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During the Cold War, the inherent mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union kept the two superpowers from cooperating even on many projects that might have proven mutually beneficial. Nevertheless, they were willing to work together at least occasionally; two such examples are the neutralizations of Austria (in 1955) and of Laos (in 1962). Despite very different world orders in those two countries at those times, the weaker superpowers in each contest, the Soviets in Austria and the Americans in Laos, took very similar actions. They followed the same three-stage process from the outbreak of the dispute to its negotiated conclusion. This process failed, however, in Vietnam. In trying to explain why neutralization failed so soon after its success, this thesis postulates a number of possible explanations. Ultimately, it was several factors coming to result in the failure of neutralization in Vietnam.

Thesis advisor: Robert Ross / Thesis advisor: Timothy Crawford / This paper examines the credibility issue in China's extended deterrent attempts during the Cold War. In its efforts to protect North Korea, North Vietnam and Kampuchea, how did China convey its threats, and why did these initiatives have differing results? First, I argue that signaling is the key explaining credibility of China's extended deterrent threats across space and time. While ambiguous signals ruined China's credibility in deterring challenges on North Korea and Kampuchea, clear-cut signals backed threats in China's attempts to save North Vietnam. Consequently, China's signals in the first two cases were disregarded or misunderstood but were perceived as expected in the last case. Secondly, the paper seeks to appraise the explanatory power of current theoretical approaches with regard to the effectiveness of extended deterrent threats. Balance of interests (BOI) and Balance of Capabilities (BOC) shed lights on sources of deterrence outcomes, but neither of them is sufficient to explain the cases. The paper concludes that China's peaceful rising is more likely if Beijing signals its interests and capabilities more clearly. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

“Children of a Former Future” argues that the political upheavals of the twentieth century have produced a body of German-language literature that approaches children and childhood differently from the ways these subjects are conventionally represented. Christa Wolf, Herta Müller, and Jenny Erpenbeck use the child as a device for narrating failed states; socialization into obedience; and the simultaneous violence and fragility of normative visions of the future. In their narratives of girlhood under authoritarian or repressive societies, these authors self-consciously decouple the child from the concept of futurity in order to avoid reproducing the same representational strategies as the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes that co-opted the child for political ends. Examining literature from the GDR, Communist Romania, and post-Reunification Germany, “Children of a Former Future” argues that these representations offer important insights into the fields of German literary studies, queer theory, and feminist scholarship. The dissertation contends that a historically-grounded reading of Cold War and post-Cold War German-language literature can meaningfully contribute to and complicate current feminist and queer scholarship on the child. This scholarship has focused primarily on historical, social, and cultural developments associated with Western democracies and capitalism. “Children of a Former Future” demonstrates how a consideration of literature from Socialist and post-Socialist context complicates these theorizations of the child. At the same time, the dissertation demonstrates how the analytical modes developed by queer and feminist scholarship can create new frameworks for the interpretation of German-language literature. “Children of a Former Future” examines authors who intentionally set out to complicate readers’ preconceptions about children in their writing, specifically the pervasive theme of childhood innocence. Written during the 1970s, Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) examines the effects of authoritarianism on childhood development, as well as critiquing the German Democratic Republic’s founding historical myths. Herta Müller’s Niederungen (1982/4) and Herztier (1994) examine childhood in an ethnic German community in Communist Romania; Müller’s protagonists grapple with the legacies of their parents’ experiences with fascism and Soviet labor camps, as well as the experience of entering Romanian society as a cultural minority during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999) and Wörterbuch (2005) critically examine the emotional impact of adult idealizations of childhood through the lens of post-authoritarian transition states. “Children of a Former Future” argues that these narratives use the child to reflect on socialization into obedience and conformity; kinship formations; social reproduction; trauma; and political life. Wolf, Müller, and Erpenbeck highlight the ramifications of the emotional burdens placed on children, particularly on girls. Their representations resist conventional idealizations of children and childhood. Intensely concerned with complicity, the authors scrutinize how children are taught to conform to and even revere repressive social systems. The authors posit that certain childrearing practices in fact enable the rise of authoritarianism, in that they condition children that love is contingent upon obedience. The dissertation argues that for these authors, examinations of childhood are at once opportunities to sift through the experiences that begin to constitute the individual self, and to analyze how these psychological dynamics contribute to, sustain, and reproduce larger social and political dynamics.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States was gripped by an intense anxiety about its national security. While primarily triggered by the external threat of the Soviet Union, this anxiety was especially centred on internal threats, real and imagined. Most previous studies have focused on the so-called Red Scare, the hunt for Communists and other political undesirables. This was accompanied by a parallel Lavender Scare, an assault on homosexuality in American culture, especially public service. Homosexuality had been grounds for dismissal from the Civil Service since the 19th Century, but Cold War anxiety about gays in government became so great that some in the press began referring to it as a Panic on the Potomac. Fear of sexual subversion became so integrated into the larger national security obsession that, by 1955, fully 1 in every 5 American workers was subject to a combination of loyalty and security restrictions, related to both political and moral categories of unsuitability. Yet this episode has remained a largely forgotten footnote in American Cold War experience. The homophobia that characterized the early Cold War was new, more intense, and unique to that moment in history. Full-scale investigations and purges of suspected gays from the Civil Service began in 1950, but possessed deeper roots in the politics and culture of the era. They were stimulated by a combination of Cold War anxiety, post-war conservatism, and a changing conception of the nature of homosexuality. The effects of the purges would include not only widespread dismissals and intensified repression of gays and lesbians, but also the emergence of gay activism and the concept of a distinct gay minority. The evolving nature of gay identity, especially self-identity, is ultimately central to the thesis topic. This thesis is one of a small, but growing number of works that attempt to comprehensively examine the origins, characteristics, and impacts of the Lavender Scare. It draws on a wide range of sources, including the most recent specialized studies and the best available primary sources, including archival materials, first-hand recollections of events, and newly declassified government documents.

