Cold War Politics Research Articles

Blasting the Post-Critical Out of the Continuum of Cold War Political Economy

This article aims to complicate the economic and political terrain on which debates within Polanyi Studies take place, arguing that imprecise terminology and an ossified set of Cold War concepts erect dubious and simplistic dichotomies (e.g., liberal/conservative, markets/planning, freedom/totalitarianism, etc.) that are not up to the task of appropriately navigating contemporary political economy. The essay accomplishes this task by offering counterexamples to status quo assumptions in Polanyi Studies as well as by suggesting more nuanced avenues for future Polanyian exploration.

Israel’s Relations with Angola: From Portuguese Colony to the Present

Angola, which achieved its independence in 1975 following an armed struggle of thirteen years and the military overthrow of a dictatorship in Portugal a year earlier, is one of eleven countries in sub-Saharan Africa hosting an Israeli embassy. It is also one of fifteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa that has an embassy in Israel. It is obvious that Israel and Angola acknowledge the importance of their relationship and understand well each country’s respective influence in their own regions. While formal diplomatic ties only began in the early stages of the post-Cold War, Angola and Israel – or more exactly the Jewish people – have had a much longer connection. Before the Balfour Declaration, some seeking a place of refuge for the Jewish people considered Angola. During the era of decolonisation in Africa, which began in the late 1950s, while Israel eagerly pursued relations with the newly independent states, diplomatic activity continued with Portugal; its actions were also connected with the Cold War politics of the United States. Initially, Israel supported forces in Angola opposed to the ultimate victor in the civil war which followed the war for independence. Yet, in the post-Cold War environment, with the cooperation of Israeli businesspeople and intelligence assistance, Angola and Israel engaged in developing mutually beneficial relations, though in the case of defence-related connections somewhat secretive ones. In recent years, with South Africa’s promotion of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement, and being the country most critical of Israel’s policies outside the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel’s ties with Angola have taken on greater importance for the Jewish state’s relations with other countries in Southern Africa.

Trumpism, Cuban Americans, and the Fetishism of Politics

This article analyses the transfigured way in which President Trump and the Cuban-American far right exercised their power. It assesses both the underlying social relations behind this in both US society as a whole and in particular in its subset of the Cuban-American community in Miami, and the construction of what Michel Foucault called a truth regime which serves to hide the social actors’ true power-related goals. Theoretical perspectives about the nature of power in international relations, and society as a whole, are employed in this endeavour. It is concluded that beyond the predominant Cold War politics and narrative, Trump and the Cuban-American far right’s goal was to maintain the local and national power structure they have benefited from, given the perceived harmful impact of Barack Obama’s policies.

Beyond “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord”: Diffused Religion and Religious Co-Optations in Hong Kong

Abstract Most discussions on religious activism in Hong Kong focus on Christianity. Building on C. K. Yang’s classic theory of diffused religion, this article first distinguishes Chinese religious institutions from less institutional religious practices and expressions and argues beyond this popular assumption and representation of Christianity by considering elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese folk religions in recent activism, revealing a more complex religious ecology. Second, this paper uncovers a longer historical trajectory whereby colonial forces attempted to co-opt Christianity to legitimize their power, which explains why assumptions concerning Christian domination exist in the first place. Furthermore, colonial policies, Cold War politics, and Chinese regimes have all co-opted institutional religious elites in Hong Kong for ideological purposes, resulting in institutional Chinese religions in Hong Kong, such as Buddhism and Daoism, being connected with the Chinese Communist Party, whereas the linkage between Christianity and liberty is reinforced. At the same time, without secularizing forces from Mainland China, religions in Hong Kong, including Christianity, institutional Chinese religions, and less institutional folk religions, have all diffused into secular institutions and with each other, contributing to the foundation of the Chinese community in the past and the pursuit of democracy, justice, and freedom today on a grassroots, non-institutional level. In this way, this article not only offers critical insight into the role of religion in Hong Kong activism and the often neglected history of religious co-optations under British colonialism and in the Cold War but also provides a theoretical contribution in terms of furthering our understanding of the relationship among religious institutions, state apparatuses, and diffused religion on the ground.

