Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Grassroots Level ◽  
The Cold War

The introduction lays out the main theme, argument, and structure of the book. It states that this study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations during the early Cold War. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the Cold War used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally accepted among contemporary policymakers. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of the gradual convergence between idealism and realism. A transnational politics of peace succeeded only when idealist objectives met the needs of realist political ambition. It maps three dynamic arenas that together shaped the global discourse on peace: Cold War states, nongovernmental peace advocacy groups, and anticolonial liberationists. The gradual development of a politics of peace at the grassroots level paved the way for a more pragmatic politics of peace among political leaders. The politicization of peace thus both obstructed and advanced the cause of peace.

The Politics of Peace

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Peace Activists ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations during the early Cold War. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the Cold War used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally accepted among contemporary policymakers. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of a gradual convergence between idealism and realism. A transnational politics of peace succeeded only when idealist objectives met the needs of realist political ambition. It maps three dynamic arenas that together shaped the global discourse on peace: Cold War states, peace advocacy groups, and anticolonial liberationists. The thematic focus on peace moves transnationally where transnational discourses on peace emerged. It reveals the transnational networks that challenged and eventually undermined the Cold War order. It deterritorializes the Cold War by revealing the multiple divides that emerged within each Cold War camp, as peace activists challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace, and also challenged each other over the best strategy. The Politics of Peace assumes a global perspective once peace advocates confronted the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. It thus demonstrates that the Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Peace Activists ◽  
International Discourse ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Cold War

The conclusion reformulates the central question of the book, how a politics of peace became a major international current in the early 1970s. It briefly summaries the findings of the previous chapters, tracing the trajectory of the international discourse on peace from the idealism of transnational peace advocacy groups to the practical pragmatism in the highest echelons of power politics. It reiterates the central thesis that peace, while on the surface a disarmingly simple and direct notion, became a major political weapon in the Cold War battles between the two superpowers, as well as between grassroots peace activists and political leaders. Nongovernmental peace advocates eventually succeeded in convincing political leaders of the benefits of peaceful cooperation, but along the way they lost the support of grassroots activists, who became highly polarized, and whose more radical wings turned toward violence by the end of the 1960s.

Cold War consumption and the marketing of childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
The Cold War

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.

Morale

Sanitized Sex ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kramm
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
White Community ◽  
Guidance Programs ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
The Cold War

The global legacy of moral reform, its intersection with social hygienic knowledge, and its impact on the Cold War is the main theme of chapter 4. It analyzes sex education and character-guidance programs, a terrain in which moral reformers and social hygienists clashed but occasionally also cooperated, which incorporated specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community building that American Cold War ideology popularized and military educators propagated to occupation personnel. Secondly, chapter 4 discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol, who vividly represented the revolutionary changes of democratizing Japan but was also perceived as incarnation of moral and social decay.

Sense and Nonsense in Politics

1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (04) ◽  
pp. 573-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin Surkin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
New Generation

I take my cue for the title of this paper from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, who wrote in 1948 that “the political experience of the past thirty years oblige us to evoke the background of non-sense against which every universal undertaking is silhouetted and by which it is threatened with failure.” Merleau-Ponty refers to the experience of that generation of intellectuals for whom Marxism was a “mistaken hope” because it lost “confidence in its own daring when it was successful in only one country.” But this criticism is equally relevant for a new generation of intellectuals in America for whom the ideals of liberalism have been emptied of reality and have become little more than a super-rational mystique for the Cold War, a counter-revolutionary reflex in the third world, and a narrow perspective of social welfare at home. Merleau-Ponty argues that Marxism “abandoned its own proletarian methods and resumed the classical ones of history: hierarchy, obedience, myth, inequality, diplomacy, and police. Today intellectuals in America are making the same critique with equal fervor about their own lost illusions.As we search for new ways to comprehend the social realities of American life and new modes of social thought and political action to reconstruct “the American dream,” Merleau-Ponty's notion of sense and nonsense guides us to see the historical relationship between ideologies and practice, between thought and action, between man and the world he creates. It symbolizes that recurrent fact in history whereby reason parades as unreason, where even “the highest form of reason borders on unreason.” We must learn from recent history that “the experience of unreason cannot simply be forgotten;” that the most noble claims to universal truth, the most rational modes of philosophical or social inquiry, the most convincing declarations of political leaders are all contingent, and should be subject to revision and open to criticism and change.

The Chilean Moment in the Global Cold War: International Reactions to Salvador Allende's Victory in the Presidential Election of 1970

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-55
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Salvador Allende ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Cold War ◽  
East West ◽  
Different Parts

This article discusses the reactions of governments and political leaders around the world to the victory of Salvador Allende in the Chilean presidential election of 1970—reactions that were shaped by a combination of ideological considerations, the diplomatic interests of particular states in the context of the Cold War, and an image of Chilean democratic exceptionalism purveyed by Chilean diplomats and largely assumed by a surprising number of people abroad. Reactions to Allende's victory in 1970 reflected the ideological divisions in Chilean politics as well as the tensions and anxieties of an international order that was then beginning to experience a series of significant changes as a result of the East-West détente. Paradoxically, Allende's ideological foreign policy, one of the main reasons for which his election was both dreaded and welcomed in different parts of the world, foretold some of the changes that would take place in the international system in the 1970s.

