Margins for Manoeuvre in Cold War Europe

Front matter

Routledge Studies in Modern European History

MARGINS FOR MANOEUVRE IN COLD WAR EUROPE

THE INFLUENCE OF SMALLER POWERS Edited by

Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors List of abbreviations

Introduction: smaller powers in Cold War Europe LAURIEN CRUMP AND SUSANNA ERLANDSSON

PART I Manoeuvring through multilateralism multilateralism as an instrument of smaller powers LAURIEN CRUMP AND ANGELA ROMANO

PART II The margins of superpower rule

5 Manoeuvring into the Soviet market: Polish and Finnish Eastern trade practices during the Cold War SUVI KANSIKAS, MILA OIVA AND SAARA MATALA

6 The imperative of opening to the West and the impact of the 1968 crisis: Bulgaria’s cooperation with Denmark and West Germany in the 1960s ELITZA STANOEVA

7 Americanising the Belgian civilising mission (1941-1961): the Belgian information centre in New York and the campaign to cast the Belgian civilising mission as part of the Point IV Programme FRANK GERITS

8 A gas giant in a small state’s clothes (1981-1982): a political economy analysis of the Dutch margins for manoeuvre during the Urengoy pipeline crisis MARLOES BEERS

PART III Identity as an instrument

9 Neutrality as an instrument for small state manoeuvring and the globalisation of neutrality in the Cold War JOHANNA RAINIO-NIEMI

10 Denuclearisation and regional cooperation: Romania’s tactical approaches to escaping bloc rigidities CORINA MAVRODIN

11 Transitional margins to re-join the West: Spain’s dual strategy of democratisation and Europeanisation CRISTINA BLANCO SÍO-LÓPEZ

Contents vii

“At last, our voice is heard in the world”: Greece and the Six Nation Initiative during the Euromissile crisis 224 EIRINI KARAMOUZI

Conclusion: shedding a new light on Cold War Europe 240 LAURIEN CRUMP AND SUSANNA ERLANDSSON

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of conversations between the two of us, while we were still working on our doctoral theses many years ago. It struck us both how smaller powers in post-World War II Europe seemed to have much more room for manoeuvre than conventionally assumed. Our embryonic idea on compiling a volume revolving around the concept “margins for manoeuvre” became much more concrete when Utrecht University’s History and Art History Department gave us a grant to organise a two-day international workshop around this theme. We decided to invite the new generation of Cold War scholars, all of whom were conducting multi-archival research on a wide range of smaller European powers during the Cold War. To our delight, everyone accepted the invitation and — better still — almost everyone who participated in the workshop in December 2017 contributed to this volume. The results exceeded our expectations, and we are most grateful to the authors for responding so creatively and intelligently to our call and to Utrecht University for facilitating this in the first place.

Moreover, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Robert Langham, the senior editor at Routledge, who believed in this project from the start and has been generous with his support, as well as very flexible. Managing this process would not have been possible without our student assistant, James Hall, whom Utrecht University’s History and Art History Department appointed on our behalf. James has been tireless in proofreading chapters, checking references and chasing authors. Moreover, he often spotted inconsistencies that we had overlooked, and we were impressed with his insightful suggestions. James has certainly helped to raise the volume to a still higher level. It has been a great joy to work with such an inspiring team of authors, and we are thrilled that our embryonic idea resulted in this volume.

Laurien Crump and Susanna Erlandsson, Utrecht and Uppsala, 11 July 2019

Contributors

Editors

Laurien Crump is Associate Professor in Contemporary European History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published widely on multilateral relations in the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain, based on multi-archival research in eight European countries. Her monograph The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955-69 (London & New York 2015) was awarded the George Blazyca prize. She has been visiting scholar in inter alia Oxford, Florence and Uppsala. She is currently working on a research project on Pan-European diplomacy and the end of the Cold War, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Susanna Erlandsson is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History at Uppsala University, Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrádet), and was Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam 2017/19 and the London School of Economics and Political Science 2018/19. She combines studies of how conceptual frameworks influence our understanding of international history with detailed empirical research. Her dissertation Window of Opportunity. Dutch and Swedish Security Ideas and Strategies 1942-1948 (Uppsala 2015) was awarded three prizes. Recent publications include “Off the Record: Margaret van Kleffens and the Gendered History of Dutch World War II Diplomacy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 21:1 (2019).

