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Freedoms, set out in 1941, provided particularly American inspiration for the post-war development of liberal global governance. 1 But the principles of great-power trusteeship and balancing, reflected in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals in 1944, were decisive in the creation of the United Nations. 2 Despite the early proliferation of liberal institutions under the aegis of the UN, Cold War prerogatives undermined cosmopolitan aspirations for world government. Cancelling each other out in the Security Council, the US and the Soviet Union
possibility now existed permanently for sovereignty to become conditional on international normative approval lies at the root of much of the hubris of the last two decades (despite the fact that anchoring it all was the US, which refused steadfastly to qualify its sovereignty). Sovereignty is the foundational norm of ‘the political’ in the international system, and to demand sovereignty is overruled to achieve a normative end is a high-risk and usually doomed activity unless two conditions hold: one, a great power is willing to back the demand
be seen to act in a more or less predictable way: In the relationship between nation states, the mere preservation of social existence requires the constant expansion of power because, in a situation of open competition, those who do not rise, fall. In other words, in the inter-state system, every great power is obliged to expand its power continuously, even in periods of peace, if possible seeking the limit of absolute and global monopoly. But reaching this limit is an impossibility in this system because, if it were to be reached, the
Introduction Rio de Janeiro, 20 August 2018 Outside, resentment festered in the deep tracks of modernity’s march. Inside, Celso Amorim sat back on his sofa, coddling a copy of E. V. Rieu’s English translation of The Iliad . ‘Sometimes I seek asylum in classical antiquity.’ There are surely more tranquil sites of refuge than Homer’s Troy. But it is perhaps fitting that Amorim should find comfort in a foundational tale of great power struggle. He has worked in foreign service for most of the last fifty years. He is the most
With the rise of new powers and the decline of seemingly unchallenged US dominance, a conventional wisdom is gaining ground in contemporary discourse about world politics that a new multipolar order is taking shape. Yet ‘multipolarity’ – an order with multiple centres of power – is variously used as a description of the current distribution of power, of the likely shape of a future global order, or even as a prescription for how power ‘should’ be distributed in the international system. This book explores how the concept of a multipolar order is being used for different purposes in different national contexts. From rising powers to established powers, contemporary policy debates are analysed by a set of leading scholars in order to provide an in-depth insight into the use and abuse of a widely used but rarely explored concept.
The European scramble for colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by rather more than the interests of an elite, aristocratic and bourgeois. This book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book offers six case studies on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The book demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers. Inspired by the directions of research pioneered by John MacKenzie, specialists of the French Empire started to combine methodologies from social and cultural history to revise the perception of French popular imperialism. Germany's imperialism is analysed along the axes of mobility and migration, 'race' and the sciences, commodities and markets, the missions and imperialist social formations, and the vast field of popular culture. What sets popular imperialism in Belgium apart from others is the remarkable yet ironic reverence reserved for Leopold II. Power rivalries, ingenious if tricky diplomacy, and Leopold's tenacity resulted in recognition of his rule over much of the Congo around the time of the Berlin conference. So far as the peoples of Europe were concerned, the imperial experience helped, paradoxically, to further 'Eurocentrism' and install the naturalisation of Europeanness as 'whiteness'.
rapidly from – and increasingly in dissonance with – our own. There are various ways to understand and describe Russian foreign policy – through the last decade, Russia has been described by senior officials and observers alike as both a power in long-term decline and as a great power resurrected, as both “only” a regional power and as a global power. 1 There can be little doubt, though, that Russia’s relationship with the Euro-Atlantic community, and especially the United States and the United Kingdom, has
Why does the US view China’s progress in dual-use AI as a threat to its first-mover advantage? How might the US respond to this perceived threat? This chapter considers the intensity of US–China strategic competition playing out within a broad range of AI and AI-enabling technologies (e.g. machine learning (ML), 5G networks, autonomy and robotics, quantum computing, and big-data analytics). 1 It describes how great-power competition is mounting within several dual-use high-tech fields, why these
On intervention The second intervention in the nineteenth century on humanitarian grounds is regarded the great power intervention in Lebanon and Syria, headed by France. 1 Both were at the time provinces of Greater Syria, within the Ottoman Empire, which included today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. When the intervention in Lebanon and Syria took place in 1860–61, the debate among publicists on humanitarian
traditional laws of war: there may be a trend towards interpreting the fundamental principles of necessity and proportionality ever more strictly in self-defence settings, in favour of minimising abridgements of the normal rights of third parties. The world, in other words, may be entering a period somewhat like the early and mid-nineteenth century, in which the absence of protracted great-power warfare led to a general belief that