Event Date: November 28, 2024 - 10:00am to 11:30am
Location: Simard 125, 60 University Private, Ottawa

Presented by the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa, the Department of History and CIPS

The post-World War II period is typically seen as a time of stark division, an epochal global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But beneath the surface, the postwar era witnessed a striking degree of international cooperation. The United Nations and its agencies, as well as regional organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, and private foundations brought together actors from conflicting worlds, fostering international collaboration across the geopolitical and ideological divisions of the Cold War.

Diving into the archives of these organizations and associations, Sandrine Kott provides a new account of the Cold War that foregrounds the rise of internationalism as both an ideology and a practice. She examines cooperation across boundaries in international spaces, emphasizing the role of midsized powers, including Eastern European and neutral countries. Kott highlights how the need to address global inequities became a central concern, as officials and experts argued that economic inequality imperiled the creation of a lasting peace. International organizations gave newly decolonized and “Third World” countries a platform to challenge the global distribution of power and wealth, and they encouraged transnational cooperation in causes such as human and women’s rights. Assessing the failure to achieve a new international economic order in the 1970s, Kott adds new perspective on the rise of neoliberalism. A truly global study of the Cold War through the lens on international organizations, A World More Equal also shows why the internationalism of this era offers resources for addressing social and global inequalities today.

This book was translated by Arby Gharibian.

Speaker:

Sandrine Kott is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Geneva and Visiting Professor at New York University. She is a social historian of Modern Germany and Europe in a global perspective. Among her last publications: A World more Equal. An Internationalist Perspective on the Cold War, Columbia University press, 2004, revised translation of Organiser le monde. Une autre histoire de la guerre froide, Paris, Le Seuil, 2021; Day to Day Communisme, Michigan University press, 2014 ; Sozialstaat und Gesellschaft. Das deutsche Kaiserreich in Europa, Göttingen, Vandehoeck&Ruprecht, 2014, ed. with Kiran Klaus Patel, Nazism across Borders. The Social Policies of the Third Reich and their Global Appeal, Oxford University Press, 2018, (ed. with Michel Christian and Ondrej Matejka), Planning in Cold War Europe, competition, cooperation, circulations, Oldenburg, De Gruyter, 2018.

Moderator:

Roman Krakovsky is the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa, as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. His research focuses on modernization strategies in Slovakia and in Central and Eastern Europe. His latest publications include Le Populisme en Europe centrale et orientale (2019) and L’Europe centrale et orientale de 1918 à la chute du mur de Berlin (2017).