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.     

Red Foxes in the Filing Cabinet: Günter Tembrock's Image Collection and Media Use in Mid-Century Ethology**

This paper considers the epistemic career of visual media in ethology in the mid-20th century. Above all, ethologists claimed close contact with research animals and drew scientific evidence from these human-animal communities, particularly in public relations. However, if we look into the toolboxes of comparative behavioral biologists, it becomes evident that scientifically valid research results were primarily obtained by experimenting with model images. These visual specimens tell a technical story of the methodological requirements in behavioral science necessary to bridge everyday observations between the laboratory and the field. By neutralizing individual traces of animal bodies as well as their observers, they prompted the abstraction of ethological hypotheses. The case study of East-German biologist Günter Tembrock (1918–2011), who maintained his own collection of newspaper clippings, drawings, photographs, and films, offers a new perspective on the methodological development of this field. Furthermore, this article contributes to a scholarly discussion geared toward expanding the spaces of ethological research. My analysis of the image collections of the Forschungsstätte für Tierpsychologie presents the archive as a relevant site of study in the history of ethology.     

Squeezed between external trade barriers and internal economic problems: Bulgaria’s trade with Denmark in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Bulgaria’s trade strategy towards the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1970s: a decade of intensified economic exchange between East and West thanks to détente and, simultaneously, of growing trade barriers due to the consolidation of the EEC’s Common Market. The successes and failures of Bulgaria’s endeavours are discussed through a study of economic cooperation with Denmark before and after its accession to the EEC in 1973. The main argument is that while Bulgarian economic policy focused on the rising regulatory impediments to trade with EEC members, it neglected the structural deficiencies of Bulgarian export production. Thereby, Bulgarian state officials strove to resolve foreign trade problems through diplomatic negotiations over customs regulations instead of advancing domestic economic reforms . This argument is supported by analysis of intergovernmental economic negotiations and trade deals between Bulgaria and Denmark during the 1970s. It highlights the different ways in which Bulgarian trade envoys in Copenhagen and top officials at home evaluated recurrent problems in accessing the Danish market and formulated solutions for these problems. Thus, instead of tackling internal structural problems, the blueprints for Bulgaria’s foreign trade focused on external foes, namely trade discrimination against socialist countries.     

‘Enlightenment takes hold of our lands’: translating and publishing in Volhynia and Podolia in the 1800s–50s

ABSTRACT

This article uncovers the role of self-employed translators in one of the distinctive regions of Eastern Europe – the Volhynian and Podolian provinces. These lands belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until they became governorates of the Russian Empire in the 1790s. By exploring the memoirs of the landed nobility and cultural elite from this geographically and intellectually contested area, this article discusses the importance of translation during the crucial period of search for national and cultural identity, and debates the cultural transfer of ideas in the homes of local petty nobility in the 1800s–50s. The article also analyses the problem of reading, discusses the book’s importance and the variety of ways it could be read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By tackling these problems, the article attempts to decode the meaning of Enlightenment for the provincial szlachta in the 1800s–50s.