending World War II, the United States became a global beacon for a reconstituted European political liberalism that could be exported to the world at large. During the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union (1947–1991), a nation that was led by a Boston “Brahmin” elite and guided by generic Christianity proposed a universalizing democracy to face off with international communism (see, e.g., David Halberstam’s [1993] The Best and the Brightest). American ideals of liberty, equality, freedom, and progress were widely circulated in a bid to outpace communism as a competing ideology for nation-building, regional influence, and world unity.

Worldmaking from the margins: interactions between domestic and international ordering in mid-20th-century India

This article investigates the contribution of decolonising states to the nascent international order emerging after the end of World War II. More precisely, it investigates the Indian contribution to the emerging international human rights regime, focussing on two key contributions: the advocacy for a strong supranational authority endowed with substantial enforcement mechanisms for the realisation of human rights and the equally strong defence of a bifurcation of civil-political and socio-economic rights into two treaties. Both contributions have been largely ignored within International Relations – and where they have been acknowledged, they have been subsumed into either narratives of liberal progress (as in the case of human rights enforcement) or Cold War rivalry (as in the case of a separation of the two Human Rights Covenants). In contrast, this paper seeks to shed light on the agency of Indian diplomats and politicians. It shows how their positions were neither simply replications of pre-existing scripts nor bare executions of superpower preferences. Instead, they were responses to the challenges of becoming a post-colonial state in a still overwhelmingly imperial world. Two challenges stood out: the definition of citizenship in light of internal diversity and a widely dispersed diaspora and the challenge of development against the backdrop of highly unequal global economic relations. In this article, I trace the movement of key protagonists between the Constituent Assembly and the United Nations to show how they were engaged in a project of postcolonial worldmaking, which required the simultaneous transformation of domestic and international order.

Retrospecting the Indus Mediation through Waltz's levels of analysis

Abstract This article presents a retrospection of India–Pakistan Indus Mediation (1951–1960) that culminated in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) from the perspective of Waltz's levels of analysis. It argues that apart from the factors at the individual and domestic levels of India and Pakistan, it was the US–USSR Cold War rivalry coupled with the India–Pakistan security dilemma at the international level that goaded the Mediation to succeed. The US sought to resolve the India–Pakistan water dispute as a first step to resolve the Kashmir dispute before the USSR could intervene in the region in the pretext of the Kashmir dispute. The India–Pakistan security dilemma compelled India and Pakistan to accept the offices of the World Bank and sign the IWT in 1960.

<i>Soul to Soul:</i> Americans’ Discovery of Yelena Khanga and the Promise of Russian-American Relations

This essay analyzes US press coverage of the Black Russian journalist Yelena Khanga in conjunction with her 1992 memoir Soul to Soul to illuminate how discussions of racism remained central to the late Cold War competition for moral superiority and the nascent Russian-US rivalry that replaced it. Khanga’s Soul to Soul challenged the dominant US (mis)representations of the USSR and her own life story which impeded closer relations between the two countries that her own family proved possible. Khanga advocated that the “connected differences” between Russia and the United States serve as the basis for greater cooperation, solidarity, and respect.

The WIDF's Work for Women's Rights in the (Post)colonial Countries and the “Soviet Agenda”

AbstractThe primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

The Unknown War of the Eastern Front: the first American-Soviet television production and Détente’s World War II

This article details the production of the first American-Soviet television collaboration The Unknown War. The 1978 documentary series chronicled the Eastern Front of World War II, an area of the war few Americans were familiar with. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s American film and television portrayals of the war excised or minimized the Soviet Union’s role due to the Cold War rivalry leading to a knowledge gap. The success of the documentary series The World at War spurred the interest of American independent producer Air Time International for a similar series on the Soviet side of the war. For Americans it was capitalizing on a revival of interest in the war while remedying the public’s lack of knowledge on the Eastern. For the Soviet authorities it was a means of furthering relations eased by Détente and bolstering their ‘Cult of the Great Patriotic War’. The series’ creation showcases the difficulties and compromises made to craft a product that suited both sides’ needs. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the series never being rebroadcast in the United States and largely forgotten. It serves as an example of the difficulties of such ‘cross-curtain’ collaborations and the Cold War’s influence on the interpretation of World War II.