Contributors

Marloes Beers is Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on European energy cooperation in a global context and on European identity. She has published on topics such as energy cooperation in Europe, the history of Dutch gas policy and the creation of the International Energy Agency.

Cristina Blanco Sío-López is Assistant Professor in European Culture and Politics at the University of Groningen. From September 2019 she is EU H-2020 Marie Sktodowska-Curie Senior Global Fellow and Principal Investigator of x Contributors the project “Navigating Schengen: Historical Challenges and Potentialities of the EU’s Free Movement of Persons, 1985-2015”. She was previously Santander Senior Fellow at the European Studies Centre — St. Antony”s College of the University of Oxford.

Frank Gerits is Lecturer in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University, research fellow at the International Studies Group of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and Senior Editor for History, Politics, IR, and Social Science for the European Journal of American Studies. He has also worked as postdoctoral fellow at New York University in 2015.

Suvi Kansikas is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki, currently researching the socialist bloc’s disintegration. Her publications include ‘Calculating the Burden of Empire. Soviet Oil, East-West trade and the End of the Socialist Bloc”, in: J. Perovic (ed.), Cold War Energy, (London 2016) and ‘Dismantling the Soviet Security System. Soviet — Finnish Negotiations on Ending Their Friendship Agreement, 1989-91”, The International Review of History 41:1 (2019).

Eirini Karamouzi is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Sheffield and author of Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974-1979: The Second Enlargement (London 2014) and co-editor of the volume The Balkans in the Cold War (London 2017). She is co-director of the Cultures of the Cold War network and Editor of Cold War History and Contemporary European History. She works on the history of European integration and modern Greece, and currently runs as PI a Max Batley peace-studies funded project on peace movements in Southern Europe during the Euromissile Crisis. She tweets @ EiriniKaramouzi.

Aryo Makko is Associate Professor of History at Stockholm University and Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. His publications include Ambassadors of Realpolitik: Sweden, the CSCE and the Cold War (New York 2016) and European Small States and the Role of Consuls in the Age of Empire (Leiden 2019).

Stefanie F. M. Massink is a PhD candidate and lecturer in History of International Relations at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She researches Dutch — Spanish diplomatic relations in the twentieth century and is currently finishing her PhD dissertation on the Netherlands and the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Saara Matala defended her doctoral thesis on the History of Industrialization at Aalto University, Finland in 2019. Her research examined the transformation of the Finnish Cold War shipbuilding industry focusing on the interaction between industry and politics. Her publications include “Small Nation, Big Ships. Winter Navigation and Technological Nationalism in a Peripheral Country, 1878-1978”, History and Technology 33:2 (2017).

Contributors xi

Corina Mavrodin is Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and author of Romania and the Cold War: The Roots of Exceptionalism, 1953-63 (London, forthcoming). She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she taught courses in both International History and International Relations. Her current research focuses on non-proliferation, non-alignment and Eastern Europe’s relationship with the Third World during the Cold War.

Mila Oiva is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku. She is an expert on Russian and Polish history with a particular interest in Cold War consumption, transnational transfer of information and digital humanities. Her publications include ‘Selling Fashion to the Soviets. Competitive Practices in Polish Clothes Export in the Early 1960s’, in: K. Miklóssy & M. Ilic (eds), Competition in Socialist Society (London and New York 2014).

Trineke Palm is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. She studies European integration in the field of security and defence. Her research on EU military operations has been published in Contemporary Politics and Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Johanna Rainio-Niemi is Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of The Ideological Cold War. The Politics of Neutrality in Austria and Finland (London & New York 2014) and has published widely on the history of neutrality, democracy, and societal cohesion-seeking in 20th-century Europe in comparative and transnational perspectives.

Angela Romano is Senior Fellow and project manager in the ERC-funded PanEur1970s at the European University Institute in Florence and Invited Lecturer at University of Rome-Tor Vergata. She has published extensively on Cold War and integration processes in Europe, the external relations of the EC/ EU, the CSCE process, and transatlantic relations.

Elitza Stanoeva is Research Associate at the European University Institute in Florence within the ERC project PanEur1970s. Her ongoing research is focused on détente and East-West economic cooperation, Cold War tourism, and memory politics in public space. She is author of the monograph (in Bulgarian) Sofia: Ideology, Urban Planning and Life under Socialism (Sofia 2016).

