The Making and Breaking of States: The End of Empire in India Revisited

Author(s):  
Judith M. Brown

Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’. By revisiting an example from the first of these great waves, perhaps the greatest ‘imperial ending’—the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947, this lecture investigates issues which may prove instructive in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states. It addresses four major questions which are relevant across the many different episodes of state breaking and making, with the help of evidence from the case of the South Asian subcontinent. What is the relationship between state and society and the patterns of relationship which help to determine the nature and vulnerability of the state? What makes a viable and destabilising opposition to the imperial state? What is the nature of the breaking or collapse of that state? How are states refashioned out of the inheritance of the previous regime and the breaking process?

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-41
Author(s):  
A. Mustafabeyli

In many political researches there if a conclusion that the world system which was founded after the Second world war is destroyed of chaos. But the world system couldn`t work while the two opposite systems — socialist and capitalist were in hard confrontation. After collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist community the nature of intergovernmental relations and behavior of the international community did not change. The power always was and still is the main tool of international communication.


Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Arch Getty

It is clear that tested by the Constitution of the Soviet Union as revised and enacted in 1936, the USSR is the most inclusive and equalised democracy in the world.Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1937Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the “thoroughly democratic” elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death.


Author(s):  
David Abulafia

The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny. Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation. When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world.


Author(s):  
Kal Raustiala

The single most important feature of American history after 1945 was the United States’s assumption of hegemonic leadership. Europeans had noted America’s enormous potential since at least the nineteenth century. After the Civil War the United States had one of the largest economies in the world, but, as noted earlier in this book, in geopolitical terms it remained a surprisingly minor player. By 1900 the United States was playing a more significant political role. But it was only after 1945 that the nation’s potential on the world stage was fully realized. Victory in the Second World War left the United States in an enviable position. Unlike the Soviet Union, which endured devastating fighting on its territory and lost tens of millions of citizens, the United States had experienced only one major attack on its soil. Thanks to its actions in the war America had great influence in Europe. And the national economy emerged surprisingly vibrant from the years of conflagration, easily dominant over any conceivable rival or set of rivals. When the First World War ended the United States ultimately chose to return to its hemispheric perch. It declined to join the new League of Nations, and rather than maintaining engagement with the great powers of the day, America generally turned inward. The years following the Second World War were quite different. In addition to championing—and hosting—the new United Nations, the United States quickly established a panoply of important institutions aimed at maintaining and organizing international cooperation in both economic and security affairs. Rising tensions with the Soviet Union, apparent to many shortly after the war’s end, led the United States to remain militarily active in both Europe and Asia. The intensifying Cold War cemented this unprecedented approach to world politics. The prolonged occupations of Germany and Japan were straightforward examples of this newly active global role. In both cases the United States refashioned a conquered enemy into a democratic, free-market ally—a significant feat. The United States did not, however, seek a formal empire in the wake of its victory.


2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.


Author(s):  
Catherine Andreyev

After a long period of scholarly neglect, owing partly to political reasons, the Second World War is now being studied as an integral part of the history of the Soviet Union. This chapter considers the war’s far reaching effects on state and society, taking a multi-faceted, comparative view. Beginning with German and Soviet war aims, the chapter goes on to highlight recent historiography, which has revealed much about the experience of the individual Soviet soldier and has emphasized that by concentrating on military set-pieces, such as the battle of Stalingrad, we risk distorting our understanding of the war. Also discussed are controversial subjects such as collaboration and partisan warfare, and the impact of the war on the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russian national identity.


