The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain,France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s

The theory of “preventive war” states that, under certain conditions, states respond to rising adversaries with military force in an attempt to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power. British and French passivity in response to the rapid rise of Germany in the 1930s would appear to constitute one of the leading empirical anomalies in the theory, one the theory's proponents must explain. After clarifying the meaning of the preventive motivation for war and specifying the conditions under which it should be the strongest, we examine French and British behavior in the crises over the Rhineland in 1936 and Sudeten Czechoslovakia in 1938 through an intensive study of government documents and private papers. We argue that French political leaders, anticipating a continuing adverse shift in relative power, wanted to confront Hitler, but only with British support, which was not forthcoming. British leaders believed, even by 1936, that the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that German ascendancy was only temporary and that British rearmament would redress the balance of power in a few years. We contrast our argument with alternative interpretations based on domestic political pressures and ideologically driven beliefs and interests.     

Review of public budgeting and financial management

User charge is an alternative option to privatizing public service provision. But its use as a policy instrument, compared with that of asset sales or contracting out, for instance, is less researched and documented. This paper tries to fill the gap. By contrasting the experiences of employing user charge for two public services in Hong Kong with diametrically opposing results, this paper offers preliminary conclusions on several lessons, which governments, in their drive toward improved efficiency, can learn in commercializing their trading activities. Implications to public policy making are also suggested. These include: the user-pays principle has to be applied equitably, the public service market has to remain depoliticized, the management has to be transformed to behave more entrepreneurially, and the users have to be educated.     

Review article

Towards a Post‐Fordist Welfare State? Edited by Roger Burrows and Brian Loader. London, Routledge, 1994. Pp.263. £35.00 hb, £13.99 pb.     

The Takeover Directive: Is a Little Regulation Better Than No Regulation?

This article examines Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids through a regulatory lens in order to determine its effectiveness as a regulatory mechanism. A central regulatory problem for European legislators is to determine the optimal balance between harmonisation and diversity, and the directive reflects the balance which was struck. The article questions whether the resulting 'light regulatory touch' may have jeopardised the existing efficient self-regulatory regime which operates in the UK (the largest European takeover market), while simultaneously undermining the directive's goal of facilitating takeovers and yielding a level playing field.     

Characterization and differentiation of aluminum powders used in improvised explosive devices – Part 1: Proof of concept of the utility of particle micromorphometry

Aluminum (Al) powders are commonly used in improvised explosive devices as metallic fuels, a component of explosive mixtures. These powders can be obtained readily from industrial‐scale and consumer products, and produced using unsophisticated “kitchen chemistry” techniques. This research demonstrates the potential of automated particle micromorphometry for comparisons between known source and questioned Al powders recovered from IEDs, as well as for insight into the method of Al powder manufacture. Al powder samples were obtained from legitimate manufacturers, and 56 samples were produced “in‐house” from Al‐containing spray paints and ball‐milled Al foils. Transmitted light microscope images of Al powder particles were acquired using an automated stage with automated z‐focus; 17 size and shape parameters were measured for all particles. Approximately 37,000–2,500,000 particles/sample were analyzed using an open‐source statistical package with customized code. Dimensionality reduction was required for processing the large datasets: eight of the 17 measured variables were selected based on inspection of the correlation matrix. Data from four subsamples from each of the 56 samples produced using “in‐house” methods were analyzed using ANOVA to assess the within‐ and between‐sample variation. High within‐sample variation was noted; however, ANOVA and post‐hoc Tukey's honestly significant difference (HSD) tests demonstrated that the between‐sample variation was substantially larger than the within‐sample variation. Each sample could be differentiated from all other samples in the test set. Future experiments will focus on ways to reduce the within‐sample variation, and additional statistical and microanalytical methods to classify sources and confidently constrain the method of Al powder manufacture.