Postwar Politics Research Articles

The ‘New Right’ and its legacy for British conservatism

ABSTRACT New Right theories have had a major impact on British politics since the emergence of Thatcherism and the end of the so-called ‘years of consensus’ in the mid-1970s. In radically rejecting the conventions of postwar politics in terms of the management of both economic and social policies, the ideas of the New Right initially came to significantly shape the policies of the Thatcher government (1979–90), and indeed have continued to wield influence over other administrations in subsequent years. However, to what degree this influence has been retained as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century is a matter of conjecture, specifically in the wake of Conservative Party ‘modernization’, as well as the advent of major crises such as the 2007/8 economic crash and the Covid-19 pandemic. Within this context, this article seeks to assess and analyse the ongoing legacy of the New Right and its impact on British Conservatism over this sustained historical period.

Two Art Exhibitions as Dialogic Events in the History of Czech-Norwegian Cultural Relations

The article analyses two art exhibitions in the context of Czech-Norwegian relations, presenting both the Czechoslovak book exhibition in Oslo (1937) and the Norwegian painting and applied art exhibition in Prague (1938) as important parts in a bilateral cultural dialogue. The promising initial communication in form of a mutual information exchange was soon disrupted by the beginning of World War II and post-war politics.

THE SPACES OF MYTH IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY: EXPLORING THE INTERSECTIONS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) reconstructs the experiences of an ageing butler, Stevens, trapped within the confined space of the house he has served in for many years. The contours of memory are drawn along the spatial dimensions of the house which serve as a space of contestation between traditional values and emergent cultural beliefs in the post-war period. Physical modifications on the architecture produce continuities and alterations within the subject, who inhabits the space. This paper seeks to explore the dynamics of remembering and forgetting which are determined by the sites of memory and which trace historical changes as well as shifts in identity politics in Ishiguro’s novel. The paper critically assesses the idea of space, its functional dimension and mythic commemoration in relation to a symbolic historical past. It examines the development of subjectivity through the expansion of memory embodied in material form and the complex relationship between history and myth-making, which complicates individual identity. This paper further proposes that these spatio-temporal expressions can be understood as not only confined to the individual but may be extended to the domain of public memory and contextualized in a post-war British cultural politics of grief.

The making of a socialist underworld: people on the margins in post-war Czechoslovakia (1945–60)

ABSTRACT This text depicts the mechanisms that created the underworld and the profiles of people who formed a part of it in post-Second World War Czechoslovakia. The chronological framework is set between the end of the Second World War and the declaration of the so-called Socialist Constitution. It therefore covers the establishment of the Communist monopoly on power in February 1948, the period of Stalinism, the post-Stalinist thaw after 1953, and the amendment of Communist policies in the second half of the 1950s. It also shows the continuities between the principles set at the end of the war and the politics of the post-1948 period, as well as points to several continuities which go back deep into the nineteenth century. The existence of the underworld contrasts with the determination of the post-war political authorities to create a better and more moral society, which took radical forms after the establishment of the Communist monopoly on power. More precisely speaking, the underworld often grew out of this determination on the part of the authorities as well as from some specificities of the post-war welfare and economic politics. The text illustrates these mechanisms using the example of a number of personal destinies. For this, it uses a variety of sources: criminal reports; interrogation protocols and intelligence of the Public Security Service (Veřejná bezpečnost) and various departments of the National Security Corps (Sbor národní bezpečnosti, SNB); reports of the National Committees (Národní výbory) and of the Ministry of the Interior and legal norms. The topic is approached from the perspective of the social and economic history of state-socialist regimes.

Rethinking Alcohol and Conflict: The Politics of Alcohol in Post-war Sri Lanka and Nepal

ABSTRACT Existing research on the relationship between alcohol and conflict has focused on displaced populations and viewed alcohol largely as a driver of post-war social problems such as trauma and violence. We draw on qualitative research in Sri Lanka and Nepal to build a more complex picture of alcohol’s role in post-war societies that is attuned to its political economy dimensions and its politically symbolic role. This article develops a comparative and multi-disciplinary approach to demonstrate how narratives about alcohol can reinforce existing processes of social marginalisation and how alcohol can play an important symbolic role in post-war politics.

