Birth control,population control,and family planning: an overview

This overview of the US birth control movement reflects on the emergence of family planning policy due to the efforts of Margaret Sanger, feminists, and the civil rights movement, the eugenics motive to limit "deviant" populations, and the population control movement, which aims to solve social and economic problems through fertility control. Population control moved through three stages: from the cause of "voluntary motherhood" to advance suffrage and women's political and social status, to the concept of "birth control" promoted by socialist feminists to help empower women and the working class, to, from 1920 on, a liberal movement for civil rights and population control. Physicians such as Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson legitimized the movement in the formation of the Committee on Maternal Health in 1925, but the movement remained divided until 1939, when Sanger's group merged with the American Birth Control League, the predecessor of the present Planned Parenthood Federation of America. A key legal decision in 1939 in the United States v. One Package amended the Comstock Act and allowed for the distribution of birth control devices by mail to physicians. Sanger, after a brief retirement, formed the International Planned Parenthood Federation and supported research into the pill. Eugenicists through the Committee on Maternal Health supported Christopher Tietze and others developing the pill. Final constitutional access to contraception based on the right to privacy was granted in Griswold v. Connecticut. The ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972 extended this right to unmarried persons. The right to privacy was further extended in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 on legal abortion. The argument for improving the quality of the population remained from the formation of the Population Reference Bureau in 1929 through the 1960s. Under the leadership of Rockefeller, population control was defined as justified on a scientific and humanitarian basis. US government support for national and international family planning proceeded slowly through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Congress during 1967-70 enacted strong legislation in support of national and international family planning. The Bucharest conference in 1974 highlighted the inadequacies of international population control that deemphasized economic development. Polarization and divisiveness on population policy persists.     

Translated fronts: songs of socialist cosmopolitanism in Cold War India

Throughout the Cold War, India maintained a policy of non-alignment, first in relation to China and later in relation to the US and USSR. This policy allowed India to receive support from both superpowers during the Cold War, and bolstered Jawaharlal Nehru’s efforts to craft a secular nation that would modernize rapidly along socialist lines. As is inevitably the case, reality proved more complicated than policy. The political context became messy, and myriad translations of socialism in regional contexts pulled at the seams of Nehru’s dream, particularly in the rural areas he sought to modernize through dams, irrigation projects, and infrastructural development. In this paper, I interrogate Cold War socialism at its highly translated margins through the work of Sant Tukdoji Maharaj, a singer-saint from rural Eastern Maharashtra whose influence was local, national, and international. Tukdoji was many things to many people: a devotional singer, a Gandhian, a champion of progressive land reform, an international spokesperson for World Peace, and a supporter of nuclear defence at the Chinese and Pakistani fronts. Tukdoji’s music absorbed influences from beyond rural Maharashtra, but many of his songs obscure the depth of his international political engagements and the complexity of his intersecting ideologies. Through close readings of his songs and writings, this article explores how Tukdoji Maharaj adapted cosmopolitan political ideas to particular contexts, crafting each cultural translation to be optimally intelligible and impactful for a given audience.     

Mother,Child, Race,Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption

‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transracial adoption, which became the subject of debate in the USA during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and were at least as much about symbolic debates over race as the fate of particular children. Together, these visual and familial practices made US foreign and domestic poverty policy intelligible as a debate over whether to save women and children. When they cast the USA as rescuer, they made it all but impossible to understand what US political, military or economic power had to do with creating the problem.     

试论布什政府对华政策的调整

美国布什政府对华政策的调整是冷战结束期间美国对外战略调整的一个重要方面.布什当政的四年是美国政府对华政策调整的四年,这一调整过程大致经历了四个阶段.在调整中布什政府对华政策的演变呈现出六大特点一是过程前起后伏;二是目标为演变和遏制中国;三是出发点着眼于长期性和全面性;四是政策的矛盾性;五是突出了人权政策;六是表现出政治问题经济化和经济问题政治化.导致布什政府调整对华政策的直接原因是“六·四”风波,但是,冷战的结束及因此而造成的美国战略利益的转变,才是布什政府改变对华政策的根本动因.     

