Cold War Politics Research Articles

The role of the state in international security since the end of the cold war

The sudden demise of Cold War politics ended the possibility of nuclear war to international security. In the absence of macro-level threats to international security, scholars, analysts and policy-makers hastily searched for new threats to fill this gap. In this context issues such as pandemics, violations of human rights and democratisation have become important subjects amongst Western policy makers and analysts of international security studies. However, in the world outside the Western orbit, issues of geopolitics have retained their de facto importance in international security and have grown even stronger in some regions, such as Middle East, South and East Asia. This article examines the role of state based on three key challenges of international security, geopolitics, non-traditional threats, and human rights. It will be argued that in spite of the fact that critical schools of thought, advocating importance of non-state actors to international security, have gained recognition in the post-Cold War era; states remain crucial and responsible actors in international security.

Indonesian Trade Unionists, the World Federation of Trade Unions and Cold War Internationalism, 1947–65

From 1947 to 1965, members of the communist-linked trade union federation SOBSI (Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia, All-Indonesian Trade Unions Centre) were actively involved in global Cold War politics through participation in international labour groupings and campaigns. Based predominantly on archival research, this paper argues that SOBSI’s internationalism had several main aims: to support the Indonesian state, particularly in the foreign policy realm, to further the goals of the Left domestically in Indonesia, particularly in facing off their political rivals, and to educate its membership about global working-class politics and the relevance of socialism and communism as political models in Indonesia. This article discusses the views and activities of Indonesian trade unionists on international issues of the 1950s and 60s, chiefly peace and disarmament issues, Western intervention and decolonisation struggles underway in Asia and Africa. It argues that the pressures of the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split and political circumstances in Indonesia combined to narrow SOBSI’s internationalism and resulted in its utter devastation in the face of the 1965–66 Army-led anti-communist repression.

Humanitarian Imperialism: The politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880–1940 by Amalia Ribi Forclaz

Reviewed by: Humanitarian Imperialism: The politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880–1940 by Amalia Ribi Forclaz Gelien Matthews Humanitarian Imperialism: The politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880–1940 By Amalia Ribi Forclaz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. The most remarkable feature of Amalia Ribi Forclaz’s Humanitarian Imperialism is that on a multiplicity of levels it has departed from mainstream academic interrogations of the history of humanitarian movements. This scholarly feat is made possible largely through the examination of humanitarianism against the backdrop of imperialism. The author has succeeded in merging two themes that are usually antithetical and she has done so by being neither romantic nor cynical. It should be noted that there is a new and growing body of work integrating humanitarianism alongside imperialism to which Forclaz’ work belongs. Chief among these is Jean Bricmont’s 2007 publications on the themes. Bricmont, however, lacks the control of perspective that is the hallmark of Forclaz’s study. He rejects and denounces outright the Cold War politics of entities like the Kremlin and Beijing claiming that it was an attempt to exert brutal sway over the entire world.1 Forclaz’s study is not tainted by this caustic, judgmental tone even in her examination of the unpopular Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 (139). The balanced and almost neutral perspective through which she analyses her subject is justified in her comment that both humanitarianism and imperialism wore different faces at different times and, therefore, cannot be totally glorified or totally condemned (8–9). Forclaz’ primary objective in using the imperialistic canvas is not to dismiss European humanitarianism as hypocritical pontification but to internationalize a topic which other historians have tended to limit to the national level. Reginald Coupland (1933) and Frank Klingberg (1968), for example, have conducted research on the British humanitarian movement while much of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845) attacked slavery in the southern USA.2 Forclaz’s study is far more ambitious in the sense that it encompasses anti-slavery in Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Germany (22). Forclaz has also shifted the historiography by making Africa (50) and not the Americas the center stage of her anti-slavery target. By the manner in which and the extent to which Forclaz crossed geographical and national boundaries in her study, she has produced a world history of humanitarianism. It is ironic, nevertheless, that one of the major conclusions of the text is that the European attempt to forge international cooperation in eradicating African slavery virtually failed, as manifested particularly by Italy’s antagonistic relationship with the League of Nations and its rejection of the 1924 Temporary Slavery Commission (130). The European approach to the study of humanitarianism that Forclaz selects enables the author to employ a comparative analytic methodology. She notes, for instance, that while British anti-slavery was largely Protestant in nature, French and the Italian anti-slavery were steeped in Roman Catholicism (15, 18). On the other hand, Forclaz concedes that all three to varying degrees were driven by selfish political, national and imperialistic objectives while simultaneously sponsoring various humanitarian initiatives in their African spheres of influence (165). The chronological markers of Forclaz’s work is also relatively new. While most other historical studies on the subject focus on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the author sets her chronological parameters in and around World War I and World War II: 1880 to 1940. By so doing, she encounters a range of humanitarian causes beyond the slavery question such as emasculation, the trade in eunuchs and cannibalism (146). The time frame of Forclaz’s study also permits the reader to gaze into the humanitarian methods and objectives which were unique to the later period and yet, in some ways, similar to the previous century. With the new technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humanitarian propaganda tools were no longer limited to speeches, petitions and publications. They were sharpened by the lantern lectures of such British humanitarians as Lady Kathleen Simon, European and African tours, cinema, pageantry and radio programmes (78). In this regard, Forclaz traces the continuities and changes in Europe’s humanitarian movements and concludes that between...

