Particular generalisation: the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 in relation to the anti-nuclear movement

Polar Record ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Kendall Moore

ABSTRACTThis article presents the US role in the formation of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 in relation to the era's anti-nuclear movement. The purpose is two-fold: to highlight the strategic orientation of US Antarctic policy, suggesting that it was less enlightened than it is frequently portrayed; and to highlight the influence of the anti-nuclear movement upon the treaty's inclusion of a test ban which the United States initially opposed, hoping to reserve the right to conduct nuclear tests. The treaty is depicted as a particular generalisation: one aspect of the cold war that gains significance when scrutinised in relation to another that is much better-known.

2017 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Marcin Wieczorek

The text discusses the play about the last hours of life of the Rosenbergs titled Julius and Ethel, the history of the trial, passing the sentence and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs carried out on June 19, 1953. Besides Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy’s “witch-hunt”, this is the second most famous example of the American anti-communist atmosphere of the early 1950s, which led to the crisis of the democratic order and its institutions in the United States. The case took place at the beginning of the Cold War division of the world and the nuclear arms race, which put the world on the brink of selfdestruction. For the US radicals and the left-wing intellectuals, the Rosenbergs belonging to the US Communist Party are victims of the right-wing witch-hunt, creating anti-communist atmosphere, however they are also perceived as patrons of antiwar movements, precursors of the nuclear weapons opponents movement (the espionage, which they had never confessed to was to concern passing secrets about the US nuclear weapons programs to the Russians). For conservative America this will be a story about the efficiency of the legal, political and moral system facing a real threat in the fight against communism – dangerous for the entire civilized democratic world. How does the socialist realism work by Leon Kruczkowski appear against this background?


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mervyn O'Driscoll

France's first nuclear tests in Algeria in 1960 occurred at a critical moment in the Cold War. The United States, Great Britain, and the USSR had suspended their tests in 1958 and had been holding test ban talks in Geneva. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan faced a vociferous anti-nuclear movement at home and wanted to foster East-West détente. The U.S. State Department wished to prevent Soviet propaganda in the Third World, including the newly independent African and Asian states that strongly opposed French testing. Nonetheless, both Britain and the United States adopted a sympathetic stance toward France in the run-up to the first test in February 1960. Macmillan hoped to move Britain into the European Economic Community and therefore wanted to avoid antagonizing France, whose support for British membership would be crucial. Macmillan also wanted France's backing for a four-power summit to try to achieve East-West détente. Similarly, the United States did not want to alienate France, a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).


Author(s):  
W. Michael Seganish

In a criminal law matter, jurisdiction is often a minor consideration.  That is, where the crime is committed determines who has the right to prosecute and what law applies.  There may be some jurisdictional issues whether state law or federal law governs in the United States; but this is by and large resolved by one taking jurisdiction.  The same would be normally true in the international law area where it was committed.  That is, if a crime is committed in France or Germany, then the law where it was committed would prevail subject to other international issues such as diplomatic immunity which would prevent a sovereign from prosecuting.  This is not the case in Antarctica because Antarctica belongs to no one particular nation.  It is governed by the Antarctic Treaty.  The Treaty is mindful of territorial claims and defers to a sector theory as to which criminal law applies.  This means in this sovereign-less continent that one cannot tell specifically what criminal law, if any, exists to regulate activities.  This has numerous ramifications other than the micro application in one particular case because from a macro point of view actions can occur for which there is no remedy.  The analysis limits itself to criminal law issues, but much larger implications exist in the event of an environmental disaster, for example, where there may be no remedy against an offending party.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Aleksei D. Katkov

In the 1990s the end of the Cold War and the US’s efforts to build a “new world order” actualized in scientific discourse the problem of understanding the principle of state sovereignty. Moreover, due to the WTO accession, the discussion among United States’ scholars intensified about the preservation of sovereignty of their own state. As a result, both the US authorities and most experts advocate the inviolability of the sovereignty of their country, noting, however, that it might be temporarily limited by different international obligations, first of all by economic agreements, but this does not affect it radically and the possibility of withdrawing from various kinds of contracts remains. At the same time, the last superpower’s foreign policy actions at the end of the 20th century (interference in the internal affairs of Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, etc.) clearly illustrate the disregard for the sovereignty of other states. In an attempt to explain this policy, they argued that sovereignty, while remaining a significant principle in general, can be lost, which opens up the legitimate path to the internationalization of a conflict. All in all, despite the fact that such an understanding of sovereignty as a conditional principle, is not new in itself, the United States took some steps to extend this understanding to the whole world, granting itself the right to single-handedly determine cases where and why sovereign rights are lost.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.


