{"id":250,"date":"2021-03-01T14:50:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T14:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/?p=250"},"modified":"2021-03-01T14:50:44","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T14:50:44","slug":"17-3-21-benjamin-martin-the-rise-of-the-cultural-treaty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/2021\/03\/01\/17-3-21-benjamin-martin-the-rise-of-the-cultural-treaty\/","title":{"rendered":"17\/3\/21 Benjamin Martin \u2013 The Rise of the Cultural Treaty: Diplomatic Agreements and the International Politics of ‘Culture’ in the Age of Three Worlds."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Abstract<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this talk, Professor Martin presents his on-going work on an article in which he documents and interprets the extraordinary growth in the use of bilateral treaties on cultural\u00a0cooperation and exchange that took place in the 1950s and 60s. This event, the rise of the cultural treaty, was a dramatic, system-wide change in the way states around the world arranged cross-border cultural, educational and scientific cooperation. Yet we know next to nothing about it. In the historical literature on Cold War-era cultural diplomacy,\u00a0scholars have often noted these agreements, more or less in passing, but virtually no systematic attention has been devoted to them as a genre. The paper is\u00a0based on the notion that bilateral cultural treaties\u2014the documents themselves as well as the historical patterns of their creation and use\u2014offer rich materials with\u00a0which to analyze the changing role of culture in twentieth-century international relations, in the context of broader transformations in the age of the Cold War and\u00a0decolonization.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Professor Martin first reconstructs the history of how \u2018cultural\u2019 agreements have been defined and discussed within the international system. On this basis he\u00a0present a categorization\u2014applied to data available in the\u00a0electronic World Treaty Index<\/a>\u2014that I use for counting these agreements. Second, he offers a quantitative\u00a0analysis of how (and when, and by whom) such agreements were used between 1935 and 1980, identifying and interpreting several striking trends. This\u00a0combination of approaches is designed to allow me to explore the bilateral cultural agreement as a technology of international relations\u2014one that came to be a\u00a0distinctive feature of political and cultural internationalism in what Michael Denning has called \u2019the age of three worlds\u2019. That, in turn, is a first step toward a\u00a0broader exploration of this technology\u2019s history in international and transnational perspective.\u00a0This research is part of a larger project,\u00a0The Culture of International Society<\/a>,\u00a0funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (2017-2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"C.<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

C. Burke Elbrick, U.S.\u00a0ambassador\u00a0(left),\u00a0and Vukasin Micunovic, Yugoslav Federal Council\u00a0President for Education and Culture\u00a0(right),\u00a0sign an agreement\u00a0extending\u00a0the U.S.-Yugoslav binational educational exchange program in December 1968. (Photo credit: The Fulbright Program, 1946-1996:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biography:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A graduate of the University of Chicago and\u00a0Columbia University, Benjamin G. Martin\u00a0is senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and\u00a0Ideas at Uppsala University, where he is lead researcher on the project\u00a0\u2018International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History\u2019<\/a>,\u00a0funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-2022). His publications have appeared in\u00a0The Journal of Contemporary History<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0International Politics<\/em>\u00a0as well as in several edited volumes. He is co-editor (with Elisabeth Piller) of the forthcoming special issue of Contemporary European History<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cCultural Diplomacy and Europe\u2019s Twenty Years\u2019 Crisis\u201d<\/a>. His book\u00a0The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Harvard University\u00a0Press, 2016), won the 2020 Culbert Family Book Prize of the International Association for Media and History.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abstract: In this talk, Professor Martin presents his on-going work on an article in which he documents and interprets the extraordinary growth in the use of bilateral treaties on cultural\u00a0cooperation and exchange that took place in the 1950s and 60s. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6000"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/moderneeuropeanhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}