Postwar Western Research Articles

Gamson going global? Cabinet proportionality in comparative perspective

AbstractWe conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

The British Occupation and the Making of Democracy in Italy and Germany, 1943–1949

AbstractOver the past two decades, historians have become increasingly fascinated by the question of what enabled the emergence of a stable model of democracy in post-war Western Europe, characterized by the persistence of pre-war elites and top-down forms of decision-making. This article reveals the importance of the British occupations during and after the Second World War in fostering this model of democracy. It does so by comparing and weaving together British occupation strategies in Germany and Italy between 1943 and 1949. Based on a novel examination of archival sources, it demonstrates that British ruling strategies influenced the form of democracy that emerged in these two states. As such, the article reveals the centrality of ‘indirect rule’ practices and their multifaceted impact. Building on imperial precedents, the occupations were primarily run through pre-existing local elites who commanded authority and influence amongst the population. The article argues that this choice explains why the British produced, first, functioning occupation regimes and, subsequently, contributed to the emergence of remarkably stable democracies. At the same time, however, this ruling strategy aided the creation of political regimes that were elite-led and that strongly limited popular participation, leaving many democratic aspirations unfulfilled.

Housing policy in the social and economic sphere. Housing policy relationships and other specific policies

Abstrakt Housing policy aspiring to have a general social impact, subtracting from the scale of the state, like any other policy in this scope, is conducted in the European Union countries by the public sector. This sector remains a significant point of reference for this policy. The activity of the public sector in the countries of post-war Western Europe varies in intensity over time and is carried out at different spatial levels - also in relation to housing. The public sector has been subject to a tendency towards apparent self-limitation for at least the last four decades. This occurs mainly by reducing the importance of the state and its agencies in socio-economic development. Housing policy is one of the important sectoral policies of the state - including the government and local authorities - engaging public entities, political and social organizations and private entities to achieve the main and long-term goals in the area of housing, which are: creating conditions for purchasing or renting apartments by all citizens; ensuring the availability of the housing stock, i.e. implementing an appropriate scale of housing investments using primarily the market mechanism, and supporting the appropriate quality of the housing stock throughout the entire period of use of the property.

Sisyphus on horseback: Landscape allegory in the postwar Western

This article locates a psychological mobilization of natural settings in the post-war Westerns Duel in the Sun, Lonely Are the Brave, and Man in the Wilderness, which I refer to as ‘Sisyphean’ landscape allegory. This narrative of inner conflict is not only expressed through an inhospitable terrain per se, but also through the protagonist’s physical attempts to navigate and/or overcome it as a primary obstacle. I argue that the existential sense of futility these films invoke through their Sisyphean sequences serves to corroborate audience angst rather than to assuage it. At the same time, the larger therapeutic agenda of these films for American audiences varied according to their cultural milieu.

Special Issue: ‘Lonely Are the Brave’

The Western has been seen as a key genre for understanding both the American national character and the particulars of Hollywood, but there are now very few contemporary studies of this once foundational genre. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the Lonely Are the Brave conference of 2021, aim to revisit the Western, and the post-war Western specifically, in order to revive scholarship surrounding these texts, to interrogate existing models of understanding the history of the genre, and to examine how the genre treats ideas connected to time and its passing as attached to the American west and its depictions on-screen.

Peer-to-peer counselling and emotional guidance on infertility in Britain and Belgium (1970s–1980s)

In the wake of sexual and reproductive health counselling in postwar Western Europe, emotional guidance on infertility was as yet neither readily recognised nor available. In this article, we show...

Outlaw Trails: New Routes Through the Postwar Western

Outlaw Trails: New Routes Through the Postwar Western

CAP(공동농업정책) 수립 배경과 과정

This article aims to describe the background and process of establishing the CAP(Common Agricultural Policy), which is the most important concern of the early Community of the EEC and has a symbolic status as the first common policy of the EEC. The period of research is from the 1950s to the 1960s. Although CAP negotiations officially began in 1958, there is a reason for extending the period of research to the 1950s. The key challenges that Western European agricultural policies tried to solve after World War II remained at the time of establishing the CAP, and the CAP's goals were not much different from those of post-war Western European agricultural policies. Therefore, the subject of this article is largely divided into two categories. The first topic is the discussion of the establishment of a failed agricultural community at the Western European level, which was attempted in the early 1950s to solve the agricultural problems in post-war Western Europe. The second topic concerns the historical process from the mid-1950s to the birth of the CAP in the 1960s, discussed by the six founding countries of the EEC.

