Indonesia-US Relations, 1949–1999

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Strategic Imperative ◽  
The Cold War

The US relationship with the Republic of Indonesia has gone through three distinct phases. From 1945 until 1966 Indonesia’s politics and foreign policy were driven by the imperatives of decolonization and nation building, dominated by its founding President Sukarno and cleaved by bitter rivalry between secular political forces, regional movements, Islamic parties and organizations, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the armed forces. In the aftermath of the September 30th Movement, an alleged coup by the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party), under the leadership of General Suharto, launched a campaign of mass murder in which hundreds of thousands of alleged Communists were killed and Sukarno ousted. Suharto would rule Indonesia for the next thirty-two years (1966 to 1998). With the Cold War inside Indonesia effectively over and a staunchly anti-Communist and pro-US regime in power, US-Indonesian relations entered a long period of what one might call authoritarian development in which US officials focused on political stability, supported the military’s heavy involvement in politics, encouraged pro-Western investment and development policies, and sought to downplay growing criticism of Suharto’s abysmal record on human rights, democracy, corruption, and the environment. The end of the Cold War reduced the strategic imperative of backing authoritarian rule in Indonesia, and over the course of the 1990s domestic opposition to Suharto steadily built among moderate Islamic forces, human rights and women’s activists, environmental campaigners, and a burgeoning pro-democracy movement. The Asian financial crisis, which began in the summer of 1997, accelerated the forces undermining Suharto’s rule, forcing his resignation in May 1998 and inaugurating a third phase of formally democratic politics, which continues to the 21st century. Since 1998 US policy has focused on regional economic and security cooperation, counterterrorism, trade relations, and countering the growing regional power of China.

Tony goes out into the world: The official travels abroad of the President of Czechoslovakia, Antonín Novotný (1953–68)

2021 ◽  
pp. 002252662110314
Author(s):  
Pavel Mücke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
The World ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

The long-term First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and later also President of the Republic, Antonín Novotný (1904–75), was popularly known as “Nice Tony”. As a communist politician and statesman, Novotný was well known as a great disciple and follower of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, famous for his personal and very contact-oriented diplomacy. The main contours of several of Novotný's official visits have already been analysed from political and diplomatic history perspectives. Based on archival research and available memoirs, this article tries to reconstruct the still non-visible and unknown view of transport history and, consequently, traveling and tourism history. It outlines the general contours and several aspects of V.I.P. communists’ international travels on the cases of several trips abroad which took place during the 1950s and 1960s of the Cold War era.

scholarly journals ‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations1

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-337
Author(s):  
Mark Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Union Leader ◽  
British Trade ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.

Beneš-Stalin-Roosevelt-Truman

1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Roucek
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Internal Affairs ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

The year of 1948 was one of the most critical ones of the postwar period. The presence of the Cold War could no longer be denied. Berlin was under Soviet blockade; Yugoslavia had broken with the Cominform; in elections in Italy it was feared that the Italian Communist party would be widely successful; France was in the grip of Communist-inspired workers’ strikes; Mao Tse-Tung was triumphing in China. Above all, Czechoslovakia, a country which had enjoyed real democracy from its birth in 1918, until the tragic Munich Agreement in 1938, where its people treasured political and personal freedom above everything else, and at the same time entertained the friendliest possible feelings towards the Russians, lost its democracy and became a Soviet satellite with the connivance of Moscow. Dr. Eduard Beneš, who had returned to his country, via Moscow, as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and who had been promised by Stalin and Molotov, on several occasions, that they would not interfere with the internal affairs of his country, lost his power to Gottwald and his communist group while Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, who “happened” to be in Prague at the critical moment on a trade mission, supervised the transfer of power to the new masters of Czechoslovakia.

Serbia and Croatia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filip Ejdus
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Small States ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Defence Strategy ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
National Defence

During the cold war, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was a middle-sized power pursuing a non-aligned foreign policy and a defence strategy based on massive armed forces, obligatory conscription, and a doctrine of ‘Total National Defence’. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s resulted in the creation of several small states. Ever since, their defence policies and armed forces have been undergoing a thorough transformation. This chapter provides an analysis of the defence transformation of the two biggest post-Yugoslav states—Serbia and Croatia—since the end of the cold war. During the 1990s, defence transformation in both states was shaped by the undemocratic nature of their regimes and war. Ever since they started democratic transition in 2000, and in spite of their diverging foreign policies, both states have pivoted towards building modern, professional, interoperable, and democratically controlled armed forces capable of tackling both traditional and emerging threats.

Italy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Coticchia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
First Century ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the bipolar era, Italy has regularly undertaken military interventions around the world, with an average of 8,000 units employed abroad in the twenty-first century. Moreover, Italy is one of the principal contributors to the UN operations. The end of the cold war represented a turning point for Italian defence, allowing for greater military dynamism. Several reforms have been approved, while public opinion changed its view regarding the armed forces. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive perspective of the process of transformation that occurred in post-cold-war Italian defence, looking at the evolution of national strategies, military doctrines, and the structure of forces. After a brief literature review, the study highlights the process of transformation of Italian defeshnce policy since 1989. Through primary and secondary sources, the chapter illustrates the main changes that occurred, the never-ending cold-war legacies, and key challenges.

The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
National Defence

The armed forces of Europe have undergone a dramatic transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces provides the first comprehensive analysis of national security and defence policies, strategies, doctrines, capabilities, and military operations, as well as the alliances and partnerships of European armed forces in response to the security challenges Europe has faced since the end of the cold war. A truly cross-European comparison of the evolution of national defence policies and armed forces remains a notable blind spot in the existing literature. This Handbook aims to fill this gap with fifty-one contributions on European defence and international security from around the world. The six parts focus on: country-based assessments of the evolution of the national defence policies of Europe’s major, medium, and lesser powers since the end of the cold war; the alliances and security partnerships developed by European states to cooperate in the provision of national security; the security challenges faced by European states and their armed forces, ranging from interstate through intra-state and transnational; the national security strategies and doctrines developed in response to these challenges; the military capabilities, and the underlying defence and technological industrial base, brought to bear to support national strategies and doctrines; and, finally, the national or multilateral military operations by European armed forces. The contributions to The Handbook collectively demonstrate the fruitfulness of giving analytical precedence back to the comparative study of national defence policies and armed forces across Europe.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

The Soviet Factor in the US-China Military-Technical Cooperation during the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Cooperation ◽  
Arms Sales ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.

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