Victimhood and Denial: Recent Scholarship on the Legacy of the Indonesian Mass Murders of 1965-66

Recent scholarship continues to shed light on the 1965-66 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia, as well as its effect on Cold War politics around the globe. John Roosa’s Buried Histories: The Anti-Communist Massacres of 1965-66 in Indonesia (2020) is his third book on the subject, and explains, through rigorous case studies, some of the variation in the scope of the killings due to the role of the military and militias. Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (2020) argues that the Indonesian case became a “playbook” for other right-leaning forces to crush communism in Latin America and elsewhere, and has left a legacy of legitimized violence from which many have not yet recovered.

The struggle for marital equality beyond Cold War political divides: transnational relationships between Polish and Spanish women lawyers in the 1960s and 1970s

ABSTRACT This article discusses the transnational relationships between women lawyers from Poland and Spain that developed within the International Federation of Women in Legal Careers (Fédération Internationale des Femmes des Carrières Juridiques, FIFCJ) from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Drawing on archival material and published sources, it traces the history of relations between the Spanish lawyer María Telo Núñez and the Spanish Association of Women Lawyers, and Zofia Wasilkowska and Maria Stypułkowska from the Section of Women Lawyers (Sekcja Kobiet Prawników, SKP) of the League of Women (Liga Kobiet) in Poland. Women lawyers from both countries joined the Federation at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, and met at international meetings, two of which were held in Warsaw and Madrid. This analysis focuses on the forms and meanings of exchange between these women and their influence on legal changes in civil and family legislation in Poland and Spain during the mid-1970s. Developing a mutual interest in the family law of both countries, these women strategically framed their activity as apolitical. Transnational relationships between lawyers and activists from two contrasting dictatorships reveal the importance of professional networking in overcoming political and ideological divides in the struggle for women’s rights in Cold War Europe.

The origin story of rapamycin: systemic bias in biomedical research and cold war politics.

METEI (Medical Expedition to Easter Island) was a Canadian-led expedition to Easter Island in 1964 that led to the discovery of rapamycin, launching a billion-dollar drug industry and major field of biomedical research. Stanley's Dream, by medical historian Jacalyn Duffin, provides remarkable details about METEI and raises important and timely questions about systemic bias in biomedical studies, the relationship between science and geopolitics, as well as obligations of pharmaceutical companies to indigenous communities. As such, this book is a must-read for those interested in the intersection of science and society as well as anyone who has used rapamycin, or one of many derivatives, in their laboratory or clinic.

Countercultural Misunderstandings: Alternative Art and Cold War Politics

Drawing on Theodore Roszak's 1969 classic, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, this essay argues that the difficulties experienced by members of the counterculture in establishing bonds of solidarity with potentially like‐minded groups were often shared by alternative artists working internationally post‐1968. Opening with a case study in hostile American feedback on the politics of Russian émigré art in early 1980s New York, the article works through a range of unintended and intentional misunderstandings among leftist art workers and countercultural figures, whose political positions were formed in different centres and peripheries. Arguing that alternative art should be viewed as part of a shared, anti‐technocratic project, the article proposes that glitches in communication are worth lingering over, as we continue to grapple with different accounts of historical developments, and seek to find ways of working across borders in polarized times.