Abbreviations

ABAKO ANIC BEB

BIC BKP BZNS

CBMs CIA CID

CoCom COMECON CND CSCE DPC EC ECSC EDC EPC ERC FCO FRG FRUS GDR G7

Alliance des Bakongo (The Alliance of Bakongo)

Arhivele Nationale ale României (Romanian National Archives) Buitenlandse Economische Betrekkingen (Directorate General for Foreign Economic Relations)

Belgian Information Center

Balgarska Komunisticheska Partiya (Bulgarian Communist Party) Balgarski Zemedelski Naroden Sayuz (Bulgarian Agrarian People’s Union)

Confidence-building measures

Central Intelligence Agency

Centre d'Information et de Documentation du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi

Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe

[NATO] Defence Planning Committee

European Communities

European Coal and Steel Community

European Defence Community

European Political Cooperation

European Research Council

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Federal Republic of Germany

The Foreign Relations of the United States

German Democratic Republic

Group of Seven

International Civic Aviation Organization

International Energy Agency

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces

Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas (Communist Party of Greece) Katholieke Volkspartij (Dutch Catholic People’s Party)

Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions

MPT NAC NATO NIG N+N NNSC NPT NSWP NWFZ OECD OPEC PCC PPR PvdA PWO SALT UCD UKNA UN UNGA WP

Abbreviations

Multilateral preparatory talks

North Atlantic Council

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

Nederlandse industrie groep (Dutch Industrial Group) Neutral and Non-aligned states

Neutral Nations Supervisory Committee

Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members

Nuclear weapon free zone

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Political Consultative Committee

Politieke Partij Radikalen (Dutch Party of Radicals) Partij van de Arbeid (Dutch Labour Party) Parliamentarians for World Order

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty xiii

Unión de Centro Democrático (Spanish Union of the Democratic Centre)

British National Archives

United Nations

United Nations General Assembly Warsaw Pact

Introduction

Smaller powers in Cold War Europe

Thirty years after it ended, this book tells the story of the Cold War from a perspective that both transcends and engages with the well-known dramaturgy of East versus West. While the conventional narrative features a superpower conflict that dominated the shape of international relations between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, this volume takes the aims and influence of smaller European powers as its point of departure. It challenges the classic image of a bipolar Cold War that determined the fates and scope for manoeuvre of smaller states all over the world, its course beyond their control.

In the vein of New Cold War history, researchers have questioned that bipolarity and called for more attention to the influence of smaller powers on Cold War dynamics, as well as the “retroactive debipolarisation” of the Cold War.! This volume joins a burgeoning literature that highlights cooperative, multilateral and multipolar aspects of the Cold War, but it points to the roles played by smaller powers and non-state actors in a much broader thematic, chronological and geographical spectrum.” That endeavour emphatically includes perspectives from both sides of the Iron Curtain and beyond.

In spite of a renewed interest for small states in the Cold War era, the focus even of recent volumes on Cold War Europe tends to remain on particular themes, such as détente, European security or the end of the Cold War, instead of approaching the concept of smallness as a starting point. Whereas some researchers have pointed to contacts across the Iron Curtain, even this focus tells the story of (bridging the differences between) East and West, rather than analysing the strategies of smaller European powers regardless of their alignment.* So far as monographs are concerned, when the role of Cold War Europe in particular has been covered, the work has not been based on primary sources.” And for all its other merits, Arne Westad”s recent work on the Cold War focuses on the global perspective and contains little detailed analysis of individual players in Cold War Europe.f

Besides being about East versus West, the United States versus the Soviet Union, the Cold War is also a story of smaller versus big powers — on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume approaches international relations from the vantage points of the smaller powers. The aim is to examine and facilitate a comparison between the goals, strategies, and scope for manoeuvre of smaller European powers during the Cold War era empirically, without a priori assumptions about

DOI: 10.4324/9780429425592-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

limitations inherent to their East-West positions. Whether and how the superpower conflict had an impact on each smaller power’s goals, strategies and scope for manoeuvre is posed as an open question, and so is whether and how the smaller powers’ goals and strategies in turn influenced Cold War dynamics. The volume offers a thought-provoking survey of the diverse agendas as well as common denominators of smaller European powers on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including neutrals/non-aligned. It aims for a better understanding of European Cold War dynamics by considering the influence of a variety of factors and actors on the margins for manoeuvre of smaller powers.

