麦克米伦政府与塞浦路斯独立

麦克米伦执政时期,塞浦路斯已成为英国的一种负担。岛内希腊族人要求归并希腊,为此与土耳其族人、英国殖民当局发生的武装冲突愈演愈烈。由于希腊和土耳其的介入,塞浦路斯问题日益复杂化和国际化。出于现实的考虑,麦克米伦政府不断修改对塞浦路斯的政策,最终在保留英国军事基地主权的前提下同意塞浦路斯独立。英国由此从塞浦路斯的泥淖中得以脱身,塞浦路斯岛内则获得了短暂的和平。     

Banquo's Ghost: Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan, and the High Politics of Decolonization, 1957-1963

This article reconstructs the bitter political argument betweenLord Salisbury and Harold Macmillan over decolonization. Inorder to do so it makes extensive use of their private papers.It describes their view of each other and their political manoeuvres.The article argues that Macmillan and Salisbury themselves wereso obsessed by their conflict that it dominated much of theprime minister's thinking on the empire throughout his premiership.The obsessive nature of the struggle was a result of genuineideological differences but took on its particular characterbecause the two principals had known each since their schooldays.The account contends that a political contest between intimatescan best be understood through the lens of ‘intimate history’.     

华沙会谈与中美对第二次台湾海峡危机的处理

华沙会谈对中美双方处理第二次台湾海峡危机产生了不同的政策影响和作用。会谈虽然有利于中美决策者了解对方的意图,但会谈使双方的分歧更加尖锐;中国通过华沙会谈调整和改变了对台湾和沿海岛屿的政策,而美国则更加明确了沿海岛屿的政策。     

Eisenhower and Castro: US-Cuban relations, 1958-60

Books reviewed in this article:
United States Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960, Vol. V. American Republics
United States Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960, Vol. VI. Cuba     

Death and the Making of West Berlin, 1948-1961

This essay traces shifts in attitudes towards death, practicesof burial, and rituals of mourning in West Berlin from the 1948currency reform to the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall.It shows that West Berliners in the years immediately followingthe Second World War maintained an arduous devotion to theirdead—particularly the war dead. Yet as the war becamea less immediate experience over the course of the 1950s, broadcultural shifts took shape, including a renewed sense of optimismand an emerging feeling that the suffering associated with thewar could be and was being redeemed. Meanwhile, a cult of thedead long venerated as part of the very foundation of Germanculture gradually became ‘less German’ and ‘moreWestern’ over that same period. In this way, it also becamea means of distinguishing West Berlin from its Communist neighbourto the East. By focusing on shifts in perceptions and practicessurrounding death, the essay reveals part of the process bywhich moral and ethical values were reconstructed after Nazism,and how the racist collectivism of the Third Reich graduallygave way to the broadly individualist, democratic-socialisthumanism that would form the basis of an expressly West Germanpolitics and society.     

Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson and devolution, 1966-70: the making of government policy

This article expands our understanding of devolution, the Britishconstitution, the Wilson government of 1966–70 and thecareers and attitudes of Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson.It shows that devolution was debated not as a simply ‘Celtic’affair, but as part of a long-standing Labour concern with reformingthe ‘machinery of government’. This interest—expressedby Crossman amongst others—became submerged by other eventsand pressures. Perceived nationalist successes and the conflictingaims of (divided) Labour parties in Scotland and Wales pushedout Crossman's little-studied desire to replace ‘nationaldevolution’ with regional devolution across the UK. Wilsonadopted the delaying tactic of a Royal Commission on the Constitution.Using a wide range of private, governmental and Labour sourcesfrom across the UK, the article shows the interchange of policydebate between London and the ‘Celtic fringe’. Inthe process, the article reveals both national tensions anda commitment to Britishness, stemming from shared policy interestsand also from wider cultural influences.     

Presidential Policymaking in Crisis Situations: 9/11 and Its Aftermath

This paper compares the decision-making approaches of two presidents, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, in relation to unanticipated international crises. One, President Kennedy, employed a broad body of expert opinion and entertained a wide range of options in meeting the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. The actions taken avoided a potential worldwide nuclear war. The other, George W. Bush, consulted only a few, like-minded colleagues and appears to have decided early on that a war directed against Iraq and Saddam Hussein was a necessity. The administration's justifications for the war were difficult to prove and the administration chose an essentially bilateral (as against a multi-lateral) approach. The Iraq War was won fairly easily, although its long-range consequences remain unclear. The two styles of decision-making present polarized approaches to international crisis situation management.     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.     

Kathleen Ritzpatrick (1905-1990), Margaret Kiddle (1914-1958) and Australian history after the Second World War

This article explores the pioneering efforts of two Australian historians, Margaret Kiddle and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, to place issues of women and gender centrally in a narrative of Australia's past. While they were not the first women to enter the history profession in Australia, both women made a significant mark on the Australian history profession in the years after World War II. Furthermore, their first books represent the earliest scholarly Australian works in which women appeared as central figures. Their achievement was initially overlooked by feminists of the 1970s, but in retrospect can be viewed as a first step in subverting the dominant masculinity of Australian national identity.     

Isaiah Berlin and the totalitarian mind

One of the important—yet often underestimated—dimensions of the intellectual legacy of Isaiah Berlin is his contribution to the demystification of the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century. This paper starts with an apparent paradox: Berlin is described as a major figure of the anti‐totalitarian camp, yet his writings nowhere touch explicitly on the totalitarian regimes of his time. Nonetheless, it is argued that Berlin's notion of “monism,” and his unique insight into the totalitarian mind, are an indirect yet valuable contribution to the understanding of the appeal exercised by totalitarianism within the modern political imagination. Despite Berlin's highly contestable account of the origins of monism—which he situates in the Enlightenment movement—it is asserted that Berlin's denunciation of utopias remains very much pertinent in light of the emergence of new fundamentalist utopias in a post 9/11 world. Consequently, there are grounds from which to dismiss those claims according to which Berlin's work belongs to an age—that of the Cold War—unfamiliar to the present.