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The British paper and board industry opposed plans to establish the Western European free trade area and the more modest EFTA, arguing that British producers would be unable to compete successfully against their Nordic rivals. The paper industry did support British entry to the EEC, but only because this was considered to be a less bad option than continued membership of EFTA. It is argued that while the British government could not fundamentally change its European policy solely because it harmed the interests of one particular industry, pressure from business and fears that increased competition would lead to increased unemployment gradually persuaded it to find ways to reduce competition. However, this policy probably encouraged many companies to delay efforts to modernise production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British mandated Palestine has attracted scholarly attention for its role in the development of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Some aspects of the time period, however, remain somewhat overlooked, and one prominent example is the reversal of the Passfield White Paper in 1931. Following extremely violent anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1929, the British Government in Westminster utilized two commissions of enquiry – the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Commission – to justify a change in policy. Rather than adhere to Britain’s original Zionist commitments, articulated in the Balfour Declaration and official mandate, the government decided to limit Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine, articulated in the Passfield White Paper, before reversing the policy months later. Subsequent explanations of this decision have been sparse and focused almost solely on the efficacy of Zionist lobbying. Why the British Government was susceptible to pressure and how this process took place has remained largely unexplored. In order to provide a more thorough analysis of why the Passfield White Paper was reversed, this article reassesses several assumptions within the literature and places the decision within the context of a Labour Government’s need to maintain internal unity, as well as cross-party support, on foreign and particularly India policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the role played by Great Britain (GB) in the counter-revolution in Turkey on March 31, 1909 against the Young Turks. Attitude of GB toward differences of opinion within various Young Turks groups and between them and the government; Policy of GB after the suppression of the counter-revolution; Implications of the Young Turks' revolution for the Anglo-Turkish relations.

The article offers a fresh perspective on the critical significance of ratifying the Treaty of Alliance between Great Britain and Irak (the 1922 Anglo-Iraq Treaty) for British policy on Iraq, and for that country’s evolution from mandated territory to independent state. In contrast with existing accounts, it considers the treaty primarily in the context of domestic tensions over Britain’s future role. The strength of the ‘Quit Mesopotamia (subsequently Iraq)’ movement in Britain meant that Iraqi failure to ratify could have led to British withdrawal from Iraq, with far-reaching implications for the region. The article also reveals for the first time the considerable contribution to securing ratification made by the British representative on the ground, the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs. He took full advantage of distance to make decisions and act in line with his own, not London’s approach. The source for these new perspectives is Sir Henry Dobbs’ recently discovered letters and private papers—never previously available to historians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of humanitarian intervention as a tool of foreign policy in the Conservative-led Coalition. The first section of the paper provides historical context and assesses the traditional approaches to humanitarian intervention as an instrument of foreign policy of Conservative governments since the end of the Cold War. This analytical narrative considers the Major Government's response to the Bosnian War. The second section of the paper considers the Conservative-led Coalition's approach to humanitarian intervention in two ways: first by an examination of the influence of Blair's humanitarian intervention and secondly, by an evaluation of British involvement in the Libyan Revolution of 2011. The third and final section of the paper offers an explanatory interpretation of the Conservative-led Coalition's humanitarian intervention. This interpretation is predicated on an English School theoretical framework for understanding international relations and, in particular, advances the argument that the global worldview of David Cameron, William Hague and their liberal Conservative colleagues can be understood as solidarist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Harnessing international support for the struggle against apartheid was a major aspect of international solidarity work, and publicising the atrocities of apartheid and the role of the liberation movements in combating apartheid was therefore a campaign priority. The British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) emphasised informing the British public about developments in South Africa as one of its core functions. In this article one aspect of this activity - namely the AAM's own publication, The Anti-Apartheid News - is analysed. A survey of the paper illustrates how the AAM used it to inform the British public about both apartheid and the African National Congress's (ANC) history and ideology. Through the newspaper the AAM was able to increase international solidarity with and support for the ANC. The article argues that the AAM therefore played a pivotal role in popularising the ANC and helping to establish its reputation internationally as the authentic representative of the people of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of appeasement has twisted back and forth. Having begun with condemnation of Chamberlain and moved through a period of understanding, perceived wisdom is back where it started. Appeasement, ipso facto, was the wrong policy—sullying British honour and leading to war anyway. This article takes issue with the first of these points—the idea