Cold War Framework Research Articles

Understanding Socialist Television

This article develops a number of conceptual and methodological proposals aimed at furthering a firmer agenda for the field of socialist television studies. It opens by addressing the issue of relevance of the field, identifying three critical contributions the study of socialist television can make to media, communication and cultural studies. It then puts forward a number of proposals tied to three key issues: strategies of overcoming the Cold War framework that dominates much of existing literature; the importance of a multilayered analysis of socialist television that considers its cultural, political as well as economic aspects; and the ways in which we can challenge the prevalence of methodological nationalism in the field.

Evolution of Transboundary Politics in the Euphrates-Tigris River System: New Perspectives and Political Challenges

Transboundary water politics in the Euphrates-Tigris river system have evolved with competitive power dynamics and cooperative institutional development. We analyze the evolution of transboundary water relations over four consecutive periods. The first period coincided with nation build ing in the region, when the riparian states focused on their domestic need for socioeconomic development rather than the formulation of external water policies. The second period saw the advent of competitive trans boundary water politics shaped by the initiation of uncoordinated, largescale water development projects. The third period was the most complex, given the link between transboundary water issues and nonriparian secu rity issues. In the fourth period, the role of water bureaucracies in the re orientation of water policies from hostile to cooperative became significant. Even in the midst of the very recent political crisis between Turkey and Syria, partial institutionalization of water cooperation and growing networks of water dialogue at both the governmental and non governmental levels should continue to serve as open channels for easing the tensions. KEYWORDS : transboundary water politics, Euphrates-Tigris rivers, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, conflict, cooperation, water bureaucracies. THE MAIN RIPARIAN STATES OF THE EUPHRATES -T IGRIS RIVER SYSTEM ARE Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. 1 Water disputes among them originated with moves in the 1960s by each of them toward large-scale water development projects. The initial aim of the projects was flow regulation designed to end the alter ation of flooding and droughts. But ambitions in each country quickly grew to include hydropower generation and sharp increases in the use of river water for drinking and irrigation. Unilateral and uncoordinated water devel opment projects by each party began to stress the river system’s capacity. As the demand for water exceeded supply, water authorities in each country finally began reaching out to their counterparts in the others and they devel oped rather ad hoc processes of discussion and negotiation. Unfortunately, above the level of the water bureaucrats, political rival ries stemming from conflicting national positions within the Cold War framework prevented any fruitful cooperation from taking root. Turkey’s NATO membership and Syria and Iraq’s ties to the Soviet Union did more

The Oxford handbook of postwar European history

The postwar period is no longer current affairs but is becoming the recent past. As such, it is increasingly attracting the attentions of historians. Whilst the Cold War has long been a mainstay of political science and contemporary history, recent research approaches postwar Europe in many different ways, all of which are represented in this volume. As well as diplomatic, political, institutional, economic, and social history, this book contains articles that approach the past through the lenses of gender, espionage, art and architecture, technology, agriculture, heritage, post colonialism, memory, and generational change, and shows how the history of postwar Europe can be enriched by looking to disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy. It covers all of Europe, with a notable focus on Eastern Europe. Including subjects as diverse as the meaning of ‘Europe’ and European identity, southern Europe after dictatorship, the cultural meanings of the bomb, the 1968 student uprisings, immigration, Americanisation, welfare, leisure, decolonisation, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and coming to terms with the Nazi past, the thirty-five essays in this book present a coverage of postwar European history that offers far more than the standard Cold War framework.

Listening to the Cold War: The Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations, Seismology, and Psychoacoustics, 1958–1963

This article shows how sound was used as an epistemic tool for seismological research during the Cold War, when the ability to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from natural earthquakes, the so-called detection or discrimination problem, became a critical issue of international arms control. In 1960, the psychoacoustician Sheridan Speeth created an “auditory display” for presenting seismographic records to the ear. Despite promising initial results, neither seismologists nor military officials seemed to welcome Speeth’s work. I place his efforts within a Cold War framework and show how the sounds of science can be politicized and why it is important to take into account the disciplinary and sociopolitical contexts in which research enterprises are embedded.

