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This article discusses the end of the Cold War in Southern Africa and its impact on the Apartheid Government's nuclear weapons program. The program was developed as a strategic deterrent against perceived communist threats in the region. However, with the changing political landscape, including the end of hostilities in Angola and the rise of progressive leaders like FW de Klerk, the program was deemed unnecessary and a burden. In 1989, de Klerk ordered the termination of the program and the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal. This decision, along with South Africa's subsequent commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, played a significant role in the country's transition to democracy and its emergence as a leader in promoting disarmament. [Extracted from the article]

In 1989, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was going through a period of transition. The fall of the Berlin Wall posed an enormous challenge to Marxist beliefs and the communist political project. In this situation, party secretary Achille Occhetto and his close collaborators planned to embark on a new social-democratic path, as a significant part of the elderly leaders and rank-and-file members feared the abandonment of communist ideals. 'We are a different party ... and I continue to believe it,' a Milanese communist militant shouted while Nanni Moretti was shooting La Cosa (1990), a documentary about the last days of the PCI, crystallising the perceived sense of uniqueness and diversity that pervaded Italian communism despite the complete loss of meaning for the communist movement worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I have chosen a specific perspective from which to identify and analyse what has gone wrong for the Italian Left in the past thirty years. I will take as my starting point the demolition of the Berlin Wall (1989) and continue with the foundation of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party [PD] 2007), its vicissitudes, its current state of health and its status. I will do so by attempting as far as possible to consider what has been done, or not done, by other left-wing parties in Europe. My main hypothesis is that the Left has declined because it has been unable to renew or reinvigorate its political culture. When dealing with the PD I will briefly analyse the motivations behind its birth, and especially the frequently repeated intention to amalgamate – through the so-called and never-achieved hybridization – the best of all Italian reformist political cultures. My final remarks will be devoted to what can be done to (re)formulate a left-wing political culture in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) treated the Berlin Wall as an official state border, but the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not recognize it as an official state border and thus did not impose entry controls. This asymmetric recognition opened up a gap in the regime of border policing and turned divided Berlin into one of the most significant sources of unauthorized migration into the FRG, creating tensions in Berlin, West Germany, and western Europe more broadly. Countries including France, Denmark, and the Netherlands all pressured the FRG to shut the open border in Berlin. This article examines how West German authorities sought to respond to their demands without recognizing the Berlin Wall as a state border. West German authorities pursued two broad strategies. The first involved internalizing the border through institutionalized racial profiling in West Berlin. The second entailed externalizing the border by asking the GDR to enforce FRG visa and passport requirements. Although both forms of border policing have often been associated with the end of the Cold War, this article shows that they were adopted earlier, and in response to Cold War imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Achille Occhetto, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), announced that the Party needed to transform itself, implicitly including changing its name. His announcement launched a 15-month-long process that culminated in the dissolution of the PCI and the rise of a new political organisation, which became a member of the Socialist International. Drawing on the individual and collective memories of former Turinese PCI officials, this essay examines the complex, tortuous abandonment of the communist reference and the disintegration of the political community surrounding the Party. Because of their highly varied reactions, the dissolution of the PCI caused fragmentation of the subsequent careers and paths of former Party 'comrades'. To this day, the 1989 turning point continues to inspire highly diverse memories among former Italian communists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the public and scientific debate about the state of unification has regained considerable momentum. The debate stresses in particular the persistent, returning, and even deepened East-West differences which refer to central elements and promises of representative democracy. However, it is a controversial and so far unanswered question whether and in which way this poses a challenge to the legitimacy and functioning of representative democracy in Germany. Therefore, this Special Issue focuses on the representative democracy by concentrating on its central dimensions, actors, and institutions (citizens, political parties and parliaments, and elites). The introduction outlines the three key questions which are addressed by the contributors regarding (1) to the status of unification in longitudinal and in cross-sectional perspective, (2) the causes and determinants for ongoing differences and divides between East and West, and (3) the implications for representative democracy in Germany. Moreover, it summarises the results of the contributions and discusses research desiterata for future research on the state of unification and representative democracy in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses Las cartas de Alou/ Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990) to argue that labour migrants engage in pedagogies of solidarity that, in keeping with the theorization of bell hooks, recast the margins into which they enter as spaces of resistance and possibility. The (in)formal teaching and learning that migrants undertake to support themselves and each other urges an expansion of the concept of public pedagogy. Released in 1990 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and amid triumphal celebrations of democracy, Las cartas de Alou rigorously deconstructs the perils of neoliberalism and the dependence of European economies on unregulated migrant labour. The essay examines how migrants develop pedagogical languages and practices of solidarity to better navigate the hegemonic and exploitative structures they encounter in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do militants expelled from the Communist Party ever leave it behind? Jorge Semprún was a Communist resister captured and sent to Buchenwald, where he worked in the sui generis Communist organization there. He spent almost two decades in the party, half of those years organizing the Communist underground in Franco's Spain. Expelled in 1964, he became an anti-Communist who held on to what he valued as a Communist at Buchenwald and in the underground. In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Semprún came to see in what he had learned at Buchenwald a harbinger of the European project he was making his own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on destruction of the Berlin Wall with construction of a peace wall in Belfast, Ireland. It mentions sense of belonging that the violent demonstrations may counterintuitively occasion by creating community and sense of belonging is most certainly not what Aristotle or Singer meant as "social." It also mentions Northern Ireland's paramilitary prison had two names beautifully illustrates the bifurcated nature of Northern Ireland.

