Fugitive Leverage: Commercial Banks, Sovereign Debt, and Cold War Crisis in Poland, 1980–1982

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRITZ BARTEL
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Commercial Banks ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
Financial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Communist Countries

This article examines a familiar Cold War event, the Polish Crisis of the early 1980s, but from an unfamiliar perspective: international financial history. Historians have yet to examine how the growing international activity of Western commercial banks and the Eastern Bloc’s heavy borrowing on international capital markets during the 1970s influenced the course of the late Cold War. This article covers the history of the Eastern Bloc’s largest borrower—Poland—and its road to sovereign default in 1981. It examines how financial diplomacy among banks, communist countries, and the U.S. government catalyzed the formation of the labor union Solidarność (Solidarity). Ultimately, this article speaks to an important theme in the history of U.S. capitalism since World War II; namely, how the construction of global finance influenced U.S. foreign policy. The end of the Cold War in the fall of 1989 was the result not only of communism’s loss of legitimacy among the peoples of Eastern Europe, but also its loss of creditworthiness on global financial markets.

scholarly journals Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

Polish Sovietology in the Lead-up to the Cold War

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-193
Author(s):  
Richard Pipes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, some of the closest study of the new Communist regime and Soviet state was conducted by Polish scholars, whose country had a long history of troubled relations with Russia. Polish scholars had long been studying the Tsarist regime, but the advent of Soviet rule forced major adjustments. Some of the literature that emerged in Poland about the Soviet Union was perceptive, but other works were warped by anti-Semitism and an obsession with alleged Bolshevik-Judeo conspiracies. By the time of World War II, a substantial body of expertise about the USSR had accumulated in Poland. The war and the subsequent establishment of Soviet hegemony largely brought an end to this tradition, which could not truly be revived until after 1989.

Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
World War ◽  
American Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Carnegie Institution Of Washington ◽  
Emotional Dimensions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Scientific Identity

This essay brings together and builds upon histories of cold war American science and studies of objectivity, scientific personae, and the self by exploring the physicist Merle A. Tuve‘s career in the late 1940s and 1950s as a history of selfhood and the emotional dimensions of scientific identity. As director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II, Tuve followed a convoluted path through the institutions, politics, identities, and sensibilities of science in the cold war, and he struggled to preserve a sense of meaning and identity centered on the humanistic and aesthetic possibilities of scientific inquiry in an era of rapidly growing instrumentalism. His predicament highlights not just the political and institutional shifts within postwar science, but also the intricate entanglements between feeling, selfhood, and the cold war order.

Americanists in Unexpected Places

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”

Population Studies and Genetics in Mexico during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Barahona
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Energy ◽  
Human Genetics ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Although their history can be traced further back to the study of heredity, variability, and evolution at the beginnings of the 20th century, studies on the genetic structure and ancestry of human populations became important at the end of World War II. From 1950 onward, the tools and practices of human genetics were systematically used to attack global health problems with the support of international health organizations and the founding of local institutions that extended these practices, thus contributing to global knowledge. These developments were not an exception for Mexican physicians and human geneticists in the Cold War years. The first studies, which appeared in the 1940s, reflect the emerging model of human genetics in clinical practice and in scientific research in postwar Mexico. Studies on the distribution of blood groups as well as on variant forms of hemoglobin in indigenous populations paved the way for long-term research programs on the characterization of Mexican indigenous populations. Research groups were formed at the Ministry of Health, the National Commission of Nuclear Energy, and the Mexican Social Security Institute in the 1960s. The key actors in this narrative were Rubén Lisker, Alfonso León de Garay, and Salvador Armendares. They consolidated solid communities in the fields of population and human genetics. For Lisker, the long-term effort to carry out research on indigenous populations in order to provide insights into the biological history of the human species, disease patterns, and biological relationships among populations was of particular interest. Alfonso León de Garay was interested in studying human and Drosophila populations, but in a completely different context, namely at the intersection of studies on nuclear energy and its effects on human populations as a result of World War II, with the life sciences, particularly genetics and radiobiology. In parallel, the study of chromosomes on a large scale using newly experimental techniques introduced by Salvador Armendares in Mexico in 1960 allowed researchers to tackle child malnutrition and health problems caused by Down and Turner syndromes. The history of population studies and genetics during the Cold War in Mexico (1945–1970s) shows how the Mexican human geneticists of the mid-20th century mobilized scientific resources and laboratory practices in the context of international trends marked by WWII, and national priorities owing to the construction movement of postrevolutionary Mexican governments. These research programs were not limited to collaborations between research laboratories but were developed within the institutional and political framework marked at the international level by the postwar period and at the national level by the construction of the modern Mexican state.

Human Rights and History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micheline Ishay
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Political Purpose ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

As a focus of academic inquiry, human rights gained legitimacy only after World War II. While the subject received consistent attention within the field of international law, greater attention from other disciplines became more significant in the mid-1960s. Yet, it was after the Cold War, in the era of globalization, that human rights research became a well-entrenched interdisciplinary field. Even though no encompassing history of human rights was yet to be found in the late twentieth century, many important historical human rights studies had already appeared. Until the Cold War, the study of international relations had been grounded in efforts to integrate political theory and history. As ideological confrontation heightened during the Cold War, history became more descriptive, formalistic, and divorced from political theory, or from any normative or political purpose. With the end of the Cold War, the advance of globalization, the war on terror, and the current meltdown of the global economy, the past 20 years have sent a succession of electric shocks through the nervous system of the international order. The sense of being buffeted by unpredictable events stimulated new efforts to comprehend the direction of history, or, alternatively, to assert its timeless truths. Despite a significant body of enriching historical scholarship, however, it remains the case that both history and historiography have been widely overlooked, not only in the burgeoning human rights academic field, but also in most disciplines within the social sciences.

Jazz, Power, and Soviet Youth in the Early Cold War, 1948−1953

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gleb Tsipursky
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Competition ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Examining the history of jazz in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953, this essay sheds light on the role of popular music in the cultural competition of the early Cold War. While the Soviet authorities pursued a tolerant policy toward jazz during World War II because of its wartime alliance with the United States, the outbreak of the Cold War in the late 1940s led to a decisive turn against this music. The Communist Party condemned jazz as the music of the “foreign bourgeoisie,” instead calling for patriotic Soviet music. Building on previous studies of the complex fate of western music in the USSR during the postwar decades, this article highlights a previously unexamined youth counterculture of jazz enthusiasts, exploring the impact of anti-jazz initiatives on grassroots cultural institutions, on the everyday cultural practices of young people, and on the Cold War’s cultural front in the USSR. It relies on sources from central and regional archives, official publications, and memoirs, alongside oral interviews with jazz musicians and cultural officials.

Cold War Shadows of Japan’s Imperial Legacies for Women in East Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-675
Author(s):  
Kozue Akibayashi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Japan occupies a unique position in the history of East Asia as the sole non-Western colonial power. Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War that ended its colonial expansion did not bring justice to its former colonies. The Japanese leadership and people were spared from being held accountable for its invasion and colonial rule by the United States in its Cold War strategy to make post–World War II Japan a military outpost and bulwark in the region against communism. How then did the Cold War shape feminisms in Japan, a former colonizing force that never came to terms with its colonial violence? What was the impact of the Cold War on Japanese women’s movements for their own liberation? What are the implications for today? This article discusses the effects of Japan’s imperial legacies during the Cold War and the current aftermath with examples taken from the history of the women’s movement in Japan.

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