of British honour. Certainly, it has come more and more to the fore in recent years. Lynne Olson’s Troublesome Young Men portrayed a group of brave former soldiers opposing successive cowardly Prime Ministers, pointing to the Eden and Duff Cooper generation as the vanguard of righteous rebellion that eventually leads to the rise of Churchill. Whilst Olson's is a work of popular history, it represents a wider academic tradition. Analysing the activities of Conservative Great War veterans in this period, this paper illustrates three major problems with this thesis. First, the moral dimension given to the anti-appeasement position by the use of ex-servicemen MPs had already been seen in causes not always compatible with positions held in the late 1930s. Secondly, the numbers simply do not stack up. If one goes through the data of House of Commons votes, it is clear that the veterans did not vote the way their post facto accounts suggest. And lastly, Churchill was by no means the beacon of honour his later self-publicity suggested. Veterans, it will be shown, could give him rather a wide berth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the relationship which developed during the Second World War and first decade of Cold War between the Foreign Office and one of Britain's leading Anglican clerics, Cyril Forster Garbett, archbishop of York 1942-55, widely respected as a liberal and the "conscience of the nation." It offers a model case study of relations between church and state by drawing upon state papers as well as upon ecclesiastical ones. It illustrates how religion was a crucial propaganda tool, advocating the defence of Western civilization and Christianity against first the paganism of Nazi Germany and then the atheism of Soviet Russia. Garbett's evolution from a domestic cleric concerned with social deprivation to an ecclesiastic statesman and Cold Warrior, reveals the significance of the religious component in Anglo-American relations. The presentation of the alliance as a crusade bonded together the two nations despite the differing political outlooks of their respective peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1947, the British government made a number of policy decisions which led to withdrawal from India, Palestine and Greece. The paper seeks to demonstrate that although economic constraints highlighted the need to reduce overseas commitments, these pressures did not predetermine the choice or timing of the withdrawal decisions. The consequences of the retreats in terms of reduced military overstretch, balance of payments alleviation and the diminution in Britain's international status are also examined. It is concluded that the Attlee administration shed a range of military burdens as rapidly and in as orderly a fashion as political and strategic circumstances permitted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In its first 2 decades the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), Canada's premier foreign policy think tank, never functioned merely as a neutral and apolitical research organization. Under the leadership of Edgar Tarr, president of the Monarch Life Assurance Company, and in its capacity as the Canadian Council of the transnational Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), in the 1930s and 1940s the CIIA became an instrument that championed Canadian national autonomy and sought to expand Canada's international role, while challenging British imperialism, racism, and Anglo–Saxon dominance. Prominent Canadian diplomats and other officials were complicit in this enterprise, which reached its apogee at the IPR conference held at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in December 1942. The CIIA's activities during this period revealed the porosity and imprecision of the boundaries in Canada between the state and non-state realms. Throughout World War II, DEA and other Canadian government representatives attended CIIA and IPR conferences as “official non-officials,” effectively cooperating with private individuals in a network of purportedly non-governmental organizations that enabled Canada to exert leverage on the British government, reject British leadership, align itself with the United States, and secure a greater world role. CIIA leaders and Canadian officials also consciously encouraged nationalist forces in India, China, and Southeast Asia that sought to reject colonial rule and Western dominance. CIIA activities thus became part of a web of diplomatic interactions across a transnational network of think tanks within and outside the British Empire that had their own impact upon international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the contours of the complex, often obscure administrative and governance arrangements that have framed relationships between the Caribbean Overseas Territories of the UK in recent years. Relations between the governments of Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands (BVI), Caymans, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos and the UK government in London have not always been smooth. From the 1970s onwards, it was assumed in Whitehall and Westminster that these territories would become independent. This absent-minded assumption reinforced a set of fragmented, and remarkably personalised, ad hoc governance arrangements, at least to the late 1990s. Little sense of post-colonial purpose or shared vision animated relations between Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) and UK governments. The ‘bias for independence’ has faded, however, as opposition to sovereignty being imposed was finally acknowledged by the New Labour government's White Paper of 1999. In 2009, the UK government even imposed direct rule on the Turks and Caicos Islands, following a corruption scandal that threatened the territory's economic and political future. We reflect on lessons of the past decade or so, contrasting UK–OCT governance arrangements to those in the comparable, yet also very distinct, neighbouring Dutch and French Caribbean territories. Overall, developments in governance arrangements indicate that whilst new ‘contracts’ are periodically forged between the UK and its Caribbean OCTs – something that appears to be true at EU-wide level also, for the Dutch and French Caribbean territories in their relations with the ‘metropolis’ – reform has been insufficient and incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores a number of key facets of Vincent Massey's tenure as Canada's wartime high commissioner in London between 1939 and 1942. Using the personal tensions and mutual suspicions which existed between Massey and the mercurial Canadian prime minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, this essay analyses how Massey and his dedicated staff coped with the increasing and punishing workload during the first three years of the Second World War. Wheat, wartime finance and the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan dominated Anglo-Canadian relations during the early stages of the war when the British Empire/Commonwealth stood almost alone against the European dictators. What emerges is that, despite King's attempts to restrict Massey's authority in wartime London, the pressure of prime ministerial work in Ottawa allowed Massey, for the first time since his appointment in 1935, to exert the authority and responsibility he so desperately craved prior to the war. However, this essay is not just about high policy and the tensions between Trafalgar Square and Ottawa or within the Commonwealth alliance. Massey and his wife Alice also responded magnificently to the needs of off-duty Canadian service personnel while on leave in London. At the centre of this analysis is the changing and at times frustrating part played by the Canadian high commissioner in London and Massey's role in modernising the office of high commissioner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the structure and domestic political relevance of foreign policy beliefs in contemporary Britain. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of data gathered in five national surveys conducted between May and September 2008 show that the British public's foreign policy beliefs are organized by two latent factors, which we label Liberal Internationalism and British Militarism. These factors closely resemble those reported in studies of the foreign policy beliefs of the American public. Analyses reveal significant covariation between the two foreign policy belief factors and voting intentions, as well as with partisanship and feelings about party leaders-key predictor variables in voting behavior models. These relationships remain significant in the presence of several controls, including measures of incumbent government performance in domestic and foreign policy domains. Demonstrating that foreign policy beliefs matter for the fates of political parties and their leaders helps to explain how public opinion in democratic politics affects the conduct of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines British Army operations in Iraq. It focuses on the causes of the army's apparent failure to live up to its reputation for the conduct of small wars. The paper discusses the British experience of small wars in the context of Iraq, the influence of doctrine and strategy, and the political and moral factors that shaped the army's performance. The paper's conclusions suggest that the Iraq War may cause a significant reappraisal, not just of military doctrine and strategy, but also of Britain's role in future small wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article revisits Ireland during and after the First World War when its people defied British rule and discusses the effects on British Catholics. The British Catholics were divided over whether Ireland should have autonomy. The author discusses this division and its ramifications on the relations between Irish Catholics and British Catholics.

There is a long historical narrative of the relations between Britain and Ireland in which images of the Irish have been mobilised as major changing representational resources for the making of the British nation, identity and culture. Presently, the Irish diaspora in Britain is a major racialised ethnic group. However, it is absent from contemporary British theorists' representations of race and ethnicity. The paper critically explores the dominant racial regime of representation and this accompanying conceptual absence, as illustrated in anti-racist and new cultural theory texts. There is a need to rethink the histories and geographies of social closure and cultural exclusion as defining elements of the politics of race and nation. The paper argues the need to move beyond the Americanisation of British race-relations - the colour paradigm - to a critical engagement with European explanations, focusing on questions of nation, nationalism and migration. This is not an argument for the inclusion of the Irish in the current model of British race relations, but rather seeks to investigate the denial of difference with reference to Irish ethnic minority status and the specificity of anti-Irish racism. I conclude by looking at the question of self-representation in relation to Irish cultural formation and subjectivity, suggesting that in terms of a traditional racial dichotomy of domination/dominated, the Irish are not either/or but both/and. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of twenty-first-century America, it seems natural to assume that no other nation has ever been able seriously to threaten the continental states with its navy or military. The assumption that US geography has always deterred such pressure, however, ignores the early Victorian era. In the 1830s and 1840s, one nation could and did pose a credible threat to the United States: Great Britain. As the world’s supreme naval and financial power, Britain had the means to protect and advance its interests in the face of American belligerence. Ultimately, Britain’s strength deterred the United States from turning the tensions of 1838–46 into war. True, by this time Britain could never invade and reconquer its former American colonies. But it was never in its interest to go to war with the US. Anglo-American commercial relations were quite profitable, and peace kept them so. Furthermore, the British preferred a divided America, fighting over slavery and states’ rights, to one united against an external enemy. Britain’s goal was peace, but the methods it used to avoid war with the US in this period did not look particularly peaceful. Especially under Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, preserving the peace did not equate with yielding in diplomatic battles. Rather, a ‘strong stance’ warned the US away from confrontations of a more lethal kind. Interestingly, the