The Economic Calculus of British Military Alliances in the Post-war Period

1975 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-39
Author(s):  
R. T. Maddock
Keyword(s):  
Military Alliances ◽  
British Military ◽  
Post War

Post-War Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelvin Everest
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Literary Journalism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Material World ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
British Military ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Post War

The post-war period following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo saw an influential literary journalism dominated by the political polarities of Whig and Tory. All cultural judgements were affected, in an era when British imperial confidence and international prestige were at their height. The settlement of the Congress of Vienna, the strength of the British military, and colonial expansion across the globe drove economic power while also exerting broad influence on Romantic cultural forms. Romantic literary culture was, however, not unitary, but marked by ironic oppositions and contrasting stylistic idioms. Visionary idealism, imaginative subjectivity, and emotionalism were countered by demotic realism and a groundedness in new social and political forces and in the sensuous appeal of the material world. These oppositions are internalized in the major work of the leading poets and novelists, who seek to balance a representation of their own times with a transcendent vision of experience.

Post-World War II Group Psychology and the Limits of Leadership: Bion, Lacan and the Leaderless Goup

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-339
Author(s):  
Max Maher
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Logical Time ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
British Military ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Post War

This article attempts to reveal something different about the afterlife of a number of innovations made in British psychiatry during World War II – in particular around the notion of leadership – by reading them in a much broader context which includes Jacques Lacan's article ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). Within such a broader trajectory, considerations of leaders and leaderlessness, which pressed towards democracy and egalitarianism, intersect (paradoxically) with other currents, equally radical, which envision a totalizing reduction of individuals to a technocratic mass. The article's starting point is Jacques Lacan's high praise of British military psychiatry – in particular of W.H. Bion, John Rickman and John Rawlings Rees, consulting psychiatrist to the army during the war. It then weighs Lacan's description of their achievements against a historical account of where such experiments led in the post-war context, and the social functions envisaged for them, that differed from those Lacan hoped they could perform. It concludes with a comparison of Lacan's article ‘Logical Time’, his first published after reading Bion and Rickman, to the contemporary work of Friedrich von Hayek, the early theorist of neoliberal economics, to illustrate the profound ambiguity which exists within the political implications of psychoanalytic theories of groups.

Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Military Alliances ◽  
Racial Tolerance ◽  
British Military ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
British North American

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

British Policy and Strategy in the Middle East in 1941: Three Wars ‘East of Suez’

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-221
Author(s):  
A. M. Fomin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Policy And Strategy ◽  
British Military ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk

After the defeat of France in the summer of 1940, Great Britain was left face to face with the Nazi Germany. It managed to endure the first act of the ‘Battle of Britain’, but could not wage a full-scale war on the continent. Under these conditions, the defense of the British positions in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East became a top priority for W. Churchill’s cabinet. The author examines three episodes of Great Britain’s struggle for the Middle East in 1941 (Iraq, Syria, Iran), framing them into the general logic of the German-British confrontation during this period.The author emphasizes that potential assertion of German hegemony in the Middle East could have made the defense of Suez almost impossible, as well as the communication with India, and would have provided the Reich with an access to almost inexhaustible supplies of fuel. Widespread antiBritish sentiments on the part of the local political and military elites could contribute greatly to the realization of such, catastrophic for Britain, scenario. Under these circumstances, the British government decided to capture the initiative. The paper examines the British military operations in Iraq and Syria. Special attention is paid to the complex dynamics of relations of the British cabinet with the Vichy regime and the Free France movement. As the author notes, the sharpest disagreements aroused on the future of Syria and Lebanon, and the prospects of granting them independence. In the Iran’s case, the necessity of harmonizing policies with the Soviet Union came to the fore. The growing German influence in the region, as well as the need to establish a new route for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, fostered mutual understanding. After the joint Anglo-Soviet military operation in August-September 1941, Iran was divided into occupation zones. Finally, the paper examines the UK position with regard to the neutrality of Turkey. The author concludes that all these military operations led to the creation of a ‘temporary regime’ of the British domination in the Middle East. However, the Anglo-French and Anglo-Soviet rivalries had not disappeared and, compounded by the growing US presence in the region, laid basis for new conflicts in the post-war period.

