scholarly journals Third Cold War: What to Beware, How to Resolve

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torgeir E. Fjaertoft
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
History Department ◽  
The Cold War

<p>The author shares his understanding of the confrontations between East and West during the Cold War in the dangerous phase of the first half of the 1980s, from his unique vantage point of life in the two German states, first as a Norwegian Visiting Lecturer in Communist East Germany at the University of Greifswald 1980 – 81, then as an official of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1981 – 84, which brought him as diplomat to Bonn, the capital of West Germany, 1984-87. </p><p><br></p><p>These experiences from Germany in the 1980s he will then analyze critically from the vantage point of a succession of encounters with former East German officials, starting 2016 until he in October of 2019 was a Visiting Research Fellow, <i>Gastwissenschaftler</i>, at the German Institute for Contemporary History, Department for the Cold War in Berlin. </p><p><br></p><p>The methodology of this article works with the standard procedure in diplomatic fact-finding and analyses, abductive reasoning from confidential conversations.The article follows the standard procedure for drawing on confidential conversations, Chatham House Rule, abbreviated CHR. What someone says may be quoted, but the identity of sources and their affiliated institutions remain confidential.</p><p><br></p><p>The author denotes this methodology <i>exploratory conversation</i>, inferring by active listening. By this methodology, the researcher may gain insights into the set of assumptions, the underlying mental models that determine the perceptions of options. In mental models, language constructs the shared sense of social reality and serve as repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

scholarly journals Third Cold War: What to Beware, How to Resolve

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torgeir E. Fjaertoft
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
History Department ◽  
The Cold War

<p>The author shares his understanding of the confrontations between East and West during the Cold War in the dangerous phase of the first half of the 1980s, from his unique vantage point of life in the two German states, first as a Norwegian Visiting Lecturer in Communist East Germany at the University of Greifswald 1980 – 81, then as an official of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1981 – 84, which brought him as diplomat to Bonn, the capital of West Germany, 1984-87. </p><p><br></p><p>These experiences from Germany in the 1980s he will then analyze critically from the vantage point of a succession of encounters with former East German officials, starting 2016 until he in October of 2019 was a Visiting Research Fellow, <i>Gastwissenschaftler</i>, at the German Institute for Contemporary History, Department for the Cold War in Berlin. </p><p><br></p><p>The methodology of this article works with the standard procedure in diplomatic fact-finding and analyses, abductive reasoning from confidential conversations.The article follows the standard procedure for drawing on confidential conversations, Chatham House Rule, abbreviated CHR. What someone says may be quoted, but the identity of sources and their affiliated institutions remain confidential.</p><p><br></p><p>The author denotes this methodology <i>exploratory conversation</i>, inferring by active listening. By this methodology, the researcher may gain insights into the set of assumptions, the underlying mental models that determine the perceptions of options. In mental models, language constructs the shared sense of social reality and serve as repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

scholarly journals Curing the Middle East State System: The Urgent Need to Innovate Strategy for Diplomatic Intervention.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torgeir E. Fjaertoft
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
State System ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Language Constructs ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Fact Finding

<p>The methodology of this article works with the standard procedure in diplomatic fact-finding and analyses, <i>abductive reasoning</i> from confidential conversations. The article follows the standard procedure for drawing on confidential conversations, <i>Chatham House Rule,</i> abbreviated <i>CHR.</i> What someone says may be quoted, but the identity of sources and their affiliated institutions remain confidential. </p> <p>The author denotes this methodology <i>exploratory conversation, </i>inferring by active listening. This article presents the author’s research by exploratory conversations in all four states that form the Middle East state system, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and sources from these states at various international venues. The conversations span the period from 2011 to 2017. </p> <p>By this methodology, the researcher may gain insights into the underlying <i>mental models</i> that form the group identities. In mental models, language constructs the shared sense of social reality and serve as <i>repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience</i>.</p> <div><br> <hr> <div> <p><br></p></div> </div>

scholarly journals Curing the Middle East State System: The Urgent Need to Innovate Strategy for Diplomatic Intervention.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torgeir E. Fjaertoft
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
State System ◽  
Abductive Reasoning ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Language Constructs ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Fact Finding

