War Veterans and the World after 1945: Cold War Politics, Decolonization, Memory

This book examines war veterans’ history after 1945 from a global perspective. In the Cold War era, in most countries of the world there was a sizeable portion of population with direct war experience. This edited volume gathers contributions which show the veterans’ involvement in all the major historical processes shaping the world after World War II. Cold War politics, racial conflict, decolonization, state-building, and the reshaping of war memory were phenomena in which former soldiers and ex-combatants were directly involved. By examining how different veterans’ groups, movements and organizations challenged or sustained the Cold War, strived to prevent or to foster decolonization, and transcended or supported official memories of war, the volume characterizes veterans as largely independent and autonomous actors which interacted with societies and states in the making of our times. Spanning historical cases from the United States to Hong-Kong, from Europe to Southern Africa, from Algeria to Iran, the volume situates veterans within the turbulent international context since World War II.

About the Author

Ángel Alcalde obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in 2015. He was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich in 2016-2017. He has also been a visiting scholar at the European Institute at Columbia University (New York), the Leibniz-Institute for European History (Mainz), and the Center for the History of Global Development at Shanghai University. His latest book is War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Santiago de Compostela and at the LMU of Munich (2012-1017). He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books on nationalist movements, national and regional identities, history of migration, and the cultural and social history of war in the twentieth century. His latest books are Die spanische Blaue Division an der Ostfront (1941-45) (Aschendorff, 2016) and (ed.) Metaphors of Spain (Berghahn, 2017).