The chapter looks in detail at Churchill’s post-Second World War campaign for European unity. It begins by explaining the concepts of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ and ‘Christian civilisation’ that informed his thinking, before outlining the evolution of his thought through exposure to the ideas of Coudenhove-Kalergi and Briand. Prior to the Second World War, Churchill stated explicitly that Britain should not be a member of a proposed United States of Europe, but his ideas continued to evolve. In 1940 his government made the offer of Franco-British Union, and by 1942 he was promoting the idea of a Council of Europe as a counterweight to Russian ‘barbarism’. Defeated at the 1945 election, his Zurich speech and ensuing United Europe campaign are seen within the context of his desire to demonstrate his continued relevance on the world stage and against the backdrop of the developing Cold War. Nonetheless, they were based on sincere beliefs that helped inspire a broader transnational movement. The chapter concludes with the ambiguities in Churchill’s views on the role of Britain in Europe and argues that they may be a ‘problematic guide’ to more recent European politics.

Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, I argue that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when (a) they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview and (b) their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals’ political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

This chapter is concerned with the last period of Churchill’s premiership and leadership of the Conservative Party. It focusses not just on the last part of his ‘Indian summer’ when back in office but also on the tempestuous moves and motives of the Conservatives to compel his retirement in an age before party leadership elections. It also examines Churchill’s manoeuvres to frustrate these ambitions and continue in power. While many studies have examined how British politicians gain the leadership of political parties, there has been less analysis of their inevitable fall. The chapter is written primarily from the Conservative perspective since, until the 1965 Douglas-Home Rules which established leadership elections and procedures, so-called customary processes existed to enable, largely without public knowledge (and even beyond the engagement of many Conservative politicians themselves), the emergence, and removal, of leaders ‘for the good of the party’.

The chapter examines Churchill’s role on the international stage and his summit diplomacy with Roosevelt and Stalin. Faced with the surprise collapse of France in 1940, he was forced to seek new partners, assiduously courting the United States while seizing the opportunity of an alliance with the Soviet Union. The result was that he had to juggle the conflicting demands of Roosevelt and Stalin, embarking on strenuous personal diplomacy in the face of declining British influence. The chapter reviews the key decisions of the major meetings before looking at their postwar legacy in Churchill’s attempts to advance European reconciliation and his ultimately unsuccessful bid to resume summitry with the Soviet Union.

Largely forgotten in histories of the Cold War is America’s remarkable response to the global food crisis in the early postwar years. Across the Atlantic, Europeans were starving. The war had crippled food production. The massive bombing of roads, bridges, canals, and railway lines had shattered transportation routes, making the transit of food to cities that much harder. Drought had withered crops, further depleting what little food remained. More than two years had passed since Germany’s surrender, but the lives of average people had only worsened. Tens of millions of children were enduring malnutrition, stunted growth, and disease. Mothers jostled and shoved their way into the scrums surrounding canned food distribution sites. Others picked through garbage dumps, searching for any edible scraps. With winter rapidly approaching, Europeans desperately needed nutrients or millions would soon die. The continent was facing a grim postwar apocalypse, and Americans were being asked to help. Half a million gathered one night in Hollywood to launch a distinctly American solution: the newly minted Friendship Train.

Bolaño’s work in the nineties shows him conscious of the harm that has been done to an entire generation and to the psyche of Chile. His preoccupation with the Chilean situation connects with his interest in writing fiction that recounts that loss, along with the establishment of the central pieces of the new economic world order. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) unleashes energies associated with a new world map in which the American continent is key to the necropolitics of the end of the century. Bolaño will become the main Latin American author of this period marked by multilateralism, though he is certainly not alone (a central characteristic of Latin American literature of the end of the century is a desire to become global.) Much of what he wrote in the second half of the nineties is an inquiry into Chile’s Pinochet which shows the pervasiveness of evil and the bitter conclusion the neoliberal trend has consolidated. Bolaño’s fame explodes with the publication of The Savage Detectives, which can be read as an instruction manual for contending with the market without making concessions.

This chapter describes Roberto Bolaño’s life and work in the context of the Cold War. In Latin America, that conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union often had the character of an internal civil war. Many of the region’s most prominent writers, who by and large belonged to the political left, spoke about Cold War politics as a continuation of U.S. imperialism in the region. But there were also deep divisions on the left. Some writers were pro-Soviet, while others were anti-Stalinist. After the Cuban Revolution, it too became a fault line. Born in 1953, Bolaño began his literary career at a time in the early 1970s when these political and literary paths seemed increasingly exhausted. As a young provocateur, he mocked the pretensions of both Communists and anti-Communists. His works often feature the invented lives of writers, but not in the heroic or redemptive roles they are sometimes mythologized as playing. Bolaño’s major output, published in the 1990s and 2000s, looks back on the Cold War with a sense of loss: the losses of accumulated violence, and the lost dreams of political justice that could not come to pass.

In the wake of the Azerbaijan Crisis, the United States supported the Pahlavi development program, the Seven-Year Plan, masterminded by Abolhassan Ebtehaj, the country’s premier developmentalist. Assistance came from proxy groups, particularly the World Bank. The bank neglected to provide loans until Ebtehaj and the shah agreed to place the plan under foreign management. Primary financial support for the plan was to come from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But negotiations failed to produce an agreement that would increase Iran’s revenues. The rise of an Iranian petro-nationalist movement, an economic crisis, and political paralysis within the Pahlavi government coalesced in 1950, and despite a late intervention the United States and its allied proxies failed to rescue the plan or the shah’s government from succumbing to the nationalization campaign of nationalist leader Mohammed Mosaddeq in early 1951.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

In the twentieth century, Western oil companies worked to combat the oversupply of oil on world markets through oligopolistic management of production and competition. At the same time, they attempted to contain petro-nationalism in the oil-producing Global South. The rise of the Pahlavi regime in Iran threatened the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, until World War II led to the abdication of Reza Shah and the occupation of Iran, including its oil fields, by Allied forces. American advisors came to Iran determined to “cure” what they saw as a sick and unstable country, while US oil companies attempted to break the British monopoly on Iranian oil. The Azerbaijan Crisis and Cold War clarified US policy, producing an American commitment to safeguarding Iran’s territorial integrity by backing the young shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and ensuring the smooth flow of Iranian oil into the global market managed by the oil oligopoly.

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.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.