Chapter 6 explores the prospects for change in the UK and the US, where the ultra-processed food culture is most advanced. This chapter examines the prospects for reforming the food system by focusing on three dimensions of change: (1) the clash between the power of new ideas and the power of vested interests, (2) the role of civil society organisations and public sector bodies as key agents of change and (3) the need for more powers and resources to be devolved to cities and regions in the name of subsidiarity, because these subnational agents are pioneering climate-friendly food policies and fashioning new spaces of deliberation in which local citizens can be actively engaged in shaping the process of change.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by examining the evolving international debate about the food system and its role in the multiple crises of health, environment and climate change. While global summits are belatedly trying to craft a reform agenda for the food system, the nation-state level remains the key arena where food policy reforms are fostered or frustrated. Taking the UK as an example, the book argues that more than forty years of neoliberalism – the political ideology that demonises the public sector and lionises the private sector – have bequeathed a noxious legacy in the form of a food system that is dysfunctional for producers and consumers and a public sector that has been denuded of capacity and resources. Chapter 1 also highlights progressive efforts to reclaim the public plate, tapping the potential of the power of purchase through regulatory reform from above and grassroots social innovation from below. Drawing on the pathbreaking Food for Life programme to illustrate the scope for reform as well as its limits. While public food procurement is now fashionable in political circles, I argue that it is being set up to fail unless it is part of a food system approach that integrates the interdependent domains of purchasing, production and consumption. A food system approach presupposes a food strategy, but successive Conservative governments have been ideologically averse to embracing such ideas because they smack of too much state intervention.
This book explores the good food revolution in public institutions. In schools it examines the challenge of the whole school approach, where the message of the classroom needs to be aligned with the offer of the dining room. In hospitals it examines the quest to put nutrition on a par with medicine to fashion a health service worthy of the name. And in prisons it shows how good food can bring hope and dignity to prisoners, helping them to rehabilitate themselves. The good food revolution refers to the struggle – locally, nationally and globally – to create a fairer, healthier and more sustainable food system. Charting the rise of the Good Food movement in the UK and the US, the book reveals how this new social movement is playing a prominent role in putting good food on the political agenda. But the struggle to reform the food system will need to overcome two formidable obstacles: the lobbying power of Big Food and the damaging legacy of forty years of neoliberal governments in thrall to free market policies.
This chapter focusses on inquiry as an instrument of international order and how the League of Nations used it when dealing with a wide range of international issues during its lifetime. The League’s model of inquiry was not created out of a vacuum but drew upon precedents from international dispute settlement to domestic and colonial inquiries. In this chapter, inquiry as an instrument of international order is discussed through the prism of a border delimitation dispute that created tensions between Albania and neighbouring countries Greece and Yugoslavia in the early 1920s, while juxtaposing this case study with elements from later League inquiries to reach a greater understanding about the instrument’s overall purpose. The chapter shows how officials and politicians at the League of Nations often spoke about truth, impartiality and independence when pertained to inquiry, but it was left unspecified how these aims could be fulfilled when commissioners were sent out to collect information. As a result, inquiries relied on informal practices and the personal authority of individuals to produce and qualify relevant information, creating a contrast between the institution’s formal adherence to fact-finding and impartiality and a markedly different reality on the ground. League inquiry is better understood if it is not strictly considered at face value, not as a fact-finding instrument but rather as an instrument of diplomacy and the interwar international order. Frequently it served as a safety valve, allowing a greater degree of flexibility to respond to an escalating conflict or a sensitive cross-border issue.