prospect of a British invasion through Canada played only a relatively small part in this deterrence. More important was the ability of the Royal Navy, with new gunnery and steam vessels, to strike at the populous and prosperous cities of the eastern and southern coasts of the US. Britain knew the possibilities for mayhem, as did the US government and some, at least, of the American public. Besides Britain’s technical advantages, its funding and political support for the navy were second to none. While the US struggled in vain to finance new ships and fortifications, the British cabinet could rest assured that if the Royal Navy required more funding, it would get it. The British government counted on the navy’s strength to intimidate the Americans in controversies over the Caroline and McLeod affairs, the Maine boundary and the Oregon territory. Palmerston’s personal style of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ may have encouraged this course, but he and his colleagues did worry that the political system of the United States might lead it to start a war neither side really wanted: the fevered American press and people might push the government to some act the British could not tolerate. Britain used the Royal Navy to signal the dire consequences of such an act and forced the American government to resist popular pressure. Geography in these cases was not enough to shield the US; Britain’s strong stance preserved its existing interests and maintained peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to look at the political attitudes of Muslims in Britain. It tests the relationship between political alienation and political participation on the one hand, and Islamophobia and disapproval of British military involvement in Afghanistan on the other. The principal findings are that perceptions of Islamophobia are linked to greater political alienation, to a greater likelihood of non-electoral participation and to a lower likelihood of voting among Muslims. Likewise, disapproval of the war in Afghanistan is associated with greater political alienation and a greater likelihood of some types of non-electoral participation. There is strong evidence that British Muslims are more likely to interpret discrimination they experience as motivated by their religion and that they perceive more prejudice at the group level. These findings have two theoretical implications. First, they support the theory that non-electoral participation is motivated by dissatisfaction with the party political system. Second, they suggest that perceptions of sociotropic discrimination (for minorities) and a rare salient political issue in which all parties are in opposition to most voters can lead to negative affect towards the political system and stimulate non-electoral participation at the expense of voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new, so-called 'ethical' foreign policy of the UK Government places the promotion of human fights at its heart, and emphasizes multilateral and especially European action as a key strategy for its implementation. The recent Asia-Europe Meeting in London (ASEM-2) was dominated by consideration of the East Asian financial crisis, and human rights issues appear to have been marginalized. This suggests that parallel Asia-Europe NGO dialogue may play an important role in redressing the balance in favour of popular interests. The paper argues, however, that such an intercultural dialogue on human rights, though extremely welcome, should be informed by clear thinking about the relation between the idea of universal human rights and the claims of particular cultures. This requires an engagement with the 'Asian values' debate. In this connection, the paper argues that the first, crudely polemical phase of this debate has been superseded by much more refined 'new Asian thinking' about human rights and Asian culture. An important intellectual space has been created for productive dialogue between East Asian and Western human rights advocates. Just as the Asia-Europe economic dialogue supplements that between East Asia and the USA, so Europe can supplement the political and intellectual role of the USA in the human rights dialogue with East Asia with distinctive contributions of its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the British government document "Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy" released in 2021. Topics discussed include the role of foreign-policy experts and historian John Bew in the document, plan of the government to expand the nuclear deterrent of Great Britain as stated in the document, and the approach of the document to national security.

This paper examines the process of the UK's ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon using a liberal intergovernmentalist approach. Traditionally, in contrast to other member states of the European Union, the UK has often been hesitant to pursue European integration. And yet, over the past half century, the European Union has become a significant model of voluntary regional integration. The ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon, which brought important changes to the European Union, marked a significant milestone for European integration in the early twenty-first century. This paper aims to explore the process and challenges of the UK's ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by employing a liberal intergovernmentalist analysis. Such an approach has been developed over several decades and become a major theoretical approach to the study of European integration. Liberal intergovernmentalism, which draws special attention to the processes of negotiating, signing, and ratifying the EU's major treaties, provides a suitable theoretical approach to the analysis of the UK's passage of the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper is, therefore, designed with the dual purpose of examining the empirical case study of the UK's passage of the Treaty of Lisbon, and of examining the theoretical validity of liberal intergovernmentalism against empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the political historiographical connections between Great Britain and Germany. Conferences of Fruhe Neuzeit Interdisziplinar; Presentation of research papers on the culture, politics and society of the German-speaking central Europe; Engagement of participants in debates; Lists of conference participants.