This dissertation examines how Zambia’s international relations, particularly with China, affected its political and economic development in the first decade after independence. Zambian development issues in the 1960s were directly tied to the volatile situation in Southern Africa, and its methods of negotiating this situation were deeply influenced by the Cold War. Regional issues placed land-locked Zambia in a difficult situation politically, economically, and socially. Yet, despite major hurdles to peace and stability, Zambia was an anomaly among newly independent Africa nations. Postcolonial African history is riddled with violent decolonization struggles, civil war, and oppressive dictatorship. The history of these newly independent nations was dramatic and bloody and has garnered much attention from scholars of Africa, identifying causes ranging from inept colonial governance to neo-colonialism, global resource competition, and poor leadership. More recently, scholars have begun to include the Cold War in this postcolonial narrative; however, they have almost exclusively focused on instances of resistance. It is true that violent conflict unfortunately represents a majority of decolonization struggles, not just in Africa, but in Asia as well. It is also true that these narratives are more dramatic than their peaceful counterparts. It is not true however, that decolonization struggles influenced by the Cold War only manifested in bloodshed. Relatively speaking, the Zambian independence process was deliberate and peaceful. Yet Zambia’s political and economic development following independence was directly influenced by the bi-polar political situation of the Cold War. The Zambian government’s most important communist ally was the People’s Republic of China. The reaction of the West to this “mutually beneficial friendship” between Zambia and China was, unsurprisingly, not a positive one. Yet Zambia’s staunch commitment to non-alignment was both a reaction to its political and economic situation, as well as the best way of ensuring development. Through trade agreements, pledges of aid, and, most importantly, the negotiation of the TAZARA railway, the Zambian government showed deft political skills at negotiating between the West and China for its continued economic development.

