‘Personifying the coloured community’: Sonny Leon and the ambiguities of the politics of co-option and resistance in the apartheid state

Abstract

The traditional focus regarding the Angolan Civil War, 1974–1976, has been on the nature of Soviet and Cuban involvement, the American response to communist activities, and South Africa's invasion. A point often mentioned, but rarely elaborated upon in the literature, is the degree to which the United States of America (USA) encouraged South Africa to intervene in the Angolan conflict. This paper investigates the extent and nature of American collusion with South Africa in the civil war, and the degree of complicity of senior American officials. The paper argues that on balance, the evidence suggests that senior elements of the United States executive branch, covertly and informally, colluded with South Africa. South African politicians overestimated the depth and extent of American support for its intervention, and when the USA ceased its assistance, they felt betrayed by Kissinger.     

Elusive Security in the GDR: Remigrants from the West at the Faculty of Journalism in Leipzig, 1945–61

Abstract

This article explores how the GDR dealt with intellectual remigrants, in particular ‘bildungsbürgerlich Marxist intellectuals’, who had survived the Third Reich in Western exile. It analyses the political biographies of three such remigrants, namely the journalist Hermann Budzislawski, the publisher and author Wieland Herzfelde, and the journalist and party functionary Hans Teubner. In the late 1940s and 1950s, these three men were appointed to professorships at the Faculty of Journalism at Leipzig University, a future training school of party journalists, and thus ?lled important strategic positions at the intersection of higher education, mass media, and politics. However, their biographies testify to more than just individual success stories. They point to the dif?culties of returning Communists in adapting to the political realities of the GDR in the 1950s, marked by widespread distrust and coercion. Behind the scenes, the remigrants in question here were put under enormous pressure to bow to Party command. As Budzislawski and Herzfelde were Jewish, the article also discusses to what extent their problems were related to antisemitic prejudices in the Stalinist period of the GDR. Regardless of individual differences, this article demonstrates that one of the central hopes of the remigrants, that is, to erase the scars of emigration, remained unful?lled.     

Anglo-American Relations: End of a Special Relationship?

Obama's election in 2008 as the United States’ first self-styled Pacific President drew a hearty round of ‘end of the affair’ editorials about Anglo-American relations. His first term was littered with ‘snubgates’, serious irritations in policy areas regarded as being core to the special relationship, and indications of an accelerating US departure from Europe with his premier foreign-policy strategy declared to be a pivot to Asia. His return for a second term in 2013 augers a continuation of first-term adjustments in US foreign policy and greater domestic focus given a divided Congress and a bitterly split and war-weary United States with domestic priorities to the fore. Doomsayers - or so-called terminalists - have been repeatedly gainsaid by the Lazarus-like quality of the relationship in the past but can the Anglo-American special relationship survive in the Obama environment? This article suggests it can and sets out the author's rather unfashionable argument in four parts: the weight of history; the canons of international-relations theory; the importance of considering interest and sentiment in explaining the special relationship's resilience; and a relativist argument that suggests the United States still really does have no better ally than the United Kingdom.     

Poverty Point Objects Reconsidered

In this paper we examine the enigmatic but plentiful hand-molded, baked-clay objects known as Poverty Point Objects (PPOs) from a number of different facets. Although the vast majority of these Terminal Archaic artifacts are found in the Lower Mississippi Valley, they also are found at sites as far north as Clarksville, Indiana, and as far east as the Atlantic Coast of Florida. Although most archaeologists generally assume PPOs were used primarily for roasting food, we consider a variety of other possible functions, including their use in boiling water and as symbolic tokens linking the far-flung Poverty Point culture area. We demonstrate that even though a few other archaeological cultures in the world used round clay balls for cooking, the Poverty Point culture was unique in the care, variety, and standardized forms of its baked-clay objects. We discuss the various PPO types and their possible functions in nine distinct regions in the southeastern United States and, based on our thin-section analyses of 66 samples, we demonstrate that PPOs circulated among different sites in these regions.     

