In June 1966, the International PEN Club held its annual conference in New York City. It was the first time in forty-two years that the United States had hosted the meeting, and there was much to celebrate. Pablo Neruda, who had repeatedly been denied visas to the United States since 1943 on the grounds that he was a communist, was one of the stars of the show. Throughout – and, indeed, long after – the conference, he made headlines, drew audiences, and made statements that had a lasting impact. He also earned the wrath of supporters of the Cuban Revolution, who attacked him for betraying the revolution by participating in the conference. This chapter discusses Neruda’s participation in the event, including the controversies that he sparked during and afterward, as well as his other activities in New York and his travels in the United States afterward.

While living in exile in a divided Berlin after the 1973 military coup and Pablo Neruda’s death twelve days later, Antonio Skármeta created his own version of Neruda in Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), a humane image of the poet that contrasted with the one-dimensional communist martyr projected after his death. Skármeta wrote the base story for four different media under the same title: a radio drama, a play, a film, and a novel. The story has since been freely adapted by others, such as Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (The Postman), Daniel Catán’s opera, with Plácido Domingo as Neruda, and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s recent film released by Netflix. Aside from clarifying the confusion in the critical bibliography regarding these multiple stories, this chapter focuses on Skármeta’s two media versions of Ardiente paciencia, the play and the film, to show how a single artistic creation can captivate audiences worldwide.

Neruda’s poetry and political activism have been naturally inscribed in the geopolitical and hermeneutical framework of the Cold War, the struggle between capitalism and communism, and the national liberation processes of the Global South. His international recognition coincides with his political radicalization: from his exile at the end of 1940 to his presidential candidacy in 1969, promoted by the Communist Party of Chile. His poetry, on the other hand, from Residencia en la tierra and El canto general, and to his later Incitación al Nixonicidio y alabanza de la Revolución Cubana, can be understood as an expression of partisan literature. It is clear that Neruda is not only a well-known writer, but also an important witness of the twentieth century. In this context, this chapter begins with the question: Is a new reading of Neruda possible, a reading beyond the historical framework that has informed his usual reception?

Pablo Neruda lived in the crossroads of the cultural Cold War and its influence in Latin America. At once an ardent defender of the Soviet Union and the policies dictated from the Politburo, but also falling prey to the tensions that those directions generated in Latin America, the Chilean poet made the attempt (and ultimately failed to bring it to completion) to reconcile his views on democracy with the more radical members of Salvador Allende’s government. After the coup, amid the raids against all members of the political left, Neruda became a thorn in the side of the junta, and a potential menace that needed to be neutralized. The ensuing controversy regarding the judicial process to find the real cause of his death, not complete in its totality as of yet, contextualizes the rest of this essay.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

Which form of capitalist governance best fosters peace, prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental protection? I argue that making sense of this complexity calls for revisiting the three different principles of capitalist governance: liberty (freeing the market to unleash growth), solidarity (reining in the free market to protect the weak and the environment), and community (safeguarding the group through protectionism and military might). I contend that studying the European Union helps provide insight into how a compromise between liberty, solidarity, and community capitalisms is struck, as the Union is in a constant process of negotiation among bickering members. Dealing with community capitalism, in particular with protectionism and nationalism, has been the most pressing challenge for Europe in the past, not just today. This book will focus on the interaction between capitalism and European integration between 1945 and 2025, drawing on studies from areas of scholarship that rarely enter into dialogue with one other (history, political science, comparative political economy, international relations), as well as through new archival research.

Chapter 2 reviews Plath’s metaphorical employment of the witch-martyr figure within the political and religious framework of the Cold War. The chapter outlines Plath’s subversion of the religious vocabulary and themes in her poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, particularly its draft, and her parallelling doctors and priests in short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ to critique the rhetoric of the Cold War. The chapter gives evidence that Plath employs the female body as a site of modern political and medical institutional violence, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the early modern witch trials and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. The close examination of Plath’s drafts of ‘Fever 103°’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ concludes the chapter on Plath’s Cold War poetics. It argues that the anticlerical and anti-authoritarian language of her poetry reimagines witch prosecutions, martyrdom, and inquisition in periods of political torture and nuclear warfare.

Chapter 7 introduces the cultural and political context of post-war Britain in which the rise of English nationalism, immigration from the Commonwealth countries, Cold War anxieties, and the development of the Neo-Pagan Wicca religion contributed to the association of witchcraft with the dark other. The chapter reviews Plath’s short stories and poems written about a small English village community and beekeeping during the early 1960s, arguing that she engages with contemporary concerns of exclusionary politics and the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft. Her bee metaphor interrogates the binary between self and otherness and ideas about magical and racialised power. The chapter concludes that in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women, Plath simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.

The Conclusion reviews Plath’s engagement with the supernatural within the political, cultural, and literary context of post-war America and Britain. It summarises the nuances of concepts like witch, witchcraft, black and white magic, and their relation to gender and power. The Conclusion also emphasises the importance of examining Plath’s manuscripts and additional archival materials, which her demonstrate continuous interest in magical themes around gender power dynamics. Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural concludes that the re-examination of Plath’s works with an approach of the supernatural is timely and significant not only for Plath scholarship but for literary studies. It positions the comprehensive analysis of this book in the historical reckoning with witch trials and reflects on the lasting relationship between the language of magic and poetry.