The article deals with the British government's recognition of limitations of its power of defence against the Ottoman Empire. The material used comes mainly from the papers of the Committee of Imperial Defence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answering the legitimate call for a more transnational approach to the history of sport in Europe, we seize upon the 2012 Olympic Games as an opportunity to look back on Belgo-British contacts in sport since the Middle Ages. Contextualising this history within the wider Belgo-British political, economic and cultural contacts is, indeed, much more revealing than recounting a superficial story about the three medals the Belgian Olympic delegation actually obtained in London. We illustrate that transnational flows and contacts – crucial to the shaping and diffusion of sport – are not always reflected at the level of the Olympic Games. The cases of cycle racing and soccer demonstrate the divergent adoption and adaptation processes of specific sporting disciplines in Belgium and Britain. At the end of the paper, we also reflect on David Cameron's competitive sport policy in primary education, and raise the question whether the dissipation of public funds for elite sport – to the detriment of ‘Sport for All’ – is still defendable in times of government budgetary scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

History is much present for the British and Nordic peoples, which means it can also be controversial and instrumentalized. Documents like the new FCO collection help to remind us that the past was truly in some ways ‘another country’. In the early post-war years, for example, before collective nuclear deterrence, there was huge uncertainty both over the scale of Communist advances and the viability of Western defence. The Nordic defence pact alternative thus deserved serious thought, but the reasons for its ultimate sidelining carry lessons still relevant today about the limits and functionality of Nordic cooperation. Interestingly, Britain seemed (and seems?) driven to repeatedly seek more from the latter than it can deliver. While close, British–Nordic relations were and remain prone to misapprehension and ruffled sensitivities caused inter alia by different ‘mental maps’ and group-building instincts. The documents underline the perennial role of Ambassadors in attempting to translate Nordic realities to London, albeit with a constant risk of being over-frustrated or over-charmed by one's hosts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike the high commissioners from the other dominions, Sidney Waterson was not in London before the war and represented his country only until the end of 1942. Because of this, while Waterson is the focus of this essay, a discussion of his predecessor, Charles Te Water (1929–39), and of his two successors, Deneys Reitz (1943–44) and George Heaton Nicholls (1945–47), places his term of office in context. The essay touches on Waterson's background and examines his attitude to Britain and the war effort. Initially inexperienced and without the political clout of high commissioners like Massey of Canada and Bruce of Australia, he was also overshadowed by Smuts who, enjoying direct contact with Churchill and other British officials, frequently bypassed him. Smuts's instructions to his high commissioners were explicit: their task of representing South African interests in London was to take second place to that of offering uncritical support to the British government in its prosecution of the war. Despite his commitment to the war effort, Waterson found it difficult giving this support. Throughout his term of office he was critical of the way in which the British government prosecuted the war and was resentful of Churchill's attitude to the dominions in general and the high commissioners in particular, believing that he fobbed them off with second-rate men as secretaries of state for the dominions. Thus, although he was a highly successful high commissioner and under him South Africa House was run as a tight ship, he never succeeded in persuading Smuts of the necessity of urging Churchill to pay more attention to the dominions nor did he succeed in gaining more political clout for the high commissioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1946 veteran British intelligence officer Kenneth Strong undertook the Directorship of a new intelligence organization, the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB). The JIB absorbed the responsibilities of several wartime intelligence organs, and was responsible for economic, topographic, and aspects of scientific intelligence on an inter-service basis. Its responsibilities grew over the following 18 years; most notably, it absorbed atomic intelligence in 1957. When the Defence Intelligence Staff was created in 1964, absorbing the JIB and the individual Service agencies, JIB was at its heart and Kenneth Strong its first Director. The organization conducted key work in the early Cold War, was at the centre of an international network of Joint Intelligence Bureaux, and was an important stepping stone in the movement to centralize military and military-relevant intelligence in Britain – but the historiography pays it surprisingly little attention. This paper introduces the JIB and various aspects of its work, and demonstrates that its low profile in the historiography is unjustified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades, the United Kingdom has been one of the main resolution centres for cross-border disputes, notably for the bespoke solutions that