Reisen Kozo no Henyo to Nihon no tai Chu Gaiko (The Transformation of the Framework of the Cold War and Japan's China Policy)

Reisen Kozo no Henyo to Nihon no tai Chu Gaiko (The Transformation of the Framework of the Cold War and Japan's China Policy)

On national literature and the division system

One of the most esteemed public intellectuals active in South Korea for the last four decades at least, Paik Nak‐chung is known as the author of two seminal theories, one on the concept of ‘national literature’ (minjok munhak), and the other on the subject of the ‘division system’ (pundan ch'eje). If the former was an attempt to articulate a cultural aesthetics capable of responding critically to the contemporary social reality of the 1970s in South Korea, the latter adopted a political systems theory to comprehend the task of Korean unification beyond the Cold War framework. The overtly literary theory and the overtly political theory share, however, a common premise and basic structure. Both theories posit a central relationship among three key terms, and both triadic relationships are marked by an internal tension that is constant and dynamic. Division System Theory, in fact, must be seen as an heir to the earlier National Literature Theory, with the central triadic relationship modified to bear the weight of a different, more expansive set of terms. The continuity between the two theories becomes visible when one examines the way Paik Nak‐chung deploys the concept of realism. For Paik, realism is not, as some postmodernists would argue, a doctrinaire prescription for reaffirming predetermined ‘right answers’. Rather, realism's ‘truth value’ can never transcend the specificity of a particular time and space, and its determination necessitates a ‘(sense of) balance’ acquired through apprehending reality creatively. Applied to the particularly complex reality called the division system, Paik's theory of realism allows the task of unification to be grasped as an ‘open structure’. Such a conceptualization, in the end, makes it possible to approach the process of unification itself as a kind of ‘literary work’ or ‘artistic creation’ in the making.

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN EDITORIALS

This study addresses the question of the extent to which the representation of a national identity is a “prisoner of its past” and thus might represent an obstacle to the improvement of intercultural relations. Following a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this paper investigates in particular how French and American collective memories of Communist Russia establish a framework for representations of post-Communist Russia in 1999–2000 editorials of Le Monde and The New York Times when shared representations of this country were still being constructed. It appears that both newspapers rely principally on a Cold War framework, and that this negative framework is updated with mentions of post-1991 events. The reliance on this framework is reinforced when the newspapers construct a negative image of Russia. Representation of Russia is more negative in The New York Times than in Le Monde, but the French and American conceptions of history and the newspapers’ roles in their respective societies resulted in Le Monde's bleak outlook on Russia's future in contrast with The New York Times’ more positive perspective.

Public Evaluation of Presidential Performance During Foreign Policy Crises

This paper examines criteria the public use when evaluating a president’s action in foreign policy. It attempts to discern who has the upper hand in shaping public opinion on foreign policy choices pursued by the president: policymaking elites in Congress or the media? Previous studies have shown that media cues are generally inconsequential in determining public support for presidential actions in a foreign policy crisis, particular when placed in a Cold War framework. Even without the Cold War framework, however, the media appears largely irrelevant in determining public interpretation of presidential actions during a crisis. This finding supports prior understandings of a rational public not susceptible to media slant, but also suggests that the president, with Congressional support, has considerable leeway to provide frames of evaluation, and control basic facts early in the crisis to win public support. The implications for democratic accountability are discussed.

America's Middle East Policy: Response to Reality or to Domestic Politics?

Peter Hahn considers American policy toward the Palestinian-Zionist and then, after 1948, the Arab-Israeli conflicts from the onset of Harry Truman's presidency in 1945 to the end of the Eisenhower administration. There is no other scholarly monograph examining this subject specifically for this period, although there are books considering parts or all of the topic in varying formats, making this venture all the more welcome. Hahn's archival research is enormous and impressive. He has utilized Israeli Hebrew-language sources from the Israel State Archive, Jewish Agency, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry along with extensive collections of private papers found in either the relevant presidential libraries (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson) or located in university collections, such as the Allen and John Foster Dulles archives at Princeton, as well as the U.S. National Archives and the British Public Record Office.1 Hahn divides his book into chronological sections that, after a brief survey of “the Palestine Conflict to 1945,” correspond to the presidential terms of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1945–1949, 1949–1953, 1953–1957, and 1957–1961. Within each section, he isolates issues he defines as keys to the U.S. approach to the conflict for that period. This means that a section may consist of five to six chapters surveying the American effort over four years to deal with items such as the Holy Places in Jerusalem or efforts to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem for 1949–1953, and water allocation tensions and Arab-Israeli border clashes for 1953–1957 along with the 1956 Suez crisis. In the last section, 1957–1961, Hahn considers several problems principally within a Cold War framework.