Essential to the book’s endeavour is a transcending of the East-West divide as well as the use of a shared conceptual approach. This volume suggests margins for manoeuvre as a common denominator that may help explain small state foreign policy behaviour, also providing a tool to discuss the interrelationship between system level, state level and individual level of influence on small state foreign policy. One of the advantages of the concept as an analytical frame is that it replaces a discussion of power with a term that better highlights the agency of smaller states. While power is easily associated with military strength and coercion, margin for manoeuvre leaves room for other strategies to maintain independence and pursue interests. Margin for manoeuvre also avoids the connotation to passivity or merely reactive behaviour suggested by a term like defensive power, which has been used to define the particular character of the power of small states as opposed to that of great powers.’ Although it can be a useful concept, characterising small states’ power as defensive by nature holds the risk of focusing attention on what they resisted rather than on what they pursued.

The idea to combine and compare studies on small states in the Cold War was born out of previous multi-archival research by the volume’s two editors. In 2015, Laurien Crump showed that the smaller members of the Warsaw Pact had much more leverage over the Soviet Union than previously assumed, demonstrating the need to also analyse the aims and actions of the smaller powers within the Soviet bloc.’ Simultaneously, a detailed comparison by Susanna Erlandsson of Dutch and Swedish security ideas and strategies in the 1940s revealed correspondences that were surprising in light of the fact that the Netherlands joined NATO while Sweden emerged as a staunch defender of neutrality.” While Crump pointed to diversity within a bloc generally considered monolithic, Erlandsson pointed to striking similarities between two countries with ostensibly diverging Cold War positions. Combining these insights made clear that the Cold War division of smaller European powers into the three categories — NATO, Warsaw Pact or neutral/non-aligned — fails to tell the whole story of smaller states’ policies and possibilities, and, by extension, of the mechanisms of the Cold War itself. The results also seemed to suggest that a quest for the widest possible margins for manoeuvre might explain the choices made by different governments.!°

This volume brings together twelve studies of a still wider range of European powers in the Cold War era in order to test and build on these tentative results. It is a unique joint effort to combine in-depth multi-archival historical research with ground-breaking conceptual work, which has been further consolidated by

Introduction 3 an intensive roundtable workshop with the contributors in Utrecht in December 2017. It is an unprecedented endeavour not only because it includes leading young scholars of so many different nationalities, but also because the “margins for manoeuvre’ of smaller powers are not considered as a constraint but as a potential opportunity, which in turn sheds an altogether new light on their contribution to the Cold War era.

While it has not been possible to include all states of Europe, the case studies, many of which deal with more than one state, have been chosen so as to include as wide a variety of states as possible: states of different sizes and resources, and states from Northern, Southern, Western as well as Eastern Europe. Two important choices underpin the enterprise. One is the choice for a common conceptual approach highlighting states’ margins for manoeuvre rather than framing the narrative as one of power relations. To avoid static categories, we have also deliberately chosen to speak of smaller rather than small powers, emphasising the variety and leaving it up to the individual authors to define the ways in which the state(s) they study are small." Second, we have limited the scope to Europe to allow for a maximum of variety within a still somewhat cohesive unit of study. This is a way to avoid differences so big and contexts so diverse that the variables make a comparison and coherent narrative difficult. It does not mean that the approach would not be applicable to other areas of the world, or that Europe is more important as a Cold War arena. Ideally, this book will inspire further research and future comparisons, transcending other divides, as well as shedding a new light on Cold War Europe.

The conceptual and empirical contribution

This book straddles the divide between theoretical literature on small states and empirical literature on the Cold War. While many small state researchers have tried to list typical small state foreign policy behaviours, others have noted that such lists quickly become too long to be meaningful and act as any guide on behaviour. Moreover, compilations of small state behaviours include contradictions, like ‘small states tend to choose neutral options’ as well as ‘small states tend to rely on superpowers for protection’, so that whether they can generate any theory depends on scholars’ ability to identify under which conditions small states choose which behaviour. Similar concerns hold true for attempts to determine whether the system level, state level or individual level is more important to small states’ foreign policies: a ranking of levels explains little without an eye for how these levels interacted.!?

