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Abstract: The Second World War challenged the well-established circulation of cultural practices between France and Britain. But it also gave individuals, communities, states, and aspiring governments opportunities to invent new [...]

Nüzhet Sabit was a typical Ottoman intellectual of the Second Constitutional Period(19081918). He distinguished foreign politics from domestics politics, and discussed them separately in his articles. When the Constitution was restored in 1908, the Young Turks intended to establish friendly relations with both France and England. Towards Germany, which had supported Abdülhamid II, on the other hand, they had a more distanced attitude. In time this preference changed, and Germany was once more seen as an ally. The break-out of World War I, however, forced the heads of the Ottoman State to take sides. Eventually, it joined the alliance led by Germany and stayed in this group until the end of the war, which it would conclude in defeat for them. In this article as an opponent intellectual and journalist Nüzhet Sabit's views are explained about the foreign policy of Committee of Union and Progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did France influence the geopolitical system of eighteenth-century Europe more effectively than did Britain? Explanations pointing to states’ military and economic power are unable to explain this outcome. I argue that durable geopolitical influence depends on states’ symbolic capacities to secure recognition from competitor states, in addition to their coercive and economic capacities. And I show that states are liable to secure recognition to the extent that their agents embody social dispositions congruent with those of competitor agents. France converted military and economic power into durable influence in eighteenth-century Europe because French agents and most of their European counterparts shared courtly standards of competence, and they were invested in the common stakes of patrimonial sovereignty. By contrast, Britain failed to convert its greater material power into similar influence because British agents tended to lack courtly manners and they were uninterested in patrimonial stakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a conference about the Congress of Vienna (Vienna, Austria) held in Bonn, Germany, from November 27-28, 2015. The event was organized by several associations including the Gesellschaft für Internationalen Kulturaustausch und Politische Bildung e.V. (GIK) and the Deutsch-Ägyptische Gesellschaft Bonn-Kairo e.V. and focused on topics including France's and Great Britain's role, Prussia and Rhineland (Germany), and the Congress's influence on the development of the Egyptian State.

Since the loss of their empires, Britain and France have been seen as states in historical but still only relative decline: no longer great powers but not typical of the large category of middle-range powers. Despite financial constraints and limited size they retain their status as permanent members of the UN Security Council and continue to display the ambition to exert global influence. At times, London and Paris deal with this anomaly by acting in harness but at others their foreign policies diverge dramatically, not least because of the contrasting domestic traditions from which they emerge, and because of their differing roles within the European Union. This article assesses the capacity of these two notable states to maintain a leading role in international politics given their own uneasy relationship and the significant constraints which they now face, both external and internal. The article is a revised version of the Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, held at Chatham House, London, on 3 November 2015. [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]

The author comments on the status of the Constantinople Agreement, secret World War I deal between France, Russia and Great Britain aimed at Ottoman Empire's postwar partition, the reasons why 1916 Sykes-Picot deal, the secret agreement between the French and British governments related to the partition of the Ottoman Empire among Allied Powers, is considered the replacement of the Constantinople Agreement, and the objections expressed by the people to the colonial rule.

In October 1916, the French government agreed with Armenian political elites to establish a Légion of Armenian volunteers in British Cyprus to fight the common Ottoman enemy. Despite British, French, and even Armenian rejections of such a Légion during different times throughout 1915 and early 1916, all sides overcame earlier concerns. Understanding how they managed to overcome these concerns will allow for this little-known episode in the history of the Great War in the eastern Mediterranean to contribute to the knowledge on (1) the complex French and British wartime stances towards this region, driven by imperialism and humanitarianism; (2) the ability of local elites to draw concessions from the Allies; (3) the important role played by local British and French colonial and military officers; and (4) broader historiographical debates on the responses to the Armenian Genocide. This article explores the origins of how the Entente co-opted Armenians in their eastern Mediterranean campaigns, but also made them into pawns in the French and British reinvention of their imperial rivalry in this region in order to achieve their post-war imperialist agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article argues that the legitimacy and the effectiveness of privateering in the mid-eighteenth-century Mediterranean were determined by high politics beyond the indispensable war status. After the presentation of four distinctive privateering stories involving individuals of different backgrounds, there follows an analysis of the Ottoman, French, and British factors that determined national and private interests in wartime Archipelago (the Aegean Islands). As the Ottoman Empire was the major commercial partner and a potentially desirable ally for both the French and the British, especially for the Levant Company, privateers were trapped between conflicting interests, beyond their own comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]