scholarly journals CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND HUNGARY AT THE BRUSSELS EXPO OF 1958- NATIONALISM IN THE DISPLAY OF SOCIALIST MODERNITY AND THE GLOBAL CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE COLD WAR.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkaprabha Pal

The Brussels EXPO of 1958 was envisioned by its organisers as a platform to renew the intellectual, spiritual and moral powers of humanism after the horrors of the Second World War. In its post-War setting, it aimed to promote the new Man by crossing the anxious binaries of Cold War politics. In reality, however, it fed on these very anxieties with the USA and USSR using art, technology, architectural designs to further the propaganda of their respective competing antagonistic political worldview. But, some small countries like the Soviet satellite states of Czechoslovakia and Hungary made a significant impact through their pavilions on the millions of visitors. The death of Stalin in 1953 followed by the comparatively liberal policies of Khrushchev and the consequent political disturbances in Hungary and, political reforms in Czechoslovakia determined the content and styling of the pavilions at the Expo. Both the countries marked a shift from socialist realism and posited themselves through art, architecture or technological displays which were more abstract, innovative, individualistic, existential, humanistic and even avant-garde. Moreover, the local, regional, ethnic and even the national were strongly emphasized in the pavilions, some of which at times were bereft of the traditional symbolism of a socialist state. The emphasis on the national illustrated the contradictions in the ideology and action of politics in these east and central European countries in the light of the post-Stalinist era. These contradictions, not only helped to realign the dominance of socialism internally, but had global implications and intentions in the cultural Cold War, which were played out through the content and styling of the pavilions at the expo in Brussels.

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (6) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Alexey Gromyko ◽  

The article continues the research of the “big three” strategic thinking, especially the USSR and the USA, during the Second World War, their contribution to the post-war settlement with the United Nations as a key element. Their approaches to new mechanisms of global governance were developing on parallel and overlapping courses. On the chronology of the Cold War, the author proposes to define its start as an extended period from 1945 until the end of the decade. This methodology avoids absolutization of intentions, separate events and statements. Instead it imbeds them in the process of political-military structures’ construction, designed for regional and global confrontation. The attention is paid to the role of the subjective factor in transition of the “big three” from cooperation to the Cold War. The meaning of the Iranian crisis is demonstrated as an additional source of the Cold War’s premises. The author reveals the milieu of conflicting views in the US political establishment on the legacy of the “Roosevelt course” including the nuclear factor. The conclusion is drawn that in the years of the Second World War great powers pursued long-term policy towards the post-war settlement putting aside political conjuncture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

AbstractThis article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.


2020 ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Alexey Gromyko ◽  

The article is dedicated to the 75-th anniversaries since the end of the Second World War and the creation of the United Nations. The author explores the evolution of key ideas, including the contribution of the Soviet diplomatic strategy, on the post-war world and interaction among the great powers. Special attention is drawn to the phenomenon of the ―Roosevelt course‖ and the atmosphere in the Soviet-American relations during the war. The main approaches of the allies’ diplomacy towards principles of post-war cooperation are analysed. It is shown that the emergence of the Cold War was not inevitable and did not correspond to the national interests of great powers. In the course of the war their vision was based mainly on pragmatism and security interests rather than on antagonistic ideologies. In terms of chronology the start of the Cold War is proposed to attribute not to a concrete year but to a period from 1945 to the end of the decade. The author underlines the outstanding and unique nature of the UN as the most enduring legacy of the Second World War, which has not lost its acute role in 2020. This research will be continued in the next paper by the author.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 1042-1062
Author(s):  
Tijn Sinke

Within three years after the Second World War, the wartime alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, and between communist and bourgeois resistance forces, had collapsed. By 1948, Dutch communists found themselves in total isolation. Historians have generally treated this phenomenon in light of the ‘restoration’ of pre-war structures – including anticommunist attitudes – or by interpreting the Cold War as an international phenomenon ‘imposed’ on Dutch society. Neither view pays sufficient attention to the contingency of transition politics and the power struggle that was fought between 1944 and 1948. My project focuses on the Dutch Communist Party’s (CPN) attempt to forge a political breakthrough by forming a front of progressive forces against the ‘reaction’, and on the responses of non-communist political and intellectual actors. Instead of interpreting the 1948 stalemate as a ‘natural’ outcome, this article highlights the combination of historical anticommunism, dynamics of transition politics and strategic solidification that accounts for the emergence of the Dutch Cold War. The reinvention of the rules of Dutch politics during political reconstruction ultimately led to the ruination of the post-war communist breakthrough. This resembles the process going on in other European countries, but with important unique features.


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.


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.


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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Uta Andrea Balbier

Anti-Communism constituted a core feature of Billy Graham’s preaching in the 1950s. In Graham’s sermons Communism did not just stand for the anti-religious thread of an atheistic ideology, as it was traditionally used in Protestant Fundamentalist circles, but also for its opposition to American freedom and Free Market Capitalism. This article argues that the term Communism took on significantly new meaning in the evangelical milieu after the Second World War, indicating the new evangelicals’ ambition to restore, defend, and strengthen Christianity by linking it into the discourse on American Cold War patriotism. This article will contrast the anti-Communist rhetoric of Billy Graham and other leading evangelical figures of the 1950s, such as Harold Ockenga, with the anti-Communist rhetoric used by early Fundamentalists in the 1910s and 1920s. Back then, Communism was predominantly interpreted as a genuine threat to Christianity. The term also made appearances in eschatological interpretations regarding the imminent end-times. The more secular interpretation of Communism as a political and economic counter-offer by evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham will be discussed as an important indicator of the politicization and implied secularization of the evangelical milieu after the Second World War.


Author(s):  
Yan (Amy) Tang

Samuel Barclay Beckett is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Ireland and living in France for half of his life, he wrote prose, dramatic works, poems, and criticism in both English and French. He started to write fiction after he met James Joyce and other intellectuals in Paris in the 1920s. His research on languages, literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris provided a solid basis for his works. His popularity grew rapidly after the Second World War, particularly after the publication of his groundbreaking play, En attendant Godot (1953, Waiting for Godot), and his trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951, Malone Dies), and L’innommable (1953, The Unnamable). He was not only a prolific modernist who innovated avant-garde prose, theatre, radio, television, and cinema; he also joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.


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