Communist Bloc Research Articles

Threats and Challenges for young European Countries in New International Conditions, Using Ukraine and Moldova as a Case Study

Several mounts ago, during emergency meeting of UN Security Council, General Secretary Antonio Guterres, made a very trebling statement, that Cold war is back and it is even more dangerous than in the 60’s.
 This is not news for majority of scientific community. New international conflict started in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimean peninsula. New international conflict will definitely change the balance in international relations.
 The most vulnerable in these new conditions are the young democracies and countries that formed several decades ago due collapse of USSR and the whole communist bloc, Ukraine, Moldova, south Caucasian and Baltic states. 
 Imperial past left a lasting mark on economical, social and political life of newly form states. Soviet social experiments led to good number of problems for the former republics, ranging from political to territorial.
 Russian Federation uses these problems for her advantage. Surviving in this harsh conditions and reforming their society is the main challenge of young European countries.
 Key words: Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Putin, hybrid war, post-soviet space, international security

A lost chance for Balkan cooperation? The Romanian view on ‘regional micro-détente’, 1969—75

ABSTRACTThe Soviet-American détente raised many concerns among small states that Cold War bipolarity could be consolidated and that the superpowers’ dialogue was just another form of excluding other countries from having a say in international affairs. In order to neutralise the effects of bipolarity, many European governments advocated in favour of a multilateral détente. This paper argues that a similar process occurred in Eastern Europe and analyses the Romanian proposals for Balkan cooperation in the context of what was called a ‘regional micro-détente’. Bucharest called for a multilateral high-level meeting of all Balkan states with the aim of devising formulas for improving cooperation and limiting the influence of the superpowers in the region. As Romania was engaged in serious divergences with the Soviet Union and also had good relations with the Chinese at the height of the Sino-Soviet polemic, Moscow regarded the Romanian proposals as directed against its interests in the peninsula and opposed it. In spite of its lack of results, the Romanian project demonstrates that the commitment to multilateral détente existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain and reveals the increasing fragmentation of the Communist bloc in the context of détente and the CSCE process.

A peculiar case of a runaway ambassador: Yi Sang-Cho’s defection and the 1956 crisis in North Korea

ABSTRACTThe defection of Yi Sang-cho, the North Korean ambassador to Moscow, in 1956 was an event without precedent in the history of the communist bloc. This article deals with the background to the event, drawing on newly available archival documents and other sources. The study indicates that Ambassador Yi, deeply involved with intra-party opposition in North Korea, played a major role in the Mikoyan-Peng delegation’s trip to Pyongyang and subsequent events. It also traces why the Soviet authorities decided to grant asylum to Yi Sang-cho, and how Moscow’s attitude to his defection changed over time.

A Genealogy of Economic Growth as Ideology and Cold War Core State Imperative

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines and problematises the ‘taken for granted’ status of economic growth within modern politics and political economy. It views economic growth is an ideology and structural interest of the capitalist state, one that serves the interests of a specific class or elite rather than, beyond a threshold, the interests of a majority in society. The article outlines some of the historical and institutional origins of economic growth as a core state imperative. It focuses on the immediate post-WW2 period, the Cold War, and the role of the OECD (and its predecessor the OEEC) in systematically disseminating and promoting GDP growth in Western European countries as a key part of the US led competition of the ‘free capitalist world’ against the Communist bloc. The article suggests that economic growth is s a powerful idea that has become a keystone of the (initially Keynesian-based) political ideology of growth, which in turn enabled and empowered state and supra-state institutions, and acted as a legitimating ideology throughout capitalist societies.

