Financial crises and the balance of power in international finance, 1890–2010

Has the centre of gravity of international finance irreversibly started to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific since the financial debacle of 2007-2008? This article discusses this highly topical question in a historical perspective, by considering previous changes in the balance of power in international finance and the role played by global financial in these changes. Particular attention is paid to the Baring Crisis of 1890, the American Panic of 1907, the financial crisis of July -August 1914, the banking crises of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial instability of the early 1970s and the ensuing banking failures, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, and the Japanese Banking Crisis of 1997-8. The article concludes that financial crisis, perhaps surprisingly, did not lead to clear changes in the balance of power in international finance; and that the financial debacle of 2007-8 is unlikely, in the medium-term, to fundamentally alter the current order.     

Science as propaganda: Swedish scientists and the co-production of American hegemony in Sweden during the cold war, 1953–68

This article takes a close look at how the United States used the funding of scientific research in Sweden as a hegemonic and propaganda tool in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that non-aligned Sweden functioned just as much as a node in the international science network set up by the Americans after the Second World War as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. These funds were awarded mainly to an elite network of prominent Swedish scientists. The article sheds interesting light on the controversies of such funding in Sweden during the cold war and adds important knowledge about Swedish–American relations during the cold war. The article argues that this Swedish scientific elite co-produced US hegemony in Sweden by actively seeking out American military funding and by making use of it. It also argues that US funding was intended to portray the United States as an altruistic patron of science in the world and thus serve American propagandistic purposes as well.     

Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization

Abstract: When US military commanders refer today to the “long war”, they could more instructively refer to the “long war of securitization”, involving both practices of war and reconstruction that have always been based on a therapeutic logic of preemption and an endgame of protection from global economic risk. Since the early 1980s, the centrepiece of US foreign policy has been the securitization of the Persian Gulf region, with the newly created United States Central Command (CENTCOM) given the task of effecting a grand strategy that has subsequently been consistently based on two interrelated tactics: first, the discursive identification and positing of the Persian Gulf as a precarious yet pivotal geoeconomic space, essential to US and global economic health; and second, the enactment of a dual military–economic securitization strategy to secure, patrol and regulate designated “vital interests” in the region. With the rhetorical power of “risk management” perhaps more palpable today than ever, this paper reflects on the neoliberal discourses of “risk” and “regulation” that sustain a “long war” in which the perennial potentiality of a volatile global political economy necessitates securitization by US military force.     

An ineluctable minimum of natural law: François Gény, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the limits of legal skepticism

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, legal theory on both sides of the Atlantic was characterized by a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the private law concepts of property and contract. In the United States and France, Oliver Wendell Holmes and François Gény led the charge with withering critiques of the abuse of deduction, exposing their forebears’ supposedly gapless system of private law rules for what it was, a house of cards built on the ideological foundations of laissez faire capitalism. The goal was to make the United States Constitution and the French civil code more responsive to the realities of industrialization. Unlike the other participants in this transatlantic critique, François Gény simultaneously insisted on the immutability of justice and social utility. His “ineluctable minimum of natural law” would guide judges and jurists toward the proper social ends, replacing deduction with teleology. The problem was that nearly all of Gény's contemporaries were perplexed by his conception of natural law, which lacked the substance of the natural rights tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historicist impulse of the early twentieth. No one was more perplexed than Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose more thoroughgoing skepticism led him to see judicial restraint as the only solution to the abuse of deduction. The ultimate framework for this debate was World War I, in which both Holmes and Gény thought they had found vindication for their views. Events on the battlefield reaffirmed Gény's commitment to justice just as they reignited Holmes’ existential embrace of the unknown. In a sense, the limits of their skepticism would be forged in the trenches of the Great War.     

咸阳“周王陵”考古调查、勘探简报

周王陵位于陕西省咸阳市渭城区周陵镇北侧,陵园平面为长方形,方向170°,由南北两陵、内外双重围墙、双重壕沟、外藏坑、建筑遗址、小型墓葬等部分组成。内陵园中除南、北两陵外,还有少量的建筑遗址及外藏坑。外陵园内则有较多的外藏坑及建筑遗址。外陵园的西北角、东北角及东侧外围墙、外壕沟之间的北段发现小型墓葬三组。据陵园形制、布局特点及出土遗物分析,周王陵的时代为战国晚期,为秦悼武王及其夫人的陵墓——永陵的可能性较大。     

金融危机下的“美国留学热”及其发展趋势

金融危机爆发后,为增加学校收入和刺激消费,美国政府和大中学校采取各种措施吸引中国学生赴美留学,中国掀起了留学美国的新一波热潮,留美学生人数直线上升。受美国政府、学校积极推动和人民币升值等因素的影响,这股美国留学热将持续升温,且呈低龄化趋向,但留学移民难度会有所增加。美国留学热对中国社会的影响将日益扩大,应引起有关方面的高度关注。     

论中国与印度尼西亚建交

中国与印度尼西亚建交是冷战时期中国与东南亚外交关系发展的重大事件。尽管印度尼西亚建国初期曾有其总工会代表团赴华与中共高层接触,但正式向中国政府提出两国建交问题的却是印度尼西亚前宗主国荷兰。荷兰利用荷—印(尼)联盟主导者的身份,企图在保留与台湾当局外交关系以及不支持中国加入联合国的情况下,以印度尼西亚与中国建交作为荷中建交的交换条件,并以此保持在华各类利益,但此举为中方所拒。荷兰不得已放弃对台湾当局的外交承认,由此台湾当局撤销驻印度尼西亚外交机构。在印度尼西亚方面,尽管美国施加了外交压力,但苏加诺总统仍采取了平衡外交政策,而中方也获得苏联对中国与印度尼西亚建交的支持。在两国的努力下,中国与印度尼西亚于1950年4月13日建交。     

Dairy Farming and Milk Marketing Relationships in the CIS

A team of Western and CIS agricultural economists presents the results of a cross-national survey of 916 dairy farms located in Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The focus on milk marketing and supply chain relationships reflects their importance as determinants of farmers' welfare. Survey findings cover herd sizes, milk yields, investment activities, prices, sales to processors, and relationships with and support from buyers. An analysis of farmer satisfaction based on use of an ordered probit model, highlights the significance of trust and support measures. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, P32, Q13. 8 tables, 37 references.     

‘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.