‘An Organic Part of the Whole Structure’: John Curtin's Empire

In March 1957 Harold Macmillan expressed to Dwight Eisenhower that the British government was ‘considering abandoning Hong Kong’. The hitherto unknown Hong Kong Question in 1957 grew primarily out of Britain's imperial decline, and particularly the difficulties of defending Hong Kong. During the Cold War Hong Kong was a colony too valuable for Britain to abandon in peace, and yet too peripheral to be worth committing scarce resources to for its survival at war. The British dilemmas were exacerbated by the 1956 riots in Hong Kong and the general defence review undertaken by the Macmillan government in 1957, both of which raised serious questions about the adequacy of a reduced garrison to maintain internal security. The United States also showed concern about the future of the British colony in the light of Anglo-American differences over the Suez crisis and China policy. As a result of the Bermuda and Washington conferences in 1957, the Anglo-American relationship was restored by Eisenhower and Macmillan, a restoration which, as the latter saw it, made Hong Kong ‘a joint defence problem’ between the two allies. Together with the Chinese communist policy of leaving the colony alone, the Hong Kong Question was thus resolved inadvertently.     

‘To Prostitute the Elements’: Weather Control and Weaponisation by US Department of Defense

The US military has a long and robust history of scientific research programs, often conducted in conjunction with civilian scientists at non-military governmental agencies as well as universities. These programs flourished in the immediate post-Second World War and the early cold war years, as the field of military science expanded to address the sprawling Soviet threat. One area of growth was in atmospheric science, which had already taken off preceding Second World War in conjunction with the growth of air warfare. Advances in meteorology, cloud science and climatology enabled military interests to align with weather forecasters and also agricultural interests, as old ideas about cloud seeding and weather control were revived in the light of new research. The military, largely through the Air Force, advanced a series of projects investigating the potential of weather and climate control, manipulation, and ultimately weaponisation. These programs, which were sometimes linked to US Department of Agriculture programs aimed at improving agricultural production, persisted for decades. Some of the newly developed tools were deployed: local climate manipulation efforts during the Vietnam conflict were aimed at impeding traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with mixed results. Significant efforts came during the Weather Bureau leadership of Francis W. Reichelderfer, whose papers contain a wealth of information about efforts ranging from cloud seeding to proposals to drop atomic weapons on hurricanes. These papers, along with those of Weather Bureau scientist Harry Wexler, provide a fascinating window to a time when the US military and scientific establishment seemed poised to grasp the levers of power over nature itself. This paper describes these little-studied programs, and situates these efforts within the broader military science programs accompanying the emergence of air warfare, as well as post-war science programs aimed at countering the Soviet challenge.     

John Howard and the ‘Anglospherist’ reshaping of Australia

The conceptual category of the Anglosphere never found explicit currency in John Howard's narrative when he was prime minister. While in office, he ostentatiously avoided ‘putting Australia into a particular sphere – Anglo or otherwise’. This article suggests instead that his endeavour to reshape Australia drew on an Anglospherist perspective. The reshaping of Australia he undertook when he won office rested on two pillars of Anglospherism: the rejection of multiculturalism and the alignment to countries with ‘shared values’ in Australia's external relations. The article traces how these two Anglospherist precepts found actual implementation in Howard's re-framing of ‘Australian multiculturalism’ and re-conceptualisation of ‘Australia's engagement with Asia’.

约翰·霍华德担任总理期间,英语圈的说法在他的叙述里并不通行。在他的官方官样文章里,他明确地避免把澳大利亚放进特定的圈子——英语圈也好,别的圈也好。霍华德在职的时候重塑澳大利亚的努力,其实是基于英语圈的视角。他赢得竞选时要重塑澳大利亚的事业,有两个英语圈的支柱：拒绝多元文化;对外关系中优先“持共同价值观”的国家。本文研究了霍华德如何将这两个英语圈思路落实到对“澳大利亚多元文化”的重新塑造、对“澳大利亚与亚洲关系”的重新思考中的。     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Müller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.     

‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy

Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.     

Thinking Transition ‘From the Outside’: An Analysis of the Film De L’argentine by Werner Schroeter

The present article concentrates on the analysis of the film De l’Argentine/De la Argentina/For example Argentina (Werner Schroeter, France/Argentina, 1983–1985) as a way of access to a number of specific problems concerning the process of Argentinean democratic consolidation. It is a film that was only screened in Argentina for the first time in 2013, after a copy was found at the French Cinémathèque. Like other films produced in the context of dictatorship and democratic transition, Schroeter’s film has tended to think Argentina ‘from the outside’, that is, with a view marked by strangeness. These are documentaries which reflect upon physical and temporal distances, but, not the least, through cultural and ideological remoteness. On the basis of an analysis framed within Documentary Theory and the Sociology of Culture, this article seeks to make a contribution by way of an original perspective on a political film which, as far as we know, has not been addressed yet by Film Studies.     

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.