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Now available:ÂNC-Chronology
Upcoming conference:Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975-1989 November 4 - 6, 2010
Workshop:Friedensbewegung und Zweiter Kalter Krieg: Europäische und transatlantische Perspektiven |
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MissionOn December 12, 1979, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) implemented the so-called Double-Track Decision: In case arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union failed, the West would station intermediate nuclear forces to provide a counterweight to the new Soviet SS-20 missiles. This momentous decision, alongside the almost simultaneous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, directly affected international politics as well as domestic developments in Europe and North America. The world moved from an era of reduced tension to a newly heightened East-West confrontation during the "Second Cold War." East-West tensions and the threat of nuclear war provoked sustained political protest. This was further augmented by domestic political turmoil, which in Western societies was heightened by the arrival of a new brand of Western leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl. The early 1980s thus saw the biggest protest mobilization of the Cold War. Our research project seeks to establish a transnational history of this “Nuclear Crisis,” which engulfed both Western Europe and North America, yet transcended the European and global East/West divide as well. The “Nuclear Crisis” explores this discourse from three distinct but interrelated angles: (1) It looks at the diplomatic, political, and strategic debate surrounding the nuclear armament issue. Only recently have historians started to look at this most salient political issue of the 1970s and 1980s. “Traditional” actors such as the political, diplomatic, and military elites carried this debate forward. Yet “anti-establishment” forces as well as other domestic and transnational actors, such as the churches and intellectuals, were equally important. (2) By merging an “establishment” perspective with an analysis of protest cultures, this project aims to transcend the narrow boundaries of traditional diplomatic history: it seeks to bring non-state actors, intellectual discourses, and the role of culture into the study of international relations. It also looks at manifestations of “nuclear” death in popular culture, as well as in “high art,” including—but not limited to—music, film, and novels. (3) The project transcends the traditional East/West divide in postwar European history in a number of ways: it explores the “nuclear crisis” on both sides of the Iron Curtain; it looks at the connections between establishment and anti-establishment forces across national borders; it places them in a transatlantic and pan-European setting (one that is potentially global, given the impact of nuclear testing in the South Pacific); and it asks how and to what extent people envisioned themselves as part of larger transnational communities and spaces. The accompanying digital archive has three main goals: First, it gathers and preserves materials on this most important chapter of transatlantic and European history. Second, it makes these materials available worldwide and free of charge to scholars and teachers. Third, it fosters the growth of a community of scholars, teachers, and students engaged in teaching and learning about the nuclear crisis of the 1980s. Philipp Gassert und Martin Klimke February 2009 |
