A ‘Near-Communist’ Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 75-106
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

The third chapter examines perceptions of the Irish revolutionary left following the outbreak of what became known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Unrest in Northern Ireland raised the question of Irish revolutionaries again seeking Kremlin assistance, as KGB ‘special actions’ through proxy organisations had been a tool of Soviet foreign policy. London, at times, had a Cold War understanding in relation to developments in Ireland. And so did the US embassy in Dublin, because White House fears in relation to any threat posed by communism were fuelled by widespread opposition in the West to America’s war in Vietnam. This chapter looks at the geo-political dimension to the northern crisis as it was raised at the United Nations (UN) and the Soviets began to take a greater interest in developments in Ireland. Sectarian violence in Northern Ireland led to a split in the republican movement and the emergence of the leftist Official IRA.

1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166

The third session of the West Indian Conference opened at Guadeloupe, French West Indies on December 1, 1948 and closed on December 14, after considering policy to be followed by the Caribbean Commission for the next two years. The Conference was attended by two delegates from each of the fifteen territories within the jurisdiction of the commission and observers invited by the commission from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United Nations and its specialized agencies.


Author(s):  
Ilan Pappé

This chapter examines the peace process historically as a strategy of the settler colonialist state and as a native response to it. It argues that the peace process was conceived at a particular moment, in June 1967, as part of the settler colonialist state's attempt to reconcile Israel's wish to remain demographically a Jewish state and its desire to expand geographically without losing the pretense of being a democratic state in the post-1967 context. It is also argued that the Israeli political and military elite knowingly engaged in this dilemma, contemplating the possibility of a scenario of its own or of others' making that would place it in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. All three vantage points suggest that the two-state solution and the process that is supposed to bring it about are an Israeli plan, with modifications, by a powerful coalition of the US, EU, European Union, Russia, the United Nations, most of the Arab states, the Fatah Palestinian leadership, the Zionist Left and Center in Israel, and some well-known figures in the Palestinian solidarity movement. It is the power of the coalition and not the logic of the solution or the process that has maintained the “peace process” for so long, despite its apparent failure.


Author(s):  
Jan Fellerer

This chapter identifies key notions about the nature and workings of language and their wider political implications in Europe from around 1789 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are at least three formations, aesthetic and philosophical, linguistic, and political. Even though treated under separate headings for ease of exposition, they are meant to meet in this introduction in response to more granular surveys. The political dimension in particular tends to be left to historians or to philologists who deal with that part of the continent where it first gained real prominence: East and East Central Europe. Thus, after the first two sections on aspects of philosophy and early linguistics, where the focus is on Germany with France and England, the third section on language and nation moves eastwards to the Slavonic-speaking lands, to finally return back, albeit very briefly, to the West. The main purpose of this survey to provide introduction and guidance.


1951 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 762-770
Author(s):  
W. W. Kulski

The postwar cultural isolationism towards the West and a specifically Soviet complex of inferiority inherited from the early years of the regime have produced since the last war an attitude of self-assertion. This somehow childish attitude is expressed, among others, by a frenzy of claims to Russian priorities not only in regard to technological inventions, but also in respect to the learned theories. The Soviet scholars seem to forget that the priority of a thinker in stating a concept, though important in itself, does not reduce another ’ s merit of fully developing a new concept in all its intellectual aspects; moreover, the importance of an intellectual must also be measured by the actual influence he exerted upon his contemporaries and the succeeding generations. A Russian writer may have preceded Bodin in formulating the idea of the state supreme power, but this does not alter the fact that Bodin was the first to establish a fully developed theory of sovereignty, nor does it diminish the Frenchman’s influence upon many generations. However, this Soviet frenzy of claiming priorities may have one beneficial result, namely, it might enrich our knowledge of the older Russian thought. The West is fairly familiar with some Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but knows next to nothing concerning their predecessors. This is why one may read with interest V. I. Zuev’s article:“The Priority of Russian Juristic Thought in the Establishment and Development of the Theory of Sovereignty” (Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, No. 3, March, 1951, pp. 24-37). This article presents another interest as well: It illustrates the Soviet opposition to the contemporary Western tendency to get rid of the encumbering dogma of state sovereignty; the concept of state sovereignty provides a theoretical basis for Soviet foreign policy, especially within the United Nations, and supplies the necessary arguments for denying the superiority of international law over municipal law:


Author(s):  
Angela Poh

Chapter 4 explains the Chinese leadership’s impetus in using its sanctions rhetoric and elaborates on the substance of such rhetoric. It suggests that China’s experience of being a target of Western sanctions since its establishment in 1949 had convinced its leaders that ‘the West’ was determined to stigmatise China through various forms of economic punishment, with the ultimate goal of undermining the Chinese government’s political legitimacy. The Chinese political elite therefore engaged in a rhetorical counter-stigmatisation strategy that sought to delegitimise the sanctions strategy of the US and its allies by depicting them as imperialist and interventionist. China also sought to gradually redefine, in the understanding of United Nations Member States, the notion of when and how sanctions could legitimately be employed.


Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Soviet Union decided to support national liberation movements to undermine the US and its allies worldwide. Concurrently, the IRA leadership began to emphasise socialism and co-operate with communists in various agitations – the most significant would be the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. This chapter discusses perceptions of the republican movement’s ‘new departure’. William Craig, the Northern Ireland minister of home affairs, contended that the communist-influenced IRA aimed to manipulate the civil rights issue as a prelude to another armed campaign. In 1969 Northern Ireland’s prime minister, Major James Chichester-Clark, warned that some civil rights protesters aimed to create an ‘Irish Cuba’. The civil rights campaign inadvertently worsened sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, leading to the outbreak of the Troubles.


Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders

This chapter explores the conduct of actors in the United States Government during the early years of the violence in Northern Ireland. It considers the reasons for the relatively non-interventionist approach that Richard Nixon adopted during the first year of his administration and places emphasis on the role of Ambassador John Moore, a prominent Irish-American figure. It also provides an analytical narrative of the development of violence in Northern Ireland, placing this alongside an examination of the responses of the US media and officials. It then assesses the relatively minimal impact of Nixon’s resignation and the inauguration of President Gerald Ford on the US role in Northern Ireland. Finally, it looks at the Democratic Primary campaign in 1968 and the British response to the prospects of a Democratic President winning the Presidential Election that year.


Author(s):  
Williamson Myra

This chapter examines Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon on 14 March 1978, often referred to as ‘Operation Litani’. First, the chapter discusses the immediate and long-term causes of the Israeli invasion: the former includes the ‘Coastal Road Massacre’ that occurred on 11 March 1978, whilst the latter includes the effects of the Palestinian presence in southern Lebanon. The second section analyses the positions of the main antagonists, setting forth the positions adopted by Israel, Lebanon, the PLO, Jordan, the US, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait and the United Nations’ Security Council. The third section discusses the legality of this use of force, purportedly an act of anticipatory self-defence to prevent future attacks. Finally, the chapter offers a brief conclusion on the precedential value of this incident. It concludes that the Israeli use of force, which was unanimously condemned by the Security Council, was unlawful.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Egede

AbstractNigeria is a coastal state located strategically on the West Coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea. After gaining independence in 1960 it enacted legislation in 1967 on its territorial waters, which has been amended twice, in 1971 and 1998. After participating in the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) it became a party to the 1982 Convention on 14 August 1986. This article examines the laws governing the Nigerian territorial waters vis-à-vis the LOSC provisions on the territorial sea with a view to pinpointing how far these laws are in compliance with the relevant provisions of the LOSC.


2020 ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips

“You Are Leaving the American Sector,” signs read as Martha Graham and her company crossed from West Germany to celebrate Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The East German government sought reunification; for the communists, “reunification,” “peace,” and thus the promise of “human bonds” became political weapons. Although the “Stalin Note” in 1952 promised West Germans “the rights of man” and some freedoms, Stalin demanded military neutrality. The US and West German governments finally decided it was communist propaganda. “Peace” remained a contested term with the “peaceful Soviets,” positioned against a “warmongering America.” Graham’s East Berlin repertory featured Frontier, the same work of Americana that had she had presented at the White House in 1937 and then more recently under Gerald Ford. Unlike Graham’s pioneer woman, East Berliners stood in front of a wall, a barbed-wire fence; Graham’s dancer stood in front of a fence and envisioned an expansionist future—not a stopping point. “The girl is seeing a great landscape, untrammeled,” Graham said to an East German of her pioneer woman, performed by an African American dancer to emphasize racial inclusion as an American tenet: “It’s the appetite for space, which is one of the characteristics of America. It’s one of the things that has made us pioneers.” Five months later, Ronald Reagan stood in the West demanding, “Tear down this wall.” Reagan and Graham worked in tandem to bring East Germany into the Western fold.


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