Informal elite networks, such as the Trilateral Commission, established in 1973 and still operational today, have not received much scholarly attention. After introducing the changes to the international power constellation that gave rise to the Commission, including how the Commission functioned as an incubator for consensus-building and coordination between North America, Western Europe, and Japan, the chapter explores the Commission’s involvement in the East-West conflict, especially its contribution to opening up China to foreign investments. In doing so, the chapter suggests that rigid ideas about a sharp distinction between state and non-state actors be replaced by an understanding of policymaking and diplomacy as taking place in overlapping transnational elite networks, merging formal and informal spheres.

Dino Knudsen undersøger hvorledes Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), en global organisation af prominente intellektuelle og kunstnere der førte kulturkamp mod den internationale kommunisme i 1950’erne og 60’erne, virkede i en dansk og skandinavisk sammenhæng, indtil det i 1966-67 blev en offentlig skandale at organisationen havde været delvist finansieret og styret af den amerikanske efterretningstjeneste CIA. Tidligere forskning har kastet lys over hvordan organisationens danske aktiviteter i 1950’erne blev ledet af den tidligere modstandsmand Arne Sejr. I 1960’erne blev CCF’s arbejde i hele Skandinavien imidlertid reorganiseret og koordineret fra København. Nyt arkivmateriale belyser hvordan organisationen, nu anført af den danske bibliotekar og journalist Jørgen Schleimann, skiftede strategi fra mere lokale og diskrete aktiviteter til offentligt påvirkningsarbejde, blandt andet gennem førende kulturtidsskrifter som danske Perspektiv. Man engagerede sig også i antikolonialisme, hvorved der opstod interessante paralleller og koordinering mellem statslige og private engagementer i blandt andet Afrikansk uafhængighed og udvikling.

Religious organizations are perfectly situated to perform key roles in global politics. They are some of the largest and best organized civil society organizations, in some instances even more stable than local or national governments. Their networks stretch deep into society, even across state borders, constituting potentially effective channels of communication. Moreover, few can match their ability to formulate norms and values, including influencing public opinion, which provides them with a high moral authority. Together with access to top-level decision makers, this makes religious organizations unique diplomatic players with the ability to influence and frame policy making. 

When the Cold War replaced the Great Alliance of the Second World War, most transnational organizations inspired by this alliance either split, aligned themselves with one camp or crumbled within a few years. However, one of the sole organizations able to resist the escalating East-West tensions and remain relatively independent was a religious organization, the World Council of Churches (WCC). Having faced the breakdown of international order in the 1930s and with Cold War tensions threatening to obstruct the formation of a new one after the Second World War, Christian churches reactivated and reinvented their diplomatic craft through the birth of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs.  

This paper looks at the role the Commission played in bridging East and West in the Cold War, especially the significance of its pioneering of East-West cultural exchange and how it reached out to Christians behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains. 

The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Cultural Cold War in the Nordic region, 1950-1970

The Cold War was much more than the military arms race and proxy wars between the two superpowers. At its core, the Cold War was a battle between cultures, between ideas and visions. The Cultural Cold War is therefore not a side show, but a central aspect of the Cold War.

In this cultural contest, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, was the largest covert program of its kind by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in terms of activities, budgets and longevity. Until the CIA-link was revealed in 1966-67, the Congress organized local subchapters and published journals in more than 30 countries worldwide, including on all five continents. 

Congress magazines focused on high culture and included contributions from leading Western writers, artists, and philosophers. Promoting freedom and combatting totalitarianism, the Congress published books and organized conferences, concerts, exhibitions, and campaigns that contributed to a positive view of American culture and the spread of an anti-Communist “Cold War modernism”. On the political level, the Congress contained communist peace initiatives, combatted neutralist tendencies, advanced a Cold War consensus liberalism, and common security in NATO.

In the past twenty years scholars have studied the Congress locally and globally, including in the Nordic region. However, this panel will deepen and widen the study of this phenomenon, including to new places in the Nordic region, but also with a focus on the still largely unexplored 1960s, including how Congress activities became centrally coordinated from Copenhagen. This will be done with an eye to how Congress activities related to official diplomacy.  

Anmeldelse: Parapolitics – Cultural Freedom and the Cold War

It is widely recognized that Europe rose to global power on the basis of the triangular trade with Africa and America. However, often historians fail to acknowledge the extent to which our contemporary world is the product of a triangular cultural circuit between the three continents. 

This panel explores the cultural circulation between Scandinavia, the US and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, during decolonization and the Cold War. These transatlantic exchanges led to the reinvention, renegotiation and reformation of fundamental ideas and practices related to freedom and equality, race and universality, dependence and independence, development and modernization. 

But what kind of symbols, discourses and practices evolved as non-state actors engaged in this exchange, which included creating an image of Scandinavia as a tolerant and progressive region? To what degree did the circuit challenge the Color Curtain and the Iron Curtain, the fundamental divisions at the time?