The Real Fidel Castro

We learn very little that is new from this biography of Cuba’s aging leader, written by Britain’s ambassador to the island in the early 1990s. At best, one might be able to speculate on the kind of distortions Leycester Coltman reported to the Foreign Office about Cuba as it endured tumultuous and extraordinary changes during his tenure as London’s man in Havana. The revolutionary regime had to restructure fundamentally its economy and global market relations and faced severe challenges to its legitimacy when the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’s trading system collapsed. But Coltman’s relatively brief summary of events from 1991 to 1994 lacks anecdotes, observations about Cubans’ daily lives, or even personal reflections that might have given some depth to this superficial part of the book.In fact, Coltman did not intend The Real Fidel Castro to be a first-person kind of report. It has the pretension to be a scholarly work, though there are no citations in the book. His children explain in the preface that the author’s untimely death prevented him from including annotations. Yet that does not justify Yale University Press’ decision to publish the book this way. At a minimum, the publisher might have enlisted a researcher to construct notes drawn from the short list of secondary sources Coltman provides and from which it appears he derived almost all of the information in the biography.Notably absent from the list is recent scholarship about Cuba. Without the benefit of this information, Coltman repeats several conventional but discredited notions: that the 1962 Soviet emplacement of ballistic missiles in Cuba was intended to serve as a bargaining chip to gain U.S. concessions on West Berlin; that Castro’s 1968 speech about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was a slavish endorsement of the aggression, designed to regain favor with his superpower benefactor; that Cuba’s support for the MPLA government in Angola was not the result of a well-developed relationship and was calculated to serve Castro’s global ambitions.The pattern that emerges from such misinterpretations fits a well-worn cold war framework. While he avoids polemics, Coltman seemed unable to escape a mind-set that assesses each country’s behavior in bipolar terms. Thus, he is preoccupied by whether Castro was secretly a Communist before 1960, in contrast to his public image. “The real Castro,” Coltman asserts, “shared and encouraged the Marxist convictions of Che and Raúl” (p. 128).Coltman seems to understand—as U.S.-based authors often do not—that not all Marxists supported the Soviet Union. He notes correctly that Castro was critical of Cuba’s Communist Party because its members granted “servile obedience to the Soviet Union” (p. 39). He acknowledges that Castro was attracted to Marxism because it offered a “rational and scientific explanation” for the wrenching poverty most Cubans experienced (p. 50). Yet he implies that the significance of Castro’s ideology is that it disposed him toward the Soviet Union, though he does not develop this point convincingly. Indeed, he downplays evidence to the contrary, such as the outright hostility that developed between Castro and Soviet leaders in the 1960s over Cuba’s support for non-Communist Third World insurgencies.Ultimately, Coltman’s perspective is distorted not only by his cold war framework but by his sympathy for a great power that is in conflict with a defiant smaller power. He recognizes that Castro was a nationalist, determined to keep Cuba free of domination by either superpower. Yet he reports (p. 148) that in 1959 Castro was “gratuitously offensive” to Americans in saying that two hundred thousand “gringos” would die if the United States invaded the island. The former British ambassador seems better able to appreciate U.S. sensibilities than the reasonable outrage of a Cuban nationalist who is asked in an interview about a possible U.S. invasion. Similarly, in describing the U.S. response to Castro’s 1994 warning that he might permit an exodus of Cubans to the United States, Coltman righteously asserts, “It was unthinkable that a President of the United States should allow himself to be pushed around by Fidel Castro, of all people” (p. 301). He demonstrates little empathy for the way in which the tightened restrictions of the new Cuban Democracy Act and instigation by U.S. diplomats in Havana engendered an increase in boat hijackings. He describes U.S. hostility as if it were insignificant and Castro’s responses as always provocative. If not calculated, he suggests, they have been the manifestation of character traits Castro exhibited as a spoiled, “self-absorbed” high school student, “a bad loser [who] could react with ferocious anger,” an egomaniac with an inflated sense of entitlement and a “great belief in himself” (p. 14).Such armchair psychoanalysis rarely helps to explain the behavior of complex political events or political leaders. It is useless in trying to understand Fidel Castro, a towering figure whose impact on world events Ambassador Coltman’s biography only begins to comprehend.

