‘A great list of potential mistakes’: NATO,Africa, and British efforts to limit the Global Cold War

The scholarly consensus on why NATO adopted a ‘non-policy’ towards the non-North Atlantic world rests on the logic of the Cold War. But British diplomats and officials did not see NATO’s policy towards Africa through a Cold War lens. NATO’s ‘non-policy’ towards the world beyond the North Atlantic was not the product of an allied Cold War consensus among the allies. Instead, it was the result of a determined British effort to channel growing pressure for NATO action into a bureaucratic dead-end in an effort to keep the Cold War out of Africa.     

Border crossings and the remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies

This essay reviews the burgeoning literature on Latin America’s distinctive variant of the Cold War since about 2000. First, it examines a watershed of recent collaborations between Latin American area specialists and foreign relations scholars, which has dramatically transformed Latin American Cold War Studies. Then, it focuses on two of the more fertile veins in that scholarship: first, the notion that the region’s Cold War should be placed in a broader historical context, which scholars are increasingly referring to as Latin America’s “long Cold War,” and second, the long Cold War’s multivalent cultural dimension. If study of the Latin American Cold War has become something of a growth industry in the last 15 years, its leading edge may well be efforts to tease out the complex, power-laden cultural processes, relationships, exchanges, and institutional forms that antedated and shaped Latin America’s Cold War proper (c. 1947 to the early 1990s), and had consequences beyond the conflict’s denouement.     

Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War

This paper examines how acrobatics was imbued with multiple meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. More specifically, the author discusses why the Chinese government chose acrobatics to facilitate the Sino-US rapprochement and the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as the acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival data, this study demonstrates how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of ‘Chinese revolution’ was established, strengthened, disrupted, and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. This historical investigation advances the literature on performing arts and politics by exposing the political logics in the North-South exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.     

Fred Halliday,Marxism and the Cold War

Though possibly best known today as a specialist on the Middle East and Islam, it is often forgotten how central the Cold War was in defining Fred Halliday's understanding of world politics before 1989 and indeed even after. Building on the earlier work of Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr, Halliday developed a distinct theory of the Cold War which afforded him great insights but ultimately failed in explaining the complexities of the East–West relationship, and why it came to an abrupt conclusion in the late 1980s.     

冷战与拉美游击运动的兴衰(1961-1969)

20世纪60年代,古巴革命的成功及共产主义势力在拉美地区的不断增强打破了美国主导的泛美体系的国际格局,拉美游击运动登上了冷战的历史舞台,并成为当时第三世界最强劲的地区势力,但最终在双方冷战战略的调整和竞争地位的转换中以失败谢幕.因此,这一时期拉美游击运动的兴衰是冷战对第三世界地区势力发展影响的典型案例,对它的研究具有一定的学术意义.     

China and Albania: the Cultural Revolution and Cold War Relations

During the central decades of the Cold War, China was Albania’s only ally. The aim of this article is to analyse how the Chinese Cultural Revolution affected Sino-Albanian relations. This article argues that the events in China threatened to undermine the Sino-Albanian alliance, because Albania did not endorse most of the Cultural Revolution’s policies, but supported it only for the sake of relations with China and the benefits received from this alliance. In a time when the Cultural Revolution caused enormous difficulties to the Chinese economy, Albania nonetheless received an increasing amount of aid. Based on recently released archives, this case study sheds light on this underexplored Cold War alliance and adds to our understanding of how the Cultural Revolution had implications beyond China’s borders.     

