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.     

British policy and European reconstruction after the first World War

The paper relates the concept of a European political identity to the development of the European Community's foreign policy. After a brief review of the idea of political identity as it developed in Europe over the last five centuries, the paper relates this concept to that of liberal democracy. It then turns to the European Community and the growth of its foreign policy. It addresses two questions: Could the concept of political loyalty to a territorially defined identity be replaced by that of institutional loyalty to not one, but a variety of overlapping institutions? Secondly, can the development of the European Community's foreign policy contribute to the development of a European sense of identity? Two short case studies, one on Yugoslavia, and one on economic aid to Eastern Europe, illustrate recent European Community foreign policy. The paper concludes with some speculations as to the future European political system and its applicability to other parts of the world.     

Visions of My Youth: Representations of the Childhood of Medieval Visionaries

This article is based on visionary narratives and vitae of twenty‐seven female and thirteen male visionaries from Britain and Europe, from the late eleventh to the early fifteenth century. Across this chronological and geographical span, the differences between the childhood representations of male and female visionaries are shaped by prevailing beliefs about the nature of men and women. Male visionaries rarely include reminiscence of their childhood in their narratives, while women offer childhood memories relatively consistently. For male visionaries, childhood seems irrelevant in terms of their adult spirituality. For women, childhood reminiscences reaffirmed their association with the purity of virgin childhood.     

Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South-West Australia

This paper considers various aspects of the interactions of missions and indigenous peoples in regions of Canada and Australia. An analysis of first encounters indicates that the introduction of Christianity was dependent on both evangelist and client population agreeing to a modus operandi for the mission. The structure and operation of the mission were determined by the pre-existing indigenous society and the financial and personnel resources of the mission organizations. Attitudes towards, and acceptance of, Christianity were not static, they depended on changing material and political circumstances both within and outside indigenous communities. This comparative analysis indicates that religious change was not only negotiated between missionary and "convert," but among indigenous peoples themselves. The decision to profess Christianity was not a one-off decision made by individuals or communities. Rather it was a long process of change which was contingent on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the mission world and countervailingpressures from within indigenous and colonial societies.     

Folktales,Reality, and Childhood in Ethiopia: How Children Construct Social Values through Performance of Folktales

This article examines how Oromo-speaking children in Ethiopia construct social values in multiple ways through their participation in storytelling and the subsequent meaning-making discussions. By presenting children as actors in the re-contextualization of folktales, the article argues that participation in a folkloric performance is not a mere play practice for children, but is a social and artistic forum through which they acquire survival skills and grow connected to values of their society. This indicates that in the processes of storytelling and meaning-making, children draw an analogical relationship between imagined situations in folklore and living realities in their local environment. The article is based on data generated through ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with children among an Oromo-speaking society in Ethiopia.     

French and British Security: Mirror Images in a Globalized World

The French government is reassessing the whole basis on which it trains and equips its diplomats for their calling, driven by a growing perception that French diplomacy has not been performing well. The 'Heisbourg Report' on the state of French diplomacy pulled no punches and accused French diplomats of being closed to international influences, untrained for modern diplomacy and stifled by a state-centrist view of modern international relations. On the face of it this can all be interpreted as a milestone in an underlying convergence between Francophone and Anglophone approaches to modern diplomacy and security. In very important respects, however, Britain and France are mirror images of each other. What is defined here as mirror imaging can be seen to exist at three different levels which are self-reinforcing, though not in obvious ways: in the pros and cons of each others' policy-making style; in their inextricable fate to develop the European Security and Defence Policy project; and even at the most abstract levels in the predicaments they face in the light of globalization. Seen in this context, it is evident that it is not merely the skills and techniques of French and British policy-makers that need to be re-examined, but rather their way of thinking about their own state and about the nature of the international system around them in an era when globalization is symptomatic of deep structural change.     

The Australian Catholic Church and the Public Sphere: World Youth Day 2008*

World Youth Day 2008 was the largest public religious gathering in Australian history, which proudly celebrated Catholicism in the streets of Sydney. This article argues that the organization and outcomes of World Youth Day 2008 were significantly shaped by the perceptions of Catholic Church leaders and officials who were determined to present the Catholic Church as a powerful opponent of the trend toward secularization. The organizers of World Youth Day 2008 achieved significant success in overcoming the legacy of sectarianism, the fears of secularization, the problems of internal division and scandal, and distrust and suspicion in the media prior to the event. The event showed that the Catholic Church was very capable of negotiating the Australian public sphere, and successfully marketed an energized and inclusive brand of Catholicism to the broader public.