Ernst Plischke and Post-war Politics in New Zealand: The Case of Naenae

ABSTRACT Through his work for the first Labour Government in Wellington, Austrian-born émigré architect Ernst Plischke (1903–92) was directly involved with New Zealand politics in the 1940s. While he has appeared to others as a not outwardly political person, his professional life in New Zealand was directly tied to governmental decisions of the time. Particularly his duties in the town planning division of the Department of Housing Construction (1943–1947) meant that Plischke was not only involved with the politically initiated design of large-scale environments, but in this role he also actively took sides – for a somewhat more collectivist model of living than many New Zealanders favoured. By bringing together the existing debate about housing, dwelling and in particular the Community Centre in Naenae with Plischke’s design work and his own views, it may be possible to characterise more closely his interactions with New Zealand politics. It appears that despite being an “Enemy Alien,” Plischke’s attitude towards architecture and society was largely aligned with the positions of the first Labour Government for the quality of his work to be recognised.

Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan

This short essay introduces the special issue, ‘Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan’. It first explains that the issue came out of the two-year project entitled ‘Historicizing the Discourses of Declining Fertility and Ageing Population in East Asia, in which we reappraised Japan’s post-war history by identifying the demographic, discursive, social, scientific, and political factors that shaped the post-war population policies and reproductive practices. The essay then elaborates on the two interwoven threads of analysis we incorporated to reach the overall goal of the special issue, namely, to complicate understanding of Japanese post-war reproductive politics. The first thread is the politics of reproduction in modern Japanese history was inherently a politics of population. The second is that the medical and scientific knowledge on reproductive bodies and population statistics constituted a discursive register that allowed issues surrounding reproduction and population to be reformulated as concerns of the state. By locating the stories of everyday reproductive practices within a broader history of population politics embedded in the post-war Japan’s sovereignty and statecraft, the special issue clarifies hitherto understudied, yet critical, elements that shaped domestic reproductive experiences and the interpretation of the reproductive bodies in Japan’s post-war history.

Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England, 1945–65, by Julia Mitchell

Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England, 1945–65, by Julia Mitchell

Croatian Interwar Cultural Memory and Disabled War Veterans

In the contemporary international scholarly community cultural memory related to the First World War as a research field and subject area is extensively problematized and studied by social sciences and humanities. Based on the available surveyed scholarly production, it is evident that Croatian cultural memory of the First World War is an under-researched subject. This paper therefore presents preliminary findings of conducted qualitative sociological research into the development of the post-First World War cultural memory in Croatia in the interwar period. The research provides an insight into how Croatian disabled war veterans (de)constructed post-war cultural memory inside a newly formed multiethnic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and to which extent it was connected to national and ethnic. The discourse and discursive practices developed by Croatian disabled war veterans are analyzed in selected newspapers (Nezavisnost, Hrvatski invalid, Ratni invalid, Vojni invalid) published in the period 1920–1924. The article uses post-modernist sociological fallibilistic Foucauldian methodology of discourse analysis and Foucault’s understanding of modernist societies, which is based on the research into how the language appropriates specific discourses developed by certain groups in addition to the prevalent discursive practices. Both methodology and theory are used to explain the findings in the framework of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls ‘culture of defeat’. The research concludes that difficult post-war political, social and economic circumstances profoundly shaped the way in which the collective memory of the First World War was (de)constructed by post-war disabled veterans in Croatia and subsequently induced collective amnesia thus helping to create the culture of forgetting.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey: A Feminist Economist?

