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Pan American Airways (Pan Am) sought toeholds in Africa only after it had secured its prominent position in the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific. Then, for 50 years, Pan Am operated a variety of commercial, promotional and protective activities in Africa. Its first experimental flight tested aeronautical facilities and limits. For a year, nominally commercial monthly flights were undertaken, mindful of building stepping stones to the Indian Ocean, of serving long-standing US links with Liberia, and of tapping future continental business potential. Geostrategic considerations propelled Pan Am's trans-Atlantic and trans-Sahel re-provisioning of Allied armed forces in North Africa in 1941–1942. After the Second World War, Pan Am resumed commercial flights. It targeted modest passenger and freight opportunities along a slender African route network. Modest results and Cold War rivalry in Africa prompted Pan Am to widen its presence there in the 1960s. The US Government pressured it to get more involved in aviation development projects. For its first 30 years, as a giant airline, Pan Am used its organisational and technical capacities to muscle opportunities out of changing and challenging circumstances. In its last two decades in Africa, the iconic but financially and managerially troubled carrier was there by default, mostly working residue. There had been no single, overarching, uncompromising plan. Improvisation was at the heart of Pan Am's Africa enterprise, a loosely managed, adaptable limb grown by its influential and long-serving founder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1961 the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) organised a large music festival in Lagos, Nigeria. American celebrities such as Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and Lionel Hampton went on AMSAC’s fully sponsored trip to strengthen African-American/African connections. The performances and AMSAC’s image-building will be examined through photographs of the Lagos festival. These photographs are records of staged acts – acts that were meant to generate positive images of Black Americaandto reinforce (unequal) power relations between Nigerians and (Black) Americans. The visit of the group provides an interesting case study on the intersecting histories of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the decolonisation of the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After World War II American and European Protestants linked up at various organisational levels to discuss and defend their common interests. On the American side this was far from a unified action. Disagreements between liberal and conservative Protestants in the United States meant that each side reached out to Europe in different ways, resulting in a variety of transatlantic religious alliances. The liberal representatives tried to draft a common platform for European engagement as part of their ecumenical objectives. Conservative Protestants on the other hand, feared this liberal effort and courted European souls with informal evangelical networks and joint US-European revival campaigns. Neither effort to shape new alliances was as successful as anticipated. Both suffered from Europe’s strong national religious interests and from the incongruity of a US presence in transatlantic political formations. As well, neither group could easily transcend the ideological divide created by the Cold War. In the end American evangelicals had greater success in drawing citizens on both continents in viable transatlantic relationships. Though the religious connections surfaced publicly only on occasion, they contributed to a lively transatlantic religious exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the role the Moscow–Washington Hotline played in the 1967 Six-Day War, focusing on the Soviet side. We argue that the Soviet Union used the Direct Communication Link much more broadly than had been intended when the Hotline was agreed on in 1963 mainly because Moscow did not assign the Hotline any special diplomatic significance. We also show that the Hotline is a poor channel for crisis negotiations, and its efficacy as a communication tool is compromised if regular diplomatic channels cannot match its speed. Finally, we challenge the existing debate in the historiography of the Six-Day War, arguing for the importance of studying the implications of Soviet behaviour rather than Soviet intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images of the Iron Curtain and their resonances accompanied by the standard Cold War narrative persist in contemporary Western culture and collective memory. The cast of mind created in the 1946 Fulton speech centred on the Iron Curtain, has endured beyond the changed geopolitical landscape. Though Churchill’s was a message strewn amongst a series of other similar sentiments, its narrative authority, the clarity of the image, the resonance of the metaphor, wove through the Cold War years; it was referenced frequently as shorthand for a bipolar configuration of power. Eventually, the Berlin Wall became a manifestation of the Curtain and the image, constructed of words, of metaphor, eventually of concrete and wire, it became ametaimage, an allegory ‘of power and value’ that was presented as a neutral reading of the geopolitical landscape, the image of Europe and Cold War confrontation [W. J. T. Mitchell,Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation(Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 157]. Churchill was not alone in the creation of the message, certainly he explored options for diplomacy in the 1950s, but his was the captivating image, and image that made accommodation along lines of the ‘one world’ agenda advanced by Franklin Roosevelt, by pragmatists and realists, later, Nixon and Bush Sr., more difficult. Gorbachev identified the conventional Cold War thinking as the ‘Fulton model’. In his vision for the post-Cold War era he sought to avoid this Cold Warmentaliteand through his 1988 UN speech and other initiatives