The Fall of Mosaddeq,August 1953: Institutional Narratives,Professor Mark Gasiorowski and My Study

Over the decades that followed the overthrow of Mosaddeq in August 1953 a narrative attributing the fall exclusively to foreign conspiracy has taken hold and become institutionalized. In this narrative the internal factors are reduced to the simplest level of abstraction. They do not exist outside foreign conspiracy! This narrative is premised on an Anglo-American coup plot code-named TP-AJAX that was attempted in the late hours of 15 August but failed. The ensuing flight of the Shah generated dynamics which led to the fall of Mosaddeq four days later. The CIA chief operative in Tehran Kermit Roosevelt was quick to take credit claiming that these dynamics were inseminated by his ingenious and spontaneous planning. For abiding internal reasons both the CIA and the MI6 headquarters preferred to claim victory rather than admit failure. Evidence that emerged following the declassification of the State Department papers in 1989 and the leak of a secret CIA internal history in 2000 produced glaring evidence that the fall of Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953 had taken Washington, even its embassy in Tehran, by complete surprise and that post facto claims by Roosevelt were inconsistent both with Washington's explicit policy directives and Roosevelt's own situation reports filed with the CIA Washington during the interval between the two events. Roosevelt later published a phantasmagorical account of the event which, together with reminiscences of a few unnamed former operatives, was given credence by Professor Gasiorowski and associates, who curiously chose to ignore archival evidence.     

The Causes of Iran's 1953 Coup: A Critique of Darioush Bayandor's Iran and the CIA

This article presents a detailed criticism of Darioush Bayandor's book Iran and the CIA. Bayandor argues that certain Shi'a clerics, rather than the US Central Intelligence Agency, were the main actors responsible for overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953. Bayandor presents no major new evidence to support this claim. He gives too much weight to certain statements, draws unwarranted inferences from others, and discounts or disregards a wealth of evidence that conflicts with his account. He overemphasizes the role of civilian crowds in the overthrow of Mosaddeq and underemphasizes the role of Iranian military units organized by the CIA. And he fails to acknowledge the importance of US and especially British efforts to foment opposition to Mosaddeq before the coup.     

The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq: A Research Note

Although it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union did not play a significant role in the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, little has been written about how the Soviets perceived the Iranian leader and the movement he inspired. This article argues that Soviet leaders generally saw Mosaddeq as weak and ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to secure an oil concession in Iran in 1946 and general conservatism about anti-colonial movements during the late Stalin period conditioned their assessment of Mosaddeq's premiership. After Soviet policy towards the Third World changed in the mid-1950s, Mosaddeq's movement was reinterpreted as a genuine “struggle of national liberation.”     

The Australian ballot: Not the secret ballot

Australian historical and political science academic accounts of the ‘secret ballot’ often describe it as being designed in Australia and first applied in Victoria in 1856. Narratives often focus on Chartists and radicals finding fertile ground in the New World for ideas that had met insurmountable resistance in the Mother Country. But this concentration on the ‘British story’ has led to a misconception in this country: that the secret ballot was first tried in Australia. This comes from conflating the ‘Australian ballot’ with the ‘secret ballot’. Voting by ballot, in ‘secret’—that is, not by a show of hands, on the voices or signed voting paper—was in use in America and Europe well before being implemented in Australia. This was the secret ballot many demanded for Australia, but they got something else: the Australian ballot, wholly original, with identifying features—such as the government printed ballot paper—previously unimagined. The Australian ballot was not the world's first secret ballot; it was much more important than that.     

“Down with the Monarchy”: Iran’s Republican Moment of August 1953

The purpose of this article is to explore and analyze Iran’s “Republican Moment” of 16?19 August 1953, arguably the last concerted effort to abolish the monarchy and establish a republican order in the county prior to the Revolution of 1978?79. By drawing on a broad range of primary source materials that have thus far remained relatively understudied by existing scholarship, such as the political press of those crucial days, the essay will attempt to shed light on a number of significant domestic developments which impacted the outcome of the actual coup of 19 August 1953. A further attempt will be made to explain the importance of calls in favor of the Republic and the premier Mohammad Mosaddeq’s refusal to take heed of them. The paper will also explore the diverse origins of the Republican platform and its impact on both the urban crowd and the political elite.     

