scholarly journals The Wilsonian moment: Japan 1912–1952

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Inoguchi

AbstractThe aim of this special issue is to give a new spin to the study of the impact of the liberal Wilsonian moment on Japan, with a focus on the interwar period in a broader historical span. The Wilsonian liberal international order encompasses its fledgling (1914–1945), formative (1945–1952), competitive (1952–1989), and maturity (1989–2018) periods. In this special issue, the four articles deal with the first and second periods. Yutaka Harada and Frederick Dickinson adopt this longer perspective – not just President Wilson's moment of Fourteen Points – each focusing on (1) the vigor of Japan's industrialization and open economic policy in 1914–1931 and (2) the basic continuity between the prewar and postwar periods in terms of normative and institutional commitments with the fledgling, if volatile, liberal international order such as those with the Versailles and Washington treaties after World War I, the war prohibition treaty of 1928, and the naval disarmament treaty of 1930. Ryoko Nakano and Takashi Inoguchi take up the re-examination of two tiny minorities of liberal academics, Yanaihara Tadao and Nambara Shigeru, who at most kept their integrity. Nakano recasts Yanaihara's academic life with its intellectual agony of believing in a national self-determination policy for Japanese colonies. Inoguchi underlines Nambara's stoic self-discipline under wartime dictatorship and active political involvement under US occupation regarding the newly drafted Japanese Constitution. An emphasis is placed on the considerable positive influence of Wilsonian ideas on Japan, an influence that faded in the late 1930s, but re-emerged with considerable vigor after 1945.

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 01027
Author(s):  
Yifei Liu

World War I (WWI) causes irreversible consequences on the British economy, and Britain has experienced the most severe economic crisis in the 1920s. This paper aims to explain the causes of unemployment in Britain in the years between the wars and why that problem persisted for much of that period. This paper will describe the causes of unemployment by analyzing how World War I affected the British exports market. Then this essay will move on by exploring how the economic policy of Britain after World War II(WWII) damages the exports market and creates high unemployment. In addition, this paper will also discuss the relationship between the change in the labour market in World War I and the unemployment problem. Finally, this paper will illustrate why the unemployment problem persists by exploring regional and industrial unemployment issues.


2020 ◽  
pp. 54-79
Author(s):  
Alexander Cooley ◽  
Daniel Nexon

This chapter identifies three drivers of hegemonic unraveling and transformation in international orders: great-power contestation and alternative order building; how the dominant power’s loss of its “patronage monopoly” enhances the bargaining leverage of weaker states; and the rise of counter-order movements, especially transnational ones, that weaken support for existing international arrangements—sometimes within the leading power itself. Because analysts tend to focus their attention on the relationship between power transitions and great-power wars, they have only recently begun to appreciate the significance of these three processes. This chapter shows that these challenges—from above, below, and within—played a key role in past power transitions and transformations in international order, including the decline of Spanish hegemony, challenges to British hegemony before World War I, the rise of fascism and Bolshevism during the interwar period, decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet system.


2012 ◽  
pp. 259-273
Author(s):  
Drago Njegovan

The issue of regionalism and the autonomy of certain areas is mainly related to the ethnic composition of the population. The idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina as a Serbian region in the Habsburg Monarchy was created back in 1690. It came into being 150 years later by the decision of the 1848 May Assembly. In a significantly different form, it lasted ten years as the Serbian Voivodship and Temisvar (Timisoara) Banat. In the next fifty years, a autonomous Serbian Vojvodina was just a dream. At the end of World War I the areas of Vojvodina, on the basis of the right to self-determination, entered the Kingdom of Serbia and thus became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, i.e. Yugoslavia. The idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina was then discarded. Some liberal politicians, supported by the Croats, tried to restore it in the interwar period but this option did not receive any support of voters at the elections. The illegal Communist Party politically promoted the idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina in a federalized Yugoslavia, which was achieved during World War II. At the end of the war, the autonomous Vojvodina remained part of Serbia, and according to the 1974 Constitution, it became a part of federal Yugoslavia. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the autonomy of Vojvodina within Serbia was preserved but recently, after the so-called democratic changes of 2000, domestic and foreign (EU and NATO) political engagement in Serbia has been more directed towards the greater autonomy of Vojvodina, and even its separation from Serbia, despite the two-thirds Serbian majority living in the Province.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 337-354
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock

In Russia, the impact of the end of World War I was subsumed under the far greater impact of the October Revolution, which led to a bifurcation of Russian culture into Soviet and émigré branches. This article examines a hybrid literary and musical work from the interwar period: Viacheslav Ivanov’s nine Roman Sonnets ( Rimskie sonety, 1924) and the musical settings that the composer Aleksandr Grechaninov made of five of these as his Sonetti Romani in 1939. Here, both poet and composer seek to convey the experience of finding oneself in one of Europe’s most evocative historical and cultural locations. At the same time, their evocation of Rome forges a powerful historical narrative of the city’s prior inhabitants. Accordingly, Rome emerges as an intertextual palimpsest of literary and artistic references, which together create a powerful sense of cultural continuity to offset the loss of the artist’s original homeland.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER M. STERBA

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including 42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.


1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic S. Lee

In recent years we have witnessed a revival of interest in the National Resources Committee (NRC) and its work on national planning. The research shows that the roots of national planning at the NRC are found in the Progressive Era, when individuals sought, through city, regional, and economic planning, to bring order to American society, in the government's management of the economy during World War I, and in Hoover's attempt at macromanagement of the economy. The research also shows that national economic planning, as distinct from other forms of planning, was an important component of the committee's work. In regard to this, researchers have acknowledged that Gardiner Means, as director of the Industrial Section of the Industrial Committee and author of The Structure of the American Economy, Part I: Basic Characteristics, was an important and outspoken advocate of economic planning within the NRC, but they have been less clear as to his specific contributions to economic planning. Moreover, the researchers have not extensively investigated the NRC position toward national economic planning, the economic models from which national economic plans would be developed, and the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the NRC approach to national economic planning. These omissions are not surprising inasmuch as neither Warken's (1979) nor Clawson's (1981) general coverage of the NRC provided much more than a brief and superficial description of the Industrial Section and a listing of its most important publications. Kalish (1963), on the other hand, discussed Means and the Industrial Section in more depth but in such a disjointed manner that it is impossible to grasp the movement toward economic planning that took place in the NRC and the important role Means played in the process. Finally, neither Chapman's (1981 and 1983) nor Jeffries's (1987) discussions of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the activities of the NRC dealt specifically with its impact on Means's work on economic planning.


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