Region Building and Regional Cooperation in Response to Environmental Challenges: A Case Study from the Barents Region

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-157
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Mackie
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Regional Cooperation ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
Barents Region ◽  
Arctic Regions ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the border between Norway and the Soviet Union was almost completely closed and there were few diplomatic relations between the Arctic regions of northern Europe and the Soviet Union. Within weeks of the end of the Soviet Union, however, the Norwegian government began negotiations over regional cooperation which led to what is now the Barents Euro-Arctic Cooperation.This article argues that one of the significant incentives which led to the formation of the Barents region at the time that the Soviet Union collapsed was the common environmental threats faced by each of the Arctic nations of Europe and northwest Russia. This article considers the sources of the environmental challenges and the work that has been undertaken to tackle those shared threats. It also considers the region building that has taken place as a result of the cooperation which, although it began as a means of solving the environmental threats but has now spread much further with cohesion and cooperation in many other policy areas. The article concludes with a discussion of how this model could be used as a means of encouraging regional cooperation in other parts of the world, particularly in areas where there is a history of conflict or where there are shared environmental concerns.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

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.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

scholarly journals Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Basic Consumer

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

scholarly journals Increasing Relevance of Treaties: The Case of the Arctic

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 52-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Koivurova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Polar Bear ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Soviet Leader ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Multilateral Cooperation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

The Arctic was one of the main theatres for strategic military confrontation during the Cold War between the blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. There was no place for multilateral cooperation, other than for very limited issue areas, such as the 1973 Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears between the five states with polar bear populations. Yet, the warming of relations by the end of the Cold War changed all this. Inspired by Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech in 1987, in which the Soviet leader pro-posed various possible areas for Arctic cooperation, differing ideas for international cooperation were advanced. Canadians, in particular, were trying to advance international treaty-based general cooperation for the Arctic, but this never came to pass and it was eventually Finland who was able to broker soft-law collaboration between the Cold War rivals.

Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan C. Iacob
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
The Continuum

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Gavin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

A widely held and largely unchallenged view among many scholars and policymakers is that nuclear proliferation is the gravest threat facing the United States today, that it is more dangerous than ever, and that few meaningful lessons can be drawn from the nuclear history of a supposed simpler and more predictable period, the Cold War. This view, labeled “nuclear alarmism,” is based on four myths about the history of the nuclear age. First, today's nuclear threats are new and more dangerous than those of the past. Second, unlike today, nuclear weapons stabilized international politics during the Cold War, when in fact the record was mixed. The third myth conflates the history of the nuclear arms race with the geopolitical and ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, creating an oversimplified and misguided portrayal of the Cold War. The final myth is that the Cold War bipolar military rivalry was the only force driving nuclear proliferation. A better understanding of this history, and, in particular, of how and why the international community escaped calamity during a far more dangerous time against ruthless and powerful adversaries, can produce more effective U.S. policies than those proposed by the nuclear alarmists.

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art

Human Affairs ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vardan Azatyan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Art History Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
History Survey

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov'sThis article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys.

scholarly journals Foreign Trade Relations Between Turkey and the Eurasian Countries: An Empirical Study

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tacinur Akça
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Cultural Wealth ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Cold War

The Eurasian Countries incorporates many economic and cultural wealth. The Eurasian countries have attracted attention all over the world with its rich oil and natural gas reserves and geopolitical situation. Due to the increasing importance of the Eurasian countries, as well as being an alternative to a political foreign policy and it has created an economically viable alternative in terms of foreign trade for Turkey. The importance of exports is increasing for the development of Turkey and Eurasia cannot be neglected as an important issue. History of the republic's foreign policy is focused on establishing good relations with the West. Of the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended after the opening of the new Turkish foreign policy became inevitable to be based in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Turkey aimed to be active in this region. The main purpose of our study was that Turkey's foreign trade with The Eurasian Countries is to reveal the relationship. The interest in the region began in the beginning of 1990, the economic policies implemented by Turkey has tried to analyze using relevant data. İn our study, in order to analyze the economic relationship between our countries and Eurasian Countries, Turkey's import and export figures which were explained in the form of tables with the countries concerned. We will concentrate on the major Eurasian countries, especially in our work we focus on Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova.

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