Three Tales for Emmie: Joan Wise’s Forgotten Tasmanian Triptych

Joan Wise made her fiction debut in pages of Australia's Bulletin magazine in 1950. poem of hers had earlier appeared in same publication, but her arrival as a writer of prose announced by a series of linked tales, Conquest of (January), Poison in Furrow (May), and A Fence for Emma (August). The stories are a subtly comic triptych about gender politics and hardscrabble bush-farming in remote Central Highlands district of Tasmania.We discovered Joan Wise by chance, while trawling archives during early stages of editing Deep South: Stories from Tasmania (2012).1 One of our intentions in editing anthology to re-present to contemporary reader a selection of best Tasmanian stories that had for decades languished unread in back issues of journals and magazines. More than sixty after original publication of Wise's stories, they struck us as original, witty, and of remarkable interest to contemporary reader.Born Joan Boyd in Tasmania in 1912, Wise educated at St Michael's Collegiate School, a private Anglican girls' school in Hobart, and following her graduation trained as a Mothercraft nurse. At age of twenty, she met and married Archibald (Arch) Wise, a farmer from Plenty, a small town in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. Following her marriage, Wise took over management of farmhouse at Kinvarra, a substantial sheep- and hop-producing property, combining demands of this role with raising three daughters and trying to establish a career as a writer. While Wise's publications span four decades, her writing fragmented and her output sporadic. The first flush of her publishing career came between 1946 and 1950 when she focused on producing poetry and short fiction for an adult audience. The 1950 publication of Emmie stories, when Wise thirty-eight old, might have heralded emergence of a strong new voice in Australian fiction, but immediately following their publication, Wise seems to have disappeared from view. When she reemerged on publishing scene fifteen later, it as an author of children's poetry and fiction. Between 1965 and 1978, Wise produced two children's novels, Trapped on Tasman (1971) and The Silver Fish (1972), as well as numerous shorter works that appeared in School Magazine (published by New South Wales Department of Education since 1916) and various anthologies. During final phase of her career, Wise confided in a letter to an editor at Writers' Radio that she now not able to write for children, although her reasons for this conclusion remain unclear. Her last written works were fragments of autobiographical nonfiction that were never published but possibly intended for radio broadcast. They tell of period of her in which she cared for her husband after he suffered two strokes and-together with her correspondence-paint a picture of a woman torn between concern for her husband and frustration at lack of time she is able to devote to her writing.Wise's biographical profile is remarkably similar to those of Australian writers who are subjects of Susan Sheridan's group biography, Nine Lives. Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Gwen Harwood, Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting, Jessica Anderson, Rosemary Dobson, Dorothy Hewett, and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green were all born between 1915 and 1925, and each of them achieved success between mid-1940s and 1970s. Sheridan is interested in why some of them (Jolley, Witting, Anderson) did not publish until middle age and why others (Dobson, Hewett, Green) started strongly as poets in 1940s, but either reduced their output or fell silent for next twenty years (back cover). Literature, writes Sheridan, was a particularly unwelcoming and uncertain profession for women (5) in immediate postwar period, time when Wise seeking a foothold for her fiction. The ideologically driven ousting of from public life (5), chauvinism of established literary gatekeepers, dominance of Cold War politics (in which relatively few writers participated), and personal circumstances of individual women-who usually combined the artistic with domestic (2)-are among interlocking cultural, social, and political factors that Sheridan offers as an explanation for partial occlusion of Australian women's writing at that time. …

Las redes sociales como herramienta de recuperación de la memoria colectiva. Contenido político de la cuenta en Twitter de John F. Kennedy

El presente artículo estudia el contenido político de la cuenta de Twitter @JFKsaid, creada por la JFK Library con motivo del cincuenta aniversario de la presidencia de John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Se presenta un análisis de contenido cuantitativo de los temas tratados en los 3.253 tuits publicados cinco décadas después de su mandato. El trabajo analiza cómo se transmite al público actual el legado político de Kennedy, caracterizado por las políticas de bienestar social y defensa de los derechos civiles en el interior y por la guerra fría en el exterior.

