scholarly journals In quest of Eastern Europe: troubling encounters in the post-Cold War field

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Sideri
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Family Memories ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Of Greece

This paper examines various transformations regarding the categories of 'us' and 'them' that occurred during my year of fieldwork in Georgia (2003-2004). My research questions concerning the formation of a 'Greek diaspora' in Georgia through family memories and historiographical accounts led me to 'paradoxical' encounters, which seemed to challenge my perceptions of selfhood as well as my ideas about the political, historical and geographical topographies of Greece and Georgia. These troubling encounters seemed to drive me to a re-conceptualisation of both 'East' and 'West', not only as spatial and temporal/historical entities, but also as mutually constructed ideologies during the Cold War and post-Cold War period.

scholarly journals From Iron Curtain to Velvet Curtain? Peter Brook's Hamlet and the Origins of British–Soviet Cultural Relations during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Divide

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.

Telling Lies, Making Truth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
East European ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the political function of show trials in Eastern Europe. It argues that while show trials told lies, their primary purpose was to reveal new truths about the Cold War world to their East European audiences. Show trials described a world where the peace-loving socialist East was continually menaced by the imperialist West, which sent spies and saboteurs to wreck its economic development and plotted to destroy it in a nuclear war. These political plays told East Europeans how they should see the world and clarified the consequences of non-compliance. This chapter also examines how people around the region were required to voice their condemnation of the traitors on trial and dedicate themselves to the search for hidden enemies.

Vaccination and the communist state: polio in Eastern Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Vaccine Development ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
The West ◽  
Communist State ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War

Through the case of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, this chapter explores the role of Eastern European states in polio prevention and vaccine development in the Cold War. Based on published sources and archival research, the chapter demonstrates that polio facilitated cooperation between the antagonistic sides to prevent a disease that equally affected East and West. Moreover, it argues that Eastern Europe was seen – both by Eastern European states and the West - as different when it came to polio prevention, since the communist states were considered to be particularly well suited to test and successfully implement vaccines.

Response to Slater review ofCompetitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 388-389
Author(s):  
Steven Levitsky ◽  
Lucan A. Way
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Hybrid Regimes ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Environment ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Cold War

Dan Slater offers thoughtful and incisive comments. We respond here to three of his points. The first is that by limiting our study to the post–Cold War period, we convert it into a “period piece,” akin to studies of fascist and communist regimes. Although this may be true, a historically bounded analysis is essential because of the changing character of the international environment. World historical time powerfully shapes regime outcomes. The prospects for democracy and authoritarianism during the Cold War, which was marked by global superpower rivalry, differed dramatically from those during periods of Western liberal hegemony. During the Cold War, for example, nearly all military coups ushered in authoritarian rule; after 1989, nearly 70 percent of coups led to multiparty elections In 1989, single-party rule predominated in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa; five years later, it had disappeared.

scholarly journals Eastern European Exilic Trajectories in Post-1989 Life Writing

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. T61-T80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioana Luca
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The Cold War

My article offers a comparative analysis of autobiographical works by Susan Suleiman, Andrei Codrescu and Kapka Kassabova with a three-pronged interest. First, I aim to further the discussion about exilic identities emerging from Eastern Europe; second, I show the “shifting national, global imaginaries” that post-1989 Eastern European exiles’ life writing registers; and third, I analyze how Suleiman, Codrescu and Kassabova negotiate affective attachments withtheir “native” Eastern European countries in the aftermath of the Cold War. I consider their life writing important as it captures the overlappings and complicities between apparently opposite regimes — nazism, communism and/or post-communism — and in so doing they animate a historical imaginary of the recent past in Eastern Europe. Their trajectories of exile and return become a lens for the larger variations of exilic subjectivity in post-cold war Eastern Europe.

‘It has to go away, but at the same time it has to be kept’: the Berlin Wall and the making of an urban icon

Urban History ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOACHIM SCHLÖR
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Structure ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Uwe Johnson ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.Uwe Johnson

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Land of Blue Helmets

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Arab World ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Member States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Mediation

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

Worse Than a Monolith

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Burden Sharing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Regional Conflicts ◽  
Security Relations ◽  
Opposing Camp ◽  
The Cold War

In brute-force struggles for survival, such as the two world wars, disorganization and divisions within an enemy alliance are to one's own advantage. However, most international security politics involve coercive diplomacy and negotiations short of all-out war. This book demonstrates that when states are engaged in coercive diplomacy—combining threats and assurances to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries—divisions, rivalries, and lack of coordination within the opposing camp often make it more difficult to prevent the onset of regional conflicts, to prevent existing conflicts from escalating, and to negotiate the end to those conflicts promptly. Focusing on relations between the Communist and anti-Communist alliances in Asia during the Cold War, the book explores how internal divisions and lack of cohesion in the two alliances complicated and undercut coercive diplomacy by sending confusing signals about strength, resolve, and intent. In the case of the Communist camp, internal mistrust and rivalries catalyzed the movement's aggressiveness in ways that we would not have expected from a more cohesive movement under Moscow's clear control. Reviewing newly available archival material, the book examines the instability in relations across the Asian Cold War divide, and sheds new light on the Korean and Vietnam wars. While recognizing clear differences between the Cold War and post-Cold War environments, the book investigates how efforts to adjust burden-sharing roles among the United States and its Asian security partners have complicated U.S. security relations with the People's Republic of China since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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