The afterword offers a coda to the volume, without addressing individual essays’ achievements individually. Rather, it reflects on how the essays reconceive the problem of Cold War liberalism as a category less in Atlantic intellectual history or political theory than in the history of the foreign relations of the American hegemon after World War II. The contemporary renaissance of Cold War liberalism suggests that pondering how it arose and dominated in the first place will continue to teach useful lessons about its senescent phase, which is unlikely to end soon. Someday geopolitical transformations will bring into being a different enough world than the Cold War liberal one that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Until then, the meanings and outcomes of Cold War liberalism will demand investigation, and this volume will play a pivotal role in an ongoing referendum on how contemporary politics came about, and on what should happen next.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.

If anyone is worthy of the title of “Cold War liberal,” you think it would be the celebrity journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann. Lippmann coined the phrase “Cold War” in 1947 and had long been considered the guru of modern liberalism. Yet Lippmann was a harsh critic of containment and, by the time of the Vietnam War, considered himself a “neo-isolationist.” He was also self-identified as a conservative by the Cold War era and was an outspoken critic of New Deal “planning.” Lippmann’s career highlights the problem of talking about “Cold War liberalism” in the singular. At the same time, there were few greater champions than Lippmann of a large military establishment and an expansive welfare state that typified Cold War liberal orthodoxy.

The final decade of Sarah Wambaugh’s life would see her appointed technical advisor to the allied-run mission to observe the sensitive Greek elections of 1946, as well as to the soon abandoned plebiscite in Kashmir several years later. However, in Greece Wambaugh’s expertise now stood in contrast to new scientific sampling techniques, while she would keep silent about the fact that women were not allowed to vote, in a bid to support the anti-communists who won the election. Meanwhile her normative rules for the plebiscite would be dispensed with as not culturally relevant by those planning the vote in Kashmir. The chapter ends with an examination of the first UN plebiscite actually held, in British Togoland in 1956, and with the 1955 referendum on the proposal to turn the Saar into a Europeanised territory. Both operations eschewed many of the heavy normative principles which Wambaugh had developed for the plebiscite.

Chapter 3 moves to the global level, exploring the history of technology control and its historical links to geopolitics. It begins by considering control of technology in the context of the Cold War and technology as being explicitly considered a security issue in terms of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. It covers the CoCom technology restrictions imposed by the US, and Soviet Union attempts to gain access to critical technologies through Comecon, before considering how the approach to technology changed substantially with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the belief in the triumph of the liberal international order and globalism as reflected by the World Trade Organization and ‘free trade’. It then explores the multifaceted crises impacting upon this conviction in the benefits and resilience of the global trade system, the increased economic conflict between the US and China as a rising technological power, and a move from multilateralism in a ‘unipolar’ system to increased nationalism and protectionism in a ‘multipolar’ system, and what this meant for the EU’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the context of geopolitical reordering.

Systemic change by means of hegemonic war amounts to a transformation of the parameters of political legitimacy. The war decides who rules and the content of legitimacy at the global level. As such, only the most extensive major-power wars – ones that end in a new phase of substantial capability re-concentration and global military-political and economic leadership – can be designated hegemonic wars. The history of international order and, therefore, of the Long Cycle started with the Italian renaissance and the West European maritime explorations of the late fifteenth century. I identify four hegemonic wars: the Italian Wars (1496–1559), the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), and World War II (1939–1945). To this list, I add one “failed” power transition, the end of the Cold War (1989–1991). A new Long Cycle began in 1991, with the United States serving as the lone World Power. This chapter explores each Long Cycle and all four phases therein. This discussion is comparatively brief for the first two long cycles, becoming more extensive for the three most recent cases, for they offer more “usable pasts” than the earlier cycles from which to draw relevant lessons for modern times.

Social theorists like Weber sought to explain why modernity emerged in the West but not in the supposedly “unchanging” non-Western societies. These theorists based their understanding of non-European civilizations on the biased works of prominent Orientalists of their time. Weber’s primary sources on China were the later works of Legge and de Groot. Though the distorted views in such Sinological works were later rejected in the field, the prejudices of nineteenth-century Orientalism persisted through dominant, universal social theories – like Weber-inspired modernization theory. Meanwhile, Sinology, as it evolved into postwar China Studies, became one of the first Area Studies fields to “de-Orientalize” by shedding centuries of reductionist and essentialist epistemology. This de-Orientalizing process began on the fringes of Sinology in the mid twentieth century, benefitting from new social science methods and the growing participation of Chinese scholars. It culminated in the transformative 1960s, a time when many Eurocentric ideologies were challenged and China’s geopolitical relations with the West shifted drastically after the Sino–Soviet split.

Wartime controls ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of postwar growth and change. The 1950s and 1960s are often recalled as a ‘golden age’. In many respects they were, for the baby boomers born from 1945 to 1961 who enjoyed a childhood unburdened by depression and war, and for the parents responsible for their upbringing. Broadly, however, the internal dynamics of the Pacific region were in flux. Playwright Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather (first performed in 1960), his dramatic solo performance about a summer in a boy’s childhood.