Missing the nuclear boat? British policy and French military nuclear ambitions during the EURATOM foundation negotiations, 1955-56

This paper examines the neglected nuclear dimension of the 'relaunch' of Europe at Messina. France favoured British membership of EURATOM and some interests in Britain saw the commercial and diplomatic advantages of Britain's leadership of the European nuclear industry. However, the possibility of a French military nuclear programme and European nuclear proliferation compounded Britain's established reluctance either to participate in European integration or to jeopardize the prospect of Anglo-American nuclear weapons cooperation. Britain's aversion to using the hypothetical 'nuclear card' is a recurrent theme in Anglo-French diplomacy.     

Moscow,Havana and asymmetry in international relations

Asymmetric relationships have been fundamental to the study of international relations, becoming even more important with the end of the Cold War, which left the United States as the sole global superpower. However, what impact does the distance between two countries have on the magnitude of an asymmetric relationship and the exposure of the countries to one another? This article examines these phenomena by analysing the relationship between Havana and Moscow from the time of the Russian Revolution in November 1917 to the present. Specifically it examines three distinct periods: from November 1917 until February 1960, from February 1960 until the implosion of the Soviet Union in late 1991 and from 1992 to the present. This article posits that the distance between two countries reduces neither the intensity of an asymmetric relationship nor the exposure of the two countries to one another.     

Russo–Cuban Relations in the 1990s

This analysis re-examines Russo–Cuban relations in the period in which Boris Yeltsin was Russian President using previously unseen documents housed in the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba [MINREX] archive in Havana. A number of conclusions offer themselves including that the relationship remained key for Havana throughout the 1990s, despite a Cuban ideological aversion to the Russian reforms of the early to mid-decade and the subsequent “new realities” of Russo–Cuban relations. Cuba desired a relationship that preserved a number of features of Soviet–Cuban relations, which MINREX officials strove to achieve by purposefully creating a political legacy from the Soviet era, whilst also specifically lobbying members of the Russian political elite who had sympathies with the Soviet period. This development has resonance for contemporary Russo–Cuban relations that are at their most robust politically since 1991. Consequently, the Soviet legacy remains both much greater than previously thought and deliberately created by Cuba.     

Migrants, Civil Society and Sovereign States: Investigating an Ethical Hierarchy

Many actors in global politics profess both a commitment to basic human rights and to a system of sovereign democratic states. There are clear tensions between these commitments which become apparent when seeking ethical answers to the increasingly urgent problem of migrants who cross state boundaries in pursuit of better life chances elsewhere. Is it possible to achieve a coherence between a commitment to individual human rights and to sovereign democratic states? It is argued that a neo-Hegelian constitutive theory of individuality provides a useful guide to our thinking about this matter.     

Interrelationships among Native Peoples, Genetic Research, and the Landscape: Need for Further Research into Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

To understand the impacts of development on native peoples requires an understanding of how their genetic make-up is implicated in their relationship with their landscapes. This is an area ripe for more research. The ASLME project on DNA Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties proposed improvements to the ethical and legal safeguards for the collection and storage of DNA-derived genetic information. Native peoples have proposed a similar examination of the ethical and legal issues related to the collection and storage of their genetic information obtained via family histories and genealogies.     

Teleportation,Cyborgs and the Posthuman Ideology

This paper is concerned with a set of phenomena that lies at the intersection of popular culture, genetics, cybertechnology, nanotechnology, biotechnology and other advanced technologies, bio-ethics, science speculation, science fiction, mythology, the New Age Movement, cults, commerce and globalization. At the centre is a radical technophilia that finds representative expression in posthumanism, an Internet-based social movement driven by an extreme scientific utopianism. This set of phenomena constitutes an articulated cultural response to a number of underlying economic, technological and social dynamics that are together transforming the world, and particularly developed societies as they are incorporated into a global system of 'digital capitalism'. This paper first describes posthumanism and transhumanism. It then explores two key notions, teleportation and cyborgs, that receive extensive attention in mainstream media and serve as exemplars of this scientistic ideology, locating them both in cultural history and contemporary popular culture. The paper argues that posthumanism and associated phenomena are best seen as an ideological interpellation of humanity into an increasingly dominant scientific and technological order based on the cultural and scientific ascendancy of the 'Informational Paradigm' identified by Katherine Hayles in her inquiry into 'How we became posthuman'.