Silent star: Cold war sci-fi movies from the Soviet bloc

The essay examines selected science fiction movies from the Cold War era from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The movies chosen for this analysis could serve as perfect examples of artistic discourse, in which certain phenomena could be observed that are of great significance for art in historical research. It is possible to see the influences of current questions and political events in visual pop culture that could be applied to high art. One can also trace how the visual culture was inspired by and complementary to Cold War politics; the Space Race in this particular case. The coincidence of the fascination about deep space and the future that is essential for Sci-Fi movies, with the obsession with future technologies and the space race during the Cold War, results in movies that are both typical for their genre but also could be seen as manifestations of the then current interests, fears and political agenda.

Understanding Eliot: Mass Media and Literary Modernism in the American Century

Abstract T. S. Eliot’s extraordinary popularity in the United States during the late 1940s and the 1950s rests in part on how mass-market magazines like Time and Life reinterpreted his poetry from the 1920s as transparent, realistic, and, most strikingly, American. These magazines widely circulated Eliot’s prewar poetry, especially The Waste Land, as an allegory of the crisis in national and nationalist culture during the “American Century,” a term coined by Henry Luce in 1941. The articles about and reproductions of Eliot’s work leading up to his Nobel Prize in 1948 not only figure literary modernism as part of the “vital center” of Cold War politics but, improbably, position postwar nationalist anxiety as a version of modernist ennui. This unlikely picture of an American Eliot exposes a momentary reinterpretation of modernism as inherently nationalist in postwar periodical culture, while it also suggests the possible critical payoff of taking failed readings seriously.

Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind. Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2014

Article Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind. Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2014 was published on October 13, 2015 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 301, issue 2).

Excavating Southeast Asia’s prehistory in the Cold War: American archaeology in neocolonial Thailand

The discovery and excavation in the 1960s through to the mid 1970s of several prehistoric sites in north and northeastern Thailand, the best known being the World Heritage site of Ban Chiang, were a major breakthrough in Southeast Asian archaeology. Evidence of an autonomous Bronze Age tradition contradicted colonial scholarship’s view of Southeast Asia as a cultural backwater that owed its advancement to imports from India and China. Subsequently, based on a dating later rejected, Ban Chiang was at the center of an international debate about the beginning of world metallurgy. Focus on chronological and typological issues has obscured the fact that American archaeologists surveyed and excavated sites in Northeast Thailand at the time when the region was thoroughly militarized to provide frontline facilities for the Vietnam War. This article examines the production of American archaeological knowledge on Southeast Asian prehistory in relation to the Cold War politics, and more specifically of Thailand’s neocolonial dependence on the United States.

Raging Rivers and Propaganda Weevils: Transnational Disaster Relief, Cold War Politics, and the 1954 Danube and Elbe Floods

This article analyzes disaster relief efforts for the 1954 Danube and Elbe River floods. Carried out jointly by the U.S. government and the Geneva-based League of Red Cross Societies, this food aid program affected Western and Eastern Europe, and marked an important moment in Cold War political and humanitarian history.

Reframing ‘Hokkaido Photography’: Style, Politics, and Documentary Photography in 1960s Japan

This article investigates the political ramifications of the Japanese postwar revisiting of the nineteenth-century photographs of Hokkaido, a northern island colonised by the Japanese empire in 1869. Compared with the programme of American Western Settlement, the Hokkaido Colonisation Project actively adopted photography as an efficient means of documentation and communication. The historical photographs of Hokkaido were reinterpreted by postwar avant-garde artists, who hailed them as the origin of documentary photography in Japan. This return to the archival records was the ironic result of an artistic response to the social milieu of the 1960s, when state ideology and Cold War politics were heavily imposed on Japan.

