This chapter begins by illustrating how Fedecafé avoided the social contradictions of their fully proletarianized labor regime by engaging in collective action efforts with other coffee-exporting countries that de-peripheralized their niche in the international coffee market. While Fedecafé’s early efforts to upgrade up the coffee commodity chain fell flat, the shift in the world hegemonic context and rise of US world hegemony during the postwar decades opened opportunities for collective action efforts among coffee producer-exporter countries that became institutionalized through the International Coffee Agreements (ICA). This geopolitically regulated international coffee market system provided Fedecafé with core-like profits that were essential to the viability of their Pacto Cafetero and therefore to the establishment of a hegemonic regime in Viejo Caldas. This chapter then discusses how the world historical context shifted in the 1980s, with the United States abandoning its support for the ICA system in favor of a deregulated coffee market. It closes with a discussion of how this unraveling of US world hegemony re-peripheralized Colombia’s niche in the international coffee market. This downgrading of Colombia’s niche in the market, combined with the regime’s dependence on fully proletarianized producers, undermined Fedecafé’s hegemony and pushed the region into a series of contemporary crises of labor control.

The introduction offers an overview of the Tricontinental worldview and its place in the historiography. Secular, socialist, and militant, Tricontinentalism aimed to empower states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to mount a revolutionary challenge against the unjust international system and Western imperialism through armed revolts and confrontational diplomacy. More closely aligned with communism, this iteration of Third Worldism broke with Bandung’s self-conscious neutralism by reuniting socialism and the global revolution for national liberation. In recognizing this shift, the introduction offers a revised framework and chronology of Third World internationalism by challenging the idea of a single, evolving movement. Instead, it argues Tricontinentalism was one component of a century-long Anti-Imperial Project that existed in the overlapping goals of diverse movements that ultimately informed the Third World challenge to the Cold War. This project encompassed an array of competing ideologies and alliances that hoped to achieve sufficient unity to advance the interests of the Global South, with Tricontinentalism emerging as the most prominent worldview in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China saw decolonization as a long-awaited opportunity to overturn the imperialist-dominated world order. Both countries saw themselves as bearing no guilt for the crimes of imperialism and the underdeveloped state of newly independent countries. Rather, they saw themselves to varying degrees as victims of imperialism and natural allies for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the advent of attempts to give political structure to the developing world raised the specter of a “Third World” not necessarily aligned with Moscow or Beijing. For the Soviets, the very notion of a “Third World” was a non-starter, a political and ideological dead-end that would deflect the revolutionary energies of the people. For the Chinese, the unwillingness of many in the developing countries to accept Chinese leadership kept this constituency beyond China’s reach. Consequently, the rhetoric of support for anti-imperialism and alliance between the “international communist movement” and the “national liberation movement” masked a much more complex, manipulative, and often antagonistic relationship between the “Second World” and the “Third.”

The Cold War and process of decolonization divided the world, with Vietnam emerging after 1954 as a center of global competition. Leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi believed that success in their revolution could tip the worldwide balance of power in favor of the socialist bloc and national liberation movements. This conviction, combined with the need to conduct diplomacy from a position of military weakness, made those leaders accomplished practitioners of international politics as they balanced commitments to Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism.

This chapter addresses how Hanoi navigated its membership and commitment to overlapping international movements at the height of the Cold War. It demonstrates that despite confronting the United States in Indochina, DRV leaders never thought strictly in terms of their own interests. Over the years they iterated and acted upon commitments to socialist internationalism, “world revolution,” and “Third Worldism” (tiermondisme). The Cold War and Sino-Soviet dispute created challenges for Hanoi, but the contemporaneous process of decolonization in the Third World also created opportunities.

The chapter examines US officials’ views of and responses to the Tricontinental Conference and the OSPAAAL organization from 1965 through 1968. Using declassified US government archival documents, it argues that the US government saw the Tricontinental as both a revolutionary threat and a counterrevolutionary opportunity. The Johnson administration and the State Department responded to the conference and the OSPAAAL organization through a vigorous but largely behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort to meet the challenge and exploit the opportunities it presented. The core of this strategy was to exacerbate and exploit, largely indirectly and by proxy, the political and ideological divisions among the organizations represented at Havana, in order to undermine the tricontinental solidarity project and divide, isolate, and harass Washington’s enemies, especially the Cuban government. Through its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence and security counteroffensive, the US government largely validated the Tricontinental critique of the US role in the Third World.

