The President and the Political Use of Force

1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 541-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Ostrom ◽  
Brian L. Job

Throughout the post–World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.

Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The experience of World War II and the precedent of the Japanese American internment dramatically altered the political and legal landscape surrounding habeas corpus and suspension. This chapter discusses Congress’s enactment of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 along with its repeal in 1971. It further explores how in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, questions over the scope of executive authority to detain prisoners in wartime arose anew. Specifically, this chapter explores the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of the concept of the “citizen-enemy combatant” in its 2004 decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and evaluates Hamdi against historical precedents. Finally, the chapter explores how Hamdi established the basis for an expansion of the reach of the Suspension Clause in other respects—specifically, to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


Author(s):  
Bronwyn Jaques

In recent years, Canadian peacekeeping and UN involvement has assumed a place of high regard, reverence, and veneration, often at the expense of Canada’s military past. While its glorification is in many ways justified, the mythology surrounding Canada’s peacekeeping role has compelled many Canadians to view Canada solely as a peacekeeping nation. As a result, peacekeeping has become the “touchstone of our identity.” This mythology distorts the reality of Canadian military action to the point where Canadian veterans of NATO conflicts are often forgotten and it ignores the fact that many of the first peacekeepers left Canada “virtually unnoticed,” without the recognition and support of their nation. The mythology of peacekeeping misrepresents Canadian military conflicts and ignores that, in spite of the characterization of peacekeepers as nonviolent and unbiased actors, the majority of them were first and foremost Canadian soldiers, many of whom veterans of World War II. For the soldiers who came of age on the battlefields of Europe, the role of peacekeeping was a frustrating and politically charged experience, whereby they held no power and they felt they made very little positive impact. Despite the virtually universal glorification and celebration of peacekeepers in recent years, investigation of the “Cold War Home Front” demonstrates the difficulties faced by Canadian NATO soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and their families in a society that wanted to move beyond the years of struggle, pain and sacrifice in war time and had little sympathy for the men and women who ‘chose’ to leave their families to serve in wars their nation was not fighting.


1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.


2019 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Edyta Kahl

The problems discussed in the article concern the educational policy in Poland in the first years after World War II (1944-1948). The article presents the educational concepts and postulates of different political fractions and teachers’ circles, which already before the end of the War had formulated their own educational programmes. The discussions about the shape of the post-war educational system, particularly the organization of schools, the school structure, the ideological foundations, the syllabus, school handbooks and teachers’ training, were carried out, among others, between the representatives of the National Democrats, Christian-national groups, political parties, teachers’ organizations and school administration. Their attitudes to many problems varied considerably, and thus, the situation required social debate and confrontation of opinions. The quality of those discussions, the style in which the educational problems were solved as well as the direction of the structural and ideological transformations in the post-war educational system, were significantly influenced by the geopolitical post-war conditions and a strong position of the Left, consolidated by the Soviets, in the policy of the Polish state. In the expansive struggle for the political leadership in Poland, the Left used different forms of pressure and terror in order to eliminate the opposition. To achieve social legitimization for its pseudo-democratic activities, the Left undertook attempts to encourage other groups to co-operate. Particularly, the communists tried to attract cultural elites, including teachers, who they wanted to use to start the process of rebuilding social consciousness according to the rules of the ideology of Marxism and Leninism. These monopolistic ambitions, in the first years after World War II, were reflected in the destruction of the underground state and the development of administrative structures of the totalitarian system. As far as the educational system is concerned, the policy of the Left was manifested in more and more apparent actions taken to subordinate school to the communists’ interests, thus including education into the process of the transformation of the political system. All those activities, were part of the phenomenon of structural Sovietization, formed the foundations for the ideological offensive, planned by the communists and conducted on a massive scale after the formation, in 1948, of the monopolistic Stalinian party - PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party).


