Contenu du sommaire : Cold Warriors : propagande, culture et guerre froide

When in the 1950s C. Wright Mills was writing about the emergence of the new power elites he paid no attention to the presence of women in its midsts. He was not entirely mistaken. Yet there is a particular intertwining of the ideologies of leadership and masculinity which serves to maintain the status quo, the privilege of an elite and perpetuate preconceptions about political agency and gender. In an attempt to go beyond available models and predominantly masculine images of the postwar America the present article accounts for women's role in the postwar American efforts for cultural hegemony. It focuses on the cases of the American archaeologist Alison Frantz and Ekaterini Myrivili, a Greek cultural administrator and their work with the Fulbright Foundation and Ford Foundation respectively. This article seeks to stress women's role as professionals and members of status groups with great cultural capital responsible for the production and distribution of high-culture integral to the American Cold War efforts. Furthermore, the article contributes to the growing literature on the cultural Cold War in Greece.

This paper will trace Friedrich Karl Kaul's journey from East Berlin to Jerusalem for the Eichmann Trial, and back. What were the ‘few things' he ‘organise[d]' while in Israel? What did he aim to achieve by going to Jerusalem? What can his efforts to take part to the Eichmann trial tell us about broader historical issues? This paper will attempt to answer these questions, touching upon matters including: the relevance of the legacy of the Nazi past to the specifically German-German Cold War; individual agency in the GDR; the evolution of East German propaganda (and its, by 1960, global ambitions); and the East German room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis other Socialist countries, including the Soviet superpower. For Kaul's moves were significant beyond the GDR: they sparked alarm in West Germany; interest and suspicion in Israel; and concern in the United States – and well as in the Soviet Bloc. Based on sources from East and West Germany, CIA memoranda and Israeli documents, this paper positions Kaul's engagement with the trial as part of a transnational history of the (cultural) Cold War

Decolonization and the rise of the “Third World” opened up a new front in the global Cold War. In response, neutral and non-aligned states faced the complex choice of either adapting to or challenging the bipolar order. In this context, Sweden gradually embraced a highly profiled “active foreign policy” in the interest of East-West détente, North-South dialogue and so-called Third World solidarity. In particular, Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme played a crucial role in establishing “small state interests” as a discursive alternative to the antithetical bipolarism of the Cold War during his first terms in power (1969-1976). As such, Palme's activities as a public diplomat in the emerging progressive universe of networks, debating fora and expert bodies were widely noted in the emerging global public opinion of the Cold War era. In this paper, we explore two related dimensions in Palme's Cold War public diplomacy: 1) Sweden as both a global neutral and a possible social model, both of which must be interpreted from the perspective of the ideological contest of the Cold War; and 2) Palme as a public intellectual in probing alternatives to pervasive Cold War bipolarism, focusing upon the early 1970s as a key moment in Cold War North-South conflict.

During the first phase of the cold war, Britain played a pioneering role in defining strategies of international pro-western and anti-communist information and propaganda. This article examines the activities carried out in Italy by the British Foreign Office through its Information Research Department (IRD) – the main hub for the production and dissemination of information materials used for anti-communist campaigns abroad. The article examines the evolution and transformations of this activity from the birth of the IRD, in 1948, until its closure, in 1977, with a particular focus on the way in which the messages of the department were adapted to both the Italian public and the different phases of the Cold War.

Soviet intellectuals were closely related with indoctrination practices and the legitimisation of the regime. During post-Stalinism Soviet intellectuals experienced the impact of destalinization by opening more room for the dynamic exchange of ideas and expressions. It is important to explore the Soviet peripheries, which were important for the demise of USSR, and to track down similar manifestations in them. This article pays special attention to those controversial situations in Soviet Lithuania and Soviet Georgia, that showed the shift in ideologies, conflicts in cultural establishment and the lines of cleavage that have emerged within the dissident movements. By embracing the Cold war atmosphere in Soviet peripheries, this article analyses the trajectories of two intellectuals - the poet Tomas Venclova and the literary critic Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who came from the families of cultural nomenclatura in Soviet periphery, but who in the 70's increasingly moved to the position of dissidents and human rights activists. Bearing in mind that Gamsakhurdia adopted an increasingly harsh nationalist rhetoric and Venclova declared cosmopolitan values, though both became well-known dissidents, the analysis provides the context of cultural process and ethnoparticularism in Soviet Lithuania and Soviet Georgia, revealing the similarities and differences in Tomas Venclova's and Zviad Gamsakhurdia's relationship with the cultural establishment and dissident movement. In doing so, this article places these cases in the broader context of ethnic particularism during the Cold War. The comparison of both cases allows us to argue that cosmopolitanism, especially bearing in mind that Soviet Lithuania was more open to various ideas from the West (if compared with Georgia), felt a stronger disciplining effect than a covered nationalist position.

This article analyses a notorious episode of the early 1960s when Senator J. William Fulbright, then Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, investigated the anti-communist propaganda activities of right-wing ‘ultras' in the US military. The episode is used to investigate the phenomenon of ‘cold warriors', those figures who associated their entire political identity with the ‘fighting' of the Cold War. One particular figure soon stood out as epitomizing the anti-communist paranoia that so worried Fulbright: Major General Edwin Walker. The contest between Fulbright and Walker (and their supporters in Congress) was not a political side-show, since it soon involved President Kennedy and saw Defense Secretary Robert McNamara testifying before a Senate investigative committee. It also marked a contest between an orthodox anti-Soviet position and the new, uncertain but more flexible world-view to be known as Détente. The Walker case encapsulated the debate and the widening divide in US politics and society between those who saw the Cold War as a do-or-die struggle to the bitter end, and those who were willing to accept the existence of the Soviet Union for the sake of a stable Détente. By drawing on the work of Anders Stephanson, this article explores the broader political ramifications of the Fulbright-Walker contest in the context of the changing dynamics of the Cold War.

The nazi regime organised the biggest looting of art in history. France was a specific hunting ground for the services headed by Alfred Rosenberg (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg : ERR) in charge of this operation ; at least 100 000 works of art were looted, mostly from Jewish families. Numerous German art historians and museums curators participated into this enterprise, bringing their expertise. Most of them were not put on trial after 1945. Only France attempted to bring justice. In 1950, the Paris military tribunal judged six senior members of the ERR. The prosecution failed to describe the complex administration of looting and to understand the ideology that governed it. Even if this trial attracted little attention at the time, it was unique in post-war Europe.

The present article is focused on the political and masculine history of interwar Saint-Denis — a working-class area in the northern suburb of Paris. Due to the undermining effects of the war and of industrial labour on the physical condition of Saint-Denis male population, the masculine prospect of bodily and moral regeneration, proposed by both left and right-wing radical political movements, met with an intense local success throughout the interwar years. At the crossroads of masculine troubles and man-up politics, this study re-investigates the ideological turnaround experienced by Saint-Denis in the interwar years — from communism to doriotism.

“Europeana collections” is a huge online project, aiming to “share cultural heritage” of Europe, and giving access to millions of digitized items. During the Centenary of the First World War, a special platform, Europeana 14-18, turned into a crowdsourcing project, asking citizens of Europeans countries to give their archives concerning this terrible war. What can be learned from this wave of new archives? Which problems has been raised by the digitalization? Will Europeana 14-18 help researchers write a new history of the First World War?