Russia – USA relationship: R.I.P. Cold War?

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Isabela de Andrade Gama

The focus of the proposal is related to the relationship of Russia and the West after the Cold War, especially concerning the NATO enlargement. It is assumed that at this moment the relationship of these entities have changed to a whole new situation. However if the Cold War was about performance of identity conformation, this proposal claims that this logic still persists In this scenario Russia is trying to find a new role at the international level, as much as NATO is trying to do the same. since their main enemy no longer exists, so the Atlantic Alliance starts a new project of spreading democracy and market economy to the ex-soviet sphere of influence, on the basis of fear of a renewed cycle of Russian nationalist expansionism. Thereby, the rationalism of this debate can be substituted by a new one more inclined to the post-structuralist debate. In this way the main purpose of this paper is to analyze the delimitation of the Russian and West’s identities in this space full of “otherness” constituting the “self”, in this scenario of tension/distension hark back to the Cold War era, with special emphasis on Russian foreign policy.

Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter examines US–Soviet relations during the Cold War as well as the question of the genuineness of efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve disarmament and resolve troublesome disputes. It begins with a discussion of the German question, noting that Germany’s future position was vital to the future of Europe and a particular concern of the Soviets. It then considers the progress of arms control and peace efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union, before concluding with an analysis of the relationship of arms control to the use of armaments in hot war and to some aspects of fighting the Cold War.


2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-42
Author(s):  
Monika Boll

This article delves into the relationship between cultural radio and the Cold War. After 1945, culural radio took on a central role in the intellectual self-understanding of the early Federal Republic. From the very beginning, there was much less censorship than with political editorial departments. Thus, it was possible for cultrual radio to offer an intellectual forum in which socialism was not simply dismissed due to the official anticommunist political doctrine. This article shows the ways in which the East-West conflict was present in the cultrual departments of radio broadcasters. It argues that socialism appeared less as an ideological restraint or taboo, but rather as a productive challenge, which in the end was part of the modernization of West Germany's intellectual self-understanding. Two prominent examples buttress this argument: the free space that cultrual radio conquered in a kind of leftist integration with the West, and the rapid advancement of sociological discourse.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 269-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko

Since 2003, Russian foreign behavior has become much more assertive and volatile toward the West, often rejecting U.S. diplomatic initiatives and overreacting to perceived slights. This essay explains Russia’s new assertiveness using social psychological hypotheses on the relationship between power, status, and emotions. Denial of respect to a state is humiliating. When a state loses status, the emotions experienced depend on the perceived cause of this loss. When a state perceives that others are responsible for its loss, it shows anger. The belief that others have unjustly used their power to deny the state its appropriate position arouses vengefulness. If a state believes that its loss of status is due to its own failure to live up to expectations, the elites will express shame. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has displayed anger at the U.S. unwillingness to grant it the status to which it believes it is entitled, especially during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and most recently Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the 2014 Ukrainian Crisis. We can also see elements of vengefulness in Russia’s reaction to recognition of Kosovo, U.S. missile defense plans, the Magnitsky act, and the Snowden affair.


2021 ◽  

Free Voices in the USSR is a project dedicated to the myriad of independent voices present in the culture of dissent in the Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century. Its aim is to offer a conceptual overview of the many forms of dissent by exploring two main thematic areas, the first devoted to “free voices” in the USSR and the second focused on reception in the West. The different manifestations of the USSR’s ‘Second Culture’, which was non-official and independent, spread thanks to the samizdat (the clandestine publication and circulation of texts within the USSR) and the tamizdat (the publication of texts forbidden in the USSR in the West). The reception of non-official forms of expression in the West is explored in the context of the debates arising from the Cold War; the role of the West in engaging with the literary, cultural and artistic challenges to the Soviet regime from within its own borders proved fundamental. Contributions to this website including critical essays, bio-bibliographic entries, archive information and the review and cataloguing of magazines are the result of coordinated research by a group of specialists at an international level.


2019 ◽  
pp. 122-155
Author(s):  
Joan Wallach Scott

This chapter argues that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the old public/private distinction was dissolved in the realms of both religion and sexuality. This put into place concepts that prepared a new discourse of secularism in Western Europe and the Anglo-American world—one in which Islam took the place of Soviet communism as a threat to social order. Secularism as a political discourse was eclipsed by the Cold War, although its traces and effects were not. The relationship of the state to religion was reformulated as the Soviet Union came to represent, not the embodiment of secularism as it had been defined in the nineteenth-century anticlerical campaigns but the home of what was derided as godless atheism. In this new discourse, the secular and the Christian were increasingly considered synonymous, and women's sexual emancipation became the primary indicator of gender equality.


2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-412
Author(s):  
Chad Bennett

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.


Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter examines US–Soviet relations during the Cold War as well as the question of the genuineness of efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve disarmament and resolve troublesome disputes. It begins with a discussion of the German question, noting that Germany’s future position was vital to the future of Europe and a particular concern of the Soviets. It then considers the progress of arms control and peace efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union before concluding with an analysis of the relationship of arms control to the use of armaments in hot war and to some aspects of fighting the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Jens Boysen

This chapter assesses the relationship between East Germany and Poland during the last phase of the Cold War. It explains how the historical legacy of German–Polish relations infused the relationship of both countries with mistrust, despite the officially proclaimed brotherhood of a “socialist community” mandated from Moscow. Personal enmity between communist leaders Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka, conceptual differences of notions of statehood, and rivaling foreign policy goals and ideas about tolerance for domestic opposition since the end of the 1970s only exacerbated these tensions, which not even successful military cooperation under the Warsaw Pact umbrella was able to alleviate. Held together by their relationship to the Soviet hegemon, the officially required “trust” between the two countries fully disintegrated in the second half of the 1980s.


2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Shaw

This article examines Cold War film propaganda in the 1950s, when the cin-ema was enjoying its last period as the dominant visual mass entertainment form in both the West and the East. I concentrates on the role that religion played as a theme of propaganda primarily in British and American movies, as well as some of the Soviet films released during the decade. The article ex-plores the relationship between film output and state propagandists to show how religious themes were incorporated into films dealing with Cold War is-sues, and considers how audiences received the messages contained within these films. The article therefore builds on recent scholarship that highlights the importance of ideas and culture during the Cold War by looking at the adoption and adaptation of religion as a tool of propaganda.


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