Drinking Diplomacy: The St. Petersburg ‘Ordre des Antisobres’ and Fraternal Culture among European Envoys in Early Imperial Russia

Abstract

Early in 1728, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Duke of Liria—a Spanish diplomat, prominent Jacobite, and an illegitimate grandson of James II—sought to establish a curiously-titled fraternity called the ‘Order of the Anti-Sober’. Using the surviving charter of the proposed fraternal order as a point of departure, this article reconstructs the context and the meaning of Liria’s initiative. While drinking has traditionally been associated with Russia and in particular with the mores of Peter I’s court, this microstudy helps us to see it as a part of European sociable and diplomatic practices of the era. This episode sheds light not only on the broader evolution of fraternal societies in the early eighteenth century, but also on the mechanisms that drove the spread of such forms of associational life across the continent.     

Forensics and fortification in South African self-captivity

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how residential security and forensic genetics in South Africa open ways to think about captivity as something that the relatively privileged embrace to delineate a safe inside from a threatening outside. Captivity functions here as a means to entrench privilege and guarantee its protection.     

Doing Independent Overseas Fieldwork 1: Practicalities and pitfalls

This article explores issues of scalability and sustainability in distance learning. The authors kept detailed records of time they spent teaching a course in geographic information science via the World Wide Web over a six-month period, during which class sizes averaged 49 students. The authors also surveyed students' satisfaction with the distance learning course through ratings and open-ended questions. Findings are compared with similar data collected a year earlier, when class sizes associated with the same distance learning course averaged 18 students. In response to the increase in average class size by a factor of 2.7, the authors' course-related workloads increased by a factor of about 2.5 (from 47.5 hours to 116.7 hours total). Analyses of student feedback suggest that student satisfaction with the course was high overall and suffered no significant decline as a result of increased instructional efficiency.     

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.     

苏联专家与新疆综合科学考察

1956～1960年,在自然资源综合考察委员会领导下,中国开展了第一次新疆综合科学考察。这次考察以查明新疆自然条件与资源情况,提出新疆生产力发展与布局方案为目的。这项考察不仅是《十二年科学技术远景规划》的重要任务之一,而且也是中苏科学技术合作的项目。从1957年开始,苏联陆续派遣专家组参与了考察工作。苏联专家在新疆考察中承担了重要任务,也做了大量工作,不仅指导了考察工作的顺利进行,还举办了一系列学术讲座,帮助中国培养了一批科研人才,并将他们的野外考察经验无私地传授给中国同行。在考察中,苏联专家们还有针对性地提出意见和建议,与中国同志开展学术交流活动。总之,虽然因中苏关系的破裂,使苏联专家未能参加最后的总结工作,但苏联专家仍为考察工作做出了重大贡献。     

Thomas Fitzherbert's reason of state

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms.     

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。     

Coping with parallel authorities: the early diplomatic negotiations of Soviet Russia and China on the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1925

This article explores the evolution of Soviet diplomatic policies with respect to the disputed ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the responses of the three Chinese political authorities in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Fengtian from 1917 to 1925. It unveils a “parallel diplomacy” on the Soviet side and the roles the three Chinese authorities played in this grand diplomatic game. From the October Revolution in 1917 until the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, Moscow’s contacts with Beijing, Guangzhou, and Fengtian were initiated almost simultaneously with a different purpose in each case, namely political legitimacy, justification of ideology, and practical leverage, respectively. In response, the Beijing Government took a relatively active approach toward reclaiming the ownership of the railway, whereas Sun in Guangzhou was somewhat passive in dealing with Soviet claims. Fengtian warlord Zhang Zuolin’s responses were quite ambiguous, as he was suspicious of Moscow yet willing to cooperate with it. In general, this study reveals a balance between propaganda and national interests in Soviet diplomatic policy making, and it evaluates the effectiveness of Chinese politicians’ responses to Soviet Russia.     

The return of Xinjiang to Chinese central control during the late period of the Sino–Japanese War: a reappraisal based on Chiang Kai-shek's Diary

After the outbreak of the Pacific War, while considering taking back the Japanese-occupied areas, the Nationalist government also started to think of recovering the frontier regions, which had been somewhat out of China's control under the influence of a major ally of China, the USSR. For a long time, Xinjiang had a very close relationship with the Soviet Union under the rule of Sheng Shicai, and the central government of China had little direct control. In April of 1942, Sheng Shicai, suspicious of a Soviet conspiracy to overthrow his rule, conducted mass arrests in Xinjiang, causing a sudden deterioration in the relationship between Xinjiang and the Soviets. At first, the Soviet Union attempted to intimidate Sheng in order to prevent him from turning to the central government, but failed. Paying no heed to the alienation policy of the Soviets, the Nationalist government soon decided to buttress Sheng in an effort to place Xinjiang under centralized control. The Nationalist government first set out to take back the diplomacy of Xinjiang, followed by expropriation of formerly Soviet-controlled enterprises and forced removal of Soviet military advisors, experts, technicians and army personnel from Xinjiang. In the meantime, a large number of party, government, economic, cultural and educational personnel were dispatched by the central government to Xinjiang to infiltrate various sectors. With the weakening of his own power and increasing conflicts with the central government, Sheng Shicai planned another turn of events. By executing a new round-up, this time to cleanse Xinjiang of the central government's forces, Sheng re-oriented his regime towards the Soviet Union. Yet his gesture was turned down by the USSR because of his loss of credibility. Well prepared militarily, the Nationalist government eventually forced Sheng Shicai to leave Xinjiang, which then was almost fully restored to the authority of the central government.     

British Diplomacy,Propaganda, and War Strategy and the Hungarian-Romanian Dispute over Transylvania in 1939–40

Abstract

Between 1914 and 1935, the cities of Vienna and Pressburg/Bratislava were linked by an electric railway known as the Pressburgerbahn. More than just a line of transportation, the railway became intertwined with the complex politics of identity in Pressburg. The Pressburgerbahn presented nationalists in the Habsburg Empire with a dilemma: it had the potential to contribute to the unification of the nation, but at the same time was transnational by definition. This paradox generated a heated controversy about the Pressburgerbahn between Magyar nationalists and the predominantly German-speaking Pressburg bourgeoisie. Using biologized rhetoric, Hungarian politicians and journalists portrayed their nation as a body politic that was disfigured by having a railway ‘vein’ cross the border into Austria, in particular from such a peripheral location as Pressburg. By contrast, the discourse of the German-speaking bourgeoisie was firmly anchored in an imperial, supra-ethnic landscape. This controversy was replayed following the incorporation of the renamed city of Bratislava into Czechoslovakia in 1919: the Prague-based Ministry of Railways employed the rhetoric of the railway as an integrating structure within the body politic, while the eventual closure of the Pressburgerbahn in 1935 was closely connected to the belated nationalization of Bratislava. The railway to Vienna thus became a symbol of the liminal status of the town as a whole, in terms of nation, geography, politics and culture.