«Asian Backstage Diplomacy» in Building Bridges Between the USSR and Great Britain in 1924

В статье исследуется роль и место «азиатской периферии» в период установления британо-российских отношений в 1924 г. Британские архивные документы позволяют сделать вывод о сохранявшейся значимости для британской стороны действий СССР в сопредельных с британской Индией странах. Одновременно британские дипломатические службы и разведывательное сообщество обращало особое внимание на складывавшуюся в советской Центральной Азии обстановку с целью выяснения возможного её влияния на британские позиции в регионе, а также советское продвижение на Восток в приграничные государства. В статье делается вывод о стремлении лейбористского правительства Макдональда избежать обострения взаимоотношений с СССР во имя достижения главной цели – подписания и ратификации договоров с Москвой несмотря на очевидные активные действия последней в индийском прикордонье. Автор приводит документальные свидетельства и оценки британскими дипломатами, а также военными действий СССР как в самой Центральной Азии, где советское руководство начинало проводить новую национально-территориальную политику, так и в приграничных с ней странах. The study examines the role of the Asian periphery in the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Great Britain in 1924. British archival documents suggest that the United Kingdom regarded Soviet activities in countries bordering British India as extremely important. At the same time, the British foreign office and intelligence were paying close attention to the situation that was unfolding in Soviet Central Asia, trying to assess its impact on the British standing in the region, as well as the possible Soviet expansion eastwards into the neighboring countries. The article concludes that MacDonald's Labour government wanted to avoid confrontation with the USSR in order to attain its main goal — signing and ratifying agreements with the Soviet state, despite it being rather active near the borders of India. The author cites documents and assessments by British diplomats and military officers. These sources cover both Soviet actions in Central Asia itself, where the USSR leadership was beginning to pursue a new national and territorial policy, as well as in the countries bordering that region.

Sovereignty, Democracy and Neutrality: French Foreign Policy and the National-Patriotic Humanitarianism of the French Red Cross, 1919–1928

Recent historiography pertaining to the International Red Cross has generally emphasised the transnational scale as best suited for analysing this global movement. Using the French Red Cross as a case study, this article suggests that focusing on the national scale, or even on the national-imperial scale, does not exclude transnational approaches but enriches them. In doing so, it highlights the dialectic between scales of humanitarian activity and complicates our understanding of the Red Cross movement in the early twentieth century. The article examines how the French Red Cross strived for its independence within the broader Red Cross world in a postwar humanitarian context increasingly dominated by transnational organisations. It also argues that in the 1920s the French Red Cross, a traditional auxiliary of the French army, became an arm of the French Foreign Office, advancing French diplomacy and sovereignty.

A ‘world of method and intrigue’: Muriel Spark's Literary Intelligence

In 1944, Muriel Spark was recruited by the Foreign Office to work as a Duty Secretary in the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan. ‘I played a very small part,’ Spark wrote in her autobiography, ‘but as a fly on the wall I took in a whole world of method and intrigue in the dark field of Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare, and the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy.’ Drawing on research in Spark's personal and literary archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and the National Library of Scotland, this essay explores the ways in which this ‘world of method and intrigue’ is taken in and reformulated in Spark's writing. Political espionage takes centre-stage in several of Spark's fictions, and a preoccupation with secrecy and spying runs through her work. But the methods of black propaganda can also be read as a secret sharer of some of Spark's most characteristic aesthetic strategies. Focusing in particular on Spark's most direct treatment of her secret war work – The Hothouse by the East River – critical tension centres on reading Spark's literary intelligence less as a re-enactment than as a subversion of the logics of disinformation.

‘A great traffic was going on, as usual, in Whitehall’: Public Places and Secret Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s London

Arthur Conan Doyle is rarely considered a master of spy fiction, but several Sherlock Holmes stories were highly influential in the development of this genre in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This paper examines three of these stories – ‘The Naval Treaty’, ‘The Second Stain’, and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ – and shows how they use the topography of London to explore themes of secrecy, concealment, and political power. Holmes investigates place and space in two ways: he discovers what happens behind the closed doors of government buildings like the Foreign Office in Whitehall and the Woolwich Arsenal, and he reads public spaces (like the London Underground and the streets of Westminster) to detect relationships not apparent to those lacking his criminological skills. These stories inspired contemporary and later authors of espionage fiction as they exemplify some of the purposes and pleasures of the genre – the romanticisation of bureaucracy and insights into secret history.

Engaging with Public Opinion at the Micro-Level: Citizen Dialogue and Participation in German Foreign Policy

This article analyzes how and why foreign policy (FP)-makers use dialogue and participation processes (DPPs) with (groups of) individual citizens as a source of public opinion. Taking Germany as a case study and drawing on DPP initiatives by the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA) since 2014, we analyze the officials’ motivation for establishing such processes and find four different sets of motivation: (1) image campaigning, (2) educating citizens, (3) listening to citizens, and (4) changing the citizens’ role in FP. Our article makes three contributions. First, we provide a novel typology of the sources of public opinion upon which FP-makers can draw. Second, our study points to the importance of, and provides a framework for, analyzing how officials engage with public opinion at the micro-level, which has so far been understudied in FP analysis. Finally, our empirical analysis suggests that both carefully assessing and influencing public opinion feature prominently in motivation, whereas PR purposes are of minor importance. Recasting the citizens’ role in FP gains in importance over time and may mirror the increased need to legitimize FP in Western democracies vis-à-vis their publics.

Grand-Strategic Thinking in History

Something that is recognizably and consciously “grand strategic” emerges in British political and foreign policy debates from the late nineteenth century onwards, but this chapter argues that certain grand-strategic assumptions were present even earlier in the century. A clearly identifiable British grand-strategic rationale—an understanding of the country’s “place in the world”—emerged out of the Napoleonic Wars and developed across the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, this grand-strategic thinking was key to the “soft landing” Britain sought to engineer in the aftermath of the Second World War as its position began to contract rapidly and radically from a world power into a Continental power. The examples discussed here are Lord Castlereagh, George Canning, and Viscount Palmerston in the nineteenth century; and several Foreign Office officials in the twentieth, but most notably Gladwyn Jebb. In its early incarnations, grand strategy is better thought of not as a process (leading to the production of plans) but as a habit of mind: a conscious attempt to look beyond the confines of short-term requirements of national defense or immediate foreign policy dilemmas.