Italianità and internationalism: Production,design and mediation at Alessi, 1976-96

This article considers the Italian household product design company Alessi as quintessentially Italian and international. The interplay of mass-production and craft techniques at Alessi, an extended design process and the presentation of the family in company publicity exemplify the ambiguities identified within Italian design. The extent to which Alessi typifies Italian post-war design is questioned with reference to the company's international design team and the marketing of its products to foreign consumers as manifestations of italianità. The findings are based on primary research in Milan and the Alessi factory, including a series of interviews with designers, retailers, curators and media workers, combined with secondary material centred upon design history.     

Anti-Ballistic Missiles and the Liberal–Conservative Internationalist Divide in Cold War Canada, 1966–1970

Shortly following Canada's controversial adoption of nuclear weapon roles in NORAD and NATO in 1963, the focus of nuclear debates shifted to the potential impact on Canadian and international security of the construction of US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems. This article expands the focus of scholarship on the ABM issue from the political and policy-making settings to include members of the attentive elite and the news media, and finds these groups deeply divided between liberal and conservative internationalists. On the one hand, supporters of liberal internationalism believed that AMB systems would destabilise the international security environment and ultimately increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Conservative internationalists took the opposite position, arguing that the systems represented a necessary addition to the Western nuclear deterrent and would make nuclear war less likely. In other words, the ABM debate exposed deep divisions in Canadian society between those who preferred diplomatic and multilateral versus military means of achieving middle power goals in the international system.     

Toward an Understanding of Canada’s International Identity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the construction of Canada’s postwar international identity and how that identity continues to influence Canadian foreign policy, especially with the United States. Furthermore, the article illustrates how changes in Canadian policy necessitated by the Trump Administration may impact Canada’s international identity in the future. The article argues Canadian policy makers have consistently constructed an international identity in opposition to the United States and continue to use the US as a reflective tool in shaping their own policy. The first part of the article briefly examines the concept of state identity outlining both type and role variants and their relevance to foreign policy and this is followed in the second part by a discussion of Canada’s postwar international identity.     

Imperial Projections & Crisis: The Liberal International Order as a ‘Pseudo-Empire’

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that empire serves as a suitable framework for understanding how and why the liberal international order is exhibiting symptoms of ‘imperial overstretch’. Noting that many of its critics and opponents subscribe to a simplistic and yet powerful narrative that views liberal internationalism as a pseudo-imperial project, it shows that detractors tend to perceive democracy promotion and globalisation as the two main instruments of an order-building endeavour that is remoulding international structures along imperial lines to reflect liberal values and institutions. Within the transatlantic community, critics from the left resent liberal internationalism for its corporate greed, its imperialistic tendencies, wars of intervention, and the veneer of humanitarianism that disguises its ideology of a ‘civilising mission’. Critics from the right fear the erosion of national boundaries and the subversion of the nation-state as a result of mass migration, the dilution of national identities, and the constant meddling of supra-national organisations. Externally, the order is under attack by revisionist states, competitors, and violent non-state actors. Ideological incompatibility and differences in motives notwithstanding, these hostile forces are increasingly united in their struggle against the liberal order – with the risks of its possible disintegration all too familiar to the students of empire.     

Branding the United Nations: The Adoption of the UN Insignia and Flag, 1941–1950

Abstract

This article contends that the symbols of the United Nations (UN) have played a vital role in establishing the organization’s identity and in protecting its personnel. The design and usage of these emblems developed in a number of steps in the 1940s and early 1950s, a process dominated mainly by Americans. Although private admirers of the UN originated a number of serviceable and aesthetically pleasing designs, products mainly of their own self-initiative, the emblems chosen by the UN were prepared by professional designers, starting with an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) team operating under the aegis of the U.S. State Department. The author compares this process to product ‘branding’, and he also sees it as reflecting a longstanding claim to predominance in the internationalist project by technical specialists. In the 1940s, this dynamic revealed itself in rivalry between an elite of liberal internationalist technocrats and ‘populist internationalists’, the former coming to determine the character and choice of UN emblems. Members of the OSS design team had backgrounds in advertising and – not surprisingly – produced a logo-like design. The ultimate product of this process, a UN flag, was adopted in 1947, but it was treated by early UN bureaucrats like a protected trademark of the UN, at least until popular pressure-driven by an outpouring of mass emotion at the time of the Korean War – forced its release for broader public use.     