to produce a ‘Fulton in reverse’. Yet the wall endures in our culturalmentalite, and in our cultural and institutional conception of the era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the Cold War arrived in America – in Washington and in U.S. public opinion – between October 1945 and March 1947, and more specifically in February and March 1946. It also contends that Winston Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech on 5 March 1946 played an important role in alerting the American public to the reality that Soviet foreign policy was both expansionist and anti-democratic. Churchill’s anti-Soviet speech, together with earlier ‘firm’ but more guarded speeches by Senator Arthur Vandenberg and Secretary of State James Byrnes, clearly contributed to the anti-Soviet milieu that was reflected in a Gallup poll in mid-March in which only 7% of respondents approved of ‘the policy Russia is following in world affairs’. Ironically given the lasting fame of Churchill’s speech, editorials in the five North Carolina newspapers analyzed in the article opposed what they saw as his main proposal: an Anglo-American alliance against Russia. Yet four of the five papers agreed with Vandenberg, Byrnes, and Churchill that Western nations needed to oppose Soviet expansionism firmly, thus upholding the ideals of the United Nations. The article concludes by explaining why President Harry Truman did not follow Churchill’s lead in publicly condemning Soviet foreign policy for another year, until his famous ‘Truman Doctrine’ speech on 12 March 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Lord Salisbury passed the above remark in November 1961 it was at a moment of intense frustration for the British Foreign Office during the Congo crisis as the UN accelerated their efforts to restore territorial integrity to the Central African state by ending the secession of Katanga. The British viewed UN actions as a threat to their political and economic interests in the Congo and in Central Africa but crucially, also found that they were at loggerheads with the United States. This article examines Anglo-American relations at two key junctures in March and December 1961 when Britain successfully appealed to the United States to intervene in order to stall UN actions in the Congo. The cooperation between President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to constrain UN Congo policy reflects the centrality of the organisation in Anglo-American relations at the time and also highlights an understudied aspect of the relationship between the London and Washington. It will be shown that the crisis put a strain on the Anglo-American relations, leading to efforts by the British to play on the Cold War fears of the Americans by urging them to limit the actions of the UN. It is argued that the changing nature of the organisation helped to foster tensions in the Anglo-American relationship, exposing inherent differences of opinion about how American Cold War objectives should be balanced against the British agenda for decolonisation. The two incidents highlighted here reflect how the crisis became a challenge for Anglo-American relations and ultimately reveal the waning influence of the United States and the UK within the UN at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the scholarly and popular literature, the view on former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy has often been exclusively focused on his role in the expansion of the Vietnam War, where he helped presidents Kennedy and Johnson escalate the conflict at the expense of negotiation and disengagement. The present article attempts to nuance our view of Bundy by analysing his role in US foreign policy-making during the 1961 Berlin crisis, because while Bundy was clearly a Vietnam hawk, this was not the case in other policy areas of more immediate importance in the early 1960s. Here, the article argues, Bundy persistently sought a negotiated settlement to the crisis and was ultimately successful in crafting an action-oriented negotiating platform. And while the ensuing negotiations eventually proved fruitless, the American willingness to negotiate helped relieve the tension in Berlin and prepare the two superpowers for the Limited Test Ban Treaty and to conclude the European phase of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article addresses East–West relations in the civil aviation sector – a subject largely neglected and overlooked in current historiography of the Cold War. The article's main objective is to fill this lacuna by describing the major developments affecting East–West civil aviation diplomacy from the end of the Second World War up to the early 1960s, when the Soviet bloc airline companies launched their first inter-continental operations. This article seeks both to explore the rationale for Eastern bloc aviation inroads into Western Europe and the developing countries of Asia and Africa, and to explain why reactions to the ‘Eastern air offensive' were different in Washington and other NATO capitals. From a methodological viewpoint, the article shifts from a predominantly Western-oriented narrative of existing studies to a more transnational approach that draws on evidence from both Western and Eastern archives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the development of US international civil aviation policy between 1944 and 1964, as the USA instituted policies to expand and protect the global aviation opportunities of its airlines. This entailed hard bargaining with the British and others to establish and maintain the Bermuda formula as well as efforts to contain and isolate Soviet and Soviet Bloc aviation behind the Iron Curtain. By the mid-1950s, the success of American aviation policy was clear. But thereafter, as the capabilities of non-American airlines increased and the needs of American carriers changed, the effectiveness of containing Soviet Bloc aviation and maintaining the Bermuda formula waned. Responding to the changing realities of international aviation, the Kennedy administration undertook a reassessment of American