After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Truman and the Eisenhower administrations tried to apply an even-handed policy towards Israel. Both administrations acted under the assumption that favouring Israel over its Arab neighbours would alienate the latter and would push them into Soviet arms. Washington was concerned that the Soviets would gain a foothold in the Middle East, which was under sway of the West. The very strong attachment of the United States towards Israel would preclude a truly even-handed policy. Israel needed urgent economic aid during its first years of existence, and while both administrations attempted to provide such assistance as a part of universal programmes of aid, they also helped Israel significantly more than what they were gave to other nations. Militarily, both administrations managed to thwart pressures to supply arms to Israel, but in the process, the set two principles ramifications lasting for years to come. The administrations argued that Israel was militarily stronger than its neighbours, and that if it was need, it could purchase arms from other suppliers. This meant that when the two provisions were no longer valid, the administration would supply arms to Israel. The establishment of the state of Israel also thrilled Americans from various walks of life, including Evangelicals and American Jews. The press delivered to the American people a message of a new, pioneering Israeli, justifying the American support for Israel and setting conditions for its continuation.

The 1958 Middle East crisis led to a change in the relations between the United States and Israel. The Eisenhower administration looked at Israel as a strategic ally in a region that fell under the sway of the Soviet Union. Hesitantly, the seeds for strategic cooperation between the two nations were being sown. The deepening strategic ties between the two nations led the American recognition that the Arab–Israeli conflict was conflated with the Cold War. Consequently, the United States recognized that Israel needed arms in order to maintain its strength whilst facing an Arab military challenge due to the Soviet military support for the Arab states. In a gradual process that began with President Eisenhower and culminated with President Lyndon Johnson, the United States became Israel’s main arm supplier. The 1967 June War further deepened the attachment between the two nations. Evangelicals cherished what they saw as the fulfilment of the prophecies about the restoration of the Jewish state, and the American people and politicians viewed the Israeli victory as additional proof of the Israelis’ high spirit and capabilities, especially when compared to the failing war in Vietnam. For Israel, which came to control more territories, the war provided an additional opportunity to deliver its messages to the United States through tourism diplomacy. The war also forced Israel to contemplate its place in the Middle East, with peace becoming a more plausible option.

This chapter focuses on the activities of the Polish War Crimes Office from 1947 to the closure of the UNWCC in March 1948. The War Crimes Office is discussed with reference to the political situation in Poland following the rigged January 1947 election. The scale and substance of Charge File submissions are examined, and the ways in which the head of the office, Marian Muszkat, sought to influence debates within the UNWCC are explored. The chapter highlights the growing East/West tensions over the issues of extradition and alleged traitors/collaborators in the early period of the Cold War.

This chapter offers a conceptual framework for better understanding the long and often misrepresented history of social rights. It begins by debunking the common notion that social rights are ‘second-generation rights’ – that they are recent additions to ‘core’ civil and political rights that stretch back to the Enlightenment. After historicising this myth, the authors sketch out the long history of social rights presented in this volume, situating their origins across a wide range of sources: religion, liberalism, socialism, decolonisation, biopolitics, among others. Understanding the chronic precariousness of social rights, they argue, requires understanding their entanglements with notions of charity, justice, equality and, above all, ‘duties’ and ‘obligations’. The history of social rights, they insist, is inseparable from the problem of obligation – a problem with philosophical, legal and cultural dimensions. They conclude by linking the history of social rights to broader struggles over inequality, particularly those generated by class, race, gender, colonialism and globalisation.

What will be the contours of the “post-post-Cold War” world? This chapter takes up that question by examining the defining international and domestic characteristics of this new age and assessing their similarities with previous eras. We begin by identifying three defining attributes of the Cold War: ideological clash, limited economic exchange, and nuclear arms racing between the American and Soviet-led blocs. Next, we explore the central feature of the post-Cold War era - namely, American primacy. We then examine the trends that have eroded primacy's material underpinnings and produced new domestic and International conditions — global power shifts, technological change, and sociopolitical fragmentation -- then project forward how those trends are likely to evolve over the next ten to fifteen years. Finally, we examine the extent to which those trends are distinct from, or continuous with, the conditions facing the United States during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, and find that some important continuities remain even as meaningful discontinuities will disrupt existing patterns of international order. The chapter concludes by arguing that the post-post-Cold War world requires a new strategic approach for the United States — one guided by a principle of openness, rather than Cold War-style containment or post-Cold War-style liberal universalism.