Menotyra ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Vasiliūnienė

The newly identified goldsmiths’ works of East Prussia are presented in the article: a chalice from Kaunas St. Cross Church forged by Otto Schwerdfeger, a master in Königsberg, in 1704 (?), a ciborium from Vilnius St. Apostles Peter and Paul Church made by goldsmith Johann Kownatzky in Tilsit in the 1760–80s, and a monstrance from Valakbūdis Church made by Michael Greiffenhagen II, a master from Tilsit, in 1795 (?). After the World War II, East Prussia was annexed by the Soviet Union. Destruction of the region and its historical memory and enormous losses of the cultural heritage partly resulted in knowledge gaps in Lithuania about the goldsmithing in this region. For the knowledge of goldsmith history in East Prussia, works by Eugen von Czihak, a German scientist, based on the information collected before the First and Second World Wars are very important. The goldsmithing of Eastern Prussia is pretty seldom mentioned in the Lithuanian historiography. Only sparsely survived works by Königsberg, Tilsit and Klaipėda (Memel) masters from the 17th – 19th century have been published. On the contrary, the context of Lithuanian goldsmith history is described based on data provided by the German writings. According to our knowledge, the goldsmith heritage from Königsberg predominates in Lithuania. Not a few goldsmith works from Tilsit were also identified in Lithuania. The works of Eastern Prussian goldsmiths are of particular value. Because of the dramatic fate of Königsberg region, the survived number of goldsmith works throughout Europe is relatively low.


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-283
Author(s):  
Christopher Burton

One of the many achievements of Kate Brown's remarkable new book is to relocate the Chernobyl disaster and its official medicine internationally, but Manual for Survival also certainly illuminates the particularities of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. The Soviet Union had a penchant for secret medicine with regard to radiation. Brown's readers learn early of Angelina Gus΄kova, who was the first expert in Moscow to be called by the accident-stricken staff at the reactor, had treated more patients with radiation sickness than anyone else in the world, and had written the Soviet manual on the subject. Yet she did this having been forbidden to ask any patient directly about their exposure.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esra Karapınar

Globalization process which started at the end of nineteenth century and goes on at the present shows its impacts more in some countries or less in some other countries but this is a process that closes up countries, blots out authorities’ immunities, makes them become transparent, and strengthens socio-cultural, political and especially economic relations. After the terms of being introverted and self-sufficiency between First and Second World Wars, struggles to liberalized world trade have been accelerated since 1960, and good and service flows between countries grew both as a volume and value. As a result of liberalization and deregulation politics which appears since 1980, the capital could move easier on the world. So, how has this process felt its effect on the Central Asian Turkic Republics includes Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that arised in 1991 after dissociation in the Soviet Union because of clearing and reconstruction policy applied and after facility of establishing its own, independent states by earning their national identities to Turkish elements who lived under the sovereignty of Russians for years is given? The aim of study here is to analyse the effects of that globalization wave in the Turkic Republics which spread out all over the world. For this purpose, first of all changes in the Soviet Union 's policy will be considered and reflections of it on the economical life are to be investigated, and then applications and what the course of actions about integration with the World determined by mentioned republics after dissociation are to be discussed.


Author(s):  
Vladimir K. Кantor ◽  

The author examines a geopolitical line in the development of Russian philoso­phy in emigration. Not only the Russian revolution of 1917, not only the Nazi revolution of 1933–1935, but the Second World War changed the balance of power on the intellectual map of the world. Hitler was defeated by the Soviet Union with the help of the Anglo-American allies. As a result, two blocks emerged. They got a taste for the disposal of Europe and other countries of the United States, the USSR also strengthened, expanding the area of its influence (“Eastern bloc”). Should emigrants return to Russia? Bunin tried, but at the bor­der he turned back after reading articles about Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in the Pravda newspaper. Remain in a devastated and half-starved Europe, which has no time for emigrants? Or choose the third path where the track has al­ready been paved. Russian intellectuals from Germany have already settled in the United States, many have taken root there, some have returned. This, in essence, was the second emigration, the continuation of the first. There was already an experience of flight, but there was also a craving for German culture, which, despite the German Nazism sweeping through the world, Russian thinkers highly valued. They – as it should be in trouble – held on to each other. An example of this intellectual collaboration is Karpovich and Stepun.


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