The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970

This paper examines the links between Cold War geopolitics and economic development to explain the relatively rapid proliferation of the concept of river basin development throughout so-called “developing areas” of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the most significant water resource development agency of the US government, and its engagement in what it termed “foreign activities” beginning in the aftermath of World War II. Grounded in recent work on technopolitics, the constructed scales of water resource development, and histories of the “global” Cold War, this research examines the advancement of water resource development in the Litani River basin in Lebanon—as guided by staff of the US Bureau of Reclamation—during the period from 1950 to 1970. The Bureau operated as a geopolitical agent attempting to implement a universalized model of river basin development, but encountered continuous difficulties in the form of political and biophysical contingencies. The Bureau’s efforts, centred on the basin as the most appropriate unit of development, were consistently undercut by scale-making projects related to global and regional geopolitical concerns. The research concludes that understandings of the technopolitics of development interventions would benefit from a closer engagement with recent discussions regarding the construction of spatial scale within political geography and related fields. River basin development and its material transformation of multiple locales remains one of the largely neglected, but vitally important, legacies of Cold War geopolitics.     

BorderCrossings

Using the notion of a "geopolitics of mobility" this paper argues that international borders are more porous to capital than to displaced bodies. Juxtaposing these two levels of mobility generates two distinct but related geographies. Mobility is also theorized by seeing how colonial, Cold War, and ethno-nationalist struggles have shaped people's histories of migration, and by examining displaced groups in a context cognizant of both cultural and political difference as well as material relations of power. Focusing on the relationship between Europe and the Horn of Africa, especially movement of Somali peoples, the paper shows that a colonialism of derision has been transformed into a colonialism of compassion.     

Backlash of the Free World: the US presence at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, 1962

The Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students brought an exceptional number of US citizens to Helsinki in the summer of 1962. The event was made important by the fact that it took place in neutral territory. Furthermore, this event briefly made Helsinki a centre of extensive Cold War operations. This article examines the background and impact of this festival in the larger context of the Cold War and international relations. The timing of the festival is especially intriguing, between two major Cold War confrontations, the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. However, instead of being an open conflict between warring parties, the festival reminds us of other conflicts of the cultural Cold War: it was waged through front organizations. Both the KGB and CIA were involved behind the scenes deploying their representatives and trying to impact the Finns' – but also the other festival delegates' – thinking, and win them over to their respective causes. This article exploits both Finnish and American archival sources, mostly intelligence reports from the festival. Apart from the festival in Helsinki, therefore, this article illustrates the way in which Finland was subjected to political and cultural influencing by the superpowers during the height of the Cold War.     

近十年来美英两国学术界冷战史研究述评

冷战主宰了20世纪后半期的国际政治。在后冷战时期,许多国家的学者利用新获得的档案资料来仔细考察和重新评估冷战史。自从冷战国际史项目于1991年在伍德罗.威尔逊国际学者中心建立以来,冷战国际史这一概念,已经被广为接受。根据相关英文文献,对过去十年美英两国冷战史研究新发展、新动向以及冷战史研究现状,做一总结归纳。主要涉及以下几个方面:美国的主要冷战研究中心、研究冷战的资料来源和新的研究方法、学者们关注的热点问题及最新研究成果的介绍、英国冷战研究概况等。     

冷战时期美国对埃塞俄比亚的政策演变——以卡格纽通讯站为中心的历史考察

冷战两极格局的形成促使美国把非洲之角纳入其大中东战略,并选择与埃塞俄比亚结为军事防御联盟,其中作为主要纽带的卡格纽通讯站就是两国关系的晴雨表。美国政府主要根据对该基地的战略需要程度决定对埃塞俄比亚军事援助的规模与速度。而埃塞俄比亚皇帝塞拉西以稳定政权统治及应对周边威胁为根本目标,将之视为向美国索取更多军事援助的筹码。随着美苏关系的缓和、卫星技术的突破以及迪戈加西亚军事基地的兴建,卡格纽通讯站的作用迅速下降,美埃(塞)关系处于崩溃边缘。然而,由于苏联大规模介入非洲之角以及埃塞俄比亚革命的爆发,美国转而强调埃(塞)的地缘战略意义,并在加速运送已承诺的军事援助基础上采取了观望政策。最终,门格斯图革命政权因意识形态以及急需大量武器以应对来自厄立特里亚和索马里的威胁,而选择了苏东集团,与美国的联盟关系随之破裂。     

Looking back: a quarter of a century after the Cold War

This special issue of Cold War History offers a retrospective on the end of the Cold War, 25 years after its peaceful conclusion. This peaceful conclusion is an achievement that cannot be celebrated enough, and we must continue to build international relations in conflict and co-operation on this awareness of our common humanity and our common human fallibility.     

