In December 1960, the international advocates Rev. Michael Scott and Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan met for a conference at Gandhigram Ashram in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu), India. Although Scott and JP did not agree on certain issues – such as the demands of Naga nationalist claimants within India – they both supported anticolonial nationalism across much of the decolonizing world and were committed proponents of nonviolent political action. At the conference, JP called for the creation of a World Peace Brigade, an international civil society organization that would send peace activists to intervene nonviolently in confrontations between states, empires, and nationalist movements. The Brigade’s first endeavor, the Africa Freedom Action Project, was launched in Dar es Salaam in 1962, which they hoped to make the “anti-Algiers” – a training ground for nonviolent, anti-communist, anticolonial national liberation.

There is a rather obvious convergence point between the Cold War, decolonization, and nationhood. The end of formal European colonial rule across most of the globe in the mid-twentieth century precipitated new states, on old territory, which required a national identity for legitimacy. In colonies where colonial rule ended through violent armed struggle, that armed struggle required a particularly potent vision of what people were fighting for. Once independence came, the consolidation of the state also demanded an answer to the question: who are we as a people, what binds us together? The Cold War, founded on an assumed clash between ideas and cultures even if activated as military and strategic conflict, prompted the same questions. The Cold War demanded a statement of national identity in two respects. First, as an ideological conflict the Cold War influenced the language by which nations articulated the belief systems that supposedly bound them together and informed their relationship with others.

This chapter explores the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Increasingly, Provisional Government head Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, for a time maintaining a veneer of Resistance unity, found themselves in a struggle over the complexion of postwar France. The perception of a communist threat, for many in the French government and their American allies, became pressing as new variables complicated relations and intensified the feeling of crisis. The PCF’s growing strength and popularity in domestic politics, and deteriorating relations with the Soviets, brought the threat to the forefront and shaped French domestic and foreign affairs. Some French factions continued to warn of communist subversion and intrigue through their exchanges with US diplomats and American intelligence. Gaullists sought out contact with U.S. intelligence officers to counter the weakness narrative and prove their anti-communist bona fides. For their part, OSS and (subsequently) State Department intelligence analysts argued that many in France viewed the PCF as a legitimate political party and that there were genuine working class grievances that should be addressed. These contacts—informal and formal—acted as powerful constraints on American policy and explain in sharper relief how the United States was drawn into French affairs.

U.S. security interests intensified with the early Cold War. The high ideals of the Good Neighbor Policy rapidly disappeared and after the 1954 invasion of Guatemala, U.S. policy makers could not credibly claim to reject armed intervention. The United States became more openly supportive of dictatorships and authoritarian governance in order to fight against Communist infiltration. Power was once again central. The predominance of security over all else bred dissatisfaction in Latin America. In part to counter U.S. influence, Latin American governments supported the creation of hemispheric pacts and organizations. Latin American citizens protested against poverty and U.S. domination. U.S. policy makers targeted reformist movements because they assumed that they were too weak to resist Communist domination and they threatened business interests. Revolutionary fervor with a distinctly anti-U.S. bent was developing during the early Cold War, though it would not fully flower until the Cuban revolution. This chapter examines how the early Cold War brought national security and self-interest once again squarely to the fore.

In 1961, as the Cuban Revolution radicalized, the newly-formed Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) created training programs for domestic servants to learn tasks like typing, teaching, and taxi driving, thereby eliminating the supply of domestic workers on the island. Members of the FMC reported that they were inspired to create schools for domestics by Fidel Castro himself, who had noticed the high attendance of domestic workers at night schools already open before 1961. This chapter investigates the history of these schools from the perspective of attendees, teachers, and counterrevolutionaries, who were suspicious of the new government’s motives. The schools for domestics, along with rehabilitation programs for prostitutes and schools for campesina (farmer) women, were emblematic of revolutionary integration of the masses into its political project. The transformation of domestic service in the 1960s reflected Cubans’ deepest fears and hopes about the revolutionary future – but the way in which the government chose to address domestic service as a labor field connected back to the republican past.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Norwegian social democrats and conservative German Christian democrats both managed to decisively shape the outcomes of comprehensive school reform attempts. Chapter 5 explores in more detail how they managed to convince large parts of the population to consent to their education policy agendas and how they successfully forged reform packages that appealed to different groups. To this end, the chapter analyzes five dimensions of education politics, which highly engaged at least some parts of the population: struggles over religion, centralization, language, anti-communism, and gender. It becomes clear that especially the center-periphery and rural-urban cleavages shaped Norwegian school politics during the postwar reform period. For the most part, this facilitated coalitions between the rural periphery and the Labor Party. In North Rhine–Westphalia, the state-church cleavage and the communist-socialist cleavage stood in the way of similar coalitions and instead stabilized the internal cross-interest coalition of the CDU.

This chapter gives an overview of the structure of the book, detailing how it is organized around a series of contests over the expressions of sovereignty made by these four pseudo-states. In identifying the similarities in how these contests over sovereignty played out, inside and outside Africa, this chapter lays the foundation for the argument that Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana can be usefully seen as linked parts in a larger story. In this formulation, their individual quests for diplomatic recognition and international acceptance were all in pursuit of a common ideological project, one born out of a reaction to the rapid decolonization of the African continent and the triumph of anti-colonial African nationalism. All four of them harnessed important transnational right-wing networks across Africa, Europe, and North America that were energized by the dissolution of the European empires, the rise of the Afro-Asian Bloc, postcolonial migrations, and the international civil rights movements. Each of these aspirant states ultimately failed to achieve international acceptance and faced collective nonrecognition, which reflected the larger regional and global importance of these challenges to the postcolonial African state system.