Challenges for Trade Liberalization and WTO Rules: The Case of Macedonia

The collapse of communist systems in the Former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia led the way for the states of these systems to the democratic systems of governance and market liberalization. Membership of the former communist bloc countries in the Euro-Atlantic alliances and international organizations of various characters has been accompanied by political, economic and social challenges. The reforms which should be realized by the governments, aimed at meeting the standards that are imposed as conditions for membership, these reforms in the field of economy and trade, accompanied by the cost that the state, domestic companies, and the population had paid to the membership process. Through this research, we aim to highlight the challenges with which it was faced the Macedonian State and Government during the process of market liberalization, with emphasis on the costs associated with and during the World Trade Organization (WTO) membership process. Following the analysis of the official reports of the WTO and the Macedonian Statistical Office, as well as the interviews with Macedonian officials, we conclude that the WTO rules and principles have had an impact on the reduction of revenues from customs, domestic businesses and legislative changes in terms of foreign trade.

Challenges for Trade Liberalization and WTO Rules: The Case of Macedonia

The collapse of communist systems in the Former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia led the way for the states of these systems to the democratic systems of governance and market liberalization. Membership of the former communist bloc countries in the Euro-Atlantic alliances and international organizations of various characters has been accompanied by political, economic and social challenges. The reforms which should be realized by the governments, aimed at meeting the standards that are imposed as conditions for membership, these reforms in the field of economy and trade, accompanied by the cost that the state, domestic companies, and the population had paid to the membership process. Through this research, we aim to highlight the challenges with which it was faced the Macedonian State and Government during the process of market liberalization, with emphasis on the costs associated with and during the World Trade Organization (WTO) membership process. Following the analysis of the official reports of the WTO and the Macedonian Statistical Office, as well as the interviews with Macedonian officials, we conclude that the WTO rules and principles have had an impact on the reduction of revenues from customs, domestic businesses and legislative changes in terms of foreign trade.

Nebulous nationalism: Walker Connor in an era of rising populism

AbstractWalker Connor's extensive writings on nationalism covered a wide range of issues and an even wider range of societies, from North America to Western Europe, from the countries of the Communist bloc to the evolving forms of identity and affiliation throughout the postcolonial, developing world. No theme in his work is perhaps more salient than his critical distinction between state and nation, one that was so often blurred by a loose terminology that saw political units and forms of ethnic identity as synonymous. For Connor, this sin was perpetrated by both academic scholars and general writers and led to a lack of appreciation of one of the foremost forces – what he called ethno‐nationalism – shaping the contemporary world.

Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World, by Jason C. Parker

Scholars of modern US international history tend to view the twentieth century as shaped most fundamentally by the Cold War between the Soviet-led Communist bloc and the US-led democratic capitalist sphere. But, for the majority of the world’s peoples who lived in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the period from the 1940s to the 1970s was defined instead in political terms primarily by the struggle for national self-determination and independence from western European colonial rule. The intersection of these two axes of power—East–West and North–South—determined many of the contours of contemporary world affairs. US foreign policy after the Second World War aimed to preserve close ties with Washington’s NATO partners in western Europe while simultaneously winning the allegiance of the newly emerging nations that became known collectively as the Third World. A vast literature now documents the heavy-handed and often unsuccessful military and intelligence interventions by the United States in non-European terrain. Jason Parker’s engaging new book turns our attention instead to official American public diplomacy toward the Third World from 1945 to 1963. This was the effort by the United States Information Agency and its bureaucratic predecessors favourably to impress other peoples with American values and behaviours and thus to woo them to the American side in the Cold War struggle.

