The Study of International Relations in Great Britain: Further Connections

1986 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 626-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene M. Lyons

Aside from language, students of international relations in the United States and Great Britain have several things in common: parallel developments in the emergence of international relations as a field of study after World War I, and more recent efforts to broaden the field by drawing security issues and changes in the international political economy under the broad umbrella of “international studies.” But a review of four recent books edited by British scholars demonstrates that there is also a “distance” between British and American scholarship. Compared with dominant trends in the United States, the former, though hardly monolithic and producing a rich and varied literature, is still very much attached to historical analysis and the concept of an “international society” that derives from the period in modern history in which Britain played a more prominent role in international politics. Because trends in scholarship do, in fact, reflect national political experience, the need continues for transnational cooperation among scholars in the quest for strong theories in international relations.

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Thompson

International relations have been the object of widespread study and review in the United States since World War I. Attention has focussed alternately on the flow of events, the goals and standards, and the underlying principles of world affairs. Primary emphasis has been directed to empirical, normative and theoretical problems. Along the way, scholars, statesmen and observers have singled out certain factors from the myriad dimensions of international society. Students have looked for concepts and methodologies by which order and meaning could be derived in this as in other complex fields.


1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Finch

The founding fifty years ago of a society to promote the establishment of international relations on the basis of law and justice was a step marking the progress that had been made at the beginning of the century in the age-long efforts to find a means of substituting reason for force in the settlement of international controversies. At that time arbitration was generally regarded as the most suitable and acceptable substitute for war. Great Britain and the United States had both heavily contributed to that conviction first by submitting to arbitration under the Jay Treaty of 1794 the numerous misunderstandings that developed in carrying out the provisions of the Peace Treaty of 1783, and then three-quarters of a century later in submitting to arbitration by the Treaty of Washington of 1871 the dangerous Alabama Claims dispute following the American Civil War.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-82
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Cook

This article contributes to the discussion of internationalisation in higher education in the context of the international relations (IR) subfield of political science. The field of IR might seem by definition to be ‘internationalised’, but the underlying theoretical assumptions of the field, its social science rationalism and privileging of the unitary nation-state exhibit an American or Eurocentric bias. This Western bias with its emphasis on security issues is then replicated in research agendas and reproduced in higher education classrooms across the United States and beyond. I argue that the way forward to promoting internationalisation partially lies with promoting plurality and diversity within research and in the classroom or what Lamy calls ‘challenging hegemonic paradigms’ (2007).


1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman T. Strauss

The erosion of Great Britain's economic and political foothold in Brazil reached critical proportions during the 1870's, at which time England sustained dual commercial assaults by German and American interest groups. In his study of British Preëminence in Brazil, Alan K. Manchester says that the first rival to seriously threaten Britain's role in Brazil was Germany and he goes on to cite examples of this threat during 1873. While Manchester alludes to the United States as another economic rival of Great Britain during the nineteenth century, he suggests that the United States figured only as a minor competitor until World War I, when it would supplant Great Britain as the principal supplier of the South American nation. A closer examination of the sources, however, indicates that the United States was anything but a minor competitor and actually a very real threat to Great Britain during the 1870's. The study undertaken by Richard Graham discloses that the British investment in Brazil slowed down during the years 1873-1879. During this period the United States took advantage of the opportunity to increase its economic role and its political prestige in Brazil at the expense of the British.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-126
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson

International relations scholarship overwhelmingly expects that relatively rising states will threaten and challenge declining great powers. In practice, however, rising states can also cooperate with and support declining powers. What explains the rising state's choice of policy? When do rising states support or prey on declining great powers, and why do such strategies vary across time and space? The answer depends on the rising state's broader strategic calculations. All things being equal, a rising state will generally support a declining power when the latter can be used to offset threats from other great powers that can harm the rising state's security. Conversely, when using a declining state to offset such challenges is not a plausible option, the rising state is likely to pursue a predation strategy. The level of assertiveness of support or predation, meanwhile, depends on the declining power's military posture: the stronger the declining state is militarily, the less assertive the rising state tends to be. A review of the strategies adopted by two relatively rising powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, toward a declining Great Britain after 1945, and of a rising United States vis-à-vis a declining Soviet Union in the late Cold War, illustrates how this argument outperforms explanations that focus instead on the importance of economic interdependence and ideology.


1961 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. R. Fox ◽  
Annette Baker Fox

INTERNATIONAL relations, as a subject of instruction, has flourished more in the United States than elsewhere and more in recent years than ever before. What forces explain its growth and its present shape? How have methods of teaching it been affected by the goals of the teacher, by his relation to research, and by the formal organization of international studies in American colleges and universities? To what extent is the American experience so rooted in uniquely American conditions that it is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere? These questions will be considered in turn.


Author(s):  
Ihor Likhtej ◽  

This article covers the influence of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on international relations, in particular on the official position of the United States, Great Britain and France. It analyses the process of discussing “the Hungarian question” at the UN Security Council and at the emergency General Assembly session. The author emphasizes the significance of the activities of the special commission for investigating events in Hungary established by the UN General Assembly in autumn 1956, as well as the great merit of the Danish diplomat Bang Jensen in investigating and formulating the text of commission’s report, which covered the struggle of the Hungarian people for freedom.


2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aeleah Soine

Campaigns for state nursing registration in the United States and Great Britain have a prominent place in the historical scholarship on nursing professionalization; the closely related German campaign has received less scholarly attention. Applying a transnational perspective to these three national movements highlights the collaborative and interrelated nature of nursing reform prior to World War I and recognizes the important contribution of German nurses to this dialogue and agenda. Focusing particularly on the years 1909–12, this article depicts a generation of German, American, and British nurses who organized national and international nursing associations to realize state registration as a stepping stone to other markers of professional recognition, such as collegiate education, full political citizenship, social welfare, and labor legislation. However, the consequent reliance of these strategies on nation-states as arbiters of citizenship and professional status undermined the shared ideological foundation of international and national nursing leaders. This article contributes to a more multinational understanding of how these international nursing leaders transcended and were confined by the limits of their nation-states in the years leading up to World War I.


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