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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (3): 114–152.
Published: 01 September 2018
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This article examines the interactions between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and African-American activists during the Cold War. Relying mostly on archival records and personal documents in English as well as Chinese, the article shows that the construction of the new “black bridge” was made possible because of the PRC's determination to achieve its policy objectives, the African-American activists' needs in fighting for racial equality, and the U.S. government's strict ban on travel to China. Both the PRC and the black activists were new to these transnational interactions, and they worked together in such an unprecedented manner that they redefined the nature and function of Sino-American cultural relations. The black bridge facilitated a limited flow of people and information but also carried misinformation that eventually led to greater misunderstanding and fiercer confrontation. The bridge began to fade in the late 1960s and early 1970s as Beijing was forced to readjust its policy toward the United States, which soon lifted its ban on travel to the PRC.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (3): 153–179.
Published: 01 September 2018
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This article uses comments, questions, and conversations about the PRC's draft constitution of 1954 to assess state legitimacy and how people felt more generally about the Communist regime. Taking advantage of untapped archival sources in Hong Kong and the mainland—including classified intraparty reports and transcripts from meetings in factories, police stations, universities, and villages—this article challenges the conventional view that the constitution bolstered support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, the document generated a great deal of anxiety among ordinary citizens, as well as among CCP officials and the regime's favored classes. This “text-based” cause of emotional turmoil was a supplement to the classic forms of political terror that dominate the literature on Communist dictatorships. Despite widespread confusion, people's identification of problematic sections of the constitution turned out to be remarkably prescient in light of political disasters in the 1950s and 1960s and ongoing constitutional controversies in the era after Mao Zedong.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (3): 180–206.
Published: 01 September 2018
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This article contributes to the historiography of two separate topics that became intertwined in the final decade of the Cold War: wildlife protection activism and Cold War broadcasting. The article explains how the activities of Radio Free Europe (RFE), a U.S.-funded radio station based in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that transmitted shortwave broadcasts to five Soviet-bloc countries, throw into sharp relief the fine line between the advantages of radio technologies and their pitfalls. The article focuses on a protracted conflict between RFE and the FRG's bird protection activists in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some U.S. officials viewed the fight over the station's superior “killer technologies” as reflecting anti-Americanism during Ronald Reagan's presidency, but West German officials saw it more as an outgrowth of the species protection movement that had recently become a part of the FRG's political mainstream. The article highlights the complex social and international political dimensions of the dispute.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (3): 3–56.
Published: 01 September 2018
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Earlier historical studies often suggested that the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin, distrustful as he was of Ho Chi Minh's policies and attributing little importance to Vietnam, remained unwilling to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam until the Chinese Communist leaders threw their weight behind their Vietnamese comrades. On the basis of Soviet press articles, Hungarian archival documents, United Nations (UN) records, and other sources, this article shows that in fact Soviet interest in Vietnam significantly increased as early as 1948–1949, well before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China. This interest, expressed in growing press coverage and sporadic efforts to represent North Vietnam's cause in various UN organs, seems to have been linked to Moscow's strong disapproval of France's attempts to create an anti-Communist “puppet state.” From the outset, the USSR took the position that the Communist North was the sole legitimate representative of the Vietnamese nation and, hence, that the Bao Dai regime in the South was ipso facto illegitimate. The article concludes that Chinese support to Ho Chi Minh was only one of the three major factors that persuaded Stalin to recognize North Vietnam; the two others were the “Bao Dai factor” and Moscow's dissatisfaction with France's new European policy.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (3): 57–113.
Published: 01 September 2018
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From the late 1950s until 1975, the war between North and South Vietnam had both domestic and international consequences. Unlike the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, the war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the Communist North) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, the non-Communist South) was an armed conflict between two polities that both identified themselves as Vietnamese. In this twenty-year-long struggle, the fates of the DRV and the RVN were tied to their success in producing new generations who would subscribe to their respective agendas. This was done through many venues, of which education was one of the most important. Relying on archival materials and published documents, this article compares the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the period 1965–1975.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (2): 38–62.
