The End of Ideology Thesis

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Brick
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Politics ◽  
Second World ◽  
Intense Debate

The idea that ‘Western’ politics had witnessed a post-Second World War ‘end of ideology’ carried great weight among mid-twentieth-century liberal European and US intellectuals. Almost as soon as this idea was broadcast, however, it became the object of intense debate: what represented to some a welcome reprieve from ‘extreme’ and destructive political doctrines (‘isms’), and the conflict between them, struck others as an order of complacency that stifled vigorous political debate and meaningful visions of a better future. It remains exceedingly difficult to locate a clear meaning to the phrase, ‘the end of ideology’. Nonetheless, the most prevalent definition aligned it with a very moderate social-democratic perspective that was anti-Communist and allied with anti-Soviet Cold War policies, dedicated to the promise of the postwar ‘welfare state’ (in a ‘left-liberal’ sense that dismissed ideologies of free-market efficiency), and tinged with a culturally conservative disposition that was suspicious of disruptive protest movements and avant-garde culture.

‘Communism Is a Religion That Is Inspired, Directed and Motivated by the Devil Himself’: Billy Graham’s Apologetics and the Cold War West

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Uta Andrea Balbier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
End Times ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

Anti-Communism constituted a core feature of Billy Graham’s preaching in the 1950s. In Graham’s sermons Communism did not just stand for the anti-religious thread of an atheistic ideology, as it was traditionally used in Protestant Fundamentalist circles, but also for its opposition to American freedom and Free Market Capitalism. This article argues that the term Communism took on significantly new meaning in the evangelical milieu after the Second World War, indicating the new evangelicals’ ambition to restore, defend, and strengthen Christianity by linking it into the discourse on American Cold War patriotism. This article will contrast the anti-Communist rhetoric of Billy Graham and other leading evangelical figures of the 1950s, such as Harold Ockenga, with the anti-Communist rhetoric used by early Fundamentalists in the 1910s and 1920s. Back then, Communism was predominantly interpreted as a genuine threat to Christianity. The term also made appearances in eschatological interpretations regarding the imminent end-times. The more secular interpretation of Communism as a political and economic counter-offer by evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham will be discussed as an important indicator of the politicization and implied secularization of the evangelical milieu after the Second World War.

scholarly journals CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND HUNGARY AT THE BRUSSELS EXPO OF 1958- NATIONALISM IN THE DISPLAY OF SOCIALIST MODERNITY AND THE GLOBAL CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE COLD WAR.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkaprabha Pal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Man ◽  
Small Countries ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The Brussels EXPO of 1958 was envisioned by its organisers as a platform to renew the intellectual, spiritual and moral powers of humanism after the horrors of the Second World War. In its post-War setting, it aimed to promote the new Man by crossing the anxious binaries of Cold War politics. In reality, however, it fed on these very anxieties with the USA and USSR using art, technology, architectural designs to further the propaganda of their respective competing antagonistic political worldview. But, some small countries like the Soviet satellite states of Czechoslovakia and Hungary made a significant impact through their pavilions on the millions of visitors. The death of Stalin in 1953 followed by the comparatively liberal policies of Khrushchev and the consequent political disturbances in Hungary and, political reforms in Czechoslovakia determined the content and styling of the pavilions at the Expo. Both the countries marked a shift from socialist realism and posited themselves through art, architecture or technological displays which were more abstract, innovative, individualistic, existential, humanistic and even avant-garde. Moreover, the local, regional, ethnic and even the national were strongly emphasized in the pavilions, some of which at times were bereft of the traditional symbolism of a socialist state. The emphasis on the national illustrated the contradictions in the ideology and action of politics in these east and central European countries in the light of the post-Stalinist era. These contradictions, not only helped to realign the dominance of socialism internally, but had global implications and intentions in the cultural Cold War, which were played out through the content and styling of the pavilions at the expo in Brussels.

Restoring Four-Power Rights, Reviving a Confederation in 1989

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
World War ◽  
German States ◽  
Divided Germany ◽  
Second World ◽  
Restoration Model

This chapter examines the Soviet restoration model and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's revivalist model. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) hoped to use its weight as a victor in the Second World War to restore the old quadripartite mechanism of four-power control exactly as it used to be in 1945, before subsequent layers of Cold War modifications created room for German contributions. This restoration model, which called for the reuse of the old Allied Control Commission to dominate all further proceedings in divided Germany, represented a realist vision of politics run by powerful states, each retaining their own sociopolitical order and pursuing their own interests. Meanwhile, Kohl's revivalist model represented the revival, or adaptive reuse, of a confederation of German states. This latter-day “confederationism” blurred the lines of state sovereignty; each of the two twenty-first-century Germanies would maintain its own political and social order, but the two would share a confederative, national roof.

scholarly journals Programa Bracero y Guerra Fría: auge y declive, 1942–1964

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Catherine Vézina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Context ◽  
World War ◽  
Bracero Program ◽  
Agricultural Work ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Second World

El Programa Bracero, creado por Estados Unidos y México en 1942 durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se mantuvo hasta 1964. Los estudios sobre este programa señalan la importancia de los intereses domésticos de Estados Unidos para explicar la longevidad del mismo. El presente artículo se enfoca en los factores estratégicos propios de la lógica de la Guerra Fría que intervinieron en la decisión de mantener o cancelar este programa bilateral de trabajo temporal agrícola. Mediante un examen atento sobre la época del auge y del declive del programa, se replantean estos debates dentro del contexto nacional, pero también bilateral y panamericano. The Bracero Program, created by the United States and Mexico during the Second World War, survived until 1964. Studies that look at this program generally signal the importance of domestic factors in the United States to explain its longevity. This article analyzes dynamics of Cold War logic that played a role in the decision of whether to maintain or cancel this bilateral program for migratory agricultural work. By carefully examining the rise and fall of the program, these debates are reconsidered within a national context, as well as one that is bilateral and Pan-American.

scholarly journals Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
World War ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

scholarly journals Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors: Enmity and ethics in Just War Cinema

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Finlay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

AbstractHow do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between thejus ad bellumand thejus in bellothat anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Planner ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Archives ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Second World

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New Order ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.

Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: the Two Germanies, 1949–1961

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
German States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.

scholarly journals Nexos entre México y Europa Centro-Oriental

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Mónika Szente-Varga
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Archive ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Second World

The first diplomatic and consular relations were established between Mexico and the Habsburg Empire in the 1800 s, motivated basically by commerdal reasons and dynastic interests. These got to an abrupt end with the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Querétaro in 1867, and diplomatic relations were resumed only decades later, in 1901, which is, in fact, our starting point. This essay examines the development of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Central-Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 20'' centuiy until nowadays. It is divided into chronological chapters, where we study bilateral relations in the coordinates of the following periods: beginning of the century, the period between the two world wars, the Second World War, Cold War and recent years. The investigation in based on documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico (SRE-AHD) and of the Hungarian National Archive (MOL).

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