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Sozialdemokratie Global. Willy Brandt und die Sozialistische Internationale in Lateinamerika

The culmination of two decades’ research, Sozialdemokratie Global. Willy Brandt und die Sozialistische Internationale in Lateinamerika is a high-level, political history of the Socialist International (SI) under Brandt’s presidency (1976–1992). Rother elevates Brandt’s SI engagement in a field of political history and biography dominated by attention to earlier periods. The book combines a chronological account of relationships among Latin American and Caribbean reform parties and European democratic socialists in the 1970s and 80s with case studies of practical SI involvement in regional conflicts (Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Falklands/Malvinas). Framed by a biographical orientation towards key actors and a concise summary and assessment of how increased attention to the SI in Latin America might illuminate modes of thinking about Cold War politics and diplomacy beyond national governments, each section converges on an image of the SI as exemplary of an emerging arena of loosely coordinated political action parallel to foreign policy classically conceived. Rother attends productively to the challenges of approaching the SI as a unified political actor. The organization’s ‘diffuse edges’ (p. 30), financial entanglement with and dependency on national party structures and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, and repeated failure to come to consensus around foundational documents, complicate but never negate its status as a recognized player in an era of political globalization.

Mapping Nepal's Foreign Policy Behaviour towards Great Power Politics: A Study of Nepal's Foreign Policy Response to the Russia-Ukraine Crisis

A country's foreign policy is characterised by continuity and change. A stark divergence, however, between stated foreign policy objectives and practically implemented foreign policy behaviours cannot be convincingly vindicated as a routine transformation. Nepal's foreign policy objectives and principles are laid down in the Constitution and various foreign policy documents, particularly in the integrated foreign policy of 2020. A series of perceptible deviations from those guiding principles, without any justifiable reason, may label Nepal's foreign policy behaviour as an adventurist project. Today, while the residue of Cold War politics has enveloped the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Nepal has divulged traceable foreign policy responses over the same. Taking the case study of Nepal's foreign policy responses to the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the study aims to map Nepal's foreign policy behaviour toward great power politics. Surveying Nepal's foreign policy behaviour towards the United Nations and the great powers, particularly the United States and Russia, this study, firstly, identifies the sources of key changes and detectible transformations in Nepal's foreign policy behaviour. Secondly, drawing a critical analysis of Nepal's responses to the great power politics to understand the foreign policy behaviour of Nepal that has been ambiguous, ambivalent, and uncertain. Methodologically, this qualitative study has employed the framework of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) along with inductive as well as deductive methods of reasoning per the nature of non-numerical data.

Colonial continuities and colonial unknowing in international migration management: the International Organization for Migration reconsidered

ABSTRACT The International Organization for Migration (IOM) exerts increasing power in global migration governance, yet research on IOM’s early history is scarce. Explanations of IOM’s founding and early migration management efforts are often reduced to bipolar, Cold War politics, with the US creating the organisation outside the UN to sidestep Soviet interference. Such simplistic accounts fail to grapple with the ways in which its creation and early activities also reflected and entrenched legacies of colonialism and related racialized inequalities. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article analyses how colonial interests and biases also shaped IOM’s establishment, founding documents, and vacillating positions in decolonisation movements. It examines the organisation’s role in moving colonists out of newly independent states; facilitating settler colonial states’ preference for white migrants; and advancing western interests in having an international migration forum in which opposition to exclusionary policies was virtually non-existent. In particular, it questions the agency’s involvement in supporting white migration to Southern Africa in the apartheid era, and the sanitisation of such work from IOM’s institutional history. Theoretically, the article analyses these dynamics through the lens of ‘colonial unknowing’, thereby laying the foundation for deeper, historicised understandings of IOM’s continued, contested roles in migration management.

The Transregional Illustrated Magazine Al-Arabi

Abstract This article investigates the transregional cultural magazine Al-Arabi (al-‘Arabi) during the late 1950s and 1960s under its first editor, the Egyptian scientist Ahmad Zaki. Founded in Kuwait, the magazine’s establishment and sociocultural-political agenda are reconstructed within the context of Kuwait’s cultural diplomacy and pan-Arabism during decolonization and early Cold War politics. Al-Arabi offered timely discussions on Arab cities, gender, literature, politics and science, and readily embraced color photography for illustrations as a way of stimulating transnational understanding during times of substantial change in the region. Consequently, an analysis of Al-Arabi provides insights into historical strategies for re-imagining the region from within. Overall, the magazine can be situated in a long-standing tradition of Arab printing and publishing, while also forming part of a global illustrated magazine culture. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the article combines archival research and interviews with the media-historical and art-historical analyses of text, image and graphic design.

