Cold War World Research Articles

Slobodian, Quinn (ed.) Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 572 multivalent than Hellbeck’s in analysing individual attitudes towards official ideology. For example, she posits a ‘vast’ (p. 133) range of motivations for participation in volunteer activities and speculates that petitioners’ evocations of the housewarming trope suggests ‘genuine faith’ or ‘clever manipulation’ or possibly both at once (p. 149). This book will be of great interest to scholars interested in the Khrushchev era and post-war Soviet society more generally. It is informative, well researched and much enlivened by vivid descriptions of everyday life. Adrian College, Michigan Deborah A. Field Slobodian, Quinn (ed.). Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. Protest, Culture and Society. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2015. viii + 325 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $120.00: £75.00. This edited volume focuses on encounters between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and people of colour, taking the latter as its subjects. It contributes to a growing body of literature which examines the connections and identifications between the Second World and the Global South during the Cold War. The volume adds to this literature by providing a number of valuable case studies which explore the global significance of a state which retains a reputation for parochialism and insularity. More significantly, it attempts to challenge this ‘provincial myth’ (p. 3) of the GDR by focusing on the accounts of individuals from the Global South. This is a noble and original goal, and the volume is at its best when these accounts are at the fore. The inclusion of primary sources from South African, Chinese and Cuban authors toward this aim are illuminating. Challenging myths of East German provincialism does not necessarily mean accepting the GDR’s official claims to internationalism, and much of this volume is taken up with the limitations of such a claim. The first section of the volume, a chapter by editor Quinn Slobodian on race in the GDR, shows that despite the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claims to have eliminated racism, it continued to produce stereotypical depictions of difference that privileged whiteness. In a similar vein, section three deals with what Slobodian calls ‘ambivalent solidarities’. Sara Pugach’s article on the politics of race and gender show that African students who came to study in the GDR were subject to racist stereotypes of ‘lasciviousness’, (p. 132) although she contrasts the stigma attached to Afro-German children in the West (where such children were often sent to orphanages) with their relative acceptance in the East. Katrina Hagen shows how campaigns in the GDR to free Angela Davis REVIEWS 573 mobilized citizens through exoticized and objectifying imagery, while Jason Verber’s contribution on the experience of Mozambican children who came to study in the GDR at the behest of the ruling Frelimo party suggests a clash between the values of the SED and Frelimo, which was nevertheless suppressed for the sake of solidarity. In between these two sections, the second section of the volume traces examples of ‘socialist aid’ carried out in the Global South in the name of the GDR. This is an area that remains largely unexamined, which is particularly notable considering that discernible differences are traceable between socialist aid programmes and liberal-capitalist variants. These accounts display a narrative of Utopieverlust (the loss of utopia) that is typical to many features of the GDR, as an early utopian idealism is replaced by political pragmatism. Young-Sun Hong shows how East German reconstruction projects after the Korean War saw led to the development of transnational identities and affinities between German aid workers and Koreans which were however ‘slowly eroded by official decree’ (p. 54) as the politics of the two nations diverged in the late 1950s. A similar narrative can be seen in Gregory Witkowski’s analysis of the imagery of solidarity in the GDR, which sought to transcend established visual conventions of Western charity, but often failed in this task. Likewise, Bernd Schaefer shows how aid programs between the GDR and Vietnam often provided important support, but culminated in the problematic employment of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese workers in East Germany under exploitative conditions in the 1980s. Particular attention is devoted to...