This paper is an attempt to historicize Frank Plumpton Ramsey’s Apostle talks delivered from 1923 to 1925 within the social and political context of the time. In his talks, Ramsey discusses socialism, psychoanalysis, and British women’s movement. Ramsey’s views on these three intellectual movements of his time were inter-connected, and they all contributed to his take on the then policy debates on the role of women in economy. Drawing on some archival materials, biographical facts, and the historiographical literature of the post-war politics of motherhood, this paper shows that the kind of feminism that explains Ramsey’s remarks on women the best is the “new feminism” of the 1920s whose demands were not egalitarian in character.

Nep-hop for peace? Political visions and divisions in the booming Nepalese hip-hop scene

This article explores the burgeoning Nepalese hip-hop scene – commonly known as nep-hop – as a discursive intervention in the post-war politics of Nepal. Its core argument is that nep-hop oftentimes demonstrates an ethos of peacebuilding through popular culture. Indeed, many songs explicitly criticize violence, war, and the political leaders who recently brought the nation to a civil war. Yet, this political critique appears to often fall on deaf ears, due to the fact that nep-hop is commonly decoded as a radically ‘alien’ and ‘vulgar’ genre by audiences in mainstream Nepalese society. Importantly, however, this should not be read as a rejection of the ideological content of nep-hop, but rather as a negative evaluation of the aesthetic form of the genre, which bars many Nepalese citizens from engaging with its political messages in a meaningful manner.

The Self-Defense Forces and Postwar Politics in Japan

The Self-Defense Forces and Postwar Politics in Japan

War, Resistance, and “Combatant Identity:” Hezbollah’s Political Identity and the Legacy of Conflict

ABSTRACT A key issue in analyzing how armed conflict shapes postwar politics pertains to the question of how rebel groups frame their wartime “combatant identity” in the context of their postwar political activism. As armed political organizations active in the midst of conflict, rebel groups’ identities often encompass a “combatant identity” and and what Canetti et al. have described as an “ethos of conflict,” centered on the legitimacy of the use of force, the rightfulness of the rebels’ goals and the defensive nature of their struggle, along with a narrative of victimization and patriotism. How does this identity crystallized in wartime shape political behavior in the aftermath of hostilities or after a political settlement has been reached? How is this combatant identity embedded, reframed and adapted to fit into a broader postwar political narrative? The article explores this question by analyzing the case of Hezbollah’s political and militant identity in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war; underlying the group’s political, military and social orientation and contextualizing it as operating in a liminal, no-war, no-peace context defined by both the end of the internal civil war and the continuation of the open conflict with Israel. Hezbollah offers an interesting case to examine the resilience of the combatant framework during and in the aftermath of conflict. The article traces the evolution of Hezbollah’s combatant identity from the Lebanese civil war, through its post-agreement political transition, until the group’s involvement in the Syrian conflict. In doing so, it underlines how the group’s combatant identity remained resilient while also being fungible, allowing Hezbollah to preserve core ideological beliefs while shifting its discourse based on political expediency.

Liberalism Is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought

Liberalism Is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought

History, legitimacy, and Renamo's return to arms in central Mozambique

AbstractTwenty years after the Mozambican war ended, a return to arms from 2013 by the opposition movement Renamo served to revitalize support for the party in the 2014 election, and put pressure on the Frelimo government to consider demands for constitutional change. Building on existing research on post-war politics and on recent economic change, this article addresses the question of how Renamo obtained civilians’ approval for renewed armed action in the south of Sofala province, the region where conflict broke out in 2013. I argue that popular legitimacy for Renamo's challenge to the state is constituted in a narrative about Renamo that is congruent both with present-day grievances against the state and with understandings of local history dating to the anticolonial struggle that challenge the nationalist history on which Frelimo hegemony rests. Renamo has adapted this narrative in such a way as to claim a historic role for itself in defending the interests of central and northern Mozambique and in struggling for an inclusive and democratic state. In this way, Renamo has gained support for its renewed armed actions, not only among those politicized by Renamo in the earlier war but more broadly among civilians in the region.

