This chapter introduces the puzzles, questions, and concepts permeating the book, and provides an organizational map of its causal logic. It delineates the major challenges to the liberal state’s capacity to regulate immigration in an insecure international and domestic security environment. First, it identifies the perceived threats posed by human mobility and immigration. Second, the chapter describes the migration trilemma confronting policymakers whenever market imperatives and liberal immigrant policies are perceived to be in tension with their responsibility to safeguard public safety. Third, it reconceptualizes the regulatory politics of immigration within a context of various issue paradigms and threat perceptions. It offers a neo-institutional analytical framework linking diverse policy-making logics, actors, and norms within which these empirical developments can be explained over time. It proposes these dynamics illuminate the relationship between threat context and immigration regulation, and delimits the normative parameters of policy whenever security concerns preoccupy the public’s thinking.

This chapter traces the evolution of Iran’s international relations from the oil nationalization episode until the outbreak of the 1978–1979 revolution. Iran’s oil nationalization was met with the stiff opposition of Britain and the United States, culminating in a CIA-sponsored coup that reinstalled the Shah back to power and placed Iran firmly in the Western camp. Practically every presidential administration in the United States paid special attention to Iran as a central component of its Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union, an attention which the Iranian government used to its advantage in order to receive large amounts of military hardware from United States. Seeing Iran and the United States as “natural allies,” the Shah assumed that Washington would rescue him from the tide of revolution. Long after his overthrow, the Iranian monarch felt abandoned and betrayed by his American allies.

Chapter 11 focuses on the new violence that has erupted in many Latin American countries in the early twenty-first century. It shows that Latin America is the most violent region in the world and that violence is perpetrated by drug cartels, gangs, common criminals, militias, and state agents. The chapter explores the causes of violence through case studies of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and draws several conclusions. International factors, such as the global drug trade and US policy toward Latin America, have played a largely negative role. The state has failed to guarantee citizen security, in part because it is absent, and in part because it colludes with criminal groups. Additionally, needed reforms of the state’s security forces are not enacted because the democratically elected politicians who have to propose such reforms are threatened or bought off by actors who benefit from violence. This chapter shows that problems of democracy – the poor quality of democracy – and problems for democracy – the failure of democracies to guarantee civil rights such as the right to life – are tightly interconnected.

In the mid-nineteenth century, touring minstrel and Italian operatic troupes reached Bombay’s shores, exposing its residents to the delights of European and American popular tunes and burlesque Italian opera. Although reformists initially struggled to convince locals to patronise this strange warbling, opera gradually became a marker of high culture in the subcontinent. This transition was the result of the adoption of the term ‘opera’ by Parsi theatre, India’s most widespread, commercial, ‘modern’ dramatic form. The chapter traces Parsi theatre's role in the creation of a modern South Asian aural culture during the second half of the nineteenth century through the indigenisation of Italian opera. It delineates how the locus for Hindustani music shifted, from the courts of Awadh to the proscenium theatres of Asia, and how an Indian brand of opera that combined European melodies with Hindustani music became a staple not only of the theatre but also of the cinematic medium that followed.

Teresa Carreño’s 1887 operatic season in Caracas is a notorious episode in Venezuelan musical history: an attempt to launch an Italian opera company by the country’s most celebrated pianist that ended in dismal failure. Invited by President Guzman in 1885 to give a series of recitals – and subsequently to start a permanent opera company – Carreño was by then in the glory years of her career. Studies of Carreño have long emphasised the symbolic importance of Carreño’s time in Caracas in the 1880s, highlighted by her composition of an 'Himno a Bolivar' during the visit. Less frequently discussed, however, is that the majority of the operatic troupe were in fact recruited from New York, where Carreño had settled in the previous decade, and from where she had pursued concert tours across the United States. The chapter reassesses Carreño’s failed operatic experiment both through the lens of her North American networks and against the shifting relations between New York, Venezuela and Italy at this time. It provides a framework for later activities within Latin America by the US operatic gramophone industry, and underlines the problematic status of Italian opera’s 'civilising' ambitions for local Venezuelan elites. If Venezuela could easily be subsumed into clichés of italianità abroad, then Italian opera was an uneasy and surprisingly mobile symbol of cultural progress.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans’ reputation at home and abroad was for French opera. Performances of opéra comique appeared on the city’s stages in the last decade of the eighteenth century; from the 1830s, grand opéra became a mainstay of the repertoire at the francophone Théâtre d’Orléans, whose resident company was recruited annually from Europe. ‘Rossini fever’ seems largely to have bypassed New Orleans, and the relatively few performances of Italian operas that the city did have in the first three decades of the century were always in French (or sometimes English) translation and often heavily adapted. Between 1837 and 1842, however, English-born impresario James Caldwell arranged several short seasons of Italian opera in an attempt to lure novelty-loving audiences to his St Charles Theatre. Although there were already numerous troupes performing opera in Italian further north in the United States, the troupes Caldwell engaged came to New Orleans from the south, from Cuba, where they were contracted to Havana’s theatres. This chapter focuses on the seasons given by these troupes, exploring the discussions that took place about the relative merits of French and Italian comedy, and the exchange of performers and materials between the permanent French troupe and the visiting Italians. When the Théâtre d’Orléans troupe was invited to visit Havana the press expressed concerns that Cuba was ‘uncivilised’ and unhygienic, and that news of a tour there would ultimately prevent New Orleans from recruiting high-quality performers for its own francophone troupe.