Out of Nowhere

This paper examines the early works of Soviet conceptual performance art group Collective Actions, founded in 1976, and focuses on the way the group employed the concept of “emptiness” as a motif throughout its practice. Namely, I consider the 1979 action Place of Action (fig.1-4), organized by Andrey Monastryrski and Nikita Alekseev, and pay particular attention to how the organizers engaged with the aesthetic quality of emptiness and worked to articulate the possibility of human practice within an empty space. The stakes of such a line of inquiry are best understood when one considers the historical moment of the Collective Actions’ work, as well as the parallel artistic tendencies within the unofficial art circle in the Soviet Union and the ambition of conceptual art in the West. Notions of nothingness, emptiness, and dematerialization dominate the visual language of much conceptual art in post-war Western (fig. 5) and late-Soviet (fig. 6) contexts and articulate a critical position vis-à-vis the old, assumed to be retrograde, notions of structure, institution, and aesthetic form. To this end, I will freground conceptualism’s expressions of disillusionment in and disavowal of political and cultural institutions. These sentiments welcomed “nothingness” as a productive metaphor which was worked into the larger conversations about art’s function in the late Cold War era. Though they took different avenues, many Western and Soviet conceptual practices arrived at theorizations of varying voids as emancipatory practices. I propose to consider performance art practices of Collective Actions as negotiating a productive relationship between emptiness and collectivity through an artistic practice that relies on, at the time suspect, categories of structure, composition, and social form. Their approach renders emptiness not a byproduct of the disenchanted negation of the old but as a particular quality of the newly articulated space, available for aesthetic exploration. Collective Actions, I argue, take one of conceptualism's dominant tropes—that of nothingness, dematerialization, boundlessness—and articulate it in a tangible, workable, and localized tension within the confines of a work of art.

The French connection at the Council of Europe: éducation permanente as a pan-European policy repertoire

ABSTRACT This paper examines transnational circulation of political and pedagogical ideas associated with éducation permanente with particular reference to post-war Western Europe. It offers a socio-historical reconstruction of pan-European dissemination and reception of policy repertoires articulated by governmental and non-governmental policy actors. It focuses on advocacy regarding permanent education as a pan-European repertoire associated with the Council of Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. The paper explores involvement of French and other francophone nationals in circulatory regimes, who were engaged in mediating partisan reform aspirations, exchange of information, and dissemination of innovative practices at national, transnational, and pan-European levels. The more specific focus of this paper addresses participation of ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ in policy formation, who are defined as policy actors rooted in specific national contexts, but who engage in regular activities involving their participation in transnational networks. The conclusions call for further research into circulatory regimes at local, sub-national, regional, national, bilateral, transnational, and pan-European during the 1960s and 1970s. Such research should focus on revisiting different expert, reformist, missionary, and militant networks responsible for building peripatetic ‘scholar-militant-activist’ coalitions that historically contributed to pan-European policy repertoires seeking to mobilise citizens to participate in the unfinished political project of pan-European cultural democracy.

Neoliberalizing state spaces in postwar Western Europe: The emergence of a new integrative regime of sovereignty

Contrary to recurrent statements that neoliberalism was implemented from the late 1970s in the United Kingdom and United States, this article shows how in fact, this political ideology was rolled out in Western Europe much earlier, in the years following World War II. The experiences of Italy, West Germany and France reveal how some neoliberal reformers took advantage of postwar geopolitical crises to impulse a new spatial regime of sovereignty based on macroregional economic integration and submission of domestic policies to international economic competition. Far from being hegemonic, this neoliberal opening up of state spaces is implemented within the framework of a composite, flexible and ever evolving policy regime. A multifactorial and complex explanatory framework is used to show how neoliberalization in Western Europe takes the shape of a systemic process of macro-regional economic integration.

폴란드 체제 전환 30년 결산

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the economic, social, and political changes in Poland over the past 30 years since the transformation in 1989, and at the same time to examine the biggest challenges that Poland has to solve in the short and medium term. In making this assessment, various indices and figures are referenced as The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal for the transformation, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development for the transition to market economy and economic freedom, and the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and GDP per capita for economic development. Based on the results of the basic analysis presented in this paper, including comparisons with France, Romania, Germany, the United States and the Visegrad Group countries, it was possible to conclude that the results of the Polish transformation over 30 years were positive. The achievements and success of Poland after the transformation, so-called Third Republic were even compared to ‘the glorious thirty years’ in the history of post-war Western Europe. In conclusion, it seems that the success of Poland’s economic development over the medium and short-term will depend on the quality improvement and improvement of existing system and orders, respect for democratic laws and principles, and how to avoid the middle-income country trap.

디지털 시대의 비평이론: 현재의 문제들과 사이버네틱스

This paper introduces recent studies in the humanities that investigate the critical valence of cybernetics in the contemporary world. Tracing the metamorphosis of cybernetics from a war-time computing technology to a dissimulated epistemological frame for the postwar Western world, I argue that cybernetics can provide an insightful theoretical lens onto critical issues associated with the digitization of the contemporary world. The paper first delineates the early history of cybernetics―its inception during the second world war, its basic technical and logical structures, and its evolution into a general theory of all systems―to demonstrate how cybernetics has offered the principal foundations for the technological rearrangement of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Recent studies of cybernetics have focused on the fundamental influences that cybernetics has brought to the intellectual, cultural, and socio-political history of the Western societies since the 1950s. In addition to this critical reevaluation of cybernetics as a cultural logic and existential condition for the digitally reconfigured contemporary world, this paper also discusses how recent critical endeavors to reassess and explain the cultural conundrums of the contemporary world have drawn on cybernetics to enrich the theoretical conversation. Issues such as the seemingly autonomous workings of contemporary capital, the irony of subjects feeling freer and more contained at the same time, and the meaning of subject and existence in the digital age find new critical connotations in recent theoretical research via cybernetics, attesting to the possibility of cybernetics as a new critical model for the digital age.

