The Failure of the Socialist Declaration of Human Rights

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 318-341
Author(s):  
Ned Richardson-Little
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
The West ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Increased Pressure

In the mid-1980s, the Eastern Bloc faced increased pressure on the issue of human rights from western governments, ngos, and indigenous dissident. Although the Socialist Bloc had claimed to represent the ideals of human rights throughout the Cold War, by 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev called on the leaders of the Eastern Bloc to work together on a coordinated response to this threat and in response East Germany proposed the creation of an international declaration based on the principles of socialist—rather than bourgeois—human rights. Within a few years, however, the project collapsed in ignominious failure as it provided a vehicle for reformers to challenge the status quo in the name of human rights by demanding greater democratization. Although the project was originally devised to refute the human rights claims of the West, it instead acted to spur on the intellectual collapse of the Eastern Bloc’s ideological unity at its time of greatest crisis.

scholarly journals International Slavic Studies: Concepts, History and Evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenfei Liu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The West ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Formal Establishment ◽  
Slavic Studies

Abstract This paper departs from the definition of Slavistics and reviews the history of international Slavic studies, from its prehistory to its formal establishment as an independent discipline in the mid-18th century, and from the Pan-Slavic movement in the mid-19th century to the confrontation of Slavistics between the East and the West in the mid-20th century during the Cold War. The paper highlights the status quo of international Slavic studies and envisions the future development of Slavic studies in China.

scholarly journals From Tehran to Helsinki: the International Year of Human Rights 1968 and State Socialist Eastern Europe

Diplomatica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-201
Author(s):  
Ned Richardson-Little
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The West ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Status ◽  
Subsequent Rise ◽  
State Socialist

When the United Nations proclaimed 1968 to be the International Year of Human Rights, the official goal was to promote the adoption of the recently created human rights Covenants around the world. Instead of compelling the Eastern Bloc to accept liberal democratic conceptions of rights, however, it acted as a catalyst for the genesis of state socialist conceptions of human rights. Eastern Bloc elites claimed these rights were superior to those in the West, which they argued was beset by imperialism and racism. Although some within Eastern Europe used the Year as an opportunity to challenge state socialist regimes from within, the UN commemoration gave socialist elites a new language to legitimize the status quo in Eastern Europe and to call for radical anti-imperialism abroad. While dissent in the name of human rights in 1968 was limited, the state socialist embrace of human rights politics provided a crucial step towards the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the subsequent rise of human rights activism behind the Iron Curtain.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Unilateral Economic Sanctions, International Law, and Human Rights

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idriss Jazairy
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Eventual Collapse ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
United Nations Charter

AbstractAs part of the roundtable “Economic Sanctions and Their Consequences,” this essay examines unilateral coercive measures. These types of sanctions are applied outside the scope of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and were developed and refined in the West in the context of the Cold War. Yet the eventual collapse of the Berlin Wall did not herald the demise of unilateral sanctions; much to the contrary. While there are no incontrovertible data on the extent of these measures, one can safely say that they target in some way a full quarter of humanity. In addition to being a major attack on the principle of self-determination, unilateral measures not only adversely affect the rights to international trade and to navigation but also the basic human rights of innocent civilians. The current deterioration of the situation, with the mutation of embargoes into blockades and impositions on third parties, is a threat to peace that needs to be upgraded in strategic concern.

Russia says no: Power, status, and emotions in foreign policy

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 269-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Missile Defense ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The West ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ukrainian Crisis ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S

Since 2003, Russian foreign behavior has become much more assertive and volatile toward the West, often rejecting U.S. diplomatic initiatives and overreacting to perceived slights. This essay explains Russia’s new assertiveness using social psychological hypotheses on the relationship between power, status, and emotions. Denial of respect to a state is humiliating. When a state loses status, the emotions experienced depend on the perceived cause of this loss. When a state perceives that others are responsible for its loss, it shows anger. The belief that others have unjustly used their power to deny the state its appropriate position arouses vengefulness. If a state believes that its loss of status is due to its own failure to live up to expectations, the elites will express shame. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has displayed anger at the U.S. unwillingness to grant it the status to which it believes it is entitled, especially during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and most recently Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the 2014 Ukrainian Crisis. We can also see elements of vengefulness in Russia’s reaction to recognition of Kosovo, U.S. missile defense plans, the Magnitsky act, and the Snowden affair.

scholarly journals (Un-)veiling the west: Burkini-gate, Princess Hijab and dressing as struggle for postsecular integration

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Berg ◽  
Mikela Lundahl
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Street Art ◽  
The West ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Secular State

