Who was saving whom? The European Community and the Cold War, 1960s–1970s

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiran Klaus Patel
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
European Community ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Bilateral Agreements ◽  
Political Cooperation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article argues that during the 1960s, the European Community (EC) made little contribution to peace. What peace there was resulted mainly from other factors, most importantly the United States as benevolent hegemon, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and bilateral agreements. European integration under the auspices of the EC presupposed peace rather than contributing to it. At the time, the EC’s main role with regard to peace was at the symbolic level: it started to represent all attempts at peaceful co-operation and reconciliation in Western Europe. It was only in the 1970s, especially with the European Political Cooperation, that the EC began to actively promote peace beyond its borders.

Between Ambition and Paralysis—Germany's Policy toward Yugoslavia 1991–1993

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Thumann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
European Community ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Peace Settlement ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Cold War

The decay of Yugoslavia since 1990 has put an end to the experiment of a state of Southern Slavs. At the same time it has destroyed the myth of a peaceful and strong Western Europe. The continent that had displayed an impressive performance of cooperation and skillful diplomatic maneuvering during the last years of the Cold War proved to be incapable of coping with the problems in its southeastern backyard. In the beginning of the conflict, the European Community assumed responsibility for negotiating cease-fires and a peace settlement for the embattled Yugoslav states. But all efforts were fruitless. In 1995, it was primarily the interference of the United States that brought about the peace treaty of Dayton for Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Liberalism since the Cold War: an enemy to itself?

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEOFFREY HAWTHORN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Regional Development Banks

Many expected that after the Cold War, there would be peace, order, increasing prosperity in expanding markets and the extension and eventual consolidation of civil and political rights. There would be a new world order, and it would in these ways be liberal. In international politics, the United States would be supreme. It would through security treaties command the peace in western Europe and east Asia; through its economic power command it in eastern Europe and Russia; through clients and its own domination command it in the Middle East; through tacit understanding command it in Latin America; and, in so far as any state could, command it in Africa also. It could choose whether to cooperate in the United Nations, and if it did not wish to do so, be confident that it would not be disablingly opposed by illiberal states. In the international markets, it would be able to maintain holdings of its bonds. In the international financial institutions, it would continue to be decisive in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it would be an important influence in the regional development banks; and it would be powerful in what it was to insist in 1994 should be called the World (rather than Multinational) Trade Organisation. Other transactions in the markets, it is true, would be beyond the control of any state. But they would not be likely to conflict with the interests of the United States (and western Europe) in finance, investment and trade, and would discipline other governments.

‘Gentlemen, you are Mad!’: Mutual Assured Destruction and Cold War Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan T. Berend
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lewis Mumford

In the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford made a dramatic attack on the insanity of the nuclear age. In his article entitled ‘Gentlemen: You are Mad!’, Mumford said: ‘We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security’. According to Mumford, the modern superweapon society, for all its technological supremacy, was unable to recognise the looming disaster. People were sleepwalking towards the abyss of atomic war. The Cold War arms race created and served to maintain what Winston Churchill termed ‘the balance of terror’. By the end of the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had more than enough nuclear weapons to withstand a first strike and still be able to retaliate. This article explores how mutual assured destruction (MAD) was reflected and refracted in European culture and society from 1950 to 1985, and shows how film and fiction played a key role in highlighting the potential effects of MAD – a global nuclear holocaust.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Kornbluh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Military Law ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

Western Europe

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Etges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter explores the role and experience of Western Europe in the Cold War. It explains that Western Europe is not a precise political or geographical entity, and that its role in the Cold War can only be understood in the context of its changing internal dynamics and changing relationship with the United States, the Soviet Union, and countries of Eastern Europe. The chapter argues that Western Europe both shaped and was shaped by Cold War in a political, economic, military, cultural, and ideological sense, and also considers the German question, Franco-German rapprochement and European integration, and military aspects of the Western alliance.

Poverty Knowledge and the History of Poverty Research

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Official Declaration

This article examines the history of poverty research and the evolution of the practice of gathering knowledge about the poor. It distinguishes between poverty research and poverty knowledge, suggesting that the convergence of the two was a historically specific development that first began to gain wide currency in the late nineteenth century in response to the vast and increasingly visible disparities of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and the United States. It also situates poverty research within the politics and social organization of knowledge and considers the influence of broader contextual factors, such as the creation, expansion, and subsequent restructuring of welfare states in Western industrial democracies; the geopolitical imperatives of empire, decolonization, and the Cold War; and the official declaration of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Finally, it explores how poverty knowledge was reshaped by the economic, political, and ideological transformations associated with the rise of neoliberalism.

Intelligence Failure Theory

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Failure Theory ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Intelligence Failure ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Intelligence Failures

Intelligence failures are commonly understood as the failures to anticipate important information and events, such as terrorist attacks. Explanations for intelligence failure generally include one or more of the following causal factors: organizational obstacles, psychological and analytical challenges, problems with warning information, and failures of political leadership. The earliest literature on intelligence failures is found in the 1960s, having developed in the context of the Cold War. At the time, the stable bipolar system was threatened by periodic surprises that promised to alter the balance of power. With tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, the United States and the Soviet Union spent a great deal of time and energy assessing each other’s intentions and capabilities and trying to avoid a catastrophic surprise. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, scholarship on intelligence failure decreased substantially. In the meantime, this scholarship diversified to include topics such as the environment, human rights, drug trafficking, and crime, among other things. Surprises in these areas were perhaps more frequent, but were less consequential. However, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, interest in both scholarly and journalistic analyses of intelligence failures has once again increased.

Europe: The Lost Peace

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Michael Mandelbaum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Vladimir Putin ◽  
Do So

In the wake of the Cold War, both the United States and Western Europe had an unprecedentedly peaceful relationship with Russia. That relationship eventually ended, however, to be replaced by conflict, for two reasons. First was the unwise Western decision to expand the Western alliance, also known as NATO, to Russia’s borders despite having promised not to do so. Second were aggressive Russian policies toward its neighbouring countries. These measures were undertaken by President Vladimir Putin as a way of winning popular support for his dictatorial rule, which had begun to lose favor across the state due to its economic shortcomings.

The Cold War Politics of Soviet Federal Structures, 1945–1965

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-207
Author(s):  
Étienne Forestier-Peyrat
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Federal Structure

Abstract This article shows how official discussions of federal arrangements within the USSR affected Soviet foreign policy from the 1940s through the 1960s, especially on questions of decolonization and relations with the United States and other Western countries. Connecting Soviet domestic history and international developments, the article shows how the federal structure of the USSR was used in transnational debates on composite polities, race, and nationality and also how it was debated internally. Attacks on the highly centralized nature of Soviet federal structures in international arenas and the countermeasures adopted as part of the ideological Cold War had long-term as well as short-term effects on Soviet politics and foreign policy. Within the USSR, such attacks raised questions about the ethnofederal structure of the USSR and provided comparison points for both loyalist and dissident proponents of national rights in the country.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document