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Eurasian security governance has received increasing attention since 1989. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the institution that best served the security interests of the West in its competition with the Soviet Union, is now relatively ill-equipped resolve the threats emanating from Eurasia to the Atlantic system of security governance. This book investigates the important role played by identity politics in the shaping of the Eurasian security environment. It investigates both the state in post-Soviet Eurasia as the primary site of institutionalisation and the state's concerted international action in the sphere of security. This investigation requires a major caveat: state-centric approaches to security impose analytical costs by obscuring substate and transnational actors and processes. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon marked the maturation of what had been described as the 'new terrorism'. Jervis has argued that the western system of security governance produced a security community that was contingent upon five necessary and sufficient conditions. The United States has made an effort to integrate China, Russia into the Atlantic security system via the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. The Black Sea Economic Cooperation has become engaged in disseminating security concerns in fields such as environment, energy and economy. If the end of the Cold War left America triumphant, Russia's new geopolitical hand seemed a terrible demotion. Successfully rebalancing the West and building a collaborative system with Russia, China, Europe and America probably requires more wisdom and skill from the world's leaders.
involved intricate, coordinated timing of shipping in Europe, politics and markets in Africa, and the seasonal needs of planters in the Americas; Nuala Zahedieh’s deeply researched study of London’s role in the Atlantic economy 1660–1700, showing that commercial city’s coordinating function in an increasingly coherent Atlantic system; Franco Venturi’s brilliant tracing through the entire Atlantic World of Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments ; Horst Pietschmann’s many works on the ramifications of Latin American trade, winding through the economies of two
Union, is now relatively ill-equipped to defend against or resolve the threats emanating from Eurasia to the Atlantic system of security governance, which had emerged over the course of the postwar period and is now facing a difficult transition to the post-Cold War environment. The changing nature of the security agenda and security dilemmas facing the states of Europe and North America make the transatlantic community increasingly vulnerable to threats originating outside its immediate geographic ambit, a point brought home to the United States on September 11 2001
elements’ which generated ‘mysterious social strains’. This was the ‘Atlantic System’ shaken by seismic changes affecting the very foundations of economic and demographic existence. Thus the colonisation of the Americas, notably in the later eighteenth century, was a crucial part of an oceanic system which connected very large movements of people on both sides of the Atlantic, rearranging population patterns in the three inter-connected continents: it produced massive transfers of migrants between Europe, America and Africa. Bailyn speculated about ‘grand tectonic forces
evolving state formation in the British and Irish Isles continued into the era of union. It has been argued that the prospect of full involvement in imperial affairs became a primary means of persuading a sceptical Protestant political nation in the 1790s of the benefits of an incorporating union. 23 Yet at exactly the same time as the kingdom obtained full access to the British Atlantic system after 1780, existing patterns of over representation in the officer-levels of the EIC’s military complex went into relative decline. Ireland’s age of union and empire between the
, for example, compares the ‘voluntary and self-bound migrations in the Atlantic system’ with Asian migration that ‘involved a minority of free migrants, large numbers of self-bound migrants, and forced moves’. 23 Asian migration, on this view, was by and large a product of European imperial intervention and coercion. By contrast, scholars have argued recently that Asian and Atlantic systems of
international and criminalized underclass at the vortex of commercial and imperial endeavour. Colquhoun acted for and articulated the interests of a mercantile elite who not only initiated the investigation of river plunder but also subsequently financed the Marine Police Office at Wapping. He had the ear of those West India merchants and politicians who had played a prominent role in establishing the Atlantic system and
, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 36–7. 38 In this he is following Patrick K. O’Brien and Stanley L. Engerman (1991), ‘Exports and the growth of the British Economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens’, in Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991). 39 Two recent works reinvigorating, in different ways, the notion that British primacy was sparked by a culture favouring innovation and accumulation are Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (New Haven, 2009), and Deirdre McCloskey
involving a straightforward calculation of the widening differential between income and prospects in Ohio compared with those available in the Isle of Man. It was a perfectly rational reciprocation between two particular components of the Atlantic system, a relocation of population, technology and capital. The mechanism which started the flow required some initial risk-taking by the first contact migrants
which Spain gave Britain the Asiento to trade slaves in the Spanish colonial realm. From the mid-seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was primus inter pares in the Atlantic system (Curtin, 1964: 6). This system was built on the integration of an early industrialising Europe, the colonisation of the Americas, and the evacuation of slaves from West Africa. Britain’s heavy involvement in the Atlantic slave trade generated more systemic representations of Africa and Africans than had previously been the case, and it erased both the