Reform of the United Nations and Transformation of the International System

The reform of the United Nations is closely related with the transformation of the International system. The United Nations has made great success since it started a comprehensive reform in 2005. Such a reform is necessary both for the transition of the largest international organization in the world and transformation of the international system. The United Nations still has a long way to go in the comprehensive reform because of many factors.     

Progressivism Armed? Reform and the Origins of the Modern U.S. Military

During the four decades before World War I, both the United States Army and the United States Navy underwent a massive transformation. What had been a frontier constabulary in 1880 became a world class army in 1918. What had been a hodgepodge of obsolete vessels in the 1880s emerged as a force second only to the Royal Navy during the same period. This article discusses the factors that help account for this remarkable change.     

Hatchet or Scalpel?Domestic Politics,International Threats,and US Military Spending Cuts, 1950–2014

Abstract

Budgetary cuts are characterized by distinct political, organizational, and psychological dynamics in contrast to increases. Ideally, policymakers rank, prioritize, and assess among likely strategic challenges to identify the appropriate offices, programs, line items, or service branches in which to curtail spending. Targeted cuts—preserving some line items or services while cutting others—occurred during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, and Clinton administrations. In contrast, the Nixon, H.W. Bush, and Obama administrations implemented across-the-board cuts, impacting all areas of the budget uniformly, regardless of strategic priorities. We argue that the ability of the executive to target and redirect spending commensurate with national security needs are constrained by domestic interests. However, the degree to which the threat environment is diverse conditions the number of available policy options and, in turn, executive capacity to implement targeted cuts vis-à-vis parochial interests.     

International the Chinese Recognition of Rejuvenation——Retrospect on China＇s Diplomacy over Thirty Years of Reform and Opening-up

The thirty years of reform and opening-up are an importanthistorical period in China＇s national rejuvenation. This period has witnessed the triumphant advance and great changes in its foreign relations. For China, the outside world has never been closer. For the world, China is becoming a more and more significant or even indispensable factor.     

The Political Economy of Reform Under the UPA, 2004–14: The Tension Between Accumulation and Legitimacy

Electoral success during the reform process requires maintaining a prudent balance in meeting the requirements of the two basic state functions of accumulation and legitimacy. Initially, the Congress-led UPA government was the unintended beneficiary of the economic acceleration resulting from a global boom and the earlier economic reforms in aid of accumulation. The growth acceleration, however, also escalated rising expectations. In the effort to advance its legitimacy in order to assure continuance in power, the UPA government emphasized a distributive strategy to the neglect of accumulation. However, the rupture in growth acceleration because of external shock and internal economic mismanagement aggravated the loss of legitimacy stemming from a series of corruption scandals. The consequence was the emergence of an enormous “gap” between rising expectations and the existing reality of economic stagnation and high inflation. It is in the context of this gap that the Congress Party suffered its most severe electoral defeat in history.     

Antiretroviral Treatment and AIDS Entrepreneurs in South Africa: Domestic Opposition to an International Norm (1999–2004)

Recent studies in international relations tend to examine the role that international norms play in transforming local political practices. However, local opposition to international norms is rarely explored. This paper tackles some gaps in main constructivist explanations of norm diffusion, and also addresses the empirical puzzle of South African resistance to the international norm of antiretroviral treatment. The author disaggregates three chief explanations of norm diffusion according to how they describe agents of change and relationship among them, properties of diffused norms and norm selection mechanisms leading to norm adoption. This disaggregation provides an innovative way to investigate norm diffusion without making theoretically preloaded claims about adoption outcomes. The analysis presents an alternative empirical argument about the persisting turbulence of HIV/AIDS politics in South Africa.     

The Role of the Alternative Press in the Agenda‐building Process: Spill‐over Effects and Media Opinion Leadership

Rainer Mathes and Barbara Pfetsch. (1991). “The Role of the Alternative Press in the Agenda‐building Process: Spill‐over Effects and Media Opinion Leadership.” European Journal of Communication, 6, 1, 33–63.     