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and Postwar by Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. vi, 388 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). The time has long past when 1950-1953 conflict in Korea could be called the forgotten Of course, war has never been forgotten on Korean peninsula itself, where a heavily fortified armistice line still separates two mutually hostile regimes more than sixty years after ceasefire. In China, Aid Korea, Resist America as it is called, remains a source of pride for People's Republic even if relations with both Korea and America have changed radically since war. In West, including United States that contributed by far largest number of United Nations forces to conflict (followed by Britain and Canada), scholarship and memorialization of war has recently come into its own, after decades of being overshadowed by World War II and Vietnam. Masuda Hajimu's Cold War Crucible is a unique and valuable contribution to historiography of Korean War--or more precisely, to history of Cold War and Korean War's central place in emergence of that global conflict. Masuda Hajimu, a US-trained Japanese historian based in Singapore, admits that his book is not about Korean War itself. Rather, it explores how war functioned as a catalyst in crucible of postwar and contributed to materialization of Cold War world (6). Hajimu reverses usual logic about relationship between Korea and Cold War: rather than see Korean War as an effect of emerging Cold War, Hajimu argues that Korea in important ways produced Cold War. As Bruce Cumings and others have long pointed out, Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950 justified rapid and long-lasting expansion of US forces around and hardened geopolitical lines of Cold War conflict between Soviet Union and China, on one side, and United States-led Free World, on other. But Hajimu is not primarily interested in Cold War geopolitics. He focuses instead on effects of Korean War on domestic societies in Asia, North America, and Europe. The Korean War, Hajimu claims, turned domestic societies into battlefields in which people were forced to choose sides in a global conflict expressed at local level. Cold War Crucible is interested less in geopolitical realities than in discursive imaginings. The Korean War created bipolarity within societies on both sides of East-West divide, and bipolar division of Cold War became a simplified prism for seeing a postwar, decolonizing, post-imperial whose realities were far more multi-dimensional and complex. …

Conflicting Visions: Canada and India in the Cold War World, 1946–1976 by Ryan M. Touhey

Conflicting Visions: Canada and India in the Cold War World, 1946–1976 by Ryan M. Touhey

Transnational Perspectives in Nelson Mandela’s Writings

As the Cold War world was divided according to political and ideological alliances and specific terminologies developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Nelson Mandela’s use of the term “cosmopolitanism” in one context and “internationalism” in another situation highlights a complex conceptual map that has been flattened out after 1989. This article is focusing on tracing the developing transnational dimension of Nelson Mandela’s worldview during the Cold War as well as the terms of this engagement. What are the tenets of Mandela’s comprehensive international vision and how did it evolve during the apartheid years, as the leader spent much of this period behind bars, with limited contact with the world outside? To provide an answer to this question, this article looks at Nelson Mandela’s autobiographical writings and several speeches during his presidency to discuss the shaping of his transnational perspective. In order to discern the tenets of his international approach, the article engages with an array of terminology, ranging from cosmopolitanism to internationalism and from Pan-Africanism to Afro-Asian solidarity, which are placed in the context of the Cold War. Mandela used both liberal humanist terms that align with a cosmopolitan outlook as well as a lexicon of solidarity that resonated with leftist internationalism, as demanded by the ANC’s political alliances and attentive to the ideological tensions produced by the Cold War.

