Although cultural diplomacy has become an increasingly fashionable term embraced by academics, foreign-service personnel, and private sector commercial and cultural interests, the very practice of this idea remains conspicuously challenging to define. This thesis attempts to take on this problem, advancing a new understanding of cultural diplomacy that results from a historical investigation of a single area of government and private sector partnership, and what became in the mid-twentieth century the most prominent manifestation of this alliance—the cultural exhibitions sent abroad to “tell America’s story” with the goal of “winning hearts and minds.” To illustrate this point, selected exhibitions and the intentions of the policymakers who proposed them are interrogated beside archival documentation, writings from the history of design, advertising, science, as well as art historical and museum studies theories that address various aspects of the history of collecting and display, all of which explore the reality of how these exhibitions were conceived and prepared for foreign audiences. Through this discussion it is important to ask: What was America showing of itself through these exhibitions? And, more urgently, what do these exhibitions tell us about U.S. interest in verisimilitude? This investigation spans the crucial years of American exhibitions abroad (1955-1975), beginning with the formation of an official system of exhibiting American commercial wares and political ideas at trade fairs, through official exchanges with the U.S.S.R., to pavilions at world's fairs, and finally to museum exhibitions that signaled a return to the display of founding American values. They are thus complex ideological symbols in which concepts of national identity, globalization, technology, consumerism, design, and image management both coincided and clashed. The investigation of these exhibitions enhances the understanding of a significant chapter of U.S. cultural diplomacy at the height of the Cold War and how America constantly reimagined itself.

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The thesis analyses Dag Hammarskjöld’s political role as UN Secretary-General and the efforts he made to justify such a role. It is the first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the political role Hammarskjöld played from “both sides”, based on the now available sources from both national and UN archives. The thesis also deals with the problems of a political role for the UN Secretary-General. The conventional picture of Hammarskjöld as a “neutral and impartial” international civil servant is challenged and the figure that emerges is the one of an astute politician – a ”Machiavelli of Peace”. As a civil servant in Sweden, Hammarskjöld played a political role although he viewed himself as an expert and civil servant and not a politician. He argued that he could play a political role based on ”neutrality and impartiality” and he transferred this concept to the international arena as Secretary-General. Hammarskjöld managed to play an important political role because he offered a solution to the American dilemma of how to deal with the Cold War in the ThirdWorld without choosing between their Western European allies and the newly independent countries. This at the precise time when the Americans were losing control of the General Assembly due to the influx of newly independent countries that put decolonisation on the agenda. In the Congo Crisis the political role of the Secretary-General reached its zenith during the initial period where Hammarskjöld played an interventionist role. Hammarskjöld’s policies were based on clearly defined Cold War objectives – shared by the Western permanent members of the Security Council – and on a wish to enlarge the political role of the Secretary-General. The weak base for Hammarskjöld’s political role forced him to radically change his policies in the Congo to shore up his position when he was criticised for his interventionist policies.

The dissertation builds upon the question of why Nixon, a Republican, implemented the first affirmative action programs. It is divided into three parts. The first charts the liberal approach to race relations and the crisis that attended its collapse. As Habermas noted, a "legitimation crisis" affected private institutions necessitating a new round of government intervention. This section explores the idea that affirmative action was part of this legitimation crisis, an administrative replacement for the failure of the post-war hope that racism would disappear after the destruction of formal barriers to black equality. The second looks at the interventions of the Nixon administration. It argues that the Philadelphia Plan was less important in terms of later affirmative action than is usually thought. Other programs (such as the OMBE) developed around the same time became more significant. 1970 became the year that programs aimed at reforming ghettos transformed into programs aimed at strengthening the black middle-class. Nixon, though often characterised as "aprincipled," had what Garry Wills termed "the right to earn" in mind when pushing through the Philadelphia Plan in Congress. All Americans - black and white - should have this right, he reasoned. The present-day sides of the argument had yet to be formed and in 1972 Nixon saw no fundamental contradiction in insisting that quotas not curtail the rights of white workers. The third section examines why the issue of affirmative action seemed to follow the implementation of affirmative action programs. Here, it is suggested that the changing intellectual climate surrounding the introduction of the first affirmative action programs transformed piecemeal civil rights programs into a broad policy model and ensured that controversy followed. Early affirmative action policies, this section demonstrates, caused little controversy before (at least) 1973. The sides of the debate had yet to be formed. John Rawls' work is examined as an expression of the need to replace liberal institutions - such as the allocation of resources on the basis of merit. The Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth similarly focussed attention onto the realm of distribution rather than that of production, moving from Kennedy's perspective" a rising tide lifts all boats" - to one of affirmative action. Affirmative action measures were both necessary as a mechanism of distribution and a constant focus of complaint as different groups argued over relative shares.