The Caliphate,and the Changing Strategy of the Public Statements of al-Qaeda's Leaders

Abstract

According to the American President George Bush's administration, the establishment of a global Caliphate is a key al-Qaeda goal. This article focuses primarily on the statements of Ayman az-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, with their public words traced throughout the last three decades, from Egypt to Afghanistan, to Sudan, back to Afghanistan and through the various conflicts that have happened since they have been on the run post 9/11. By highlighting the changing strategy of their discourse according to the events around them and internationally, it is shown that far from being a critical part of al-Qaeda ideology as some would have the public believe, the Caliphate plays a minor role in their objectives and rhetoric, used primarily as a motivational and instrumental tool in uniting the ummah in its efforts to expel foreign forces from what it considers to be occupied lands.     

The regressing ‘culture of anarchy’ in ancient China and its implications for Wendt's progressive constructivism

What does the qualitative increase in the brutality of international relations in the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China (770–221bc) mean for the implicit progressivism of Alexander Wendt's constructivism, as espoused in his landmark text Social Theory of International Politics (1999)? Wendt's constructivism is useful in understanding international systems outside the contemporary Westphalian order and provides an excellent analytical tool for understanding ancient China. However, this article argues that Wendt's implicit teleology of progressively cooperative ‘cultures of anarchy’ in international politics is empirically questionable. It is demonstrated that such a progression is not supported by the historical evidence of ancient China, which represents an instance of an international system ‘regressing’ from a more to a less cooperative international social structure.     

Is Australia a middle power? A systemic impact approach

This article examines whether Australia is a middle power. It identifies the three most popular approaches to defining a middle power: by a country's position, behaviour and identity. The article tests each definition against Australia, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. Highlighting an earlier systemic approach to defining states, an alternative ‘systemic impact’ definition for middle powers is proposed. This approach, it is argued, provides a more comprehensive manner for identifying whether a country like Australia is a middle power, along with the implications for international security.     

The Australian National University's Department of International Relations: the early years

This article is a contribution to the re-evaluation of the formative years of the emergent international relations discipline. Work on this topic, extensive over the past decade and a half, has overturned a number of the foundational myths of the global discipline, especially regarding the period between the two world wars. The literature on international relations in Australia, slow to reflect this re-evaluation, generally still locates the first important developments in the 1960s, and characterises the scholarship that emerged as predominantly ‘realist’. This study both pushes back the boundaries and challenges the theoretical perspectives used to categorise thinking in Australia at that time. A student of C. A. W. Manning and thus conversant with British ideas of ‘international society’, George Modelski's early exposure to theoretical work in the USA and his endeavours to give his department a strongly regional focus gave his work a richness and multifaceted character not easily captured by the ‘realist–rationalist’ dichotomy. Modelski went on from the Australian National University to become a major figure in international relations in the USA, contributing to the original debates on globalisation and best known for his work on ‘long cycles’ in world politics.     

The Plural Society: Labour and the Commonwealth Idea 1900–1964

ABSTRACT

The Labour Party founded in 1900 necessarily confronted the imperial nature of the British state, the empire as an economic and military entity, and the inequalities it contained. Yet Labour initially thought on the subject primarily in terms of the liberal objective of the advancement of self-government. It was only in the 1930s, in the writings of Lansbury and Attlee, that more systematic thinking about the empire in terms of global divisions of labour of which the British working class were among the beneficiaries, began to emerge. Tensions between the perceived interests of these beneficiaries and of the working classes of the empire as a whole remained in Attlee’s postwar government. It did, however, begin to develop a reconceptionalisation of the empire as a multi-racial Commonwealth. This facilitated a Labour patriotism around the Commonwealth that reached its apogee in Gaitskell’s weaponising of it as a means of resisting European entry in 1962. Yet the economic and military relations he evoked were already out of date, leaving his successor, Harold Wilson, to adjust to a multi-racial partnership.     

跨学科方法与冷战史研究

就研究方法而言,受兰克史学观念的影响,中国的冷战史研究长期以来以档案研究和传统叙事为主,急需跨学科理论与方法的引入。国际关系理论、文化研究方法和社会性别理论可以帮助冷战史学者提出新问题、发现新领域、挖掘新材料和建立新解释。跨学科理论和方法的引入不仅不会削弱冷战史的史学色彩,反而会加强冷战史的人文特性,并有助于建立起关于冷战史的新叙事。     

新世纪以来中国推动国际关系民主化的理论与实践

国际关系民主化思想是新世纪以来中国共产党根据冷战后国际形势的发展变化,从维护中国人民和世界各国人民的根本利益出发而提出的一项国际关系新主张,是中国共产党在外交战略思想上的一项重要创新和理论建树。在这一思想指导下,中国积极推动世界多极化的发展;推动建立公正合理的国际政治经济新秩序;恪守公认的国际法和国际关系基本准则,推动联合国在国际事务中发挥中心作用;反对一切形式的霸权主义和强权政治;加强同广大发展中国家的团结与合作;大力倡导多边主义,积极开展多边外交,为维护世界和平、促进共同发展做出了积极的贡献。     