Contesting Keweenaw: competing visions of landscape aesthetics at Keweenaw National Historical Park

Keweenaw National Historical Park (hereafter KNHP) is one of a periodically growing list of partnership parks developed in response to changing ideals of what the National Park Service ought to preserve and interpret. Established in 1992, KNHP and some other newer parks are intended by Congress to be public–private partnerships. This paper illuminates how KNHP stakeholders used information vacuums to intensify competing narratives regarding landscapes in a partnership park. Ethnographic fieldwork illustrates that stakeholders’ competing narratives complicate KNHP's management. Furthermore, this case study highlights the need for historic preservation professionals to build trust and to communicate effectively with all stakeholders in communities with historic preservation programs. Within a social group, insiders’ knowledge construction guides ideas of landscape aesthetics.     

Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.     

Great Britain and die International Economy: Changing Historical Perspectives

E.H. HUNT. British Labour History 1815–7014. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981. Pp. 428; M.W. KIRBY. The Decline of British Economic Power Since 1870. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Pp. 205; DONALD N. MCCLOSKEY. Enterprise & Trade in Victorian Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Pp. 211; SIDNEY POLLARD. The Integration of the Europe Economy Since 1815. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Pp. 109.     

From Imperialism to Internationalism: British Idealism and Human Rights

ABSTRACT

The article provides a historical account of the younger generation of British Idealists’ (1880–1930) approach to international relations and human rights. By focusing on pre-Great War and post-Great War periods, it reveals the shift that occurred in their approbation of T. H. Green's theory of rights. It shows that the Great War put an end to perceptions of the Empire as a plausible and sustainable international order for the younger generation of British Idealists, as it did for the significant majority of liberal British intellectuals. Their work, especially in the post-Great War period, reveals an attempt at translating Green's theory of rights into an internationalist human rights theory, which they saw as being indispensable to maintain a stable international order. As an alternative to contemporary attempts to locate Green's rights theory within the cosmopolitan–communitarian divide in human rights theories, this study draws attention to the younger generation of British Idealists’ long neglected internationalist approach to human rights as a middle way position.     

Canadian Civil Aviation 1935–45: Flying Between the United States and Great Britain

This article examines Canada's role in post-war planning for international civil aviation and how it was influenced by plans emanating from both London and Washington. Canadian aviation policy was driven by ambitions not easily reconciled: collective-security idealism; commercial advantage; the desire to reconcile British and US policies; and to raise Canada's international profile. These issues are explained and analysed in the lead-up to and in the events of the Chicago International Civil Aviation Conference in November–December 1944. What emerges challenges a considerable part of the conventional wisdom about Canada's diplomacy and the role it played at Chicago through a more nuanced picture of both motives and the stage upon which the civil-aviation drama was played out.     

Australia's Campaign for Security Council Membership

The United Nations Security Council has global responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. It is therefore essential for Australia to nominate periodically for non-permanent membership, and 2013–14 was the earliest feasible opportunity available to the Rudd government. Australia's uneven record of participation in the United Nations over the last decade and a half was an impediment to election, but recent renewed commitment to international law and upgraded multilateral engagement, among other factors, strengthened the case for election. Australia was elected in the first round of voting, principally due to effective political leadership and the sustained campaign organised by diplomatic officers. Membership will enable Australia to participate actively in discussion of issues on the Council's agenda and to lead discussion of two or three additional subjects.

联合国安理会负有维护国际和平及安全的责任。因此澳大利亚有必要定期提名为非常任理事国,2013—14年对陆克文政府是最早的机会。过去十五年中澳大利亚参与联合国事务颇不均衡,这不利于其当选。而最近它对国际法的重新关注、对多边关系的提升则有助于其当选。澳大利亚主要由于有效的政治领导和外交官坚持不懈的努力而在第一轮投票中当选。有了成员国资格,澳大利亚就能积极参与安理会的讨论,并领导两三个附加议题的讨论。