The Sino-DPRK Split and Origins of US-DPRK Bilateralism

North Korea has identified its official foreign policy as being focused on ‘self-reliance’ since the mid-1906s. Kim Il Sung (Kim Il-sŏng) had been long preoccupied with external interference in internal affairs, so the escalation of the Sino-Soviet schism created an environment in which to eliminate foreign influence in domestic politics and strengthen his control. North Korea did not only try to balance between the two giant socialist countries, but also expand its diplomatic sphere outside the communist bloc such as with Third World and European countries. In addition, it pursued direct contact with the US to achieve its longstanding goals, the removal of US troops stationed in the South and the replacement of the 1953 armistice with a permanent peace treaty. Since then demands for bilateral talks have become the most distinctive feature of North Korea’s foreign policy. With the advent of détente in the early 1970s, discontent with their Chinese comrades also led Kim to seek US-DPRK talks. Despite a mutual hostility generated during the era of the Cultural Revolution, Kim Il Sung’s first response to China’s rapprochement with the US was not negative, anticipating the potential for Chinese assistance in accomplishing North Korean diplomatic objectives in its relations with the US. At odds with Kim’s expectation, however, Chinese behavior did not meet North Korea’s demands. China, as well as the US, preferred the status quo to a rapid change in the region, even though they fully supported the beginnings of inter-Korean dialogue that culminated in the conclusion of the Joint Communiqué. Also, Kim Il Sung felt that, in the UN, China was more interested in seeking compromise with the US than asserting North Korea’s requests. Kim Il Sung’s dissatisfaction with China’s halfhearted stance during the détente strengthened his mistrust that Beijing did not consider North Korea’s national interests. As a result, North Korea deliberately excluded China in its offer of negotiations to the US such as the Tripartite Talks between the US and two Koreas, insisting on bilateral meetings with the US.

The Ostpolitik of Francoist Spain

Francoist Spain was not recognised by the Communist Bloc countries due to its support of the communities of political exiles. In 1969 a thaw in relations began at an economic level in search of markets for Spanish development. The timid contact would gradually increase and favour relationships away from political ideology, beneficial in economic terms, and this would prepare the basis of full future recognition, with the exchange of ambassadors in 1977.

The Domestic Origins of the Second Korean War: New Evidence from Communist Bloc Archives

In the late 1960s, the Korean Peninsula suddenly exploded with a violence not seen since the end of the Korean War, driven by a sudden wave of North Korea aggression that culminated in January 1968 with the attempted assassination of Park Chung Hee and the capture of the USS Pueblo. For decades, scholars have struggled to understand this crisis, as they lacked access to materials that could open a window into DPRK policy. Only now, with the recent release of new materials collected from the archives of the Communist bloc nations, can we begin to understand the critical events of the Second Korean War and the larger environment that surrounded it. This paper integrates the most recent materials from former Communist bloc states to revisit our understanding of this dangerous situation, and to suggest that it was driven above all else by domestic political and economic circumstances inside North Korea.

A comparative analysis of Serbian national culture and national cultures of some European countries by GLOBE project approach

Many scholars have been interested in grouping countries into similar clusters based on different criteria including geographic proximity, mass migrations, and ethnic social capital and religious and linguistic commonality. Clustering of societies is beneficial for many reasons and the GLOBE project method of clustering is of special importance from the intercultural management point of view. The results of the GLOBE project were based on the data collected from samples which consisted of middle managers. In this paper, we used the GLOBE project approach to clustering process because of its importance from the point of view of international business cooperation. Namely, it is well known that national culture strongly influences organizational culture and that the business performances are much better when national and organizational cultures fit well. Our cluster consists of Serbia and the Eastern European cluster without Georgia, Kazakhstan and Albania, since the rest of the Eastern European cluster has many common historical connections with Serbia including the fact that they belonged to the former Eastern Bloc (the Communist Bloc) or they were under the occupation of the Ottoman Empire during a long period.

Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann

Reviewed by: Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann Elizabeth McKillen Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ( Leiden: Brill 2018) The International Labour Organization (ilo) will celebrate its centennial in 2019. Studies by scholars and ilo functionaries of this long-lived and uniquely structured affiliate of the League of Nations and United Nations abound, but the role of women in shaping its policies has received only sporadic attention. Such neglect is not surprising because, until recently, women have constituted a very small percentage of the members of the ilo governing body, or of the delegates and technical advisors sent by individual nations to the yearly ilo conferences. Yet this edited collection of fourteen essays makes a convincing case that women have played an important role in shaping the ilo's policies toward women workers and in ensuring the ratification and implementation of ilo conventions governing women's work in diverse national contexts. The book is divided into two overlapping sections. The first section primarily considers the role of transnational women's networks in shaping debates and policies within the ilo; the second focuses on the ways in which ilo standards were negotiated and implemented within particular nations, regions, and populations of workers. In an important opening chapter of the first section, Dorothy Sue Cobble explores the neglected role of women in the "origin story" of the ilo. (27) The blueprints for the ilo were first drawn up by the all-male Commission on International Labour Legislation at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Fearful of the growing contagion of Bolshevism and other forms of labour radicalism in the aftermath of World War I, they recommended an innovative tripartite structure for the ilo: the yearly conferences would include national delegations of government, business, and labour representatives, and the governing body would also include representatives from all three groups. These groups were charged with working together to raise labour standards in order to prevent the injustices and poverty that caused social unrest and threatened world peace. A coalition of women's groups visited the commission to voice their concerns and several women's organizations asked that representation for women also be mandated as a component of the tripartite structure of the ilo. Instead, the Commission required only that the ilo's director appoint women to the ilo staff and recommended that national delegations include at least one woman in an advisory position. Of the 40 nations that sent delegations to the founding convention of the ilo in Washington, DC in the autumn of 1919, none appointed a woman as a voting delegate and most included only a few female advisors. The US and British-based Women's Trade Union League, however, responded by staging their own International Congress of Working Women (icww) in Washington, DC at the same time as the ilo convention. Their meeting included over two hundred women from nineteen nations, some of whom were also advisors to their national delegations at the ilo convention. The icww prepared a set of resolutions and policy statements that were then championed by the women advisors at the ilo meeting. The icww recommendations proved particularly important in shaping the ilo's Maternity Convention [End Page 302] to include a far-reaching demand for six weeks paid benefits for women before and after childbirth. icww proposals were also taken into consideration in debates over conventions on child labour and the prohibition of night work for women. Subsequent articles by Françoise Thébaud, Kirsten Scheiwe, and Lucia Artner highlight the way women continued to influence debates over labour standards for women during the interwar period through the no's Correspondence Committee on Women's Work and its dedicated staff members. The Cold War, as Eileen Boris demonstrates, complicated the quest for international labour standards as the no's protective legislation for women came under attack by feminist activists from Communist bloc countries as well as legal equality feminists based in the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Silke Neunsinger...

Rethinking of Korean Foreign Policy’s Practical Strategy : Focusing on Sports Diplomacy toward the Communist Bloc during the Cold War Era

Rethinking of Korean Foreign Policy’s Practical Strategy : Focusing on Sports Diplomacy toward the Communist Bloc during the Cold War Era

SKYHAWK, SKYSHIELD, AND THE SOVIETS: REVISITING CANADA'S COLD WAR

AbstractFor the past two decades, Canadian international historians have largely missed the Cold War, or at least a significant portion of it. Certainly, there has been no shortage of studies of Canadian foreign policy featuring the bipolar struggle, and yet historians have largely confined their attention to Canada's admittedly crucial relationship with the United States, while Canadian–Soviet relations have been ignored. Indeed, in the historiography of Canada's Cold War international relations, the communist powers are largely missing. Hoping to challenge this limited focus, we frame our article around two Canada–US air defence exercises held in 1959 and 1960. While historians have viewed these exercises within the context of Canada's relationship with the United States, we highlight the wider Cold War framework in which Canadian policy was formed. After all, these exercises occurred during the mini-détente of the late 1950s and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960. As we demonstrate, the failure to take full account of the Cold War is a shortcoming of much of the writing on Canadian international relations, and so we offer an example of the need to take seriously Canada's foreign policy toward the communist bloc.

Introduction: From Revolution to Globalization: Foodways in Russia and East-Central Europe

This introduction examines how food and foodways were used in Russia and in the Communist Bloc nations of Eastern and Central Europe as a means of envisioning and implementing the idea of a utopian future in the here and now. In the case of Russia, food imagery had been utilized in nineteenth-century literature to imagine the ideal community, which became a political and economic necessity after the October Revolution of 1917. Loudly proclaimed ideals of modernity and progress required tangible results, such as an abundance of cheap and healthy food. Local variants of this followed the spread of Soviet influence to Eastern Europe after World War II. Here new foodways and technologies were likewise introduced in order to create the “dreamworlds” of the future. The fall of communism (1989–91) brought about the need to reimagine culinary landscapes, both as a critique of socialism and—later—as a response to twenty-first-century globalization and homogenization.