African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements

African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements Jamie Monson The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies: Back to the Future? In 1997, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza wrote as president of the African Studies Association that the field of African studies had been plagued by perpetual crisis since its institutionalization in the 1950s. The crisis had its roots in deeply embedded historical structures of race and hierarchy, on the one hand, and institutional power over the production of knowledge on the other. He wrote that scholars in the field were working in “unyielding solitudes” and “bitter contestations” that divided African American from European American and from African scholars. Until these solitudes could be transcended, the field would continue to founder. He went further in his challenge: he suggested that the crisis of the 1990s could lead African studies “back to the future,” as cold war–era strategic concerns declined and a return could take place to transcontinental scholarship that was both intellectually rigorous and socially responsible.1 Sandra E. Greene, speaking as president of the African Studies Association the following year, made a similar argument, stating that the crisis in the field would continue so long as Africanist scholarship from the North continued to play a gatekeeping role and remained detached from African realities. Greene stated that the time had come for a strong bridge between Africanist and African scholars, as a necessary precondition for the field to flourish, stating that it was imperative that African studies address its uncompleted agendas and unacknowledged concerns.2 William Martin and Michael West wrote hopefully, in an article titled “A Future with a Past,” echoing Zeleza, that African studies during this time of crisis was moving into a post-Africanist era. While powerful institutions may have been seeing their demise in the post–cold war world order, Martin and West were optimistic about the possibilities for an African studies centered in Africa and untethered from military funding and developmentalist paradigms. They anticipated that the field would diverge productively from “One Africa” to “Many Africas” without a single hegemonic paradigm.3 [End Page 66] These and other significant interventions in the 1990s sought to open a more global vision of African studies, one that left behind the narrow nationalisms of cold-war area studies and embraced its roots in African diasporic intellectual traditions, while bridging the conventional subdivision of the continent into sub-Saharan and Northern Africa. The end of area studies could allow not only for a return to a broader intellectual geography in African studies, but also the inclusion of multidisciplinary explorations that would no longer be restricted by the need to serve national strategic agendas. Nearly twenty years have passed since these debates about the crises confronting the field and hopes for a different future. Where do we stand in African studies? Has the field been transformed since the late 1990s?—and if so, how? Have we continued to suffer from “perpetual crisis”?—or have we built enduring bridges across continents, constituencies, and disciplines? Has the militarism and strategic developmentalism of the cold war given way to a more just and rigorous scholarship? All these questions need to be raised and debated as we consider the relationships among African studies, global studies, and the disciplines. The picture today is a mixed one. We still have much, much more work to do in order to build bridges between scholars and continents that will be sustainable and enduring, for despite these perpetual calls for partnerships and collaboration, efforts have continued to be piecemeal and often patronizing, originating from the needs and interests of Western scholars, donors, and institutions. And we have not yet fully extended our partnerships to African studies institutions or stakeholders in the parts of the world characterized as rising powers such as Brazil, India, and China, preferring to study their activities on the continent, rather than to engage with them in knowledge production. And our energies are distracted as we deal with a new crisis facing African studies today, the critical crisis of resources. The precipitous fall in financial support from traditional foundation and government sources over the last decade has affected research on African languages and in the humanities and social sciences. Yet...

Yugoslav Protest: Student Rebellion in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo in 1968

In June 1968, Yugoslav university students launched strikes and demonstrations condemning police brutality and university conditions and critiquing the apparent failure of self-managing socialism. The "June events" show that the demonstrators were active participants in a global movement but also heavily influenced by local context, practices, and ideas. Whereas Yugoslav youth engaged with, drew from, and ignored the activities of other student movements, authorities reacted to youth rebellion by insisting that the majority of the protesters were showing support for state policies and that the most incorrigible were influenced by, or agents of, foreign entities. Thus, the state reproduced an artificially rigid boundary between east and west as well as between good socialist youth and enemy agents. This article decenters the west as the standard of youth rebellion, considering it in conjunction with but not in comparison to Yugoslavia. It approaches the Cold War world as characterized by the transfer of ideas and practices, not just the clash of civilizations.

Is trade governance changing?

Preferential trade agreements have experienced an extraordinary expansion since 1990s. This issue is fundamental because it calls into question global governance in world trade. Crafted in the post Cold War world, WTO function was undermined as the main instrument of governing world trade. PTA’s seem inextricably associated with the globalization logics. Similar observation obliges us to look at the globalized world with a more powerful lens. At the end of Uruguay Round, WTO became the main pillar of the world trade system. The burgeoning of preferential trade agreements since the last decade of the twentieth century, the WTO position as the major tool for trade governance is seriously threatened.

