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?

In 1981, a prominent delegation of financiers, politicians and academics from North America, Western Europe and Japan arrived in Beijing. The purposes of their visit were to strengthen dialogue with the Chinese leadership, open up China to foreign investments and to consolidate the fraction in the Communist Party that reintroduced capitalism in Chinese society. Led by David Rockefeller, the delegation had talks with Deng Xiaping, China’s de facto leader, among other Chinese leaders. This book chapter studies the circumstances surrounding the visit, the meetings that took place in China, the special role of David Rockefeller, and the results of the visit.

"The European Champions" depicts the national teams that have won the European Championship in football since 1980: the teams’ road to victory, their stars, style and crucial matches. The book provides a wealth of football history and thoughts on the contemporary development of the game, but at the same time each triumphant team is discussed in relation to the country’s national identity. Perhaps the European Championship constitutes the largest therapeutic arena for the pan-European healing of the traumas from the Second World War.

In 2016, I edited "Europamestrene", an anthology exploring the history of the Men's European Championship in Football. In my own contribution to this volume, I looked towards the future: What is needed by the Danish national football team to once again become a strong competitor among the best teams internationally? This chapter discusses how to upgrade “The Red Thread”, the Danish development strategy in football. Based on advanced international research in high performance, current trends and lessons are analyzed and suggestions are made as to how to meet the challenges so that Denmark again can win international titles.

In 1973, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski formed the Trilateral Commission, an elite network consisting of influential people in politics, finance and business from North America, Western Europe and Japan. This research monography is based on extensive research in archives of the Commission, its benefactors (including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) and collaborators (which included the US government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The book argues that governance and diplomacy takes place in overlapping elite networks that fuses formal and informal spheres across national borders.

An introduction to a collection of contributions on the "New Diplomatic History"-approach.

A collection of contributions on the New Diplomatic History-approach. 

Private transnational anti-communist networks were crucial in containing international communism during the Cold War. In the Nordic countries, social democratic oriented trade union representatives allied themselves with American counterparts – who had both relations to the state and secret services – in an effort to detain/suppress the local communists.

Omdrejningspunktet i den danske koldkrigsdebat er som regel den østlige trussel mod og påvirkning af Danmark. Ikke desto mindre blev Danmark via Marshallhjælpen og NATO-medlemskabet tidligt integreret i den vestlige alliance. Særligt fra USA kom de udenlandske impulser som var med til for alvor at forme vores samfund: produktivitet og forbrugerisme, klassesamarbejde og antikommunisme, frihandel og europæisk integration. I bogen gives der for første gang på dansk et indblik i hvordan Den Kolde Krig blev foregrebet og udkæmpet på fagforeningsniveau. Og hvordan danskerne blev tæt allieret med en gren af den amerikanske fagbevægelse der – bistået af CIA – organiserede hemmelige efterretningsoperationer og splittede den internationale fagbevægelse. Bogen flytter fokus fra det traditionelle diplomatisk-statslige plan til ikke-statslige aktører og blander politisk historie med analyser af kulturmødet danskerne og amerikanerne imellem. Den afrundes af et efterskrift hvor amerikaniseringsbegrebet sættes til debat.

This book is a collection of 220 eyewitness accounts from 1940-1945, the “five evil years” of German occupation of Denmark. The accounts are by Danes who experienced the occupation first hand: resistance fighters, politicians, policemen, Nazis, Jews, volunteers on the German Eastern Front – men and women, young and old, 'high and low', known and unknown figures. "Eyewitness to the Occupation" is a mosaic of stories that can be read either in parts or chronologically as one collective narrative about this period.

Historien om hvordan en gruppe ufaglærte pakkeriarbejdere gik fra at være de nederste i hierarkiet i en af Danmarks førende medievirksomheder til at blive en magtfaktor som selv de øverste chefer ikke kunne tillade sig at ignorere. Dette er en fortælling om at fagligt sammenhold nytter, og hvorledes man får den stablet på benene. Men det er også historien om de mange modsætninger og vanskeligheder der er i det faglige arbejde, og hvor udsatte ufaglærte arbejdere er i dagens Danmark.

Approximately 150 Danish trade union activists were invited to the US as part of the Marshall Aid and subsequent programs. Through these travel experiences, the Danes learnt about productivity and “the American Way of Life”. But how were their visits arranged? How were the activists selected? What were their experiences and what impressions of the US and its' culture did the activists disseminate to the Danish public upon returning home?

After the Second World War, a power struggle for the control of the international trade union movement began due to movement's key role in reconstructing and developing Europe. The close links between Danish trade union movement leaders and their American counterparts became vital for the alliances of Danish labor.

"Kapitalen.com" is an alternate analysis of the impact of globalization on Scandinavian societies, and a deconstruction of the so-called post-industrial society. Lean Production has replaced Fordism as the dominant production form, but the assembly lines run faster and more efficiently than ever. My postscript deals with the triumph of (neo)liberalism in Denmark, and how an attack on reason resulted in a showdown with social engineering and the traditional welfare state.