THE GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS?

The engagement of Swedish industry in the Liberian American–Swedish Minerals Company (LAMCO), which mined iron in Liberia between 1963 and 1989, was the largest Swedish commercial investment in Africa during the Cold War. In this paper I investigate how political and administrative actors of the Swedish government conceptualized the link between private and public interests in the context of LAMCO’s operations, and how this shaped Swedish government policy towards the company and Liberia. I identify two phases: a phase of almost unanimous political support for LAMCO and close Swedish–Liberian relations from ca. 1955 to 1965, and a more fragmented phase following 1965, during which LAMCO was increasingly understood as a political liability. My findings show how business interests could figure into Swedish foreign policy during the Cold War, highlighting the coherence with which Swedish industry and government acted in relation to the commercial interests in Liberia before ca. 1965, but also the lack of coherence – between government and industry as well as within the state apparatus – that followed the turn to a more activist policy after the mid-1960s.     

Containment and territorial transnational actors: Israel,Hezbollah and Hamas

Containment has been salient in intellectual and policy debates for 60 years. It informed US foreign policy towards the USSR and, later, the so‐called rogue states. The endurance of containment beyond the Cold War suggests that it possesses the quality of transferability, the capacity of a grand strategy from the past to transcend the circumstances that gave rise to it, to suggest what should be emulated and what avoided in future policies. Drawing on the notion of transferability and on the method of structured, focused comparison, this article uses Israel's foreign policy towards Hezbollah and Hamas to argue that containment is transferable from the state level to a state/territorial transnational actor (TNA) relationship, albeit with permutations. This argument is examined in relation to four issues: the circumstances under which containment arises; its applicability to territorial TNA; the objectives sought by implementing containment; and the role of legitimacy as a component of containment. In so doing the article seeks to make a contribution to the debate on containment. While there is a rich literature on state containment, research on containing territorial TNA has been extremely limited.     

The birth control movement before Roe v. Wade

This essay synthesizes the history of the birth control movement in the US and describes changes in sexual behavior, social values, and public policy in order to provide a context for the changes in human reproductive public policy. After an introduction, the essay outlines the history of contraception from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Part 3 covers the period of World War I to the Depression when civil libertarians and eugenicists began to question the suppression of contraception and Margaret Sanger organized her clinics. The fourth part of the essay carries the history forward to the end of World War II, a period in which Dr. Clarence J. Gamble began to expose the marketing of defective contraceptive methods and to illustrate the willingness of poor women to accept contraceptives. The social changes which began in the 1950s are the subject of the fifth section of the essay. During this period, Roman Catholic opposition to contraception lessened, and social scientists began to focus world attention on overpopulation. Frank Notestein was appointed the first head of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, and John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council which conducted research into the IUD and began to attempt to influence population growth in nonindustrialized countries. This period also saw the development of the oral contraceptive. The changes of this era were institutionalized in 1967 when the federal government took a positive stance towards family planning in its Social Security Amendments. The decade of the 1970s is the subject of the last part of this essay. This period saw the Supreme Court assign a constitutionally protected right to abortion and Congress pass the Helms Amendment which denied the use of foreign aid funds for abortions. Challenges to the right to individual birth control practice continued during this period, and debate centered around the specter of overpopulation, the threat of adolescent pregnancy, and perceptions of "family values."     

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.     

US grand strategy and national security: the dilemmas of primacy,decline and denial

The foreign policy crises that the USA has confronted under the administration of President Barack Obama have generated profound uncertainty about whether the USA can maintain what has been its consistent grand strategy since the end of the Cold War: primacy. The authors argue, drawing on a neoclassical realist framework, that this uncertainty has been driven not so much by fundamental changes in the international system itself, but rather by how such changes have been interpreted by the Obama administration and its critics. US grand strategy is now caught between approaches best described as the ‘decline management’ of the Obama administration and the ‘decline denial’ of president Donald Trump, which reflects the fracturing of the domestic ‘political support system’ that has underpinned primacy since the end of the Cold War.     