D. J. Mulloy.The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War.

Given the familiarity of the right-wing John Birch Society (JBS) to historians of American conservatism, it is remarkable that D. J. Mulloy’s new book represents essentially the first full-length, rigorous historical treatment of this organization. Nevertheless, that is what it is. A large part of the reason for this is evidential: the society, still in operation, has a closed organizational structure and its records are not available to researchers. Most interested historians have therefore limited themselves to shorter studies based on the published record. In the absence of detailed material on internal structure and dynamics, anyone seeking to offer a more extensive treatment of the JBS is forced to choose his or her methodology carefully. One option would be to expand upon and extend the geographical scope of the few local, bottom-up studies of the organization already conducted—such as Eckard V. Toy Jr.’s work on the Pacific Northwest and Lisa McGirr’s work on Orange County, California—to offer a broad social history. The JBS boasted some four thousand national branches at its peak. Studying the society’s variable composition and growth (and shrinkage) over time would offer an invaluable perspective on grassroots changes after the Age of McCarthy but before the Age of Reagan, analogous to the local studies produced in the last few decades on the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. Mulloy has opted instead for a top-down approach, looking at the organization from a Welch’s-eye perspective. Given the autocratic pretensions of the JBS’s leader, this makes some sense. However, the approach also raises questions about the relationship between the JBS, the media, and the wider structure of American Cold War politics that would have benefited from slightly more systematic consideration.

The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (review)

Jamie Cohen-Cole, Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 368 pp.It seems safe to say that in contemporary America, is a fairly ecumenical concept. We are told to keep an open mind to the cultural practices of others, to new technological innovations, to difference in all forms. However, open-mindedness cuts both ways: we can also hear frankly racist denunciations of mainstream unwillingness to consider the evidence for the hereditary bases of intelligence as a form of close-mindedness. Indeed, the very obviousness of the metaphor and its seeming lack of ideological specificity lend the concept a certain air of timelessness. open mind, however-at least in its specifically American form-is a surprisingly recent invention. Jamie Cohen-Cole's meticulously researched monograph does an excellent job of excavating the political and intellectual context in which the idiom emerged, demonstrating convincingly the powerful role that it played in shaping the intellectual landscape of post-war America. Indeed, its contemporary idiomatic ubiquity-however attenuated its positive content may appear-only serves to demonstrate how successfully it has infiltrated American ways of thinking about thinking. Open Mind lucidly charts the history of the concept, showing how it sutured creativity, rationality, autonomy, and willingness to embrace alternative viewpoints to a politically centrist, technocratic understanding of science and governance. Open-mindedness was used as both an evaluative standard for and scientific description of human activity in a surprisingly wide range of venues.Cohen-Cole argues that this open mind emerged as a quilting point for a whole host of projects and strategies within the ideology of a newly ascendant class of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, Cold War intellectuals. These intellectuals found in the open mind the perfect expression of, and justification for, their particular experiences and understandings. Their participation in war-time working groups and policy planning, designed to rapidly mobilize America's intellectual capital to solve concrete problems, had forced them to learn to work together with experts from radically different disciplinary traditions and social locations. As they transitioned back to civilian life, they were faced with the dual challenges of transforming the networks of patronage and collegiality forged during World War II into durable institutions for the conduct of Cold War science, and-with millions of returning soldiers entering universities and the work force-of designing an educational system adequate for training a productive and cohesive citizenry. In Chapters 1 and 2 (Democratic Minds for a Complex Society and The Creative American, respectively), Cohen-Cole convincingly demonstrates how open-mindedness came to serve as perhaps the chief ethical virtue guiding each of these ventures, as the creativity, receptivity to alternative viewpoints, and problem-solving orientation required for success in intellectuals' earlier undertakings came to be held as a model for both academic and civic life more generally. As World War II turned into the Cold War, these elites used their particular war-time experiences to develop a new ethics and a new way of understanding their own practices as intellectuals. These self-understandings became the basis for a series of practical interventions into the way that all Americans learned, worked, and understood themselves both as citizens and human beings.Of course, the problems of coordination in complex organizations and societies were hardly novel. Indeed, Cohen-Cole also traces how the open mind presented a solution to longstanding fears in the educational establishment and early social sciences about the corrosive effects of the division of labor and stratification of society on national unity. In the Cold War context, however, these fears took on new urgency when dovetailed with the political concerns of a centrist, technocratic elite-fears of both an insidious international communism, as well as the home-grown specters of racism and reactionary paranoia. …

The Cold War in the Coffeehouse: Hans Weigel and His Circle of Writers in the Café Raimund

The Viennese critic and author Hans Weigel is well known for his forays into Cold War politics after 1947, such as the Brecht boycott he helped organize in Viennese theaters in the early 1950s. He is also known as a mentor to aspiring young authors of the early postwar period, such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, and many others. That these two aspects of Weigel’s activity on the Viennese cultural scene after 1945 were essentially inseparable is, however, less well known. This article examines how the political vagaries of the Cold War informed and influenced Weigel’s work with younger authors.

