The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe examines how the neutral European countries and the Soviet Union interacted after World War II. Amid the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, several long-time neutral countries abandoned neutrality and joined NATO. Other countries remained neutral but were still perceived as a threat to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Based on extensive archival research, this volume offers state-of-the-art essays about relations between Europe’s neutral states and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and how these relations were perceived by other powers.
Drawing on analyses of the socio-cultural context of East and Central Europe, with a special focus on the Czech cultural dynamics of the Cold War and its aftermath, this book offers a study of the making and breaking of the centrally-controlled system of book production and reception. It explores the social, material and symbolic reproduction of the printed text, in both official and alternative spheres, and patterns of dissemination and reading. Building on archival research, statistical data, media analyses, and in-depth interviews with the participants of the post-1989 de-centralization and privatization of the book world, it revisits the established notions of ‘censorship’ and ‘revolution’ in order to uncover people’s performances that contributed to both the reproduction and erosion of the ‘old regime’.
The postwar period is no longer current affairs but is becoming the recent past. As such, it is increasingly attracting the attentions of historians. Whilst the Cold War has long been a mainstay of political science and contemporary history, recent research approaches postwar Europe in many different ways, all of which are represented in the 35 chapters of this book. As well as diplomatic, political, institutional, economic, and social history, the The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History contains chapters which approach the past through the lenses of gender, espionage, art and architecture, technology, agriculture, heritage, postcolonialism, memory, and generational change, and shows how the history of postwar Europe can be enriched by looking to disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy. The Handbook covers all of Europe, with a notable focus on Eastern Europe. Including subjects as diverse as the meaning of 'Europe' and European identity, southern Europe after dictatorship, the cultural meanings of the bomb, the 1968 student uprisings, immigration, Americanization, welfare, leisure, decolonization, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and coming to terms with the Nazi past, the thirty five essays in this Handbook offer an unparalleled coverage of postwar European history that offers far more than the standard Cold War framework. Readers will find self-contained, state-of-the-art analyses of major subjects, each written by acknowledged experts, as well as stimulating and novel approaches to newer topics. Combining empirical rigour and adventurous conceptual analysis, this Handbook offers in one substantial volume a guide to the numerous ways in which historians are now rewriting the history of postwar Europe.
The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes. First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries. The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War.
This compelling history of Europe’s Cold War follows the dramatic arc of the conflict that shaped the development of the continent and defined world politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on European actors and events, Mark Gilbert traces the onset of the Cold War, the process of Stalinization in the Soviet bloc, and the difficulties of legitimation experienced by communist regimes in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany even after Stalin’s death. He also shows how Washington’s leadership and worldview was contested in Western Europe, especially by Great Britain and French president Charles de Gaulle. The book charts the growing weakness of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the economic and moral reasons for the system’s eventual collapse. It highlights the central role of European leaders in the process of détente and in the diplomatic endgame that concluded the Cold War in 1990. Rather than simply a strategic standoff between the superpowers, Gilbert argues, the Cold War was a social and ideological conflict that transformed Europe from Lisbon to Riga. Fast-paced and readable, this political, intellectual, and social history illuminates a conflict that continues to resonate today.
Exploring the visions of the end of the Cold War that have been put forth since its inception until its actual ending, this volume brings to the fore the reflections, programmes, and strategies that were intended to call into question the bipolar system and replace it with alternative approaches or concepts. These visions were associated not only with prominent individuals, organized groups and civil societies, but were also connected to specific historical processes or events. They ranged from actual, thoroughly conceived programmes, to more blurred, utopian aspirations -- or simply the belief that the Cold War had already, in effect, come to an end. Such visions reveal much about the contexts in which they were developed and shed light on crucial moments and phases of the Cold War.
This book analyses Russia-Europe/EU relations by exploring their practical essence and conceptualizing them in terms of the main categories of international relations research. It argues that the liberal world order, established in Cold War days, whereby international relations are underpinned by a global balance of power and a highly institutionalized framework of international relations, thereby balancing power and morality, continued after the Cold War, with high hopes in the early 1990s for a new order of security and cooperation for all Europe, including Russia. It goes on to show how the liberal world order has broken down, one manifestation of this being the new conflict between Russia and Europe in recent years, a conflict resulting from the failure of European countries/the EU to acknowledge the actual balance of military, economic and political power, the lack of limits on the policy of European countries in terms of infringing on Russia’s interests, and Russia’s consequent revision, after 1999, of its policy of co-operation. Overall, the book provides huge insight into the nature of Europe-Russia relations.
Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.
Although the Cold War is over, the writing of its history has only just begun. This book presents an analysis of the origins of the Cold War in the decade after the Second World War, discussing the development of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers and the reactions of the Western European states to the growing Soviet-American rivalry. Drawing on recently opened archives from the former Soviet Union as well as on existing research largely unavailable in English, distinguished authorities from each of the countries discussed provide new insight into the Cold War and into the Europe that has been molded by it. The book begins with an overview of United States Cold War policy after the war and a pioneering post-communist examination of Russian involvement. The next chapters focus on the other two members of the wartime alliance, Britain and France, for which the Cold War was interwoven with concerns such as the maintenance of empire and the continued fear of Germany. The book then examines the vanquished countries of World War II, Italy and Germany, who--particularly in the case of divided Germany--were struggling to recover their international status and come to terms with their past. The last part of the book considers how the small states--Benelux and Scandinavia--forged new groupings in the search for security, even though conflicts of national interest still persisted between them. The authors not only show the impact of superpower policies on each country but also reveal the many ways in which West European states were active participants in Cold War politics, trying to draw the Americans into Europe and shaping the blocs that emerged. The book sheds light on the European Community (in many ways a response to uneasiness about Germany) and on NATO, whose purpose was once described as keeping "the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