Chapter 4 studies the consequences that state repression in 1932–1933 had on the political capacities and on the calls for Latin American solidarity of the Peruvian APRA. It argues that trans-American solidarity buttressed the rise of APRA as a populist movement from the 1930s on. The simultaneous experiences of persecution and exile in the early 1930s on one side, and of political contests to control the rank-and-file of the party on the other, pressed upon the Aprista community, and more specifically upon the Hayista faction within that community, the necessity to cling to a discourse of Latin American solidarity to ensure political survival in Peru. The chapter shows that being connected to the outside world supplied to the Hayista faction two crucial political advantages as it vied for political control of the movement. For one, the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who were deported in the early 1930s had access to transnational solidarity networks that others in the party lacked. Also, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital in Peru.

The literary career of Richard Eun-kook Kim may best be viewed as a set of narrative responses to his biography and the broader political dilemma of modern Korea, one beset by differential and competing historical colonialisms and ideologies on the peninsula. Key figures in the USA were marshalled to serve Cold War interests by making literature a central instrument in winning transnational hearts and minds; Kim would benefit from this by becoming the first Asian to enroll in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, from which he would draft his first novel, The Martyred, whose popularity signaled that readers viewed Kim and his work as an expression of US liberal value from an Asian beneficiary of the Cold War project. But Kim’s form of realism actually serves as a form of narrative autonomy from such expected discursive capture. This, and in his later forays into speculative fiction and elegiac life writing – the novel The Innocent (1968) and collection Lost Names: Scenes of a Korean Boyhood (1970), respectively – Kim narrates a Korean temporality that seeks to minimize, even as it acknowledges, the influence of imperial powers.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.

This chapter explores the mutually reinforcing transformations in American state-society and foreign relations engendered by the First World War and its aftermath. Scholars have long recognized the war as a critical event in the emergence of American global power and the concomitant rise of Wilsonian liberal-internationalism. Yet it is the post-World War II period that is typically designated as the decisive moment of epochal rupturing in US history. This chapter seeks to problematize these notions of a sharp epochal break, demonstrating the more fluid lines of continuity between the two periods contextualized within the longue durée of American state-formation. In particular, it highlights the ideo-political and cultural antecedents to Wilson’s liberal internationalist order-building project and its relationship to the defence of white supremacy at home and abroad. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how the post-1945 US-led Western liberal international order was built upon white supremacist foundations and a particular form of racialized anti-communism that had emerged decades earlier. US hegemonic practices were, on this view, constituted in and through the racial articulation of an anti-communist “common sense” defined by a militantly normative Americanism that found its roots in the First World War period.

This chapter examines the Vatican’s decision in 1939 to end its opposition to Chinese Catholic participation in Chinese rites, a position it had held since 1704. The historiography has traditionally interpreted the end of the Chinese rites as a progressive move by the Vatican to support calls for indigenization in China. Focusing on the career of Celso Costantini, the first apostolic delegate to China, this chapter argues that the decision to end the Chinese rites controversy must be understood as part of the Vatican’s geopolitical strategy to expand its influence in China. Revising its position on Chinese rites was a way to curry favor with the Chinese Nationalists; it also belonged to the Vatican’s anti-Communist outlook. This chapter argues that the end of the Chinese rites controversy must be read and understood within the context of the moment when the Catholic Church was also reconceptualizing its relationship to human rights.

The conclusion illustrates the uneven and nonlinear nature of Guatemalan nation-state expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the important role played by Q’eqchi’ patriarchs, the legacies of colonialism, and the centrality of race and time to political struggles. The Conclusion also illustrates how the historical debris of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories shaped Guatemala’s post-1954 descent into civil war. It shows the longer historical genealogy of the Guatemalan military’s doctrine that Mayas were dangerous because they were “alien to modernity” and how the legacies of coerced labor and planter sovereignty reemerged with new meaning and contours during the scorched-earth campaign.

This chapter discusses the impact of collective culpability after the Korean War from a microhistocial perspective. It situates the proliferation of this technology of societal control within the broader Cold War global politics and offers a critical review of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on modern disciplinary technology.

Chapter 2 investigates the Reagan administration’s approach to human rights within the context of its broader foreign policy. After introducing the key members of Reagan’s foreign policy team situated within two camps of hardliners and moderates, the chapter examines the development in the administration’s approach to human rights. The chapter demonstrates how the administration initially sought to downgrade the importance of human rights concerns in US foreign policy. However, pressure from Congress and the human rights community, culminating in the Senate’s rejection of Ernest Lefever to head the State Department’s Human Rights Bureau, led the administration to incorporate human rights into its overarching foreign policy agenda. The chapter argues that Congress was key to this turnaround, but it also demonstrates that the seeds for a more proactive human rights policy were present within the administration from early on. Highlighting the importance of Elliott Abrams as head of the Human Rights Bureau, the chapter traces how the administration proceeded to craft a conservative human rights policy centered on anti-communism and democracy promotion. An unintended consequence for the administration’s congressional critics, this new approach resulted in a continued contestation over the appropriate role of human rights in US foreign policy.