The final substantive chapter examines the impact of international sanctions on the North Korean political economy. On the one hand, sanctions can be said to have exacerbated the tendency whereby North Korea has become an economic appendage of the booming Chinese economy. Indeed, we examine how the strengthening of sanctions have coincided with a shift away from economic relations with its erstwhile trading partners of South Korea and Japan and towards China. In terms of their impact, we argue that sanctions until 2017 at least largely failed to exert pressure on the North Korean economy, but they have at the same time deepened the illicit nature of its external economic relations. Even less have they translated into political pressure on the North Korean regime. We also examine the impact of increased enforcement by China of UN sanctions since 2017 and the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. By examining the unintended consequences of sanctions, the chapter contributes to critiques of the mainstream sanctions literature and has direct policy implications.

This chapter surveys the history of terrorism from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism is defined here as a strategy that uses symbolic violence that seeks to change the behavior of the many by targeting the few. After a brief historiography of the phenomenon, the chapter discusses the origins of modern terrorism in the nineteenth-century paradox of growing individualism and state power; thus, while terrorism can be used in pursuit of any ideology, it is closely associated with the emergence of modern democracy. Particular attention is paid to the role of violence in the French Revolution, early efforts to theorize and organize conspiratorial violence, and three late nineteenth-century terrorist movements: revolutionary terrorism in the Russian Empire, white supremacist terrorism in the United States, and anarchist terrorism in Europe and the United States. The essay uses primary and secondary sources and includes a lengthy annotated bibliography.

The idea of the Free World emerged in World War II from the struggle of Western liberal democracies against their autocratic and totalitarian enemies. After the war, the Free World consisted of the United States, a group of Western European liberal democracies that re-emerged after liberation from Germany and sought American protection, and the reconstructed and mostly demilitarized war enemies Italy, (West) Germany, and Japan. The US-led anti-communist alliance building in the wake of the Korean War increasingly included Asian and the Middle Eastern countries in the defense of the Free World, although they often were authoritarian . The liberal-democratic nature of the Free World’s core in Europe allowed open political disagreements to emerge, mostly between Charles de Gaulle’s France and the Anglo-American powers but also within the societies of the Free World itself. These conflicts reached their combined peak in 1968 over the Vietnam War and widespread popular protests in several Western countries. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and subsequent changes of government in the West, however, helped to recreate a semblance of unity within the Free World by the early 1970s.

The Cold War did not cause the conflicts in the Middle East, particularly the one between Israel and the Arab states. The Zionist state building project rooted in the anti-Semitism of the emerging European nation states of the late 19th century, employed British imperialism as a vehicle, and derived its moral urgency from the Holocaust. But it triggered the Palestinian displacement. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported the UN partition proposal in 1947 and recognized Israel within a year. Still, they supported Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956. The United States was concerned about the possible growth of Soviet influence in the region, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Its joint effort with the United Kingdom to build up an anti-Soviet alliance system divided the Arab world while it alienated both Israel and Egypt. In the end, the pre-emptive anti-Soviet alliance making helped destabilize the Middle East and allowed the USSR to enter the region. Although the Suez Crisis terminated British imperial influence, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were able to benefit from it by making significant inroads in the following decade.

