Negotiating the caliphate: British responses to pan-Islamic appeals, 1914–1924

This paper considers two aspects of historiography about the 1967 Arab–Israeli War – American and Soviet foreign policy in the region – to better appreciate the Soviet role in the outbreak of hostilities, as well as how the war concretized the US–Israeli ‘special relationship’ and weakened American–Arab relations. Relying especially on research from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library and Foreign Relations of the United States, this paper argues that Soviet officials had little interest in pursuing measures to prevent war during the pre-war crisis because the situation promised to undermine American interests in the region.     

“I’m awfully fed up with being a prisoner”* Australian POWs of the Turks and the Strain of Surrender

Nearly 200 Australians were captured and held as prisoners of war (POWs) by Ottoman Turkish forces during the First World War. They have largely been overlooked in Australian history and memory of the conflict with the result that little is known of their time in captivity or of its wider ramifications. In examining the emotional impact of their capture and imprisonment, this article offers intimate insights into how these Australian POWs felt about their captivity, from the moment of surrender until long after the war had ended. The humiliation of capture and confinement at the hands of a culturally, religiously and linguistically different enemy and the restrictions imposed by wartime imprisonment exacerbated the prisoners’ private feelings of shame and failure, feelings that were publicly reinforced in the aftermath of the war as the two dominant narratives of the conflict—the heroic Anzac fighter and the Turks as the honourable enemy—excluded or, at best, marginalised their experiences. Such analysis tells us much about the psychological dimension of wartime captivity, and adds to our understanding of the legacy of this POW experience.     

Policing protest in the Australian Capital Territory: the introduction and use of the Public Order Act 1971

This article examines the reaction by the Australian Federal Government to the protest movements of the 1960s–1970s and their attempts to use public order legislation to thwart radical discontent in Australia. It argues that the Public Order (Protection of Persons and Property) Act 1971 was aimed at the threat of “violent” protests, particularly the tactic of the “sit-in”, and that to this end, the legislation was an overreaction to the actual threat posed by the protest movements at the time. It also shows that after a long gestation period, the Act was ill-equipped to deal with the changing nature of demonstrations in the 1970s, such as the problems caused by the erection of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Thus, after an initial flurry of use in mid-1971, the law has been seldom used since.     

Terrorism,Agenda 2063 and the challenges of development in Africa

The nobility of the objectives and aspiration of the African Union's Agenda 2063 towards the developmental needs of the African people are laudable, as are the attempts being made to ensure collective action, despite the ‘shield of sovereignty behind which too many corrupt leaders have hidden’. However, these noble objectives and aspirations may be undermined and threatened by the upsurge in militant Islamism and the spread of terrorism within and outside Africa, a fact not being addressed by Agenda 2063. Yet while Agenda 2063 does not seek to address the challenges posed by terrorist networks within the continent, which are threatening human security as well as the sovereignty, territoriality, legitimacy and stability of political regimes, these issues are at the core of the agenda. This article argues for Agenda 2063 to step up its efforts to combat both the roots of terrorism and the threat to development that terrorism itself poses.     

‘A MAD age’: Heibon Punch,student protest,the media and consumer society in Cold War Japan

Abstract

In the 1960s, Heibon Punch became one of the most popular weekly magazines in Japan. It was the first weekly magazine aimed at young men and I examine here a selection of articles from the late 1960s, a period of violent student protests and international uncertainty, to argue that the importance of Heibon Punch can be found in the creation of a commodified urban, male subjectivity. In the pages of Heibon Punch, the counter-cultures that were emerging along with the protest movements taking to the streets of the major cities, became firmly embedded within the ideological state promotion of a consumer culture. The government's explicit connection of national development to domestic consumption after the ANPO protests was tied to American military and economic power, and was simply one more assault on popular sovereignty. In the pages of Heibon Punch, the political nature of the social and economic transformations wrought by high-speed economic growth was effaced by the relentless consumerisation of individual subjectivity. I place the magazine, its editorial stance and mediatisation of subjectivity, within the broader emergence of an urban, middle-class culture of consumption that served to blur the contours of individual male subjectivity, and was, in many ways, a precursor of neo-liberal subjectivities that emerged full-blown both politically and economically in the 1970s and 1980s. By pressing its readers to decide for themselves how to negotiate the identities, ideas, and goods on offer in its pages, Heibon Punch shifted the focus of political subjectivity from the established social and political system to the core of the individual subject.     

