Containing containment: rethinking Italy's experience during the Cold War

This article examines the impact of the Cold War on the Italian political system. It compares the relations of the two main Italian parties - the DC and the PCI - with their external interlocutors and allies - the USA and the USSR - during the first decade of the Cold War. By doing so, the article rejects traditional interpretations of how post-Second World War international constraints limited Italy's sovereignty. It argues instead that the main Italian pro-western party, the Christian Democrats, deliberately opted for a policy of containment of American pressures. Such a policy was functional to the twin objectives of consolidating DC hegemony, and safeguarding Italy's new republican constitution.     

American Red Cross posters and the cultural politics of motherhood in World War I

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.     

Feminism,Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.     

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.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Protagonists and politics in the Italian women's movement: a reflection on the work of Annarita Buttafuoco

This article retraces Annarita Buttafuoco's work as a historian of the women's political movement in Italy through a brief survey of her essays and books. These covered more than two centuries of history, ranging from the echoes of the French Revolution in Italy and the constitution of the Jacobin Republics to the struggles for female suffrage and emancipation in the liberal era down to the period after the Second World War and the founding of the Italian Republic. Emphasizing the originality of both the sources and the methodological approaches she used, the article offers a critical appreciation of Annarita Buttafuoco's research and her role in organizing and shaping collective research projects. It is focused on three specific issues: the history of women as conscious historical subjects, the history of women's political movements not only in their social and political contexts but also in relation to institutional networks and the practices of citizenship.     

Italy and the World Bank: The European Foundations of Development Lending, 1947–51

Foreign financial assistance for economic development and the discipline of development economics have traditionally been associated with US Cold War policy toward the Third World. This article, however, suggests that these practices were also shaped by the experiences of foreign aid for European reconstruction after the Second World War. The article traces loan negotiations between the World Bank and the Italian government, and argues that this process played a substantial role in shaping not only the World Bank's lending policies, but also the way its staff understood the institution's mission. The article emphasises Europe's significance as a site in the early history of development, suggesting new ways of understanding the evolution of development ideas, practices, and institutions after 1951.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

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.     

Corvalán for Bukovsky: a real exchange of prisoners during an imaginary war. The Chilean dictatorship,the Soviet Union,and US mediation, 1973–1976

Based on Chilean, Soviet, American, and Italian declassified documents, this article examines a particular case in the global Cold War: the only international exchange of political prisoners during that period, involving the general secretary of the Chilean Communist Party Luis Corvalán and Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. It emphasises the intersecting agendas, purposes, and consequences of multiple state and non-state actors in this episode: from the governments of Chile, the US, and the USSR, to the Chilean Communist Party, the Soviet dissident movement, and finally to the European communist parties, Cuba, international solidarity, and human rights movements.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

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.     

The Cold War as history

Jonathan Haslam's Russia's Cold War is the latest effort by a western scholar to synthesize new research and findings on the Soviet role in the Cold War. Citing an array of published Russian archival material, Haslam seeks to resuscitate the traditional western Cold War view that the conflict was the inevitable result of communist expansionism. However, the material cited by Haslam does not support such a conclusion and he ignores conflicting evidence and views. The Cold War was a war of choice not necessity, the result of distorted perceptions and calculations by both sides, aided and abetted by generations of ideologically aligned historians.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.     

Confronting a Disciplinary Blindness: Women,War and Rape in the International Politics of Security

Much of the debate surrounding the inclusion of women in the study of international politics, particularly in reflections of war, promotes passive representation. State-sanctioned images of non-combatant women in supportive wartime roles reflect, rather than confront, traditional conceptualisations of 'legitimate knowledge' and ways of knowing. Therefore, estimates that 30,000 women were raped during the war in Bosnia shocked the international community. Yet it shouldn't. War rape is as old as war itself. This article looks at why, and how, traditional forms of theorising about international politics fails to identify or vocalise the violent insecurities of women in domestic and international space, thus ensuring women's silence. It also draws on alternative ways of knowing to confront the tradition and to un/recover the experiences of women.     

From Cowards and Subversives to Aggressors and Questionable Allies: US Army Perceptions of Zionism since World War I

For most of the twentieth century, the attitudes and policies of the US army were consistently anti-Zionist. From World War I into the 1950s, army anti-Zionism was inextricably interrelated with a mutually reinforcing anti-Semitism that ranged from political and ethnic bias to extremist versions of biological racial and conspiratorial thinking. Army officers perceived Zionist objectives in the Middle East as detrimental to America's national interest regarding wartime security and geopolitical stability in a crucial region, as well as concerning oil resources and communist containment. In supporting Zionism and later Israel, America Jews revealed their suspected disloyalty. Although anti-Semitic concepts gradually disappeared from official army analyses, striking continuities remained in the army's anti-Zionist position. Until the end of the Cold War, the army rejected the “special relationship” argument based upon shared values or Israel as a military asset. The image of the cowardly, weak Jew incapable of establishing and defending a Jewish state in Palestine had been replaced by that of a militarily superior, potentially aggressive Israel destabilizing a strategic area.     

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.     

International History and International Relations Theory: A Dialogue Beyond the Cold War

Until recently, there has been little 'real' dialogue in Cold War studies between International Relations theorists and international historians. In many ways this is not surprising. For the most part, International Relations theorists took the Cold War as an immutable feature of the international system. Historians did indeed seek to explain the outbreak of the Cold War and the historic features that had given rise to American hegemony and Soviet opposition, but they did so primarily by concentrating largely on archival and related research with only limited attention given to the bigger issues of the Cold War world. However, as the article demonstrates, a dialogue between historians and theorists over some key aspects of the Cold War, such as the role of ideology, is now timely. The evolution of both a broader conception of International History, as well as the partial opening of communist archives and a range of new developments in International Relations, means that it is now possible to 'rethink' the Cold War using both history and International Relations theory.     

Women and Alcohol Consumption in Fascist Italy

This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention; alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames.     

Rethinking the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and its Inter‐American Regional Organization

In responding to the impact of corporate globalization on the working class, the trade union movement needs not only to rethink its strategies, but also to review its international organization. This article highlights changes in the labour market such as the increase in unemployment, deregulation, informality, the stronger presence of women, and the issue of child labour. In this context, the article goes on to consider the growing social movements that might form alliances with trade unions for social change. The present international confederations of trade unions—the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the World Confederation of Labor (WCL), and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)—were profoundly engaged in the cold war. Their structure today, particularly that of the ICFTU, is the same as 50 years ago. The ICFTU's structure mirrors the Leninist model of centralized direction practiced by its traditional opponent, the WFTU. Many national confederations resisted this East‐West pressure during the Cold War, and chose to stay outside all of the international confederations. Post‐Cold War, most have elected to become members of the ICFTU, believing it to be a democratic space for an open political debate, and in the hope of reform. However, expected change has been slow to materialize. This paper explores the way in which changes already made in the Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT) might shape ongoing discussions in the ICFTU.