The end of World War II brought forth many problems for the allies that had not been completely resolved by the victors. One of the most important was what to do with the defeated Germany. Within the first decade after World War II, the division of the former German superpower had become the front line of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the first eight years after the war (1945-53) East Germany, the Soviet controlled sector, quickly became 'Stalin's unwanted child' and was the first communist country to rebel against the imposed Soviet style socialism. The post war build up and Sovietization of East Germany was the catalyst for the 1953 East German uprising, which became the model that other Soviet influenced countries followed (Hungary, Czechoslovakia). After viewing internal Soviet documents sent from East Germany to Soviet Foreign Ministers and reviewing interviews with eyewitnesses, it is clear that the 1953 East German uprising was a worker's revolt triggered by the ill treatment they received from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It was not a popular uprising (a revolt where much of the population is represented by specific groups).

This dissertation presents a historical study of intersections between music and activism in Poland from the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978 to Poland’s first democratic elections in 1989. Musical action in three cultural spheres shapes the project: (1) the political activism of musicians, (2) activists who turn to music as a political instrument, and (3) the musical ambitions of the communist authorities, the Polish United Workers’ Party. I critique the repercussions of politics in music as well as music’s significance for policy makers and dissidents, and I assume that neither course of influence is intrinsic or inevitable under state socialism. In doing so, I highlight the complex relationship between activist culture and music at the end of the Cold War. Throughout the decade, religious hymns, patriotic anthems, experimental music, and popular songs shared spaces in Polish society, projected analogous ambitions, reflected communal responses, and partook in debates about culture’s capacity to effect political action. The plurality of musical genres and music histories during the Cold War reflects the political tensions in the Polish opposition to state socialism. The diverse materials I investigate in this dissertation respond both to the tumultuous politics of the 1980s and to the ethnographic, historical, and analytical methods I employ to write music history. My thesis—that political activism offered politicians, activists, and musicians the opportunity for constructive creative action—provides a model for rethinking Cold War music history. I begin with an explanation of the Communist Party’s program for music and the practical means by which it carried out this vision through the decade. Two chapters examine specific historical moments: I critique the ways in which music has come to be associated with the August 1980 strikes that brought about the formation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Eastern bloc, and map the sites of music making in the weeks after martial law’s imposition in December 1981. I explore the resonance of popular sacred hymns and plainchant for musicologists, composers, and members of the opposition through the final decade of the Cold War. The dissertation concludes by analyzing the unofficial musical discourse on independence, drawing out the concept’s resonance for artists invested in their own musical autonomy. / Music

Land of the in-between explores how modern architecture responded to demands for political and ideological representation during the Cold War using socialist Yugoslavia as a case-study. Self-proclaimed as universal and abstract, modernism acquired a variety of specific meanings hidden behind seemingly neutral forms that, however, frequently contained decidedly political dimensions. During the Cold War, Yugoslavia deliberately positioned itself halfway between the Eastern and Western blocs, thus representing an excellent case for a study of shifting political meanings ascribed to architecture at that time. This dissertation follows two lines of investigation: transformations of architectural profession, and changes in the modes of architectural representation of the state. Consequences of two key moments are explored: the rise to power of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1945, and its expulsion from the Soviet bloc in 1948. These two moments correspond to two distinct phases that shaped architecture in socialist Yugoslavia: a period of intense Stalinization immediately after WW II, and a period of gradual liberalization after the country's sudden break-up with the Soviet Union. During the short-lived Stalinist period, the regime subjected Yugoslav culture to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. But after 1948, the state relaxed its iron grip, allowing for a degree of intellectual and artistic freedom. At the same time, Yugoslavia reestablished friendly relations with the West, opening itself to influences of Western culture. The revival of modern architecture that followed was in return instrumental in reinforcing Yugoslavia's new image of a reformed Communist country. Land of the in-between argues that Yugoslavia's political shifts gave rise to a uniquely hybrid architectural culture. It combined Communist ideology with Western aesthetic and technological influences to create a mix that complicated the common black and white picture of the Cold War. Architecture in socialist Yugoslavia thus operated within a complex framework of shifting political and cultural paradigms whose contrasts highlight the meanings that post-World War II modernism assumed on a global scale. / text