During the nuclear crisis years of 1958 to 1961, millions of U.S. citizens were instructed by their federal government that the best chance of surviving a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union resided in converting their backyards or basements into family fallout shelters. Directing their policies towards middle-class suburban America, civil defence policymakers asked citizens to realign their lives and family relationships in accordance with a new doctrine of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival, stating that middle-class suburban fathers had the capacity and resources to protect both themselves and their families from the worst possible manmade disaster. “Every Home a Fortress: The Fallout Shelter Father in Cold War America” is the first historical study of fatherhood and the family fallout shelter during the early Cold War. Focusing specifically on the cultural and political representations of fatherhood and masculinity in the formation of and public reaction to the doctrine of civil defence, this project examines the tension between the politics of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival and the lived reality. The process and practice of fallout shelter construction represented an almost unprecedented level of state penetration into the private sphere. Yet, as the ideal of shelter fatherhood permeated society, a widening gap emerged between the political rhetoric of civil defence and the everyday experience of the ordinary Americans facing the prospect of building a family fallout shelter and surviving the next war. Each chapter of this thesis explores the lived reality of civil defence, highlighting the ways in which U.S. fathers interpreted and reinterpreted the act of private shelter construction. Rather than fostering one singular politicised vision of Cold War fatherhood, this thesis argues that fallout shelters brought to the surface a variety of interlinked visions of Cold War fatherhood, rooted in narratives of domesticity, militarism, and survivalism. Central to these narratives of masculinity was the private fallout shelter itself, a malleable Cold War space that inspired a new national discourse around notions of nationhood, domestic duty, and collective assumptions of what it meant to be a father in the nuclear age.

L’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier les transformations économiques, sociales, politiques et idéologiques qui caractérisent le développement du néolibéralisme aux États-Unis, depuis l’essor du mouvement conservateur qui porta Ronald Reagan au pouvoir en 1980 jusqu’à la crise financière de 2008. Par néolibéralisme, on entend une idéologie qui postule la supériorité des forces du marché et du secteur privé sur l’intervention de l’État, un ensemble de politiques qui visent à libérer ces forces des entraves étatiques, et un mode de gouvernance qui s’inspire de la gestion des entreprises privées. À la lecture des nombreux ouvrages consacrés au néolibéralisme, on peut constater un morcellement des connaissances sur certains aspects particuliers du sujet, telles que ses dimensions idéologique, politique ou internationale ; il manque des études qui tentent de concevoir le néolibéralisme à la fois dans sa globalité et dans la spécificité de son développement aux États-Unis. Il nous est paru que la méthode dite « progressive-régressive » de Jean-Paul Sartre permettrait de faire la synthèse qui manque à la littérature actuelle. Bien que Sartre ait développé cette méthode dialectique à l’attention des chercheurs en sciences humaines et sociales, ce cadre épistémologique cherche encore ses adeptes. En l’appliquant au néolibéralisme américain, nous espérons donc contribuer non seulement à la connaissance d’un grand sujet d’actualité, mais aussi au développement des méthodes de recherche dans le champ des études civilisationnistes. / This dissertation aims to study the economic, social, political and ideological transformations that have characterized the development of neoliberalism in the United States, from the rise of the conservative movement that brought Ronald Reagan to power in 1980 to the financial crisis of 2008. Neoliberalism can be defined as an ideology that claims the free market and the private sector to be superior to government intervention, as a package of economic policies that aim to liberate market forces from government constraints, and as a mode of governance based on corporate management practices. Although many studies have been published on neoliberalism, each of them tends to focus on a limited dimension of the subject, such as its ideological, political, or international dimension. Given this fragmentation, there is a lack of studies that attempt to understand the specific development of neoliberalism in the United States from a holistic point of view. In order to achieve this goal, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “progressive-regressive” method appears to be an effective approach. While Sartre developed this method as an epistemological tool for the humanities, few researchers have attempted to make use of it. By applying it to the study of American neoliberalism, this dissertation hopes to contribute not only to the knowledge a topical subject, but also to the development of new research methods in the field of civilizational studies.

