Transatlantic triage? European and UK ‘grand strategy’ after the US rebalance to Asia

Transition in the Middle East, the ongoing effects of the global financial crisis and the United States' rebalance to Asia are key trends that will have an impact on transatlantic relations and European defence. As US priorities shift, a common European ‘grand strategy’ could encourage the development of a shared vision to help Europe order its priorities and begin to respond to the new, post‐austerity context of world politics and shrinking defence budgets. Will these changes be enough to quicken Europe's currently shrivelled strategic thinking? In any scenario, given its relative weight and role as an interlocutor with the US, the United Kingdom will remain vital to any developing European security and strategy agenda, although its broader relations with the European Union will complicate this relationship. How it proceeds will also help to define the boundaries of this nascent European security order. This article charts these key global trends, relates them to current debates in European security and strategy and maps opportunities and constraints faced by Europe and the UK in developing a grand strategy in an increasingly ‘American‐lite’ European neighbourhood.     

U.S. URBAN POLICY: THE POSTWAR STATE AND CAPITALIST REGULATION

This paper provides an historically grounded theory of U.S. urban policy which is informed by regulationist theory and recent contributions to the theory of the State. It is shown how the content and form of urban policy in the New Deal, was shaped by the rise of mass-production Fordism and informed by the particular struggles that emerged in the United States during the formative period of the 1930s and 1940s. These struggles produced a particular State policy response, setting in place a limited and constrained mode of State intervention in the economy. In the realm of urban policy, this narrow form of State intervention set limits on further rounds of State policy, leaving the U.S. State unable to respond in an effective way to the mounting economic crises of the 1970s and the 1980s, contributing to the so-called "failure" of urban policy.     

Capital,Labour and State Relations in the Analysis of Enterprises and Restructuring: An Australasian Debate

The paper arises out of the debate of a group of Australian and New Zealand geographers who attended a workshop in ‘Enterprises and Restructuring’ held in Canberra in September 1988. The paper outlines a framework for a political economy analysis of processes at the heart of economic restructuring and examines the units of analysis, concepts and approaches used by geographers bringing different philosophic positions to the investigation of economic restructuring. It explores how the three threads of production, accumulation and social relations are intertwined in the study of enterprise and restructuring and how an understanding of these dimensions provides a basis for reinterpreting the utility of many analytical categories. The discussion of the meaning, relevance and content of terms such as enterprise, industry, capital and the state confirms the validity and value of concepts derived from different theoretical positions and goes some way towards demonstrating that researchers from opposing positions can meaningfully communicate and cooperate.     

CANADA'S ALL RIGHT: THE LIVES AND LOYALTIES OF IMMIGRANT FAMILIES IN A TORONTO SUBURB, 1900–1945

Before World War II, many immigrant workers in North America lived in industrial and residential suburbs. The early history of a residential suburbo of Toronto, Ontario, shows that, initially, homes were modest and public services were absent. Men worked long hours, commuted far and built the family home. Women strove hard to keep house and raise a family in unserviced homes. Children helped out, and played in the accessible bush. Self-provisioning was common, and early opportunities to acquire homes and establish businesses were good. Community-building created a strong neighbourhood identity. At first, settlers felt loyal to Britain, compared their experience with the situation back home, and concluded that Canada was 'all right. The Depression brought working-class loyalities to the fore and prompted many to become more critical of the Canadian status quo. This story raises questions about the nature of the immigrant working-class experience in North American cities in the early twentieth century.     

Export-oriented industrialisation,the new international division of labour and the corporate state in the Third World: an exploratory essay on conceptual linkage*

The division of the social sciences into separate disciplines is now largely recognised as spurious. Nowhere is this more so than in what we generally call ‘development studies’. Major contributions to development studies have come, and must continue to come, from economists, political scientists, sociologists and geographers–a pattern that is epitomised in the enormous amount of ‘interdisciplinary readers’ in development studies and the manner in which journals from all social science disciplines publish research on development studies as part and parcel of their regular format. As a political scientist my research in general and my research in development studies in particular has recently been informed, amongst others, by scholars who we might nominally call geographers (especially the work of Clark and Dear, 1984; Clark, 1983; Harvey. 1982; Brookfield, 1975; Peet, 1980; and Rimmer and Forbes, 1982). I am pleased, therefore, to be able to publish a contribution to the current debate on development issues in a journal of geographical studies. It is, indeed, most apposite that the following discussion of the New International Division of Labour should be presented to an audience which, more than most, should appreciate the increasingly significant spatial aspects of this division of labour as it strives to locate and relocate major elements of the global productive processes in different parts of the developing world.