scholarly journals Czechoslovak Seafarers’ Memories of Polish Ports as their “Second Home” during the State Socialism Period (1949–1989)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Lenka Krátká
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Second Home ◽  
Loading And Unloading ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Dock Workers ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Historical Issues

Czechoslovakia began to develop its ocean fleet after the communist coup d’état in 1948. Prague was designated as the place of registration for these ships. From a practical point of view, however, it was necessary for the Czechoslovak fleet to reach a port located as close as possible to the Czechoslovak border. Szczecin (located 298 km from the border) became the base for the fleet not only due to the political circumstances of the Cold War but also for economic reasons. While Hamburg remained a vital harbor for international trade where “East meets West,” Polish ports were used not only for loading and unloading goods and transporting them to the republic but also to supply ships, change crews, carry out most shipyard maintenance, etc. Consequently, Czechoslovak seafarers themselves called Szczecin their “home port.” Numerous aspects of this perception as “home” will be reflected on in this paper. Specifically, the paper will touch on perceptions of Poles (mainly seafarers and dock workers), some aspects of the relationships among Czechoslovaks and Poles, including a discussion of some important historical issues (1968, the 1980s) in this area. This paper is based on archival sources, oral history interviews with former seafarers, and published memoirs. It should contribute to broader research and understanding of relationships among people living in various parts of the socialist block and show different images of life under socialism(s).

The Cold War and After

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Trachtenberg
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International System ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Book Deal ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
Shed Light

What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? This book explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems—with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.–European relations. But the book's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. The book demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way. These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects—for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon–Pompidou period. But in each case, the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems.

Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European Part of the USSR and Siberia in The System of International Contacts of the USSR during the Cold War (1944—1955)

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Zilya Khabibullina
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Treatment ◽  
European Part ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Republic Of Bashkortostan ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The Spiritual Administrations of Muslims of the USSR were official organizations accountable to the Council for Religious Affairs, which concerned with regulation the life of religious communities in the allocated territory. Their competence included functions of a theological nature, statistical treatment, observation of cult objects and believers. Under the pressure of post-war circumstances, the beginning of the Cold War, religious organizations were engaged in the propaganda foreign policy tasks of the USSR. In permitted international contacts, they created a positive image of the country and demonstrated freedom of religion. The article examines the participation of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European part of the USSR and Siberia in the spread of the Soviet ideological project abroad. Territorially, the spiritual administration was located in Ufa, the materials of the National Archives of the Republic of Bashkortostan offer an insight into such forms of interaction with the foreign world as: staff meetings of the spiritual administration with representatives of foreign states, visits of Islamic spiritual leaders to Muslim countries, their publication in foreign editions, participation in international conferences, the presence of believers of the USSR in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj. In the 1950s DUMES has been converted regularly subjected to demonstrations to foreign guests of Bashkiria and all kinds of delegations as a symbol of freedom of conscience in the USSR. The Muslim clergy had promoted of the Soviet lifestyle and the country’s achievements in a deep crisis of religious life in the USSR.

scholarly journals Transformations of the national security concepts of Belarus and Russia and historical policy: substantive aspects

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
A.A. Mushta ◽  
◽  
T.V. Rastimehina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Holistic Concept ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

The interrelated concepts of memory policy, historical policy and security policy are considered. It is shown that in Russia and in the Republic of Belarus there is a steady trend of securitization of historical policy and memory policy. The tendencies of indoctrination of the securitist model of historical policy into official documents of both states are considered. It is shown that both in Belarus and in Russia, the internal political confrontation is considered in the historicist construct of the Cold War. It is argued that in the context of the need to deepen integration within the framework of the Union State, it is necessary to search for a relatively unified holistic concept of history for all the forces of Russian and Belarusian societies.

The ‘Good War’ after September 11

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lawler
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Military Technology ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
New Wars ◽  
The Cold War

Rather Than Signalling The End Of War, As Many Liberal Minds had hoped, the end of the cold war has seen ‘hot’ war moving firmly to centre-stage, while at the same time presaging a reclassification of its predominant forms and purposes. Since 1990 there has been a rash of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. Although often highly localized, they confound settled understandings of inter-state or civil war by virtue of the diverse range of protagonists involved, the issues over which they are fought, and their consistently brutal impact upon civilians. A virtual revolution in media technology has also made such wars publicly visible to an unprecedented degree. In spite of the fact that new wars are often fought without recourse to the most sophisticated or destructive of military technology, the horrific impact upon populations caught up in them has clearly assaulted public sensibilities worldwide and generated a chorus of demands that something should be done about them. Consequently, the political and ethical dimensions of going to war in response to such threats have also moved in from the periphery to the centre of public and intellectual debate. As Walzer has recently observed, the ‘chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside’. From the point of view of the key members of the international community at least, armed ‘humanitarian intervention’ is no longer just a form of war but has become virtually synonymous with permissible war itself.

