US‐European trade relations: Between crisis and stability

Future historians may consider 2010 a defining moment in the evolution of attitudes towards multilateralism. Natural disasters, China’s economic rise, and continued sluggish growth elsewhere might well condition future attitudes. Beyond the headlines, three points seem clear. First, building multilateralism is a long game: there is a considerable lag between changed perceptions about the desirability of multilateral cooperation and its realisation. Second, building multilateralism requires political impulse and leadership. Third, the extension of multilateralism requires the right domestic as well as international political conditions. Current political and economic conditions suggest that patience is in order in the quest to build a more multilateral order.     

What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations

What happens when the ‘international’ as a distinct social space is approached from the perspective of war rather than war from the perspective of the ‘international’? Tarak Barkawi's question (Millennium, 39:3, 2011, 701–706) is best answered by attempts to understand war not as part of inter/intra-state relations but as a socio-cultural, trans-historical institution that impacts on the ‘everyday’ lives of men, women and children. In this article I argue that war is not a disruption of the ‘everyday’, an abstraction that has a definite beginning and end, something we enter into and exit. Instead, it can be captured in daily and mundane lived experiences of people and in powerful emotions that constitute ‘self’, community and the ‘other.’ Drawing upon my research on wars in South Asia, I particularly reflect on how war shapes the banal and the fervent and how cultural and political narratives of ‘war bodies’ perform the ‘international’ in a variety of ways. Most significantly I want to draw attention to how international relations as a scholarly discipline is so deeply engaged with war and yet seems to have an estranged relationship with it.     

The dimensions of the divide: vertical differentiation,international inequality and North–South stratification in international relations theory

Recent attempts at developing social-structural accounts of the international order have suggested that the international system might be analysed in terms of patterns of vertical differentiation and stratification. Taking up this challenge, this article argues that inequality should be understood as part of the ‘deep structure’ of the international system rather than in terms of the attributes of individual states. It suggests that we can understand how stratification and vertical differentiation emerge by examining five dimensions along which processes producing asymmetry occur, focusing on transactions between actors. These dimensions are: inter-state political hierarchy; secular socioeconomic development within societies; global stratification within the world economy; the dynamic of competitive development; and the process of overall collective management and supranational governance of the international system/global order. The historical intersection of these forms of stratification has produced an emergent, historically contingent division within the international order familiar to students of international politics as the North–South divide.     

European‐Atlantic Security Institutions: Current state and future prospects

Since the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits have been musing over the decline of the West. The disappointing US military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the subprime mortgage crisis, seem to be evidence of an abrupt end to America's ‘unipolar’ moment. In Europe, the sovereign debt crisis has amplified Europe's long-term structural economic problems and laid bare the fragile institutional foundation on which the Economic and Monetary Union was built. At the same time, the BRICs and other emerging economies have been growing at unprecedented rates. Those same analysts see a ‘decoupling’ in the world economy: the developing economies pulling the world out of recession, while the advanced industrial economies are unable to solve their domestic difficulties. So to them, the events of the past five years signify the beginning of the end of Western influence, eventually leading to a more complete rebalancing of the world economy's current ‘Western’ system of governance. This article argues instead that the West still has a significant edge when it comes to most critical factors that determine long-term economic growth potential, including technology, innovative capacity, research and development, investment climate and education. Furthermore, the transatlantic economy is less vulnerable than the rest of the world to outside economic shocks and might eventually prove more capable of reform than many expect. The current malaise in the transatlantic community might therefore prove once again to be more cyclical than structural. Relying on linear projections, many are ‘crying wolf’ again, too loud and too soon.     

Moral panics and anti‐cult terrorism in Western Europe

Religious minorities in Western Europe today are often perceived as threatening. After Solar Temple suicides and homicides, parliamentary and other official commissions investigated the dangers of ‘cults’ or ‘sects’. The article reviews reports published between 1996–1999 and argues that they may be classified into two categories. ‘Type I’ reports (more prevalent throughout French‐speaking Europe) rely on anti‐cult models and stereotypes, and may perpetuate moral panics by seeing all unfamiliar religious minorities as uniformly dangerous. ‘Type II’ reports, while still maintaining elements of the anti‐cult models, appear to be more balanced and concentrate more attention on academic findings. ‘Type I’ reports, and anti‐cult models in general, generated ‘anti‐cult terrorism’ (an expression first used in one of the Swiss ‘Type II’ reports) in the form of both verbal and actual violence, with extremist groups acting as self‐appointed anti‐cult vigilantes. While there are actually and potentially dangerous religious minorities, anti‐cult rhetoric in official documents may incite and provoke violence both against the assaulted movements and by the movements threatened. Law enforcement, the article concludes, should focus on the minority of violent religious and millenialist movements and the small extreme anti‐cult fringes.     

‘Not a heap of stones’: material environments and ontological security in international relations

Extant scholarship on ontological security in international relations has focused on the significance of social environments for state identity. In this article, I argue that material environments also provide an important source of ontological security for states. In order to assume this role material environments need to be discursively linked to state identity through either projection or introjection. Once incorporated into state identity narratives, material environments become ‘ontic spaces’: spatial extensions of the collective self that cause state identities to appear more firm and continuous. However, ontic spaces are inherently unstable and require maintenance, especially during periods of crisis or transition. States bear agency in this process but they never achieve full control, as identity discourses are continuously contested both domestically and internationally. I illustrate these claims by looking at the role of the General Staff Headquarters in Belgrade, destroyed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, in the ontological security of Serbia.     

Sir George Clerk and the struggle for British influence in central Europe, 1919–26

During the Great War, Sir George Clerk was a senior Foreign Office official, strongly sympathetic to the cause of the ‘oppressed nationalities’ of Austria‐Hungary and the liberal ideals associated with the journal, The New Europe. In 1919 he was granted a unique opportunity to shape the face of the New Europe when he embarked on his mission to Hungary. As British minister to Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s, Clerk harnessed his idealism for the Czechs to his ambition to make Prague a centre of British influence and power in central Europe. Though this policy ultimately failed, Clerk showed a greater rapport and sympathy for the Czechs than any of his successors.     

Introduction:New perspectives on China – Central and Eastern Europe relations

Asia Europe Journal -     

Radical right parties in Europe and anti‐foreign violence: A comparative essay

This is a comparative survey of contemporary patterns of anti‐foreign violence in Europe and some historical antecedents, such as pogroms and individual and small group attacks on visible foreigners. It considers the perpetrators and the long list of different categories of victims, many of them not foreigners at all. Against the background of general youth violence in schools and neighborhoods and waves of asylum‐seekers, the motives of anti‐foreign violence are examined and attributed to the under‐educated, ‘no‐future’ youth or underclass ‘losers’ of the ‘communications revolution’ of the 1980s. The skinhead and soccer hooligan anti‐foreign violence is, on the whole, not remotely as political as the fascist blackshirts and Nazi stormtroopers of the inter‐war period were. A look at the evidence from different European countries reveals on the one hand recruitment attempts by extreme right‐wing organizations among the skinhead and hooligan groups ‐ but rather limited success. On the other hand, most of the violent actions appear to be uncoordinated and responsive to community panic and media hype regarding the ‘floods’ of asylum‐seekers and illegal immigrants in the offing. By making themselves the executors of the community panic, the otherwise despised skinheads are grasping at personal acceptance and legitimacy.