As Iver Neumann and Sieglinde Gstöhl have pointed out for the discipline of international relations in general, Cold War studies need to pay more attention to small states in terms of relations between states. Not only do minor powers by far outnumber great powers; great and small powers are mutually constitutive." We have chosen to refer to the countries studied in this book as smaller powers rather than states. While thereby recognising that hierarchies between states exist — even highlighting the Cold War as a story of superpower versus smaller powers as well as East versus West — the use of the relative form signals that the differences in power are not absolute but complicated and contextual. In the context of Cold War Europe, the term ‘smaller powers’ could in fact indicate all European states except the Soviet Union. The countries in our case studies all fall within the broad category of states that are not great powers. The ways in which a state is ‘small’ are a contextual and therefore an empirical matter. Although practitioners of small state studies in the 1960s and 1970s (and a few later cases too) went to great lengths to find objective criteria by which to define small states, later researchers in the field have advocated a less rigid and static approach, pointing to diverse, subjective and changing discourses.'*

We believe that this open approach leaves more room for historical reality, while still allowing for conceptual comparison. Referring to the space within which smaller powers could manoeuvre and pursue their goals as a margin is also a conscious choice: besides connoting to a space beside the main narrative, margin associates to a certain flexibility. By leaving it to all authors to define how the state(s) they study was (were) small and by asking them to define the margins for manoeuvre in terms of goals, interests and influence, as well as explore the strategies to stretch those margins, this volume seeks to contribute valuable insights to the field of small state studies.

The volume also makes a significant contribution in empirical terms to New Cold War history. The product of a chronologically, thematically and geographically wide-ranging cooperation between leading young historians from all over Europe, it transcends the East-West divide as well as challenging the conventional superpower paradigm. Based on original archival — mostly multi-archival — research, the chapters highlight different aspects of small state strategies using different levels of analysis, under the common denominator of margins for manoeuvre, all exploring to what extent smaller powers succeeded in stretching their room for manoeuvre and as such contributed to shaping the Cold War in ways hitherto overlooked.

Three themes guide the outline of the volume. The chapters are clustered around these themes, which are not related to the East-West divide, but rather to common strategies and opportunities of smaller powers. The first part of the volume, Manoeuvring through Multilateralism, addresses how smaller powers used multilateral frameworks to increase their scope for manoeuvre during the Cold War era. Part II focuses on The Margins of Superpower Rule, highlighting how superpower rule not only constrained but also offered opportunities to smaller powers. Finally, under the heading /dentity as an Instrument, the contributions of Part III examine how smaller powers fostered a particular kind of national identity as an instrument to increase their scope for manoeuvre.

Laurien Crump and Angela Romano usher in Part I by discussing multilateralism as a tool for smaller powers to challenge the straitjacket of the superpowers’ Cold War and promote national foreign policy goals. Their chapter (Chapter 1) responds to the call of New Cold War History to investigate the role of smaller powers on both sides of the Iron Curtain, offering a unique analysis of Eastern and Western Europe simultaneously. It deals with the smaller powers’ room for

Introduction 5 manoeuvre in four different multilateral contexts, namely the Warsaw Pact, the European Community/European Political Cooperation, NATO and the overarching context of the European security conference/the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe in the period 1965-1975.

Chapter 2 deals with the Netherlands, the Benelux and the European Defence Community in the early 1950s. Trineke Palm examines Dutch strategies for exploiting the tight margins of manoeuvre in the negotiations over a European army (1950-1952). The chapter especially highlights the interplay of different multilateral security networks within the Western Alliance, emphasising the diverse nature of power and power struggles.

A different aspect of small states” manoeuvring through multilateralism in the Cold War is foregrounded in Chapter 3 by Aryo Makko, who uses a comparative approach to investigate whether NATO membership or non-alignment provided a wider margin for manoeuvre in the multilateral setting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). Like Palm, Makko highlights how different multilateral settings interplayed. The chapter compares the policies of neutral Sweden and the NATO member state Norway in the CSCE and the making of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.

In Chapter 4 Stefanie F. M. Massink examines the Dutch social democrats’ attitudes and actions regarding the question of dictatorial Spain’s accession to NATO. While NATO provides the multilateral framework within which the margins for manoeuvre of the Dutch government are examined, Massink adds a layer of complexity by analysing Dutch social democratic influence both when the party was in opposition and when it was later in power. That way, the contribution offers insights into how the influence of domestic politics on smaller powers” foreign policy interplayed with the margins provided by the multilateral setting (NATO).

