Western Integration vs. Reunification? Analyzing the Polls of the 1950s

2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Kruke

From the beginning of the West German state, a lot of public opinion polling was done on the German question. The findings have been scrutinized carefully from the 1950s onward, but polls have always been taken at face value, as a mirror of society. In this analysis, polls are treated rather as an observation technique of empirical social research that composes a certain image of society and its public opinion. The entanglement of domestic and international politics is analyzed with respect to the use of surveys that were done around the two topics of Western integration and reunification that pinpoint the “functional entanglement” of domestic and international politics. The net of polling questions spun around these two terms constituted a complex setting for political actors. During the 1950s, surveys probed and ranked the fears and anxieties that characterized West Germans and helped to construct a certain kind of atmosphere that can be described as “Cold War angst.” These findings were taken as the basis for dealing with the dilemma of Germany caught between reunification and Western integration. The data and interpretations were converted into “security” as the overarching frame for international and domestic politics by the conservative government that lasted until the early 1960s.

1976 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilhelm Bleek ◽  
Elizabeth Homer

For over a quarter-entury, two separate states have existed in Germany. By fighting over “unity” and “unification,” the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic have in fact stabilized and legitimized their separate sociopolitical orders. This impact on the domestic politics of both states has been the main function of inter-German relations. Only recently has positive identification replaced negative orientation to the counter-state. The “German question” provides an example of “nation building” as a historical process of both the disintegration of old and the building up of new identities.


2019 ◽  
pp. 266-288
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

Chapter 11 turns to a crucial challenge faced by the CIA-backed Russian exiles: the shifting political situation in West Germany, the crucial place d’armes for Cold War political operations against the Soviet bloc. The two main Russian organizations funded by the agency, the NTS and TsOPE, attempted with great persistence to gain the sympathy of West German political and academic elites in the 1950s. German anti-Russian sentiment limited the success of the émigré charm offensive, however, while the shifting form of the Cold War in Europe weakened their position in the country. In the second half of the 1950s, CIA operations utilizing exiles came under scrutiny and pressure from the now sovereign West German state, which sought to safeguard its new diplomatic relationship with the USSR.


2020 ◽  
Vol 04 (01) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Dr. Tauqeer Hussain Sargana ◽  
Dr. Mujahid Hussain Sargana

This paper is an attempt to analyze the emerging international environment and assess the Foreign Policy of Pakistan to determine what it needs to focus on since the world has entered into new dynamics of international politics. The study makes the point that contestation of international politics had allowed transformation of political actors from one to another and reveals that the political dynamics of Cold War, post-Cold War with that of post 9/11 world order have accommodated the transformation from bipolarity to unipolarity, and onward to multipolarity as the contemporary phase of political order. Answers are surrounded with a question, how and why the above factions of politics undermined geopolitical relevance of Pakistan as leading state in the region while making it a client state to global competition. The appraisal is carried out by analyzing the emerging trends and drivers of the international environment, which is followed by Pakistan’s policies since the end of the cold war, the challenges it faces in the light of the emerging international environment, and suggested policy options. The study is deductive in nature and premises neoliberal ‘complex interdependence’ of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977) to contest the very philosophical fabric of bipolarity, unipolarity and multipolarity.


Author(s):  
Raymond A. Patton

The conclusion condenses the book’s argument that punk developed through networks that crossed all three worlds through intertwined phenomena of immigration, postmodernism, and globalization; that punks and societies’ reactions to it defied and subverted the fundamental assumptions and categories of the Cold War era; and that punk provoked a realignment away from sociopolitical, ideological categories and toward a new framework emphasizing identities as conservatives and progressives. It briefly examines the post-1989 punk scenes of the East and West; many punks felt as dissatisfied with the global neoliberal order as they were with the Cold War world and often joined the new antiglobalization movements of the East and West. It concludes with the example of Pussy Riot in Russia, which shows that punk retained its power to consolidate forces of reaction (Putin, the Orthodox Church, and conservative public opinion) and cultural progressives alike long after the end of the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Angela Penrose

