American diplomatic history and international thought: a constitutional perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C Hendrickson

This essay offers a constitutional perspective on the American encounter with the problem of international order. Its point of departure is the American Founding, a subject often invisible in both the history of international thought and contemporary International Relations theory. Although usually considered as an incident within the domestic politics of the United States, the Founding displays many key ideas that have subsequently played a vital role in both international political thought and IR theory. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ideas and to take account of their passage through time, up to and including the present day. Those ideas shine a light not only on how we organize our scholarly enterprises but also on the contemporary direction of US foreign policy and the larger question of world order.

Author(s):  
Attila Mezei

China has been a rising power in East Asia for decades. The end of the Cold War and the increasing effects of globalization brought the country in the forefront of attention on the international scene. The economic importance of the East Asian giant cannot be denied. Its economic power has been translating into a powerful tool to upset the balance of power tremendously. China has been expanding its influence around the globe and challenging the status quo more than ever before. The United States, the strongest state in the current international system has to pay attention to the increasingly assertive China. The USA uses several strategies to mitigate the threat China poses to the world order that the USA built. The structural forces of the international system, the Covid-19 pandemic, and American domestic politics make the threat of rising China more challenging. In my paper, I try to identify the balancing strategies of the United States in the 21st century against China. In my opinion, the application of neoclassical realist school of international relations can foreshadow the possible paths of the conflict. The United States of America has to use a wide variety of balancing strategies in order to counter the threat. A heavier reliance on allies is inevitable for the United States if it wants to contain the increasing influence of China around the globe. The USA should increase its hard-, soft-, and asymmetrical balancing methods mixed with smart power strategies to remain on the top of the international system. In my opinion, the showdown between China and the United States of America will be inevitable in the medium term. If the USA uses its position right, the peaceful containment of Chinese ambitions is possible. The successes of the above-mentioned strategies will decide how the competition of these two countries shape the international relations in the coming decades.


Author(s):  
A. Y. Borisov

From ancient times, war was called "the creator of all things". And winners created the postwar world order. The article reveals the backstage, the diplomatic history of the Great Patriotic War, which make the picture of the main events of the war, that culminated in victory May 1945 in the capital of the defeated Third Reich, complete. The decisive role of the Soviet Union and its armed forces in the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies was the strong foundation on which to build the strategy and tactics of Soviet diplomacy during the war. It was implemented in the course of negotiations with the Western Allies - the United States and Britain, led by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. World history teaches, large and small wars have been fought on Earth for centuries for specific political interests. In this context, the Second World War has been a shining example not only to curb the aggressor states, the liberation of peoples from the Nazi tyranny, but also an attempt by the victor to organize a new, better postwar world order to guarantee a durable and lasting peace based on the cooperation of the allied states. But the allies in the war did not become allies in the organization of the postwar world. Their collaboration briefly survived the end of hostilities and was overshadowed start turning to the Cold War. It was largely due to the US desire to realize their material advantages to the detriment of the Soviet Union after the war and build a system that would be a one-sided expression of the interests of Washington. Americans, especially after the death of President Roosevelt, and during his successor Truman understood international cooperation as an assertion of its global leadership while ignoring the interests of the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the war.


2018 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Denzenlkham Ulambayar

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Mateusz Chaberski

Summary In recent science-fiction literature, we can witness a proliferation of new counterfactual narratives which take the 17th century as their point of departure. Unlike steampunk narratives, however, their aim is not to criticise the socio-political effects caused by contemporary technological development. Such authors as Neal Stephenson or Ian Tregillis, among others, are interested in revisiting the model of development in Western societies, routing around the logic of progress. Moreover, they demonstrate that modernity is but an effect of manifold contingent and indeterminate encounters of humans and nonhumans and their distinct temporalities. Even the slightest modification of their ways of being could have changed Western societies and cultures. Thus, they necessitate a rather non-anthropocentric model of counterfactuality which is not tantamount to the traditional alternative histories which depart from official narratives of the past. By drawing on contemporary multispecies ethnography, I put forward a new understanding of counter-factuality which aims to reveal multiple entangled human and nonhuman stories already embedded in the seemingly unified history of the West. In this context, the concept of “polyphonic assemblage” (Lowenhaupt-Tsing) is employed to conceptualize the contingent and open-ended encounters of human and nonhuman historical actors which cut across different discourses and practices. I analyse Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle to show the entangled stories of humans and nonhumans in 17th century sciences, hardly present in traditional historiographies. In particular, Stephenson’s depiction of quicksilver and coffeehouse as nonhuman historical actors is scrutinized to show their vital role in the production of knowledge at the dawn of modernity.


Author(s):  
Andrés Malamud ◽  
Júlio C. Rodriguez

From November 1902 through February 1912, four presidents governed Brazil. Throughout all this period, though, only one person headed the foreign ministry: José Maria da Silva Paranhos Jr., alias Baron of Rio Branco (20 April 1845–10 February 1912). This political wonder and diplomatic giant was to shape Brazil’s international doctrine and diplomatic traditions for the following century. His major achievement was to peacefully solve all of Brazil’s border disputes with its South American neighbors. Founded in 1945, Brazil’s prestigious diplomatic school carries his name, Instituto Rio Branco, and, since the early 2000s, Brazilian foreign policy has become the largest subfield of international relations in university departments across the country. Indeed, Brazilian foreign policy is to Brazilian academia what American politics is to US academia, namely, a singular phenomenon that has taken over a general field. In contrast with the United States, most in-depth research from about 1998 to 2010 came from foreign-based scholars; however, since then a large cadre of mostly young academics in Brazil have seized the agenda. Unlike the pre-2000 period, the orientation has been toward public policy rather than diplomatic history. That the top Brazilian journals of international relations are now published in English rather than Portuguese attests to the increasing internationalization of the field.


1938 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 146
Author(s):  
Max Savelle ◽  
Samuel Flagg Bemis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Amitav Acharya

Buzan and Acharya challenge the discipline of International Relations to reimagine itself in the light of the thinking about, and practice of, international relations and world order from premodern India, China and the Islamic world. This prequel to their 2019 book, The Making of Global International Relations, takes the story back from the two-century tale of modern IR, to reveal the deep global history of the discipline. It shows the multiple origins and meanings of many concepts thought of as only modern and Western. It opens pathways for the rest of the world into this most Eurocentric of disciplines, encouraging them to bring their own histories, concepts and theories with them. The authors have written this book with the hope of inspiring others to extend these pathways by bringing in a wider array of cultures, and exploring how they thought about and acted in worlds composed of multiple, independent, collective actors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ku Daeyeol

This important new study by one of Korea’s leading historians focuses on the international relations of colonial Korea – from the Japanese rule of the peninsula and its foreign relations (1905–1945) to the ultimate liberation of the country at the end of the Second World War. In addition, it fills a significant gap – the ‘blank space’ – in Korean diplomatic history. Furthermore, it highlights several other fundamental aspects in the history of modern Korea, such as the historical perception of the policy-making process and the attitudes of both China and Britain which influenced US policy regarding Korea at the end of World War II.


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