Cold War & Ostpolitik Flashcards
REYNOLDS | what is popular in common discourse now?
Cultural history - Peter Burke - ‘on the way to the culture of everything’
REYNOLDS | What is of growing obsolescence in discourse?
‘International history’ and ‘diplomatic history’ Rather seen as relics of old fashioned political history
REYNOLDS | What did the French Annales school introduce?
Focus on socio-cultural history - rejection of marxist class analysis, rejection of diplomatic history
What agitations were emerging in Britain and America to the practice of history?
History from Below E.P. Thompson
Who do not like positivism? (verifiable, scientific)
Marxists and postmodernists
How has the interest in cultural turn affected diplomacy?
The creation of cultural diplomacy - discovery of the ways in which USA used music, literature, art and other cultural products as weapons in the cold war
What must be remembered about the Cold War, David Caute?
Very cool in terms of military conflict - compared to the crusades and the wars of religion in the sixteenth century
What has cultural history unveiled about the nature of Cold War cultural policy?
Promotion of freedom within and beyond the free world was done by distinctly illiberal methods - bribery, propaganda, coercion. This could all be achieved covertly through the funding of unions, journalists, scholars and private groups to avoid direct U.S. government involvement
How did the Truman administration covertly influence the Italian elections of 1948?
‘Exchange Stabilisation Fund’ - $10 million through unvouchered and private sources to defeat the communists.
What is the progression from the Frankfurt school critique of cultural imperialism?
Movement to cultural transmission or transfer - suggestion of two way movement.
What does Reinhold Wagnleitner’s book Coca-Colonisation and the Cold War show about young Austrians?
They embraced American values in their own ways and for their own reasons - to help move their country on from the social and political norms of the National Socialist era. This was ‘self-colonisation’
What does Jessica Gienow-Hecht’s study of American cultural diplomacy in West Germany conclude?
Germans embraced Elvis and Disney but jealously guarded their own high culture (Goethe and Mozart) as part of their national identity.
When did gender enter the field of international history?
1990s - Emily Rosenberg
What does Frank Costigliola contribute to the gender narrative?
Utility of emotive meanings to constrain rational analysis. I.e. detection in US officials the depiction of allies as “beings that were in some way diminished from the norm of a healthy heterosexual male: sick patients, hysterical women, naïve children, emasculated men”
How did the British diplomats read the Americans during the 1930s?
Isolationistic and erratic tendencies through gender scopes: ‘she resembles a young lady just launched into society and highly susceptible to a little deference from an older man”. Britain felt the need to educate America.
How does Robert Dean measure the Kennedy role in the coming of the Vietnam war?
Kennedy wanted to not seem weak - to promote a cult of manliness which went beyond style - was something more akin to a fundamental makeup of a world view.
What is the typical JFK quote to demonstrate a ‘manly’ tendency to face up to Khrushchev?
“If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act… and Vietnam looks like the place”
Another function -the role of memory. How has this impacted international history?
The memory of Yalta was used by the Republican right in America during the 1940s to blast Roosevelt and the Democrats for selling out Eastern Europe and China to communism.
What is the function of ‘alterity’ in international history?
Edward Said - Orientalism Others have detected a similar set of enduring and powerful European stereotypes about the Balkans, and have used ‘Balkanism’ as a tool to understand western policies in south-eastern Europe.
What does Reynolds caution about the role of cultural diplomacy?
Runs the risk of becoming the deus ex machina in history
What is the basis of foreign policy in the US?
Lockean liberalism - theory of liberty, based in law and rooted in property. American conceptualisation of liberalism bound liberty with the spreading of American ideas.
What was the liberal defence of black slavery?
slaves were unfit to rule themselves
How was the Spanish-American war guised?
For the liberation of Cuba, the achievement of self-government.
What do the documents released from the Kremlin show in the 1990s?
The trove of once-secret documents declassified in the 1990s make clear that Lenin and his successors did not use ideology as mere cover for raisons d’etat; in the apt words of one skeptical historian: “There was no double-bookkeeping
What was characteristic of both Soviet and American ideologies?
both were universalistic; they both held the their conceptions of society applied to all nations and peoples
ENGERMAN | What claim to modernity did the Soviets and Americans hold?
Vanguard of modernity - seeking to supplant the moribund traditions of Europe- and ultimately to transform Europe itself. History was seen as the irreversible march of improvement, which they defined as the spread of their own influence. They considered eachother to be a step back from the realisation of true freedom.
What did both Wilson and Lenin write for?
International system divided into imperial blocs, centred in European nation-states, and maintained through secret and self-interested diplomacy
ENGERMAN | What did the depression of the 1930s offer those looking for American-Soviet convergence?
New Deal in the US represented a step away from an individualist and free-market orientation that had defined american liberalism.
What was the USSR doing at the time of the American depression?
Focusing on socialism in one country - abandoning the ambitions for socialism in one country. Seen by one as the ‘great retreat from ideology’
During the cold war, how did the us and ussr elect to operate their respective empires?
The US elected to run an empire by invitation, whereas the USSR ran an empire by imposition.
What did George Kennan concede through his long telegram?
That there could be no permanent modus vivendi between the two ideologies
What did the US conclude about the nature of defeating communism?
