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We propose that the “historically relevant” comparison of the Danish and Russian Empires from the early eighteenth century until the First World War presents a useful starting point for a promising research agenda. We justify the comparison by noting that the two empires enjoyed striking geographical, political and institutional similarities. Beyond this, we also demonstrate that the two empires were bound together by war, royal marriage, and migration. We suggest some examples of what might be investigated, with a particular focus on agriculture, due to its importance to both Danish and Russian economic history. Finally, we zoom in on the role Danish experts played for developing the Russian butter industry.

We explore the role of elites for development and in particular for the spread of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the 1880s, which was a major factor behind that country's rapid economic catch-up. We demonstrate empirically that the location of early proto-modern dairies, so-called hollaenderier, introduced onto traditional landed estates as part of the Holstein System of agriculture by landowning elites from the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the eighteenth century, can explain the location of cooperative creameries in 1890, more than a century later, after controlling for other relevant determinants. We interpret this as evidence that areas close to estates which adopted the Holstein System witnessed a gradual spread of modern ideas from the estates to the peasantry. Moreover, we identify a causal relationship by utilizing the nature of the spread of the Holstein System around Denmark, and the distance to the first estate to introduce it, Sofiendal. These results are supported by evidence from a wealth of contemporary sources and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications.

We discuss the early development of sophisticated agricultural accounting in Northern Germany and Denmark within a framework that establishes the role of accounting for knowledge generation and subsequent economic growth. We highlight the work of Thaer, on encouraging and systematising the use of double-entry bookkeeping in agriculture for scientific and efficiency purposes, and that of Gyllembourg, who emphasised the calculation of economic returns in monetary value. Evidence exists to suggest that their work was the basis upon which further developments in accounting practice in the nineteenth century were laid, supporting the rapid modernisation and success of Danish agriculture.

It is only within the last decades that the rural population of the world was overtaken by that of the cities. Thus, any economist working on a topic in economic history needs to take agriculture seriously. This chapter discusses the significance of agriculture since its invention during the Neolithic Revolution, and highlights the role of agriculture in the course of economic development up to the present day.

Is diplomacy important and can diplomats make a difference? This article examines these questions in the context of American foreign policy during the first two years of the Obama administration. The policy of George W. Bush’s administration in Iraq and Iraq, unilateral in form and controversial in substance, ensured that foreign policy was a major issue in the election campaign, with all of the major candidates agreeing that American diplomacy needed to be restored. Candidate Obama went beyond the consensus about restoring the status and influence of the State Department, however, to argue that the United States should talk without preconditions, even with regimes of which it did not approve. In office, Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, rhetorically elevated diplomacy to an equal standing with defence and development, provided resources for greatly expanding the Foreign Service, and stressed the importance of taking advantage of developments in information technology to strengthen public and ‘digital’ diplomacy in the service of civilian power. They also ‘reset’ certain key bilateral relationships and ‘reengaged’ multilateralism. However, American diplomacy under Obama remains framed by the increasingly questionable assumption that its renewed openness to talking, its continued military superiority and its claim to embody universal values will continue to confer upon it the mantle of global leadership. If US administrations continue to assume that this is so, then American diplomacy will face the challenge of trying to bridge the increasingly widening gap between their aspirations and the means available to sustain them.

The recent revival of interest in the English School has emphasised the historical and, hence, impermanent and incomplete character of international societies. Its focus has been upon the circumstances in which specific societies come into being, flourish and fade, with a view to making better sense of what is happening in and to the contemporary international society of states. Recent commentary, however, has noted both the insistence of the first generation of the English School upon the importance of diplomacy and its failure to develop any significant empirical work upon this insight. This case study of Mullah Zaeef and the Taliban embassy in Islamabad in the two years before the Afghan war seeks to rectify that shortcoming by providing an analysis of diplomatic activity in a context where there is little intersubjective understanding of both what an international society is or ought to be and the elements of the diplomatic culture which helps sustain it. It argues that while war was not averted, the episode provides grounds for modest optimism about the possibility of surmounting the obstacles to resolving conflicts of this kind in the future.

p laul Kennedy has identified a pattern in the histories of the great powers: nations which rise inevitably fall. It is counter-intuitive, but a nations strength (primarily economic and military) is the cause of its eventual demise. As nations ascend they extend their commitments and resources. At a critical moment commitment turns into over-commitment and resources become over-stretched. The political result is

We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was not sufficient for their success. The Danish legal system, which we compare to that of other countries, was also of crucial importance, along with the way in which rules were monitored and enforced. Of particular interest is the Danish cooperatives’ use of contracts, which we explore with evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources.