Author(s):  
Anna Igorevna Filimonova

After the collapse of the USSR, fundamentally new phenomena appeared on the world arena, which became a watershed separating the bipolar order from the monopolar order associated with the establishment of the US global hegemony. Such phenomena were the events that are most often called «revolutions» in connection with the scale of the changes being made — «velvet revolutions» in the former Eastern Bloc, as well as revolutions of a different type, which ended in a change in the current regimes with such serious consequences that we are also talking about revolutionary transformations. These are technologies of «color revolutions» that allow organizing artificial and seemingly spontaneous mass protests leading to the removal of the legitimate government operating in the country and, in fact, to the seizure of power by a pro-American forces that ensure the Westernization of the country and the implementation of "neoliberal modernization", which essentially means the opening of national markets and the provision of natural resources for the undivided use of the Western factor (TNC and TNB). «Color revolutions» are inseparable from the strategic documents of the United States, in which, from the end of the 20th century, even before the collapse of the USSR, two main tendencies were clearly traced: the expansion of the right to unilateral use of force up to a preemptive strike, which is inextricably linked with the ideological justification of «missionary» American foreign policy, and the right to «assess» the internal state of affairs in countries and change it to a «democratic format», that is, «democratization». «Color revolutions», although they are not directly mentioned in strategic documents, but, being a «technical package of actions», straightforwardly follow from the right, assigned to itself by Washington, to unilateral use of force, which is gradually expanding from exclusively military actions to a comprehensive impact on an opponent country, i.e. essentially a hybrid war. Thus, the «color revolutions» clearly fit into the strategic concept of Washington on the use of force across the entire spectrum (conventional and unconventional war) under the pretext of «democratization». The article examines the period of registration and expansion of the US right to use force (which, according to the current international law, is a crime without a statute of limitations) in the time interval from the end of the twentieth century until 2014, filling semantic content about the need for «democratic transformations» of other states, with which the United States approached the key point of the events of the «Arab spring» and «color revolutions» in the post-Soviet space, the last and most ambitious of which was the «Euromaidan» in Ukraine in 2014. The article presents the material for the preparation of lectures and seminars in the framework of the training fields «International Relations» and «Political Science».


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu

Abstract In this article, I bring the constitutional jurisprudence of major East Asian courts into reconstructive dialogue with that of the United States, South Africa, and several former Soviet-bloc countries, on per se review of capital punishment. This fills in a gap in the literature, which has failed to reflect new developments in Asia. Besides analysing various review approaches, I extrapolate recurrent analytical issues and reconstruct dialogues among these court decisions. Moreover, I place the analysis in historical perspective by periodising the jurisprudential trajectory of the right to life. The contextualised reconstructive dialogues offer multilayered understanding of my central analytical argument: for any court that may conduct per se review of capital punishment in the future, the highly influential South African Makwanyane case does not settle the lesson. The transnational debate has been kept open by the Korean Constitutional Court's decisions, as well as retrospectively by the US cases of Furman and Gregg. This argument has two major points. First, the crucial part of the reasoning in Makwanyane, namely that capital punishment cannot be proven to pass the necessity test under the proportionality review, is analytically inconclusive. The Korean Constitutional Court's decision offers a direct contrast to this point. Second, the exercise of proportionality review of the Makwanyane Court does not attest to the neutrality and objectivity of proportionality review. Rather, what is really dispositive of the outcome are certain value choices inhering in per se review of capital punishment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 272-290
Author(s):  
Evgenii V. Kodin

The post-war Belarusian emigration, both in Europe and in the United States, was divided into two main groups: the supporters of the President of the Belarusian Central Rada R. K. Ostrowski (Astrouski) and the Chairman of the BNR Rada N. S. Abramchyk. The declassified CIA documents indicate that this was not just a rivalry for the right to speak and act on behalf of the entire Belarusian emigration, but also to receive substantial dividends from close cooperation with the American intelligence agency in the implementation of plans to destabilize the situation in Belarus through the preparation of various kinds of espionage and subversive operations, up to the direct delivery of agents to the territory of the BSSR in the 1950s, as well as in information and propaganda work against the Soviet Belarus. This confrontation took various forms: from accusations of direct collaboration with the Nazis during the war (Ostrowski) to the self-appointment as the head of the Belarusian Folk Republic (Abramchyk). The visions of the future of free Belarus and its foreign policy between these actors differed, as well as the means and methods of struggle for the liberation of the Belarusian people from the communist system. At the same time, both Abramchyk and Ostrowski understood well that in order to strengthen their positions among the Belarusian emigration, close relations with those who built and financed the anti-Soviet policy of the West during the Cold War were important. First of all, it was about the American intelligent services. And here Abramchyk won an obvious victory, and Ostrowski’s main former comrades-in-arms were soon going to move to his camp.


Jurnal ICMES ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196
Author(s):  
Firmanda Taufiq

Throughout 2018, relations between Turkey and the United States seemed to deteriorate. The leaders of the two countries issued sharp diplomatic statements and the US even imposed economic sanctions on Turkey. This article aims to analyze how the future of relations between Turkey and the United States. Cooperation between the two has a long historical side after the Cold War. Relations between the two countries are based on various interests, both economic, political, military and security interests. The theory used in this study is the theory of national interest. The US has great interests in the Middle East and Turkey is the front-line ally in achieving those interests. However, there are many US foreign policies that ignore the Turkish concern and create tensions between the two countries. On the contrary, Turkey also has considerable economic interests, but the role of the government elite (in this case, President Erdogan) has a significant influence in the determination of Turkish foreign policy. The findings of this study, although it will go through complex challenges and processes, the US and Turkey will continue to maintain their relations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document