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.     

The Cultural Cold War

Book reviewed:
Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? London, Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003. xvi + 328 pp. Illustrations, index. $115.00 (cloth).     

The Old Cold War

James McAllister . No Exit: America and the German Problem , 1943 – 1954 . Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 2002 . vii+264 . Index and bibliography. $ .     

Churchill's Cold War: The Search for a Summit Meeting

Klaus Larres , Churchill's Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy . Yale University Press : New Haven and London , 2002 . 608 pp. $ .     

The Cold War in retrospect

The Cambridge history of the Cold War is a three‐volume work by 75 contributors, mostly from the United States and the United Kingdom, and is intended as ‘a substantial work of reference’ on the subject. The bulk of the text deals, in frequently overlapping chapters, with the main protagonists of the conflict—viz. the United States, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China—and the areas in which they clashed. At the same time, it aims to go ‘far beyond the narrow boundaries of diplomatic affairs’, although it is not always successful in doing so. In analysing the origins of the Cold War, the contributors pay perhaps too much attention to ideology as opposed to geopolitics, a flaw which is made easier by the absence of sufficient historical background. On the other hand, the duration of the conflict and the failure of various attempts at détente is more successfully explained in terms of the zero‐sum game nature of the conflict and its progressive extension from Europe across the rest of the world. When it comes to the end of the Cold War, the overall conclusion is that this came about through both a shift in the international balance of power following the Sino‐Soviet split and the political and economic problems of the Soviet bloc. It is generally agreed that Mikhail Gorbachev's willingness to abandon old shibboleths both at home and abroad was a major factor in bringing about the end of the conflict. The three volumes, while not always an easy read, are the outcome of considerable research and expertise in both primary and secondary sources and will repay careful study.     

Constructing a Cold War Peace

Book reviewed in this article:
Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963     

Beyond Continents,Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia,Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment

While historians are paying greater attention to the role of the post-colonial Third World in international affairs, there is a tendency to focus on North–South relations and the discourse of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Relying principally on Yugoslav and Algerian archival sources, this paper re-emphasises the dynamic historicity of ‘Third Worldism’ and the significance of ‘South–South’ connections. It explores the evolution of the Third World movement in the decade following Bandung, when smaller countries and non-state movements exerted greater influence while larger actors, such as India and China, quarrelled. The founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961 represented a victory for smaller actors who took a more provocative and subversive approach to international relations, to the extent that NAM was a means for the weak to wage the cold war on their terms. Over the following half-decade, Non-Alignment supplanted Afro-Asianism as the primary organisational concept for the Third World, confirming that the Third World was a political project with a potentially unbounded membership rather than the expression of a non-Western, non-white identity.     

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.     

Inside a Cold War Insider

H. W. Brands, Jr. Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918–1961 .