Solidarity with Solidarity

Solidarity with Solidarity

Author: Idesbald Goddeeris

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0739150707

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The Polish crisis in the early 1980s provoked a great deal of reaction in the West. Not only governments, but social movements were also touched by the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarnosc in the summer of 1980, the proclamation of martial law in December 1981, and Solidarnosc's underground activity in the subsequent years. In many countries, campaigns were set up in order to spread information, raise funds, and provide the Polish opposition with humanitarian relief and technical assistance. Labor movements especially stepped into the limelight. A number of Western European unions were concerned about the new international tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the new hard-line policy of the US and saw Solidarnosc as a political instrument of clerical and neo-conservative cold warriors. This book analyzes reaction to Solidarnosc in nine Western European countries and within the international trade union confederations. It argues that Western solidarity with Solidarnosc was highly determined by its instrumental value within the national context. Trade unions openly sided with Solidarnosc when they had an interest in doing so, namely when Solidarnosc could strengthen their own program or position. But this book also reveals that reaction in allegedly reluctant countries was massive, albeit discreet, pragmatic, and humanitarian, rather than vocal, emotional, and political.


The United States, Western Europe and the Polish Crisis

The United States, Western Europe and the Polish Crisis

Author: H. Sjursen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-12-10

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1403990298

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This book examines the response of the Western Alliance to the Polish Crisis (1980-83). The author analyses the different views of Europe and the United States regarding enforcement in East-West relations and the opposition in Western Europe to the American approach. This case exemplifies the lasting differences in attitude within the Western Alliance.


The Cold War: a Very Short Introduction

The Cold War: a Very Short Introduction

Author: Robert J. McMahon

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-02-25

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0198859546

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Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.


The Cold War in the Classroom

The Cold War in the Classroom

Author: Barbara Christophe

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 3030119998

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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.


The United States and Western Europe Since 1945

The United States and Western Europe Since 1945

Author: Geir Lundestad

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-08-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0191647780

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Based on new and existing research by a world-class scholar, this is the first book in twenty years to examine the dynamics of the entire American-West European relationship since 1945. The relationship between the United States and Western Europe has always been crucial and recent events dictate that it is becoming ever more so. In this important new work, Geir Lundestad analyses the balance between the cooperation and conflict which has characterized this relationship in the post-war period. He examines talk of transatlantic drift, and the strain now apparent between the USA and the nation states of Western Europe. In the concluding section, Lundestad offers a topical view of the future of transatlantic interaction. Throughout the work Lundestad's much cited 'empire by invitation' thesis is both put into practice and extended in time and scope. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most important and enduring international relationships of the last sixty years.


The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History

The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History

Author: Dan Stone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-05-17

Total Pages: 796

ISBN-13: 0199560986

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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.


Poland's Memory Wars

Poland's Memory Wars

Author: Jo Harper

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2018-10-20

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9637326553

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This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power. They help to make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics. The descriptions of PiS in Western media tend to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was simply successful in understanding its electorate, and just helped Poland to revert to its normal state. This new Normal seems quite similar to the old one: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist. The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Western-looking Poland and an inward-looking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, and working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition. The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.


Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

Author: Robert Brier

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1108665497

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In the historiography of human rights, the 1980s feature as little more than an afterthought to the human rights breakthrough of the previous decade. Through an examination of one of the major actors of recent human rights history – Poland's Solidarity movement – Robert Brier challenges this view. Suppressed in 1981, Poland's Solidarity movement was supported by a surprisingly diverse array of international groups: US Cold Warriors, French left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists, Amnesty International, even Chilean opponents of the Pinochet regime. By unpacking the politics and transnational discourses of these groups, Brier demonstrates how precarious the position of human rights in international politics remained well into the 1980s. More importantly, he shows that human rights were a profoundly political and highly contested language, which actors in East and West adopted to redefine their social and political identities in times of momentous cultural and intellectual change.


Kennedy, de Gaulle and Western Europe

Kennedy, de Gaulle and Western Europe

Author: E. Mahan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-10-16

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1403913927

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In Kennedy, de Gaulle and Western Europe , Mahan revises prevailing interpretations of Franco-American relations during the early 1960s that either chastise de Gaulle for anti-Americanism or Kennedy for imposing U.S. policies on Europe. Summoning a wide range of French and American archival sources, this book demonstrates that the structure and dynamics of the Franco-American relationship during this period were embedded in complex multilateral relationships within the Western alliance.