A People's Court: Emotion,Participant Experiences,and the Shaping of Postwar Justice at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946–1948

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946–1948) or Tokyo IMT is overlooked for its contributions to modern international criminal justice. Convened to hold Japanese leaders accountable for conspiring to commit aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the Second World War, the IMTFE was both a groundbreaking judicial undertaking and a pioneering multilateral institution. This distinction makes it a unique vehicle for exploring the fundamental challenges of both international justice and organisation. Institutions like the IMTFE are usually viewed through broad geopolitical, legal, and ideological lenses. Although important, these approaches miss a singularly important dimension of multilateralism: the human contingencies that impact international bodies. Using unique participant sources, this article presents an intimate “trial's-eye-view” of how working at the IMTFE affected the emotions, psychology, and temperament of its personnel. Participant responses on these very personal levels had profound consequences on the tribunal's proceedings, findings, and legacy. Other factors shaped justice in Tokyo, but the responses identified here were common, and their impact significant. Ultimately, this paper argues that people and their experiences—as much as anything—produced the outcome of justice in Tokyo.     

A “German Paperchase”: The “Scrap of Paper” Controversy and the Problem of Myth and Memory in International History

abstract

Anglo‐Russian relations during the period 1894–1914 were filled with incidents in large part stemming from the very different social and political frameworks of the two countries. The two countries had sharply differing traditions concerning individual liberty, freedom of the press and other such matters usually covered by the rubric of human rights. While the realities of great power politics forced the two countries to work together, it is not surprising that their collaboration was often marred by clashes of political and social sensibilities.     

Reluctant Appeaser: Douglas Hailsham and the German Problem 1932–1938

This article considers the ministerial career of Douglas Hogg, first Viscount Hailsham, during the 1930s and, in particular, his attitude towards the appeasement of Germany. Although Hailsham was a leading Conservative in the inter-war period and held key posts during the 1930s, his role in Britain's policy of appeasement has been overlooked. He was consistently wary of the Nazi menace and as Secretary of State for War from 1931–1935 he urged a firm line towards Hitler's Germany. As the decade progressed, however, the inescapable realities of Britain's international predicament drove Hailsham to support the government's appeasement policy, at least until September 1938. Although he forecast the near inevitability of the Second World War, he could not devise a viable alternative to the appeasement of Germany. Hailsham's experience thus offers a significant addition to the historiography of appeasement and to understanding the distinctions between “appeasers” and “anti-appeasers.”     

Negotiating Verification: International Diplomacy and the Evolution of Nuclear Safeguards, 1945–1972

Nuclear safeguards have been an essential part of the global order since the beginnings of the nuclear age. The International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], an international bureaucracy that is supposed to be a non-political, technical institution administers this global nuclear safeguards regime. Even though safeguards have always been controversial, they have turned out to be the most enduring item in the international community’s toolbox to prevent or slow down the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. This analysis shows that nuclear safeguards, whilst they survived the fall of the Iron Curtain, were a genuine invention of the Cold War. At the beginning of the nuclear age, there was an overall understanding that safeguards were not strong enough to prevent the global spread of nuclear weapons. It was only over the course of the late 1950s and 1960s that safeguards moved from the margins to the centre of diplomatic negotiations about global nuclear order. Newly declassified records from the IAEA Archives in Vienna offer insights into the evolution of early nuclear safeguards and suggest that negotiation patterns, proceedings, and settings affected the outcome of this nuclear diplomacy.     

You’ve Got to Know When to Fold ‘Em: International and Domestic Consequences of Capitulation, 1919–1999

This article explores the effect of acquiescing to compellent threats on the probability that a leader loses office and on the probability that he or she is targeted in a subsequent international crisis. Using a leader-specific punishment (LSP) model that corrects for the endogeneity between domestic and international politics, an analysis of over 9,000 observations during the period 1919–1999 suggests that backing down generally increases both the risk of becoming a target and the probability of losing office. Leaders who back down to coercive threats without a fight are almost twice as likely to become targets in subsequent crises and much more likely to lose office than those who do not. Democratic leaders are more at risk than their autocratic counterparts for loss of office and becoming targets if they acquiesce to coercive threats.     

German–American Intelligence Relations, 1945–1956: New Evidence on the Origins of the BND

Under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a certain amount of documents relating to a German–American intelligence co-operation that began almost immediately after the German surrender of May 1945; it lasted until 1956 when the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) was founded, today's German foreign and military intelligence service. The Americans assembled, supervised, and largely financed what is often referred to as the “Gehlen organisation,” named after its leader, former Wehrmacht general, Reinhard Gehlen, who was chief of the BND until his retirement in 1968. Whilst the existence of this co-operation had been known since the 1940s, largely due to Soviet subversion and propaganda, very little reliable information and virtually no original source material was available before the release of this, somewhat redacted, material in 2002 and 2007. This article provides a sketch of how former Wehrmacht officers, and even a number with an ominous SS past, who might well have been war criminals, came to work, first for United States military intelligence and, from 1949, for the CIA. It looks at some of their operations during those turbulent post-war years, which include the Berlin airlift and German rearmament in response to the Korean War. The potential of those newly declassified documents, unfortunately, cannot be corroborated from other sources as long as German and Russian archives remain closed. Despite its manifold limitations, this material provides an exciting window into transatlantic intelligence history.     