Articulating Power Through the Parochial: The 1956 Armenian Church Election in Lebanon

A seemingly insular Armenian Church election that took place in Lebanon in February 1956 was simultaneously a site of contestation by Cold War powers and their proxies. Its disproportionately high coverage in the Lebanese press—and ensuing political intervention—provides an alternative view of the struggles for power between the United States and the USSR in Lebanon during the Cold War period. This election could have been understood as exclusively affecting Armenians in Lebanon and/or merely an entertaining anecdote of competition between Armenian religious figures. Instead, I argue that it is an opening to observe American-Soviet state competition for political influence in the region outside of the conventional case studies of the 1958 US marine intervention in Lebanon and the American government’s inability to prevent the Soviet suppression in Hungary in the aftermath of the Tripartite Aggression in Egypt in October 1956. And yet, this election must also concurrently be seen as a moment where the Armenian population of Lebanon made use of Cold War suspicions to designate a leader of the Armenian Church seen to suit their community’s interests. This article throws into relief the customary depiction and understanding of the Armenian population in Lebanon as temporary refugees and therefore not an integral part of the Lebanese nation-state by drawing out the use of Cold War rivalries.

The End of the ‘Special Relationship’? The Heath-Nixon Years in Perspective

ABSTRACT The Heath-Nixon years, 1970–1974, have been widely characterised as marking a low point in Anglo-American relations, even the end of the so-called ‘special relationship’. Overall, historians and commentators have tended to point the finger at Edward Heath, the British prime minister. As a committed Europhile, Heath is said to have deliberately downgraded relations with Washington in pursuit of membership of the European Economic Community [EEC], making the old habits of transatlantic co-operation impossible. Drawing on material from both sides of the Atlantic, this analysis presents a different perspective. Far from marking a transformation of British foreign policy, Heath’s determination to join the EEC stood as part of a longstanding effort to reinvigorate Britain’s place in the world, including the alliance with Washington. Moreover, when it came to diplomatic relations, largely, it was the nature of policy-making under President Richard Nixon – assisted by his chief advisor, Henry Kissinger – that undermined the old patterns of co-operation. As the White House set out to transform international relations, overhaul the global economic order, and impose its Cold War rivalry on regional crises, London was left feeling impotent, marginalised, and even double-crossed – all of which fuelled the case for Europe.

“More Great Goods to the People! Better Work for This Year after Year!” the Soviet Alternative to the Western Society of Mass Consumption (1960s — 1970s)

The “mass consumption society” which arose in the Western industrially developed countries in the middle of the twentieth century was viewed by the Soviet Union as a form of anti-communism in the logic of the opposing systems competition and Cold War rivalry. Experiencing permanent difficulties with consumer sector the USSR opposed the new concepts with a comprehensive preventive alternative in the broad ideological and socio-economic context of a “developed socialist society”. The socialist version of the future prosperity presupposed a breakthrough in the development of the industries of the “B” group, the formation of socialist values, idealistic personal consumption, spiritual and cultural growth, the priority of public interests, and a selfless communist devotion to job. The archival documents reveal that the attractiveness of Western prosperity and the departure from the reforms of the mid-1960s, which did not change the absolute adherence to the principles of central planning and single public property, served as a catalyst for the strengthening of the ideological components of economic policy and further degradation of the production sphere. Material incentives were replaced by conscientiousness and patriotism. “Socialist competition” and communist “subbotniks” completely turned into a kind of “voluntary-compulsory” uncompensated labor in favor of the state. The USSR failed to solve the problems of unsatisfied consumer demand with the help of the Comecon countries, which were experiencing similar difficulties. The Soviet search for progressive answers to “mass consumption” had an important by-product, the scientific research of anthropogenic influence on the climate, responsible, balanced consumption, environmental protection, conservation of natural resources aimed at sustainable development. The accumulated experience is relevant for the 21st century, the beginning of which was marked by global pandemics and crises of planetary scale associated with the spread of consumerism to new states and territories.