aviation policy that recognised the inability of isolating Soviet and Soviet bloc aviation and the need to modify the Bermuda principles to better protect the competiveness of American flag carriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greek anti-Americanism can be examined as normality rather than exception in the context of the Cold War political culture and of the European Cold War anti-Americanism. This hypothesis can be broken down to the following: (1) Greek anti-Americanism can be examined as a historical entity for the period 1947–1989; (2) it comprises two distinct components that interact, a political component and a cultural one; (3) it evolved into a field of convergence for the political parties. Based on the analysis of the archival material the following periodisation of Greek anti-Americanism is suggested: (a) Genetic phase, 1947–1954; (b) Development, 1954–1965; (c) Radicalisation and transformation, 1965–1974; (e) Generalised anti-Americanism (1974–1985); (e) Latent anti-Americanism (1985–early 1990s). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Cold War activities of the Ford Foundation have been subject to many inquiries. However, its prominent role in the promotion of German-American elite networking – as reflected in its relationship with the American Council on Germany (ACG) and the Atlantik-Brücke – has largely been neglected. This article takes a first step in closing this gap by analysing the triangular relationship of the Ford Foundation with these organisations. The article views the Ford Foundation and its grant-recipients ACG and the Atlantik-Brücke as drivers of an evolving transatlantic elite network comprised of private citizens and public figures; a structure that can be conceptualised as state–private network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses French views of transatlantic and European defence from the late 1940s to France's ‘return’ to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2009. It argues that, while until the early 1950s the French Government viewed transatlantic and West European security cooperation as mutually reinforcing enterprises, by the end of that decade French decision-makers had developed conflicting perceptions of transatlantic and European defence. During the 1960s, the dominating political discourse in the Fifth Republic portrayed relations between Atlantic and European solidarity as a ‘zero-sum’ game: What was good for the Alliance was bad for Europe and vice versa. President Charles de Gaulle advocated the creation of a European ‘Third Force’, although links with NATO were never outright severed. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a ‘zero-sum’ attitude to Atlantic and European defence consolidated although as the Cold War came to a close, Mitterrand started a selective but steady re-engagement with the Alliance. By the late 1990s, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, France was once again ade factofull member of NATO, although full reintegration was completed only in April 2009. This paper suggests that France's return to ‘NATO’ marked no dramatic U-turn in French security policy; rather it was the result of a gradual and steady evolution, which was triggered by the crisis of the East–West structure of international politics during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In April 1949, Portugal, an undemocratic and underdeveloped small country of Western Europe, became one of the 12 founding members of the Atlantic Alliance. The important geopolitical position of the Portuguese Atlantic islands was the main justification for the admission of this authoritarian regime in the Western Alliance. From this moment on, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) served as a framework for the bilateral relationship between Portugal and the USA. The US interests were fully achieved after the Azores agreement of 1951, since it authorised Washington to use an airbase in the archipelago during peacetime. However, for Lisbon, NATO did not safeguard one of its most important objectives: the maintenance of its colonial empire. As the 1950s evolved, US presence in the Azores and Lisbon's resistance to decolonisation became increasingly interdependent. Portugal quickly understood that the Azores could be a trump card to obtain political leverage from the USA regarding Lisbon's colonial policy. This strategy led to the establishment of a modus vivendi in US–Portuguese relations that was based on a thin balance between the interests of both governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America cast the cold war as one of history's great religious wars, between the godless and the god-fearing, between good and evil. The significance religion was accorded in the American approach to cold war politics had a notable impact on Anglo-American relations as religion became a measure not simply for a nation's morality and justice, but also for democracy and freedom. It was an approach that impacted not only on the nature and conduct of the transatlantic alliance, but one that was to have significant repercussions on ecclesiastical leaders in their dealings with each other and the Vatican. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's views on Anglo-American relations during the crucial year of 1947. It challenges the view that Bevin was unquestioningly pro-American. It demonstrates how Bevin pushed the embassy in Washington to project a view of Britain, based on answering American criticisms robustly. He saw Britain's problems to be a consequence of American failures to act responsibly, as he saw it. Bevin was frustrated with American attitudes, and sought to bring them to underwrite his own policies and shape theirs around his strong belief that Britain had earned their support and that they should compensate Britain for its past sacrifices in the common cause. Bevin was not coldly pragmatic, nor was he uncritically pro-American, or merely a puppet in the hands of his Foreign Office officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No event better defined Charles de Gaulle's complicated relationship with his Western allies than his 1966 decision to withdraw France from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Predictably, the story of this unilateral move has been very well documented; but how de Gaulle's policy towards NATO interacted with other key elements of his grand strategy, namely his attempts to build a Western political union or to promote East–West détente, has not received the same attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that at the beginning of the 1960s Western Europe, and Germany in particular, retained a crucial role in American global strategy, and that keeping the Atlantic alliance solid and cohesive remained a key goal of the new Kennedy administration that took office in January 1961. Europe at this time was still the main arena of the cold war. Yet this constant objective of American cold war strategy had to be balanced against other realities of the new phase of the global confrontation, such as the emergence of the 'third world' and the new threat represented by Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). In this process of readjustment there began a gradual, but significant, downsizing of the relative weight of Europe in American grand strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to revitalise the neglected transatlantic ties, the Nixon administration unilaterally deliberated that 1973 was to be the 'Year of Europe'. However, 1973 did not end with the solemn renewal of the Atlantic Declaration that Kissinger had sought. On the contrary, this initiative prompted the countries of the recently enlarged EEC to engage in the first attempt to take a unitary foreign policy stance and highlighted the Nixon administration's contradictions regarding the European integration project. These contradictions, in addition to the numerous tensions that already strained transatlantic relations, gave birth to a downward spiral of incomprehension and misperceptions, seriously worsened by the unexpected deflagration of the October War. However, even though the tensions did not disappear, the European common front soon started to disintegrate, mainly under the strains imposed by the oil crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the Western European Union after 1954-1955 is still a terra incognita. This article examines the function of the Western European Union in the Euro-Atlantic security architecture of the Cold War up to the 1960s. The paper studies the prime shifts of the tectonic plates forming the Western partial system of the bipolar Cold War system - and their systemic repercussions. The relationship between the Western umbrella organisation, NATO, and its European subsystem is analysed in four case studies: (1) the Arms Pool Negotiations of 1955; (2) Selwyn Lloyd's Grand Design of 1956-1957; (3) the wider Political European Union agenda of 1960-1962 and (4) the Western European Union nuclear force project of 1963. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cold War conflict brought about a rivalry of two opposing camps in different fields and the ideological one belonged to those that came to the fore. Fighting for the minds of people, convincing them to the idea of the new, allegedly better world was crucial to raise the chances of winning the conflict. This is where propaganda came in useful. This article deals with this direct product of the East-West hostility in Polish newspapers and focuses on the propagandists' presentation of the Anglo-American relationships as driven by constant conflicts. Consequently, competition between the allies or rather the struggle by the British to maintain their position in the world is shown. Criticising both countries was of particular interest for Polish journalists. The US was the leader of the 'rotten' capitalist camp and the UK its staunch ally. What is more, damaging the image of co-operation between the leaders of the capitalist camp was meant to undermine the unity of the whole Western bloc and thus proclaim the self-destruction of the latter as a result of 'hostile contradictions' between its members, leaving the 'socialist' camp in the privileged position of the winner. Press was a particularly good tool for propagandists in Poland at that time because television broadcasting was not yet well developed. Thus newspapers became a 'transmission belt' for the communist party and a useful instrument for achieving the unity of knowledge in the country. Apart from the press articles, cartoons from a satirical magazine are analysed to show a broader scale of the propaganda's influence and to prove that its output was not only verbal but also visual one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces hostile intelligence service activity, ranging from espionage to murder, from the Warsaw Pact countries directed against exiles working for the American sponsored radio stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany, 1950-89. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the socialist representation of East and West Camps in Czechoslovakia, during the founding period of the 1950s. After investigating the origins of the Peace Movement, I analyse how the Peace and the War Camps were represented, and how the representation of 'the other' (in this case, the West) also revealed the (both idealised and actual) self-images and intents of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of Canada's international role has been the subject of much discussion in recent years, especially since 9/11. This article explores the extent to which it is possible to discern elements of a Canadian 'grand strategy' since the end of the Second World War and argues that, during the Cold War in particular, Canadian policy-makers laid the foundations for such a strategy. Drawing on the work of a number of Canadian writers and statesmen, the author identifies several basic principles that have underpinned Canadian foreign policy since 1945 and suggests that they still hold relevance today as Canada re-examines its international contribution in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]