A Step to the Left? Or Just a Jump to the Right? Making Sense of the Third Way on Government and Governance

Since the early 1990s, Left-of-Centre political parties around the world have been engaged in an attempt to redefine their politics under the banner of the 'Third Way'. In attempting to understand the Anglo-American versions of the Third Way, this article argues that while there are clear continuities between the governments of the Third Way and their conservative predecessors, a more accurate precedent can be found in the successive Labor governments in Australia between 1983 and 1996. While this connection has been noted elsewhere, this article seeks to draw it out in terms of the underlying rationale and conception of government. It argues that the proponents of the Third Way share a common perception that government has become 'overloaded' with responsibilities and that they utilise market mechanisms as a pragmatic response to this, which distinguishes them from the New Right's moral critique of the state. The conclusion suggests that although this has the potential to open a space for thinking about how government might proceed differently, the Third Way has thus far failed to realise this potential.     

WHAT IS A SCHOLARLY PERSONA? TEN THESES ON VIRTUES,SKILLS, AND DESIRES

What is the problem that “epistemic virtues” seek to solve? This article argues that virtues, epistemic and otherwise, are the key characteristics of “scholarly personae,” that is, of ideal‐typical models of what it takes to be a scholar. Different scholarly personae are characterized by different constellations of virtues and skills or, more precisely, by different constellations of commitments to goods (epistemic, moral, political, and so forth), the pursuit of which requires the exercise of certain virtues and skills. Expanding Hayden White's notion of “historiographical styles” so as to encompass not only historians' writings, but also their nontextual “doings,” the article argues that different styles of “being a historian”—a meticulous archival researcher, an inspired feminist scholar, or an outstanding undergraduate teacher—can be analyzed productively in terms of virtues and skills. Finally, the article claims that virtues and skills, in turn, are rooted in desires, which are shaped by the examples of others as well as by promises of reward. This makes the scholarly persona not merely a useful concept for distinguishing among different types of historians, but also a critical tool for analyzing why certain models of “being a historian” gain in popularity, whereas others become “old‐fashioned.”     

The War of Seduction: The Anglo-American Struggle to Engage with the Portuguese Ruling Elite (1943–1948)

Emotions and perceived cultural differences have only recently been subject to sustained attention from international historians. By tracing the role of personal politics in Anglo-American relations with Portugal in the mid-1940s, this paper intends to introduce hitherto neglected culturalist approaches into the historiography. The purpose is to illustrate the importance of cultural factors to scholarly explanation of Anglo-American relations and rivalries, of the decline of British influence over Lisbon and of the continuation of the authoritarian Portuguese regime after the Second World War, albeit integrated into an American sphere of influence.     

Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War/Tito: A Biography

The 1956 Suez Crisis has attracted enormous attention and been widely seen as marking a sea change in Britain's position in the Middle East and within the Anglo-American special relationship. Yet in September 1951 the Attlee government had already signalled waning British power in pulling back from major unilateral military action to defend Britain's single most important overseas asset: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its huge operations in Iran. What this crisis revealed of British aspirations in the Middle East and within the special relationship has not received the attention it deserves. This article examines the Attlee government's decision to ‘scuttle’ from Abadan in September 1951. It first places the decision in the context of Anglo-American relations and great cumulative pressure in favour of British military action. It then weighs various considerations claimed in the extant literature to explain the British decision. In doing so it disagrees with suggestions that British military intervention was precluded by an understanding between Truman and Attlee that such action was acceptable only in a narrow range of circumstances for fear of retaliatory Soviet intervention in Iran. It also argues that accounts that correctly emphasise US opposition to the use of force as the key restraint on the Attlee government could and should have gone further. Specifically, it needs to be better appreciated just how the Truman administration actively undermined potential British recourse to military intervention, infused other potential constraints with extra weight and helped delay a Cabinet decision until a point when armed intervention was least likely to achieve British ends.     

Transitions to Clean Government: Amnesty as an Anticorruption Measure

Anti-corruption research has been dominated by inquiries into the formal structures of clean governance, while the actual process of changing the culture of corruption has been overlooked. This paper views ‘transition to clean government’ as a conceptual parallel to ‘democratisation’ and anti-corruption measures as instances of transitional justice. Contrary to the mainstream scholarship, it argues that: (1) Measures that lead to clean government differ from measures that contribute to its maintenance; and (2) amnesty may play a crucial role in establishing clean government, if it inspires a change in political culture. To illustrate its propositions, this paper applies the literature on transitional justice and democratisation to anti-corruption strategies and re-examines the particular circumstances surrounding amnesty in Hong Kong's successful transformation into one of the cleanest governments in Asia.     

