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legitimising speech act inside the discourse of the international law, but it spectacularly fails to legitimise the violence which follows its invocation. Serbia’s attempts to legitimise its stance as a warring state defending the idea of state sovereignty was represented as an anachronism. Indeed, in Kosovo, the end of the legitimate warring state was at stake. Where is the political entity that may
In the story of post-Cold War conceptual confusion, the war in and over Kosovo stands out as a particularly interesting episode. This book provides new and stimulating perspectives on how Kosovo has shaped the new Europe. It breaks down traditional assumptions in the field of security studies by sidelining the theoretical worldview that underlies mainstream strategic thinking on recent events in Kosovo. The book offers a conceptual overview of the Kosovo debate, placing these events in the context of globalisation, European integration and the discourse of modernity and its aftermath. It then examines Kosovo's impact on the idea of war. One of the great paradoxes of the war in Kosovo was that it was not just one campaign but two: there was the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo and the allied bombing campaign against targets in Kosovo and all over Serbia. Serbia's killing of Kosovo has set the parameters of the Balkanisation-integration nexus, offering 'Europe' (and the West in general) a unique opportunity to suggest itself as the strong centre that keeps the margins from running away. Next, it investigates 'Kosovo' as a product of the decay of modern institutions and discourses like sovereignty, statehood, the warring state or the United Nations system. 'Kosovo' has introduced new overtones into the European Weltanschauung and the ways in which 'Europe' asserts itself as an independent power discourse in a globalising world: increasingly diffident, looking for firm foundations in the conceptual void of the turn of the century.
globe, ministers to millions of people every day, receives billions of dollars in income and is a major player in every crisis? More than this, it is clear that the scale of human suffering remains prodigious and that for as much good as they do, humanitarians frequently do little in terms of a net reduction in suffering and misery (think Haiti, Syria, Somalia, DRC, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, South Sudan). Much suffering – private violence, civil and gang wars, state predation, poverty, insecurity – is untouched by humanitarian intervention of any
conflict. Now it is perhaps appropriate that some attention is drawn to contemporary newspapers and periodicals – journalistic reactions fully exposed to public scrutiny and in contrast to the enclosed world of intimate diaries and letters. In summing up one of the main themes of humanistic and aesthetic opposition to the Great War – the friction that existed between the structure of the war-state with its resultant ‘herd instinct’ and notions of the sacredness of the individual – there is perhaps no more apposite personal example than that of Gilbert Cannan, an
explore the debates which surrounded post-war state patronage of the arts during this last great cultural mobilisation of the 1914–18 campaign. I will argue that two simultaneous debates had to develop hand-in-hand, and then become intertwined, to create a legacy loyal to both the integrity and continuity of British art, and to the memory of those lost in a terrible, but victorious, war. v 264 v British art at the Armistice British painting and the end of the First World War During the war, officially employed artists had played an enormous role which the government
Drawing extensively on recently released documents and private papers, this is the first extensive book-length study to examine the intimate relationship between the Attlee government and Britain’s intelligence and security services. Often praised for the formation of the modern-day ‘welfare state’, Attlee’s government also played a significant, if little understood, role in combatting communism at home and overseas, often in the face of vocal, sustained, opposition from their own backbenches. Beneath Attlee’s calm exterior lay a dedicated, if at times cautious, Cold War warrior, dedicated to combatting communism at home and overseas. This study tells the story of Attlee’s Cold War. At home, the Labour government implemented vetting to protect Whitehall and other areas of the Cold War state from communists, while, overseas, Attlee and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin authorised a series of highly secret special operations in Eastern Europe, designed to erode Soviet influence, told here for the first time in significant detail. More widely, Ministers also strengthened Imperial and Commonwealth security and, responding to a series of embarrassing spy scandals, tried to revive Britain’s vital nuclear transatlantic ‘special relationship’ with Washington. This study is essential reading for anyone interested in the Labour Party, intelligence, security and Britain’s foreign and defence policy at the start of the Cold War.
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Recent historical writing has emphasised the extent to which non-governmental organisations fuelled the ‘innovative humanitarian countermeasures’ seen during the Great War. State authorities rarely figure in these discussions or are depicted as facilitative actors, providing the context within which the new agencies could flourish, rather than purposeful actors in their own right. This chapter offers a corrective to this view by exploring the role of the US government in providing ‘protecting power’ services between 1914 and 1917. Washington had led the way in developing state practice in this area, but by 1914 the institution remained a customary, rather than a formal, element of interstate relations. The humanitarian crisis after 1914 forced states to continually re-evaluate the role of protecting powers, and, by the war’s close, neutral governments had come to assume a wide array of responsibilities over humanitarian affairs. The majority of these innovations were formally acknowledged in 1929, when protecting powers’ responsibilities were explicitly written in to the new Prisoner of War Convention. The US record after 1914 shows the extent to which state authorities operated as humanitarian norm entrepreneurs and sheds light on how ‘humanitarian imperatives’ intersected with the neutrals’ political, strategic, and commercial interests. America’s protecting power mandates gave government a discrete and direct stake in the country’s ‘humanitarian awakening’ over these years. Despite its impressive record, however, Washington remained reticent in shouldering direct responsibility for humanitarian affairs after this date, or pushing for too expansive a remit for protecting powers in the 1929 PoW convention.