The Cold War and European Security, 1950–1960

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
European Security ◽  
The Public ◽  
German Army ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
European Defence Community

In examining European socialist responses to the issue of post-war European security, this chapter challenges the image of a continent irremediably divided along Cold War lines. Throughout the 1950s European socialists struggled to devise a stable and peaceful security order in a world of nuclear armaments and superpower rivalries. This struggle initially centred on the European Defence Community (EDC). For many socialists, the EDC offered a possible means not only of avoiding an independent German army but also perhaps of overcoming Cold War divisions. Following the EDC’s demise and West Germany’s integration into NATO, European socialists recentred their hopes on ‘disengagement’—the idea of creating a demilitarized and neutralized region in Central and Eastern Europe encompassing countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, during the late 1950s, European socialists emerged as the leading organized advocates of disengagement, working assiduously to keep the project in the public eye.

scholarly journals Security policy of the Slovak Republic in the context of intensifying the hybrid actions of the Russian Federation

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 76-81
Author(s):  
Vira Y. Maksymets
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
European Security ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Cold War

The article analyzes the changes in the security environment of Slovakia, which took place after the annexation of the Crimea and the situation in eastern Ukraine. This changed the strategic situation not only in Central and Eastern Europe, but de facto in the European and transatlantic defense complex. These strategic changes not only changed the existing situation that existed since the end of the Cold War, but led to a paradigm shift in security policy. Today, besides defense, citizens of Slovakia also define other vectors, in particular energy, ecological, and cybernetic. They are clearly international in nature, and therefore the Slovak foreign policy and diplomacy must take them into account more intensively than before, possibly to the detriment of other activities. In order to realize its security interests, the Slovak Republic uses its membership in international (NATO, UN) and regional (Visegrad Four, EU, OSCE) organizations and associations, developing its capabilities, flexibility, and mutually reinforcing cooperation. NATO membership is the determining factor in Slovak foreign security.The benefits of this study are consideration of the issues of European security and its interconnectedness with the policy of the Slovak Republic is relevant and at the same time complicated. This is due to the transformation of the European security system and the security and foreign policy of Slovakia as a result of a number of factors.First, the main factors determining the security of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the security policy paradigm that existed in Europe since the end of the Cold War, have changed. The second important factor is Slovakia’s response to these changes, because the foreign policy priorities of the country have not yet been determined. In this regard, in the formulation and implementation of the security policy of Slovakia in 2014, there was a period of systemic changes through the annexation by the Russian Federation of Crimea. The Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, on the one hand, sought to maintain the neutral nature of foreign policy, while the Ministry of Defense did not react to changes. The third factor, which is also closely related to others, is a difficult task, accordingly, to find consensus on the destruction of some of the key priorities of the foreign and security policy of Slovakia, which would lead to the adoption by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Affairs of a comprehensive plan to counter foreign policy challenges, addressed to the Visegrad Four, the Eastern Partnership, the EU and NATO.

Freedom and democracy

2018 ◽  
pp. 74-131
Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
The Past ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Central Eastern ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explains the importance of the values of freedom and democracy in the Cold War struggle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists. As soon as Cold War tensions broke down the ‘national unity’ of anti-fascist forces, both fronts claimed to be the exclusive representatives of ‘true’ democracy, and compared their competitor with the defeated fascist enemy. The Socialist-Communist alliance acquired the programme of ‘progressive’ (or ‘people’s’) democracy inspired by the experiments in Central-Eastern Europe, and made it the base for its opposition to the supposed Christian-Democratic ‘restoration’ of a new ‘reactionary clerical fascism’, along with the defense of the guarantees for parliamentary opposition established by the republican Constitution of 1948. The anti-Communist front, on its side, found strong unifying motifs in the description of Soviet dictatorship and the ‘sovietization’ of the countries occupied by the Red Army filtered beyond the Iron Curtain, and in their comparison with ‘totalitarian’ experiences lived by Italians in the past years.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Weight Of Evidence ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Cold War

Histories of the Cold War have often been preoccupied with issues of accountability and intent. Such histories have generally focused on leading political actors and concerned themselves with issues that implicitly or explicitly pitted one camp against another, asking questions such as: Who was responsible for starting the Cold War? Who made key decisions? Who won and who lost? This study has been motivated by a different set of concerns. Rather than setting one side against the other, it has examined the Cold War as a shared political environment and tried to illuminate some of the ways a political culture that relied on moral absolutes affected patterns of thought on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It has tried to expand the question of who knew what and when by shifting the focus to how knowledge about Eastern Europe was produced, showing how some experiences took on the weight of evidence, whereas others seemingly provoked little thought....