The article focuses on fall of the Berlin Wall also signaled the resurrection of the Nuremberg Principles and their focus on accountability. It mentions person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment. It also mentions legal and constitutional arrangements where the international legal order was reimagined to include accountability and violated the sanctity of human rights.

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including speech by Mark Ellis on fall of the Berlin Wall; scholars' impact on defining moments in customary international law and how the Global War on Terror transformed national security law.

An interview with Adam Przeworski, political science teacher, is presented. Topics discussed include life experiences influenced interest in studying science politics; construction of the Berlin Wall in 1960 it would have consequences for as individuals and different and possible merits and failures of democracy an basic methodological problem of comparative politics.

Concern with the decay or demolition of inner cities was an underappreciated factor contributing to the discontent preceding the revolutions of 1989 in east-central Europe. Although there has been some scholarly work on the topic, particularly on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), multinational studies are lacking. This examination of parallel developments in the GDR and Czechoslovakia identifies similar trajectories of discontent and activism in the two socialist states. It follows the evolution of architectural and planning theories and practices from the high point of postwar modernism to the widespread embrace of the very styles and districts once despised. By the 1980s, this acceptance of pre–World War I buildings, districts, and urban scale had pervaded expert circles and reached even the highest levels of party and government. However, both states' failure to carry out policies that satisfied residents and defenders of old districts fueled the discontent that exploded in 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Berlin street Bernauer Straße has played an important role in the history of the Berlin Wall, from its initial construction to its demolition. Nowadays it contains the longest remaining stretch of the border zone and an elaborate memorial has been constructed on the site. The memorial is a complex space: it seamlessly blends in with its surroundings, uses a range of media and serves multiple purposes at once. It is this apparent failure to represent a coherent whole that is paradoxically its main strength. A closer look at the workings of the memorial explains its success. The article presents an analysis of the memorial from three different perspectives: a discussion of the eclectic nature of the original Wall and the ways in which the memorial represents this, a look at the memorial as an archaeological site and, finally, an exploration of the performative nature of the memorial. Die Bernauer Straße in Berlin spielte eine wichtige Rolle in der Geschichte der Berliner Mauer, von ihrer Entstehung bis zu ihrem Abriss. Heutzutage befindet sich hier der längste noch bestehende Abschnitt des ehemaligen Grenzstreifens und eine umfassende Gedenkstätte wurde dort errichtet. Die Gedenkstätte ist ein komplexer Ort: sie fügt sich scheinbar nahtlos in ihre Umgebung ein, bedient sich diverser Medien und erfüllt mehrere Zwecke zugleich. Es ist dieses augenscheinliche Scheitern ein kohärentes Ganzes darzustellen, das paradoxerweise die eigentliche Stärke dieses Ortes ausmacht. Eine nähere Betrachtung der Funktionsweise der Gedenkstätte erklärt ihren Erfolg. Dieser Artikel bietet eine Analyse aus drei verschiedenen Blickwinkeln: eine Diskussion über den eklektischen Charakter der Originalmauer und die Art und Weise wie diese dargestellt wird, ein Blick auf die Gedenkstätte als archäologische Fundstätte und zuletzt eine Betrachtung ihrer performativen Eigenschaften. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austria's security architecture has changed significantly following the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the country's accession to the EU in 1995, and the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s led to a re-calibration of the Austrian understanding of foreign and security policy. As a result, Austria became more engaged in international peace-keeping operations and was interacting more with international organisations (EU, NATO-PfP). Austria became more and more engaged with EU CSDP, which de-facto undermined the country's neutrality, even if the neutrality issue keeps coming up at the level of political discourses. The public assessment of perceived threats is shifted from more traditional threat categories (e.g. crime) towards new security challenges (e.g. immigration), but in general, Austrians feel extraordinarily safe in comparison with other European nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that the Stasi policed East German artists because of their potential dissident and ideological production. In contrast, Cornelia Schleime's Stasi Series (1993) reveals the secret police's preoccupation with her domesticity as a sign of her rebellion. For the photo-text series, the artist assigns fourteen excerpts of her Stasi file to as many self-portrait photographs. The images and texts inform each other, providing a biographical sketch of Schleime's life in two temporalities (the 1980s and 1993) and from two seemingly incommensurate perspectives (the Stasi and her own). The Stasi files document in careful detail Schleime's private life in the years that immediately preceded her 1984 emigration. Although the truth of these texts is suspect, the artist does not completely discredit them. Rather, she unites her file to her 1993 present by performing its contents in photographs that exhibit both mockery and resignation. This article considers how the artist's use of her archive reveals as much about the limitations of her Stasi source as it does about her unique perspective as both subject and interpreter. It examines Schleime's project in relation to contemporary archival and surveillance-oriented art practices to demonstrate how the Stasi Series adds to their concerns over information and power, memory and document, observation and self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on interpretation of Central European identity in relation to decline of Iron Curtain and mentions efforts to maintain unity within structure of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Topics discussed include distinction provoked by migration crisis within Central European countries, focus on right to remain homogeneous nation, and celebration of unification of West and East Germany after the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989.

