American diplomatic realism: A tradition practised and preached by George F. Kennan

George F. Kennan's work remains pertinent to the contemporary debate over American foreign policy in which voices calling for a realistic conduct of American diplomacy have been faint. Kennan's thought contains a framework that can be used to examine critically the drift in American diplomacy from the realist assumptions held by the American Founding Fathers towards the liberal or Wilsonian school of international relations. Wilsonianism has seized the world view of contemporary American diplomats and statesmen, particularly during the Clinton administration. Kennan's analysis provides a salutary word in the debate over the course of post-Cold War American foreign policy that takes Wilsonian assumptions for granted.     

American diplomatic realism: A tradition practised and preached by George F. Kennan

George F. Kennan's work remains pertinent to the contemporary debate over American foreign policy in which voices calling for a realistic conduct of American diplomacy have been faint. Kennan's thought contains a framework that can be used to examine critically the drift in American diplomacy from the realist assumptions held by the American Founding Fathers towards the liberal or Wilsonian school of international relations. Wilsonianism has seized the world view of contemporary American diplomats and statesmen, particularly during the Clinton administration. Kennan's analysis provides a salutary word in the debate over the course of post‐Cold War American foreign policy that takes Wilsonian assumptions for granted.     

Japanese diplomacy towards Korea in multipolarity: history and trend

This article shows that in situations of multipolarity Japan has been active and adroit in dealing with the developments on the Korean peninsula, which is a microcosm of the strategic situation in Northeast Asia. It shows such a dynamic by examining two periods of multipolarity in East Asia: the era of the Russo-Japanese War and the détente era of the early 1970s. Japanese diplomacy in the 1970s was carried out under the constraints of its peace constitution and under United States protection. But, even subject to such conditions, Japan actively worked to diplomatically promote its position on the Korean question. Though mainly a historical review, this article provides evidence that supports a realist explanation for Japan's activist foreign policy. This trend also helps to explain the recent activist initiatives in Japanese diplomacy towards Korea in the post-Cold-War era.     

A theory of reform consolidation in India: From crisis-induced reforms to strategic internationalization

ABSTRACT

I use the policy feedback literature to present an argument regarding the new politics of reform consolidation in India. India’s reform trajectory can be understood in terms of three distinct phases of reforms interspersed by periods of slowdown. In this narrative that goes beyond 1991, an analysis of struggles, opponents, and reversals become important, revealing a more contested pathway. In the 2000s India has moved beyond the initial, crisis-driven phase to a deeper external integration with the global economy and structural reform within. I call this phase an era of strategic internationalization. Reforms of 1985, 1991, and 1998–2000, in different ways, have begun to create new constituencies of support across India, which underlies the consolidation phase of reforms. During this long trajectory, the opponents of reforms could delay reforms but failed to reverse the direction of economic reforms. The purpose of this article is to provide a temporal framework that pays attention to mechanisms underlying different phases of reforms and how new supporters and opponents of reforms were created across different phases of the reform trajectory. Policies, the social bases of the Indian economy, and classes have been re-configured as a result.     

China-EU convergence 1957–2003: towards a ‘strategic partnership’

This article looks at how the ‘strategic partnership’ announced in 2003 between the People’s Republic of China and the European Union came to be. Strategic geopolitical balancing and containment towards other third parties have been prominent features of their convergence, during a period when the EU developed more of a foreign policy dimension and China continued its economic surge. To some extent both actors in various ways began to see each others as partners in dealing with the Soviet Union and with the United States, and helping their own rise in the international system. Strategic convergence has taken place, though one could still notice China’s emphasis on geo-politics and multipolarization and the EU’s greater stress on geo-economics and multilateralism.     

美国对印度、朝鲜核政策的比较研究：建构主义的视角

冷战结束以来,特别是近十年面对印度和朝鲜发展核力量的努力,美国采取了完全不同的核政策。美国对印度持友善甚至支持的态度,而对朝鲜采取对抗性政策。本文试从温特的身份建构主义并结合语言行为的角度分析,揭示美国形成不同核政策的原因——美国对两国构建起截然不同的身份。冷战后,美印互动促使美国对印度在冷战时期构建起的非敌非友身份向准盟友方向转化,而美朝的互动强化了美国在冷战时期就已经构建起的敌人身份认同。     

From Human to Workers' Rights: The Emergence of a Migrant Workers' Union Movement in Korea

Migrant workers in Korea occupy a low social position because of their objective economic position within the division of labour, hegemonic norms of racial homogeneity, and government policy that seeks to extract the labour power from migrant workers without recognising their substantive human and workers' rights. Despite the existence of an official system for the rotational employment of so-called “industrial trainees”, the dominant system in Korea has been a tacitly accepted market for illegal labour. Despite the emergence of a dynamic civil society movement to support migrant workers, their challenge to the prevailing cultural norms in society and their manifestation in government policy has been somewhat limited. However, a migrant-worker-centred trade union movement has also emerged which, although still in its early stages, has more directly begun to challenge these norms and to achieve a common identity with the Korean working class.     

