Transnationalism,Transgovernmentalism and Canada–US Relations in the Twenty-first Century

This article assesses the contemporary dynamics of transnationalism in Canada–US relations as the interaction of three key factors: market-driven or “bottom-up” economic integration, sectoral differentiation embedded in transgovernmental relations, and societal (or cultural) transnationalism. It also notes the disruptive and potentially transformative effects of transnational and transgovernmental forces beyond North America which are becoming increasingly central to the calculations of policymakers and major interest groups in both countries. It concludes that transnationalism is a multidimensional phenomenon that appears more likely to facilitate mutual accommodation between the US and its North American neighbors embedded within broader national and international policy streams than to build a broad North American consensus on policy harmonization for the foreseeable future.     

From Revolution to Dissolution: The Quai d'Orsay,the Banque Russo-Asiatique,and the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1926

This article explores the use made of Christianity during the Second World War and the dilemmas created for the Allies by Stalin's religious record. It is particularly concerned with the way in which Christianity appeared for a while to become a bridge between East and West, with the explicit promise of continued post-war co-operation. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglo-American policies in particular switched from using Christianity to rehabilitate the adverse image of the Soviet regime to what had been the inter-war policy of using religion to demonise it. Inter-war demonisation held up the Soviet Union as a model not to be emulated. Post-war demonisation pointed to the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat bent on world domination. The article examines Stalin's responses, and Allied perceptions of those responses, to the changes in Western religious policy and propaganda from the Second World War to the emergence of the cold war. The article seeks to show how both sides used religion for political purposes, but that in the final analysis Western reluctance to relinquish what was perhaps its most emotive means of indicting and containing Communism meant that Christianity, instead of becoming a bridge, became a divisive factor that contributed to both the onset of the cold war and public acceptance of it.     

Beyond the carrot and stick: the political economy of US military aid to China, 1945–1951

By applying the rent-seeking assumption and sifting through both the archival materials and published historical documents, this article revisits the US–China relationship during the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) and the early Cold War period, when the United States was caught in the conundrum of aiding the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. As military aid is usually regarded as an important representation of broader economic aid, this research mainly concentrates on the US military assistance to postwar Nationalist China. This topic is important, as it signifies a direct American involvement in the Chinese Civil War, when the influence of the United States in postwar world politics was overwhelmingly predominant. As a result, postwar Chinese history might be reevaluated in a broader global postwar context. In addition, this article also tells the story about rent-seeking behaviors in the complicated US–China military relations during the early Cold War period at both micro and macro levels. When it came to US military assistance to China, the formulation of policy was perennially in the name of one's best interest.