“Exporting Democracy”? Neoconservatism and the Limits of Military Intervention, 1989–2008

This article challenges the almost universal consensus that post–Cold War neoconservative foreign policy has been characterised by the objective of “exporting democracy” abroad for strategic or moral reasons or both. Instead, the article contends that the touchstone of neoconservatism was the attempt to preserve America's so-called “unipolar moment”—its apparent position as the single pole of power in every region of the world. Moving beyond the abstract and grandiose rhetoric employed by many neocons, the article points out that neocons made a distinction between the respective uses of military and non-military power, arguing that the former should be reserved only for situations where strategic interests were at stake rather than for the sake of ideals. The article goes on to argue that this focus on strategic interests facilitated a close alliance with other conservative nationalists who were also dedicated to maintaining America's position as the single pole of world power. Thus neoconservatism should be analysed and evaluated—by both conservatives and liberal interventionists alike—on the basis that it was a strategy dedicated primarily to preserving American unipolarity, not to the promotion of ideals.     

Exploring the Civil–Military Interface and its Impact on European Strategic and Operational Personalities: ‘Civilianisation’ and Limiting Military Roles in Stabilisation Operations?

Abstract

The paper discusses a still more obvious foreign policy dilemma facing Denmark: On the one hand, Denmark has made a proactive foreign policy decision to pursue a strategy of influence with the European Union as the most important international forum. On the other hand, Denmark has chosen to stay outside the increasingly important cooperation on defence policy within the EU. As a small state, Denmark is opting for a multilateral strategy, but it has deliberately chosen to limit its commitment to the same forum. A combination of adaptation theory and theory of small states informs the analysis. It is argued that the Danish opt-out sends an unclear and inconsistent signal to Denmark's partners which again hampers the possibilities for using Danish coalition power within the EU. Nevertheless, contrary to both theoretical expectations and common sense intuition, there is little to suggest that the opt-out has had negative consequences for Denmark's influence on capabilities in the EU.     

Crisis Expediting Reform and Reform Giving Birth to Opportunities,Competition and Cooperation Existing Side by Side——A comprehensive Review of the International Situation in 2009

The year 2009 had witnessed the most profound changes in the international arena since the end of the Cold War.The ongoing international financial crisis,     

Nationalist Politics at the Crossroads: The Basque Nationalist Party and the Challenge of Sovereignty (1998–2014)

In the past two decades the Basque Nationalist Party's political strategy has exemplified its historical oscillation between, on the one hand, a more radical claim to Basque sovereignty supported mostly by nationalist forces and, on the other, a comparatively more moderate Realpolitik aimed at achieving higher degrees of regional autonomy and cross-party consensus as a means of more gradual Basque nation-building. In contrast to the mainstream interpretation forwarded by the media and other political parties, the main difference between the relatively more radical or moderate strategies of the PNV is not a higher or lower ideological profile of the claim for Basque sovereignty but a different strategic decision concerning the problem of how to bring together the struggle for sovereignty and the reality of Basque pluralism.     

“The Human Factor”: French–West German Bilateralism and the “Logic of Appropriateness” in the European Crisis of the Mid-1960s

This analysis reviews a crucial moment in the contemporary political and constitutional history of Western Europe. Prior to the “empty chair crisis” in 1965–1966, an important Franco–West German summit had failed and allowed the French president, Charles De Gaulle, to jeopardise negotiations in the European Economic Community. This analysis not only illustrates the overwhelming importance of Franco–West German bilateralism in the prelude to the crisis, but also analyses the negotiating behaviours of De Gaulle and West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard at the summit of 11–12 June 1965. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Erhard, rather than the allegedly anti-European De Gaulle, doomed the negotiations. Furthermore, this study draws pragmatically on social institutionalism and constructivism to shed light on Erhard’s mental map and identify the relevant considerations in his decision-making and bargaining. Rational choice approaches fail to explain the “human factor” in Erhard’s negotiating behaviour and the mysterious breakdown of Franco–West German entente in summer 1965.