Introduction: The Future of Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship

In her Introduction to this issue of International Affairs devoted to the future of Europe and the transatlantic relationship, Julie Smith highlights the challenges facing the West's major organizations—the European Union and NATO. The Convention on the Future of Europe, enlargement of both NATO and the EU, the euro debate, and the tensions in the transatlantic relationship are discussed in the context of the articles in these pages.     

中国谋求打开对欧关系的努力

20世纪60年代初,随着国际形势的变化,特别是中苏关系的破裂,中国在对外关系方面做出重大调整,重点是谋求打开对欧关系。为此,中国在公共关系、经济和政治外交等领域积极展开活动。总的来说,中国在上述领域所做的努力是有成效的,特别是中法关系正常化标志着中国对欧外交的一个重大突破。但也要看到,中欧关系总体上依然发展缓慢,这主要是由于大多数西欧国家仍不能摆脱美国的控制来发展对华关系造成的。     

Transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation

Despite recent advances in transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation, significant problems remain. The bombings in Madrid in March 2004 have demonstrated how terrorists and criminals can continue to exploit the limits of hesitant or partial exchange to dangerous effect. Intelligence and security cooperation remain problematic because of the fundamental tension between an increasingly networked world, which is ideal terrain for the new religious terrorism, and highly compartmentalized national intelligence gathering. If cooperation is to improve, we require a better mutual understanding about the relationship between privacy and security to help us decide what sort of intelligence should be shared. This is a higher priority than building elaborate new structures. While most practical problems of intelligence exchange are ultimately resolvable, the challenge of agreeing what the intelligence means in broad terms is even more problematic. The last section of this article argues that shared NATO intelligence estimates would be difficult to achieve and of doubtful value.     

Transatlantic working-class institutions

This paper investigates the migration of English and Irish textile workers from Lancashire, England to Fall River, Massachusetts. Historians have traditionally focused on migration and immigrants in terms of the image of the deracinated peasants. This paper looks at the influence of the industrial experience in Europe before migration on the culture and institutions of industrial migrants and the impact of that experience and those institutions on the American industrial city. These migrants brought with them institutions and a consciousness which were forged in Europe and which directly affected the American setting. By looking at the interactions between Fall River and Lancashire and the functioning of the formal and informal institutions of the working class of Fall River the paper will analyse the transatlantic nature of the working-class experience.     

Transatlantic financiers and the Civil War

This essay examines the sympathies and actions of transatlantic financiers in Britain during the Civil War. Motivated largely by their financial and ideological connection to the Northern states, major Anglo‐American banks sympathized with the Union and campaigned to keep Britain out of the conflict. Unable to procure the support of Britain's leading banking houses, the Confederacy turned to lesser capitalists and speculators for financial assistance. By highlighting Britain's economic links to the Northern states and pointing to the potential dangers of meddling in the conflict, financiers in the City of London provided statesmen in the Westminster Parliament with a powerful justification for the policy of neutrality.     

Transatlantic Trade and the Coastal Area of Pre-Liberia

Transatlantic trade affected the coastal area of West Africa that became Liberia in 1822. The impact of that trade has confused historians of the region, particularly the social and economic effects the trade had on the Vai, Kru, Glebo, and other ethnic groups. Before the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, coastal pre-Liberia had been affected by internal and external social dynamics. The Mande, Mel, and Kwa were the first linguistic groups to reside in the region. The earliest home of the Mande has been traced to the area north of the Niger River, but there is disagreement as to the origins of the Mel and Kwa. All three linguistic groups contributed to population growth. Indeed, such Mel-speaking ethnic groups as the Kissi and Gola, and such Kwa-speakers as the Dei, Bassa, Kran, Kru, and Glebo came to pre-Liberia in about 988 A.D. The Mande-speaking groups, including the Mende, Bandi, Loma, and Vai, settled long after the other two linguistic groups had moved there. The Vai, isolated from other Mande-speakers for over two thousand years, reached the coastal area in the sixteenth century.¹     

Queering women,peace and security

The aim of the eight Women, Peace and Security (WPS) United Nations Security Council resolutions, beginning with UNSCR 1325 in 2000, is to involve women in peacebuilding, reconstruction and gender mainstreaming efforts for gendered equality in international peace and security work. However, the resolutions make no mention of masculinity, femininity or the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) population. Throughout the WPS architecture the terms ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably. As a result, sexual and gender‐based violence (SGBV) tracking and monitoring fail to account for individuals who fall outside a heteronormative construction of who qualifies as ‘women’. Those vulnerable to insecurity and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity remain largely neglected by the international peace and security community. Feminist security studies and emerging queer theory in international relations provide a framework to incorporate a gender perspective in WPS work that moves beyond a narrow, binary understanding of gender to begin to capture violence targeted at the LGBTQ population, particularly in efforts to address SGBV in conflict‐related environments. The article also explores the ways in which a queer security analysis reveals the part heteronormativity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence.     

Keeping the bureaucratic peace

'Audit culture and the politics of accountability, new managerialism, and neoliberal governance', American Anthropological Association Invited Roundtable Session, Chicago, 21 November 2003     

The Passenger Cases Reconsidered in Transatlantic Commerce Clause History

The Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in the Passenger Cases (1849) overturned two Northern states' taxes on poor foreign immigrants. The Court's eight opinions disputed whether destitute transatlantic immigrants arriving in U.S. ports were legally and constitutionally “persons” like fugitive slaves fleeing the South, free African Americans residing in the U.S.‐Canadian borderlands, and black seamen working on ships entering Southern ports. The eight opinions issued in the case, as Charles Warren noted, raised fundamental constitutional questions concerning whether U.S. congressional or state authority was exclusive or concurrent over persons moving in interstate and international business, reflecting wider sectional struggles fostering the Civil War. ¹ More recently, Mary Bilder and others examined connections among indentured contract labor, race‐based American slavery, and the Court's antebellum Commerce Clause decisions to establish that foreign immigrants were commercial objects subject to regulation through the Constitution's Commerce Clause. ² Southerners and Northern pro‐slavery supporters argued, however, that fugitive slaves and free blacks crossing interstate and international borders were “persons” who could be regulated or altogether excluded under state police powers. ³