A Cold War Humanitarian Action: The Western Admission of 1956 Hungarian Refugees

The story of the refugees who fled Hungary following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Revolution and the coordinated international humanitarian operation launched to receive them is an outstanding chapter in the history of emigration. These refugees received far more favorable treatment than earlier Hungarian expatriates or other European refugees had been given. With a total of 200,000 refugees, their successful transportation to host countries and their subsequent integration represented an exceptional success for international aid efforts. How can this efficiency be explained? Trends in humanitarian sentiment in world public opinion, influenced in part by the horrors of World War II, and the increasingly precise formulation of the rights of the refugees were just as important, as factors, as the supportive attitude of the populations of Western countries, who empathized with the suppressed revolution. The exceptionally favorable composition, from the perspective of the labor market, of the mass of people who fled in 1956 coincided with Western economic prosperity, producing economic “miracles.” However, even these favorable initial conditions would not have led to such a swift and successful settlement in the West of nearly 200,000 Hungarians had it not been for the Cold War rivalry between the Eastern and the Western blocs. As a consequence of the ideological and propaganda conflict with the Soviets, the NATO governments had the necessary political will to give effective support for a resolution to the Hungarian refugee problem, even after emotional support among the public opinion had waned.

International aspects of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

This article analyses the international conditions during the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is an outline of a broad research problem, a historical analysis from the perspective of the decades-long evolution of Yugoslavia’s international position. After its expulsion from the Eastern Bloc in 1948, the country balanced between East and West, becoming one of the founders and leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. The author focuses on the aspect of Yugoslavia’s role in the politics of the West, especially the US and the EEC, during and at the end of the Cold War. It was the West that could, possibly, have played a role in preventing the disintegration of the country in the early 1990s, in contrast to the USSR, which had its own internal problems at that time. What factors influenced Western support for the SFRY during the Cold War? How did Yugoslavia’s position in Western politics change when the Cold War rivalry ended? The author points out the temporal connection between the disintegration of the SFRY and, among other things, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, the democratisation process in Eastern Europe, German reunification, European integration, and the crisis in the Middle East. In the end, there was a lack of real and coherent action by Western countries to bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis in the Balkans. The consequence of this would be the disintegration of the SFRY and several years of war in the former Yugoslavia.

Re-imagining the space age: Early satellite development from Earthly fieldwork practice

ABSTRACT Imagining space technology has been influenced by (usually American-centred) turning points in rocketry, launchers, space exploration and human spaceflight: principally in terms of techno-bureaucratic Big Science products embedded in Cold War rivalry, military and prestige objectives. While this representation is useful to understand many developments of the space age, it has tended to downplay the role of natural history practices of data collection and interpretation in the development of space technology. The notion of sociotechnical imaginary helps to reveal a more complex and complete understanding of the history of space technology. Between 1967 and 1973, the vision of the French remote-sensing satellite as both enabled by and an extension of aircraft photo-interpretation helped to shape scientific and technological expectations of remote-sensing technology. In turn, the practices, values, and visions of aircraft photo-interpreters informed the development of satellite remote-sensing work. In particular, the fieldwork-driven research mode, focusing on data collection and field observations, was an important part of satellite technology development –a tie which remains strong today. Approaching remote-sensing satellite technology through historical research not only suggests a particular way of imagining space technology within the tradition of field science practices, discourses, and history, but also allows us to reflect on the power and limitations of prevalent imaginaries to fully understand the space age and its place in history.

Securing the keystone: the suppression of anti-communist insurgents in Southern China, 1949–1952

ABSTRACT Following their victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese Communists initiated a nationwide counterinsurgency. In Guangxi, a mountainous province at the China-Vietnam border, anti-communist rebels waged an insurgency from 1949 to 1952, hoping that foreign support and Cold War rivalries could eventually restore the ancien régime. This research investigates the counterinsurgency in Guangxi, one of the more mutinous provinces in post-Civil War China. By situating the Guangxi counterinsurgency in the global context, this article aims to contribute to the discussion of Chinese counterinsurgency strategy, experience and how the People’s Republic’s triumphed over the armed resistance.

