Allied economic intelligence and strategy during the ‘Phoney War’

This article examines the efforts of French and British intelligence services to assess the German economy before and during the opening stage of World War II. The French and British, attached to a long‐war strategy based on the assumption time worked in their favour, looked to economic intelligence to indicate whether this was in fact the case. Yet for a variety of reasons clear and consistent assessments were impossible. Rather than accept uncertainty, the French and British chose to impose certainty by assuming the worst, a decision which contributed to the abandonment of a long‐war strategy as the Allies began to search for some way to win a short war.     

‘What is to be done?’ Anticipating the future and mobilizing prudence

Various social and political factors often block the emergence of good ideas — e.g., the presence of an overbearing leader, the loquaciousness of some actors and the shyness of others, conventional and doctrinal thinking, the political climate, etc. — and devices have been invented to overcome some of these obstacles in decisionmaking settings: the Delphi technique, idea writing, and the nominal group technique are all front-end operations designed to encourage the blossoming of possible solutions to problems. Devices for generating ideas have not been helpful in coping with the volumes of ideas produced, however, and this had led some theorists to give up on the human mind as a solver of problems. Following a summary of the factors impeding rationality in decisional settings, the advantages of Q methodology are presented, and a case study is described in which Q, in conjunction with front-end operations, has been used to assist groups in clarifying their own perspectives and in gaining access to collective wisdom (political prudence) for purposes of problem solving.

(Aristotle,Metaphysics)

Revised from a paper read at a meeting of the Policy Sciences Annual Institute, School of Law, Yale University, October 16–18, 1992, and at a meeting of the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity, University of Missouri, Columbia, October 7–9, 1993. We are grateful for the helpful comments from reviewers for this journal.     

The ‘Sarcee War’: Fragmented Citizenship and the City

In 1880, the Tsuu T'ina Nation (then the Sarcee band) staged a small, armed protest known as the ‘Sarcee War’, in Calgary, Alberta, to demand food and a separate reserve from the Siksika, with whom they had been assigned land. This paper argues that this protest reveals the material and political roots of Aboriginal citizenship: a fragmented and differentiated political body, unified through contingent agreements. The Tsuu T'ina actions, the choice of location and their specific demands reveal an assertion of rights that differ from the ‘standard’ idea of Canadian citizenship (then and now) and articulate a complex process of ‘othering’ and belonging.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship,the political and dedemocratization

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.     

Transitional Justice and ‘National Ownership’: An Assessment of the Institutional Development of the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina

In anticipation of its closure in 2014, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has begun to set out proposals for preserving and promoting its legacy of prosecuting persons responsible for violations of humanitarian law during the conflicts of the 1990s. A key aspect of this legacy has been to support the ‘national ownership’ of the justice systems in the former Yugoslavia that will continue to try war crimes cases in the years to come. This study explores the institutional development of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (WCC) to national ownership. In particular, it considers three critical aspects of the WCC's functioning that highlight the challenges that it faces as a mechanism of transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). These are the composition of prosecutors and judges, prosecutorial practices and outreach and communication activities. The article shows that the continued difficulties with these areas of legal practice figure as significant obstacles to the WCC's transition to full national ownership by both the legal professionals and local populace of BiH.     

A ‘Post-Work’ World: Geographical Engagements with the Future of Work

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While ‘work’ has long served as a presumed norm or telos of ‘development’, this article considers the prospect of the ‘end of work’ and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a ‘post-work’ world without cementing social and economic inequality.     

The North Korean abduction issue: emotions,securitisation and the reconstruction of Japanese identity from ‘aggressor’ to ‘victim’ and from ‘pacifist’ to ‘normal’

Abstract

After Kim Jong-il's confession in 2002 that North Korean agents had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea has become the most detested country in Japan, and the normalisation of bilateral relations has been put on the back burner. The abduction issue has taken precedence in Japan even over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It has also grossly overshadowed the atrocities for which Imperial Japan was responsible in the 20th century. Why has there been such strong emphasis on an issue that could be disregarded as comparatively ‘less important’? This article understands the ascendency of the abduction issue as the epitome of an identity shift under way in Japan – from the identity of a curiously ‘peaceful’ and inherently ‘abnormal’ state, to that of a more ‘normal’ one. The differentiation of North Korea as ‘abnormal’ emphasises Japan's own (claim to) ‘normality’. Indeed, by incarnating the perils of Japan's own ‘pacifist’ ‘abnormality’, which has been so central to the collective sense of Japanese ‘Self’ in the post-war period, the abduction issue has become a very emotional argument for Japan's ‘normalisation’ in security and defence terms. The transformation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ is further enabled by Japan trading places with North Korea in the discourse, so that Japan is defined as ‘victim’ (rather than former aggressor) and North Korea as ‘aggressor’ (rather than former victim). What is at stake here is the question whether Japan is ‘normalising’ or ‘remilitarising’, and the role of the abduction issue discourse in enabling such foreign and security policy change.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