Truly Bewept, Full of Strife: The Myth of Antigone, the Burial of Enemies, and the Ideal of Reconciliation in Ancient Greek Literature

In postwar Western culture, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments, not least due to the strong influence of one of the key plays of the twentieth century, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. The rich discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, Sophocles’ Antigone, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This paper analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year-long ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways – sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does – with the main issues in some unique contemporary traditions of its reception (especially the Slovenian, Polish and Argentine ones): the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation.

D.T. Suzuki at the World Congress of Faiths in 1936

Abstract This paper examines the speeches that D.T. Suzuki presented at the World Congress of Faiths in London in 1936 and analyzes his interactions with Buddhists, sympathizers, and critics in the West during the interwar period. It will uncover how various reactions and historical contexts constructed Suzuki’s discourses, which prepared Suzuki for popularizing Zen in postwar Western countries. Compared to his early years and post-1949 lectures in the United States, as well as his English publications on Mahayana Buddhism, his half-year journey through Europe in 1936 is understudied. With limited access to primary sources in Japanese and English, previous studies tended to label him a “nationalist.” Instead, I analyze Suzuki’s discourses and other newly discovered primary sources from a historical perspective. Through this analysis, this paper will clarify Suzuki’s scheme to present Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Zen, to Westerners during the interwar period.

Activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs against the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Ukrainian Insurgent Army in postwar years on the territory of Western Ukraine

The research object is the history of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. The research subject is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its battle group - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The article studies the experience of the Internal Affairs bodies’ struggle against the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which became a symbol of the national-separatist movement in postwar regions of Western Ukraine.  The purpose of the research was to analyze the practice of the Internal Affairs bodies’ struggle against the nationalist armed groups of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1944 - 1955. The research task was to consider various measures aimed at the extermination of nationalist armed groups in postwar Western Ukraine.  The research methodology is based on analysis and synthesis, and the historical-legal analysis of events. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the need for a comprehensive study of the experience of struggle against armed national-separatist groups in the context of complicated Russia-Ukraine relations after the 2014 armed coup in Kyiv which resulted in radicals coming to power, who use the ideas of the OUN-UIA and the postwar experience of struggle against official authorities. The topicality of the research consists in the fact that the experience of military and ideological struggle against the Internal Affairs bodies of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic has been actively used by the modern Security Service of Ukraine. Territorial claims to Russia’s south-western areas are expanding, which are believed to belong to the Ukrainian Republic by Ukrainian radicals. The author’s contribution to the research of the topic is the definition of the strategy and tactics of internal affairs and security bodies of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic aimed at the elimination of nationalist armed groups. The author defines the reasons which impeded the work of internal affairs bodies during the suppression of armed separatism.   

Ruined myth: dead spaces in Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov’s Pavel Korchagin (1957)

ABSTRACT The historical-revolutionary film Pavel Korchagin (1956) by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov is traditionally read in the context of a key trend of the period: the return to the screen of the romanticised ideals of the October Revolution, which (according to the rhetoric of the Thaw) had been distorted in the Stalin era. Thus, the character study of Pavel Korchagin and the process of Soviet myth-making stood in the centre of attention, while other elements, such as the film’s spaces, remained in the margins. This article explores the empty spaces – the abandoned railway and the barrack in the village of Boyarka, whence the hero returns at the film’s end, and are shown as contradictory to the ideology of the early Thaw. In post-war Western cinema, unlike Soviet cinema, the emptiness of dead, ruined spaces is a phenomenon that defines the era. Situating Pavel Korchagin not merely in the Soviet, but also in the Western context, the author examines the film as a unique example for the transitional period between the so-called ‘film famine’ of the late Stalin years and the Thaw in terms of the spatial representation of the myth of the ruin in Soviet cinema.

Freedom to Want: The Politics of Food and the Projection of American Abundance in Postwar Western Europe, 1945 to 1960

Freedom to Want: The Politics of Food and the Projection of American Abundance in Postwar Western Europe, 1945 to 1960

Claiming National Heritage: State Appropriation of Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe

In the wake of the Second World War, cultural officers from the western Allied powers recovered several million objects plundered by the Nazis – works of art, Judaica, fine furniture, collectible books and archive collections. Recent books and films have popularized the history of the heroic art recovery effort, but less well-known is the story of what happened to objects that were never returned to rightful owners. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, postwar governments selected the best of the unclaimed objects and distributed them to public museums, ministries, embassies and other state buildings. This public use of recovered art quietly endured until the 1990s, when heightened awareness of Holocaust-era assets led to greater public and press scrutiny and an increase in restitution claims. This article examines the origins of postwar art custodianships in a comparative analysis of French, Belgian and Dutch restitution policies. The comparison reveals national differences in the scope of looting operations and postwar restitution policies, yet the broad contours of each government’s approach to ownerless art are remarkably similar. In all three cases the custodianships continued the long-term dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Shame and the Challenges of Postwar Western Democracies

Shame and the Challenges of Postwar Western Democracies