Beyond the Iron Curtain

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-186
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Vaclav Havel ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Reading Clubs ◽  
The Cold War

Ray and Maggie Bradbury’s winter 1990 stay in Paris began as Bradbury successfully negotiated a fortieth anniversary hardbound edition of The Martian Chronicles from Doubleday. Chapter 26 also narrates how Bradbury discovered that his perennial popularity in Eastern Europe was expanding as the Iron Curtain collapsed, especially in Czechoslovakia, where newly elected President Vaclav Havel proved to be a Bradbury enthusiast. The chapter closes with Bradbury’s unexpected invitation to a May 1990 luncheon for President Gorbachev held at the Russian Embassy in Washington. Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were invited as the favorite writers of the Gorbachev family. Bradbury was also beginning to learn of the scattered and informal Bradbury reading clubs that had existed in Russia throughout much of the Cold War period.

scholarly journals Challenges and Pitfalls of Feminist Sisterhood in the Aftermath of the Cold War*

Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ioana Cîrstocea
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Establishing Operations ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
East West ◽  
Instrumental Role

Established in the aftermath of the Cold War and animated by US-based scholars and activists experienced in the second wave of women’s liberation movements, the Network of East-West Women (NEWW) has received little attention from scholars. This transnational and transregional group played an instrumental role in triggering and structuring the circulation of information, contacts, and academic and activist publications dedicated to women in Central and Eastern Europe, and in conceptualizing new gender politics in that region after the end of the socialist regimes. Building on original empirical evidence (archive work and interviews), this article considers NEWW’s founding and its steps in establishing operations “beyond borders” in the 1990s—a time of professionalizing and globalizing women’s rights politics when transnational feminist activism was faced with both new challenges and potentialities.

Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Falk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
North America ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Seminal Article ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Initial Research

This article offers both a genealogy of academic interest in resistance and dissent in the region, as well as an overview of current directions in research. Four kinds of sources are canvassed to paint as fulsome a picture as a short article permits. First, the original literature on dissent prior to the conclusion of the Cold War is reviewed, beginning with the seminal challenge to the “totalitarian” school presented by Gordon Skilling’s seminal article in World Politics . Second, key texts written in the two decades since the fall of communism on the impact of resistance and dissent are examined. Trajectories of initial research in the post-communist era are outlined, along with an assessment of how more recent texts of the “twenty years since the Fall” variety account for resistance and dissent. Finally, results of a short survey conducted by the author and sent to both established and emerging scholars in Europe and North America who are interested, have written on, and/or published on forms of resistance and dissent add a critical contemporary dimension to the analysis.

scholarly journals Yalta Decisions: Was There an Alternative for the West?

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-83
Author(s):  
Vladimir PECHATNOV
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Cold War

The concluding results of the anti-Hitler coalition meeting in Yalta have long been criticized in the United States by the antagonists of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy. In recent decades, they have raised renewed criticism in Central and Eastern Europe and across the West. Though, the decisions of Yalta Conference were fully determined by the balance of power and the real military situation on the war theatre by spring 1945. Each of the Allies pursued their own interests, but they appeared able to achieve a mutually acceptable compromise of these interests for the sake of final victory over common enemy. The Yalta Conference manifested the last upsurge of the Allied cooperation and in no way it served a prologue to the Cold War as it is now being asserted.

scholarly journals The Curious Chasidic Pilgrimage to Lelov, Poland

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Lucia Morawska
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This paper discusses a Chasidic pilgrimage movement focused on Lelov, which lies south of Cracow. Pilgrimage has always been a major part of Jewish tradition, but for many years during the Cold War it was possible only for a devoted few to return to Poland. With the collapse of Communism, however, pilgrimage sites in Central and Eastern Europe have become much more accessible and consequently ultra-orthodox Jews have created a ‘return movement’.

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