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Antic

This article analyzes how the ideological discourse of the Croatian fascist movement (the Ustaša) evolved in the course of World War II under pressures of the increasingly popular and powerful communist armed resistance. It explores and interprets the way the regime formulated its ideological responses to the political/ideological challenge of the leftist guerrilla and its propaganda in the period after the proclamation of the Ustaša Independent State of Croatia in 1941 until the end of the war. The author demonstrates that the regime, faced with its own political weakness and inability to maintain authority, shaped its rhetoric and ideological self-definition in a direct dialogue with the Marxist discourse of the communist propaganda, incorporating important Marxist concepts in its theory of state and society and redefining its concepts of national boundaries and racial identity to match the communists’ propaganda of inclusive, civic national Yugoslavism. This massive ideological renegotiation of the movement’s basic tenets and its consequent leftward shift reflected a change in an opposite direction from the one commonly encountered in narratives of other fascisms’ ideological evolution paths (most notably in Italy and Germany): as the movement became a regime, the Ustaša transformed from its initial conservatism, traditionalism (in both sociopolitical and cultural matters), pseudo-feudal worldview of peasant worship and antiurbanism, anti-Semitism, and rigid racialism in relation to nation and state into an ideology of increasingly inclusive, culture-based, and nonethnic nationalism and with an exceptionally strong leftist rhetoric of social welfare, class struggle, and the rights of the working class.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
Boris Valentinovich Petelin ◽  
Vladilena Vadimovna Vorobeva

In the political circles of European countries attempts to reformat the history of World War II has been continuing. Poland is particularly active; there at the official level, as well as in the articles and in the speeches of politicians, political scientists and historians crude attacks against Russia for its commitment to objective assessments of the military past are allowed. Though, as the authors of this article mention, Russian politicians have not always been consistent in evaluation of Soviet-Polish relationships, hoping to reach a certain compromise. If there were any objections, they were mostly unconvincing. Obviously, as the article points, some statements and speeches are not without emotional colouring that is characteristic, when expressing mutual claims. However, the deliberate falsification of historical facts and evidence, from whatever side it occurs, does not meet the interests of the Polish and Russian peoples, in whose memory the heroes of the Red Army and the Polish Resistance have lived and will live. The authors point in the conclusions that it is hard to achieve mutual respect to key problems of World War II because of the overlay of the 18th – 19th centuries, connected with the “partitions of Poland”, the existence of the “Kingdom of Poland” as part of the Russian Empire, Soviet-Polish War of 1920. There can be only one way out, as many Russian and Polish scientists believe – to understand the complex twists and turns of Russo-Polish history, relying on the documents. Otherwise, the number of pseudoscientific, dishonest interpretations will grow.


Author(s):  
Stanislav Polnar

Since the end of World War II, the investigation of anti-state delinquency of military personnel was realised by the military intelligence. It originated with Czechoslovak military units in the USSR and were influenced by Soviet security authorities. After 1945 and 1948 these bodies remained in the structure of the Ministry of National Defense, but from the beginning of the 1951 they moved to the structure of the Ministry of the Interior following the Soviet model. The legal status of these bodies was always unclear and did not correspond to the legal regulation. Another important article in the investigation of the political delinquency of soldiers was the military prosecutor’s office as part of the socialist-type prosecutor’s office, which was subjected to general trends in the regulation of criminal proceedings.


Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger

This chapter analyzes the consolidation in 1942 of the two major, religiously defined institutional forces of the entire period from World War II to the present. The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, was the first moment at which rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together and agreed upon an agenda for the postwar world. The chapter addresses the following questions: Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 288-298
Author(s):  
Katherine Davies ◽  

Heidegger’s three Country Path Conversations have generated much scholarly interest for their elaboration on Heidegger’s thinking of Gelassenheit, scientific and technological thinking, the work of art, evil, and the political aftermath of World War II. In this paper, I argue that these texts also, upon closer analysis, contain a Heideggerian pedagogical philosophy. In each text, I will show, a dynamic of teaching and learning is at play, most especially when it seems to be absent. Further, I will show how only when these three texts are read together does a fuller account of Heidegger’s pedagogy emerge. In the “Triadic Conversation,” I draw out the affective dimensions according to which the Guide’s teaches the Scientist to contest his own worldview. In the “Tower Conversation,” I show how the Teacher must practice what he himself teaches, choosing to tarry with that which causes him discomfort and anxiety. Finally, I read the “Evening Conversation” as an example of students assuming the teaching role themselves when the teacher is nowhere to be found, fulfilling the hopes any teacher would have for her students.


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