Published: 01 June 2018
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This article shows that foreign tourism to the USSR from the 1950s on evolved from a political propaganda tool into what is defined in tourism studies as “ethnic tourism.” Ethnic tourism designates a type of exposure that centers on experiencing a different and presumably “authentic” ethnic culture. This change in the nature of Soviet foreign tourism was particularly explicit in the ways the Soviet authorities organized and framed travel to peripheries such as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic for the sake of earning profit for the Soviet state. As tourism to Latvia increased and drew a larger and more diverse tourist population, the ethnic uniqueness of Latvians and their culture took precedence over demonstrations of the general superiority of Communist society. These arguments are substantiated with archival materials from the Riga branch of Inturist (the Central Administration of Foreign Tourism under the USSR Council of Ministers) stored in Latvia's Central State Archives in Riga.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (2): 129–154.
Published: 01 June 2018
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Using recently declassified documents from Moscow, this article recounts Anastas Mikoyan's trip to Japan in the summer of 1961. The trip served as an inflection point in the commercial relationship between the Soviet Union and Japan—a relationship that by the end of the decade had become the most extensive between the Soviet Union and a country of the “free world.” The article indicates that narratives focusing on ideologies of great-power rivalry during the Cold War tend to miss the kinds of global ideological currents that shaped many states’ behavior after 1945. Mikoyan's discussions with political and business elites in Japan suggest that an ideology of economic growth increasingly underlay concepts of political governance on both sides and ultimately allowed for the kind of cooperation that characterized Soviet-Japanese relations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (2): 99–128.
Published: 01 June 2018
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In the wake of decolonization, Britain wanted to maintain its strategic interests in Nigeria and to keep the newly independent African country in the Western orbit. Having abrogated a defense agreement in reaction to Nigerian domestic opposition, the British government counted on military assistance to secure its postcolonial security role. The British thus hoped to gain responsibility for the buildup of a Nigerian air force, which the authorities in Lagos wished to establish for national prestige and protection against potential enemies such as Ghana. The Nigerians, however, first tried to secure the requisite assistance from Commonwealth countries other than Britain before opting for a West German air force mission. The Nigerian government aimed to reduce its dependence on Britain and thereby burnish its neutralist credentials. Yet London was challenged by a Western version of neutralism, similar to Western neutrality, because the Nigerians never attempted to approach the Soviet bloc about military assistance.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (2): 3–37.
Published: 01 June 2018
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This article examines the strategy of the Iranian Tudeh Party in concert with its Soviet and East German patrons and allies during and after the Iranian revolution of 1979. The article assesses the thinking behind the Tudeh's strategy of unwavering support for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist allies, even after other major leftist parties had begun fighting the new Islamic regime. This strategy was a product of the international Communist movement's model of revolution in the developing world that envisioned new states following a “non-capitalist path of development.” In Iran, this was compounded by the use of Allende-era Chile as a model for the politics of revolutionary Iran, as well as a deep conviction that Islamism could not provide an effective model of governance in the twentieth century and therefore would collapse of its own accord within months after the Islamists seized power.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (2): 63–98.
Published: 01 June 2018
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This article proposes a theoretical model for understanding foreign policy formation and change, especially regarding alliances and what might be called “balancing” foreign policy behavior. The article combines a realist focus on power with the perceptions of actors based on their experiences and the lessons they draw from them. When uncertainty about threat level is high, the “lessons” that actors or groups draw from the past play an indispensable role in helping them make sense of the world. The model is applied to the case of Denmark's decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, which was arguably the most significant shift in Danish foreign policy of the twentieth century. The model explains why Danish officials decided to joined NATO only after the Scandinavian Defense Union had failed.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 31–57.