The transformation of the concept of self-determination to a principle to be applied in international politics in the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to several key practices that have shaped the field of international relations. This chapter discusses the recasting of self-determination to an instrument of international politics during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. It focusses on the Victorian underpinnings of the liberal understanding of self-determination that came to be associated with Wilsonianism and explains how the concept of self-determination became one of the key regulatory principles of international politics in the dawn of the interwar period. By focussing on Anglophone debates on national questions and the transformation of the Habsburg and, crucially, the Ottoman imperial space, this chapter assesses the application of ‘self-determination’ as a method to assuage national questions and stabilise international affairs.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the use of chemical weapons was cause for indignation at international fora, including the League of Nations, but while Italy was sanctioned for its invasion, no sanctions were imposed in response to the use of gas. Chemical weapons had been outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which Italy and Ethiopia had both ratified. This chapter addresses the League’s inaction, and demonstrates how Ethiopian delegates instrumentalised the international discourse condemning chemical weapons in an effort to claim full statehood and protection under the Geneva Protocol, using the League of Nations’ own legal instruments and norms. In other words, the chemical weapons discourse was used as an instrument of international order. In the fluidity of interbellum international order, Italy and Ethiopia sought to create certainty about which states were full members and which were not. By using chemical weapons, Italy upheld the distinction between colonial conquest and civilised interstate warfare and the prohibition of gas in the latter, but not in the former. As a member state of the Geneva Protocol, Ethiopia was able to challenge this understanding more effectively than colonised peoples had been able to before, and to affirm its understanding of international order as rule-based, equal and universal. Ethiopia’s liminality as a semi-sovereign state unable to receive protections under the Geneva Protocol demonstrated the interwar international society’s own liminality, on the threshold between Eurocentrism and universalism.
This chapter charts the growth and decline of American colonial drug diplomacy efforts by examining the role of the Philippines in the multilateral summits on drug control and interim negotiations during the first half of the twentieth century. Having taken control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ended the Spanish monopoly system on opium and in 1905 prohibited all recreational sale and use of opiates and cocaine. The subsequent failure of colonial authorities to contain the flow of illicit narcotics into the Philippines resulted in the United States successfully reframing international drug control as an international responsibility rather than a quixotic imperial undertaking. Through multilateral summits, the United States sought to convince foreign producer and manufacturing states of the need to restrict exports of drugs to countries permitting their entry and to work towards restricting their use to medical purposes, thus establishing an international drugs regulatory regime. The outcome of these summits represented a victory for the transnational movement against the opium trade, largely driven by Protestant missionary influences. Following the First World War, the drugs regulatory regime was solidified with the 1925 Geneva Convention. This nascent regime was not without conflict, however. As signatories to these agreements, the United States and the United Kingdom eventually had to end the sale of opium in their own possessions and take action against international trafficking. Begun in order to enforce colonial policy, American interwar efforts ended up shifting towards a focus on drug control in the metropole.
The institutions and impact of the League of Nations have been the subject of extensive analysis by historians in recent years and yet despite this, one of its primary institutions – the Assembly – has yet to receive serious attention. This chapter intends to begin to redress this by demonstrating that the Assembly served a crucial role within what became known as the Geneva system, becoming its most publicly visible manifestation as a result of a process of coordinated decision-making. It will show that media oversight of the Assembly was actively built into its function and explores how this oversight impacted the diplomatic practices of delegates to this body. Through this, this chapter will not only highlight the function of the Assembly in its broader context but will explore how diplomats at the League engaged with concepts such as public opinion and transparency in their day-to-day work. Finally, it will also argue that, as practices evolved to rely on displays of transparency, the Assembly quickly became a unique point of convergence between open and secret diplomacy, allowing diplomats to become practitioners of both without overt contradiction.
This book explores a set of diplomatic practices and principles that shaped international politics during the first half of the twentieth century. By considering these instruments as historical constructions serving various political ends, the chapters show how internationalists interacted with traditional diplomatic actors, thus blending new and old forms of diplomacy. To illustrate this process, the authors draw on a range of new archival evidence and consider understudied actors and venues, from Ethiopian diplomats to the League of Nations Assembly. What connects them is their attention to the ways in which internationalists sought to solve international problems at an international level by infiltrating established institutions at the highest level of political decision-making.
In the first half of the twentieth century, world politics underwent a profound transformation, as foreign policy was democratised, ambitious attempts to build lasting peace and prosperity through international organisation were launched, public diplomacy and education in international relations became widespread and much else. This book offers a new look at this transformation – often told as the story of the eclipse of the ‘old’ diplomacy by the ‘new’ – by showing how these new international practices and principles came to be shared by traditional diplomats and internationalist newcomers alike, blending new and old forms of diplomacy. The introduction outlines the key themes of the book. Starting from the historical rhetoric of ‘instruments’, it explains key terms and concepts. Second, it reviews recent historiography as well as scholarship in International Relations and related fields to contextualise the book. Finally, it provides an overview of the chapters and teases out some common threads, focussing on the ways in which internationalists sought to solve international problems at an international level by interacting with established institutions at the highest level of political decision making.