scholarly journals Introduction: Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-347
Author(s):  
Carolien Stolte
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Horizontal Connections ◽  
Global Moment ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Across 1950s Afro-Asia, the ongoing process of political decolonization occurred in tandem with increased connection between the local, the regional, and the global. A variety of internationalist movements emerged, much more polyphonic than the voices of the political leaders who had gathered at the Bandung Conference. Trade union networks played a particularly important role not just in organizing labor but in connecting local unions to regional and global ones. These networks were held together by exchanges between local African and Asian trade unions and large international federations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. But they were held together at least as much by more horizontal connections in pursuit of Afro-Asian solidarity. Many of the latter built on anti-imperialist alliances, revived or reconstituted, dating back to the interwar years. A focus on the trade-union internationalism of the period can recover a “chronology of possibility” in early Cold War Afro-Asia that has since become obscured by the internationalist failings of the 1960s. It also demonstrates the limited analytical value of the term “non-alignment” for the broader Afro-Asian moment during the early years of the Cold War. Instead, it recasts the 1950s as a global moment for Afro-Asia, in which internationalists built networks that were elastic enough to encompass a wide variety of actors and ideas and resistant enough to withstand the pressure of bodies larger and more powerful.

scholarly journals Paradox of humanitarian intervention: A critical analysis of theory and practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Tadelech Bubamo Welde ◽  
Baiq L. S. W. Wardhani
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, thoughtlessness act in conducting ‘humanitarian interventions’ has posed analytical challenges for international relations academicians. Traditional security advocators have tried to distinguished implications of ‘humanitarianism’ based on their interest and how it helps state in regaining the outcome. This research identified motivation of state in conducting humanitarian intervention. There are growing studies, as expressed by the constructivist, that humanitarianism is states’ political weapon that shifted the involvement patterns of policymakers and actors in humanitarian interventions. On the other hand, primary criticism from realism stressed economic and political ambition behind humanitarian interventions and makes it impossible to be moral, ethical, and cosmopolitan. The objective of this study is to examine the practices, motives, and challenges of humanitarian interventions. Data gathered from published books and journals selected through rigorous analysis. The research finds that the failure of humanitarian interventions indicates the following: First, humanitarian interventions requires expensive cost in people’s life and other resources. Moreover, there is a moral obligation to save the victims.  Second, actors are engaged to operate the mission and has limited right to demonstrate their self-interest to protect the victims. Third is the issue of sovereignty and the subjected state’s willingness to integrate. To overcome the problem, government should promote global governance transformation and the cosmopolitanism nature between actors.

scholarly journals Identity and Secession: The Case of the Secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-97
Author(s):  
D. V. Efremenko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Identity Transformations

The secessions of Slovenia and Croatia – two interrelated and interdependent processes – put an end to the existence of the socialist federal Yugoslavia. The article examines the mutual influence of the identity transformations of the Slovenes and Croats in the second half of the 1980s – early 1990s and the disintegration of the SFRY. Historical and cultural background, the influence of socio-political conditions and the purposeful efforts of key actors to transform identities are analyzed. It is shown that the main vector of changes in the identity of Slovenes and Croats in the second half of the 1980s – early 1990s favored secessions, but they were not predetermined. The influence of external factors was very strong, including, firstly, changes in the political landscape of Serbia and their echoes in the structures of power at the federal level, and, secondly, the approaching collapse of the political regime in the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe, and also the end of the Cold War. The actions of political leaders were of particular importance for the transformations in the sphere of identity. Thanks to their efforts, the secessionist strategies strongly affected the identities of Slovenes and Croats. But in Croatia, with the coming to power of F. Tudjman and the Croatian Democratic Union, practically the entire system of government bodies began to function in the regime of a “nationalizing state” (R. Brubaker).

Afterword

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Wai-Siam Hee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

There are both continuities and rupture points in the cultural production of Singaporean and Malayan Chinese-language film before and during the Cold War. Before, appeals to Chineseness were the main theme of Chinese-language cinema, as New Friend and Wu Cun’s three films embodied weakening appeals to Chineseness. During the Cold War, the theme of how Chinese identity could survive began to replace the assumed default of Chineseness in Malayanised Chinese-language film. Retreating from the battlefield of Chineseness to defend the Chinese language became the greatest common denominator in maintaining Chinese identity. Anglo-American anti-communist films, from the MFU to Hollywood, regarded Chineseness as a S.E. Asian extension of Chinese communism and regarded Chinese identity as Chinese chauvinism. This cultural production attempted to fabricate a Chinese ethnic identity, while simultaneously interpellating the local identity of Singaporean and Malayan Chinese people: bidding farewell to being ‘neither Malayan nor Chinese’ and moving towards a nationalist discourse under which Chinese people would assimilate with Malays. This created a rupture between Singaporean and Malayan Chinese people and their Chinese historical identity, and with Chinese nationalism. The cultural production of Malayanised Chinese-language cinema was a response to this assimilationist nationalist discourse. On the surface, the singing and dancing in these films seemed to gloss over the chaotic reality of Chinese marginalisation during the Malayan Emergency, but in reality they apply the strength of the contemporary discourse of independence and self-government in order to secretly support Third-World anti-imperialist, anti-colonial idealism....

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