The ban of the burkini in the summer of 2016 in France is the latest stage in a long political history, where the French depreciation or fear of the veil, and of Islam, has come to play a more significant role since the end of the cold war. Unveiling female bodies at the beach in Nice expose conditioned values of the French republic. In this context, drawing black veils on public advertisements becomes a performative act commenting on consumerism, religion, secularity, and the imagined Muslim woman. In this article we discuss freedom and integration in “third spaces” via an analysis of “hijabisation” in street art and the official reactions against certain types of beachwear. In line with Talal Asad (2006) we want to raise the issue on how the secular state addresses the pain of people who are obliged to give up part of their religious identity to become acceptable. Race-thinking was once an explicit part of celebrated values like modernity, secularity, democracy and human rights. However, the fact that the idea of races has been erased from articulations of Western nations and international bodies does not mean that traces of race-thinking in the heritage from the enlightenment are gone. By following Princess Hijab and the “Burkini-gate” a nationalist fantasy intertwined with the idea of the secular state reveals itself and acts of un/dressing emerge as signs of integration revealing a challenged imperialist paradigm.

scholarly journals Germans Suffering in Spain: Cold War Visions of the Spanish Civil War in Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960) and Solange du lebst (1955)1

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Stefan Soldovieri
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Since 1989 connections between the once geopolitically divided German movie industries have received increasing attention. This article considers how two films of the early post-war period—one produced in East Germany and one from the West—mobilized in different ways figurations of German suffering and sacrifice. The author argues that despite their diverging politics, the two films participate in a trans-German discourse of suffering that persisted in historically variable ways throughout the Cold War period.

From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-166
Author(s):  
Noel D. Cary
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
German States ◽  
East German ◽  
Willy Brandt ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Republic of the twenty-first century, writes W. R. Smyser, is destined to be unlike all previous German states. A status quo power and a stable democracy, it is neither the battleground of others nor dominant over them, neither reticent like Bonn nor arrogant like the Berlin of the late Hohenzollerns. The Cold War was “the essential incubator” of this “new Germany” (p. 402). It provided Germany with the tools of change—a role through which to overcome its past, and time to overcome old wounds. Aiding the incubation were contradictory Communist policies, astute Western statesmanship, and bravely pursued Eastern popular aspirations. Two Germans and two Americans, Smyser avers, stand at the heart of the eventual Communist defeat: East German leader Walter Ulbricht, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, President Ronald Reagan, and Smyser’s onetime mentor, General Lucius Clay. Mighty assists go to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the inspirational Polish Pope. Further down this idiosyncratic hierarchy stand Chancellors Adenauer and Kohl and U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

scholarly journals Russian Discourse on Borders and Territorial Questions – Crimea as a Watershed?

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Forsberg ◽  
Sirke Mäkinen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
The Status ◽  
Basic Norm ◽  
The Cold War

This article addresses the question of how the Crimean case relates to Russia’s general understanding of territorial questions and border regimes. We examine the historical evolution of Russian discourse on borders and territorial questions and investigate to what extent they can explain Russia’s decision to annex Crimea. We will look into the principles of inviolability of borders and territorial integrity that sustain the status quo, and how this has been challenged by three partly interlinked doctrines: national self-determination, geopolitics, and historical rights. We argue that the discourse on territorial integrity and the status quo has predominated in Russia since the Cold War, and that this has not changed fundamentally, either before or after the annexation of Crimea. Russia does not seem to want to abolish the existing norms altogether or to advocate any clearly articulated reformist agenda. Rather, it picks and chooses arguments on an ad hoc basis, imitating Western positions in some other cases when departing from the basic norm of the status quo. Hence, we claim that Russia’s territorial revisionism is reactive, self-serving, and constrained by the desire to avoid changing the status quo doctrine to any great extent.

The Sakharov-Medvedev Debate on Détente and Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-174
Author(s):  
Barbara Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Andrei Sakharov ◽  
Soviet Dissidents ◽  
East West

Abstract This article examines the debate between Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev in the 1970s concerning the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and détente. Although both dissidents stood for East-West détente and democratization of the Soviet system and believed in the possibility of a dialogue with Soviet leaders until 1970, they later diverged in their views about methods of action. As Sakharov lost faith in the possibility of influencing the Soviet regime headed by Leonid Brezhnev, he shifted to a more radical position, adopting the language of human rights and turning to Western politicians and public opinion as an audience for his calls. Sakharov's public embrace of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was in line with his advocacy of freedom of emigration and his belief that the West should extract concessions in the field of human rights before granting trade benefits to the Soviet Union. Medvedev, by contrast, argued that the amendment was counterproductive insofar as it risked alienating Soviet leaders and triggering adverse results. He considered that détente should be encouraged for its own sake, with the hope that over time it would spur democratization in the country. Medvedev's argument had much in common with the West German leader Willy Brandt's notion of “change through rapprochement,” a concept invoked as a rationale for Brandt's Ostpolitik. Although Sakharov's position earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, the Helsinki Accords showed how détente could serve the cause of human rights even with the Cold War under way.

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