A New Scale for Global History

A New Scale for Global History

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics by Marc Landas

Reviewed by: Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics by Marc Landas Christoph Gradmann Marc Landas. Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics. Lincoln: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2020. viii + 359 pp. $39.95 (978-1-64012-105-8). The history of antibiotics can look back at a long and mostly venerable tradition of attracting expert historians, practitioners, journalists, and very often combinations of any of these. Bernard Dixon’s landmark popular science paper “Antibiotics on the Farm” from 1967 popularized contemporary work on horizontal gene transfer, which revolutionized the understanding of antibiotic resistance.1 Stuart Levy’s “The Antibiotic Paradox” of 1992 paved the way to the insight that antibiotics modernized the problem of bacterial infection rather than solving it.2 Beginning perhaps with Robert Bud’s “Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy” from 2007, authors such as Claas Kirchhelle, Scott Podolsky, and Maria Santesmases have given us rich histories of antibiotics.3 At the same time, inspiring journalistic accounts continue to appear; Maryn McKenna’s “Big Chicken” of 2017 being a recent example of rock-solid and inspiring journalistic writing.4 Marc Landas’ Cold War Resistance falls into the group of more journalistic accounts. On some three hundred pages and through fifteen chapters it attempts to draw a line from Cold War politics to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Drawing on many interesting sources, most of them published, the author goes through an enormous panorama of subjects: antibiotic drug development during World War II, the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry, Germany’s failure to participate in the invention of first generation antibiotics, Soviet science and industry under Lysenko (and Stalin), the repeated failure of phage therapy, the after-war food industry and the career of antibiotics as growth promoters, resistant staphylococcus in hospitals, and biological weapons. In addition, numerous small stories from any country that ever produced or used antibiotics are woven into the text. It is Landas’ main contention that the politicization of antibiotic drugs during the Cold War accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance. And while it is certainly correct that politics was influential in antibiotics history, starting from the drugs being a part of the allied war effort, this hypothesis is nowhere fully [End Page 280] spelled out and discussed with all its implications. The laudable aim to deliver a contextual history of antibiotic resistance results in sometimes dissociated histories where a colorful description of the battle of Stalingrad somehow leads to discussing the war-time production of antibiotics or the lack of in the Soviet Union. In a similar vein, discussion of the atomic bomb wanders through a chapter, but it is mostly left to the reader to guess what purpose this serves in the text. What does not help either is that chapters are simply numbered rather than having titles and so diverse in their content that a reader would struggle to say what each of them is about. Also, it needs to be said that the book, while mobilizing interesting published sources, is not entirely up-to-date when it comes to relevant secondary sources. As a result, the pages about Germany’s wartime effort and its accent on sulphonamides rather than antibiotics is shot through with small mistakes, all of which could have been avoided had John Lesch’s work on the issue been consulted.5 For the passages on resistant staphylococcus, insight from Kathryn Hillier’s work is missing.6 Other context is perhaps overrated. One can share the author’s fascination with Lysenkoism, but it remains an open question if the shortcomings of the Soviet pharmaceutical industry can be reduced to the idiosyncrasies of a neo-Lamarckian ideologue. The question that should have been explored systematically is how important the stated connection of antibiotic resistance and the Cold War was. If the growth of antibiotic resistance was advanced by Cold War politics, then why did it not ease or even stall after that? If we look at recent reports on antibiotic resistance in global health, it does in fact appear to be the case that the problem escalated after the Cold War ended, from the 1990s. It was then that global antibiotic production went to India...