The Balkans after the Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy by Tom s> Gallagher (review)

REVIEWS 38I their neutrality.But in the early seventies the high point of Finnish ingenuity was reached when those brightfellowsbroughtinto the Finnishforeign office, Risto Hyvarinen and Keijo Korhonen, concocted a 'German package deal'. Both Germanies were to be recognized in return for compensation for the devastation wrought by the Germany military in Lapland in I944 and in returnfor a guarantee of recognition of Finnishneutrality,a guaranteewhich would have made the I948 security treaty with the Soviet Union look redundant. It did not work out very well, though the GDR was interested. But the writing was already on the wall the wall in Bonn. The Hallstein doctrine was hoist by its own petard. Exceptions to it were alreadybeing made and the CSCE conferences, with the firstbig venue in Helsinkiin I973, made change imperative. Willy Brandt and his Ostpolitikwere doing the trickbetween the two Germanies and all the Finns had to do now was to slot into diplomatic relationswith both sides.No problem any more. Hentila's promised second workwill deal with the influence of the GDR in Finland, in respectof which he has alreadyestablisheda certainstarting-point in the Finnish press. As far as his present work on the recognition of the two Germanies is concerned, it is pleasurable to recount that it contains an excellent Englishsummarytranslatedby RoderickFletcher. Universiy ofTurku GEORGE MAUDE Finland Gallagher,Tom. 7heBalkans after theColdWar.: FromTyranny toTragedy. Outcast Europe, 3. Routledge, London and New York, 2003. 256 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $95.00: ?6o.oo. THE short twentieth century in Europe (I9I4-9I) ended, as it began, with a conflagration in the Balkans, one involving a complex interplay of regional and Great Powerpolitics. German, Austro-Hungarianand Russian competition for control of the Balkansand Near East brought about WorldWar I sparkedby an act of terrorismin Sarajevo which resulted in the downfall of the nineteenth-century European order. In turn, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia of 199I-95 marked the end of the Cold War framework of Europeanpolitics. The i990S were an interregnum, between the end of the Cold War and the startof the 'Waron Terror',in which the Yugoslavconflict was the key internationalevent. Although the US's policy towardthis conflictwas weak and vacillating,some of the characteristicsof internationalpoliticsin the 20005 were alreadyapparent:above all, a sharpdifferenceof opinion between Washingtonand itsEuropeanalliesoverhow to dealwith a regionalaggressor. The Yugoslavconflict saw Anglo- and Franco-Americanrelationsreach their coldest since Suez; in turn, the discrediting of the anti-American policy pursued by John Major's Conservative government over Bosnia paved the way for Tony Blair'sreaffirmationof the Atlantic alliance, firstin Kosovo and subsequentlyin Afghanistanand Iraq. Tom Gallagher'swell written account of the Yugoslavcrisisskilfullyweaves together its domestic and international aspects to provide a compelling 382 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 explanationforthe tragedy.Gallagherdescribeshow the expansionistagendas of the Milosevic and Tudjman regimes dovetailed with the callous and shortsighted policies of Westernleaders, above all in Britainand France,resulting in the West's collusion in the destruction of Bosnia. Racist perceptions of the former Yugoslavs,ignorance of their history, resentment of Germany and of the US and simple cynicismled British,French,UN and otherpoliticiansand diplomats down this path. Gallagher points out the irony of the Dayton Accord of I995, whereby Milo'sevicand Tudjman, the dictators responsible for the tragedy, were expected to act as 'guarantors' of the peace. The Americanscome outsomewhatbetterfromGallagher'saccount:US statesmen such as Richard Holbrooke and Peter Galbraith had a more sophisticated understanding of the region than their British and French counterpartsand more human sympathy for its peoples. Yet they went along with the farce of Dayton on account of theirnaivety and pressurefromtheirEuropean allies. Although this is familiar ground, Gallagher has provided an admirable synthesis of the existing literature,filled with juicy quotations from Western statesmenthatmakethe internationalcatalystsof the tragedyall too apparent. Thus BritishForeign Office minister Mark Lennox-Boyd is quoted as saying on 27 June i99I, the day war broke out in Slovenia: 'the government would deplore the use of force. .. I must add however that the Yugoslavfederalarmy might have a role in restoring order' (p. 47). Although Gallagher's own alignment is clear, he provides a wealth of quotations from a wide range of American, West European, formerYugoslavand other sourcesto illustrateall sidesin the debate over the...