Modern Surgeons: Still Masters of Their Trade or Just Operators of Medical Equipment?

My surgical education began at a time when Poland formed part of the communist bloc and was isolated from the world, or in today's Terms - it remained behind the Iron Curtain. This was true of all areas of life, including medicine. When after 40 years of work, I look back at my professional career; I wonder whether I owe my proficiency in surgery to my experience and dexterity or, like many others, to technological progress. Two of the great Polish surgeons were my mentors and teachers. Professor Zdzisław Łapiński was the one I met first. He was a manual genius and an unusual operational strategist. Granted, he had one character defect, but nobody's perfect after all. In 1975, I defended my dissertation. I was convinced that I should continue my education at a center abroad, preferably within a postdoctoral scholarship. Professor Łapiński wanted me to learn everything about surgery from him. I decided otherwise, and in 1978 with his tacit agreement, I obtained a Humboldt Fellowship and went to Heidelberg, to the department headed by none other than Professor Fritz Linder.1 I started my research for the habilitation thesis at the Experimentelle Chirurgie Abteilung of his Department.

POLAND’S TROOP CONTRIBUTIONS TO US-LED MILITARY OPERATIONS AS A SECURITY POLICYINSTRUMENT

This article addresses the issue of Poland's troop contributions to US-led military operations, which for Poland constituted a salient instrument for attaining its security policy goals. It is argued that the United States of America played a pivotal role in Poland’s security policy, and by providing it with active support for the military operations in which the US exercised political and/or military leadership, Poland hoped to advance its security agenda. This assumption stemmed from America’s leading role in the global system and a conviction that it could influence its development in the way suiting the Polish interest. The article is in four parts. First, it examines the significance of foreign deployments as an instrument for attaining Poland’s security policy goals. Next, it explains the role the United States was assigned in Poland’s security policy. After that, it recounts the operations of Polish military contingents in US-led allied and coalition military operations. Finally, it discusses whether and how the engagement in those operations contributed to enhancing Poland’s security. The article embraces the period from the first military operation to which Poland deployed troops following the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1991 to the termination of the ISAF operation, which has had the largest Polish presence to date, in 2014. Keywords:

The Story of Journalist Organizations in Czechoslovakia

This article reviews the political history of Czechoslovakia as a vital part of the Soviet-dominated “Communist bloc” and its repercussions for the journalist associations based in the country. Following an eventful history since 1918, Czechoslovakia changed in 1948 from a liberal democracy into a Communist regime. This had significant consequences for journalists and their national union and also for the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ), which had just established its headquarters in Prague. The second historical event to shake the political system was the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and its aftermath among journalists and their unions. The third landmark was the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, which played a significant part in the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and led to the closing of the old Union of Journalists in 1990, followed by the founding of a new Syndicate which refused to serve as the host of the IOJ. This led to a gradual disintegration and the closing down of what in the 1980s was the world’s largest non-governmental organization in the media field.

The former Iron Curtain still drives biodiversity-profit trade-offs in German agriculture.

Agricultural intensification drives biodiversity loss and shapes farmers' profit, but the role of legacy effects and detailed quantification of ecological-economic trade-offs are largely unknown. In Europe during the 1950s, the Eastern communist bloc switched to large-scale farming by forced collectivization of small farms, while the West kept small-scale private farming. Here we show that large-scale agriculture in East Germany reduced biodiversity, which has been maintained in West Germany due to >70% longer field edges than those in the East. In contrast, profit per farmland area in the East was 50% higher than that in the West, despite similar yield levels. In both regions, switching from conventional to organic farming increased biodiversity and halved yield levels, but doubled farmers' profits. In conclusion, European Union policy should acknowledge the surprisingly high biodiversity benefits of small-scale agriculture, which are on a par with conversion to organic agriculture.