Much discussed and little understood, Richard Nixon's southern strategy demands scrutiny. A brief survey of the literature suggests that study on this controversial topic has reached an impasse. Southern historians keen to emphasise the importance of class in the region's partisan development over the last fifty years insist that any southern strategy predicated on racialised appeals to disaffected white conservatives was doomed to failure. Conversely, conventional accounts of the Nixon era remain wedded to the view that the southern strategy represented a successful devil's bargain whereby an avaricious Californian exchanged the promise of racial justice for black southerners in return for white Dixie's electoral votes. Most sobering of all are political scientists concerned with executive power, who evidence the limited discretion enjoyed by presidents to implement any agenda inimical to the corporate will of the federal bureaucracy. Since Nixon's executive departments were brimming with Democratic holdovers from the Kennedy and Johnson years, the question of whether or not the President demanded concessions to southern racists apparently becomes more or less irrelevant: the 'fourth branch' of the federal government inevitably ensured that a southern strategy was simply impossible to execute. In reality, much of this stalemate is the product of academic territorial warfare on the battleground of a subject wide open to multiple interpretations. A southern historian keen to showcase the importance of his local research is likely to show little interest in evidence that a President based in Washington D.C. could initiate social change in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Similarly, political scientists fighting an unrewarding battle to emphasise the autonomy of federal departments are naturally disinclined to highlight examples of presidential willpower altering bureaucratic culture. Nevertheless, an intriguing paradox remains in evidence. Despite leaning more towards the political philosophy of antediluvian white southerners than the demands of black Americans, Richard Nixon presided over a period of such fundamental social reconstruction below the Mason-Dixie line that he could legitimately claim to have desegregated more southern schools than any other President in history. Whilst a raft of excellent monologues demonstrating the impact of local movements down South on national politics have been published over the last decade, few have even attempted to explain this peculiar phenomenon. As Matthew Lassiter observed in a Journal of American History roundtable on American conservatism in December 2011, 'the recent pendulum swing has overstated the case for a rightward shift in American politics by focusing too narrowly on partisan narratives and specific election cycles rather than on the more complex dynamics of political culture, political economy, and public policy.' The purpose of this thesis is to explain how a President notorious for pursuing the votes of white segregationists rested at the head of a federal government that ruthlessly dismantled Jim Crow. By incorporating the range of methodologies elucidated above, it will identify exactly how much influence President Nixon and his executive officers exerted over civil rights policy. Was Nixon's reactionary agenda thwarted by over-mighty bureaucrats? Or did the President act more responsibly than the majority of commentators have admitted?

La Guerre Froide domine l'histoire de la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle, et sa conclusion demeure source de débats aujourd'hui, le triomphalisme des conservateurs étant souvent remis en cause par les tensions avec la Russie. Au cœur du conflit se trouvait la perception pour les Américains d'une menace basée sur l'idéologie et la puissance militaire de l'Union soviétique. Mais cette « image de l'ennemi » resta fondée sur de nombreuses erreurs d'interprétation des données disponibles. En fait, l'étude des dernières années de la Guerre Froide révèle que cette image déformée des capacités et des motivations de l'ennemi a acquis des fonctions internes au paysage politique américain. Le débat public, souvent dominé par les personnalités anticommunistes, montre que la perception du conflit par les Américains dépendit longtemps de représentations ancrées dans l'imaginaire collectif. Or, l'arrivée au pouvoir de Mikhaïl Gorbatchev en 1985 va rapidement permettre de remettre en question ces représentations. Entre 1984 et 1989, la volonté de Ronald Reagan, puis de Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, d'apaiser les tensions à la source de la Guerre Froide, va donc signifier une déconstruction de l'image de l'ennemi et une ré-humanisation progressive des Soviétiques. En cinq ans, l'Union soviétique cessera d'être un « empire du mal » pour devenir « juste une autre grande puissance ». En étudiant cette évolution, on peut discerner l'origine et les fonctions de l'image de l'ennemi, et donc voir comment la perception des ennemis peut être influencée ou instrumentalisée. La fin de la Guerre Froide nous renseigne ainsi sur la construction de nos ennemis d'aujourd'hui. / The Cold War looms large over the history of the second half of the 20th century, and its conclusion remains a source of debates to this day, while renewed tensions with Russia may lead us to question the triumphalism of hawks after the collapse of the Soviet Union.At the heart of the conflict was the perception by Americans of a threat based on the ideology and the military power of the Soviet Union. But this « enemy image » was based on many faulty interpretations of the available data.In fact, the study of the last years of the Cold War reveals that this twisted image of the capabilities and intentions of the enemy had acquired internal functions of its own on the American political scene. The public debate, often dominated by anticommunist figures, shows that the perception of the conflict by Americans long rested on preconceptions deeply embedded in the collective imagination. However, the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 would lead to a thaw in the Cold War : the enemy image was deconstructed and the Soviets progressively became more human in the eyes of Americans. In five years, the Soviet Union ceased being an « evil empire » to become « just another great power ». By studying this evolution, one can determine the origins and functions of the enemy image, et thus understand how the perception of enemies can be influenced or used. The end of the Cold War thus allows us to better understand the construction of today's enemies.