“A Balance of Power”: The Covert Authorship of Ian McEwan’s Double Agents in Sweet Tooth

In Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth , a wariness of an extreme form of (human) control characteristic of Cold War politics indirectly reflects an anxiety about authorial manipulation. Rather than asserting his own direct authority over the text, McEwan uses tropes of romance and espionage to interrogate the conjunction of power and masculinity on which his authorship—and the cultural-political divide, largely speaking—is predicated. By foregrounding the perspective of a female spy, doubly positioned as the lover and reader of the writer within the novel, Sweet Tooth complicates what it means to construct narrative authority, while also challenging the binary thinking that dominated the Cold War years.

US Engagement with Swaziland: What has Power, Ideology and Interest got to do with it?

A lot has been said and written, particularly in the Swazi media, about Swaziland’s loss of African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) eligibility and the social and economic implications of this. However, this article locates the loss within a broad context of the evolution of US engagement with Swaziland from the Cold War period to the present. It discusses this relationship through the lenses of ideology, power and interest. These concepts are familiar and useful in the study of inter-state relations. They offer important insights into the means by which states pursue their goals, the motives behind their preferences and choices, and the limits on their ambitions. Guided by these operative concepts, the article shows that geo-strategic considerations largely influenced US engagement with Swaziland in the Cold War days – it counted on the power resources of attraction and persuasion to garner Swaziland’s cooperation to contain revolutionary ideas and communism in Southern Africa. The article shows that de-listing of Swaziland from AGOA beneficiaries marks a turning point in post-Cold War US-Swaziland relations. It argues that the US, freed from the constraints of Cold War politics and the concomitant decline of Swaziland’s strategic value, is now deploying coercive instruments to promote political reforms in the country. However, the article contends that this use of structural power has its limits and it therefore recommends a re-think of US policy.

From Cold War Politics to Post–Cold War Fiction: Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist and the Problem of Cultural Pluralism

I Married a Communist is arguably one of the most understudied Philip Roth novels. This article makes two claims that underline the book’s unacknowledged centrality both within the immediate context of the so-called “American Trilogy” and as a powerful example of post–Cold War historical fiction. First, despite its seemingly realist ambition, the novel denounces traditional truth questions in historical writing (and their skeptical rebuttal) and instead focuses on the uses of history as potential forms of world-making. Second, I Married a Communist complicates the notion that only the end of the Cold War conditioned the general turn away from ideology questions in favor of a dubious identitarian pluralism—a point variously reiterated and critiqued after Walter Michaels’s Shape of the Signifier ()—by arguing that such pluralistic desires in fact emerged in a necessary historical co-evolution with the rise of ideological antagonism during the 1940s and 1950s. Storytelling is featured in the novel as a pluralistic form of world-making to stress exactly this point.

Frank O'Hara rebuilds the Seagram Building: a radical poetry of event

This essay brings together architectural discourse and literary studies to consider alternative possibilities within our understanding of Cold War politics. It examines poems that figure Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building as important to a radical politics and experimentalism in Frank O'Hara's early poetry. The figured Seagram Building – steeped in architectural modernist ideologies and nationalist corporate interests – works to open the possibility for a new ethics of encounter within midtown New York City. Deriving a connection between O'Hara's ‘I do this I do that poems’ and the politics of architectural space shows the need for O'Hara's poems to be resituated. They are not poems that chronicle the city, but rather should be read as akin to contemporaneous event scores and happenings. Like Fluxus scores, this poetry problematises the difference between hermeneutics and enactment as it critiques dominant modernist notions of ‘reading poetry’ in general.

Reinventing “Many Voices”: MacBride and a Digital New World Information and Communication Order

The MacBride Commission Report was arguably one of the most significant multilateral interventions in the history of international communication. This article charts its emergence at the time of deeply contested Cold War politics, coinciding with the rise of the southern voices in the global arena, led by the non-aligned nations. Thirty-five years after the report's publication, has the global media evolved into a more democratic system, demonstrating greater diversity of views and viewpoints? Despite the still formidable power of US-led western media, the article suggests that the globalisation and digitisation of communication has contributed to a multi-layered and more complex global media scene, demonstrating the “rise of the rest”.

The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (review)

The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (review)