The three Great Powers at the end of World War II and the two superpowers after the mid 1960s experienced tight limits to their political, economic and military power. They were usually most successful if they were able to influence pre-existing regional developments. Particularly the Middle East defied outside influence. Conflicts and developments usually fell into one of three categories: those without Cold War roots, those dating back to the Bolshevik challenge of 1917, and those caused by the Cold War after World War II. Over the course of four decades until the late 1980s, they collectively affected structural change. However, middle powers and smaller agents enjoyed different levels of agency, ranging from much influence, like communist China, to minute, like the Palestinians. Yet, in general, agency steadily increased over the course of the Cold War.

Almost a decade ago, when I attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in Berlin, the narrative structure of this book emerged before my eyes. Wagner’s idea of a network of stories that intersect and influence each other has fascinated me since the early 1990s when I first saw the complete performance of his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Its second part, Die Walküre, sparked my vision of writing a reinterpretation of the Cold War as an interconnected set of narratives that focuses on how middle and smaller actors at the regional level shaped that global conflict.

At the end of World War II, the Big Three agreed on Germany’s territorial reduction and division, and the territorial westward relocation of Poland. Poland received the German territories of southern East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with the Oder and Neisse rivers forming its new western border. The Big Three also decided to divide the remainder of Germany into occupation zones—a decision that, however, predetermined the country’s divided fate until 1990. At their birth in 1949, both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were firmly convinced that the nation’s division would be temporary. The Korean War cemented the nation’s division. Afterwards, West Germany tried to prevent East Germany’s attempt at seeking separate statehood. The East German closure of the borders in the divided capital Berlin in 1961 deepened the division. Starting in late 1969, West Germany acknowledged the reality of the two German states but denied the existance of two German nations. Although recognition in 1972-73 had been a long-term goal of the GDR, it also brought the danger of economic and political embracement by the FRG.

The intellectual and political roots of Western Europe’s post-World War II integration process in Europe reach to post-World War I period. Two world wars had brought physical destruction, socio-economic dislocation, and global decline. Breaking this cycle of self-destructive behavior required overcoming the Franco-German antagonism. As early as the 1920s, smaller and middle countries in Western Europe grew concerned about Soviet expansionism and the obstructionist policies of the United Kingdom. But London insisted on its unfettered great power status in Europe beyond well beyond WW II. From 1947 to 1961, it tried to impose its views on the integration project. Given its waning global influence, it was forced to ask the West European continentals to join the integration project afterwards. France was the most consistent proponent of integration since the 1920s. With the encouragement of the United States, it shaped European integration after WW II with the double goal of restoring itself to great power status and of holding an integrated Germany down after having fought three wars with it in less than a century. The role of the United States was crucial for the success of post-World War II integration.

Non-Alignment also was a creation of India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, though Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser established the movement of bloc-free status in the Cold War, by 1961. Unlike Asian-African Internationalism, Non-Alignment attracted a large number of sub-Saharan African states. In 1961-1965, Non-Alignment developed into the antagonist of Asian-African internationalism, particularly in the context of China’s radicalized policies towards the Afro-Asian world. But victory in this struggle still left Non-Alignment deeply shaken. The June War in 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbors further taxed the movement’s internal unity and political raison d’être, since the founding member Egypt was one of the belligerents in a conflict in which the superpower blocs lined up behind the two warring sides. The Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia the following year forced Tito to pull back from instituting Non-Aligned collaboration with the Socialist Camp. Yet, against the background of the ongoing Indochina conflict, Non-Alignment still sided increasingly with the Socialist Camp in the first half of the 1970s, undermining its own purpose in the long term.

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the two halves of divided Europe overcame their parallel economic crises. Ballooning Eastern European debt to the non-socialist world, the Polish Crisis in 1980-81, and the economic impact of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq-Iran War permanently undermined Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. By late 1981, the USSR had neither the economic means nor the military stomach to maintain its influence by brute force. As a consequence, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany turned to the western world for credit and economic advice, which in turn accelerated the erosion of Soviet dominance. At the same time, western countries underwent a conservative transformation that partially helped to overcome the economic crises of the late 1970s that had emerged in the aftermath of the American abolition of the Bretton Woods system and the two Middle East oil shocks. In the 1980s, they emerged strengthened in economy terms and unified against the final Soviet attempt to seek supremacy in all of Europe through the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Europe. The structures for the end of the regional Cold War were in place.