The article focuses on criticism over television (TV) series "A Home for Our Children" of mores of socialist society and mentions fall of the Berlin Wall rethinking of process of democratization. Topics discussed include freedom of democratic movements in post-Soviet bloc, negotiation between Bulgarian Communist Party and Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), and collapse of the Communist power system.

This article explores the contribution of Maxime Rodinson to the thematisation of food in the Social and Human Sciences (SHS), i.e. its recognition as a legitimate object. Rodinson's contribution consists in having created the conditions for the socialisation of food. The focused interest in cookery books, as a source of empirical data, has made it possible to situate food in culinary styles, that is to say not only in physical space, but also in social space. Entry through practices has provided access to what he calls "mass effects" that affect society at large. Thus, it has been possible to sociologise the issue by adding to the local, geographical, and cultural locations of food and dishes the consideration of social hierarchies and forms of diffusion, mixing linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Beyond Rodinson's personal trajectory, which from a personal polycompetence promotes a transdisciplinary approach, the thematisation takes place in a historical and epistemological context marked by the opposition between a spiritual Islamology and evolutionary Marxism. This characterises the period preceding the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Born in Silesia in 1944, Christoph Hein lived in the eastern part of Germany. In the novel Glückskind mit Vater published in 2016, reissued in 2019, on the occasion of the author’s 75th birthday and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, it presents, based on the evolution of the protagonist Konstantin Boggosch, over sixty years of German history. The present article includes the analysis of the mentioned novel, focusing in particular on two aspects: the one of remembrance and of the construction of identity, in the foreground being a person who throughout his life tries to free himself from the “shadow” of his father. The theoretical basis of the analysis is the study of Alleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik/ The Long Shadow of the Past. Culture of Remembrance and Politics of History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, memorials and museums devoted to the victims of the massacres perpetrated in the twentieth century have multiplied in Europe, then in the world. This social, political and cultural fact is new. It reveals a radical change in historical representation where for centuries, only the victorious hero was celebrated in official history. In this context, specific memory sites, called "victim memory places", have emerged. The Second World War is the turning point in this history of memory. The memory of the Holocaust is the model. But other memories, often competing, have also developed recently.This study proposes to record this break in the long duration of the history. Where does this memory come from, which is attached to the victims rather than to the victors? What are the main stages of its emergence? Today, does the memory of the victim gather or oppose the Europeans? As a first step, we will try to understand why the memorials in tribute to the victims did not appear rather, despite a living tradition of victimhood. In a second step, we will analyze the causes that explain the advent of places of memory victim in Europe: the rupture of the world wars, the Shoah and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We will examine how this memory can be an issue at once symbolic and political. Lastly, through the example of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial, we will see how this tradition has been interpreted in the light of the Muslim religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the previously published article entitled "1989 at Thirty: A Recast Legacy," by Paul Betts, which appeared in the no. 244 August 2019 issue of "Past and Present." Topics explored include the fall of communism in the Communist Bloc countries, the opening of the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany, and the rise of populist nationalism in Eastern Europe.