Command Centre Bjorn: the conflict heritage of a Swedish Cold War military installation

This text presents the results of a contemporary archaeological investigation of an important Swedish Cold War installation, Command Centre Bjorn. This centre was connected to the Air Force Attack Squadron and together with the coastal artillery and the navy it constituted a crucial part of the Swedish defence efforts during the Cold War period. The text also discusses questions concerning heritage processes, and it stresses that a contemporary archaeology approach can contribute with new insights into the Cold War and its heritage in Sweden, as well as canalize and offer guidance to the huge public interest in the material remains from this period in Sweden.     

Social conflict and the global Cold War

This article offers a critical assessment of Fred Halliday's theorization of the Cold War and, in particular, his attempt to offer a more global perspective on it through a greater focus on the role of developments emanating from the Third World as constitutive of the Cold War. The author argues that although Halliday's theorization of the Cold War as ‘inter‐systemic conflict’ is a major advance in our understanding of the Cold War—through the attention it pays to the causal linkages between capitalist development and imperialism, revolutionary transformations and superpower geopolitical confrontations—it fails, ultimately, to fulfil its potential as a theory of global Cold War. Halliday's temporalization of the Cold War and his insistence on the autonomy of the superpower arms race and strategic competition end up detaching developments in the Third World from the axis of superpower conflict and, consequently, suggests a residual Eurocentrism within his theory. The article begins by contextualizing the wider theorization of the Cold War and the (absence) place of the Third World in it. It then proceeds to assess critically Halliday's conceptualization of the Third World in the Cold War. The final section outlines an alternative theoretical framework for a theory of global Cold War that builds on elements of inter‐systemic conflict focused on how geopolitical confrontations involving the superpowers derived from the revolutionary consequences of uneven capitalist development.     

Cold War Heritage and the Conservation of Military Remains in Yorkshire 1

Over the last few years there has been a growing interest in the future of military remains created in the UK since 1945. This interest has been sparked by debates that have taken place in archaeology, heritage management and conservation. Our purpose in this article is to intersect with these discussions and practice in a number of ways. First the article sets the discussion of Cold War military sites into the wider context of the rise of military archaeology and heritage conservation more generally. Second, it reviews some of the literature relating to Cold War heritage, both in terms of land management and reuse, but more centrally as a potential national heritage asset. Third, it outlines how this potential asset is managed currently within the heritage protection system and the heritage challenges posed by these remains, particularly the attempts which have been made to incorporate them into a mainstream heritage agenda. Finally, the paper considers the successes and limitations of heritage conservation strategies, under the auspices of the Cold War Monuments Protection Programme (MPP).     

International Relations after the Cold War

This article, based on Adam Roberts's valedictory lecture as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, reconsiders the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War. It argues that a key to understanding these developments is acceptance of pluralism—of theories, of political systems, of cultures, of methods of analysis, and of academic disciplines. Pluralism in at least some of these senses is a recognized strength of International Relations studies in the UK. The long tradition of acceptance of a plural international system, and a plural approach to understanding it, includes figures as varied as John Stuart Mill, Maxim Litvinoff, Alastair Buchan and Hedley Bull. The end of the Cold War was the result of a plural mix of factors: both force and diplomacy; both pressure and détente; both belief and disbelief in the reformability of communism; both civil resistance in some countries and guerrilla resistance in others; both elite action and street politics; both nuclear deterrence and the ideas of some of its critics; both threat and reassurance; both nationalism in the disparate parts of the Soviet empire and supranationalism in the European Community. Paradoxically, the specialists in politics and International Relations who came closest to foreseeing the end of the Cold War were those who made few if any claims to a ‘scientific’ approach, and whose idea of forecasting was based, at the very most, on Mill's modest concept of ‘a certain order of possible progress’. Since the end of the Cold War, simplistic interpretations of how it ended have contributed to narrow understandings of international order. The spirit of imposed universalism having fed from Moscow, has flourished as never before in its other favourite haunt, Washington DC. There is a need to recognize the plurality of perspectives that endure in the post‐Cold War world.     

Norwegian and Soviet/Russian World War II Memory Policy During the Cold War and the Post-Soviet Years

Abstract

World War II has played a significant role in using “memory” in all kind of “memory politics” in Europe as well as in the USA. Using examples from Norway and the Soviet Union, later the Russian Republic, this article shows how successfully, but also how contradictorily, historical events can be used as memory politics. We will also see what “memory culture” and “memory policy” is predominant in circumpolar Norway and the Soviet Union/Russia after World War II. We are introduced to the concept of “memory agents”, the producers and directors of “memory politics”. The case is first and foremost the battle of Narvik in Norway in the spring of 1940. We also take a look at the circumpolar borderland between Norway and the Soviet Union during World War II, where the German “Gebirgsjäger” from the Narvik front regrouped and continued their assault on Soviet Union in Murmansk County from the summer of 1941. In what way were the war events useful in the post war era, and how could they directly affect Soviet–Norwegian relations during the Cold War? In addition we ask how memories contributed to the justification of different approaches to the foreign policy in both countries. Besides, the article demonstrates how the memory policy of World War II was affected after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in Norway and Russia, respectively.     

Italy and Yugoslavia: from distrust to friendship in Cold War Europe

Considering the relations of two neighbouring countries with a difficult past and separated by ideological barriers, this article takes a look at the relations between Italy and Yugoslavia in a long perspective during the Cold War. The aim is to portray the development of relations from enmity after the Second World War to good neighbourly relations in Cold War Europe. Including new archival sources of Yugoslav origin, the article shows how mutual relations between Italy and Yugoslavia developed, considering the importance of economic factors, political ambitions, but also the impact of diplomatic agents and political leaders for cooperation on the Adriatic. Taking the international environment into account, the article shows that many developments leading to détente in Europe had indeed their precursors on the Adriatic. This makes the development of relations between Italy and Yugoslavia a success story during the Cold War which has hitherto not been thoroughly acknowledged in historiography.     

美国“国家安全国家”的创生

1940年代中期至1950年代末,冷战对美国国家构建产生了重大深远的影响:一种全新的现代美国国家形态——"国家安全国家"——在"为总体冷战而进行总体准备"的过程中被塑造出来。国家安全国家构成对美国主流政治传统的重大偏离,其创生、扩张和演进是冷战时期美国国家构建和总体政治变迁的重要方面。它不仅涉及联邦政府组织体制和对外政策决策程序的重组,也涉及国家和社会关系的重构。国家安全国家的中枢制度和标志是国家安全委员会,其经历的持续变动体现了国家安全国家与"帝王式总统权"之间存在复杂的共生和互动关系。在更广阔的历史背景中,国家安全国家的重大意义在于它与"福利国家"和"管理型国家"共同构成20世纪美国国家构建和国家扩张长期运动的三个基本向度。     

Two flags in the sand: anti-Communism in early Cold War Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article reveals how the Cold War impinged upon not just national, but local political considerations and became woven into communal narratives. It contributes to the examination of religion in the conflict, adds to the historiography of Britain and the Cold War, and provides a context by which British Cold War experience and responses can be assessed. With Northern Ireland’s political similarities to Great Britain, its consistency with European norms and its overlaps with popular sentiment in the United States, Northern Ireland offers a gauge to better understand the nature of anti-Communism in the Cold War’s first decade and offers an unexplored perspective on the conflict.