<p>This dissertation, Mobile Ethnicity, examines the formation of a transnational ethnic working class and the dynamics of remittance development in the context of Korean Chinese labor migration between China and Korea. I conducted multi-sited field research for over two years, mainly in Seoul, South Korea, and the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian, China, the ethnic zone bordering North Korea. My ethnography is built on a local saying: "Everybody is gone with the Korean Wind." The Korean Wind is the popular name for the massive Korean Chinese transnational labor migration to South Korea that occurred mostly during the 1990s and 2000s, at the intersection of post-Cold War and post-socialist cultures. I especially highlight the Korean Wind as a unique product of China's economic reform and open economy (gaigekaifang), which has affected not only Korean Chinese but also Han Chinese in Yanbian and elsewhere in the region.</p><p> Through the lenses of kinship, development, money, love, bodies, and time, I analyze the new affect and materiality, new forms of belonging and dwelling, and new hopes and frustrations of mobile ethnicity. On the one hand, I trace the reconstituted subjectivity of Korean Chinese as a particular ethnic working class in a transnational setting. On the other hand, I map the re-characterized ethnic space of Yanbian as a borderland traversed by a myriad of different agents. Caught between the "Korean dream" and the "Chinese dream," Korean Chinese have chosen transnational mobility as a way of dealing with the contingencies of neoliberalism and globalization. But their way of working for a better future has created unexpected vulnerabilities, sealing them into a circuit of migration as a transnational ethnic working class. </p><p> This ethnography illuminates the ripple effects of the Korean Wind with a focus on remittances, as Korean Chinese have discovered, promoted, and deployed their ethnic currency in the transnational labor market. On a macro level, remittances play a critical role in relocating populations (both pulling them into spaces and pulling them out), and create an intersection of internal migration and transnational migration, thereby reshaping the ethnic relationships and spatial characteristics of the region. I emphasize the vulnerable characteristics of a remittance-dependent economy, which fluctuates in response to exchange rates and global economic forces. On a personal level, remittances are not only gifts or realizations of familial duty, but also an unstable form of currency requiring careful management and submission to a peculiar temporality of long waits and unknown futures. The life built upon the contingent flow of remittances has created and been impacted by the transnational temporality, constantly moving back and forth between the sharply split worlds; working and resting, making money and spending money, Korea and Yanbian. Rigid visa regulations by the Korean government especially force migrant workers into a "split life," as they must weave two different worlds into a common everyday life, and discipline their bodies to switch easily between two different modes of time. </p><p> This study examines "Yanbian Socialism" that has responded to and intersected with the Korean Wind, a particular socialism that stresses overt expressions of the Korean Chinese political faith in China while acknowledging the prefecture's cultural and economic links to Korea. My dissertation aims to weave together an account of the particular structure of feeling experienced by Korean Chinese as they are caught between confusion and hesitation, contention and contradiction, economic desperation and political caution. I view their constant adjustments and revisions as a major influence on the formation of mobile ethnicity. My work thus provides a new understanding of the politics of class and gender among Chinese ethnic minorities, articulated through transnational mobility at the intersection of post-Cold War, post-socialist, and neoliberal currents across and beyond East Asia.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation explores the cultural and intellectual factors in the remaking of US-Japan relations which transformed as the two countries transitioned from enemies to allies after 1945. Diverging from the traditional approaches of diplomatic and political history that, focusing on state actors, describe policymaking processes, I comparatively study public discourses in 1940s-early 1950s America and Japan where various groups and actors - politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scholars, and intellectuals - participated and created. Both peoples shared a similar discourse concerning modernization and, indeed, developed parallel ideas about modern Japanese history and the causes of Japanese militarism, the postwar democratization of Japan, and the making of a postwar Asian peace. They believed in the European progressive view of history, variously interpreted, and judged Japan to be "underdeveloped," compared with the "advanced West," having become an unlawful aggressor nation in the 1930s. Such views of a "failed" modernity and subsequent war rationalized Allied occupation and democratization reforms in post-surrender Japan. The more influenced by Marxian theories, the more critical they were of Japan's incomplete modernization, and the more enthusiastic for Allied - or American - intervention in postwar reforms. American and Japanese discourses on the reform of Japan's political organization, namely constitutional revision, show similar reformist plans from reconstruction of the constitutional monarchy to republican options. Those adopting Marxist analyses found the root cause of Japan's undemocratic and aggressive nature in the emperor system called for its elimination; those who did not believe that democratization required the overthrow of monarchy suggested reforming Japan's imperial institution to make democratic government function better. In addition, both Americans and Japanese shared the Wilsonian idea of internationalism, and they expected Japan to reenter the postwar Asia-Pacific as a totally demilitarized, democratic, and pacifist country that could contribute to peace and development of the region. With the Cold War, the US policies for Asia and Japan altered. So did the internationalist visions, causing political debates in the United States and Japan. My work ultimately shows such parallel and intersecting cultures where US-Japan relations were rehabilitated in the immediate-postwar years.

