This chapter studies the interlocked biographies of three interwar figures: Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, and Mickey Mouse. All three achieved renown as changemakers and the title “greatest of all time” in their various social/cultural arenas. More importantly, for this chapter, all three figures undergo a steep decline, forcing the American public to reconsider the contours of greatness. Chaplin is branded a Communist. Lindbergh a Nazi. Mickey Mouse is eventually seen as too unmasculine to support patriotism during World War II and is therefore swapped by Walt Disney for Donald Duck. The chapter highlights the historical contingencies of greatness.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

Chapter 4 is a detailed description of Neurath’s adaptation to British life and professional re-establishment, mainly in the field of visual education. The Isotype Institute was established in Oxford, and this method was rapidly taken up by documentarist Paul Rotha for use in films for the Ministry of Information. The Neuraths also collaborated in producing books of ‘soft propaganda’ about Britain and its allies, and made a pioneering visualization of the Beveridge Plan of social insurance. Neurath attempted to reconstruct a scholarly environment for himself, and was keen to embrace the English language. He was much in demand as a lecturer and consultant, speaking ‘broken English fluently’. He was supportive of fellow émigrés but wary of Austrian exile politics. Inadvertently, he came into contact with some people later revealed to have been Soviet spies.

Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

This chapter looks at the ways how, from 1948 onwards, the meaning of the trials changed in light of the broader Cold War context internationally and intensifying criticism domestically. Administratively, the trials were coming to an end. They had, from the perspective of the public authorities, succeeded in their original purposes of securing inner peace and stability during the early months following the liberation. Yet, from 1948 onwards, they became acutely relevant in light of the new political threats and challenges the Norwegian state faced, at the same time as the authorities sought to defend their legacy in light of mounting criticism from some sentenced collaborators and public intellectuals. This chapter therefore argues that the final stages of the trials assumed a renewed demonstrative dimension as the government sought to reassert its administrative and interpretative authority over the trials in a changed political context.

The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate yet closely intertwined fronts.

The epilogue begins with a brief overview of the ebb and flow of state power at the Sino-Vietnamese border since the mid-1970s onward, revealing the patterns of state-society relations at the border during the decade-long conflict between the two countries and the ensuing era of rapprochement and reform, when the two states had to be “rebuilt,” again collaboratively. It then discusses the broad themes this book illuminates. The interaction between the Chinese and Vietnamese states on a daily basis underlines the significance of the mundane aspect of the territorialization of state and inter-state relations. The story told in this book highlights the necessity to examine the impacts of revolutionary ideology and the global Cold War on Asia against the broader political changes that Asian societies underwent, as well as the striking continuities in the objectives and strategies of state building in the modern era.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Vengalil Krishanan Krishna Menon established a reputation as one of the most controversial and divisive figures in Indian and broader Cold War politics. Under Nehru’s patronage, Menon experienced a meteoric rise to political power. In 1947, he was appointed to the prestigious post of Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. However, his abrasive personality and readiness to listen to and, on occasions, publicly endorse, Soviet and Communist Chinese positions on a range of international questions ruffled feathers in London and Washington. In the United States, officials characterised the Indian diplomat as ‘venomous,’ ‘violently anti-American,’ and ‘an unpleasant mischief-maker’. Many British diplomats echoed such sentiments. This chapter examines the British government’s response to Krishna Menon’s appointment. It explores the nature of Menon’s relationship with the CPGB, the risk that communists working for him posed to British security, and the strategy that MI5 developed to meet it. It illustrates the Attlee government’s conviction that India, and more particularly, Krishna Menon, represented a weak link in the Commonwealth security and intelligence chain.

Spying in South Asia examines the misguided and self-defeating Cold War interventions undertaken by British and American intelligence and security agencies in post-colonial India. British and American policymakers mounted intelligence operations in the Indian subcontinent on the basis of questionable, and often conflicting assumptions: that covert action could steer Indian opinion in a pro-Western direction; that British and American intelligence agencies could be insulated from Indian antipathy for colonialism and neo-colonialism; that Western intelligence support would corrode India’s relations with the Soviet Union; that controversies surrounding American intelligence practice would not cut through with the Indian public; that the subcontinent’s politicians would not employ the CIA as a lightning rod for India’s domestic travails; and that secret intelligence activity could help to arrest a decline in British and American influence in India. Today, India’s emergence as an economic titan, renewed Sino-Indian tensions, and backwash from the ‘War on Terror’, keep the subcontinent in the global headlines.

This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.

After his conversion to socialism in 1883, William Morris expressed again and again his hope of replacing the ‘cannibalism’ and ‘stupendous organization – for the misery of life’ that characterized modern civilization with the community of liberated equals pursuing satisfying and meaningful work that he saw in socialism (CL, ii.480; CW, xxiii.279). In his own account of his political awakening to the causes and cures of poverty and inequality he described himself as a ‘practical Socialist’ with little interest in politics for politics’ sake. Indeed, he embarked on a relentless programme of propaganda and agitation for the cause: he gave speeches, founded and edited a newspaper, Commonweal, and wrote protest chants, political poems, articles and sketches as well as contributing to pamphlets and leaflets on aspects of socialism in the present and future. This chapter examines the range of Morris’s journalistic and propaganda writings and the ways they formulate and express his practical but never narrowly pragmatic socialism. His recurring emphasis on the interconnections of art, beauty, environment and communities of many kinds shapes an internationalist, revolutionary ideal of socialism founded on and arrived at through fellowship, imagination and action.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.