Scholars acknowledge that there is a close connection between diplomacy and war, but they disagree with regard to the character of this connection—what it is and what it ought to be. In general, diplomacy and war are assumed to be antagonistic and polar opposites. In contrast, the present diplomatic system is founded on the view that state interests may be pursued, international order maintained, and changes effected in it by both diplomacy and war as two faces of a single statecraft. To understand the relationships between diplomacy and war, we must look at the development of the contemporary state system and the evolution of warfare and diplomacy within it. In this context, one important claim is that the foundations of international organizations in general, and the League of Nations in particular, rest on a critique of modern (or “old”) diplomacy. For much of the Cold War, the intellectual currents favored the idea of avoiding nuclear war to gain advantage. In the post-Cold War era, the relationship between diplomacy and war remained essentially the same, with concepts such as “humanitarian intervention” and “military diplomacy” capturing the idea of a new international order. The shocks to the international system caused by events between the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have intensified the paradoxes of the relationship between diplomacy and war.

(1992). The great test: Soviet diplomacy and the Gulf War. Diplomacy & Statecraft: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 272-302.

Rogue states, while arguably aberrant phenomena whose character is in great part generated by the demands and preoccupations of domestic politics, belong to a world closely associated with diplomacy. Greedy companies, in contrast, belong to a world from which diplomacy is conventionally understood to have been exiled, the world of economic production, distribution and exchange. What are we to do about companies which exploit people, damage the environment and use up the natural resources of the planet in order to get rich by presiding over the creation of a stock of wealth from which nearly everybody wants what they see as their fair share, and what might the diplomatic tradition of international thought have to tell us about the debates surrounding these questions? From just about every point of the intellectual compass including, until relatively recently, diplomats themselves and those who study them, the received opinion was “not a lot.” In their priorities, in their ways of understanding the world and in their characteristic modes of thought and inquiry, diplomacy and economics, indeed diplomats and economists, have been presented in opposition to one another. And they have been so in a way that reflects poorly on diplomacy. Thus, we see diplomacy existing because of human weaknesses and imperfections: the predisposition to sacrifice the dictates of reason to the cupidities of willfulness; the desire to obtain what has not been earned; the urge to use force when other means have failed or even before, and, above all, the need to fudge that all this is, in fact, the case in order to manage its consequences.

Whatever the problems posed by greedy companies and other economic actors for the effective conduct of diplomacy, it is easy to assume that they cannot be as bad as those posed by crazy religions, denominations and their members. The idea of “crazy religion” flags an apparently new and pressing challenge to the conduct of contemporary international relations. Since the attacks of “9/11” and subsequent events, largely in the United States, Western Europe, South West Asia and the Middle East, insurgent sects have appeared among peoples like hot cinders falling upon forests which, for reasons that to educated received opinion remain shocking and unfathomable, are dry and ready to burn. In a world rendered increasingly intelligible, controllable and exploitable by the application of scientific enquiry and technological discovery to human affairs, growing numbers of people are attracted to pre-scientific accounts of the world and their place within it. Not only that, they are prepared to be mobilized and to act on the basis of these understandings. What does this development tell us about people, the impact of modernization upon them and the prospects for peoples living peacefully together? The international relations of the Middle East often illustrate the problems posed by religion for diplomacy in their sharpest form. How does one negotiate with people who believe their title to a contested piece of land comes from God, and how do they negotiate with people directed by false gods or no gods at all?

Public diplomacy, the process by which direct relations are pursued with a country’s people to advance the interests and extend the values of those being represented, appears to be an idea whose time has come. The consensus is that it is made necessary by economic interdependence, possible by the communications revolution, and desirable by the rise in democratic and popular expectations. Even the emerging civilizational wars, which some argue are disrupting this picture, do not tell against public diplomacy, in fact quite the reverse. In the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, governments, it is now customary to argue, will have to conduct more public diplomacy and become better at it.1 However, this consensus about the importance of public diplomacy is not matched by a similar consensus regarding the consequences of its use for what remains an international society of states. Are governments merely to work harder at getting their message out to target markets in the same way that private enterprises seek to boost their sales? Or, in so doing, are they participating in the further disaggregation of existing social structures and the replacement of the constricted and constraining communications of states by real conversations between peoples?

