“Neither too much nor too little” France,the USSR and the Helsinki CSCE

In the early 1970s, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was the cornerstone of French foreign policy regarding East-West relations. It was considered by Paris as the best way to maintain dialogue with Moscow as well as an instrument to reach the Gaullist goal of overcoming the European status quo. This double objective explains why the French adopted an ambiguous attitude during the CSCE: even though their goal was to challenge the Brezhnev doctrine and initiate a process to meet the aspirations of peoples under Soviet domination, they knew that this would be a lengthy process. For them, it was necessary to avoid provoking the Soviets by putting forward expressively liberal proposals. The French leaders of the 1970s saw the CSCE as the multilateral prolongation of the Gaullist policy of ‘détente, entente, cooperation’.     

Canadian and American Treatment of the Nikkei, 1890–1949: A Comparison

For many Japanese people, the 49th parallel was only a line on a map, yet there were differences for the Japanese residents in the United States and Canada. The two nations had different concepts of citizenship and constitutions but, in what has been called “hemispheric orientalism,” prejudice knew no border. Both countries severely restricted immigration from Japan. In the United States, immigrants, the Issei, were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Thus, states could deny their access to commercial fishing and the right to own or lease land. Because the American constitution bestows full citizenship on the native-born, their American-born children, the Nisei, could vote and acquire land, but experienced discrimination especially in employment. On paper, the Canadian Issei had more civil rights since they could become naturalized but this provided few advantages apart from the rights to own land and to fish commercially. The Canadian Nisei had no more rights than their parents. In British Columbia, where 95 percent of the Japanese lived, they could not vote and provincial laws and customs denied their access to many occupations. During the Second World War, both nations required all the Nikkei to leave the Pacific Coast, incarcerated some, severely restricted the mobility of others, and proposed to “repatriate” many of them to Japan. Drawing mainly on the previous scholarship which has examined specific themes, time periods, or comparisons, this article offers an overview of how between the 1890s and the 1940s the effects of prejudice varied more in detail and timing than in principle even though formal consultation between the two nations was sporadic.     

Marching in time: alliance politics,synchrony and the case for war in Iraq, 2002–2003

This article considers how three countries—the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia—approached the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by examining how the leaders’ decision-making interacted, the commonalities of their policy-making processes, and the approach to policy justification taken in terms of their domestic political environments. In particular, it examines the extent to which their claims as to why invasion was necessary went in synchrony. Having decided on war, all three national leaders sought to persuade their publics of the moral imperative for invasion and the immediacy of the threat that needed to be eradicated, and each made secret intelligence public in so doing. The selective use of intelligence allowed the politial leaders to shift the focus of the blame from policy-makers to intelligence accuracy when the immediate threat from weapons of mass destruction turned out to be illusory.     

“Neither Ākhūnd nor Fukulī”: Munāzirah and the Discourse of Iranian Modernity

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—the main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this binaristic approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theatre of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monāzereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogics rather than dialectics. The monāzereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.     

Domestic events,ideological changes and the post-cold war US–South Korea alliance

How can we account for the weakening of the US–South Korea alliance after the cold war? After the cold war, the US–South Korea alliance was expected to remain strong due to North Korea's threats of weapons of mass destruction. For the past decade and a half, this realist projection has not fully come to pass: rather, it has changed inversely. How can we account for this puzzle? In explaining this counter-intuitive development, the author employs the critical juncture approach. The author argues that in South Korea, certain domestic critical events readjusted domestic ideologies that affected its alliance policy towards the USA. With the initiation of Nordpolitik after the end of the cold war (the first critical juncture), conservative anti-communism and progressive nationalism became coexistent in South Korea, thus causing frictional policy towards the USA. The 2000 North–South Korean Summit (the second critical juncture) made the progressive nationalistic move more dominant in Korea, and this ideological change made its alliance policy towards the USA less friendly.     

Buttressing the West in the North: The Atlantic Alliance,Economic Warfare,and the Soviet Challenge in Iceland, 1956–1959

MICHAEL MCCORMICK. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300-900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxviii, 1,101. $60.00 (US). Reviewed by Warren Treadgold