Introduction

Introduction

THE IMAGINED INDEPENDENCE OF CANADA’S INTERNET

Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting military, political and cultural histories of early internets across the globe, including in the US, (Abbate 1999), Chile (Medina 2011) and France (Mailland & Driscoll 2016), respectively. All three approaches inform this history, exploring the Canadian context. On the recommendation of US counterparts at NORAD, a top-secret whitepaper recommended Canada develop a distributed communications network (NORAD 1965), which became SAMSON: Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network. SAMSON developed into an internet, though riddled with a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately, until it was disbanded in 1984. (Canadian Armed Forces 1985). This paper investigates Canada’s internet infrastructural technopolitics through Larkin’s framework of questioning how they “emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy” (2013, 329). Specifically, it asks how the design, equipment, and network protocols of this Canadian internet embodied the imaginary of Canadian independence from 1965 to 1984, drawing on primary sources from the unpublished documents of the Canadian Armed Forces that have since been declassified. The emergence of the early Canadian internet occurred during a political renewal. At a time of pushback against American and British influence, the Canadian military rejected cooperation with the US, and focused on internal threats over Cold War rivalries (Hatt 1984). By design the Canadian internet was a security apparatus, but the technopolitics embedded in the system dictate who is to be secured against whom. This paper asks how this history persists in Canada’s internet infrastructure today.

The Geopolitics of Women’s Issues: The “Private Sphere” Goes Global

Kristen Ghodsee’s revisionist take on the importance of socialist women’s activism was researched and written before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world, but her observations seem even more compelling now. The Cold War rivalry of the late twentieth century fostered alliances between women from socialist countries and women from recently decolonized nations to advocate for a political economy that promoted social welfare and ecological sustainability. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, as women increasingly bore the brunt of the structural adjustment policies and neoclassical economic paradigms that obliterated social services and prized efficiency over social and environmental health, women from socialist countries offered another option—one in which state policies supported working parents and provided for basic needs such as health care and housing. Ghodsee clearly challenges the U.S.-centered liberal feminist depiction of this period, challenging the dismissal of state-sponsored women’s organizations and showing the many ways that the United States and rest of the NATO crowd lagged behind socialist countries on basic issues such as universal childcare and mothers’ pensions. But Ghodsee also challenges the narrative from postcolonial scholars such as Devaki Jain and Amrita Basu who focus on this period as a turning point for Third World feminists, without recognizing the important role of their alliances with Second World activists. Throughout the book, Ghodsee engages the extant scholarship, clarifying the stakes of her interventions into the historiography. Two more recent books, Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s For the Many, offer further evidence of how much historians gain by looking more closely at these collaborations across geopolitical divides.

An exit without strategy: learning from the Soviet Bloc’s retreat from the Horn of Africa and Central America

This article investigates the closing years of East–West Cold War rivalry by focussing on the inconsistent implementation of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of de-escalating decade-long regional conflicts across the globe. It closely examines Moscow and its Eastern European ally’s disengagement from two of the hottest war zones at the end of the Cold War, the Horn of Africa and Central America, consulting a wide range of Soviet and Eastern European party, diplomatic and security services archives. The paper argues that there was more to an economic interest that justified the Soviet Bloc’s continuing military deliveries as its leaders publicly pleaded for disarmament. As the military and intelligence services maintained their policy influence until late 1980, some of their analyses suggest that lingering security imperatives concerning the progressive regimes in the developing nations continued to play a notable role behind the scenes in motivating the Bloc’s contradictive withdrawal. This argument provides a plausible correlational explanation for the lingering inertia of ‘old thinking’ in the Kremlin’s relations with today’s Global South, precipitating a less orderly exit from regional hotbeds of conflict.