scholarly journals Thucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-287
Author(s):  
Christine Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
General Audience ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Close Analysis

The challenge of democratic statecraft is a recurring subject matter in twentieth- and twenty-first century wartime expositions of Thucydides’ History. This article examines the readings of two American scholars with great public presence, Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson, showing how they reflect enduring anxieties about the promise and perils of liberal democracy in a hostile world. I engage in close analysis of their pre- and post-9/11 interpretations of Thucydides in order to ascertain their judgments about democracy. Kagan and Hanson both use the History to defend democracy, but in ways that are at odds with their implicit criticisms of democratic politics. We can make sense of this tension by appreciating the performative dimension of their readings of Thucydides. Beyond distilling Thucydides for a general audience, their readings enact a response to concerns about democratic weakness with an account of democratic virtues. Their hermeneutic strategies are thus implicated in rhetorical politics that may have deleterious, if unintended, consequences for the democracy they seek to defend. I conclude by illustrating how Kagan and Hanson are paradigmatic rather than idiosyncratic. Their democratic exceptionalism finds echoes in leftist interpretations of ancient Greece and post-Cold War empirical political science.1

Reflections on Lawrence Freedman’s ‘Deterrence’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
International Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Social Strategy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.

Italy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Coticchia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
First Century ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the bipolar era, Italy has regularly undertaken military interventions around the world, with an average of 8,000 units employed abroad in the twenty-first century. Moreover, Italy is one of the principal contributors to the UN operations. The end of the cold war represented a turning point for Italian defence, allowing for greater military dynamism. Several reforms have been approved, while public opinion changed its view regarding the armed forces. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive perspective of the process of transformation that occurred in post-cold-war Italian defence, looking at the evolution of national strategies, military doctrines, and the structure of forces. After a brief literature review, the study highlights the process of transformation of Italian defeshnce policy since 1989. Through primary and secondary sources, the chapter illustrates the main changes that occurred, the never-ending cold-war legacies, and key challenges.

Conclusion

After Lavinia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
First Century ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Legal Rationality

This concluding chapter reflects on marriage in the contemporary West, noting that it has become an affective arrangement. In Britain and the northern European countries that still retain a constitutional form of monarchy, twenty-first-century royalty now prefer their own subjects as marriage partners, even if it means marrying a commoner like Kate Middleton. To the extent that these marriages to indigenous commoners have any bearing on foreign policy, they reaffirm the nationalist sentiments of the post-Westphalian state. The chapter argues that, despite all the legal rationality, global peace remains as elusive now as it was when Europeans tried to settle their quarrels through interdynastic marriage. It suggests that the opposition between the West and its post-Cold War enemies has brought the matter of gender and the place of women once more to the center of international relations.

Politics and Populists

2021 ◽  
pp. 94-122
Author(s):  
Jussi M. Hanhimäki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New Era ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Left And Right

Chapter 4 examines the transatlantic political space, with special attention to the rise of populism. Particularly since 2016, analysts have been obsessed with the dawn of a new era of post-truth politics and illiberal democracy. Refusing such pessimism, the chapter asserts that the rise of transatlantic populism is part and parcel of the reshuffling of democratic politics after 1989, when labels like “left” and “right” no longer carried the meaning they once had. Moreover, the transatlantic nature of populism—like the rise of the so-called Third Way in the 1990s—speaks volumes of the degree of interconnectivity between Europe and America in the post–Cold War world. While each country’s domestic politics can be idiosyncratic, the “macro” trends have grown increasingly similar in the past three decades. There is, the chapter contends, a transatlantic political space in which ideas resonate and “travel” at increasing speed.

Russian-American Relations in the Post-Cold War World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
First Century ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Global Citizen ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Balkan Wars ◽  
Mutual Interest ◽  
Defence Reactions

Why did the Russian take-over of Crimea come as a surprise to so many observers in the academic practitioner and global-citizen arenas? The answer presented in this book is a complex one, rooted in late-Cold War dualities but also in the variegated policy patterns of the two powers after 1991. This book highlights the key developmental stages in the evolution of the Russian-American relationship in the post-Cold War world. The 2014 crisis was provoked by conflicting perspectives over the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the expansion of NATO to include former communist allies of Russia as well as three of its former republics, the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and the Russian move to invade Georgia in 2008. This book uses a number of key theories in political science to create a framework for analysis and to outline policy options for the future. It is vital that the attentive public confront the questions raised in these pages in order to control the reflexive and knee-jerk reactions to all points of conflict that emerge on a regular basis between America and Russia.Key topics include struggles over the Balkans, the expansion of NATO, the challenges posed by terrorism to both nations, wars fought by both powers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, conflict over missile defence, reactions to post-2011 turmoil in the Middle East, and the mutual interest in establishing priorities in Asia.

Peaceful Change: The Post–Cold War Evolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey W. Taliaferro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Globalization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Global Leadership ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Independent Variables ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Cold War Era

This chapter traces the evolution of thinking about peaceful change at the systemic (or global) and regional levels during the post–Cold War era. Unipolarity, US liberal hegemony, and the acceleration of economic globalization were just some of the independent variables that scholars argued might facilitate such peaceful change. Each has yielded unintended consequences, including, but not limited to, the overreach of the United States during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and its subsequent retreat from global leadership, the emergence of China as a peer competitor, Russia’s efforts to undermine the United States and its allies through hybrid interference, and the uneven impact of globalization on the security strategies of different types of states across several regions. In sum, the effects on peaceful change at the systemic and regional levels are decidedly mixed.

Secession Revisited: General Framework and Lessons From the Referenda in Catalonia and Kurdistan

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-214
Author(s):  
Enrico Milano
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
First Century ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Regulatory Function ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New States

The recent referenda held in Catalonia and Kurdish Iraq have reignited the debate over referenda, self-determination and unilateral secession and over the role of international law as a legal framework capable of governing and channelling those dramatic changes towards desired ends. The debate has been ever present in the Post Cold War period, considering that the number of states has increased from just over 150 to 196, with many of the new states emerging from non-consensual processes of separation. The present article assesses the general international legal framework applicable to secession, including the scope and content of principles such as territorial integrity, self-determination and uti possidetis and tests whether and to what extent the two recent separatist claims in Catalonia and Kurdistan fit into that framework. The lessons drawn are that international law is increasingly relevant to the regulation of secession and yet the practice related to the referendum in Catalonia highlights international law’s subsidiary regulatory function and the fact that, indeed, even in the twenty-first century, international law may, in some cases, remain neutral in secession attempts.

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