Edith’s career and collaboration with Fritz Machlup at Johns Hopkins University flourished and she began work on the growth of the firm, and studied the Hercules Powder Company. As Cold War tensions increased during the 1950s she and Penrose became involved in the defence of their friend and colleague Owen Lattimore who was named as the top Soviet spy by Senator McCarthy. The chapter covers the persecution of Lattimore, his trials, the role of Judge Luther Youngdahl, and the operation of his defence fund. Other friends of E. F. Penrose became victims of the anti-communist ‘witch hunt’, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the USA, and determined he must leave. In 1953 Edith and Penrose testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. They were also investigated by the FBI. After five years the case against Lattimore was dropped. Edith’s father died and her brother Harvey was killed in an air accident.


Author(s):  
Michael N. Forster

Although Herder is not usually known as a political philosopher, he in fact developed what is perhaps the most important political philosophy of his age. In domestic politics he was a liberal, a democrat, and an egalitarian; in international politics the champion of a distinctive pluralistic form of cosmopolitanism that sharply rejected imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and all other forms of exploitation of one people by another. Spanning both domains, while he enthusiastically shared the substantive goals of supporters of human rights he also developed a subtle critique of the concept itself, replacing it with his own concept of humanity. His political philosophy is theoretically minimalist and is all the stronger for being so.


Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay

In examining the practice of socialist internationalism, this book has sought to combine three fields of historical scholarship (socialism, internationalism, and international politics) in the aim of contributing to each one. The contribution to the first area, socialism, is perhaps the most obvious. Contrary to numerous claims, socialist internationalism did not die in August 1914 but survived the outbreak of war and afterwards even flourished at times. Indeed, during the two post-war periods, European socialists worked closely together on a variety of pressing issues, endowing the policymaking of the British, French, and German parties with an important international dimension. This international dimension was never all-important: it rarely, if ever, trumped the domestic political and intra-party dimensions of policymaking. But its existence means that the international policies of any one socialist party cannot be fully understood in isolation from the policies of other parties. The practice of socialist internationalism was rarely easy: contention was present and sometimes rife. Equally pertinent, idealism could be in short supply. Often enough, European socialists instrumentalized internationalism for their own ends, whether it was Ramsay MacDonald with the Geneva Protocol during the 1920s or Guy Mollet, who hoped to discredit internal party critics of his Algerian policy during the 1950s. Nevertheless, the attempts to instrumentalize socialist internationalism underscore the latter’s significance. After all, such attempts would be inconceivable unless socialist internationalism meant something to European socialists....


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Daniela Cavallaro

This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories. The article begins with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, which focuses on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people of the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. Next, it offers a brief panorama of the pervasive presence of the lives of the saints in post-WWII Italy. The main discussion of the article concerns the hagiographic plays created for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. The article concludes that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of Italy’s reconstruction and the cold war.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Roman M. Frolov

In his Bellum Ciuile, Caesar reports the events of 1 January 49 with these words (1.3.1): misso ad uesperum senatu omnes qui sunt eius ordinis a Pompeio euocantur. laudat <promptos> Pompeius atque in posterum confirmat, segniores castigat atque incitat. When the Senate had been dismissed towards dusk, all who belonged to that order were summoned by Pompeius. He praised the determined and encouraged them for the future while criticizing and stirring up those who were less eager to act. This meeting has not attracted much scholarly attention and admittedly for a good reason: other circumstances of the outbreak of the Civil War are, perhaps, more significant for understanding the events as well as the intentions and decisions of the political actors. The importance of this gathering lies, however, not so much in what its role might have been in the developments of the year 49 but rather in the context of the phenomenon of the promagistrates’ interference in the domestic politics of Late Republican Rome.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-30
Author(s):  
Tuong Vu

The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.


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