The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.
The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.
This book examines the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War. Based on hitherto little known documents from Western and Eastern European archives, it combines the story of Soviet oil and gas with general Cold War history. This volume breaks new ground by framing Soviet energy in a multi-national context, taking into account not only the view from Moscow, but also the perspectives of communist Eastern Europe, the US, NATO, as well as several Western European countries – namely Italy, France, and West Germany. This book challenges some of the long-standing assumptions of East-West bloc relations, as well as shedding new light on relations within the blocs regarding the issue of energy. By bringing together a range of junior and senior historians and specialists from Europe, Russia and the US, this book represents a pioneering endeavour to approach the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War in transnational perspective.
This book offers the first non-official history of French nuclear policies which goes beyond the divide between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. It addresses the sizing of France’s nuclear forces, technological assistance to countries with nuclear weapons programs, uranium prospection, nuclear testing, its health effects and protests against it, as well as plans to prevent and manage accidents in nuclear power plants. It is based on new questions and new sources from France and abroad. The chapters in this volume show how independent and interdisciplinary scholarship free from conflicts of interests can uniquely advance our understanding of nuclear history and politics. This is the case because it does not treat the categories and judgments of official discourse as neutral starting points of the analysis. This volume is based on untapped primary sources from France, the UK, the US, India, South Africa and Iran, on a new assessment of the health consequences of French nuclear testing in Polynesia thanks to a modern atmospheric particle transport code coupled with historical weather data, open-source information about radioactive debris (“mushroom”) clouds, as well as data on the composition and particle sizes of the fallout; and on new survey data about French knowledge of and attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. They show notably that the first generation of French nuclear forces lacked technical credibility despite reliance on outside help. Several French officials knew this, as did France's allies and adversaries. Moreover, French strategic collaborations associated to nuclear programs extended to India and South Africa; nuclear safety regulations changed fundamentally after the Cold War, and approximately 110,000 people, i.e. 90% of the French Polynesian population in the 1970s, could have received doses that would qualify them for compensation according to French law. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of history, politics, international relations, military history, war studies, conflict and global governance. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in Cold War History. A few chapters were first published in the Nonproliferation Review, Diplomacy & Statecraft and Science & Global Security.
Hitherto, the organization of international business has been studied mostly from a managerial point of view or by examining the relationship between firms and the economy. Yet, the development of the modern, multinational firm - the most important type of business organisation - has been strongly influenced by the conflicts that bedeviled the twentieth century. The volatile macroeconomic and political environments experienced by international business point to how important it is to study political risk. Consequently, Multinational Enterprise, Political Risk and Organisational Change: From Total War to Cold War breaks new ground: it argues that non-market elements and historical context are key to understanding the way international business has been organised. This edited volume offers an historical approach to analysing how multinational enterprise has developed over time and around the world, through a series of well-crafted chapters, on important topics in international economic and business history, written by authorities in their respective fields of study and research. The study is based on the underlying premise that the coming of the two World Wars, the devastating and long-term consequences of such total wars, and the ideological challenge of the Cold War acted as a pivot points in shaping the nature and character of multinational firms. By examining such phenomena, this study offers insights to anyone who has an interest in business, economic or political history, management and business studies, or international relations. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Multinational Enterprise and Transnational Regions offers an innovative approach to the study of the history of transnational economic regions. The Rhine valley is such a region comprising the cities and areas along the Rhine river and its tributaries. The transition from coal to oil that unfolded between 1945 and 1973 rapidly transformed the region, shattering some of the old river-based connections and creating new ones with the introduction of large-scale cross-border oil pipelines. Multinational enterprises shaped these new regional connections but divergent national government responses gave rise to differentiated development in different parts of the Rhine valley. Multinational Enterprise and Transnational Regions argues that processes of regional change should be understood from transnational interconnections rather than from local or national perspectives. This book uses a transnational business history methodology to tease out the region’s transformation and to circumvent the national bias in public sources. It will be of relevance to academics and researchers with an interest in regional and transnational European history, international business, environmental history, and business history, as well as practitioners interested in the oil industry, energy and energy history, business history and international business, and associated disciplines.
The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.
This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.
The post-cold war era presented security challenges that at one level are a continuation of the cold war era; at another level, these phenomena manifested in new forms. Whether the issues of economics and trade, transfer of technologies, challenges of intervention, or humanitarian crisis, the countries of the South (previously pejoratively labelled “Third World” or “developing” countries) have continued to address these challenges within the framework of their capabilities and concerns. The volume explores defence diplomacies, national security challenges and strategies, dynamics of diplomatic manoeuvers and strategic resource management of Latin American, southern African and Asian countries.
The definitive history of the Cold War and its impact around the world We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically and offers an engaging new history of how today's world was created.
