To Hell and Beyond: The European Civilisational Crisis of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-63
Author(s):  
Johann P. Arnason
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Crisis Period ◽  
European Project ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

The main focus of the chapter is on the first half of the short twentieth century as a background to European integration, but it contains some reflections on subsequent developments. Against the widely current description of the period from 1914 to 1945 as a time of European civil war, it is argued that the notion of a civilisational crisis is more adequate, and this crisis is best understood in terms of modernity as a distinctive civilisation with specific European variations. Global wars and totalitarian regimes, based on ideological absolutizations of class and nation as historical actors, are the defining features of the crisis period. The following phase, characterised by the Cold War, was partly a step beyond the crisis, partly a perpetuation of its dynamics. The process of European integration, unfolding in this context, was a response to the most traumatic experiences of the crisis, but also an attempt to move beyond the constellation that had proved conducive to disasters. This latter aspect may be described as the civilisational dimension of the European project. The concatenation of circumstances and intentions is a matter for historical interpretation, rather than strong theories; in this regard, the work of Alan Milward is exemplary.

The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-64
Author(s):  
Christopher Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes ◽  
The Way

During the twentieth century, Christmas became a truly global holiday. The spread of the holiday, however, produced conflicts regarding Christmas’s meaning and the way it was practised by different communities. As different peoples encountered a variety of Christmas traditions at local, national, and global levels, ambivalence emerged about the changes in customary observances such encounters potentially facilitated. The identification of Christmas traditions with specific national communities placed the holiday at the centre of the century’s nationalist politics, especially those of totalitarian regimes, as well as contributing to the experiences of the two world wars and the Cold War. Christmas’s increasing commercialization likewise raised concerns about whether it was becoming too secular. The disputed character of the holiday attests to the important role Christmas continued to play annually for a large swathe of the global populace as a holiday capable of producing a range of intense emotional responses.

War Is Justiciable, Until It Isn’t

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Jasmine Farrier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
The Political ◽  
War Powers ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter demonstrates that courts were once comfortable entering into the fray when they have clear congressional guidelines about war authorization (private lawsuits) and when members of Congress press their claims through political as well as legal channels (Cambodia cases). It also shows that federal courts can have a place in war powers conflicts—and they did up through the mid-twentieth century, but only in individual plaintiff cases. Although no federal court has ever ordered a president to stop a war, there was once more comfort in judicial engagement in war-related constitutional questions, at least from the founding generation through the Civil War and beyond; the Cold War changed all three branches' orientations. Member litigation began during the Vietnam War out of frustration with imbalance of power that took permanent root in the Cold War and then remained in the political culture under new international pressures in the 1990s and after 9/11. The chapter then details the first two member cases surrounding the Vietnam War's expansion.

Sport in West and North Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
European Integration ◽  
English Language ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the development of sport in one of the most significant regions in its history. It explains the institutional reasons why a truly comparative history of the continent is still lacking and presents and critiques fruitful new avenues that might lead to a more integrated picture. Its principle plaidoyer is for greater recognition of sports of non-British origin, as well as the polygenetic spread of British sports, especially in English-language scholarship. It also urges a cautious reconsideration of political and ideological narratives (of the Fascist era in particular), which have tended to reduce complex historical reality to moral truths. While the chapter places a special emphasis on the first half of the twentieth century, it outlines the three key areas of sport’s development after 1945: affluence in the West, the Cold War, and European integration. Here, too, the chapter calls on future accounts to strive for greater complexity.

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.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Ideology Was A Uniform to Be Taken On and Off: An Anti-Communist Prisoner’s Survival from Manchuria to Korea to India

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
United Nations ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.

scholarly journals Cultural Trauma of the Civil War of 1918 Staged and Commemorated in Finland

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-131
Author(s):  
Pentti Paavolainen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Centennial of one of the cruelest of European civil wars fought in Finland between the Reds and the Whites from January to May 1918 has evoked a spectrum of theatre productions illustrating variations of styles and approaches on the events. The turn in the treatment of this cultural trauma occurred with the interpretations and narrative perspectives that were fixed in the 1960s, when an understanding for the defeated Red side was expressed in historiography, literature and theatre. Since that, the last six decades the Finnish theatre and public discourse on the Civil War have been dominated by the Red narrative as the memory of the 1918 Civil War provided an important part in the new identity politics for the 1969 generation. Since the 1980’s the topic was mostly put aside so that before the 2018 revivals of the Civil War topic, the productions seem to have been reactions by the artists confronting the developments at the end of the Cold War. Some theatrical events can even be tied to the cultural trauma of the 1969 left evoked by the collapse of the socialist block. The Centennial productions repeated the Red narrative but they also provided more balanced interpretationson the tragic events.

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