It did not need to be defeated - merely contained. A contained USSR, would be less aggressive internationally and less stable domestically, it would ultimately collapse of its own fruition. (/internal contradictions)
How did Lippmann describe Stalin?
Not the heir of Marx, but of Peter the Great - continuing the tsar’s efforts to expand Russia’s influence
What was established in 1947?
Cominform - attempt to integrate its own European sphere.
Where was the remainder of the CW fought?
The rapidly expanding Third World would remain contested terrain for the remainder of the CW. The USSR were more convincing - demonstrating the US to be on the side of empire by supporting the Western European nations
What was the second appeal of the USSR?
The USSR’ s economic system gave it a second advantage. Having recendy transformed itself from a backward nation into a modem industrial society, the Soviet Union was an inspiration for former colonies too impatient for the gradualist approach promoted by American development agencies.
What to Reynolds in the durable legacy of the Cold War?
The universalism at the root of American liberalism and the military might acquired during the conflict with the Soviet Union, might be the Cold War’s most durable legacy.
What unconventional field was discussed by Kenneth Osgood in his review essay?
Psychological warfare - the battle for the hearts and minds of the people under communist influence
What did NSC 10/2 commit the US to?
an “unprecedented program of counterforce against communism” including subversion against hostile states.
What was the remit of the OPC (Office of Policy Coordination)?
- Psychological warfare - direct mail, rumours, etc. - Political warfare - support of resistance groups, refugees and anticommunists. - Economic warfare - market manipulation, fiscal operations. - Preventive direct action - support of guerrillas, sabotage, demolition
what operations did the Free Europe Committee oversee?
Radio propaganda over eastern Europe + the crusade for freedom - also ran domestically. The CIA was the single largest political advertiser in the 1950s
How was psychological warfare to be used?
a method to chip away at the soviet bloc
Where was funding targeted?
Outside of Eastern Europe - increasingly in Africa, Asia, Latin America
What was the Congress for Cultural Freedom? (CCF)
America’s Ministry of Culture, featuring funding and promotion of intellectuals such as: - Melvin Lasky - Isiah Berlin - Sidney Hook - Dwight MacDonald - Hannah Arendt - Vladimir Nabokov - Arthur Loestler - Raymond Aron - George Orwell - others…
What could be said about the compendium of liberal anti-Stalinist confessions - The God That Failed?
Was as much a product of intelligence as it was a work of the intelligentsia
Name a CIA front for CCF?
The Farfield Foundation
Odd Arne Westad - Reviewing the Cold War | What has been the direction of CW historiography?
* 1 - Orthodox 1940s/50s - influenced by the failure of detente with Nazi Germany - viewing Stalin as an antithesis to freedom * 2 - 1960/70s - America attempting to force its will on a reluctant world - clashes between orthodox and revisionists led to extreme amounts of rhetorical escalation - Gaddis in the 1980s attempted to return to the facts * 3 - Post-revisionists ventured from the European core to the Balkans, Scandinavia, Middle East, Iran, China and elsewhere 4 - Gaddis = founder of post-revisionist approach * Leffler - focus on national security * Lundestad - Empire by Invitation thesis * Stephanson - radical critic of mainstream CW history, emphasising the conflict as being mainly an American ideological construct * Gaddis changed position with access to Russian archives
What do Gaddis’ findings from the Russian archives confirm?
A return to the original thesis: As long as Stalin was in control, the CW was inevitable.
What happened in the 1980s to the American outlook on the war?
a substantial radicalisation of American universalism - in part as a reaction against the attacks of self-doubt brought on by Vietnam and Watergate. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with the economy doing well and the failures of the 1970s forgotten or rewritten, American foreign policy again became imbued with missions: defeating revolutions, opening markets, and instituting democracies.
Odd Arne Westad - The Cold War and the international history of the twentieth century What could be said about the US preponderance of power?
This consistent US preponderance has led some historians to conclude that the Cold War was really an American project for achieving global hegemony, rather than a competition between two superpowers.
What inhibited the USSR’s agricultural ambitions?
The Soviets were long held back in genetics by the politically motivated resistance against Mendel-Morganism.
why according to Westad did the Cold War persist as long as it did?
Much of the reason why such a faith could persist for as long as it did (or does, in the American case) has to do with the com.mon lineage that the two ideologies represent. Against traditions of privilege, heritage, family, and locality, both Soviets and Americans offered a modern and revolutionary alternative, in which people could reinvent themselves and help create a new world. In the American case, this alternative meant the globalization of the US immigrant perspective, in which people could choose the communities to which they wished to belong. On the Soviet side it globalized the Bolsheviks’ hatred for “old Russia,” which they considered back-ward and underdeveloped. For Americans and Russians - and for many people around the world who came to share one or the other of these visions - the global Cold War agenda was to change the world in the image of their ideas.
What arguably did the Cold War do in Third World nations that was particularly indicative of a steamroller action?
In countries such as Ethiopia or Iran, the superpower interventions supported wars against the identities and beliefs of the great majority of the local population.
Major & Mitter | What is notable about the state of investigations on Eastern Europe during the Cold War?
Publications are certainly more abundant for the former German Democratic Republic, which has seen a number of studies of East German society, notably from the Zentrum für Zeithistorische .orschung in Potsdam, or from a number of younger British scholars. Yet, the rest of the Eastern bloc is heavily underresearched and focused on key isolated moments such as the Prague spring.