Published: 01 April 2018
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This article examines the relationship between transnational and intergovernmental organizations in the formation of the international nuclear order in the 1950s. It focuses on three major events in September 1958: the second United Nations (UN) International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, the third Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs (held in Tyrol), and the second General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The three nuclear conferences of 1958, linked closely in time and location, were shaped by interplays of science and politics at a unique moment in nuclear history. The analysis here sheds light on the organizational and institutional beginnings of the Cold War nuclear order and the evolving distinction between transnational and intergovernmental organizations that shaped it. The article shows that competitive dynamics affected relations between the IAEA and the Pugwash organization and between the IAEA and other organizations of the UN.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 140–169.
Published: 01 April 2018
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Newly available archival sources in China illuminate how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used transnational initiatives to advance its aims. This article explores Chinese interaction with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1957 to 1964 and discusses how the People's Republic of China (PRC) made deliberate use of transnational initiatives to further its own Cold War strategy and foreign policy. High-ranking CCP officials were directly involved in selecting China's scientific participants, shaping their message, and determining their objectives at the conferences, including winning over potentially sympathetic foreign scientists, demonstrating Sino-Soviet solidarity and, in 1960, potentially establishing back-channel communications with the incoming Kennedy administration in the United States. Chinese scientists’ involvement in Pugwash shows that transnational relations mattered to the PRC during the Cold War and, more broadly, underscores the importance of governments in transnational relations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 101–139.
Published: 01 April 2018
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This article sheds new light, from a transnational perspective, on the intellectual struggle in Japan over nuclear deterrence. Japanese scientists opposed the Cold War order from the superpowers on down. Against the backdrop of the intensifying nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, Pugwash scientists came to accept a key notion by the mid-1960s; namely, that stable mutual deterrence is a prerequisite for averting nuclear war and promoting nuclear arms control. Under such circumstances, the Japanese Pugwash scientists began to criticize nuclear deterrence in the early 1960s in Japanese society. This article recounts how their challenges to the intellectual hegemony of nuclear deterrence developed not only from antiwar and antinuclear sentiments that they shared with the Japanese public, but also from the transnational transfer of ideas through the Pugwash organization.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 58–100.
Published: 01 April 2018
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British nuclear policy faced a major challenge in 1954 when the radiological dangers of the new hydrogen bomb were highlighted by an accident resulting from a U.S. thermonuclear test in the Pacific that underscored how nuclear fallout could travel across national borders. Echoing the response from the United States, the British government downplayed the fallout problem and argued that weapons testing was safe. Some influential scientists rallied behind the government position on fallout and weapons tests, but others disagreed and were regarded within government circles as troublesome dissidents. This article focuses on two of the dissident scientists, Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell, showing how they challenged government policy and sought to make public their view that fallout was dangerous and that weapons testing should stop. Their objections ensured that the fallout debate became a part of public life in Cold War Britain, imbuing the hydrogen bomb and the arms race with new meaning. The article casts new light on the process by which the fallout/testing issue came to be the most publicly controversial area of nuclear weapons policy, serving as a rallying point for scientists beyond the nation-state, at once a national and transnational problem.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 210–240.
Published: 01 April 2018
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The beginnings of Pugwash overlapped with the first stage of the process of de-Stalinization, which had a marked effect on science and on scientific cooperation across the Iron Curtain. In the international context of the late 1950s, Pugwash enabled Soviet officials and scientists to play an active part in the international community at the very point when the World Peace Council (a Soviet front organization) was experiencing its deepest crisis. Despite political pressure from Moscow, the various Academies of Sciences in East European countries, which represented Pugwash national committees in their respective societies, managed to benefit from these circumstances. They developed important contacts with Western analysts such as Henry Kissinger, Paul Doty, and Marshall Shulman. This cooperation helped to shape the research agenda in Eastern Europe, though its scope was still controlled by the USSR. Nevertheless, after 1975—and most importantly after 1982—Pugwash managed to establish contact with non-Communist peace activists and dissident movements in Eastern Europe.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2018) 20 (1): 170–209.