Clichés d'Amérique, ou les États-Unis idéalisés à des fins de propagande (1945-1960)

In the post-1945 Cold War framework, “psychological warfare” became central to the worldwide competition for “the minds and wills of men”. Thus the Truman and Eisenhower cultural offensive relied on information networks, oftentimes CIA-funded and relaying State Department policy, which projected abroad a carefully designed image of the United States. Cast against the shortcomings of the Soviet model, this myth-creating reflection of America alternately glorified People’s Capitalism and the American Way of Life, mass culture and scientific achievements, “Atoms for Peace” or the American Revolution.

News Values and Social Justice: U.S. News and the Brazilian Street Children

This essay argues that a humane journalism of social justice should find a place in the vacuum of values created by the removal of the Cold War framework . In support of that argument , the essay attempts to identify standards from the literature on the journalism of social justice and apply those standards to a case of reporting: coverage of the killing of Brazilian street children .

Global Environment Conflict in the Postcold War Era: Linkage to an Extended Paradigm

The end of the Cold War era has opened a Pandora's Box of environmental concerns that, heretofore, took a back seat to superpower struggles. Today, conflict is no longer played out within a Cold War conceptual framework. Imperfect, and at times, inconsistent as the Cold War framework was, it nevertheless provided decision makers with a recipe for action--or inaction. Since conflict is no longer structured within this framework, the two former superpowers --the United States and Russia--no longer possess clear yardsticks for action. With superpower interference in "proxy" conflict(s) no longer the definitive factor in the international arena, I postulate that global conflict will increasingly take on an environmental character. Ironically, much of this future conflict is likely to be exacerbated by the subtle incorporation of an environmental pillar into national security policy, particularly that of the United States. This paper will examine (1) the progression of "environmental security" as a valid policy concern for nation-states, (2) why policy expansion is occurring, and; (3) the possible consequences of linking environmental problems to an expanded security paradigm.

The Symbolic Construction of Russia and the United States on Russian National Television

Analysis of 1995 Vremya (Russian national television) newscasts reveals few traces of the cold-war framework that dominated news media discourse throughout the world for almost four decades. The ability of Vremya to reconstruct its images of Russia and the United States reaffirms the contention of Edelman, Hall, and others that media news accounts evoke a spectacle that is an ideological product, not a set of facts. The spectacle of politics is a fetish, a creation that then dominates the thought and action of its creators.

