Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany

This article investigates tensions and dynamics in global socialism through a focus on Tanzanian students in East Germany between the late 1950s and 1990. Disciplinary techniques partially known from Tanzania and everyday strategies of survival explain why most students complied with official requirements, but did not necessarily agree with East German ideological tenets. Additionally, throughout the decades, mobility across the Iron Curtain remained an important strategy to further own interests. The article concludes that an analytical framework spanning several decades and paying attention to dynamics in the country of origin sheds new light on agency and mobility among ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘South’ during the Cold War.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

The Commonwealth and South Africa: From Smuts to Mandela

The creation of modern South Africa as an independent unitary state within the British Empire (c. 1910) gave birth to the Commonwealth idea. Jan Smuts’s views on Commonwealth were formative and they continued to inform the evolution of the organisation until the end of the Second World War. Also significant was the role played by Afrikaner nationalist leader J. B. M. Hertzog, who exerted a critical influence on the 1926 Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster. At the point of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, the Commonwealth divided between new entrants, who cast South Africa as a pariah, and older member states who lamented the exit of a troubled family member. Even after South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, apartheid’s significance as the global exemplar of institutionalised racism and colonial rule helped to bind the Commonwealth as a multi-racial organisation with strongly defined ethical values. South Africa’s reintegration in 1994, with Nelson Mandela to the fore, was welcomed as a triumph for the Commonwealth. Paradoxically, however, this proved a pyrrhic victory and may actually have contributed to the Commonwealth’s state of indirection.     

British Policy Towards Military Cooperation with the Republic of South Africa, 1961–1975

The early 1960s were a turbulent time in South Africa; the Sharpeville Massacre provoked condemnation from the international community, which, with the acceleration of decolonisation, was turning increasingly against Pretoria. The decision to withdraw its re-application to the Commonwealth in October 1960 further isolated South Africa. Despite this, UK–South African military cooperation remained largely unaffected until the pivotal Simonstown Agreement's termination in 1975. This article explores this relationship and explains why British policy-makers consistently maintained links with an overtly racist regime. UK–South African military cooperation was persistently controversial and engendered frequent criticism from African members of the Commonwealth and from campaigning groups such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement, whose membership included Labour ministers. Concurrently, Pretoria was viewed as an important Cold War ally, particularly in the context of the build-up of Soviet naval incursions into the Indian Ocean from 1968 onwards. This article will analyse how British officials attempted to navigate its military relations with South Africa under such heated circumstances.     

‘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.     

Palace Fundamentalism and Liberal Democracy: Oil,Arms and Irrationality

With the end of the Cold War, some students of international affairs have suggested that the next field of conflict will be defined in cultural terms, between West and East, and particularly between liberal democracy and Islam. In this essay, it is argued that constructing a dichotomy between ‘rational’ Western democracy and ‘irrational’ Islam is not only dangerous but hypocritical. Support for the most backward and fanatical forms of Islamic fundamentalism has long been an element in the global geopolitical strategies of Western democracies. The trade in oil and arms has had particularly perverse social and political effects, which must be confronted in order to provide greater opportunities for the development of a modern civil society in the Arab world.     

‘Mightier Than Marx’: Hassoldt Davis and American Cold War Politics in Postwar Ivory Coast

ABSTRACT

Using the travels of Hassoldt Davis in Ivory Coast to explore the global Cold War in French West Africa in the 1950s, this article argues that the main line of confrontation in the postwar era did not always pit Americans against Russians. In many instances, the struggle for the mind and soul of Africans was between the Americans and the French. The study highlights the role of everyday technology in the expansion of the American informal empire. By focusing on Davis and the significance of low-tech artifacts, the article suggests that in our scrutiny of Cold War science/technology, we need to supplement the study of the various production regimes of consumer goods with a comparable research on consumption and how they mediated the daily battles of the era. Such approach not only underscores the historical reality of the ‘social life of things’, but also gives agency to non-state actors as both users of Cold War technoscience and as participants in the politics that informed its mobilization on the world stage. Besides bringing Francophone Africa in the historiography of US–Africa relations, the article demonstrates a convergence of vision among American consular agents, US transnational corporations and an idiosyncratic travel writer.     