This special issue explores how demilitarization and repurposing are still playing out within abandoned military bunkers of the Cold War era, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Noting that the physical erasure of these bulky defensive fortifications is practically impossible, the Introduction shows how the contributors' common concern is to explore the ways in which new uses and new meanings are applied to these stubborn structures. By adopting a notably broad definition of 'cultural production' (one which can accommodate mould, acoustics and irony as cultural phenomena) the Introduction demonstrates how the contributors find these places — through their embodied exploration and archival enquiry — to be anything but dead or trapped by their past militaristic purposes. Instead, the bunker's after-life is found to be a matter of ongoing cultural production, acting out through a variety of contemporary appropriations: some of them contested and some of them playfully indeterminate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early years after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a number of smuggling operations from behind the Wall were executed, and the reports of them spread through the Western media. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the popular Swedish men's magazines Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt published several exclusive photo reportages about such operations, providing Swedish readers with information about the East Germans' desire to escape their country, and the West Germans' willingness to assist. This article discusses the Swedish escape reports as examples of border crossing through their form as well as their content. It is analysed, how the escape reports published in Sweden both represented and generated border-crossing activity. The smuggling stories also illustrate the entangled character of popular print media: the travels of texts and pictures beyond national, cultural and lingual borders as well as travels between apposite publications. The material of the article consists of a total of ten reportages published in Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt between 1965–1966 and 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens a new perspective on Finland's Cold War history by highlighting the role of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) in providing information about the German Democratic Republic as a particular polity, economy, and key player in the European Cold War landscape. The analysis is based on search results from the YLE digital database (Metro) from 1970-1989, and it is supported by documents from the German Broadcasting Archive [Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv] and the YLE company archive. The archive documents and metadata testify about a long-term interest in East Germany in Finnish television, as well as long-term contacts and collaboration between East German and Finnish television companies, in the executive as well as at grass roots levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interaction between two authors regarding the counterplanning in the crisis of social reproduction. It mentions fall of the Berlin Wall, when the left, Marxism, and the concept of communism dominated radical thought and information on Wages for Housework campaign which was a refusal of unpaid labor. It also mentions Women entered en masse into the waged labor force at a time in which the working class lost so many of the benefits that waged labor.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 it is time to start a broader reflection on one of the most debated types of housing in Eastern European urban studies. Gated housing was almost unknown in the 1990s but started spreading rapidly at the end of the 2000s in different Eastern European and Post-Soviet countries. However, the 2008-2009 global financial crisis led to a sharp decrease in housing construction in general and of gated communities in particular. In recent years, housing construction as well as housing prices have increased again. Gated communities are part of this recovery. Instead of providing insights from a certain period of boom or crisis, this paper looks at three decades of housing production in general and gated communities in particular. It tries to uncover the institutional and economic background of housing development over the last 30 years. Moreover, it relates these developments to two (South)-Eastern European capital cities (Sofia and Kiev [Kyiv]) and their pathways of housing and gated community production. We focus on politico-economic and socio-spatial relationalities in these two different context conditions and scrutinise why and how gated communities emerged as well as how supply and demand changed over time. Both cases represent rather peripheral, capitalist economies concerning their national background. However, both cases are capital cities, which absorb the majority of capital investment. The polarisation and concentration of political and economic power structures lead us to discuss different actor-constellations regarding this on-going flight to privatopia, reflecting on the role of urban planning as well as glocal housing markets. Last but not least, this paper shows that gated communities are "urban assemblages" of wider processes of peripherialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political changes in 1989/1990 affected all of East German society, including in particular the country's ethnic Sorbs. Sorbian institutions that had enjoyed a relatively regular influx of financial resources in the GDR now found themselves in an uncertain situation. The new democratic and liberal society did not guarantee Sorbs their previous certainties in the fields of science, education, culture, and other areas. This article looks at selected institutions to provide an idea of how the transformation process took place. One educational institution that did not survive the collapse of the GDR is the Zentrale sorbische Sprachschule Milkel (Sorb.: Centralna serbska rěčna šula w Minakału), which provided language instruction and an overview of Sorbian history and culture for many people who subsequently went on to work for Sorbian institutions. By comparison, one organization that weathered the changes was the Sorbian Institute, although the dissolution of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR necessitated a change in legal form (e.V.). One new institution, whose main task is to distribute financing to the most important Sorbian organizations, is the Foundation for the Sorbian People. Smaller changes affected the Sorbian print media at this time as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period of deep peace ended because Russia, China and Iran adopted policies to overturn the political status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The personal narrative of the author is presented which explores the author's experience of visiting the Berlin Wall which is now a tourist trap.

The seeming permanence of the Berlin Wall and the spaces it separated during the Cold War placed unique demands on artistic mediations of the city's material, geopolitical, and social opposition. This article assembles a set of literary and cinematic narratives by Peter Schneider, Thomas Brasch, Helke Sander, and Christa Wolf to examine aesthetic forms as emergent responses to restrictions and enclosures west and east of the Wall. Contributing to scholarship on literature and cinema's interaction with space in the Cold War, my comparative analyses of their works evaluate artistic strategies and narrative techniques as elements of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping. I also highlight the significance of such an aesthetic for the prospects of human beings' orientation in the wake of the Cold War's passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cutting of fences between Hungary and Austria, crowds of people on the streets and violence in Prague and especially Bucharest, Andrei Sakharov's televised rebuke to Gorbachev, and the glorious celebrations atop the Berlin Wall. It mentions Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie and in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević became president of Serbia. It also mentions rise of right-wing extremism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia.