Franco-Soviet SECAM: from Ambitious Plans to Reality (Based on the Materials of the French Foreign Ministry Archives)

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11 (109)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Evgeny Osipov
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Technical Issue ◽  
Zone Of Influence ◽  
Color Television ◽  
Single Standard ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministry

The article, based on the materials of the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, most of which have not yet been introduced into scientific circulation, examines the Soviet-French attempt to create a single color television standard for the whole of Europe on the basis of SECAM. It was the cooperation in the field of color television, according to the plan of Moscow and Paris, that was supposed to confirm that two countries from different military-political blocs could implement an ambitious project in the field of high technologies. Materials from the archives of the French Foreign Ministry allow us to trace how this project was implemented in practice. The article focuses on the contradictory results of Soviet-French cooperation. On the one hand, SECAM, indeed, for many years became the standard of color television in the USSR, France, Eastern Europe and some other states that were in the zone of influence of Moscow or Paris. On the other hand, the political environment (not all countries were ready to join the Soviet-French project during the Cold War) and the objective limitations of the capabilities of the Soviet and French industry led to the fact that the SECAM project, instead of a single standard for the whole of Europe, became a symbol of artificial politicization ofthe essentially technical issue and showed the limits of Soviet-French cooperation.

scholarly journals Bound to Interpret: Russia, NATO, and the Military-Political Crises in the Post-Cold War Order

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-60
Author(s):  
N. N. Neklyudov
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
The Military

The study of Russia’s foreign policy poses something of a paradox. On the one hand, Russia’s actions are viewed as aimed at revising the existing rules-based order built by the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, on numerous occasions, one pinpoints that Russia has devised a language similar to the Western nations to justify its foreign policy. I call the phenomenon that explains this paradox the game of interpretation. The article illustrates how Russia is engaged in the game of interpretation with the West in the post-Cold War order by Russia’s appliance to the norm of humanitarian interventions. By analyzing the Russian discourse during the Russo-Georgian War (2008), I demonstrate how the Russian foreign policy leadership reproduces similar narrative patterns used by the West during the Kosovo War (1999). Exemplifying the game of interpretation by humanitarian interventionism is not accidental. Humanitarian interventionism is studied in the literature as being characteristic of the Western ‘ethical foreign policy’ originated by the end of the Cold War, with Russia being depicted as either skeptical or as an unequivocal opponent of such an approach in world politics. Methodologically, the work builds on quantitative and qualitative analysis of selected texts compiled from the archives of NATO and the US State Department, as well as the website “Kremlin.ru” and the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Big Sister

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kempker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
John Birch Society ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second Wave

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.

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.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

John Leighton Stuart and U.S.-Chinese Communist Rapprochement in 1949: Was There Another “Lost Chance in China”?

1982 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-ming Shaw
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Working Relationship ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
June July ◽  
The Cold War

Reverend John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962) served as U.S. ambassador to China from July 1946 until August 1949. In the many discussions of his ambassadorship the one diplomatic mission that has aroused the most speculation and debate was his abortive trip to Beijing, contemplated in June–July 1949, to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Some students of Sino-American relations have claimed that had this trip been made the misunderstanding and subsequent hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the post-1949 period could have been avoided; therefore, the unmaking of this trip constituted another “lost chance in China” in establishing a working relationship between the two countries. But others have thought that given the realities of the Cold War in 1949 and the internal political constraints existing in each country, no substantial result could have been gained from such a trip. Therefore, the thesis of a “lost chance in China” was more an unfounded speculation than a credible affirmation.

Civil conflicts and the conditions for successful international intervention: a comparative study of Cambodia and El Salvador

1995 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo L. Munck ◽  
Chetan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Territorial Conflicts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

As the Cold War has receded, it has left behind a world system characterized by two divergent trends. On the one hand, as the two superpowers have withdrawn their security umbrellas, a host of ethnic and territorial conflicts have sprouted around the globe. On the other hand, as former rival blocs now create alliances, international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of contentious issues have proliferated. A central concern of our times, then, is whether, and under what circumstances, these new mechanisms will be successful in dealing with the disorderly aspects of the new world ‘order’.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

scholarly journals Private Enterprise, International Development, and the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-145
Author(s):  
Ethan B. Kapstein
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Development ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Private Enterprise ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This article sheds light on the role of foreign direct investment as an instrument for economic development and, in turn, for the advancement of U.S. foreign policy goals during the Cold War. From the earliest days of the Cold War, and especially after the U.S.-Soviet competition for influence in the developing world began in the 1950s, the United States sought to promote private enterprise on behalf of U.S. goals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. officials believed that foreign investment would suffice to fuel international development, obviating the need for official development assistance. These hopes, however, were largely disappointed. On the one hand, U.S.-based multinational companies preferred to invest in the industrial world; on the other hand, some Third World governments were uninterested in promoting private enterprise rather than state-led development. In part because foreign investment did not meet expectations, the U.S. government ended up elaborating an official foreign aid program instead.

Persevering through Colonial Transition: Nazareth's Palestinian Residents after 1948

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Leena Dallasheh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
National Minority ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
The Ideal

Nazareth, the only Palestinian city to survive the 1948 war intact, became the social, economic, and political hub of Palestinian life in the postwar period. As such, it provides the ideal setting to study early Palestinian responses to the creation of Israel. This paper reexamines the ambivalent relationship between Nazareth's political leadership and the newly established State of Israel to argue that the Palestinian citizens of Israel were neither traitors and collaborators, on the one hand, nor passively quiescent, on the other. Rather, as a new national minority, Palestinians overcame myriad forms of control as they negotiated the structural obstacles placed before them by their new overlords. Local Communist politicians, in particular, took a leading role to advocate on behalf of Nazarenes beset by the day-to-day hardships of poverty, hunger, displacement, and unemployment. The Israeli authorities harped on the Communist threat in response, echoing the Cold War rhetoric of the time.

The Right of Return: Chinese displaced persons and the International Refugee Organization, 1947–56

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 546-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEREDITH OYEN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese Mainland ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Chinese Mainland ◽  
Communist Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThis article examines the rise of the international refugee regime in Asia, focusing on the work of the International Refugee Organization in repatriating overseas Chinese from mainland China back to their homes in Southeast Asia from 1947 to 1956. It looks both at how the International Refugee Organization inherited this repatriation project from its predecessor—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—and its survival after a civil war installed a new, Communist government on the Chinese mainland. Doing so reveals the extent to which both Chinese governments had to rely on outside assistance to fulfil an important task of maintaining positive ties between Chinese abroad and the homeland. Using research from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in Beijing and Taipei, as well as records from relevant parties in the British and American governments, this article places the repatriation programme and the larger efforts of the International Refugee Organization in Asia in a broader context of regional foreign relations and the origins of the Cold War.

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