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.     

In the National Interest: Dominions' Support for Britain and the Commonwealth after the Second World War

Was British confidence that the Commonwealth could bolster its international status and extend its global reach after the Second World War a product of self-delusion or nostalgia? This paper examines three crucial aspects of relations between Britain and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the 1940s – diplomacy, economics and defence – to show the extensive and tangible support that the ‘old dominions’ extended to Britain. They opted to back Britain because it served their individual national interests well. British hopes that the post-war Commonwealth would be an effective association were founded on ample evidence, although the British desire to lead and dominate was confounded by the fact that Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington and Pretoria were national centres in their own right.     

Atoms,apartheid, and the agency: South Africa's relations with the IAEA, 1957–1995

A founder member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), South Africa embarked on an ambitious nuclear weapons programme contrary to the IAEA Statute. Against the background of the Cold War, South Africa's threat perception included, amongst others, threats posed by the Soviet Union, which was a nuclear-armed state and a supporter of the banned South African liberation movements. Moreover, the South African government's apartheid policies resulted in the country's increased international isolation, which also affected its relations with the IAEA. A major global campaign to isolate the apartheid government in South Africa spilt over to the IAEA, resulting in several punitive actions against South Africa. Tracing the South African case through several phases, this article illustrates the intimate links between state identity, state ideology, nationalism, status, and threat perception. The South African case illustrates the need for sustained scholarship on all the dimensions of the Cold War.     

Campaigning Against Apartheid: The Rise,Fall and Legacies of the South Africa United Front 1960–1962

ABSTRACT

The international struggle against apartheid that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century made the system of legalised racial oppression in South Africa one of the world’s great moral causes. Looking back at the anti-apartheid struggle, a defining characteristic was the scope of the worldwide efforts to condemn, co-ordinate, and isolate the country. In March 1961, the international campaign against apartheid achieved its first major success when Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd chose to withdraw South Africa from the Commonwealth following vocal protests at the Heads of State Summit held in London. As a consequence, it appeared albeit briefly, that external pressure would effectively serve as a catalyst for achieving far-reaching and immediate political change in South Africa. The global campaign, centred on South Africa remaining in the Commonwealth, was the first of its kind launched by South Africa’s national liberation movements, and signalled the beginning of thirty years of continued protest and lobbying. The contributions from one organisation that had a role in launching and co-ordinating this particular transnational campaign, the South Africa United Front (SAUF), an alliance of liberation groups, have been largely forgotten. Leading members of the SAUF claimed the organisation had a key part in South Africa’s subsequent exit from the Commonwealth, and the purpose of this article is to explore the validity of such assertions, as well as the role and impact it had in generating a groundswell of opposition to apartheid in the early 1960s. Although the SAUF’s demands for South Africa to leave the Commonwealth were ultimately fulfilled, the documentary evidence suggests that its campaigning activities and impact were not a decisive factor; however the long-term significance of the SAUF, and the position it had in the rise of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) has not been fully recognised. As such, the events around the campaign for South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth act as a microcosm of developments that would define the international struggle against apartheid.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

From Russia with Love: Dissidents,Defectors and the Politics of Asylum in Cold War India

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War defectors were invariably paraded as propaganda trophies. The wider political significance of defections has hitherto been interrogated almost exclusively in an East–West binary. Utilising recently declassified documents from three continents, attention is focused on the elided role played by the developing world in the Cold War asylum story and, specifically, that of non-aligned India. By reinterpreting international responses to three Soviet defections that occurred in India in the 1960s, new light is shed upon political asylum as a source of North–South tension and discord.     

The German question in Jakarta Indonesia in West Germany’s foreign policy, 1955–65

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany’s relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of ‘anti-imperialism’. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the ‘Third World’, West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno’s increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies.     