Global Threats and American Strategies: From Communism in 1955 to Islamism in 2005

America's current security threats—the insurgency in Iraq, Islamic terrorism, and Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons—seem strange and unprecedented. Parallels can be drawn, however, between the security threats of 2005 and those of fifty years ago. The U.S. foreign policy developed to confront the communist threat offers lessons as we develop strategies to combat today's threat. Two contemporary perspectives on strategic issues—one conservative/realist, one neoconservative/idealist—apply lessons of the Cold War to today's U.S. foreign policy, but each has serious flaws. A third, neorealist perspective, suggests that by leveraging the divisions already present in the Muslim world, the United States can win the global contest against Islamic terrorism. However, this would require a transformation in American strategy that will not be easily achieved.     

A Friend Indeed? From Tobruk to El Alamein: The American Contribution to Victory in the Desert

The article offers a re-evaluation of American reinforcement for the Eighth Army following the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, arguing that American arms and air power made a decisive, if largely unrecognized, contribution to the victory at El Alamein. Both British and American leaders, for their own reasons, glossed over the critical American component of this most quintessentially British victory, and historians have echoed this downplaying of American aid. The article sets these political and military events in the context of expanding American interest in the Middle East.     

Crossing to Safety from Cold War America: The Collaboration and Friendship of John Paton Davies,Jr. and George Frost Kennan

This analysis probes the interwoven careers and lives of two distinguished American diplomats, John Paton Davies, Jr. and George Frost Kennan. These Foreign Service officers, who rose to prominence in the years immediately after the Second World War, were embroiled in the formulation and implementation of controversial policy during the early Cold War. The experience of Davies and Kennan illustrates the domestic hazards that have dogged American foreign policy-making even into the present. Yet the focus here is on their friendship—a subject hitherto little examined in the scholarly literature—its connexion to the evolution of their policy recommendations, its steadying power in moments of moral and personal crisis, its tempering effect on failure. The assessment also draws on a notable work of fiction, Wallace Stegner’s 1987 Crossing to Safety, to consider the ineffable nature of friendship itself.     

The Sino–Russian Partnership and U.S. Policy Toward North Korea: From Hegemony to Concert in Northeast Asia

This paper presents two sets of arguments: one theoretical and one analytical. The theoretical arguments concern the relationship between regional ordering and systemic change. The paper questions the usefulness of the unipolar conception of the contemporary system arguing that the interaction of the Great Powers cannot be understood without reference to regional dynamics. Thus, a unipolar system implies considerable potential for U.S. hegemonic intervention at the regional level but in East Asia, we find an equilibrium constructed out of both material and normative forces, defined as a concert, which presents a considerable restraint on all powers, including the U.S. The paper then proceeds to examine these claims through an analysis of the foreign policies of the U.S., Russia, and China over the North Korean nuclear problem that emerged after 2002. It finds that China and Russia have substantive common interests arising from internal and external re-ordering in which they look to strategic partnerships, regional multilateralism, and systemic multipolarization as inter-locking processes. The paper finds that they have collaborated over the Korean crisis to prevent a U.S. unilateral solution but that this should not be construed as a success for an open counterhegemonic strategy as it was only under the constraining conditions of East Asian concert, including the dynamics within the U.S. alliance systems, that this collaboration was successful. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that regional multipolarity and systemic unipolarity are contradictory: a system that exhibits multipolarization at the regional level cannot be characterized as unipolar at the global level.     

《反弹道导弹条约》的兴废始末

1972年美苏签署的《美苏关于限制反弹道导弹系统条约》(简称反导条约、AMB条约)是当前国际关系中最令人关注并引起诸多争议的问题之一。该约限制美苏双方建立针对弹道导弹的国土导弹防御系统,以维持双方战略核武库力量的大体平衡。依此建立的“相互确保摧毁理论”成为现代核威慑战略的理论基础。随着冷战后美国执意发展国家导弹防御系统,反导条约已成为当前世人关注的热点。     

Ukraine’s journey to Europe: strategic macronarrative and conceptual metaphors

ABSTRACT

Informed by strategic narrative theorisation and cognitive metaphor theory refined and expanded, this paper analyses textual and pictorial instantiations of cognitive metaphors used to describe and explain the trajectory of Ukraine’s development and form a particular narrative of this movement. Both narrative and cognitive metaphor are considered as tools for navigating experience and serving to construe its subjective images. The study focuses on the ways these tools were used by Ukrainian print media (eight influential outlets) in 2016. The outcomes demonstrate how a coherent strategic macronarrative of Ukraine’s course of development emerges from metaphoric images that survive semiotic mode changes, alternating between textual and pictorial. The macronarrative is that of Ukraine on a hero’s journey towards the European Union – a journey with political and economic implications for both Ukraine and the EU.     

Swiss Neutrality: From Policy to Doctrine

This article suggests that the modern discourse in Switzerland about neutrality signals a change in nature of the global understanding of neutrality from an apparently unchallengeable generic moral stance to a doctrine that requires individual policy consideration on a case-by-case basis.