The Spanish International Brigadier as Veteran and Foreign Fighter

At the time of the Spanish Civil War much contemporary commentary about the International Brigades was consistent with the view that what was taking place on the Iberian Peninsula was part of a larger struggle between democracy and fascism. Sympathetic reporting highlighted their positive military contribution and the selfless sacrifices in what later was tagged as the ‘curtain-raiser’ to the Second World War. From the 1980s scholarship about these foreign fighters for the republic was framed quite differently. In these cases the volunteers’ war experiences tended to be placed within the contextual narratives of their own national groupings or were applied in relation to the impact of the returned veterans from Spain on the post-war politics in their own home states. In several current analyses of the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the unexamined historical figure of the Spanish International Brigadier has been utilised as a foil against which to catalogue the pernicious and destabilising role of foreign fighters in these on-going civil wars.

Navigating to Subsistence: The Gendered Struggles in the Postwar Everyday and Their Implications for Peace

In developing a feminist analysis of postwar political economic practices and institutions, my contribution builds on previous Critical Perspectives forums in following Cynthia Enloe's call (2015, 438) to make sense of people's gendered political lives while embracing their “messiness” and Rahel Kunz's (2017) argument for placing life stories at the center of analysis. It focuses on the everyday life of female petty traders involved in the coping economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), including those working at the (in)famous Arizona market in Brčko. By taking postwar gendered everyday experiences seriously, my contribution highlights the need for a gender-just, holistic approach to designing postwar reparative justice measures, labor market interventions, and integration of coping economic practices.

Trump and the Liberal International Order

ABSTRACT According to leading cosmopolitan liberals, the post–WWII order has been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The main threat to this Golden Age, they maintain, is right-wing populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. I argue that their position is a Eurocentric ideological inversion of reality. In truth, Trump is not a threat to the liberal-capitalist order, but a pure expression of its life-destructive competitive dynamics. His “America First” foreign policy is a response to the contradictions of global political economic forces. The paper begins with an examination of the real drivers of the liberal-capitalist system, confronts the ideological illusions of liberal cosmopolitanism with these darker realities, argues that an empirical examination of Trump’s record reveals that he is more consistent with than an opponent of post-war political economic dynamics, and concludes with a review of the manifold life-destructive effects that order has had on the peoples of the Global South and workers everywhere.

Civil–Military Relations and Civil War Recurrence: Security Forces in Postwar Politics

Does restructuring security forces reduce the risk of civil war recurrence? Prior research has examined effects of military integration in alleviating commitment problems, but the evidence has been inconclusive. Other aspects of civil–military relations have received less attention. This article examines the effects of civil–military relations in the context of postwar struggles to consolidate authority. It outlines three pathways through which security forces contribute to renewed civil war: by excluding rival factions and facilitating insurgent mobilization, by exploiting control over resources to challenge the regime, or by escalating incipient insurgency through repression. Analysis of original, cross-national data on postwar civil–military relations shows that reducing the potential for exclusion and exploitation through diverse officer appointments and robust civilian oversight lowers the risk of civil war. These findings emphasize the distributive effects of restructuring security forces and highlight the value of examining political contests around state institutions to understand why civil wars restart.

Savage Beauty: A Futurist Legacy in Fashion and Self-Design

Reading Italian Futurism through the lens of postwar politics has sometimes obscured its postmodern and posthumanist legacy. While the movement’s violent rhetoric of machine optimism has been seen to herald Right-wing despotism and patriarchy, it aspired to nothing less than a total aesthetic revolution that would remake mankind in the image of a mechanized world. Bodies, they theorized in numerous manifestos, were not fixed, but were evolving and expanding possibilities of self-design. This article explores how Futurist ideas about fashion and technology constitute a connective tissue between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes. Alexander McQueen’s designs are used to illustrate the ways that Futurist technolatry, or machine optimism, have evolved and endured.