The Pitfalls of the International Aid Rationale: Comparisons between Missionary Aid and the International Aid Network

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-201
Author(s):  
David W. Wright

Mission agencies have borrowed a politically oriented aid rationale that was born in the immediate post-World War II years with the Marshall Plan and fine-tuned during the long ideological struggle of the cold war. The goals and principles of this rationale are antithetical to mission purposes. Mission aid conducted on this basis leads to dependent ecclesiastical development and creates theologies of reaction. Mission agencies need to modify the aid rationale by restoring mutuality to the aid relationship, developing contextual standards for the definition of need/aid, moderating the effects of the bureaucratization of aid, and creating full webs of meaning in which to situate aid relationships.

Author(s):  
Dora Vargha

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.


Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Howell-Ardila

Berlin 1948 and the longest airlift in history simultaneously usheredin the Cold War, with a divided Berlin its best-known symbol, andtransformed West Berliners in the eyes of the Allied world fromNazis to victims of Soviet aggression. By 1950, with Germany officiallydivided, political elites of the East (GDR) and West (FRG)took up the task of convincing their citizens and each other of thelegitimacy of their own governments. In spite of the primacy ofCold War rhetoric in the media of the day, however, the mostpressing challenge of postwar society for both sides lay in redefining—in perception, if not in fact—political and social institutions inopposition to the Nazi past.


2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 169-196
Author(s):  
David Ekbladh

AbstractThe concept of modernization exerted a powerful influence over international affairs in the twentieth century. It offered not only a way of understanding the profound global transformations of the period but also a means of influencing the course and pace of those changes. While the preoccupation with the causes and consequences of modernity can be traced back at least to the nineteenth century, .modernization. as a school of thought and a set of practices is usually understood to be a decidedly post–World War II phenomenon. Many scholars have interpreted the rise of modernization as a response to the imperatives of the Cold War and the great postwar wave of decolonization, and have therefore located the origins of this concept in the years after 1945.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”


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