<p>The methodology of this article works with the standard procedure in diplomatic fact-finding and analyses, <i>abductive reasoning</i> from confidential conversations. The article follows the standard procedure for drawing on confidential conversations, <i>Chatham House Rule,</i> abbreviated <i>CHR.</i> What someone says may be quoted, but the identity of sources and their affiliated institutions remain confidential. </p> <p>The author denotes this methodology <i>exploratory conversation, </i>inferring by active listening. This article presents the author’s research by exploratory conversations in all four states that form the Middle East state system, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and sources from these states at various international venues. The conversations span the period from 2011 to 2017. </p> <p>By this methodology, the researcher may gain insights into the underlying <i>mental models</i> that form the group identities. In mental models, language constructs the shared sense of social reality and serve as <i>repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience</i>.</p> <div><br> <hr> <div> <p><br></p></div> </div>

Cold War Exiles and the CIA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Home Base ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Secret War

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

scholarly journals Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
World War ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

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.

scholarly journals The Max Planck Society and Pugwash during the Cold War: An Uneasy Relationship

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-209
Author(s):  
Carola Sachse
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
The North ◽  
Carl Friedrich Von Weizsäcker ◽  
Max Planck Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPS), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPS, the Federal Republic's most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. At the beginning, the two organizations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, the relationship was difficult from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPS was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy on behalf of West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a whole. This article explores the resources and risks of transnational political engagement during the Cold War, focusing on the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers as well as the policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization along the chief East-West divide: the front line between the two German states.

The Wisdom of a Socialist Defector

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-62
Author(s):  
Harry R. Targ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
The Cold War

Victor Grossman's A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee is at once an exciting adventure story, an engaging autobiography of a radical opponent of U.S. imperialism, and a clear-headed assessment of the successes and failures of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) at the onset of the Cold War until 1990, when its citizens voted to merge with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). Most poignantly, Grossman compares the benefits workers gained in the GDR, the FRG, and even the United States during the Cold War.

‘The Continuation of Politics by Other Means’: Britain, the Two Germanys and the Olympic Games, 1949–1972

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. GERALD HUGHES ◽  
RACHEL J. OWEN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German State ◽  
German States ◽  
British Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Sport ◽  
The Olympic Games

AbstractThis article evaluates the interplay between international sport and international politics during the cold war through an examination of the two Germanys and the Olympics from a British perspective. Germany was at the centre of Olympic and cold war politics between 1945 and the early 1970s, and the two German states competed fiercely over questions of national legitimacy. West Germany was initially successful in denying international recognition to the ‘other’ German state. East Germany countered this by developing a strategy that utilised international sport, particularly the Olympic Games, to further its claims for statehood. While recognising the flaws in the West German case against East Germany, British policy was constrained by the need to accommodate Bonn's sensibilities, given that the Federal Republic was a major ally. An examination of this ‘Olympian’ struggle from a British perspective tells us much about the West's cold war strategy and casts new light on this arena of East–West competition.

scholarly journals Istota totalitaryzmu. Wokół teorii Zbigniewa Brzezińskiego i Carla Friedricha

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Adam Wielomski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The aim of this text is a contemporary estimation of the thesis formed in a famous book by Zbigniew Brzeziński and Carl Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). This is a classic text of Western political science about totalitarianism, simultaneously scientific and political. Scientific, because it presents the idea of three types of political regimes in the 20th century: totalitarian, authoritarian, and liberal-democratic. Political, because the term “totalitarianism” was very useful in the time of the Cold War. This term presents the old (Nazi Germany) and new (Stalinist Russia) totalitarian states as equal political enemies of the USA, equal in their hostility to political and individual freedom, i.e. America’s creed. By using this term, the Americans can create a horrible picture of Russian communism as totalitarian, the same as Hitler’s regime, while presenting old enemies (West Germany, Italy, and Japan) as good friends of both the USA and freedom, because in this moment these states are democratic and liberal. The new term ended the old line of the delimitation between fascist or pro fascist and antifascist states and legitimates the new alliance between the USA and Franco’s Spain. The author analyses the definition of totalitarianism by Brzeziński and Friedrich as well as the political and ideological accusations made against this book by leftist critics.

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