Abstract
The Second World War ended Western Europe’s leadership of the international system. Woodrow Wilson’s insistence upon self-determination at the 1919 Paris Peace conference was trumped by the demands of the victorious European states—principally Britain and France;1 perhaps Winston Churchill hoped that similar rhetoric in the Atlantic Charter, which he agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt off Newfoundland in August 1941, would also be forgotten. But by the war’s end, the balance of world power had clearly shifted. In 1947, the United States assumed economically stretched Britain’s military commitments in the Greek civil war, an early signal that geopolitical power now issued from Washington and Moscow. These same dynamics ended the supremacy of Europe in the Antarctic. The defining event in the Cold War Antarctic was the IGY, which buried the colonial-era legacy of territorial claims under massive displays of state-sponsored science and superpower competition.
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Notes
See for instance Klaus Dodds, Pink ice: Britain and the South Atlantic empire” (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), and Adrian Howkins, “Frozen empires: a history of the Antarctic sovereignty dispute between Britain Argentina, and Chile, 1939–1959.” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008). and “Defending polar empire: opposition to India’s proposal to raise the ’Antarctic Question’ at the United Nations in 1956,” Polar Record 44 (2008): 35–44.
Aant Elzinga, “Antarctica: the construction of a continent by and for science,” in Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, eds. Denationalizing science: the contexts of international scientific practice (Dordrecht, Klüwer, 1993), 73–106.
Robert Marc Friedman, “Å spise kirsebær med de store,” in Norskpolarhistorie 2: vitenskapene, ed. Einar-Arne Drivenes and Harald Dag Jølle (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2004), 369.
See for instance Wendy Webster, Englishness and empire, 1939–65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
See for instance Jerry Hardman Brookshire, Clement Attlee (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 143–44.
This was particularly clear in the pamphlet prepared by the Imperial Institute for its “Focus on Colonial Progress” display. TNA WORK 25/244 E2/E37. See also Becky E Conekin, The autobiography of a nation: the Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), especially 188–89.
Peter H. Hansen, “Coronation Everest: the Empire and Commonwealth in the ‘second Elizabethan age,’ “ in Stuart Ward, ed., British culture and the end of empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 57–72.
See Alan Milward, The reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 243–44.
Knut Einar Eriksen and Helge Øystein Pharo, Norsk utenrikspolitikkshistorie 5: kald krig og internasjon- alisering 1949–1965 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1997), 144.
Peter Beck, The international politics of Antarctica (New York: St Martin’s, 1986), 272.
Richard G. Casey, Friends and neighbours: Australia and the world (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1954), 115. As noted in the foreword (which did not bear a page number), Casey premised the book on Australia being “a link in the worldwide chain against international Communism.”
Dian Olson Belanger, Deep freeze: the United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the origins of Antarctica’s age of science (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), 2–3.
See most notably Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the postwar earth sciences: the military’s influence on the environmental sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 635–66.
On the Office of Naval Research and physical oceanography, see also Naomi Oreskes and Homer E. Le Grand, eds., Plate tectonics: an insider’s history of the modern theory of the Earth (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001).
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: disciples of marine science (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
John McCannon, “No more Tsushimas: Soviet Arctic science 1945–1953,” presentation at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, January 28, 2011.
David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Olav Njølstad and Olav Wicken, Kunnskap som våpen: forsvarets forskningsinsti- tutt 1946–1975 (Oslo: Tano Aschehoug, 1997), 9.
Klaus Dodds, “The great trek: New Zealand and the British/Commonwealth 1955–58 Trans-Antarctic Expedition,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33 (2005): 93–114.
On Berkner’s life and career, see Allan A. Needell, Science, Cold War, and the American state: Lloyd V. Berkner and the balance of professional ideals (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000).
Aant Elzinga, “Swedish non-participation in the Antarctic leg of IGY 1957/58,” Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung 560 (2007): 155–57.
Charles Swithinbank chronicled his experiences in the memoirs Vodka on ice: a year with the Russians in Antarctica (Lewes, UK: The Book Guild, 2002), and An alien in Antarctica: reflections upon forty years of exploration and research on the frozen continent (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward), 1997.
One American IGY member working in the Antarctic even referred to Robin’s report on the NBSX seismic work as their “Bible.” Simon Naylor, Katrina Dean, and Martin Siegert, “The IGY and the ice sheet: surveying Antarctica,” Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008): 588.
Michael J. Turner, British power and international relations during the 1950s: a tenable position? (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 293.
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© 2011 Peder Roberts
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Roberts, P. (2011). The Cold War Comes to the Coldest Continent. In: The European Antarctic. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337909_8
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