Underground Heritage: Berlin Techno and the Changing City

Berlin is changing, arguably more and faster than ever before. The city is striving to overcome political and social divisions of the Cold War, divisions that continue to shape development deep into the twenty-first century. From the rubble of the Cold War and Second World War, a new ultra-modern capital city is emerging. This is good. But it also creates a dilemma: Berlin has long attracted people who pursue alternative lifestyles, thus creating complex networks of alternative scenes that have come to characterize the city, specifically in “cool” or “hip” neighborhoods like Kreuzberg. These alternative scenes form an important part of the city's heritage, and one that is directly threatened by this re-emergence. Berlin Techno exemplifies this dilemma. Its clubs typically exist in historic (often former industrial) buildings and mark explicit reference to heritage both by retaining architectural elements that characterize the buildings and the sounds and scenes created there and by recalling iconic “historic” performances. Their distribution shifts in advance of gentrification, creating a distinctive and fast moving landscape that is itself characteristic of the contemporary city, and often of alternative or “underground” scenes in general. These “temporary autonomous zones” are important areas for cultural engagement and production. The music too has its heritage, as old (late 1980s) samples are included in contemporary compositions in much the same as older phases of a building are incorporated into new design. We argue that this “underground” heritage is essential to social and cultural sustainability. To deny that here, in Berlin of all places, is to deny the city its capacity to attract and sustain alternative lifestyles, thus compromising its very identity.

Bill Clinton’s ‘Democratic Enlargement’ and the Securitisation of Democracy Promotion

Faced with creating a grand strategy for American foreign policy in the post–Cold War world, the Clinton Administration launched the strategy of ‘Democratic Enlargement.’ This analysis makes two contributions to the existing literature on the topic. First, it investigates the role of Wilsonianism and the ‘Democratic Peace Thesis’ in the discourse of the strategy of ‘Democratic Enlargement’ based on public speeches with a focus on the relationship between democracy and security. Second, it utilises securitisation theory to analyse how Clinton’s Administration used the linkage of democracy and security to legitimise humanitarian interventions in Haiti and Kosovo. By addressing ‘Democratic Enlargement’ in security terms, the Administration securitised democracy promotion and, thereby, created a discourse that helped legitimise a gradual move towards a more militaristic foreign policy during Clinton’s presidency. This discourse offered arguments later utilised by the George W. Bush Administration.

The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation) by Alexandre Kojève (review)

Reviewed by: The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation) by Alexandre Kojève Eric Brandom The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation). By Alexandre Kojève. Edited by François Terré. Translated by Hager Weslati. London: Verso, 2014. Pp. xxxiv + 107. Cloth $24.95. ISBN 978-1781680957. In the 1930s, Alexandre Koyré gave a regular seminar on G.W.F. Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Koyré was born in Russia but left as an adolescent to study with Edmund Husserl in Germany. After a few years he left in turn for Paris. In 1936, Alexandre Kojève—younger than Koyré by a decade but following a similar trajectory from Russia through German universities to Paris—took the place of his older colleague at the head of the seminar, which became a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This seminar became legendary and remains the thing for which Kojève is best known today. Rather than enter the university, Kojève spent the postwar years working in the French ministry of foreign economic relations. He was among the technocrats responsible for setting the course of European economic integration. There is a great deal more to Kojève’s body of philosophical work than the famous seminar, a few polemical or provocative essays—such as the famous exchange with Leo Strauss (reprinted in recent Chicago editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny)—and whatever meaning one might assign to his role in building the European Union. In recent decades, Kojève’s voluminous manuscripts and papers, held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, have become available to researchers. Hager Weslati, translator of the book under review here, is among a new generation of scholars busily exploiting this material. Kojève wrote The Notion of Authority in the spring of 1942 in Marseilles and sent it to acquaintances in the Vichy government from whom he received an appreciative note to confirm receipt. It was never intended for publication. The previous year, Kojève had delivered a large manuscript to the Soviet vice-consul in Paris to be forwarded on to Stalin. He later published a book making recommendations for French foreign policy in the Cold War world and has recently been accused of having spied for the Soviet Union. This is, if nothing else, engaged philosophy. For Kojève, Authority (which, like other concepts internal to his system, he capitalizes) is the free and conscious assent of one person to the command of another. A gramophone cannot possess authority, nor can a subject under hypnosis be said to respond to it—both examples are Kojève’s. Authority requires that consciousness and freedom of will be present but, as it were, muted. There are, Kojève tells us, four pure types of authority. Kojève pursues “analysis” of them on what he calls the phenomenological, metaphysical, and ontological levels; he then presents “deductions” on political, ethical, and psychological applications. The four varieties of authority are associated with ideal social roles as well as previous philosophies of politics. They are also temporally oriented (28–29). The Father represents the sort of authority that rests on the past and was imagined by the scholastic tradition. The Master was analyzed [End Page 438] by Hegel and is associated with risk of death in the present. The Leader formulates projects for the future and is best understood through Aristotle. The Judge, finally, stands for Platonic justice and takes the perspective of eternity. Martin Heidegger’s name does not appear in Kojève’s text but is doubtless in the background. Authority as it exists in the world is always a combination of types. Kojève suggests, for instance, that from the perspective of stability “F-LM-J” is the most desirable: political society based on the authority of the Father, with a governing structure of Leader-Master that makes it mostly forward-looking, checked by the Judge, which is to say the perspective of eternity (87–91). The authority most likely to predominate today, however, is that of the Leader, especially the revolutionary leader—Stalin (49). Readers who arrive at this text through Verso’s catalogue will find a...