The Origins of Euratom's Research on Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion: Cold War Politics and European Integration, 1958–1968

The article traces the origins and early developments of European fusion research in the framework of Euratom and of postwar nuclear international institutionalism, and as an episode of both the technoscientific Cold War and the interaction between big science and politics in the history of European integration. Based on original Italian, French and European Union archival sources, the article deals with four main passages of Euratom's fusion history: the Euratom treaty and Euratom's first five-year programme (1958–62); the early attempts to establish a Euratom ‒ CERN Joint Study Group for Fusion Research (1958‒9); the launching of Euratom's first fusion programme; and the contribution of Euratom's ‘fusion association contracts’ with the member states to the creation and training of a European transnational epistemic community of fusion scientists and technocrats. The Merger Treaty of 1965, the ‘crisis’ of Euratom and the prospect of British entry in the Community, as well as the ‘tokamak revolution’ of the late 1960s, would contribute to substantially redefine the European fusion programme.

Religion and the Cold War Politics: The Election of Athenagoras as Patriarch

A critical development during the years of World War II was the change of the USSR’s policy towards the Church and its attempt to make use of the influence of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Orthodox world. This move of the USSR mobilized the United States, which assumed that the Soviet influence in the Balkan countries and the Middle East would be prevented by strengthening the Patriarchate of İstanbul. The US proposed Athenagoras, the Archbishop of North and South America, for the leadership of Phanar; a figure who was expected to be effective in the struggle with Moscow. This proposal was accepted by Turkey and Greece. However, Athenagoras’ election as patriarch was not easily achieved both because he did not have Turkish citizenship and because of the cautious attitude demonstrated by Turkey during the selection process. At the end of the election process during which the United States has taken a cautious stance with Turkey, Athenagoras was elected as the Patriarch. As soon as he started the job, with his pro-US rhetoric and close relations with the Turkish official circles, the new Patriarch showed that he was a cleric who could meet the expectations. Being the religious pillar of the Truman doctrine, as he himself stated, Athenagoras’ efforts were also welcomed by the US and Turkish authorities. At the same time, Athenagoras's pro-Turkish and pro-American stance has caused discomfort within the Greek community over time, leading to some reactions against him.

Dam(n)ing the hills: Indigeneity, American aid, and Cold War politics in the Kaptai Dam, East Pakistan, 1957–1964

AbstractIn the late 1950s, work began on the Kaptai hydroelectric dam, a massive project in the verdant Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an area bordering northeast India, east Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and Burma (now Myanmar), largely populated by indigenous hill communities. At the time, the CHT was situated in newly created East Pakistan, and Kaptai had become a focal site for the development of hydroelectric power. In the process, Pakistan relied upon international networks, including global aid organizations and American multinational construction firms, to fulfil its development dreams; in return the United States found a useful ally to contain Soviet influence and the growth of communism in Asia. In the high stakes exchange of economic aid for political alliance-making, East Pakistani administrators, US State Department officials, and American corporations became inherently entwined in a shared vision of development, to the detriment of local ecologies and the indigenous peoples who lived within them. This article will explore how both the public and private sectors used the language of primitivity, wildness, and atavism to marginalize minority ‘tribal’ populations in the devastating name of development and modernity.

식량과 인권: 1960년대 후반 식량농업기구의 ‘기아로부터의 자유 운동’과 사회경제적 권리

When the idea of human rights gave its birth to the New Deal as global fields, it consolidated a sense of economic security, integrated with social and economic rights. In the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War politics implemented developmental model in weakened or vulnerable nations against potential threats of communist, so that the idea of human rights remained invisible in the international politics. In the 1960s, however, the Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC) became a part of FAO’s visible commitment to combating hunger and famine impacted by war or natural disasters, and it was a product of what the United Nations developed within human rights agendas. Throughout the 1960s, FFHC established contacts with international NGOs active in development and education as well as a wide range of institutions, churches, professional groups, trade unions, and fundraising agencies. Local groups and national NGOs participated in its action in developing regions.