Part IL, The Margins of Superpower Rule, begins with a contribution by Suvi Kansikas, Mila Oiva and Saara Matala. Together, in Chapter 5 they examine Polish and Finnish traders’ efforts to access the Soviet market in the 1950s and 1960s and in the 1970s and 1980s respectively. By analysing how the clothing industry of planned-economy Poland and the shipbuilding industry of market-economy Finland gained access to the Soviet market, the study sheds light onto foreign trade practices of smaller states seeking to increase their room to manoeuvre in a political situation of asymmetric trade. Kansikas, Oiva and Matala analyse the agency of the smaller powers in three phases of commerce: market analysis, marketing and political lobbying. Focusing on individual entrepreneurs and intermediate-level actors (Finland, Poland); private businesses (Finland) and state-owned foreign trade organisations (Poland), they offer a Cold War-long view of political, economic, structural, social and cultural margins for manoeuvring into the Soviet market.

The intertwining of economic and political issues returns in the discussion of the margins of superpower rule in Chapter 6. Elitza Stanoeva discusses socialist Bulgaria’s parallel political and economic relations with the FRG and Denmark: their (re)activation in the early 1960s, peak around the mid-1960s, deterioration in the aftermath of the crackdown on Prague Spring in 1968 and subsequent efforts at recovery. Assessing the bilateral relations comparatively, the chapter examines the different degrees of diplomatic autonomy that Bulgaria enjoyed vis-à-vis the FRG and Denmark as well as the divergent pressures that led to the post-1968 chill. Stanoeva’s focus on the relations between smaller powers of different sizes and allegiances brings into view a complex interaction of aims and strategies of all involved, with a particular eye for how these influenced Bulgaria’s margins and strategies for manoeuvre.

Moving to the West, Frank Gerits illustrates the margins of superpower rule through the case of Belgian colonialism. In Chapter 7 about the Belgian Information Center in New York, Gerits examines how the Belgian government tried to increase its influence in Washington, centring on the role of Belgian Congo in these attempts. By re-examining how the ‘Congo factor’ affected Belgian diplomacy, the chapter also re-examines the idea that the relationship between the United States and European empires was held together by the fear of Communist revolt in Africa.

Chapter 8, the final chapter of Part II, turns to yet another arena illustrating the margins of superpower rule: energy politics. Zooming in on the Urengoy pipeline crisis of 1981-1982, Marloes Beers approaches the role of the Dutch government from a political economy perspective and explores energy politics as an area that could have allowed the Netherlands to stretch its margins for manoeuvre in Cold War Europe. Distinguishing between the Dutch approach to Europe and to the United States, Beers analyses why it took the Dutch so long to attempt to translate its economic potential into geopolitical influence.

In Part IL, Identity as an Instrument, Johanna Rainio-Niemi opens with a discussion in Chapter 9 of neutrality as an instrument of manoeuvring in the bipolar Cold War, focusing on how the understandings and conceptions of neutrality as an identity changed in the post-1945 period, especially as contrasted with earlier conceptions. Empirically, the chapter examines the two remaining European neutrals in 1945, Switzerland and Sweden, and two of the post-1945 neutrals, Austria and Finland. Using these empirical examples, the chapter looks at the “new” post- 1945 small state neutrality and places it in the broader national and international context within which it was formulated. It looks at neutrality’s history as one in which national and international elements were profoundly entangled.

In Chapter 10, historical identity again plays an important role as Corina Mavrodin discusses Romania's initiative for creating a nuclear weapon free zone (NWEZ) in the Balkans in the late 1950s. Otherwise known as the Stoica Plan, Bucharest's call for inter-bloc cooperation on creating a ‘zone of peace” was the first ever such proposal of the Cold War at a time when the global public was increasingly worried about the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. The chapter analyses the Stoica Plan within the complex regional and global contexts with an eye for the ways in which Romania used identity as an instrument.

Astory of instrumental changing of identity is provided by Cristina Blanco Sío- López (Chapter 11), who addresses the parallel processes of transition to democracy and European Community (EC) accession of Spain. The chapter studies the margins for manoeuvre of Spain as a smaller Cold War power and its strategies