Published: 01 April 2018
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When the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) was founded as the West German section of Pugwash in the late 1950s, several high-profile scientists from the Max Planck Society (MPS), especially nuclear physicists, were involved. Well into the 1980s, institutional links existed between the MPS, the Federal Republic's most distinguished scientific research institution, and Pugwash, the transnational peace activist network that was set up in 1957 in the eponymous Nova Scotia village following the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. At the beginning, the two organizations’ relationship was maintained primarily by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. However, the relationship was difficult from the start, and the distance between them grew during the rise of détente in the 1970s, when the scientific flagship MPS was deployed more and more frequently in matters of foreign cultural policy on behalf of West Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a whole. This article explores the resources and risks of transnational political engagement during the Cold War, focusing on the individual strategies of top-ranking researchers as well as the policy deliberations within a leading scientific organization along the chief East-West divide: the front line between the two German states.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2017) 19 (4): 74–112.
Published: 01 December 2017
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In the 1970s and 1980s the Guatemalan government's counterinsurgency tactics prompted nearly 2 million people to abandon their homes. Drawing on heretofore unexamined documentation produced by North American solidarity groups, this article examines how Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. grassroots organizations represented the approximately 200,000 Guatemalans who crossed the border into Mexico. It traces the gendered and racialized victim portrayals that celebrated refugee men's voices and agency while reducing refugee women to silent symbols of trauma. A close reading of new sources reveals a paradox of solidarity work in the 1980s: North American activists promoted a new social order of justice and equality, but they did so from positions both privileged and hindered by Cold War geopolitics. As a result, even as “northern” solidarists provided very real succor to “southern” people, their actions continued to be based on uneven (colonial/imperial) power relations and assumptions about an exotic Other.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2017) 19 (4): 168–191.
Published: 01 December 2017
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This article discusses the processing of social dissent and its media relevance in East German society in the 1970s and 1980s. The Gegenwartskriminalfilm (contemporary crime movie) Polizeiruf 110 and the courtroom television show Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort are fruitful film sources for analyzing the specific ways in which social reality and social inequality were constructed and negotiated in the Communist state. Social images as mirror and manifestation of effective public attention to and the perception of social problems shed light on the social symbolic order: They reveal the opposition of “good” and “bad” behavior, with a contrast in their symbolic representations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2017) 19 (4): 4–41.
Published: 01 December 2017
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The overthrow of the monarchy in Afghanistan in 1973 was a seminal moment in the country's history and in U.S. policy in Central Asia. The return of Mohamed Daoud Khan to power was aided by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA, the Communist party) and military officers trained in the Soviet Union. Even as Communism was making its first substantive gains in Afghanistan, the United States was wrestling with how best to pursue its strategy of containment. Stung by the experience of Vietnam, President Richard Nixon concluded that the United States could not unilaterally respond to every instance of Communist expansion. In the turbulent years that followed, U.S. diplomacy and Daoud's desire for nonalignment combined to mitigate Soviet influence in Afghanistan. However, the U.S. triumph was fleeting insofar as Daoud's shift toward nonalignment triggered the erosion of Soviet-Afghan relations, culminating in the overthrow of his government and the final ascension of the PDPA.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cold War Studies (2017) 19 (4): 113–136.
Published: 01 December 2017
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State violence as a complex system of ideological prescriptions, normative values, and everyday practices has been emerging as a major topic in the study of Soviet-type regimes. Overcoming the Cold War preoccupation with the totalitarian character of these societies, new historiographical approaches put at the center the changing degree of physical and psychological violence. This article sketches the evolution of state violence concepts and practices in Communist-era Romania, focusing on the treatment of the large Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Although Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania has been largely acknowledged as a special case, incompatible with the overall development of the Soviet bloc, it is possible to apply the model of “civilized violence” and “reliability of expectations” to the specific conditions of the late phase of Romanian national Communism. The most primitive forms of physical violence such as shooting or the savage beating of inmates never disappeared from the power instruments available to the different repressive bodies, but these techniques were supplemented by more refined attempts to encourage social collaboration based on patriotic conviction.
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