The clash of great powers and revolution in the Baltic Sea?

The Soviet party leadership claimed repeatedly after the mid-1920s that the Soviet Union was under an acute threat of intervention. The interpretation was based on different views regarding the development of socialism in the USSR. The role of Finland in the Soviet policy towards other border-states offers a case for observing the relation of ideology and practice in Soviet foreign policy, especially in the Baltic Sea context in 1925. The main interests for the Soviets were plans for military alliances and spheres of influence and intelligence. Contrary to the ideological worldview, the Peoples’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) did not see the western great powers, Great Britain and France, as being behind the Baltic alliance plan. Instead, the alliance attempt was primarily seen as an independent Polish initiative, especially lacking British support. The Soviet foreign administration was able to evaluate the grounds for eventual Finnish non-alliance accurately, despite Baltic sympathies and the lack of an active Scandinavian orientation. The results suggest the NKID observed international relations from the traditional viewpoint of Soviet state interests, and on the basis of quite accurate information, not reflecting the needs of ideological interpretation or domestic power struggles.     

The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.     

Sir Philip Mitchell and the Indian Ocean, 1944–49

This article examines the strategic initiatives that Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Kenya, brought to Great Britain’s Indian Ocean imperial and diplomatic policy in the years following the Second World War. Seeking to give strategic shape to his own coastal Islamic sympathies, Mitchell encroached on high-level policy debates with a proposal to reorganise Britain’s Western Indian Ocean around a political directorate to administer the coastal zones from Aden to Tanganyika. Such a cadre, Mitchell argued, would provide a valuable defensive bulwark against nationalist agitation and a ‘civilised’ foundation for local government initiatives. This paper brings together biography, strategic policy and area studies to demonstrate how Africa’s decolonisation shaped and limited the strategic options for Britain’s post-war Indian Ocean policy. Mitchell’s proposal broached a fascinating debate concerning the Indian Ocean as a realm of historical experience and future political construction.     

Colonial Research and the Social Sciences at the End of Empire: The West Indian Social Survey, 1944–57

After the ending of slavery the West Indian colonies were marginalised in British imperial consciousness but the major disturbances of the 1930s jolted the complacency of colonial administrators and aroused more widespread concern over lack of development. At the same time, there was greater official recognition of the academic social sciences in formulating policies to promote colonial development and counter mounting threats to empire. This article focuses on a major study carried out in Jamaica in the late 1940s, the West Indian Social Survey, whose main brief was to research aspects of African Caribbean culture that acted as a barrier to progress. It evaluates the context, origins and conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the project, looks at problems encountered by the researchers during the survey and in publishing the findings and, finally, considers the impact of the research on academic knowledge and policy making. A key theme is the relationship between the Colonial Office, the academics on the Colonial Social Science Research Council who sponsored and supervised the project, and the research team in the field. Problems in the inception and management of the project and publication of research findings raise questions as to who were the gatekeepers of academic knowledge and how such knowledge was constructed and disseminated.     

Alice Munro,Charles McGrath,and the Shaping of “The Turkey Season”

Using archival evidence of the editorial process behind the publication of the story “The Turkey Season,” this article explores the collaborative literary relationship between Alice Munro and one of her long-time editors at The New Yorker magazine, Charles McGrath. It reveals McGrath’s exceptional contribution to the story—restructuring it by combining the two versions Munro submitted into a composite—and theorizes the composite version’s effects on the epistemological grounding of the story and the narrator’s certainty about her own memory of the events she recounts, both of which are features that are often considered characteristic of Munro’s style in her mature writing.     

The “Philosophical Bible” and the Secular State

Almost all scholars of the Enlightenment consider Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke as the founding theorists of the “secular modern state.” In contrast to the widely held view of the modern state, I argue that far from being “secular” it was the product of the sacralization of politics, which resulted from the way these philosophers interpreted the Scriptures as part of their philosophical inquiries. The analysis of the “linguistic turn” in their biblical interpretations reveals how they tried to undermine the power of the Church to claim greater freedoms for the state. Their philosophical inquiries initiated the secularization of the Christian religion and the sacralization of politics as two correlative developments, rather than the secularization of the state per se, as is usually supposed. The philosophical arguments proposed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke helped to resolve the religious battles of Europe’s many confessions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but are still pertinent to our current very different historical context.     

The new refugees and the “old ethnicity”

Haines, David W., ed. Refugees in the United States: A Reference Handbook. Westport, Connecticut: Westport Press, 1985. viii + 243 pp. including chapter references, annotated literature guide, and index. $39.95 cloth.