This dissertation approaches the geopolitics of river infrastructure in the Indus Basin through the structured interaction of "hydraulic regionalism" and "technocratic developmentalism". The former occurs when regional elites feel their access to river resources are threatened by upstream infrastructure development. The latter occurs when technocratic elites underplay the geopolitics of regional vulnerability by stressing the overall integrated development of river resources to maximize utility. The dissertation interprets archival, legal, and ethnographic data regarding the negotiation and adjudication of the Indus Waters Treaty between India, Pakistan, and the World Bank, as well as the implementation of the Indus Basin Development Fund Agreement. The dissertation also analyzes upstream/downstream tension between the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh. The contributions of this dissertation are in the fields of post-colonial state theory, the political ecology/economy of environmental knowledge, the geopolitics of river disputes, and Marxist methodology.

Canadians faced an unprecedented threat after the Second World War. Located between two competing superpowers Canada could become the battlefield of a third world war. How did Canadians respond to the nuclear threat? The government of John Diefenbaker warned that millions of Canadians could die in a nuclear war. It strengthened Canada's contribution to the defence of North America and Europe and dedicated more resources to civil defence. Between 1957 and 1963 the domestic issue of nuclear arms acquisition and growing cold war tensions combined to draw attention to the threat. Newly founded anti-nuclear groups as well as Canadian unions, newspapers, magazines, student groups, churches and community organizations confronted nuclear issues. These groups shared a concern about survival but reached different conclusions about how Canada could avoid nuclear devastation. Their attempts to come to terms with the threat of nuclear war highlight broader themes in the history of postwar Canada including the influence of the cold war on the attitudes and behaviours of Canadians and the nation's relationship with the United States. / While more Canadians discussed the nuclear threat in these years the majority did not join the debate. Polls showed the public supported a nuclear defence. They believed few would survive a nuclear attack but did not worry about nuclear war. Economic concerns always ranked higher. The public was, on the whole, not mobilized either in preparation or in protest. Diefenbaker questioned what else he could do to increase public concern about survival. Both the civil defence program and the nuclear disarmament movement struggled. Polls showed that most Canadians did nothing to prepare for a war fought at home. Anti-nuclear groups remained small, divided over their platforms and methods and faced financial constraints. The debate about survival grew in the period between 1957 and 1963 but was dominated by elected officials, civil defence authorities and anti-nuclear activists. Even these groups found it difficult to balance the Soviet threat with the risk of a nuclear war and struggled to achieve policies that would provide security for the nation and its population.

