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.
Sir Hugh Cortazzi who was to follow in John Pilcher’s footsteps, has compiled the defining reports to Whitehall from Pilcher’s time in Tokyo – resulting in an invaluable record of Japan’s progress at ...this important point in her post-war history, as well as providing unique insights into the activities, hopes and expectations of the British government in her dealings with Japan. Pilcher was appointed British Ambassador to Japan in 1967 and brought to his role a particular understanding of Japanese civilization together with a critical analysis of Japanese attitudes and way of life. ‘Cortazzi has made another valuable contribution to Japan country studies and, indeed, it is indispensable for any generalist who wants to master the guild of diplomacy…For those of any professional calling, venturing to reside and work in Japan, this book should be mandatory reading. It will challenge your mind and stereotypical perceptions. It achieves its intention to inform and educate.’ Mike Fogarty, Australian Outlook. July 2016.
Concerns about rights in the United States have a long history, but the articulation of global human rights in the twentieth century was something altogether different. Global human rights offered ...individuals unprecedented guarantees beyond the nation for the protection of political, economic, social and cultural freedoms. The World Reimagined explores how these revolutionary developments first became believable to Americans in the 1940s and the 1970s through everyday vernaculars as they emerged in political and legal thought, photography, film, novels, memoirs and soundscapes. Together, they offered fundamentally novel ways for Americans to understand what it means to feel free, culminating in today's ubiquitous moral language of human rights. Set against a sweeping transnational canvas, the book presents a new history of how Americans thought and acted in the twentieth-century world.
The cold war and after Trachtenberg, Marc
2012., 20120312, 2012, 2012-03-12, 20120101, Letnik:
138
eBook
What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? InThe Cold War and After, Marc Trachtenberg, a leading historian of ...international relations, explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems--with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.-European relations. But Trachtenberg's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. He demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way.
These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects--for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon-Pompidou period. But in each case the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems.
The Soviet Union's dramatic collapse in 1989 was a pivotal moment in the complex history of Central and Eastern Europe, and Ivan Berend here offers a magisterial new account of the dramatic ...transformation that culminated in ten former Soviet Bloc countries joining the European Union. Taking the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 as his starting point, he charts the gradual unravelling of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, its ultimate collapse in the revolutions of 1989, and the economic restructuring and lasting changes in income, employment, welfare, education and social structure which followed. He pays particular attention to the crucial role of the European Union as well as the social and economic hurdles that continue to face former Eastern-bloc nations as they try to catch up with their Western neighbours. This will be essential reading for scholars and students of European and economic history, European politics and economics.
Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some sixty years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain ...and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era.
In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO.
As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government enlisted the aid of a select group of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to blueprint enemy behavior. Not only did these ...academics bring sophisticated concepts to what became a project of demonizing communist societies, but they influenced decision-making in the map rooms, prison camps, and battlefields of the Korean War and in Vietnam. With verve and insight, Ron Robin tells the intriguing story of the rise of behavioral scientists in government and how their potentially dangerous, "American" assumptions about human behavior would shape U.S. views of domestic disturbances and insurgencies in Third World countries for decades to come. Based at government-funded think tanks, the experts devised provocative solutions for key Cold War dilemmas, including psychological warfare projects, negotiation strategies during the Korean armistice, and morale studies in the Vietnam era. Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists’ thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics’ intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation’s adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States.
The Second World War created and the Cold War sustained a "special relationship" between America and Britain, and the terms on which that decades-long conflict ended would become the foundation of a ...new world order. In this penetrating analysis, a new history of recent global politics, author James Cronin explores the dramatic reconfiguring of western foreign policy that was necessitated by the interlinked crises of the 1970s and the resulting global shift toward open markets, a movement that was eagerly embraced and encouraged by the U.S./U.K. partnership.Cronin's bold revisionist argument questions long-perceived views of post-World War II America and its position in the world, especially after Vietnam. The author details the challenges the economic transition of the 1970s and 1980s engendered as the United States and Great Britain together actively pursued their shared ideal of an international assemblage of market-based democratic states. Cronin also addresses the crises that would sorely test the system in subsequent decades, from human rights violations and genocide in the Balkans and Africa to 9/11 and militant Islamism in the Middle East to the "Great Recession" of 2008.
The Downfall of the American Order? offers penetrating insight into the emerging global political economy at this moment of an increasingly chaotic world. For seventy-five years, the basic patterns ...of world politics and the contours of international economic activity took place in the shadow of American leadership and the institutions it designed—an order designed to avoid the horrors of previous eras, including, most poignantly, two world wars and the Great Depression. But all things must pass. The global financial crisis of 2008, the legacy of two long, losing wars, and the polarizing and tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump all suggest that global affairs have reached a turning point. The implications of this are profound. The contributors to this book cast their eyes back on the order that once was, and look ahead to what might follow. In dialogue with each other's appraisals and expectations, they differ in their assessments of the probable, ranging from a hollowed-out American primacy muddling through by default, to partial modifications of old institutions and practices at home and abroad, and to wholesale contestations and the search for new orders. Contributors: Rawi Abdelal, Sheri Berman, Mark Blyth, Francis J. Gavin, Peter A. Gourevitch, Ilene Grabel, Peter J. Katzenstein, Jonathan Kirshner, and John Gerard Ruggie
"Kevin Boyle has done a masterful job of identifying the unique contribution of the UAW, not only to American Liberalism, but also to the nation and to all people. As contemporary labor and society ...at large search for new directions, this book should be required reading."-Victor G. Reuther
