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.

Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 280-281
Author(s):  
Carol A. L. Prager
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Atilio A. Boron, London: Zed Books, 2005, pp. 141.Michael Walzer, reflecting in a 2002 Dissent article (vol. 49, Spring) upon the compelling issues in world politics, asked “Can there be a decent Left?” After reading Atilio A. Boron's impassioned and derisive critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), one wonders whether today there can be an empirically sophisticated, coherent Left. (Negri, by the way, spent seventeen years in Italian prisons for his involvement with the Red Brigade and the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro.) Boron, a professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires claims, no doubt rightly, that the last three decades, embracing the end of the Cold War, the impact of neo-liberal policies on the “periphery” and sweeping technological changes, have necessitated a reformulation of leftist thinking. The influential Empire, which advances a root-and-branch restructuring of socialist thought, though hugely popular among anti-globalization groups and already translated into over a dozen languages, is to Boron emphatically not it. While paying obeisance to Hardt and Negri's “noble intentions and intellectual and political honesty” (4–5), the author proceeds to shred virtually all their main contentions.

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 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.

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’.

Germany as a Kin-State: The Development and Implementation of a Norm-Consistent External Minority Policy towards Central and Eastern Europe

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Cordell ◽  
Stefan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
The Cold War

Germany's role as a kin-state of ethnic German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe stems from a number of factors. At one level it is part and parcel of a unique historical legacy. It is also inextricably linked with the country's foreign policy towards this region. The most profound policy that the Federal Republic of Germany developed in this context after the early 1960s was Ostpolitik, which contributed significantly to the peaceful end of the Cold War, but has remained relevant thereafter despite a fundamentally changed geopolitical context, as Germany remains a kin-state for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans across Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Soviet Union, in Poland, Romania, and Hungary. As such, a policy towards these external minorities continues to form a significant, but by no means the only, manifestation of Ostpolitik.

8. The final phase, 1980–90

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-164
Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
General Secretary

‘The final phase, 1980–90’ recounts how the late 1980s witnessed the most momentous changes in the overall structure of world politics since the 1940s. Why did the Cold War end when it did? How does one make sense of a decade that opens with a rapidly intensifying Cold War and closes with a historic Soviet–American rapprochement, unprecedented arms control agreements, the withdrawal of Soviet power from Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and the peaceful reunification of Germany? These questions can be looked at by examining the Cold War’s final phase, including Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s accession as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the demolition of the Berlin Wall.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document