6 Transcending the Cold War: Borders, Nature, and the European Green Belt Conservation Project along the Former Iron Curtain

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Astrid M. Eckert ◽  
Pavla Š Šimková
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Xhavit Sadrijaj

NATO did not intervene in the Balkans to overcome Yugoslavia, or destroy it, but above all to avoid violence and to end discrimination. (Shimon Peres, the former Israeli foreign minister, winner of Nobel Prize for peace) NATO’s intervention in the Balkans is the most historic case of the alliance since its establishment. After the Cold War or the "Fall of the Iron Curtain" NATO somehow lost the sense of existing since its founding reason no longer existed. The events of the late twenties in the Balkans, strongly brought back the alliance proving the great need for its existence and defining dimensions and new concepts of security and safety for the alliance in those tangled international relations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin A. Schmidl

Geographically, Austria's position during the Cold War differed significantly from that of Switzerland or Sweden, let alone Ireland. Austria, like Finland, was situated along the Iron Curtain. In 1945, Austria was divided between East and West, and the Soviet Union hoped that the Austrian Communists could quickly gain power by largely democratic means. This effort failed, however, when the Communists lost decisively in the November 1945 elections. Over the next decade, Austria remained under Soviet and Western military occupation. The formal adoption of a neutral status for Austria in May 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty was signed, was a compromise needed to ensure the departure of Soviet forces from Austria. Although some other orientation might have been preferred, neutrality over time became firmly engrained in Austria's collective identity.


Author(s):  
Brian James Baer

Abstract The ideological incommensurability of the worldviews or master narratives represented by the two opposing superpowers during the Cold War and embodied in the image of an impenetrable iron curtain gave particular salience to translation theory while also questioning the very possibility of translation. At the same time, the neoimperialist projects of the two superpowers produced startlingly similar approaches to the instrumentalization of translation as a vehicle for propaganda and diplomacy. Presenting polarization as a distinct state of semiosis, the effects of which are highly unpredictable, this article explores the various ways in which the radical polarization of the Cold War shaped the theory and practice of translation both within and across the ideological divide. Plotting the entanglements of the light and dark sides of translation during this time challenges traditional histories of the field that construe the period as one of progress and liberation.


Author(s):  
Kuba Mikurda

A performative introduction, by Kuba Mikurda, to Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take (2009). Based on the themes of duality, playing for both sides, and doppelgänger fantasy, the tells not only the tale of Alfred Hitchcock’ lifelong fascination with such motifs, but also of the Cold War (and its influence on our contemporaneity) as a Hitchcock-esque reality. Using archive footage of Alfred Hichcock Presents, where the author of Psycho impersonates various alternative versions of himself, Grimonprez shows that the two sides of the Iron Curtain are actually two sides of the same coin – perfect mirror images of its double. The same is true for Cold War paranoia, the returning phantom of a global conflict, or atom war – it is ultimately difficult to say whether the films of the master of suspense, such as Birds and North by Northwest are its manifestation or is it maybe that in the current state of late modernity, our experience of the world took on the features of a Hitchcock film. Grimonprez – an artist known for gallery projects and theoretical interests, offers a story of the duplexity of a divided world – a slightly histo/erical one and full of distance and games. All the same, as Karen Beckmann reminds us, “the sameness of a twin is based on the repressed memory of division, breakage, and a sudden partition”.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH DAVIES

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.


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):  
Aryeh Neier

This chapter details how the rise of the international human rights movement as a significant force in world affairs cannot be separated from the Cold War context in which it took place. The Cold War magnified the importance of citizen efforts to promote rights and, though many of those involved in the movement during the Cold War era took significant risks and suffered severe consequences, it was the circumstances of the East–West conflict that attracted many of them to the cause in the first place. Rights activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain became aware that calling attention to abuses of rights by their own governments carried extra weight in an era when a global competition was underway for people's hearts and minds.


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