Abstract
The historiography on international labor politics in the Cold War era, and particularly on the AFL-CIO’s global projection, seems to be advancing in leaps and bounds. It started out at the height of America’s domestic conflict about Vietnam and empire with polarized, antagonistic accounts, which lambasted the AFL’s submission to the US government’s imperial designs1 or praised its independent international campaign for free trade unionism.2 After a lull of almost 15 years, it reemerged in the late 1980s when a new crop of scholars, mostly based in Europe, addressed new issues, and some of the old ones, from a different perspective. They produced archive-based works focused not only on the nature and intent of American labor unions’ foreign policy but also on its impact and effectiveness.3 These historians framed their main questions within the contemporary debates about the political economy of Western Europe’s reconstruction and its intricate relationships with US hegemony.4
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Notes
Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1969).
Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The APL As a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak, 1976);
Philip Taft, Defending Freedom: American Labor and Foreign Affairs (Los Angeles: Nash Pub., 1973).
Anthony Carew, “The Schism within the World Federation of Trade Unions: Government and Trade-Union Diplomacy,” International Review of Social History 29 (1984); Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987);
Ronald L. Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943–1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989);
Denis MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944–1951. Trans. Harvey Fergusson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Peter Weiler, “The United States, International Labor, and the Cold War: the Breakup of the World Federation of Trade Unions,” Diplomatic History 5 (1981).
Among the main works that defined that historiographical context see Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Charles Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundation of American International Economic Policy After World War II,” International Organization 31 (1977);
Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
The key references here are Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). An insightful discussion of Cold War studies’ current achievements and predicaments is offered by Holger Nehring, “What Was the Cold War?” The English Historical Review 127 (2012).
Among the most relevant works at the intersection between Cold War scholarship and postcolonial history, see Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds., The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (London: Routledge, 2011);
Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010);
Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spencer, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Jana Lipman, Guantánamo. A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009); “Special Forum: ‘Workers, Labor, and War: New Directions in the History of American Foreign Relations,” in Diplomatic History 34 (2010).
In the burgeoning literature on modernization theories applied to the Cold War rivalry, see Michael E. Latham, Modernization As Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003);
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); David C. Engerman and Corinna Unger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of Modernization” Diplomatic History 33 (2009);
Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011);
Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007);
S.V. Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).
For sound scholarly analyses of the connections between the AFL-CIO and the CIA, see Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History 39 (1998), and Quenby Olmsted Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold War Alliance between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011).
See Anders Stephanson, “Liberty or Death: The Cold War As US Ideology,” in Reviewing the Cold War, ed., Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
On European trade unions, see Idesbald Goddeeris, Solidarity with Solidarity: Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980–1982 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).
For a different interpretation of détente in Europe, see Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965–1985 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010).
See Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005);
Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
Elizabeth McKillen, Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914–1924, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
For different perspectives on these possible conceptualizations, see Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);
Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011);
Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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Romero, F. (2013). Transnational Labor Politics in the Global Cold War. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_16
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