This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.

Aristocratic capitalism, based on landowners, pluriactivity and the coercion of labor survived until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain, the First World War in France and Russia. It helps explaining the central role of empires and labor between the seventeenth century and the First World War. However, the hierarchies between peasants, landowners, cities and the state were different in the Anglo-American, French and Russian empires. Therefore, coercion and resistance also took different forms. The transformations of empires and labor in the twentieth century responded to these roots and provoked the convulsions in the USSR and the different kinds of social tensions in Britain, France and the United States.

This chapter explores the place and significance of ‘the people’ and ‘the popular’ in left-wing literary discourse between the wars, concentrating on the leftwards shift among literary intellectuals in the 1930s. It connects a widespread literary fascination with the idea of a ‘popular voice’ and the notion of popular literary ‘content’ to political shifts in Britain and on the international scene, particularly the rise of fascism and concomitant developments in the cultural politics of the Communist International. It examines the left-wing journal Left Review and a selection of left-oriented poetry anthologies as sites in which questions of the relationship between writers, literary forms, and popular audiences were negotiated.

This chapter analyses the dynamics of nationalist grounding in ethnic and civic projects of nationhood. It focuses on the Yugoslav case to explore why both historical instances of civic-based nation-formation have ultimately failed. The chapter focuses on the development and transformation of Yugoslav nationalism with a spotlight on its two main incarnations – the Yugoslav idea as articulated in the centralised and monarchic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918–1941) and the development of the Yugoslav project during the state socialist period (1945–1991). The chapter argues that despite the nominal commitment towards building a civic nationhood, the Yugoslav project has paradoxically provided organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms for the relatively continuous rise of ethnic nationalisms. The failure of Yugoslav nationalism stems in part from its uneven and misdirected grounding. It is this structural unevenness that also contributed to the relatively continuous proliferation of a much better-grounded ethnic nationalisms.

This chapter explores the place of empire and imperialism in the British literature of the Popular Front period (1934–40). During this period, left-aligned writers responded to the Communist International’s call for broad antifascist alliances built on national cultural traditions with an outpouring of works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as critical reevaluations of literary history. These contributions are characterized by an evocation of “the people” as a diverse, progressive, antifascist subject, but one always national in character and therefore fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. The chapter considers the ways that writers based in Britain negotiated the connections between antifascism, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism in this late interwar moment. It focuses first on the literary milieu around the influential journal Left Review, and second on the interlinked work of Ralph Fox, Mulk Raj Anand, and Sajjad Zaheer. In concludes by suggesting that the Spanish Civil War provided the occasion for some leftist writers from Scotland and Wales to imagine the continuities between working-class history, anticolonialism, and antifascism in their work.

This chapter argues that the division of Korea has been wrongly attributed to Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of being a result of the Cold War, the division itself was a cause of the Cold War. This chapter traces the history of US-Korean relations back to the nineteenth century, highlighting the growing interest of Americans in Korea which placed political pressure on US policymakers to support Korea in 1945. The chapter shows that American interest in Korea predated concerns over Soviet expansionism and was driven by factors such as the spread of Christianity in Korea, the desire to prevent Japanese domination in East Asia, and a sense of obligation stemming from a treaty signed in 1882. By reexamining the historical context of US involvement in Korea, the chapter challenges the prevailing Cold War narrative and offers a fresh perspective on the origins of the Korean conflict.

This chapter focuses on the two Russian revolutions in 1917 and US responses to them. The Wilson administration enthusiastically welcomed the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy in March, quickly recognized the new Provisional Government, and extended large loans in the hope that a democratic Russia would stay in the war against Germany. But after radical, antiwar socialists seized power in November, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet regime, provided covert aid to anti-Bolshevik (“White”) armies, and sent small military expeditions to Archangel and Vladivostok. Contrary to earlier studies, the chapter shows that the United States sought to speed the demise of the Bolshevik regime. US forces fought directly against the Red Army in northern Russia and battled Red partisans in the Far East, while the American Relief Administration, American Red Cross, and Young Men’s Christian Association all aided White armies. Despite the interventions by the United States and its allies, the Bolsheviks prevailed. The legacies of these events included the US rejection of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia until 1933 and Soviet conceptions of Russia as a “besieged fortress.”

By late 1964, peace activists coalesced to oppose US policy on the emerging Vietnam crisis. US government decisions stimulated greater dissent, turning a peace movement trying to stop the war’s escalation into a persistent antiwar movement. The movement had three primary constituencies that differed in fundamental ways: liberals, pacifists, and leftists. Their essential arguments fell into different categories. Practically, the United States could not create a stable representative South Vietnamese government from the outside. Its open-ended commitment to Vietnam did not involve vital US interests, would divert resources from more significant needs, and did not justify the costs. Morally, protesters believed that the destruction and cost of an extended war would be worse for the Vietnamese than communist rule and making the Vietnamese suffer for American objectives was ethically unacceptable. Others claimed that the process of intervention violated US political ideals and threatened its democracy. Pragmatists argued that China was the real Asian threat, and that America’s policy was counterproductive by undermining regional stability.

