1st Edition
War Veterans and the World after 1945 Cold War Politics, Decolonization, Memory
This book examines war veterans’ history after 1945 from a global perspective. In the Cold War era, in most countries of the world there was a sizeable portion of population with direct war experience. This edited volume gathers contributions which show the veterans’ involvement in all the major historical processes shaping the world after World War II. Cold War politics, racial conflict, decolonization, state-building, and the reshaping of war memory were phenomena in which former soldiers and ex-combatants were directly involved. By examining how different veterans’ groups, movements and organizations challenged or sustained the Cold War, strived to prevent or to foster decolonization, and transcended or supported official memories of war, the volume characterizes veterans as largely independent and autonomous actors which interacted with societies and states in the making of our times. Spanning historical cases from the United States to Hong-Kong, from Europe to Southern Africa, from Algeria to Iran, the volume situates veterans within the turbulent international context since World War II.
List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction (Ángel Alcalde and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas) Part One: The Cold War 2. The making and unmaking of the international anti-fascist resistance fighter (Václav Šmidrkal) 3. The World Veterans Federation: Cold War politics and globalization (Ángel Alcalde) 4. For Peace and Disarmament: Italian Disabled Ex-Servicemen and détente (Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre) Part Two: Race and Decolonization 5. South African Veterans and the Institutionalization of Apartheid in South Africa (Jonathan Fennell) 6. Enforcing Conformity: Race in the American Legion, 1940-1960 (Olivier Burtin) 7. "Warriors Again": Native American Vietnam Veterans in the Decolonization Movement, 1969-1973 (Matthias Voigt) 8. Poppies, pensions, passports: the British Legion and transnational civil society action in decolonizing Hong Kong (Daniel Schumacher) Part Three: Decolonization and Development 9. Colonial soldiers and postcolonial politics in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Upper Volta, 1958-1973 (Riina Turtio) 10. Algerian veterans associations in the late colonial period in Algeria (1945-1962) (Samuel André-Berkovici) 11. Development, Mobilization, and War in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The Case of the Trench Builders Association (1979-2013) (Eric Lob) 12. Veterans and land expropriation in Post-Independence Zimbabwe (Obert Bernard Mlambo) Part Four: Memory 13. Inconvenient heroes? War veterans from the Eastern front in Franco’s Spain (1942-1975) (Xosé M. Núñez Seixas) 14. Imagination and Authority in the Testimonies of French Veterans of the Algerian War of Decolonization (1954-1962) (Hugh McDonnell) 15. State Power, Cultural Exchange and the 'Forgotten War': British Veterans of the Korean War, 1953-2011 (Grace Huxford) 16. Retracing Memories of War: South African Military Veterans as Tourists in Angola (Gary Fred Baines). Index.
Biography
Ángel Alcalde obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in 2015. He was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich in 2016-2017. He has also been a visiting scholar at the European Institute at Columbia University (New York), the Leibniz-Institute for European History (Mainz), and the Center for the History of Global Development at Shanghai University. His latest book is War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Xosé M. Núñez Seixas is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Santiago de Compostela and at the LMU of Munich (2012-1017). He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books on nationalist movements, national and regional identities, history of migration, and the cultural and social history of war in the twentieth century. His latest books are Die spanische Blaue Division an der Ostfront (1941-45) (Aschendorff, 2016) and (ed.) Metaphors of Spain (Berghahn, 2017).
