scholarly journals The Challenge of Western Neutralism during the Cold War: Britain and the Buildup of a Nigerian Air Force

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-128
Author(s):  
Marco Wyss
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Air Force ◽  
African Country ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
British Government ◽  
Military Assistance ◽  
Nigerian Government ◽  
German Air Force ◽  
The Cold War

In the wake of decolonization, Britain wanted to maintain its strategic interests in Nigeria and to keep the newly independent African country in the Western orbit. Having abrogated a defense agreement in reaction to Nigerian domestic opposition, the British government counted on military assistance to secure its postcolonial security role. The British thus hoped to gain responsibility for the buildup of a Nigerian air force, which the authorities in Lagos wished to establish for national prestige and protection against potential enemies such as Ghana. The Nigerians, however, first tried to secure the requisite assistance from Commonwealth countries other than Britain before opting for a West German air force mission. The Nigerian government aimed to reduce its dependence on Britain and thereby burnish its neutralist credentials. Yet London was challenged by a Western version of neutralism, similar to Western neutrality, because the Nigerians never attempted to approach the Soviet bloc about military assistance.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Denise Getchell
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Good Neighbor ◽  
The Cold War

This article reevaluates the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup is generally portrayed as the opening shot of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere and a watershed moment for U.S.–Latin American relations, when the United States supplanted its Good Neighbor Policy with a hardline anti-Communist approach. Despite the extensive literature on the coup, the Soviet Union's perspectives on the matter have received scant discussion. Using Soviet-bloc and United Nations (UN) archival sources, this article shows that Latin American Communists and Soviet sympathizers were hugely influential in shaping Moscow's perceptions of hemispheric relations. Although regional Communists petitioned the Soviet Union to provide support to Árbenz, officials in Moscow were unwilling to prop up what they considered a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution tottering under the weight of U.S. military pressure. Soviet leaders were, however, keen to use their position on the UN Security Council to challenge the authority of the Organization of American States and undermine U.S. conceptions of “hemispheric solidarity.” The coup, moreover, revealed the force of anti-U.S. nationalism in Latin America during a period in which Soviet foreign policy was in flux and the Cold War was becoming globalized.

Western welfare states watched from the East during the Cold War: condemnation, competition, and creative learning

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Inglot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The West ◽  
Creative Learning ◽  
The Cold War

This paper examines international influences of the Western welfare state on social policy ideas, institutions and reforms in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It identifies three types of Eastern reactions to or interactions with the West: “condemnation” of various “bourgeois” conceptions of social welfare; “competition” or increased attention to redistribution and social needs of the population stemming from the demonstrable successes of Western welfare states; and “creative learning” or implicit acknowledgment that every industrial society, including the Soviet style centrally planned economies, had to adopt at least some elements of modernized social welfare models or policy originally developed in the West. Paradoxically, first the explicit and later more implicit rejection of the Western welfare state, including the social-democratic and various “third way” models, eventually led to the rise of neoliberal and anti-welfare attitudes among many Eastern social policy reformers during the last decade of communist rule and beyond, after 1989.

Sweden, Europe, and the Cold War: A Reappraisal

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryo Makko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third World ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Traditionally, Sweden has been portrayed as an active bridge-builder in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The country advocated a “third way” toward democratic socialism and greater “justice” in international affairs, but these foreign policy prescriptions were never applied to European affairs. This article examines Sweden's relations with Europe by contrasting European integration with the Cold War. Negotiations on Swedish membership in the European Communities and Swedish policy at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were influenced by a general Berührungsangst toward Europe, which persisted during the years of détente. Because Swedish decision-makers believed that heavy involvement in European affairs would constrict Sweden's freedom of action, Swedish leaders' moral proclamations were applied exclusively to distant Third World countries rather than the egregious abuses of human rights in the Soviet bloc.

Interests Aligned but Not Integrated

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-150
Author(s):  
Howard G. Coombs
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Air Force Academy ◽  
Us Air Force ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores the inception of the USAF's two educational institutions: the Air University (AU), and the US Air Force Academy (USAFA). The chapter shows that the AU, building on the interwar experience of the ACTS (Air Corps Tactical School), was able as a graduate school to go beyond expectations by becoming a fertile hub for professional learning. Conversely USAFA by mirroring Army and Navy institutions, established an undergraduate school with a solid curriculum, if not innovative in its approach. Tied to the rise of an independent air force service, the establishment of AU and USAFA sponsored by important military figures such as Billy Mitchell and Dwight Eisenhower heralded the rise of airpower theory in the Cold War era.

Deconstructing the bomb: recent perspectives on nuclear history

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. HUGHES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

“Restoring hope where all hope was lost”: Nelson Mandela, the ICRC and the protection of political detainees in apartheid South Africa

2016 ◽  
Vol 98 (903) ◽  
pp. 799-829
Author(s):  
Andrew Thompson
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
African Country ◽  
International Committee ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractAmidst the violent upheavals of the end of empire and the Cold War, international organizations developed a basic framework for holding State and non-State armed groups to account for their actions when taking prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) placed itself at the very centre of these developments, making detention visiting a cornerstone of its work. Nowhere was this growing preoccupation with the problem of protecting detainees more evident than apartheid South Africa, where the ICRC undertook more detention visits than in almost any other African country. During these visits the ICRC was drawn into an internationalized human rights dispute that severely tested its leadership and demonstrated the troubled rapport between humanitarianism and human rights. The problems seen in apartheid South Africa reflect today's dilemmas of how to protect political detainees in situations of extreme violence. We can look to the past to find solutions for today's political detainees − or “security detainees” as they are now more commonly called.

scholarly journals The Bridges of Ideas: Transnational Network of the Book Program for Eastern Europe, 1956-1990

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pawel Sowinski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Free World ◽  
Transnational Network ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
The U.S

<div>This proposed contribution reflects on how one, relatively small U.S.-led program of cultural diplomacy shaped the attitude of Polish intellectuals towards liberalization and openness to the free world during the Cold War. The importance of the topic lies in the fact that this long-lasting literary service could be considered as a vital tool for creating more space for political and cultural freedom in Soviet-bloc countries. The program represented the spirit of solidarity and friendship between Eastern Europe and the U.S. that, even now, should not be forgotten. That thirty years after the book program ended, Eastern Europe still lacks a transnational perspective on defending universal liberal values and the process of gaining freedom in the region before 1989 demonstrates the importance of bringing the Eastern and Western narratives closer together, by reexamining the legacy of the book program today.</div>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document