This thesis traces the relationship between militarism and geographical thought in the United States during the early Cold War. It does so by traveling across certain spaces, or environments, which preoccupied American geopolitics and American science during the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, geopolitics and science, understood during the Second World War as markedly distinct terms, came together uniquely to wage the Cold War from the position of strategy. The most intriguing and influential conjunctions were made possible by militarism, not in the deterministic sense of conditioning technologies or funding lines, but as a result of antagonistic, violent practices pervading American life. These practices reaffirmed America's status as distinctly, powerfully modern, while shoring up the burden of global responsibility that appeared to accompany this preeminence. Through militarist reasoning, the American world was turned into an object that needed securing - resulting in a profoundly insecure proliferation of danger that demanded an equal measure of global action and retreat behind new lines of defence. And in these American spaces, whether expanded or compressed, the identity of America itself was defined. From the global horizons of air power and the regional divisions of area studies to the laboratories of continental and civil defence research, the spaces of the American Cold War were material, in the sense that militarism's reach was clearly felt on innumerable human and natural landscapes, not least within the United States. Equally, however, these environments were the product of imaginative geographies, perceptual and representational techniques that inscribed borders, defined hierarchies, and framed populations governmentally. Such conceptions of space were similarly militarist, not least because they drew from the innovations of Second World War social science to reframe the outlines of a Cold War world. Militarism's methods redefined geographical thought and its spaces, prioritizing certain locations and conventions while marginalizing others. Strategic studies formed a key component of the social sciences emboldened by the successes and excesses of wartime science. As social scientists grappled with the contradictions of mid-century modernity, most retreated behind the formidable theories of their more accomplished academic relatives, and many moved into the laboratories previously associated with these same intellectual stalwarts. The result was that at every scale, geography was increasingly simulated, a habit that paralleled the abstractions concurrently promoted in the name of political decisiveness. But simulation also meant that Cold War spaces were more than the product of intangible musings; they were constructed, and in the process acquired solidity but also simplicity. It was in the fashioning of artificial environments that the fragility of strategy was revealed most fully, but also where militarism's power could be most clearly expressed. The term associated with this paradoxical condition was 'frontier', a zone of fragile, transformational activity. Enthusiastic Cold Warriors were fond of transferring this word from a geopolitical past to a scientific future. But in their present, frontiers possessed the characteristics of both.

The United States emerged from the Second World War determined to play a leading role in the maintenance of international order. Increasing levels of tension between the United States and the forces of communism after 1945, however, slowly forced a redefinition of what might be more distinctly termed America's "global" responsibilities, such that by 1961 John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would "pay any price. . .in order to assure the survival and success of liberty." An identifiable Cold War consensus took shape based on the assumption that it was America's responsibility to lead, protect, and defend, the "free-world." Since America was effectively waging a battle to ensure the successful spread of its own values, the Cold War consensus also served to severely limit debate—dissent essentially implied disloyalty. By the mid-1960s, however, the Cold War consensus began to crack and a debate over American foreign policy began to emerge. That debate is the focus of this dissertation, which looks at the opposition to Cold War policies which emerged in the Senate, most notably among the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee --many of whom had once played a role in developing the very foreign policies they now protested. The war in Vietnam provided the focal point for much of the dissent, but the foreign aid program also became heavily criticized, as did America's NATO policy, particularly the size of the American military presence in Europe. More important, however, Senate dissenters came to question the United States' very position as the principle defender of the free world. They did not dispute the idea that America had a significant role to play in the global arena, but they did not believe that role should consist of being the world's policeman, the self-appointed arbiter of other’s affairs, and the keeper of the status quo. Because of their views, the so-called dissenters were labelled as "neo-isolationists." They saw themselves the true "internationalists," however, believing that the Cold War had led to confusion between internationalism and indiscriminate global involvement.

This paper will rather seek to uncover and emphasize Cold War imperatives that served as significant guiding factors in shaping the Canadian response to the Suez Crisis. The success of Canadian diplomacy in the 1956 Suez Crisis was in the ability of Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson and his Canadian colleagues to protect Western interests in the context of the Cold War. Suez threatened Anglo-American unity, and the future of the North Atlantic alliance. It also presented the Soviets an opportunity to gain influence in the Middle East. The United Nations Emergency Force ensured that Britain and France had a means to extricate themselves from the Crisis. Canada wished to further protect Western credibility in the eyes of the non-white Commonwealth and Afro-Asian bloc. It was, therefore, important to focus international attention on Soviet aggression in Hungary, and not Anglo-French intervention in Egypt.