NATO was a powerful geopolitical force during the twentieth century. And their activity has increased after the Cold War. However, many problems have emerged and NATO's future seems uncertain. This essay is a critical look into the history and possible future of NATO.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States was gripped by an intense anxiety about its national security. While primarily triggered by the external threat of the Soviet Union, this anxiety was especially centred on internal threats, real and imagined. Most previous studies have focused on the so-called Red Scare, the hunt for Communists and other political undesirables. This was accompanied by a parallel Lavender Scare, an assault on homosexuality in American culture, especially public service. Homosexuality had been grounds for dismissal from the Civil Service since the 19th Century, but Cold War anxiety about gays in government became so great that some in the press began referring to it as a Panic on the Potomac. Fear of sexual subversion became so integrated into the larger national security obsession that, by 1955, fully 1 in every 5 American workers was subject to a combination of loyalty and security restrictions, related to both political and moral categories of unsuitability. Yet this episode has remained a largely forgotten footnote in American Cold War experience. The homophobia that characterized the early Cold War was new, more intense, and unique to that moment in history. Full-scale investigations and purges of suspected gays from the Civil Service began in 1950, but possessed deeper roots in the politics and culture of the era. They were stimulated by a combination of Cold War anxiety, post-war conservatism, and a changing conception of the nature of homosexuality. The effects of the purges would include not only widespread dismissals and intensified repression of gays and lesbians, but also the emergence of gay activism and the concept of a distinct gay minority. The evolving nature of gay identity, especially self-identity, is ultimately central to the thesis topic. This thesis is one of a small, but growing number of works that attempt to comprehensively examine the origins, characteristics, and impacts of the Lavender Scare. It draws on a wide range of sources, including the most recent specialized studies and the best available primary sources, including archival materials, first-hand recollections of events, and newly declassified government documents.

This dissertation proposes to examine the conspiracy narratives of Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Leslie Marmon Silko that retell American experience with the Cold War and its culture of paranoia for the last half of the twentieth century. Witnessing the resurgence of Cold War paranoia and its dramatic twilight during the period from late 70s to mid-80s and the sudden advent of the post-Cold War era that has provoked a volatile mixture of euphoria and melancholia, the work of DeLillo, Didion, and Silko explores the changing mode of Cold War paranoid epistemology and contemplates its conditions of narrative possibility in the post-Cold War era. From his earlier novels such as Players, The Names, and Mao II to his latest novel about 9/11 Falling Man, DeLillo has interrogated how the American paradigm of paranoid national self-fashioning envisioned by Cold War liberals stands up to its equally paranoid post-Cold War nemesis, terrorism. In his epic dramatization of Cold War history in Underworld, DeLillo mythologizes the doomed sense of paranoid connectivity and collective belonging experienced during the Cold War era. In doing so, DeLillo attempts to contain the uncertainty and instability of the post-Cold War or what Francis Fukuyama calls "post-historical" landscape of global cognitive mapping within the nostalgically secured memory of the American crowd who had lived the paranoid history of the Cold War. In her novels that investigate the history of American involvements in the Third World from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Reagan, Didion employs the minimalist narrative style to curb, extenuate, or condense the paranoid narratives of Cold War imperial romance most recently exemplified in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In her latest Cold War romance novel The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion reassesses her earlier narrative tactic of "calculated ellipsis" employed in A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy and seeks to commemorate individual romances behind the spectacles of Cold War myth of frontier. Departing from the rhetoric of "hybrid patriotism" in Ceremony, a Native American story of spiritual healing and lyricism that works to appease white paranoia and guilt associated with the atomic bomb, Silko in Almanac of the Dead seeks to subvert the paranoid regime of Cold War imperialism inflicted upon Native Americans and Third World subjects by mobilizing alternative conspiracy narratives from the storytelling tradition of Native American spirituality. Silko?s postnational spiritual conspiracy gestures toward a global cognitive mapping beyond the American Cold War paradigm of "paranoid oneworldedness".

While the Cold War in Latin America has been examined from a variety of angles, the scholarship on Soviet-Latin American relations is thin, outdated, and based almost totally on published sources. Moreover, much of the literature is replete with misconceptions about the nature of the Soviet approach to the Western Hemisphere and the relationship between Moscow and its regional allies. Using a case study approach, and based on substantial research in the archives of the former Soviet Union, this dissertation argues that Moscow’s approach to Latin America was more cautious and pragmatic than ideological and messianic. Rather than attempting to extend their control over the region, the Soviets instead sought to pry Latin American regimes away from dependence on the United States and to encourage the region to adopt a non-aligned foreign policy. To a degree heretofore not sufficiently appreciated, this approach involved the clever use of international organizations, particularly the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. Moreover, Latin American communists and Soviet sympathizers were hugely influential in shaping Moscow’s perceptions of the region and its relationship to the United States, and in pressuring Soviet leaders to provide more support to their regional allies. / text