冷战与美国对泰国政策的转变（1947~1950年）

20世纪40年代末50年代初,因冷战的发展和亚洲局势的变化,美国对泰国的政策经历了从勉强接受披汶重新掌权,到与披汶政府进行合作,再到扶持披汶为其冷战盟友的巨大转变。从美泰关系的变化可以发现,意识形态和政治制度在国际关系中的作用是相对有限的,而国际体系和区域格局的变动、以及由此引起的地缘政治的变化对国际关系有着更为重要的影响。     

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low,learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?†

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success ? in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.     

NEWS AS A WEAPON: HOLLINGTON TONG AND THE FORMATION OF THE GUOMINDANG CENTRALIZED FOREIGN PROPAGANDA SYSTEM, 1937–1938

Abstract

This article examines the process of the centralization of the Guomindang (GMD) foreign propaganda system during 1937 and 1938. The US-trained journalist Hollington Tong was the key person linking Chiang Kai-shek with the English-language press cohort. Based on his personal news network in the treaty ports, Tong extended the government’s propaganda network in the United States and Britain. He professionalized the propaganda institution and pursued a “hands off policy,” co-opting foreign journalists by offering them substantial assistance. This article challenges the perceived passivity of China’s foreign propaganda activities and argues that foreign propaganda was an important war strategy for the GMD government after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Factionalism played an important role in expediting the centralization process. It was Chiang’s patronage that allowed Tong, a new member of the GMD, to lead the foreign propaganda system and pursue a liberal censorship policy.     

THE DILEMMAS OF A CIVILIAN POLITICIAN IN TIME OF WAR: ZHOU FOHAI AND THE FIRST STAGE OF THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR,JULY–DECEMBER 1937

Abstract

History’s verdict on Zhou Fohai is that he was an arch-collaborator, the éminence grise of Wang Jingwei’s government. Yet Zhou’s political career in the 1930s as a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s factional network did not suggest his later activities as a highly placed collaborator. Prior to 1938, Zhou had little or no political connections to Wang Jingwei; indeed, prior to the outbreak of war he regarded Wang and his followers as bitter factional enemies. Zhou’s background, therefore, underscores the complexity and indeed contingency of collaboration in the Sino-Japanese War. This article examines three areas of Zhou’s activities in the Guomindang Party-State during the first six months of the Sino-Japanese War: his role as a Chiang Kai-shek loyalist helping to craft key policies; his involvement with developing the United Front after the Lushan Conference; and his part in efforts to seek a negotiated peace with the aim of preserving as much of China’s sovereignty as possible. The article argues that these peace efforts were not in themselves a harbinger of collaboration, but were in fact conducted within the framework of the Party-State and involved a variety of leading figures. Despite Zhou’s liaison with the communist representatives, he remained staunchly anti-communist and suspicious of their ultimate ambitions, a suspicion that only deepened with the Guomindang’s every military reverse. And in his efforts to effect peace negotiations, he faced insurmountable obstacles in Chiang’s decision to pursue the military option, in the failure of international mediation by the leading Western powers, and in Japan’s ratcheting up its demands as its army went from victory to victory. By early 1938, therefore, Zhou was profoundly pessimistic about China’s prospects in its war with Japan.     

MAO’S ROLE IN THE KOREAN CONFLICT: A REVISION

Abstract

In October 1950, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was only one year old, and the Beijing regime faced daunting tasks of regime consolidation and economic reconstruction. Thus, the CIA consistently predicted that China would not enter the Korean War, even if the United States crossed the 38th parallel. Acting on the CIA’s prediction, US forces invaded North Korea on October 8, 1950. China proved the CIA’s analysis wrong by sending masses of troops into Korea late in October, pushing the US force back south of the 38th parallel before the end of 1950. This article uncovers historical evidence to revise the existing literature on the topic of the Chinese intervention in Korea. Why did China intervene despite all the odds against Beijing? This study demonstrates the historical role of “agents,” that is, individual with various personal attributes. By using newly available sources from China and Russia as well as a new interpretation, this article breaks new ground on a significant topic in the fields of international relations and the Cold War international history.