Introduction

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Atmospheric Research ◽  
The Core ◽  
Reliable Communications ◽  
Defence Research ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter proposes the modern nation as a crucial site for elaborating the historical relationship between nature and technology. Nations emerged as both natural and technological objects partly through attempts to link distinctive natural orders (as opposed to natural environments) with technological failures. Focusing on radio disruptions in the Canadian North, the chapter argues that scientists at the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) used upper atmospheric research to define an essential antagonism between a hostile Northern nature and reliable communications to the region. That case illustrates the important place of specific machines and their behaviors (machinic orders) in defining historical natures, including the hostile natures at the core of Canadian national identity and of 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.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Jane Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German History ◽  
The Core ◽  
German States ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The Cold War

The Epilogue considers the core questions raised in earlier chapters: the place of National Socialism in German history and what it meant to be ‘German’ after the defeat of Nazism. Trials of leading figures in the regime in 1945–9 were a first step, but addressing responsibility for Nazi crimes was a prolonged and uneven process. How Germans confronted the Nazi past was affected by the establishment of two separate German states in 1949, the Cold War, the unification of Germany in 1990, and the eventual development of an international culture of Holocaust.

Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
The Core ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Sacrifice

This chapter on Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty centers on the most famous piece in it, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” As a matter of genre, it is an essay in conceptual analysis. Because liberty is a historically inflected concept, it is also an essay in the history of ideas. The chapter argues that Berlin was a “Cold War liberal” only in the limited sense that he campaigned against all doctrines that licensed the sacrifice of real individuals on the altar of impersonal entities such as the proletariat or the nation, and Soviet Communism was a salient case both because of the Cold War and Berlin’s own Russian origins. Individuals have an inviolability that governments of any stripe must not infringe. That is the core of negative liberty. Positively, Berlin’s faith was that unimpeded, individuals with adequate resources would spontaneously lead varied and vivid existences.

The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Wohlforth
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Hard Case ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Cold War

The articles in this special issue of the journal succeeded in meeting the core objective set out in the introduction: to refine, deepen, and extend previous studies of the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War. In particular, they confront more forthrightly than past studies a major challenge of studying ideas in this case; namely, that ideas, material incentives, and policy all covaried. Two other important problems for those seeking to establish an independent role for ideas remain to be addressed in future studies. Facing those problems as squarely as the contributors to this issue have faced the covariation problem will yield major benefits for the study of ideas in this case and in international relations more generally.

Sense and Nonsense in Politics

1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (04) ◽  
pp. 573-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin Surkin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
New Generation

I take my cue for the title of this paper from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, who wrote in 1948 that “the political experience of the past thirty years oblige us to evoke the background of non-sense against which every universal undertaking is silhouetted and by which it is threatened with failure.” Merleau-Ponty refers to the experience of that generation of intellectuals for whom Marxism was a “mistaken hope” because it lost “confidence in its own daring when it was successful in only one country.” But this criticism is equally relevant for a new generation of intellectuals in America for whom the ideals of liberalism have been emptied of reality and have become little more than a super-rational mystique for the Cold War, a counter-revolutionary reflex in the third world, and a narrow perspective of social welfare at home. Merleau-Ponty argues that Marxism “abandoned its own proletarian methods and resumed the classical ones of history: hierarchy, obedience, myth, inequality, diplomacy, and police. Today intellectuals in America are making the same critique with equal fervor about their own lost illusions.As we search for new ways to comprehend the social realities of American life and new modes of social thought and political action to reconstruct “the American dream,” Merleau-Ponty's notion of sense and nonsense guides us to see the historical relationship between ideologies and practice, between thought and action, between man and the world he creates. It symbolizes that recurrent fact in history whereby reason parades as unreason, where even “the highest form of reason borders on unreason.” We must learn from recent history that “the experience of unreason cannot simply be forgotten;” that the most noble claims to universal truth, the most rational modes of philosophical or social inquiry, the most convincing declarations of political leaders are all contingent, and should be subject to revision and open to criticism and change.

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.

Introduction: The Political Ambiguities of Pius XII

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Simon Unger-Alvi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This collection of essays evaluates the relations between Eugenio Pacelli and Germany from the beginning of his career as a papal nuncio in Munich in 1917 until his pontificate during the wartime and post-war periods. The contributions to this volume do not provide a complete overview of this topic. Instead, they should be understood as case studies on certain aspects of Vatican-German history. At the core of this work are the complexities and ambiguities of papal politics between four political systems from the Kaiserreich to the West German Federal Republic. Ultimately, this volume thus touches upon very diverse subjects ranging from Pacelli’s ‚concordat diplomacy‘ in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich to his silence during the Holocaust and the German occupation of Italy, the anti-communism of the Cold War, and the Vatican’s path towards reform in the post-war period.

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