This article examines art exchanges between Yugoslavia and Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s through three case studies: Henry Moore's exhibition in Yugoslavia in 1955, Exhibition of Modern Yugoslav Art Painting in 1956 and Contemporary Yugoslav Paintings and Sculpture in 1961. It highlights how art exhibitions played a significant role in the Cold War cultural diplomacy. Focusing primarily on the Yugoslav perspective, it explores how the country sought to use artistic exchanges to build its image and showcase its socialist modernity. These efforts were in line with shifts in both foreign and domestic policy following the Yugoslav–Soviet Split in 1948. This article argues that Yugoslavia used these artistic exchanges to present itself as a modern, open and progressive socialist state independent from both the East and the West. Nevertheless, such initiatives did not always achieve their intended goals, revealing a gap between the perceptions and expectations of critics, general audiences and the cultural policymakers.
This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between Israel, the USSR, and Soviet Jews during the post-Stalin Thaw. Its point of departure is that the Israeli–Soviet encounter, often analyzed primarily in terms of Cold War diplomacy or Zionist and other ideological frameworks, merits a deeper contextualization that takes into account internal Israeli and Soviet-Jewish social and cultural dynamics, as well as their interrelation. The article shows that the views of contemporary Israeli elites toward the USSR were often independent of narrow ideological stances and arose from a variety of sources, ranging from personal nostalgia to anxieties over ‘careerism’ and ‘Americanization’. It further demonstrates how the same factors frequently framed Israeli attitudes toward Soviet Jews, oscillating between idealization and disappointment. In doing so, the article provides a contextualized case study of a transnational ideological and cultural juxtaposition within the Cold War. It shows that internal Israeli dynamics were no less significant in shaping elite attitudes toward Soviet realities than the ideological and strategic conditions of the Cold War, the anti-Jewish and other oppressive policies of the Soviet regime, or abstract Zionist goals such as the promotion of immigration to Israel or the ‘negation of the diaspora’.
This article compares the development of urban tourism in Barcelona and Naples between 1939 and 1959 to explain why two peripheral Mediterranean port cities followed similar tourism trajectories despite contrasting political and institutional contexts. Drawing on a historical-comparative approach and local historiographies, the analysis is structured around three dimensions: state intervention and tourism governance, economic priorities, and local tourism policies and initiatives. The article argues that, although Francoist Spain and post-fascist Italy adopted different approaches to tourism governance – the former characterized by strong centralization and the latter by limited coordination – both cities faced similar constraints on tourism development. In both cases, industrial and port functions took precedence over tourism, while national policies prioritized other coastal destinations, relegating Barcelona and Naples to a peripheral position within the emerging Mediterranean tourism hierarchy. At the local level, public institutions and private actors sought to compensate for these limitations by promoting cultural heritage, organizing international events, and enhancing urban appeal. By demonstrating how comparable tourism trajectories emerged under different political regimes, the article contributes to understanding the relationship between state intervention, local agency, and urban tourism development in Southern Europe during the early postwar decades.
Today, Dubrovnik is synonymous with tourism. Hundreds of thousands of people flock to the city to enjoy its scenic location, beaches, and medieval and Renaissance architecture, including its famous city walls. But this image of the city minimizes its history during the breakup of Yugoslavia. From 1 October 1991 to 31 May 1992, Yugoslav troops besieged Dubrovnik, resulting in the deaths of over 100 Croatian troops and nearly 100 Croatian civilians, thousands of refugees, and extensive damage to the city's famous Old Town. This article examines the impact that tourism and cultural heritage have had on the memory of the breakup of Yugoslavia in Dubrovnik. Those who remained in the besieged city used its international fame to raise awareness about the humanitarian conditions both in Dubrovnik and across Croatia by highlighting the damage to cultural heritage and helping spur the international recognition of Croatia. Since the end of the war, Dubrovnik's memorial culture has evolved in a different way than other locations in Croatia with similar wartime histories. While monuments outside of the Old Town are similar to those across Croatia, monuments in Dubrovnik's Old Town are more tourist-facing, incorporating foreign-language text and photographs that make them accessible for visitors.
The western campaign against Soviet forced labour camps was undoubtedly one of the most significant aspects in the western organization of the Cold War. Rarely, however, have historians adequately treated this subject in all its historical implications, perhaps seeing it as just one of many tools of propaganda associated with the Truman Doctrine. An effort to connect different levels of analysis has been lacking until now. But the point is precisely to assess what social, political and cultural forces have been called together to realize a design on a global scale. Three different forces acted in a transnational sphere against Soviet-style forced labour: the morality of civil societies, the power of governments and the law of international organizations. The making of such a coalition had much to do with the logic of the global Cold War, that is reducing the risk that elites emerging from the decolonization process would look to the Soviet regime to reproduce its pattern of development. This strategy soon showed its limitations in a changing world, where decolonization imposed a global anti-imperialist discourse that did not fit within the anti-totalitarianism of the early Cold War.