The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object

In this article, I examine an Aboriginal ritual object, the secret/sacred tywerrenge which in many respects lies at the heart of Central Australian Aboriginal religious belief. Given its ritual power, the tywerrenge has always held a special place in the administrative rationalities of both colonial and post-colonial authorities. For certain missionaries, the tywerrenge was seen as an object to be eliminated as it constituted an impediment to Aboriginal “salvation”. For early anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, they offered material evidence supporting social evolutionist theories regarding the “staged” transformation of “primitive” religious beliefs into science. More recently, tywerrenge have been subject to an intensive regime of inspection and evaluation by government authorities, museums, and land councils. Indeed, they have come to play a significant role in the enforcement of Australian law under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act since the possession of a tywerrenge can decide the ownership of traditional lands. In short, these religious objects—and the beliefs associated with them—have been co-opted and employed by a variety of authorities in order to achieve a range of governmental ends. In this sense, tywerrenge have been transformed into instruments of colonial and post-colonial rule.     

Shaming and Sanitation in Indonesia: A Return to Colonial Public Health Practices?

Adequate sanitation is vital to human health, yet progress on the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation has been slow and the target is likely to be missed by one billion people. Indonesia has the third highest number of people of any country in the world without access to sanitation and, like most developing countries, it is devoting insufficient resources to the issue. In rural areas, rather than providing additional funding, the government — with support of the World Bank — has promoted the Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, which uses social mobilization to encourage people to construct their own latrines. In Indonesia as elsewhere, CLTS involves more than just education and encouragement; it uses social shaming and punishments. The authors argue that this is not only an inadequate approach but one which echoes coercive, race‐based colonial public health practices. This article thus integrates extant historiography on Indonesian colonial medicine with contemporary scholarly literature and field research on CLTS using case studies of a 1920s hookworm‐eradication programme funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the current World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme, both in Java.     

On realpolitik and its limitations

A largely peaceful collapse of dictatorships both in the communist world and beyond occurred in 1989. That year also saw one notable failure: the violent suppression of peaceful protest in Tiananmen Square, raising the perennial question of how far dictatorships can be effectively undermined by non‐violent methods. This review article offers no definitive answer to the question but provides a series of specific case‐studies from different countries, each chapter written by an expert on the country concerned. Besides covering the collapse of communist rule in the Baltic states, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, it examines the role of non‐violence in four post‐communist revolutions: in the rump Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine. But its scope goes far beyond the former communist world. The authors demonstrate that non‐violence has, with varying degrees of success, played a role in many regions—in India under British rule; in the US civil rights campaign; in Northern Ireland prior to the troubles; in Portugal during the transition to democracy in the 1970s; in Iran before the overthrow of the Shah; in the Philippines before the removal of President Marcos in 1986; and in Chile in the late 1980s, gradually ending the Pinochet dictatorship. The negotiated dismantling of apartheid in South Africa is the subject of a long chapter. The book also examines two conspicuous failures of peaceful protest—China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. The book's conclusions are understandably cautious, but the authors concede that civil resistance has proved a more potent weapon than was previously supposed. At all events, so the reviewer argues, the notion that civil resistance can only work in free societies has been proved demonstrably wrong.     

A revisionist interpretation of the impact of Queensland's electoral scheme

In December 1989 Queensland voters changed their government from National Party to Labor Party. Labor had been out of office since August 1957, a record period of opposition for a major party. How is that very lengthy Labor period in the wilderness to be explained? The orthodox interpretation is that there has been a gerrymander in Queensland. This article argues, however, that Queensland's electoral system is the same as that of other mainland states. While it is true that electorates are malapportioned in Queensland (and in Western Australia), nevertheless the method of single member electorates with preferential voting is in use for all mainland states. Such a system does not translate a party's percentage of votes into a similar percentage of seats in the Legislative Assembly. The elections of 1956 and 1989 each saw Labor getting a first preference vote in excess of 50 per cent— with which Labor won in excess of 60 per cent of the seats. At no election between these dates did Labor secure a majority of votes, either first preference or two party preferred.     