What Bernard Brodie said about nuclear weapons in 1946 continues to be true: The most important thing about nuclear weapons is that they exist and are terribly powerful. This was true in both the Cold War and the subsequent era. Although the situation has changed a great deal, there are striking continuities, especially in American attitudes and policies. Most obviously, the United States has consistently opposed nuclear proliferation, with only a very few exceptions for its closest friends. Second, the debate within the United States about the role of nuclear weapons has been altered only slightly by the end of the Cold War. The fundamental division between those who see nuclear weapons as having a revolutionary impact on world politics and those who do not continues. Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review makes arguments that are remarkably similar to those made under the Raegan administration. In parallel, the arguments made against Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems today are quite similar to those advanced during the Cold War, despite the radically changed conditions. This indicates that ways of thinking about nuclear weapons have become deeply engrained.

The Cold War’s denouement not only saw profound political changes throughout Eurasia, but an unprecedented power shift resulting from the Soviet Union’s decline that ultimately ushered in the United States’ “unipolar era.” Nevertheless, the United States’ response to the late Cold War power shift remains underexplored. This chapter fills the gap by examining the processes by which the United States recognized the power shift underway and adapted its foreign policy. I make three arguments. First, American policymakers in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations acknowledged that Soviet decline rebounded to the United States’ geopolitical advantage. Second, American policymakers responded by exploiting Soviet problems, driven by recognition that Soviet decline allowed for American gains, yet worried that the window for gains would soon close. Third, this effort altered European security, as the United States undercut the Soviet Union as a challenger while fostering conditions that could allow it to dominate European security irrespective of whether Soviet problems continued. Put simply, the United States used the Soviet decline to reify American advantages in Europe, garnering oversight over a region that had long been the cockpit of geopolitical contestation. The result meant that unipolarity also translated into American near-hegemony in Europe.

History remembers Ronald Reagan as the ultimate hard-liner, whose campaign of maximum pressure across domains brought down the Soviet Union. But there was more to the fortieth president’s approach to the Soviet Union than that: As much as he went on the offensive, he also advocated for sustained engagement with Soviet leaders. US foreign policy in the 1980s, thus, was every bit as much carrot as it was stick; and it offers a host of lessons about dealing with a resurgent and intransigent Russia today. This chapter will examine the core tenets of Reagan’s grand strategy, and what they — and their successes and failures — can tell us about the way forward in US foreign policy today.

After 1945, Romanian Germans explored multiple possibilities in their search to define a Heimat, taking us beyond the known narrative of the ‘other homeland’ in Germany. Their most hotly contested issue – where did they belong? – turned particularly acute during the Cold War, as the Romanian German community became more fractured and physically separated. Romanian German identity in this period, this chapter argues, was flexible and far more transnationally defined than often assumed. At its heart were opposing views of ‘regionalism’, nationalism, and belonging. Romanian German identity debates during this period operated on different scales in the community, which made identity contestation particularly messy. If the Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) in Germany encouraged greater emigration from Romania, other Romanian Germans, especially those close to the Lutheran Church, pushed back. Meanwhile, as this chapter demonstrates, the realities ‘on the ground’ reveal a rich cultural history of transnational Romanian Germans communicating across numerous borders, constantly rethinking their own roles in an uncertain Cold War.

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.

The European Union has reshaped Irish society over the past half-century, yet in Irish fiction Europe typically appears as a site of aesthetic discovery or historical trauma rather than as immediate political reality. Contemporary Irish writing belongs more to an Anglo-American than to a European literary sphere, and Irish novels in Europe often ponder the ‘Americanization’ of European and Irish modernity. Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe and Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone depict Irish expatriates exploring what it means to live between Europe and the United States. In both narratives, the protagonists are romantically involved with Americans and attached to European landscapes, yet neither émigré finds some sustaining new local or supranational sociopolitical form beyond the nation-state.

Chapter 2 presents a historical outline of military interventions into Africa by non-colonial actors and uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis to investigate the causes of such interventions. It begins with a historical summary of the sometimes large-scale military interventions taken during the Cold War by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States (US). It then looks at US military intervention on the continent after the end of the Cold War, noting a change in motives following the 9/11 terror attacks in the US. The chapter documents the more covert, but lasting, form that US military intervention took following 9/11 (a phenomenon some have termed “liquid” warfare) and the increasing US use of drone attacks against Islamic terror groups. Following this review of superpower and superpower proxy activity, the chapter outlines the interventionary record of other non-colonial external actors. It examines actions taken by Israel within Africa, the Chinese naval presence off of the Somali coast since 2008, and a handful of small European evacuation and rescue missions. Results from qualitative comparative analysis suggest that combinations of conditions like national role conceptions, rivalry, capabilities and at times mass unrest within the intervening state help to explain many of these external interventions.

This chapter summarises the science behind nuclear weapons and describes their development first by the United States and then by the Soviets with a narrative of the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers during the Cold War. Also described are the nuclear weapons programmes of the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, South Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea. Of these, only South Africa has eliminated its programmes and the associated weapons.