Overseas Chinese Commerce, Decolonization, and the Cold War in Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lim
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

The term “overseas Chinese” refers to people who left the Qing Empire (and later on, the Republic of China or ROC) for a better life in Southeast Asia. Some of them arrived in Southeast Asia as merchants. They were either involved in retail or wholesale trade, or importing and exporting goods between the Qing Empire/ROC and Southeast Asia. With the decolonization of Southeast Asia from the end of World War II in 1945, overseas Chinese commerce was targeted by nationalists because the merchants were seen to have been working together with the colonial authorities and to have enriched themselves at the expense of locals. New nationalist regimes in Southeast Asia introduced anti-Chinese legislation in order to reduce the overseas Chinese presence in economic activities. Chinese merchants were banned from certain trades and trade monopolies were broken down. Several Southeast Asian states also attempted to assimilate the overseas Chinese by forcing them to adopt local-sounding names. However, the overseas Chinese continued to be dominant in the economies of Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore. Malaysia introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which has an anti-Chinese agenda, in 1970. The decolonization process also occurred during the Cold War, and Chinese merchants sought to continue trade with China at a time when governments in Southeast Asia were suspicious of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Attempts by merchants from Malaya and Singapore to trade with the PRC in 1956 were considered to have failed, as the PRC had other political concerns. By the time Singapore had gained independence in 1965, the door to investment and trade with the PRC was shut, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia turned their backs on China by taking on citizenship in their countries of residence.

Boundaries: Infiltrated Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Estera Mrozewicz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
Looking Back

Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut national identities, Chapter 2 reconsiders the hard border promulgated by the master narrative of the Cold War. Devoted to a set of films which address historical themes (late 20th-century and 21st-century productions looking back to the Cold War and earlier periods), the chapter focuses on spies and double agents, who by default operate by navigating across borders. The films analysed do not utilise typical spy film formulas and their protagonists are nowhere near the affirmative James Bondian narrative. The films re-examine a range of historical issues which during the Cold War qualified as inconvenient (and were therefore censored), often relating to the complicated past of the border regions (such as Finnmark) and involvement of Nordic citizens on the wrong side of the global conflict. Using the concept of infiltration, the analysis follows the spies that embody the discourses of boundary, ‘contaminating’ an assumed pure national community. These films (such as Jörn Donner’s The Interrogation or Knut Erik Jensen’s Ice Kiss) produce affective and relational spaces, alternatives to arbitrary maps, and highlight the protagonists’ entanglement in identities which might be defined as transnational.

Mass Immunization in East Asia and Global Health, 1960–80

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Rural Health ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Mass Immunization ◽  
The Republic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter investigates the role of mass immunization in Chinese medical diplomacy programs during the 1960s and 1970s. While most scholarship has stressed the influence of barefoot doctor and other paraprofessional training programs in the emergence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a global model for rural health services, mass immunization programs in China had measurable results—in terms of lowered incidence of disease—that helped legitimize these training efforts and the nation's program of rural health care more broadly. Ultimately, the global popularization of Chinese public health was a consequence of regional competition within East Asia. During the Cold War era, the PRC used medical aid to foreign countries to compete for power and influence with the Republic of China on Taiwan, where institutions and personnel that the Nationalist Party brought to the island after 1948 built upon practices established during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). The involvement of Taiwan in medical diplomacy reflected the expansionist agendas of its Western allies in the Cold War as well as competition with the PRC for recognition as the legitimate government of mainland China.

Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d'État in Guatemala

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Holland
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Abstract Level ◽  
The Government ◽  
Private Network ◽  
The Cold War

As a wealthy American businessman and former ambassador, William Pawley was a key actor in PBSUCCESS, the covert operation that brought down the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.The anti-Arbenz rebels, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, could not have defeated the Guatemalan army on their own. The key to a successful coup was getting the army to act on their behalf, and in this regard, control of the air was vital. Pawley, owing to his knowledge of Latin America and experience in aviation, played a central role in ensuring that the rebels enjoyed air superiority during their move against the president. At a more abstract level, Pawley exempli fied the role non-governmental actors played in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The “state-private network,” as it has been dubbed, remains a rich vein for scholarly investigation.

Does Europe have a centre? Reflections on the history of Western and Central Europe

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLETTE MOUT
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Special Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
The Cold War

Any definition of Central Europe based on geographical and/or historical facts causes difficulties. The line dividing Europe during the Cold War has a very limited use because it does not take into account Central Europe as a special part of the continent. Historians such as Geoffrey Barraclough, Hugh Seton-Watson and Oskar Halecki discussed the idea of a separate identity of Central Europe during the Cold War. Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this discussion was re-opened. From a historian's point of view, the most important contributions came from Piotr Wandycz and Jenő Szűcs. An imaginary centre of Europe can only be found in the continent's common history.There is a belief, rather widespread in English-speaking countries, that the eastern half of Europe is inhabited by a number of endlessly quarrelling small nations whose conflicts keep endangering the quiet and comfort of Anglophones. (Hugh Seton-Watson)

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