Mental Maps In The Early Cold War Era 1945 1968

The early Cold War was a period of dramatic change. New superpowers emerged, the European powers were eclipsed, colonial empires tottered. Political leaders everywhere had to make immense adjustments. This volume explores their hopes and fears, their sense of their place in the world and of the constraints under which they laboured.

Mental Maps in the Era of Détente and the End of the Cold War recreates the way in which the revolutionary changes of the last phase of the Cold War were perceived by fifteen of its leading figures in the West, East and developing world.

This collection explores the complex interrelationships between the Soviet-American struggle for global preeminence and the rise of the Third World. Featuring original essays by twelve leading scholars, it examines the influence of Third World actors on the course of the Cold War.

Today, the People’s Republic of China is North Korea’s only ally on the world stage, a tightly knit relationship that goes back decades. Both countries portray their partnership as one of “brotherly affection” based on shared political ideals—an alliance “as tight as lips to teeth”—even though relations have deteriorated in recent years due to China’s ascendance and North Korea’s intransigence. In A Misunderstood Friendship, leading diplomatic historians Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia draw on previously untapped primary source materials revealing tensions and rivalries to offer a unique account of the China–North Korea relationship. They unravel the twists and turns in high-level diplomacy between China and North Korea from the late 1940s to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Through unprecedented access to Chinese government documents, Soviet and Eastern European archives, and in-depth interviews with former Chinese diplomats and North Korean defectors, Shen and Xia reveal that the tensions that currently plague the alliance between the two countries have been present from the very beginning of the relationship. They significantly revise existing narratives of the Korean War, China’s postwar aid to North Korea, Kim Il-sung’s ideological and strategic thinking, North Korea’s relations with the Soviet Union, and the importance of the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, among other issues. A Misunderstood Friendship adds new depth to our understanding of one of the most secretive and significant relationships of the Cold War, with increasing relevance to international affairs today.

This volume analyzes US policy toward communist-ruled Poland in the fields of diplomacy, economy, culture, and public diplomacy. It highlights the limitations in developing cooperation between democratic and nondemocratic countries resulting from the Cold War conflict. No comprehensive account of US policy toward Poland from 1956 to 1968 has emerged in historiography. This book aims to answer why, since the political changes of the Polish October 1956, Washington ceased to see Polish affairs as “Soviet-related matters.” Instead, it recognized communist-ruled Poland as a separate political entity among other Kremlin-dependent states in Eastern Europe. This policy, introduced by the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, was continued by his successors John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Recently declassified US and Polish archival sources allow the presentation of more considerations around the decision-making mechanisms by presidential administrations regarding communist Poland after 1956. They also reveal the dependence of the implementation of US actions on the climate of international relations. Moreover, they can now explain how Poland became an “open window” toward the Soviet bloc and a model example of the changes in the US policy of diversifying its approach to Eastern European countries under Soviet control in the next decades.

This book is the first comprehensive study of mainstream British dystopian fiction and the Cold War. Drawing on over 200 novels and collections of short stories, the monograph explores the ways in which dystopian texts charted the lived experiences of the period, offering an extended analysis of authors’ concerns about the geopolitical present and anxieties about the national future. Amongst the topics addressed are the processes of Cold War (autocracy, militarism, propaganda, intelligence, nuclear technologies), the decline of Britain’s standing in global politics and the reduced status of intellectual culture in Cold War Britain. Although the focus is on dystopianism in the work of mainstream authors, including George Orwell, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter and Anthony Burgess, a number of science-fiction novels are also discussed, making the book relevant to a wide range of researchers and students of twentieth-century British literature.

The young Helmut Schmidt and British-German relations, 1945-74 -- Harold Wilson, 1974-76 -- James Callaghan, 1976-79 -- Margaret Thatcher, 1979-82.