Denizens of a Center

2021 ◽  
pp. 384-400
Author(s):  
Ryan Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
Strategic Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Is Value

This chapter reviews the most commonly utilized historical example of grand strategy—the early Cold War—and revisits the period's most frequently analyzed protagonists: George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and Dean Acheson. However, it is not about that era's seminal strategic doctrine: containment. Instead, it explores the relationship between law and power and argues for a new understanding of the intellectual architecture of the early Cold War. At mid-century, American liberals shared a particular vocabulary about strategy—about realism itself—that reflected specific claims about natural law, sovereign interdependence, and World War I. Drawing on rarely examined primary documents, the chapter excavates this conversation and suggests that these assumptions informed how American leaders defined their aspirations and their capabilities. At a time when US leaders are profoundly divided over the country's foreign policy, there is value in revisiting the concepts that animated and circumscribed an earlier generation's strategic thought.

Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children’, 1920–30

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA ROOS
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Family ◽  
Illegitimate Children ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Policy Discourses

AbstractThis essay revisits 1920s German debates over the illegitimate children of the Rhineland occupation to examine hitherto neglected fluctuations in the relationship between nationalism and racism in Weimar Germany. During the early 1920s, nationalist anxieties focused on the alleged racial ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race children of colonial French soldiers. After 1927, plans for the forced sterilisation and deportation of the mixed-race children were dropped; simultaneously, officials began to support German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers. This hitherto neglected shift in German attitudes towards the ‘Rhineland bastards’ sheds new light on the role of debates over gender and the family in the process of Franco–German rapprochement. It also enhances our understanding of the contradictory political potentials of popularised foreign policy discourses about women's and children's victimisation emerging from World War I.

scholarly journals 18. Geopolitics and Grand Strategy

2018 ◽  
pp. 308-326
Author(s):  
Stefanie Ortmann ◽  
Nick Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
Changing World

This chapter discusses the concept of geopolitics and its role in formulating and implementing a grand strategy. It first provides an overview of the relationship between grand strategy and geography before explaining how the meanings of grand strategy and geopolitics evolved in response to changing world historical contexts. It then considers the reasons why geopolitics and grand strategy are linked to the politics of great powers and why these concepts are currently making a comeback. In particular, it examines the revival of geopolitical thinking after the Second World War and how geopolitical reasoning informed containment as a grand strategy during the cold war. It also takes a look at the pitfalls and problems associated with formulating a grand strategy, especially in today's complex international environment. Finally, it argues that there is a need to rethink geopolitics with the ultimate goal of balancing ends and means.

Grand Strategies (or Ascendant Ideas) since 1919

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-172
Author(s):  
David Milne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Grand Strategies

This chapter investigates the most ascendant ideas at work in America's rise to become a global power and then a superpower after the end of World War I. Segmenting US foreign policy since 1919 by “grand strategy” would seem to require grand simplification. Even those administrations commonly identified as practicing quintessential grand strategy appear more inchoate when approached from the protagonists’ perspectives at the time. To give one such example, the sequence of foreign policy innovations that the United States spearheaded from 1945 to 1949 were collectively possessed of considerable foresight. But they were also a series of strategies advocated by various actors at different times with motives that do not necessarily reduce to a mono-strategic essence. Even in regard to post-1945 US foreign policy, a period that has been sub-divided by many distinguished scholars, it is difficult to identify clearly demarcated grand strategies that provide overarching clarity. The chapter focuses on the ascendant ideas that have informed policymaking, shaped public discourse, forced other ideas into decline, and that can perhaps even be identified as “representative” of particular eras.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

scholarly journals Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors: Enmity and ethics in Just War Cinema

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Finlay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

AbstractHow do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between thejus ad bellumand thejus in bellothat anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.

scholarly journals The Sino-Russian Relationship: Fellow Travellers in the West-dominated World

2018 ◽  
Vol 236 ◽  
pp. 1197-1205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Kaczmarski
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Dividing Line

A decade ago, Beijing's relations with Moscow were of marginal interest to China scholars. Topics such as growing Sino-American interdependence-cum-rivalry, engagement with East Asia or relations with the developing world overshadowed China's relationship with its northern neighbour. Scholars preoccupied with Russia's foreign policy did not pay much attention either, regarding the Kremlin's policy towards China as part and parcel of Russia's grand strategy directed towards the West. The main dividing line among those few who took a closer look ran between sceptics and alarmists. The former interpreted the post-Cold War rapprochement as superficial and envisioned an imminent clash of interests between the two states. The latter, a minority, saw the prospect of an anti-Western alliance.

India and the United Nations

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manu Bhagavan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Mahatma Gandhi ◽  
Permanent Member ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Jawaharlal Nehru ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses India’s association with the United Nations. Guided by the vision of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country initially had a highly successful grand strategy guiding its foreign policy that placed that UN at the centre of its diplomatic efforts. Things took a sharp downward turn, however, during the administration of Indira Gandhi, and the relationship has lacked cohesion and meaningful direction ever since. In recent times, India has sought to become a permanent member of the Security Council and has relatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to wield influence, though large questions about its purpose and goals remain. Contemporary crises, though, now make the answers ever more urgent.

US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M Walt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites

This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today. Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past. Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.

scholarly journals The high unemployment rate in Britain during the interwar period

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 01027
Author(s):  
Yifei Liu
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Unemployment Rate ◽  
World War ◽  
High Unemployment ◽  
High Unemployment Rate ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unemployment Problem

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.

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