In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950-1953 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS155 In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950-1953, by John Toland. New York: William Morrow, 1991. 624 pp. In the past ten years, our understanding of the Korean War has been transformed by scholars like Bruce Cumings, who have reinterpreted and redefined the origins and meaning of that tragic conflict. If the Korean War was on one level a struggle between the blocs, it was on another a revolutionary civil war, an attempt by Koreans to complete the unfinished anticolonial revolution of 1945 and assert their independence of the great powers.' This new academic wave, however, has not been reflected at the popular level where authors like Joseph Goulden and Max Hastings have continued to produce combat narratives within the old coldwar framework, stressing Soviet complicity and viewing Korea as a case of communist aggression.2 Although Toland states that his purpose is to capture the horror of the war and avoid partisanship, his book at first glance offers nothing new, following a path well-trodden by popular writers before him. Although he claims to have read Cumings, he makes no attempt to discuss the domestic Korean roots of the struggle and devotes a mere two pages to the critical period between 1945 and 1950, without even mentioning the Korean People's Republic, the Moscow Agreement, the abortive joint commission talks, or the Cheju uprising. He describes Syngman Rhee as an exile patriot while claiming that Kim Il Sung was trained in Moscow and fought in "the China [sic] civil war" (p. 17). He has little doubt that the North Korean attack was instigated by Stalin to distract the United States from the NATO alliance, accepting in the process some very dubious South Korean evidence about the role of Soviet military advisers in planning and overseeing the entire operation. Toland is thus more concerned with the question of who fired the first shot in June 1950 than with the Korean and Northeast Asian context within which the fighting began, ignoring in this respect the entire thrust of recent historiography. This approach leads him to some strange conclusions . Perhaps the most bizarre is that U.S. intervention in 1950 prevented a Korean civil war. It would be more accurate to say that since 1945, Washington had been a key player in the Korean civil war, propping up a Korean right that could not have survived without its support. Indeed one could go further and agree with Cumings that American occupation of the south in 1945 was the necessary precondition for civil war, since without U.S. sponsorship the right would never have survived its history of collaboration with the Japanese. Toland's apparent ignorance of these facts allows him to mention in passing the Japanese military background of leading ROK officers without apparently grasping its 156BOOK REVIEWS significance for Korean politics in this period. His dismissal of the Korean background contrasts sharply with his treatment of Chinese intervention in October 1950, which accepts Beijing as an independent player with legitimate interests, a concession never extended to Pyongyang . A similar failure either to read or to understand the new historiography characterizes his treatment of the truce talks. As Toland recognizes , the major stumbling bloc to a settlement at Panmunjom was the issue of the repatriation of prisoners of war (POWs). Although he promises detailed treatment of this question, he reproduces the familiar tale of communist terror behind the wire on Koje island, mentioning only briefly and out of context the violence in the anticommunist compounds against anyone who desired repatriation. He seems to accept as fair, without any question, the screening of POWs in April 1952, which produced a total for repatriation completely unacceptable to China and North Korea, something that even the State Department never believed. The real story here is of the cover-up about the reality of Koje, a story which Toland ignores. There is plenty of evidence in published sources like the diary of Admiral C. Turner Joy, the chief U.S. delegate at the truce talks about the brutality that was used in the anticommunist compounds against anyone unwise enough to demand repatriation, something that produced some private qualms in both Washington and London about the morality...

U.S. and Latin American Labor: the Dynamics of Imperialist Control

Latin American labor movements do not evolve within isolated national frameworks. A host of external factors, economic and political, affect their development. This article examines one set of these by looking at relationships between United States and Latin American labor. It is divided into four parts. The first traces inter-American and, where important, intra-American labor relations until 1945 to place contemporary trends in historical perspective. The article concentrates, however, on events after the Second World War when external forces impinge upon Latin American labor in new ways. The rapid growth of an ever more centralized global economy, dominated first by the United States and later by that nation along with other advanced capitalist super-powers, initiates a period of rising interest in Latin American labor by U.S. business, labor, and government. Set within a Cold War framework, U.S. agencies and private institutions develop a variety of mechanisms aimed at controlling and manipulating Latin American labor. The second section examines these and shows their workings. It highlights the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD).' The next section presents case studies depicting imperialist agencies and institutions working together in a set geographical locale. The last part discusses the meaning of imperialist strategy for labor in Latin America.2 Several general themes emerge from the material. One is U.S. labor's continuing interest in Latin America, a relationship flowing from its past and present cooperation with U.S. foreign policy and totally consistent with its domestic practices. Almost from its founding big labor, represented by the AFL and then AFL-CIO, entered into collaboration with the government and therefore the ruling class. In brief, organized labor leadership worked under the assumption that capitalism constituted the best socio-economic system and that it could satisfy workers' needs. It saw labor as a national pressure group like any other which should seek reform of the system in its favor but not to change it. Unions existed primarily to acquire economic benefits for