“学生冷战”及其悖论——以国际学生大会为中心的探讨

第二次世界大战结束后,美苏两国在政治经济领域和地缘政治方面的矛盾和冲突频仍,冷战格局逐渐形成。在此过程中,以不同社会或文化属性为特征的跨国民众组织纷纷建立,并借助思想和文化的力量将裂痕延伸至民族国家内部,形成更为深度的东西方对峙样态。学生群体在这场冷战对抗中表现格外突出。以美国全国学联和国际学生大会为代表,跨国学生组织虽然参与到冷战政治对抗进程中,却并未完全遵循政府议事日程。学生组织的独立性和进步性使其始终与冷战政治保持距离,并成为促进冷战缓和乃至终结的重要力量。对“学生冷战”及其悖论展开探讨,有助于建立更加完整的冷战叙事,回应仍旧处于争议中的冷战史研究母课题。     

Amplified British Aviation Authority in Africa, 1947–1960: Regulation of Low-cost Overseas Airlines

ABSTRACT

Britain first exerted considerable civil and military aerial authority in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The occasional but striking presence of British pioneer pilots and aircraft was soon followed by formal agreements about Empire airbases, and operation of imperial airline service. During the Second World War, all British aviation resources in Africa were tailored to mobilising and executing military action. At the end of the War, Britain’s nationalised airline resumed scheduled commercial services to and from Africa. In the post-War Commonwealth there was demand for air services at lower prices than Britain’s flag-carrying airline offered. Private charter airlines provided long-haul but low-cost ‘trooping’ flights, ‘colonial coach’ passenger flights, and ‘tramp’ cargo flights, and consolidated and extended British aerial presence and influence in Africa. Mostly, London set and managed the regulatory regime under which they operated. Coloniality provided a key licensing element. In the 1950s, before widespread decolonisation, the authority for the least expensive long-haul flying across Africa vested in layers of complex regulation in Britain.     

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.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this article: International Relations theory Classical and modern thought in International Relations: from anarchy to cosmopolis. By Robert Jackson Human rights and ethics A new deal for the world: America's vision for human rights. By Elizabeth Borgwardt Planetary politics: human rights, terror and global society. Edited by Stephen Eric Bronner Protecting human rights: a comparative study. By Todd Landman The right war? The conservative debate on Iraq. Edited by Gary Rosen International law and organization The ‘war on terror’ and the framework of international law. By Helen Duffy The humanitarians: the International Committee of the Red Cross. By David P. Forsythe Irrelevant or indispensable? The United Nations in the twenty‐first century. Edited by Paul Heinbecker and Patricia Goff Denial of justice in international law. By Jan Paulsson Law in the service of human dignity: essays in honour of Florentino Feliciano. Edited by Steve Charnovitz, Debra P. Steger and Peter Van den Bossche Foreign policy British foreign policy under New Labour, 1997—2005. By Paul D. Williams Conflict, security and armed forces The utility of force: the art of war in the modern world. By General Sir Rupert Smith Electing to fight: why emerging democracies go to war. By Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder Al‐Qaeda now: understanding today's terrorists. Edited by Karen J. Greenberg Politics, democracy and social affairs Modernization, cultural change and democracy: the human development sequence. By Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel Globalization, governmentality and global politics: regulation for the rest of us? By Ronnie D. Lipschutz with James K. Rowe The coming democracy: new rules for running a new world. By Ann Florini Political economy, economics and development Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner History The global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times. By Odd Arne Westad History The Cold War. By John Lewis Gaddis British documents on the end of empire: Central Africa (parts I and II). Part I: Closer association, 1945–1958. Part II: Crisis and dissolution, 1959–1965. Edited by Philip Murphy Europe The Balkans in the new millennium: in the shadow of war and peace. By Tom Gallagher War and peace in the Balkans: the diplomacy of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. By Ian Oliver Perspectives on European development cooperation: policy and performance of individual donor countries and the EU. Edited by Paul Hoebink and Olav Stokke La politique étrangère de l'Union Européenne. By Romain Yakemtchouk Russia and Eurasia Russia's empires: their rise and fall from prehistory to Putin. By Philip Longworth Ukraine's Orange Revolution. By Andrew Wilson Middle East and North Africa Jordan: living in the crossfire. By Alan George Sub‐Saharan Africa Why Botswana prospered. By J. Clark Leith Season of hope: economic reform under Mandela and Mbeki. By Alan Hirsch Rethinking the labour movement in the ‘new South Africa’. Edited by Thomas Bramble and Franco Barchiesi State of the nation: South Africa 2005—2006. Edited by Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall and Jessica Lutchman A dirty war in West Africa: the RUF and the destruction of Sierra Leone. By Lansana Gberie Asia and Pacific The changing face of China: from Mao to market. By John Gittings Emerging democracy in Indonesia. By Aris Ananta, Evi Nurvidya Arifin and Leo Suryadinata The India—Pakistan conflict: an enduring rivalry. Edited by T. V. Paul Power shift: China and Asia's new dynamics. Edited by David Shambaugh North America Taming American power: the global response to US primacy. By Stephen M. Walt Quest for identity: America since 1945. By Randall Bennett Woods Latin America and Caribbean The judicialization of politics in Latin America. Edited by Alan Angell, Rachel Sieder and Line Schjolden US intervention in British Guiana: a Cold War story. By Stephen G. Rabe Transforming Latin America: the international and domestic origins of change. By Craig Arceneaux and David Pion‐Berlin     