Design in government: City planning,space-making,and urban politics

In recent years, design has appeared in an ever-broadening range of government processes and projects, particularly in cities. What has design become, such that its methods and practices could be applied to urban planning and public administration? And what are the governmental problems that design methods and designers are being mobilized to address? This article answers these questions by tracing the tangled intersections of design, city planning, and urban administration in the last century. Through a genealogical analysis, it shows how a number of designers came to redefine design as a set of procedures for formulating and proposing solutions to “wicked problems.” This understanding of design—which developed in fields such as industrial and product design that were remote from government—has recently gained salience in public administration and city planning. In contrast to an influential geographical analysis of design as spectacular architecture that is divorced from any broad social objective, the article argues that design in government can be analyzed as the design of politics. Its concern is not with the aesthetic or functional qualities of material objects—whether a manufactured product, building, or article of clothing—but with the ongoing work of organizing argumentation and decision making about complex, large-scale problems.     

The Role of "Sibling Rivalry" in the "(Re)discovery of America Controversy"

French Louisiana is Catholic country. Because of the association between the Louisiana French and the Roman Catholic Church, the Church's role in French ethnic persistence has always been taken for granted. However, from a paternalistic colonial Church, the Louisiana Catholic Church has become an American one very much out of touch with the cultural character of the population it has served. In the racial field the Church's conformity to American values has impaired the unity of the Louisiana French. In the matter of language the Church has helped to undermine the position of French in French Louisiana society. The assertion of one's Catholicism in French Louisiana at a time of increasing Anglo-American contacts may simply be a reliable way of saying “we are us—not them.”     

The war on terror in American grand strategy

The 9/11 attacks made the war on terror the central plank of American grand strategy. Yet despite its importance in shaping US policy choices, there has been considerable confusion over how the war on terror relates to foreign policy goals. This article attempts to locate the war on terror within American grand strategy and makes three claims. First, it argues that the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror rests on a false analogy between terrorism and fascism or communism. This has led to misinterpretations of the goals of the war on terror and to a persistent misuse of American power. Second, it suggests that the central purpose of the war on terror should be to de‐legitimize terror as a tactic and to induce states to assume responsibility for controlling terrorists within their borders. American grand strategy should be focused on creating a normative anti‐terror regime with costly commitments by linchpin states—defined as great powers and crucial but endangered allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—rather than on conducting regime change against rogue states on the margins of the international system. Success in the war on terror should be measured not by the perceived legitimacy of discrete US policy choices, but by the number of these crucial states who accept the de‐legitimation of terrorism as a core foreign policy principle and act accordingly. Third, it argues that bilateral enforcement of an anti‐terror regime imposes high costs for US power and puts other elements of American grand strategy— including the promotion of democracy and the promotion of human rights—at risk. To reduce these costs and to preserve American power over the long‐term, the US should attempt to institutionalize cooperation in the war on terror and to scale back ambitious policy choices (such as achieving a democratic revolution in the Middle East) which increase the risks of state defection from the anti‐terror regime.     

The Roots of the Presbyterian Church of Kenya: The Merger of the Gospel Missionary Society and the Church of Scotland Mission Revisited

The Presbyterian Church of Kenya is the product of the merger of the missionary work of the American Gospel Missionary Society (GMS) and the Scottish Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) in 1946. The two missions had been working independently of each other in central Kenya since 1898. However, there is hardly any scholarly work that has analysed the merger. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to examine why the GMS‐CSM merger became necessary from a GMS perspective. The paper argues that the merger became inevitable and unavoidable because the GMS was unable to solve the problems that plagued it — some of its own making and others beyond its control. The paper concludes by showing that the CSM emerged as the beneficiary of the merger because it eventually assimilated the GMS work.     

The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: The Soviet Union,self‐determination,and the creation of the postwar human rights system

The USSR played a key role in the establishment of the post‐World War II human rights system despite its repressive and even murderous domestic record. It forged an alliance with the countries of the Global South in support of decolonization, self‐determination, and social and economic rights, policies opposed by liberal states like the United States, Great Britain, and France. These positions were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition. Moreover, when a human rights movement emerged in the mid‐1960s, its members—in its origins overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia—called not for the overthrow of the Soviet Union but for the fulfilment of Soviet law. The language of rights, proclaimed with such flourish in the 1936 constitution and its successor in 1977, served as the weapon hurled by dissidents as they called on the Soviet government to respect freedom of speech and assembly, and national rights, including the right to emigrate. In turn, the international human rights movement developed from the 1960s to the 1990s largely through support for the Soviet dissident movement, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch prime examples. The Soviet experience is critical to any global history of human rights.