Decolonization and Neocolonialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1161-1186
Author(s):  
Stuart Ward
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Point Of Departure

Europe’s maritime empires unraveled at the intersection of the major upheavals of the twentieth century: the defeat of the Axis Powers, postwar reconstruction, and the onset of the Cold War. Conventionally labeled “decolonization,” the far-reaching implications of the term belie its surprisingly limited temporal and interpretative reach. This chapter examines the onset of decolonization and its neocolonial afterlife through the interplay of events, agencies, and the ideas that emerged to make sense of them. It takes its point of departure in the intellectual rumblings of the interwar years, culminating in the “Wind of Change” era in colonial Africa in the early 1960s—precisely the time when “decolonization” found a permanent foothold in the political lexicon. Significantly, no sooner had the term become common currency than its political antonym, “neocolonialism,” was promptly pressed into service. As such, the two phenomena were deeply implicated in each other’s formative historical context.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

“The Dilemma to a Free People”: Justice Robert Jackson, Walter Bagehot, and the Creation of a Conservative Jurisprudence

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
High Court ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Free Speech Rights ◽  
Free People ◽  
The U.S

Even today, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949) strikes students of constitutional law as a vexing factual situation. The problems the case posed for the High Court are all the more daunting considering its historical context, directly following the nation's confrontation with Nazism and standing on the cusp of the Cold War against Communism. In the broader view, most observers would locate the decision within the ascendance of liberal protection for free speech rights occurring over the second half of the twentieth century. But progressive accounts should not be allowed to mask the contemporary momentousness for the justices hearing the case. Indeed, in this constitutional conflict over the speech of a rabble-rousing priest was lodged a sober question about the polity's health at that time and the preferred response to the nation's need.

War Is Justiciable, Until It Isn’t

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Jasmine Farrier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
The Political ◽  
War Powers ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter demonstrates that courts were once comfortable entering into the fray when they have clear congressional guidelines about war authorization (private lawsuits) and when members of Congress press their claims through political as well as legal channels (Cambodia cases). It also shows that federal courts can have a place in war powers conflicts—and they did up through the mid-twentieth century, but only in individual plaintiff cases. Although no federal court has ever ordered a president to stop a war, there was once more comfort in judicial engagement in war-related constitutional questions, at least from the founding generation through the Civil War and beyond; the Cold War changed all three branches' orientations. Member litigation began during the Vietnam War out of frustration with imbalance of power that took permanent root in the Cold War and then remained in the political culture under new international pressures in the 1990s and after 9/11. The chapter then details the first two member cases surrounding the Vietnam War's expansion.

Tragedy and Irony

2021 ◽  
pp. 396-410
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Morris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyses Reinhold Niebuhr’s concepts of tragedy and irony. It explains how he defined these terms and identifies their place in his theological framework. Niebuhr identified the themes of tragedy and irony in his reflection on human nature, the crucifixion, and moral concepts such as sin, love, and justice. The chapter also explores his use of the terms within the context of twentieth-century global and domestic politics, highlighting his commentary on the Cold War, capitalism, and democracy in the United States. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the political tragedies and ironies Niebuhr identified are still with us today and that his concepts can be used to pursue the goals of his feminist, black, and Latinx critics.

State Failure and the Political Violence Phenomenon: A Comparative Analysis of Iraq and Syria Cases

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Failure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The concept of failed state came to the fore with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Political violence is central in these discussions on the definition of the concept or the determination of its dimensions (indicators). Specifically, the level of political violence, the type of political violence and intensity of political violence has been broached in the literature. An effective classification of political violence can lead us to a better understanding of state failure phenomenon. By using Tilly’s classification of collective violence which is based on extent of coordination among violent actors and salience of short-run damage, the role played by political violence in state failure can be understood clearly. In order to do this, two recent cases, Iraq and Syria will be examined.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

‘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.

Od politycznej współpracy do gospodarczej konkurencji – przemysł obronny krajów Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej po upadku ZSRR

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Szlachta ◽  
Andrzej Ciupiński
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Defense Industry ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Cold War

The paper presents the scope and scale of transformation of the defense industries of Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. The starting point is the role and position of the armaments economy sector (armaments economy environment), embedded in the realities of the centrally planned economy, and its submission to the politics of the USSR. The turn of the centuries was a period of political and economic transformation conducted during the conditions of a deep economic recession. The defense industry was one of the economic sectors most affected by the crisis. The economic and defense policy of CEE countries was aimed at preserving the capabilities of the armaments sector. Restructuring activities initiated and forced by the change of the political and economic environment have already brought noticeable effects, even though the process has not yet been completed. Defense industry enterprises have become entities operating on the same terms and conditions as other companies on the competitive market. The method of comparative analysis and a case study supplemented with elements of descriptive statistics were used to evaluate the course of the processes. The study has been focused on the analysis of the course of the changes and examination of effects of the analyzed phenomena for the economy and defense of the CEE countries, taking into account primarily their scale and scope.

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