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.

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.

This chapter analyses Karl Marx’s concept of use-value and explores the viability of a post-market economy based on the exchange of use-values.

This chapter explores the connection between natural law and the Marxian notion of communism, emphasising the continuities between the theories of community and sociability in Pufendorf and Marx.

Cultural exchange was another critically important mechanism for influencing popular emotions. This chapter looks at Sino-North Korean exchanges in theater, film, and the arts. It argues that these exchanges reached large audiences in both countries while inculcating official emotions.

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.

In privileging collective over individual rights, Ned Richardson-Little points out, socialist states aligned themselves with the Third World. The concept of rights is usually seen as distant and foreign to communism where the Party reigned supreme and law was only a fiction. From the Russian Revolution onward, however, rights played an important role in communist ideology and politics around the world. Communist conceptions of rights cannot be reduced to a belief in collective freedom at the expense of the individual, nor the realization of social and economic rights in place of political and civil rights. According to communist theorists and leaders, rights played a vital role in defining the goals of the socialist revolution, in delineating the political and economic order of post-revolutionary societies and demarcating the conflict lines of the international order. Rejecting both the liberal and natural rights traditions of their political rivals, communists enacted their own reimagining of rights as instruments of the state working to further the cause of the socialist revolution.

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.