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The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after the Second World War.
Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organised Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations.
This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-Communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.
explicitly and officially recognized. However, when Gábor Székely staged his Coriolanus at Budapest’s Katona József Theatre four years earlier in September 1985, such explicit public recognition was restricted by the system of ‘goulash communism’ which then prevailed. Under this system, Hungarians enjoyed relative material wealth, but were unable to express overt political dissent freely. 1 The
respective countries’ military and defense policies all the way until the breakdown of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Because communism, especially “late” communism, represents the immediate background to the countries’ current military and defense policies, it is important to discuss this period in some detail. As we will see, there are important and surprising continuities in the respective countries’ military and defense
included as valuable commodities on a global market. Rather, my book claims that the actualization of historical materialism in eastern Europe constitutes an important moment for understanding the development and the future of queer studies. I argue that queer theorists have incorporated many assumptions that are part of historical anti-communism in the USA. I have also shown how to
5 The demise of communism in Poland: a staged evolution or failed revolution? Tom Junes The East European revolutions The demise of communism in Poland Even after so many years, the most striking fact about the demise of communism in Poland remains that it happened through a peaceful and negotiated process. Having seemingly unfolded quite suddenly, it was the result of several inter-playing factors over a longer period of time than the actual events of the spring and summer of 1989. Changes in the international geopolitical context, a disastrous economic
1 The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe: origins, processes, outcomes Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe The 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe ‘People think of history in the long term’, comments the narrator Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, ‘but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing’.1 While Roth was referring to the social upheavals in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their impact on the town of Newark, New Jersey, when he wrote this, it might equally
87 5 ‘Meeting [our] domestic Communism problem’: Cold War governance and the public university Geoffrey Rossiter’s term of employment as executive officer of the Australian Fulbright Program (1950–64) coincided neatly with Robert Menzies’ term as prime minister (1949–66) of the L-CP government. While this provided a stability of policy and direction for the USEF, the neat symmetry also captures the overlap between politics, governance and educational exchange that characterised the Fulbright Program. Just as the Fulbright Program was being set up in the
8 The decline of revolutionary pragmatism and the splintering of British communism in the 1980s Jeremy Tranmer Introduction The 1980s were a particularly difficult period for the British labour movement. Its political wing, the Labour Party, experienced a series of electoral reversals, while trade unions suffered significant industrial defeats. The labour movement as a whole faced falling membership. It was also a time of severe divisions. The internal ructions of the Labour Party in the 1980s have been well documented, but parties and groups to its left were
African radicalism: ICU leaders have been accused of making a sudden and irreversible shift towards anti-Communism in 1926 (ignoring earlier tendencies), while the interwar CPSA has monopolised South Africa’s early ‘radical tradition’. 7 Helen Bradford, Allison Drew, David Johnson, Tom Lodge, Sylvia Neame and Lucien van der Walt have demonstrated that syndicalists and Communists had important radicalising influences on leaders of the ICU, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), a
, pledged loyalty to the monarchy. This misunderstanding arises partly due to a lack of sources on the monarchy. The most important study has been Grant Evans’s The Last Century of Lao Royalty , 7 and Evans in particular revealed the many ways the monarchy was modernised. There nevertheless remain unaddressed, but defining, issues: specifically, how loyalism and anti-communism made (and unmade) the monarchy. Although Lao historiography largely concerns politics, nonetheless the role of partisanship in making the modern monarchy remains obscure. In the period 1945 to