The Neo-colonialism of Decolonisation: Katangan Secession and the Bringing of the Cold War to the Congo

The link between the Cold War and decolonisation is tackled by using the uniqueness of the complex Congo crisis and its neo-colonial elements, with a focus on agents and specific policies rather than theories and general themes. The ‘real’ Cold War is essentially defined as that followed by Kennedy, with its priority in the early 1960s, among the Cold War’s many different constituent elements, taken to be the winning of newly independent African nations to the socio-economic values and hoped-for developmental benefits of Western capitalism. The importance of using soft power to defeat the ideology of communism, as opposed to containing the allegedly expansionist Soviet aims in Africa, is highlighted. Clear distinctions are made between the Kennedy administration and those of Eisenhower and Johnson. Interpretations of decolonisation using the Congo’s particular neo-colonial circumstances have been rare, and interpretations of decolonisation in the Congo also require some qualification. In particular the role of the colonial state and its ‘partnership’ with private European enterprises, established under King Leopold, had economic consequences for the Belgian decolonisation process. The importance of the role of financial capital, as opposed to business interests simply represented through trade and industry, is emphasised. The role of the UN and its secretary general is also highlighted but not by using inaccurate perceptions of Hammarskjöld’s neutral Cold War stance. The different positions taken by the Belgians, the British and the Americans, embodying conflict and cooperation in different forms, are analysed at different times with the important consequences of the Belgian refusal to comply with UN Security Council Resolutions highlighted. The need to limit the damage from that and from the neo-colonialism of secession is analysed. Exaggerating the causal consequences of Soviet actions and accusing Lumumba, despite evidence to the contrary, of being a communist or vehicle for Soviet influence was what brought the Cold War to the Congo. The British refusal to do more than decline to support openly the neo-colonialism in Katanga, particularly by supporting action likely to end secession, threatened to damage relations with the US. Such action, which could have led to more military action, would have contributed to the success of US policy in the ‘real’ Cold War but at the expense of those British investors who were the main financial backers of the Conservative party.     

South Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–6

The Italo-Ethiopian War led to an extensive debate in the Union of South Africa about the future of the League of Nations’ system of collective security. The different political and social groupings in the dominion interpreted the meaning of the war for the Union from a diversity of perspectives. The Italian aggression in East Africa reverberated in the context of concurrent debates about the Union's position in relation to the British Empire. These debates were influenced by the tensions between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans but also by disagreement within the Afrikaner community about South African policies vis-à-vis the British Empire. The Afrikaner-dominated Union Government had to navigate between its commitments to the League on the one hand and criticism from the extreme nationalist Afrikaner opposition on the other, which claimed that South Africa's sovereignty was diminished by Britain's leading role in the League. As a mandatory power in South West Africa, the Union was also concerned to sustain League principles in order to safeguard its sub-imperialist aspirations on the continent. The public debates were strongly influenced by a discourse on ‘civilisation’, which not only reflected ambiguous views of the status of Ethiopia as a member of the League of Nations, but also raised questions about the stability of white hegemony in a segregationist state.