‘One of our Most Valuable Sources of Intelligence’: British Intelligence and the Prisoner of War System in 1944

During the Second World War, secret information derived from enemy prisoners of war (POWs) was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Until 1944, the POW system had expanded from a small interrogation camp in the Tower of London to a multi-step structure with the so-called Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, United Kingdom (CSDIC(UK)) at its top. The methods employed to collect reliable information included microphones, stool pigeons and different interrogation techniques. The results were read by all services and several ministries which provided a unique insight into German capabilities, intentions and thoughts.     

Diplomatic Sigint and the British Official Mind during the Second World War: Soviet claims on Turkey, 1940–45

Historians of Soviet foreign policy have recently revisited the issue of Soviet claims against Turkey: a Stalinist objective during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and in the immediate post-war era. Recently opened archives show that the British response to Soviet claims in 1945 was driven by comprehensive access to Turkish diplomatic correspondence. However, the British failed to recognize wartime decrypts that indicated continuity in Soviet ambitions in Turkey since 1940. This failure reflected the responsibility of the operational departments of the Foreign Office for the assessment of diplomatic Sigint, and the absence of a genuine political intelligence department with eyes for anything other than current lines of policy.     

From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ policy design: design thinking beyond markets and collaborative governance

Policy design as a field of inquiry in policy studies has had a chequered history. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the field languished in the 1990s and 2000s as work in the policy sciences focused on the impact on policy outcomes of meta-changes in society and the international environment. Both globalization and governance studies of the period ignored traditional design concerns in arguing that changes at this level predetermined policy specifications and promoted the use of market and collaborative governance (network) instruments. However, more recent work re-asserting the role of governments both at the international and domestic levels has revitalized design studies. This special issue focuses on recent efforts in the policy sciences to reinvent, or more properly, ‘re-discover’ the policy design orientation in light of these developments. Articles in the issue address leading edge issues such as the nature of design thinking and expertise in a policy context, the temporal aspects of policy designs, the role of experimental designs, the question of policy mixes, the issue of design flexibility and resilience and the criteria for assessing superior designs. Evidence and case studies deal with design contexts and processes in Canada, China, Singapore, the UK, EU, Australia and elsewhere. Such detailed case studies are necessary for policy design studies to advance beyond some of the strictures placed in their way by the reification of, and over-emphasis upon, only a few of the many possible kinds of policy designs identified by the 1990s and early 2000s literature.     

From CAUR to EUR: Italian Fascism,the ‘myth of Rome’ and the pursuit of international primacy

ABSTRACT

The formation of Fascist Italy's international imaginary in the 1930s tells a fascinating story of growing global political ambition, of constant recalibration in the face of seismic geopolitical shifts and, in the end, a (frustrated) pursuit of symbolic primacy. Kallis discusses two different Fascist projects underpinned by this imaginary: first, the political project of internationalization promoted through instruments such as the Fasci Italiani all'Estero (Italian Fasci Abroad) and especially the Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma (CAUR), as well as through direct diplomatic and political ties with an expanding circle of regimes in Europe and overseas; and, second, the pursuit of a deeper sense of historic-cultural primacy, linked to the idea of ‘Roman universality, which became the discursive lynchpin of the ill-fated plan to host a 1942 world’s fair in Rome (EUR/E42). The transformation of Fascism from a hyper-nationalist phenomenon into a force actively seeking international diffusion and finally ‘universality’ can be understood as a reflexive adjustment of Fascism’s ideological-political horizon, driven as much by new geopolitical opportunities and frustrations as by conquering ambition and ideological continuity. In fact, Italian Fascism’s trajectory from CAUR in the 1930s to EUR/E42 in the war-torn 1940s, unfolding against a backdrop of growing antagonism between Italy and Nazi Germany for global influence, retained a primary symbolic point of reference: the ideological, political and cultural-historic estate of the ‘myth of Rome’ as a symbolic discourse of trans-temporal and -spatial primacy.