In January 1950, the missionaries reported a vicious attack and an attempted stoning while preaching in the town of Castel Gandolfo, home to the Papal Palace and the Pope’s summer residence. The missionaries’ efforts to preach and proselytize in the town sparked outrage among the local population, with violent reactions allegedly incited by the local clergy. Accounts of the incident varied. In Italy, the police and pro-Vatican press sought to downplay the event, framing it as a reaction to the missionaries’ perceived insensitive and aggressive behavior, and accusing them of aiding the spread of Communism. The missionaries seized the opportunity to raise awareness of their challenges and promote their mission. The crisis garnered headlines in the United States, leading to a significant mobilization in Congress, where senators and representatives urged the Truman administration to pressure the Italian government to allow the missionaries to preach and proselytize. The Italian Foreign Ministry and the State Department entered into protracted negotiations, which lasted several years, as they sought a practical solution that could accommodate the many actors involved. The Castel Gandolfo incident thus became a flashpoint in the broader struggle over religious freedom, sovereignty, and Cold War geopolitics.

A number of philosophical themes run throughout Marx’s corpus. Foremost is his focus on free social and political relations – on emancipated people governing themselves together rather than being mastered by others. There is no doubt, however, that Marx was a sharp critic of law, justice, and right (Recht) – which Kant had argued can only be realized in a state – and that Marx’s communist social ideal is nonjuridical. A second theme is that although Marx rejects the modern deontic conception of morality, he is very much aware that his own ideal of freedom is a modern conception, which is based, like modern morality, in a view of the unique value of human persons – the “self-worth of men” as “free.” A third is Marx’s communitarian emphasis on “a community of people [organized] for their highest ends”: a “democratic” society of free people, whether organized as a state or not. It is important that Marx does not ground his democratic conception as orthodox liberal moderns do in a deontic conception of fundamental equal human authority. Ultimately, Marx’s ideas must be understood as a liberal egalitarianism of the good rather than of the right.

This chapter examines the Chinese government’s approach to political crimes and extradition procedures from the treaty ports during the first two decades of the Republic in the 1910s–1920s. It seeks to understand how the ideas of extradition and the POE changed in this period as a result of both domestic and global political processes: the growth of nationalism and communism, the strengthening and consolidation of the political parties, the increased professionalization of Chinese lawyers and judges, and the emergence of critical voices among foreign powers on the institution of extraterritoriality. The chapter presents a legal and transnational view of the Chinese Revolution in the first two decades of the Republic, illuminating the profound impact of extraterritoriality and changing extradition rules on China’s political trajectory.

The chapter offers a critical social-historical and theoretical framework to analyze transitional justice politics in Eastern Europe, particularly Polish lustration, in the global post-Cold War moment marked by the proclamations of the “end of history” and ideology, the “moral turn,” the memory boom, the rise of human rights and rule-of-law imaginaries, neoliberal globalization, and their crises and alleged ends today. The chapter unpacks the concept of moral autopsy, which underpins transitional justice efforts such as lustration and reconstructs communism as a dead and ruinous past and criminality, the truth of which it seeks to trace and dissect in the persons associated with communism, especially communist secret service. The chapter focuses on the themes of truth-telling, deception, and treason articulated by moral autopsy and Polish lustration, and places them in the context of postsocialist contradictions of liberal legal and capitalist transformations. The chapter discusses the key methodological orientations of the book, particularly the conditions of ethnographic research on lustration, marked by pervasive suspicion of betrayal and moralization of politics and history.

The chapter develops a genealogy of the notion of moral autopsy that has become the major mode of knowing, judging, and relating to the socialist past in post-Cold War Eastern Europe and beyond, particularly in the context of transitional justice. The chapter traces moral autopsy’s historical and conceptual sources within the post-Cold War context, marked by the proclamations of the “end of history,” celebrations of the rule of law and human rights, conservative historical revisionism and criminalization of communism, the “moral turn,” competitive memory politics based on national victimhood, and neoliberal globalization. Through a detailed analysis of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the posthumous media lustration of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, especially the questions of secrecy, truth, and treachery raised about him, the chapter shows how moral autopsy constructs a transhistorical, judicialized, and criminalized account of communism that ultimately impoverishes the understanding of social-historical relations of power, informational practices, ideology, and political subjectivity concerning state socialism and Cold War socialist internationalism.

This chapter focuses on the careers of Ivana Loudová (1941–2017) and Sylvie Bodorová (born 1954), two prominent Czech female composers who embarked on their careers in different historical phases of communist Czechoslovakia, dealt with specific cultural-political circumstances, and reacted to distinct domestic and global music styles. Whereas Loudová began her career in the liberal 1960s, a time when Czech artists started to embrace Western avant-garde styles, Bodorová’s work took shape during the normalization era following the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries. This period officially rejected the reforms of the previous decade and sought to reinstate the aesthetics of socialist realism, which had dominated Czech culture after the communists initially came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Although the two composers were significantly influenced by prominent state music institutions, they also developed unique compositional styles.