scholarly journals On the Road to the New Beginning: History and Utopia in Frank Beyer’s Karbid und Sauerampfer (Carbide and Sorrel)

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Thomas Lindenberger
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
German Society ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Road ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The Future ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Today, the film Carbide and Sorrel, by the eminent and recently deceased DEFA director Frank Beyer, is a valuable retrospective look at the construction of the new Germany. Through the story of a worker tossed by his workmates onto the country’s roads in search of carbide in the summer of 1945, this 1963 comedy, made two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, is a portrait of German society in the grip of the future protagonists of the Cold War. The protagonist’s comic peregrinations between the American and Soviet occupiers are an oblique depiction, reinforced by popular songs of the day, of a utopian existence beyond the dominant political powers.

On the Road to Vienna

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Bruns
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
The Road ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Law Commission ◽  
Law Commission

This chapter focuses on the negotiations that preceded the 1961 Vienna Conference (which led to the conclusion of the VCDR). The author challenges the view that the successful codification was an obvious step and refers in this regard to a history of intense negotiation which spanned fifteen years. With particular reference to the International Law Commission (ILC), the chapter explores the difficult task faced by ILC members to strike a balance between the codification of existing practice and progressive development of diplomatic law. It reaches the finding that the ILC negotiations were crucial for the success of the Conference, but notes also that certain States supported a less-binding form of codification. The chapter also underlines the fact that many issues that had caused friction between the Cold War parties were settled during the preparatory meetings and remained largely untouched during the 1961 negotiations.

Monuments of war: defining England's 20th-century defence heritage

Antiquity ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 71 (272) ◽  
pp. 288 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. S. Dobinson ◽  
J. Lake ◽  
A.J. Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Cold War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
World War ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The editor of ANTIQUITY remembers travelling, as a child, on the main A1 highway to see relatives in southeast England, watching the banks of sharp-nosed Bloodhound missiles ranged close by the road – pointing east, to meet incoming Soviet bombers. The obsolete monuments of the Cold War, and before that of the Second World War, are history now, famously the Berlin Wall (Baker 1993 in ANTIQUITY). Many, like the concrete runways of the airfields, are so solidly built they are not lightly removed. These remains of England's 20th-century defence heritage are not well understood. However, and contrary to popular belief, they do have a large documentation; and it is this, the authors argue, that should form the basis for systematic review.

What Changes in Summer and Autumn 1989?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Causal Chain ◽  
The Other ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nondemocratic Regimes

This chapter addresses why November 1989 became the moment that the models for the future were launched. By the night of November 9, five developments had permanently altered the Cold War and produced a causal chain that resulted in the unintentional opening of the Berlin Wall. The nature of this causal chain suggests that theorists of power and theorists of ideas need to pay attention to each other to understand what happened. On the one hand, some developments were based on old-fashioned realist calculations. On the other hand, some developments were ones of attitude rather than capability, of ideas rather than material abilities. In the course of 1989, half of Europe had come to the conclusion that it need not continue to live under nondemocratic regimes in the interest of maintaining the stability of the whole.

Beyond Westphalia? Capitalism after the ‘Fall’

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 89-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY BUZAN ◽  
RICHARD LITTLE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Future ◽  
International Role ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Important Shift

When the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989 and the Cold War ended, specialists in the field of international relations (IR) readily acknowledged that it was necessary to take stock and assess the historical significance of these events. Unsurprisingly, no agreement has been reached. For most realists, the events reflect no more than an important shift in the power structure of the international system. But for liberals, the forty years of Cold War are now depicted not as a struggle for power, but as an ideological battle between capitalism and communism from which capitalism has emerged triumphant. The significance of this development for the future of international relations is difficult to gauge. As a key concept, ‘capitalism’ has largely been the preserve of the Marxian fringe in IR. It did not resonate amongst most mainstream theorists in the field, whether realist or liberal. The concept was most familiar as a term of communist propaganda. It was avoided by many specialists during the Cold War era who failed to see how capitalism could promote an understanding of superpower relations. But with the end of the Cold War now linked to the triumph of capitalism, it is impossible for liberals, in particular, to discuss the future of the international system without some evaluation of the unfolding international role being played by capitalism.

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

Global Development

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

In the Cold War, “development” was a catchphrase that came to signify progress, modernity, and economic growth. Development aid was closely aligned with the security concerns of the great powers, for whom infrastructure and development projects were ideological tools for conquering hearts and minds around the globe, from Europe and Africa to Asia and Latin America. This book provides a global history of development, drawing on a wealth of archival evidence to offer a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a Cold War phenomenon that transformed the modern world. Taking readers from the aftermath of the Second World War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the book shows how development projects altered local realities, transnational interactions, and even ideas about development itself. The book shines new light on the international organizations behind these projects—examining their strategies and priorities and assessing the actual results on the ground—and it also gives voice to the recipients of development aid. It shows how the Cold War shaped the global ambitions of development on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and how international organizations promoted an unrealistically harmonious vision of development that did not reflect local and international differences. The book presents a global perspective on Cold War development, demonstrating how its impacts are still being felt today.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

scholarly journals Sad delusions: The decline and rise of Greater Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652199975
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Order ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Tension ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
West European

The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the beginning of the unification of Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev talked in terms of a “Common European Home,” an idea that continues in the guise of the project for a “Greater Europe.” However, right from the start, the transformative idea of Greater Europe was countered by the notion of “Europe whole and free,” whose fundamental dynamic was the enlargement of the existing West European order to encompass the rest of the continent. This was a program for the enlargement of the Atlantic system. After some prevarication, the enlargement agenda proved unacceptable to Moscow, and while it continues to argue in favor of transformation its main efforts are now devoted to creating some sort of “greater Eurasia.” There remains a fundamental tension between Atlanticist and pan-continental version of the post-–Cold War international order in the region. This tension gave rise to conflict and war: in 2008 (the Russo-Georgian War) and again from 2014 (Ukraine), and to what some call the Second Cold War. The continent is once again divided. However, pan-continentalism is far from dead, and although Greater Eurasian ideas have thrived, some sort of Greater European continentalism remains on the agenda. Is this, though, no more than a “sad delusion” or a genuine possibility?

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