The Cold War and the (re)articulation of Canadian national identity: the 1972 Canada–USSR Summit Series

2012 ◽  
pp. 177-200
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War

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.

Algeria: Military Past as Prologue

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lenze, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The State ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

Algeria is a state in the Maghreb that has been dominated by military rule for the majority of its existence. The National People’s Army (ANP) used nationalism to justify its intervention into politics while ensuring that withdrawal would occur only if national identity were protected. Algeria, similar to other Middle Eastern states, underwent historical trajectories influenced by colonialism, the Cold War, and post-9/11 politics; briefly experimented with democracy; and as a result, experienced the military as the dominant institution in the state. The resignation of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika after 20 years of rule in April 2019, following six weeks of popular protest, has raised questions as to whether democratization is possible. Algeria’s history of military involvement in politics, the strength of the military as an institution, and its cooperative links with domestic elites and international actors portend the endurance of authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.

Nation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Castiglia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ideology Critique ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Cold War

Taking the Cold War state to be the origin of diffused suspicion, abstract enemies, and totalizing explanations, this chapter contends that contemporary ideology critique—based on the same dispositions—melancholically reproduces rather than challenges Cold War epistemologies. As an alternative, the chapter offers the practice of hope Granville Hicks and Constance Rourke developed around the empty signifiers nation, exceptionalism, and activism, concepts most often targeted by New Americanists (and New Historicists in general). Hicks argued for two Americas, one synonymous with capitalism and hence worthy of critique, and the other based on local communities that use nationhood to organize against capitalism and the models of national exceptionalism it requires. For Hicks, patriotism is an organizing concept for the economically disadvantaged majority who are weakened by their denied access to rhetorics of national belonging. Constance Rourke, turning to folkways that transform European culture into something distinctly American, focused on the specificity of cultures produced by distinctive communities within the United States, yet she used the particularity of cultural formations as the basis, rather than simply a renunciation, of national identity.

Japanese National Identity in the Post-Cold War Era

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Takahiko Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Power

The euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War has been gradually replaced in Japan with a sense of uncertainty and, in some quarters, with nostalgia for what seems in retrospect the stable and simple truths of Cold War power politics. Although there is a great need to find new ways of adjusting to the profound transformations that now characterize our age, there is an inclination to base these new methods on old patterns of thought and even to turn to outmoded and obsolete formulations that have been firmly conditioned by old international and domestic circumstances.

scholarly journals Beyond East–West: Marginality and National Dignity in Finnish Identity Construction

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Browning ◽  
Marko Lehti
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
The West ◽  
Eu Membership ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

Since the end of the Cold War it has become common for Finnish academics and politicians alike to frame debates about Finnish national identity in terms of locating Finland somewhere along a continuum between East and West. Indeed, for politicians, properly locating oneself (and therefore Finland) along this continuum has often been seen as central to the winning and losing of elections. For example, the 1994 referendum on EU membership was largely interpreted precisely as an opportunity to relocate Finland further to the West. Indeed, the tendency to depict Finnish history in terms of a series of “Westernizing” moves has been notable, but has also betrayed some of the politicized elements of this view. However, this framing of Finnish national identity discourse is not only sometimes politicized but arguably is also too simplified and results in blindness towards other identity narratives that have also been important through Finnish history, and that are also evident (but rarely recognized) today as well. In this article we aim to highlight one of these that we argue has played a key role in locating Finland in the world and in formulating notions of what Finland is about, what historical role and mission it has been understood as destined to play, and what futures for the nation have been conceptualized as possible and as providing a source of subjectivity and national dignity.

scholarly journals Introduction: histories of Cold War cities

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW FARISH ◽  
DAVID MONTEYNE
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

The guest editors for this special issue of Urban History are both Canadian, and for many Canadians the hottest conflict of the Cold War might have been the 1972 ‘Summit Series’, eight hockey games played between the Russian Red Army team and an all-star cast of Canadian professionals. Without delving into the sporting glories of the series (Canada won it, four games to three, with one tie), we can aver that the event was as much about diplomacy, national identity and political-economic rivalry in the context of the Cold War as it was about skating and scoring.

Introduction

Cold War II ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

The essays in this collection investigate the revival of the Cold War movie genre under multiple angles, including questions of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They are sensitive to the cinematic aesthetics and ethics of these representations in the service of understanding the contribution made by the most recent examples to the Cold War movie genre in general and how they shape audiences’ understanding of the Cold War as well as of the relationship between the US and Russia in particular. This introduction provides a brief preview of each essay.

The Cold War in the Village

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-195
Author(s):  
Marcel Thomas
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Village

This chapter examines in more detail how the inhabitants of the two villages engaged with the other Germany and the division of their nation. The Neukirchers and Ebersbachers lived far away from the inner-German border, but in their everyday lives they nonetheless were forced to confront the impact of division. By analysing everyday practices through which the villagers positioned themselves in the political landscape of the Cold War, the chapter sheds new light on the asymmetry of (be)longing and othering in the divided nation. It demonstrates how the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers constructed their own respective imaginary East and imaginary West shaped by local concerns and searches for identity. In Neukirch, the villagers increasingly built up the West as an object of longing in their attempts to deal with the daily struggles of life in a shortage economy. The Ebersbachers, on the other hand, used the East as a Cold War ‘other’ to express pride in their economic recovery and gain a stronger sense of their own identity in a divided nation. These distorted images of the other Germany led to widespread alienation and misunderstandings in the first German–German encounters in the reunified nation. It was difference, rather than a shared sense of national identity, that dominated the experiences of the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers when the inner-German border disappeared in 1990.

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