UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2010 - 20192

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    America's Commercial Cold War: Global Trade, National Security, and the Control of Markets
    (2019) Haddad, Ryan Issa; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Previous works considering the history of American trade policy during the Cold War have tended to focus on either the United States’ export control policy in the unilateral and multilateral context or the Cold War’s influence on the formation and evolution on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. While useful, these studies are limited by their narrowness. To date, no single work has emerged accounting for trade’s place in American Cold War strategy or the reciprocal impact that economic globalization and the Cold War had on each other. I argue that American Cold War trade policy was an “economic containment” exercise. The United States’ “Commercial Cold War” was conceptualized by strategists as a struggle between two rival, yet interdependent networks—one liberal and capitalist, and led by the United States; the other communist and led at the outset by the Soviet Union. The United States used trade both positively and negatively to achieve a variety of ends. Its overarching goal was to use trade to develop its network at the expense of the Soviet Union’s. This strategy assumed centralized, flexible control over trade policy in order to capitalize on diplomatic openings. Successive American presidents aspired to such trade policy control. But the diffusion of power throughout the U.S. government and across the Western alliance rendered that impossible. It proved far easier to deny East-West trade than to expand it, and more assertive American initiatives were often stymied. But despite the limits on unilateral action, the multilateral trade architectures that were established during the Cold War proved adequate to their purposes and remain in renovated form in the 21st Century.
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    Minding the Gap: Western Export Controls and Soviet Technology Policy in the 1960s
    (2010) Cappiello, Diana Marie; David-Fox, Michael; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis examines the origins and evolution of Western export controls intended to limit the transfer of high technology, particularly computers, to communist countries, and how technology policy within the Soviet Union and other communist states was shaped by these controls. This work intends to demonstrate that Western attempts to control trade in high technology were responsive to changing economic and political realities and that changes in export controls produced corresponding changes in policy within the USSR. Ultimately, policies on both sides served to maintain and widen the technology gap between East and West far more dramatically than anticipated, deepening the economic stagnation of Eastern Europe and hastening the collapse of communism.