Acknowledging economic realities. The CMEA policy change vis-à-vis the European Community, 1970–3

In the early 1970s, the economic consequences of European Community (EC) policies forced the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to devise its trade policy vis-à-vis the outside world. With the implementation of its Common Commercial Policy, the EC was about to change the rules and conduct of its foreign trade. The East–West trade boom that took off in the 1960s had created significant commercial links, and substantial dependencies, across the Iron Curtain. The smaller members of the CMEA began to advocate an opening up towards the EC due to their fears of worsening trade prospects caused by the new EC policies. After reconsideration of its allies' commercial needs, the Soviet leadership was pressured to change its mind in favour of a common approach vis-à-vis the EC. This article follows the debate within the CMEA Executive Committee on the socialist countries' dependency on the Western market and on the advisability of opening up to the global market. It relies on official CMEA documents as well as Soviet and German Democratic Republic (GDR) policy-making documents. This article analyses the process of socialist integration in connection with the simultaneous developments taking place in their Western European counterparts, and thereby fills a gap in the historiography of Europe in the Cold War.     

Underplaying the ‘Okinawa card’: how Japan negotiates its alliance with the United States

The US military bases in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa have long been a source of domestic political opposition to the US–Japan alliance. As an alliance management issue, the ongoing troubles surrounding the bases raise questions as to when and why states adopt particular bargaining strategies when dealing with allies. Why, for instance, has the Japanese government not made greater use of this ‘Okinawa card’ when negotiating alliance issues with the USA? Even though highlighting particular domestic problems as a part of a negotiating strategy (known as tying hands) should appeal to a weaker ally such as Japan, this article argues that in the Okinawan case the reverse has been true. Japan has generally, though not always, sought to minimise or downplay domestic opposition to its alliance agreements, essentially preferring a cutting-slack to a tying-hands approach. The Japanese experience suggests that when states which are directly dependent on an alliance for their security see their security environment as unstable, they view tying-hands strategies as too likely to undermine their bargaining credibility. Maintaining credibility is important in an alliance bargaining context because it is a way for such states to signal their commitment to an alliance and so guard against abandonment.     

Prony et babbage: apercus sur l'histoire de la division du travail mental∗

Hobbes and Hume on the imagination can initiate a discussion of empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries: here, however, it provides the opportunity to focus on Kant's attempt to overcome the limits of their sense originating, naturalist ethics. I argue the general point that Kant's response to his predecessors, both empiricist and non-empiricists, is to modify their focus on nature without falling into skepticism; indeed, his speculative metaphysics also is a response to classical ontological metaphysics. Kant by providing two realms or perspectives, a natural and a noumenal, avoids many difficulties resulting from Hobbes and Hume's starting point in sense leading to imagination and a non-normative reason. Yet, challenged by Herder and the romantics, he uses a sort of residual view of the imagination in relation to the freedom of the noumenal, which results in difficulties for his speculative, noumenal metaphysics.