关于日俄战争历史地位的再认知

1904-1905年的日俄战争是当代东北亚地区国际格局形成的一个起点。从政治思想史的若干范畴来探讨日俄战争在国际关系史上的历史地位,诸如帝国和帝国主义、东方和西方、民族主义和宪政革命、亚洲区域主义、战争中的超国家和非国家行为体等等,有助于对这一问题的理解,并取得对于当代国际关系发展和中国对东北亚地区的战略和政策的若干启示。     

战后中日关系研究的概况与问题--以中日两国的学术专著为中心

中国的战后中日关系研究基本上在历史学领域中展开,但实证研究仍需进一步的努力.而日本学者注意到国际政治学方法论的采用,强调了国际政治结构对中日关系的制约,但在史学研究方面还有不断把新史料纳入视野、在史学研究的基础上建构自己的国际政治学理论等方面的发展空间.相信整体性的过程研究和实证经验理论总结将使我们能够有基础和有信心尝试建立一些规范的分析概念,并通过这些概念对历史和思想演变的深层规律进行某种程度的哲学分析,即所谓理论的建构.     

The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75

It has been suggested that British intellectuals were either indifferent to decolonisation or sought to downplay its impact. As a consequence, historians of international thought have overlooked the extensive debates that occurred among scholars and intellectuals concerned with British foreign policy and international relations. This article addresses those debates, examining the responses of internationalist, Whig, realist, and radical thinkers to decolonisation and to what they thought to be the changes it brought about in contemporary world politics. It argues that far from being indifferent to decolonisation, many British students of international relations were deeply worried about what some called ‘the revolt against the West’, and that those concerned helped shape the distinctive character of British international thought in the formative period of the discipline of International Relations (IR).     

Between National Socialism and expert internationalism: Karl Strölin and transnationalism in urban planning, 1938–45

This essay examines the transnational activities of National Socialist experts, focusing on the endeavours of the burgomaster of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin. In 1938, Strölin became president of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP), one of the most distinguished international expert institutions for European and North American urban planning. The article discusses his belief that promoting an international convention on the protection of urban populations would contribute to German diplomacy in the initial period of the Second World War. Then it investigates the IFHTP president’s efforts to transform his institution into an outlet for National Socialist ideas against the background of the German advance through Europe. A final section deals with Strölin’s attempts to transform the IFHTP into a forum for evaluating urban reconstruction policies in the last year of the war. This biographical study shows how it was possible to juggle the logics and expectations of seemingly contradictory spatial and political realms during and after World War II. National socialist politics and ideology exacerbated the tensions between local, national and international affiliations, but at the same time never fully permeated the mechanisms of expert internationalism. By revealing how Strölin navigated between local ambitions, the demands of domestic foreign policy and the ethics of expert internationalism in three markedly different projects, this essay contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the cross-border activities of National Socialist professionals in (occupied) Europe.     

Unraveling Ravelstein: Saul Bellow's Comic Tragedy

Abstract

This article argues that international relations (IR) theory, defined by its paradigms, theories, and models, has responded not to questions of human experience in world politics, but rather, has been primarily an exercise in self-definitional or privately satisfying research interests. I demonstrate this through analysis of two of the most cited and discussed IR approaches of the past half-century, Waltz's structural realism and Wendt's constructivism. The article argues that a reconstruction of IR premised on John Dewey's pragmatism would enable IR to succeed in responding to questions of practical import. Such questions inherently cannot be determined by privately satisfying research interests of academia, but rather, are defined as problems of lived human experience in world politics as determined by the public itself.     

Beyond an Imperial Foreign Policy?: India at the League of Nations, 1919–1946

ABSTRACT

This article argues that India’s role as the only non-self-governing member of the League of Nations provides a largely unexamined entry point into understanding the nature of Indian nationalism and public discourse during the first half of the twentieth century. Using previously unexplored archival documentation of India’s relationship to the League of Nations throughout the duration of the League’s existence, this article exposes the varied and contradictory perspectives through which imperial officials and Indian political figures engaged with international society within the framework of the British Empire. Through the distribution of League publications and the circulation of petitions seeking redress for imperial abuses, a wide range of Indians actively sought to stage India as a clearly defined nation at the level of the international in a way that was not possible within the subcontinent itself.