The Archbishop of York and Anglo–American RelationsDuring the Second World War and Early Cold War, 1942–1955

This article addresses the relationship which developed during the Second World War and first decade of Cold War between the Foreign Office and one of Britain's leading Anglican clerics, Cyril Forster Garbett, archbishop of York 1942–55, widely respected as a liberal and the "conscience of the nation." It offers a model case study of relations between church and state by drawing upon state papers as well as upon ecclesiastical ones. It illustrates how religion was a crucial propaganda tool, advocating the defence of Western civilization and Christianity against first the paganism of Nazi Germany and then the atheism of Soviet Russia. Garbett's evolution from a domestic cleric concerned with social deprivation to an ecclesiastic statesman and Cold Warrior, reveals the significance of the religious component in Anglo–American relations. The presentation of the alliance as a crusade bonded together the two nations despite the differing political outlooks of their respective peoples.     

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.     

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.