can often be reached thanks to the flexibility of the common law system. A major contributing factor to this success has also been the efficacy of UK decisions, which are easily enforceable throughout Europe by the operation of the Brussels I Recast Regulation and the 2007 Lugano Convention. With Brexit looming, what the future holds in this domain remains largely unclear, even to the most insightful. The UK could well lose the benefit of this facilitating legal framework, which would arguably imperil its position on the international dispute resolution chessboard. We argue that the 2007 Lugano Convention, which the UK is contemplated to rejoin after Brexit, would be a workable alternative to the current regime and a way to mitigate the damaging consequences of Brexit, as the example of Switzerland has shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the private papers of Lord Killearn in conjunction with official government documents from the British national archives and the French colonial archives, this article builds upon previous historical scholarship to highlight the importance of Killearn's South-East Asian diplomacy to the resolution of the international food crisis following the Second World War. As Britain's senior diplomat in South-East Asia Killearn had little choice but to become entangled in various international disputes often centred upon French Indo-China - Killearn's failure to do otherwise would not have preserved adequate international rice supplies. Therefore this article not only demonstrates the magnitude of Killearn's concern for South-East Asian rice production during the immediate post-war food crisis but it also reveals the depth of Killearn's frustration towards the chaotic priorities emanating from French Indo-China, and thus it substantiates a more significant and complex understanding of Killearn's diplomatic mission to South-East Asia than has been formerly stated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cold War demonstrated that perception was critical in the decision making of states as it underpinned the reasoning behind many of the decisions made during the Cold War. This paper examines the British Government's response to the Second World Peace Congress. The response was influenced by the understanding of Communist ideology related to the peace movement, the possible effect of the Congress on other NATO members, and the legal limits on the response to the Congress. These factors combined to create a reaction that was based on the Government's perception of this episode as part of a greater Communist ideologically motivated security threat, not only to Britain, but to the West in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of April 1922, S.P. Waterlow of the Central Department of the Foreign Office, which dealt with Franco-German relations and European security, put up a memorandum. This claimed: “Except on paper and as an expedient for minor purposes or an escape for some dilemma, we have not taken the League [of Nations] seriously.” It contrasted London's indifference with the active use which Paris was making of the League, asserted that “the objects of British policy and those of the League are broadly speaking identical,” and urged: “let us institute a genuine and energetic League of Nations policy.” This recommendation was strongly endorsed by the Assistant Under-Secretary, Sir William Tyrrell, who believed that such a policy would secure almost universal popular support for co-operation with France, and he proposed making a joint declaration that for the purpose of maintaining the frontiers created by the Treaty of Versailles: “the two countries would place at the disposal of the League all their resources for the enforcement of its decisions.”1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Abercrombie was one of the most celebrated planners of the twentieth century both in the UK and internationally. The impact of his international activities provide insights into the core values of British planning of the early post-war period and their transferability to other countries. This paper examines a little-documented tour by Abercrombie around Australia in 1948. It seeks to understand, in the context of the times, the ideas which Abercrombie promoted, his views on Australian cities, contemporary reactions to his presentations and the wider impact of his tour on the development of Australian planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to provide a historically informed analysis of Europe, understood as an ‘essentially contested concept’, whereby Turkey is interpreted as a critical point of reference that evokes different discursive constructions of Europe, either including or excluding Turkey. At first, the theoretical-methodological section of this paper will introduce a discourse analytical research programme which utilizes the radically constructivist notion of communication as formulated by Niklas Luhmann in order to analyze the processes of inclusion and exclusion built into various constructions of Europe. Then, the empirical section of this paper analyzes more than 40 years of British and German news coverage (1960–2004). One of the main empirical findings is that Turkey is neither seen as a stable European ‘Other’ nor as a European ‘Self’. Instead, Turkey is predominantly interpreted as ‘the thing on the (European) doorstep’, thereby stimulating various differing constructions of Europe.Journal of International Relations and Development (2009) 12, 223–250. doi:10.1057/jird.2009.13 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]