“De Belgique j’ai assez peu de nouvelles...” De correspondentie tussen Jan Brans en Pierre Daye, 1945-1950

2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-209
Author(s):  
Frank Seberechts

Op het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog slaagt een aantal Belgische collaborateurs er in uit te wijken naar Spanje en Argentinië. In deze bijdrage bekijken we de correspondentie tussen Jan Brans, hoofdredacteur van het VNV-dagblad Volk en Staat, en Pierre Daye, voormalig Rex-senator en commissaris-generaal voor Lichamelijke Opvoeding en Sport. Beiden bevinden zich in Spanje op het ogenblik dat de geallieerde legers in de zomer van 1944 West-Europa bevrijden.De correspondentie van de twee collaborateurs, uit de tweede helft van de jaren veertig, behandelt verschillende onderwerpen. In de eerste plaats gaat het over de mogelijkheid om naar Argentinië over te steken. Daye arriveert in de lente van 1947 in Buenos Aires en ontpopt er zich tot go-between tussen de peronistische administratie en de kandidaat-immigranten, veelal voormalige nazi’s en collaborateurs. Brans blijft in Spanje en poogt er, zo goed en zo kwaad als mogelijk, een nieuw bestaan op te bouwen.Voorts wisselen beiden nieuwtjes en plannen uit die te maken hebben met de toestand in België. De repressie, het lot van hun voormalige medestanders en de koningskwestie nemen hier een belangrijke plaats in. Ook de algemene evolutie in de wereld komt ter sprake. Ze wijden beschouwingen aan de vrees voor het communisme, de opkomende Koude Oorlog en de vermeende zwakte van de Westerse geallieerden. Er wordt tevens nagedacht over een hergroepering van de uiterst-rechtse krachten, in en buiten Europa. De correspondentie toont aan waarmee de uitwijkelingen bezig zijn: de strijd om het dagelijks bestaan, het zoeken naar steun en informatie bij elkaar en het rechtvaardigen van hun verleden.________"De Belgique j'ai assez peu de nouvelles…". The correspondence between Jan Brans and Pierre Daye, 1945-1950At the end of the Second World War a number of Belgian collaborators managed to flee to Spain and Argentina. In this contribution we review the correspondence between Jan Brans, general editor of the VNV daily paper Volk en Staat (People and State) and Pierre Daye, former Rex-senator and permanent undersecretary for Physical Education and Sport. Both are located in Spain at the time of the liberation of Western Europe by the allied armies in the summer of 1944.The correspondence between the two collaborators, dating from the second half of the nineteen-forties, deals with various subjects. Firstly they discuss the possibility of crossing over to Argentina. Daye arrives in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1947and then turns into a go-between between the Peronist administration and the candidate immigrants, in particular former Nazis and collaborators. Brans remains in Spain and tries as best he can to construct a new existence.In addition they exchange news and plans relating to the situation in Belgium. The repression, the fate of their former associates and the Royal question play an important role in this exchange. They also discuss the general evolution of the world. They debate the fear for communism, the emerging Cold War and the alleged weakness of the Western allies. They also reflect about a possible regrouping of the extreme right forces both inside as well as outside Europe. The correspondence demonstrates the concerns of the refugees: the struggle for daily existence, the search for support and information from one another and the justification of their past.

Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte

This chapter examines the Soviet restoration model and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's revivalist model. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) hoped to use its weight as a victor in the Second World War to restore the old quadripartite mechanism of four-power control exactly as it used to be in 1945, before subsequent layers of Cold War modifications created room for German contributions. This restoration model, which called for the reuse of the old Allied Control Commission to dominate all further proceedings in divided Germany, represented a realist vision of politics run by powerful states, each retaining their own sociopolitical order and pursuing their own interests. Meanwhile, Kohl's revivalist model represented the revival, or adaptive reuse, of a confederation of German states. This latter-day “confederationism” blurred the lines of state sovereignty; each of the two twenty-first-century Germanies would maintain its own political and social order, but the two would share a confederative, national roof.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Catherine Vézina

El Programa Bracero, creado por Estados Unidos y México en 1942 durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se mantuvo hasta 1964. Los estudios sobre este programa señalan la importancia de los intereses domésticos de Estados Unidos para explicar la longevidad del mismo. El presente artículo se enfoca en los factores estratégicos propios de la lógica de la Guerra Fría que intervinieron en la decisión de mantener o cancelar este programa bilateral de trabajo temporal agrícola. Mediante un examen atento sobre la época del auge y del declive del programa, se replantean estos debates dentro del contexto nacional, pero también bilateral y panamericano. The Bracero Program, created by the United States and Mexico during the Second World War, survived until 1964. Studies that look at this program generally signal the importance of domestic factors in the United States to explain its longevity. This article analyzes dynamics of Cold War logic that played a role in the decision of whether to maintain or cancel this bilateral program for migratory agricultural work. By carefully examining the rise and fall of the program, these debates are reconsidered within a national context, as well as one that is bilateral and Pan-American.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Finlay

AbstractHow do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between thejus ad bellumand thejus in bellothat anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.


The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.


Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Mónika Szente-Varga

The first diplomatic and consular relations were established between Mexico and the Habsburg Empire in the 1800 s, motivated basically by commerdal reasons and dynastic interests. These got to an abrupt end with the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Querétaro in 1867, and diplomatic relations were resumed only decades later, in 1901, which is, in fact, our starting point. This essay examines the development of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Central-Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 20'' centuiy until nowadays. It is divided into chronological chapters, where we study bilateral relations in the coordinates of the following periods: beginning of the century, the period between the two world wars, the Second World War, Cold War and recent years. The investigation in based on documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico (SRE-AHD) and of the Hungarian National Archive (MOL).


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-376
Author(s):  
Harold Behr

This article presents the writings of Gregory van der Kleij, group analyst and Catholic priest, whose experiences of the holocaust during the Second World War shaped his thinking, not only as a therapist but also as a campaigner against the nuclear arms race. The author re-visits two significant articles on the group matrix published in this journal in the 1980s and introduces the reader to a little-known monograph addressed to the Catholic community which examines the moral dilemma faced by Christians during the Cold War. The monograph contains an exhortation to rise up in protest against what Gregory considers to be ‘the madness’ of high-level thinking on the morality of the nuclear deterrent.


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