scholarly journals Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya

1990 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lonsdale
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Mau Mau ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
British Military ◽  
Detention Camps ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This article explores the imaginative meanings of Mau Mau which white and black protagonists invented out of their fearful ambitions for the future of Kenya. Within the general assumptions of white superiority and the need to destroy Mau Mau savagery, four mutually incompatible European myths can be picked out. Conservatives argued that Mau Mau revealed the latent terror-laden primitivism in all Africans, the Kikuyu especially. This reversion had been stimulated by the dangerous freedoms offered by too liberal a colonialism in the post-war world. The answer must be an unapologetic reimposition of white power. Liberals blamed Mau Mau on the bewildering psychological effects of rapid social change and the collapse of orderly tribal values. Africans must be brought more decisively through the period of transition from tribal conformity to competitive society, to play a full part in a multi-racial future dominated by western culture; this would entail radical economic reforms. Christian fundamentalists saw Mau Mau as collective sin, to be overcome by individual confession and conversion. More has been read into their rehabilitating mission in the detention camps than is warranted, since they had no theology of power. The whites with decisive power were the British military. They saw the emergency as a political war which needed political solutions, for which repression, social improvement and spiritual revival were no substitute. They, and the ‘hard-core’ Mau Mau detainees at Hola camp who thought like them, cleared the way for the peace. This was won not by any of the white constructions of the rising but by Kenyatta's Kikuyu political thought, which inspired yet criminalised Mau Mau.

‘Forward Petitions to NEWA for Whatever Guidance and Assistance, if any’: Post-War Demobilisation Conundrum in Nigeria, 1946–1951

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 586-599
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Nwafor Mordi
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Institutional Mechanism

In this article, the Nigerian Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Association is critically examined as an institutional mechanism Britain deployed to gauge and regulate the reintegration of Nigerian ex-servicemen into civilian life. It draws on Nigerian archival sources to establish that the demobilisation instrument, wartime recruitment promises and the skills ex-servicemen acquired during their military service had raised their hopes of gainful, post-war resettlement. However, the Nigerian Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Association, formed in 1946 by the government and led by British military personnel, became a buffer between ex-servicemen and the government and part of the regulatory officialdom that hampered the processing of the veterans’ petitions.

scholarly journals ‘There is No Such Thing as an Unrepatriable Pole’: Polish Displaced Persons in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-710
Author(s):  
Samantha K. Knapton
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Displaced Persons ◽  
British Military ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Post War ◽  
Welfare Workers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
East West

A group of Polish displaced persons (DPs) was stranded in the British zone of occupation in 1945, a smaller part of a much broader population upheaval in Europe in the 1940s that included Nazi forced labour and resettlement plans, as well as the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. The relationship between British military officials, welfare workers and the Polish DPs within the British zone deteriorated quickly after German surrender. Using the issue of repatriation as a focal point, this article will explore the growing tensions between the British and Polish who had fought alongside one another and place these within the wider context of increasing East-West tensions in the immediate post-war world. As the British tendency to look upon the Polish DPs as a troublesome ‘nuisance’ can be viewed as a by-product of pressure on an economically weakened Britain straining to live up to its pre-war stature, in this context the need to help the very people who embodied the provocation for going to war became irrelevant.

scholarly journals US imperialism in Latin America: then and now, here and there

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-123
Author(s):  
Henry Veltmeyer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Alliances ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
Post War ◽  
United Nations System ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Trade Deals ◽  
Bretton Woods Institutions ◽  
Political Actions

This article examines the global political actions undertaken by the United States and its allies since the Second World War toward the establishment and fortification of US dominance in geopolitical/economic spheres. It views the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, GATT-WTO), the United Nations System and military alliances (exempli gratia, NATO) as key mechanisms for the protection of US imperial interests. The post-war preoccupation with «development» is viewed as less altruistic than opportunistic, with the Western powers concerned that newly-independent developing nations would otherwise be attracted to the Soviet sphere of influence. Development, therefore, would place a «human face» on capitalism, making it acceptable as a socio-economic system. The author examines free trade deals, military cooperation and political actions undertaken by the US as it solidified its dominance of Latin American countries.

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