Anti-Ballistic Missiles and the Liberal–Conservative Internationalist Divide in Cold War Canada, 1966–1970

Shortly following Canada's controversial adoption of nuclear weapon roles in NORAD and NATO in 1963, the focus of nuclear debates shifted to the potential impact on Canadian and international security of the construction of US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems. This article expands the focus of scholarship on the ABM issue from the political and policy-making settings to include members of the attentive elite and the news media, and finds these groups deeply divided between liberal and conservative internationalists. On the one hand, supporters of liberal internationalism believed that AMB systems would destabilise the international security environment and ultimately increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Conservative internationalists took the opposite position, arguing that the systems represented a necessary addition to the Western nuclear deterrent and would make nuclear war less likely. In other words, the ABM debate exposed deep divisions in Canadian society between those who preferred diplomatic and multilateral versus military means of achieving middle power goals in the international system.     

BACK TO BASICS

The review argues that, while Fish's book is undoubtedly a corrective to the most extreme examples of polemical teaching, it oversimplifies the difficulties academics face in trying to create sharp distinctions between politics and scholarship. The radical disconnection he advocates does not address the most difficult situations in which lines cannot be clearly drawn between the substance of academic research and teaching and the politics of the process of knowledge production itself.     

Shifting Narratives: Modern Chinese History since the Economic Reform and a Critique of Popular Opinion

When discussing the trans-formative shifts having occurred in the field of Chinese modern history following the economic reforms, one cannot avoid mention of the “revolutionary history paradigm,” the “paradigm of modernization” as well as the “postmodern paradigm.” According to popular belief, the course of development taken by the academic world during the past forty years was marked by a series of transformations: First was the progressive replacement of the “revolutionary history paradigm” by that of the “paradigm of modernization”; following that was the rise of the “postmodern paradigm” and the challenging of its predecessor. This set of divisions, though logically clear and succinct, cannot possibly conform to the realities of history in all of its complexness. While academic circles in the 1980’s were largely concerned with the issues of “what exactly is the historical driving force of Marxism” and “who are the revolutionary class,” the notion of the “paradigm of modernization” was rather a product of the conservative historical viewpoint and its rise during the late 1990’s. In this sense, then, the latter cannot possibly embody the former. On the surface of things, though the “postmodern paradigm” appears to refuse the narrative of revolutionary history, it in fact shares deeper connections with Chinese revolutionary thought at its roots. In short, then, these trans-formative shifts in modern Chinese history are not a simple “exchange” whereby one paradigm transfers into the next, but are rather a process of incessant and interconnected change.     

The Personal Is Not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues

The American religious right is often taken as the paradigmatic illustration of how conservatives responded to contestation over social issues such as same-sex rights and abortion. This article establishes that the response of Canadian conservatives – as expressed by the Progressive Conservative party – was quite different. The Progressive Conservatives held to a norm, grounded in their party's version of conservative ideology, that rendered partisan mobilization on social issues illegitimate. Rather, the party treated such topics as moral issues on which decisions, if they had to be made at all, ought to be made on grounds of personal conscience. The norm helped limit social conservative mobilization in Canada until the early 1990s, when the Reform Party replaced the Progressive Conservatives as Canada's major right-wing party.     

Forms without Substance or Synchronism? Attempts to Define Culture and Civilisation in Early Twentieth-Century Romania

This article discusses attempts to define culture and civilisation in early twentieth-century Romania on the basis of two fundamental Romanian models of development: the theory of forms without substance and the theory of synchronism. The former is studied here primarily in relation to the views of Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917) and Constantin Radulescu-Motru (1868–1957) and the latter in relation to the views of Eugen Lovinescu (1881–1943). While the theory of forms without substance asserts a would-be ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ development of Romanian culture and civilisation, the theory of synchronism proposes a development according to the ‘spirit of the age’ and the ‘law of simulation-stimulation’. In the present study, these opposed models of development are observed in relation to the general tendencies towards a pronounced critical spirit and towards discussing cultural vs. structural changes or culture vs. power in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. The Romanian models of development are also studied on the background of wider European discussions on Enlightenment and modernism, historicism, conservatism and liberalism, German vs. French influence and nationalist vs. cosmopolitan attitudes.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

1949年日本国会选举的政治意味

议会政治下的国会选举通常会透露出社会政治意识的走向。战后的日本议会政治,是在战前议会政治基础之上植入美国式民主政治理念,以英国式民主政治为范本确立起来的。而1949年1月日本国会大选,则可以看成是战后日本议会政治由英国式民主政治模式转为日本式民主政治的标志性选举。藉助这次选举,保守性质的政党开始确立优势地位、派阀政治出现、中间政治意识失势等战后日本社会政治诸多特征都呈现出来。研究1949年1月的日本大选,对于把握战后日本保守政治体制的形成和日本社会政治意识的分化,具有十分重要的意义。     

梁启超：自由主义的激进与保守

梁启超对中西文化调和的态度,使五四时期的梁启超似乎成了一个文化保守主义者。其实上世纪二十年代的梁启超与晚清民初时的梁启超无论是从思想的内容还是从思想的走向来说都是一致的,梁后期的文化保守主义与其最初的自由主义是一脉相承的,而且正是其最初对于自由主义的理解决定了其晚期文化保守主义的态度。本文是第一次从梁启超的自由主义思想方面来探讨梁的激进与保守与其自由主义思想的关系。     

Can argillaceous formations isolate nuclear waste? Insights from isotopic,noble gas,and geochemical profiles

There is considerable interest in the use of thick argillaceous geologic formations to contain nuclear waste. Here, we show that diffusion can be the controlling transport process in these formations and diffusional time scales for δ¹⁸O and δ²H in water, dissolved He, and Cl transport in shale‐dominated aquitards are typically over 10⁶ years, well exceeding the regulatory requirements for isolation in most countries. Our scientific understanding of diffusive solute transport processes through argillaceous formations would benefit from the application of additional isotopic tracers (e.g., using new ⁴He sampling technology), multidimensional diffusive‐dispersive modeling of groundwater flow and diffusive‐dispersive solute transport over long geologic time scales, and an improved understanding of spatial heterogeneity as well as time‐dependent changes in the subsurface conditions and properties of argillaceous formations in response to events such as glaciation. Based on our current isotopic and geochemical understanding of transport, we argue that argillaceous formations can provide favorable long‐term conditions for isolating nuclear wastes.     

Theology in Post-Democracy

Abstract

This essay confronts the problem of how theology is to respond to conditions of post-democracy in the United States. Building off the distinction between "politics" and "the political" in the work of Sheldon Wolin, this article asserts that his notion of "fugitive" democracy provides a useful tool to calibrate democratic engagement. The argument here identifies evangelicalism as the most historically relevant theological worldview for American politics. The analysis identifies three strands of evangelicalism: conservative, progressive and emergent. By tracing the theological foundations of each type of evangelicalism, this essay evaluates the capacity of each to speak to conditions of the fugitive in post-democracy