The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.

The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.

This book examines the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War. Based on hitherto little known documents from Western and Eastern European archives, it combines the story of Soviet oil and gas with general Cold War history. This volume breaks new ground by framing Soviet energy in a multi-national context, taking into account not only the view from Moscow, but also the perspectives of communist Eastern Europe, the US, NATO, as well as several Western European countries – namely Italy, France, and West Germany. This book challenges some of the long-standing assumptions of East-West bloc relations, as well as shedding new light on relations within the blocs regarding the issue of energy. By bringing together a range of junior and senior historians and specialists from Europe, Russia and the US, this book represents a pioneering endeavour to approach the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War in transnational perspective.

This book offers the first non-official history of French nuclear policies which goes beyond the divide between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. It addresses the sizing of France’s nuclear forces, technological assistance to countries with nuclear weapons programs, uranium prospection, nuclear testing, its health effects and protests against it, as well as plans to prevent and manage accidents in nuclear power plants. It is based on new questions and new sources from France and abroad. The chapters in this volume show how independent and interdisciplinary scholarship free from conflicts of interests can uniquely advance our understanding of nuclear history and politics. This is the case because it does not treat the categories and judgments of official discourse as neutral starting points of the analysis. This volume is based on untapped primary sources from France, the UK, the US, India, South Africa and Iran, on a new assessment of the health consequences of French nuclear testing in Polynesia thanks to a modern atmospheric particle transport code coupled with historical weather data, open-source information about radioactive debris (“mushroom”) clouds, as well as data on the composition and particle sizes of the fallout; and on new survey data about French knowledge of and attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. They show notably that the first generation of French nuclear forces lacked technical credibility despite reliance on outside help. Several French officials knew this, as did France's allies and adversaries. Moreover, French strategic collaborations associated to nuclear programs extended to India and South Africa; nuclear safety regulations changed fundamentally after the Cold War, and approximately 110,000 people, i.e. 90% of the French Polynesian population in the 1970s, could have received doses that would qualify them for compensation according to French law. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of history, politics, international relations, military history, war studies, conflict and global governance. Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in Cold War History. A few chapters were first published in the Nonproliferation Review, Diplomacy & Statecraft and Science & Global Security.

Hitherto, the organization of international business has been studied mostly from a managerial point of view or by examining the relationship between firms and the economy. Yet, the development of the modern, multinational firm - the most important type of business organisation - has been strongly influenced by the conflicts that bedeviled the twentieth century. The volatile macroeconomic and political environments experienced by international business point to how important it is to study political risk. Consequently, Multinational Enterprise, Political Risk and Organisational Change: From Total War to Cold War breaks new ground: it argues that non-market elements and historical context are key to understanding the way international business has been organised. This edited volume offers an historical approach to analysing how multinational enterprise has developed over time and around the world, through a series of well-crafted chapters, on important topics in international economic and business history, written by authorities in their respective fields of study and research. The study is based on the underlying premise that the coming of the two World Wars, the devastating and long-term consequences of such total wars, and the ideological challenge of the Cold War acted as a pivot points in shaping the nature and character of multinational firms. By examining such phenomena, this study offers insights to anyone who has an interest in business, economic or political history, management and business studies, or international relations. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In 1983, then-US Vice President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech in London. He had just been in West Berlin and spoke about his first visit to the Berlin Wall. Bush then went on to describe another German wall he saw after Berlin: "if anything, that wall was an even greater obscenity than its eponym to the north." The story of that wall is a fascinating and valuable slice of the history of post-war Europe. That wall had gone up nearly two hundred miles southwest of Berlin at the edge of divided Germany, in the tiny, remote farming village of Mödlareuth. For nearly half the twentieth century, the Iron Curtain divided Mödlareuth in two. In this little valley surrounded by forests and fields, the villagers of Mödlareuth found themselves on the literal front-line of the Cold War. The East German state gradually militarized the border through the community while eastern villagers exhibited a range of responses to cope with their changing circumstances, reflective of the variable nature of the Cold War border through Germany: along the Iron Curtain, the size and isolation of the divided place influenced the local character of the division.

Multinational Enterprise and Transnational Regions offers an innovative approach to the study of the history of transnational economic regions. The Rhine valley is such a region comprising the cities and areas along the Rhine river and its tributaries. The transition from coal to oil that unfolded between 1945 and 1973 rapidly transformed the region, shattering some of the old river-based connections and creating new ones with the introduction of large-scale cross-border oil pipelines. Multinational enterprises shaped these new regional connections but divergent national government responses gave rise to differentiated development in different parts of the Rhine valley. Multinational Enterprise and Transnational Regions argues that processes of regional change should be understood from transnational interconnections rather than from local or national perspectives. This book uses a transnational business history methodology to tease out the region’s transformation and to circumvent the national bias in public sources. It will be of relevance to academics and researchers with an interest in regional and transnational European history, international business, environmental history, and business history, as well as practitioners interested in the oil industry, energy and energy history, business history and international business, and associated disciplines.

This challenging and motivating text presents the experience of the U.S. in World War II as a backdrop for understanding recent developments and events in American history. Four principal interwoven themes trace 1) the pervasive impact of the Cold War, 2) the effects of social-protest movements among African-Americans, women, and other groups, 3) the sources and impact of economic, demographic, and cultural changes, and 4) a thorough examination of politics.

The authors analysis of Chinas relations with the countries of East Asia in the post-Cold-War era is seen from the perspectives of neorealism in general and by the utilization of the concepts of balance of power and the notion of strategic culture in particular. It is boldly argued that Chinas behaviour towards other nations in East Asia is a source of great anxiety and tension. China with its military build-up, its provocations, foreign and defence policies and others serve as a major security threat. In the final analysis, the author calls for the United States to play a more assertive role in the region to counter-balance Chinas potential expansionist goals. (http://www.ums.edu.my/ppib/buku_lai.html).