The American system: US foreign and domestic politics since the Second World War

Historians, like politicians, need to find a language and frame of reference to connect with their audience or readership. In the current US presidential campaign the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, are offering the voters a bridge between the troubled past and a more hopeful future. The works under consideration in this review article employ a similar method. All the authors share the widely held view of the broad shape of US foreign relations since the Second World War, in particular the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War followed by the more amorphous attempt to maintain American primacy, which has characterized the last two decades. Throughout this longer period the processes and goals of US foreign policy have been controversial: there has not, of course, been complete consensus. One topic which was and remains debated is the role and value of individuals, either high‐level politicians or senior diplomats, in the conduct of foreign policy. Another area of debate, often fierce argument, is the impact of domestic forces upon policy‐making. In the present case the leading example is provided by the amalgam of influences which determine US policy towards that nexus of competing interests often optimistically short‐handed as the Arab–Israeli peace process. One link between these two topics is the role of the US in multilateral bodies; and American actions within the United Nations and towards other international organizations are also examined. These and other related issues are contextualized geographically through an examination of American policies in the Greater Middle East, in particular the predominantly Muslim states which stretch eastwards from Egypt to India. While not providing a partisan political programme for the incoming president to follow, the collective message of these texts offers guidelines, even injunctions for the future conduct of US foreign policy.     

Neutrality challenged in a cold war conflict: Switzerland,the International Committee of the Red Cross,and the Angolan War

The Swiss government’s actions in Angola in the 1970s highlight its aim to improve the credibility of its neutrality policy in Southern Africa, which was greatly challenged in the global Cold War context. Drawing on Swiss, US, British, and International Committee of the Red Cross archival sources, this paper argues that the Swiss authorities’ participation in the relief mission of the ICRC during the Angolan War permitted them to benefit from this organisation’s good image. Switzerland’s early recognition of the People’s Republic of Angola was closely coordinated with European political leaders and underlines the country’s increased independence from Washington during Détente.     

‘Playing Cold War politics’: the cold war in Anglo-Kenyan relations in the 1960s

Kenya has rarely been considered a major Cold War battleground, becoming linked with Britain and the Western side, even whilst being publicly committed to non-alignment and African Socialism. Nonetheless, the Cold War offered opportunities for Kenya’s newly independent leaders. It was utilised in factional political debates between Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga. In the late 1960s, leading Kenyans around President Jomo Kenyatta used Cold War rhetoric and rivalries to bargain to their advantage with the British over arms sales. British policy-makers offered concessions as they worked to build and then maintain their position as Kenya’s closest foreign partner.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

Globalising the US Christian Right: Transnational Interchange During the Cold War

This article investigates the Cold War era efforts by self-identified Christian fundamentalists in the United States to export their political agendas and their methodologies of exerting political pressure to the rest of the world. It focuses on the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), the era's only worldwide interdenominational association by Protestant Christian fundamentalists, founded by North Americans in 1948 but functioning through autonomous regional and national councils on all continents. The article shows that US fundamentalists affiliated with the ICCC were systematically trying to create a global Christian Right from the beginning of the Cold War, but that their initial agenda – anticommunism coupled with free enterprise capitalism – failed to gain widespread support among their allies abroad. Central in moving both the US and the global fundamentalist community into the politics of morality instead were the ICCC's Northern and Western Europeans, who first had to grapple with and suffered defeats over the moral issues that came to cohere the modern Christian Right – abortion, gay rights, religious instruction versus sex education in schools, free circulation of pornography and threats to the traditional marriage. Through a synthesis of originally European agendas and US-derived methods this politics of morality was significantly globalised already during the Cold War.     

Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumerism in Postcolonial Ghana, 1960–70

This article uses the 1967 Ideal Home Exhibition in Accra as a window onto understanding connections between gender and consumerism in postcolonial Ghana. Drawing upon newspapers, comics and novels, it argues that the home was placed at the centre of national debates about economic recovery and political stability. Major goals of attracting Western investors and building Ghana's private sector simultaneously promoted conservative gender roles and restrictions on consumer behaviour. Cultural stereotypes targeting the consumption habits of women and youth intensified in the postcolonial period, masking larger issues like unstable wages, increasing foreign debts, high costs of living and government corruption.     

Aligning the Non-Aligned: a re-interpretation of why and how Sweden was granted access to US military materiel in the early Cold War, 1948–1952

The article argues that previous research into how Sweden came to be eligible to purchase armaments in the United States in the early Cold War has misread the historical evidence. Instead of there being a change in US policy in early 1950, as has been argued by several Cold War scholars, this article states that it was the incremental changes of Sweden’s security policy that eventually made the US government view the Swedes as possible non-aligned allies in the Cold War. The difference is crucial. The Swedish adherence to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) embargo is a critical factor when trying to understand the perceived change in the US policy, because this was a confirmation of the Swedish consent to US hegemony in Western Europe. Furthermore, this article argues that, contrary to what prior research has assumed, it was never part of US policy to get Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT or NATO later). The evidence for assuming that this was ever a US policy objective is simply lacking. The article thus presents a much needed re-evaluation of US–Swedish security relations during the late 1940s and early 1950s.     

Innovation and precedent in the Kosovo war: the impact of Operation Allied Force on US foreign policy

The 1990s was a period of strategic innovation in US foreign policy. Operation Allied Force in particular represented an important step in the contorted evolution of America's attitude towards the use of force in the post-Cold War period. That operation demonstrated the growing influence of humanitarian concerns and the extent to which America was willing to reconsider Cold War criteria on the prudence and utility of force in support of its foreign policy. In its decision to intervene in Kosovo, the Clinton administration also divided opinion among the military. This, in effect, reduced the premium placed on the counsels of the armed forces and made it easier for the Bush administration subsequently to ignore their advice. Furthermore, having fought the war multilaterally through NATO, Operation Allied Force made America more wary of doing so again. In other words, the intervention set a number of precedents and left a significant legacy for the way in which US foreign policy was pursued in the decade that followed. This legacy is considered in two parts: the first analyses those issues associated with the use of force debate; the second considers how the Kosovo experience affected US attitudes to coalition warfare.     

United States reactions to empire,colonialism, and cold war in Black Africa, 1949–57

United States interest in and involvement with Black Africa under colonial rule began in the immediate years following the Second World War when Africa was seen primarily as an adjunct to European recovery with economic requirements predominating. When the continent assumed political importance for American Cold War policy, Washington began to grapple with the dilemma of winning African support and preserving the alliance with European colonial powers. The African dimension was seen as having future significance in the Cold War while the Atlantic alliance served present Cold and hot war planning needs. After a brief attempt to portray colonialism in a positive Cold War light and develop a more independent policy, Washington reverted to working with the colonial powers towards implementing the common goals of self-government. It was defined in the latter part of the first Eisenhower administration as providing the best political compromise in the Cold War while offering the prospect of mutually profitable relations with dependent African countries.     

The perils of a trade-first US foreign policy

The end of the Cold War, the advent of globalisation, and new horizons in trade theory, all seem to point out to the need for a new American economic strategy. Indeed, for many they beg for the implementation of economism as the new US foreign policy doctrine. The managed trade policy (1993-1996) of forcibly opening foreign markets for the benefit of corporate America showed much of what is wrong with a trade-first agenda in foreign affairs: it accomplished nothing in terms of economic gain while creating dangerous spillovers into other foreign policy areas--such as political and security bilateral relationships--thus endangering the broader goals of US foreign policy. A foreign policy that puts trade at the top of the agenda is unwarranted, probably unsustainable, and ultimately counterproductive. Moreover, it is hardly the most important tool by which the economic wellbeing of most Americans can be enhanced. The return of low productivity figures and a slowing American economy may well rekindle calls for a policy of managed trade. Such calls must be rejected and the lessons of the recent past must be heeded.     

The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.