AEROCWE · The Allies, the European Resistance and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2012-09-01 → 2016-08-30
- EU contribution
- €271,944
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IOF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Allies, the European Resistance and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe
The project, developed in conjunction with the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge (UK) and Harvard University (USA), addressed Allied policy towards resistance groups during World War II and its impact on post-war political and ideological divisions. Although the topic has been investigated extensively in previous scholarship, this project constituted the first attempt to bring together aspects of this subject that are usually addressed separately: the different national scenarios, the two Western intelligence agencies, and the policies of the Soviets and the Western Allies. This was possible due to long research periods spent in the United States, Great Britain and Russia, where the researcher had access to the relevant documentation of the agencies and organizations tasked to deal with resistance movements during the war. In particular, the researcher worked with the records of the US Office of Strategic Services, the British Special Operations Executive and the Soviet Comintern. The preliminary findings of the projects suggest that this multi-national and comparative approach has several advantages. Firstly, putting national narratives in a broader context enables us to better assess decisions taken by the Allies in individual countries. Secondly, it shows that the mono-causal explanations often adopted to explain the Allies’ decisions do not do justice to the complexity of the situations in which they operated. Thirdly, this approach provides a better understanding of how the three Allies, in dealing with wartime resistance groups, both deliberately and inadvertently shaped the political landscape for decades to come. Combing through records of different national origins also demonstrated the role of mutual misunderstandings between the three Allies and between the Allies and the partisans. The expected final result of the project is the first comprehensive book on this topic - an important contribution to scholarship on World War II and the origins of the Cold War in Europe. The book project is currently under review with a major British academic publisher.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project, developed in connection with Cambridge Faculty of History (UK) and Harvard University (USA), addresses the Allied policy towards resistance groups during World War II and its impact on post-war political and ideological divisions.With a comparative approach and the use of newly declassified records, the research will shed light on the way the allies struck the balance between military and political goals in dealing with the resistance movements during the war. The research is linked with a multiplicity of historical problems which will be taken into account: the politics of communist movements between war and revolution in Central and Eastern Europe; the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and the Allies’ perception of the latter; the Anglo-American cooperation and competition in the field of intelligence; the use of special operations as an instrument of foreign policy, especially in regard to countries where the development of resistance movements had a strong impact on post-war settlement (e.g. Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland).The particular contribution of the project is to bring together aspects which are usually addressed separately: the different national scenarios, whose connections and mutual influence will be investigated; the two Western intelligence agencies, which have been researched mostly in separate ways by scholars of the corresponding nationalities; the Soviet and Western allies’ policies. The project will be conducted combining the history of intelligence, diplomatic history and military history.The result will be the first comprehensive book on this topic, and an important contribution to the scholarship on World War II and the origins of the Cold War in Europe.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE · CAMBRIDGECoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union