Контроль над ядерным оружием: конец истории?

The article is addressed to an unprecedented crisis of the system and process of nuclear arms control – including nuclear arms reduction and non-proliferation. During a half century history of the practical nuclear disarmament (counting from the 1963 partial nuclear tests ban treaty – PTB) this process has had many ups and downs, but never has it been so deeply deadlocked. Although the two main nuclear treaties are still implemented: the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 2010 and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1987, their future is increasingly uncertain and their validity is eroding, just as that of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 and other agreements in this crucial sphere. For the first time in the last fifty years the world is facing a real threat of totally loosing control over the most destructive weapons created in the history of mankind. What is the most amazing – this is happening half a century after the end of the Cold War, when the hopes emerged that nuclear disarmament would finally become a realistic proposition. Dramatic events in and around Ukraine are badly exacerbating the crisis of nuclear arms control, but they are not its original cause. The article is analyzing the principal reasons of the present crisis: the transforming post-post Cold War world order; Russia’s position and role in the new international environment; the military-strategic, economic and technological developments, which are leading to disintegration of former conceptual premises and mechanisms of nuclear arms control and which are not adapted to the changing objective realities. In conclusion some general proposals are provided with the aim of saving, adopting and enhancing nuclear arms limitation and non-proliferation.

RELIGION AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW COSMOPOLITANISM

In a post Cold-War world riven with ‘minor’ conflicts, and a West anxious about the intermittent threat of terrorist attack, human equality and sodality (fraternity and sorority) require urgent review. Among interesting proposals for a theoretical foundation to human equality is Martha Nussbaum’s call for a revived, modern version of Stoicism to teach indifference to race and a neighbourly goodwill. Yet in her concern to avoid ‘teleologies’ Nussbaum denatures Stoicism by disconnecting it from its transcendent foundations. A problem for the modern world is to maintain the authority of states, with their capacity to produce relief for the poor and oppressed along with their capacity to dominate, while having them absorb the ideals of cosmopolitanism into their own policyformation. It is incumbent on the democratic state, the progenitor of the cosmopolitanism of both Cynicism and Stoicism, to promote the ideals of human dignity and equality. Nussbaum’s Stoicism scarcely helps, but there are globalizing organizations, such as the United Nations and its agencies, and globalized religious organizations, as advanced by Hans Küng, which may supply the institutional foundation.

Is Viktor Orbán Right That Liberal Democracy Has Failed? Is Italy Exhibit #1?

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

Russia Has Already Invaded Ukraine

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

Putin, Erdogan and Orbán: Band of Brothers?

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

Rusya-NATO i sredata na sigurnost sled Studenata voina: Chast 1—1989–1999

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Imagining World War III—In 2034

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

How The Mideast Conflict Nourishes Anti‐Semitism

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

New BRICS Bank a Building Block of Alternative World Order

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.

Why is Rouhani Angry?

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.