The paper compares approaches to curriculum specialisation in secondary education in New Zealand and England. In both countries there have been movements towards increased specialisation, though these have been quite different in form and scope. In both countries specialisation cannot be divorced from broader education policies designed to increase devolution and choice and the paper discusses these contexts before analysing the different approaches to specialisation and attempting an explanation. The authors of the paper draw on findings from research undertaken in New Zealand schools. The paper identifies three dimensions that have played a part in influencing curriculum specialisation in both countries. These are opportunity, source of impetus and support. It is argued that while local initiative is possible in New Zealand, central planning and guidance is inadequate. In England while central planning is strong and support is available, it is far from clear that real specialisation is encouraged by existing curriculum and assessment frameworks. In these circumstances in both countries it seems likely that vertical, rather than horizontal, diversity will continue to hold sway.

The underlying and fundamental fact which confronted those responsible for Britain’s postwar foreign policy was the country’s decline as a world power.1 Between 1945 and 1979, Britain’s share of the world’s trade, merchant shipping, overseas investments and gross product all shrank dramatically. Over the same period, the Empire, as any sort of cohesive force in international politics, disappeared, and Britain became dependent on the US for advanced military technology, most notably the delivery systems for its nuclear warheads. It is true that this process had begun long before 1945, but until the Second World War it had been possible for British governments to act in public as if it were not happening. It is also true that, even as Britain’s external decline accelerated after 1945, the country retained a highly developed industrial base and that its population of over 55 million people came to enjoy the highest standard of living in the history of the country. Even in the midst of this new prosperity, however, Britain’s ability to afford the level of armed forces and military equipment commensurate with its desired status as a world power continued to shrink relative to their spiralling costs.

Until Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982, Thatcher gave no sign of being anything but a very ordinary prime minister as far as foreign affairs were concerned. Certainly, she enjoyed the reputation for having some robust opinions about world affairs, but they were indistinguishable from those of many ordinary Conservative party supporters and, arguably, just as cheaply held. The economy remained Thatcher’s priority, and she was content to leave foreign policy matters to the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington. This arrangement was widely judged, by herself included, to have been a great success.1 Had not Carrington taken formal responsibility for the loss of the Falklands by resigning, it is likely that he would have continued as foreign secretary for a considerable period. After all, Geoffrey Howe held the position for a long time, even after his relationship with Thatcher had deteriorated.

It is remarkable, in retrospect, that the British government saw the 1983 Stuttgart summit as significant for establishing the principles of a final budget settlement, and not for the Solemn Declaration on European Union. The Solemn Declaration committed members of the European Council to ‘… broad action to ensure the relaunch of the Community’, and to providing ‘… a general political impetus for the construction of Europe’. As such, it took its place in a long line of similar calls for European unity stretching back to the Treaty of Rome and beyond. Economic integration, according to key figures like Paul-Henri Spaak and Walter Hallstein, was the means to eventual political union, and the Paris summits of 1972 and 1974 had committed the Community to achieving this goal by 1980. To facilitate this, they had commissioned a report by the Belgian Prime Minister, Leo Tindemans, which called for: the establishment of economic and monetary union; reform of Community institutions; and the implementation of common foreign, regional and social policies. The Solemn Declaration was itself a response to an initiative launched by the foreign minister of the Federal Republic, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, with the assistance of his Italian counterpart, Emilio Colombo, two years previously.

Europe was, indeed, the realm of necessity for British foreign policy. As Thatcher herself made clear in her famous address to the College of Europe at Bruges in 1988, Britain’s ties with Europe were ‘… the dominant factor in our history’, and Britain’s destiny lay ‘… in Europe as a part of the Community’. Returning again to the theme of ‘Britain’s destiny’ during a speech she made in Aspen, Colorado three months before her resignation in 1990, she declared that it lay ‘… in Europe as a full member of the Community’. Britain would not be ‘standing on the sidelines or … watching from the bleachers.’1 There is no doubt she meant what she said on both occasions, but what still remains very much in doubt is what she, or anyone else for that matter, meant by ‘Europe’ and the European Community.

Whether it mattered or not, however, if circumstances were ever to be propitious for changes in British foreign policy, then they seemed to be so in the spring of 1979. The international system was sliding towards both economic recession and the ‘second Cold War’.1 The order essentially created by American power at the end of the Second World War seemed to be in danger of disintegrating in the face of challenges from radical nationalist movements in the Third World and a newly assertive USSR whose leaders spoke of a decisive shift in the international correlation of forces. The efforts of the US to arrest the decline in its international position, either by direct intervention as in the case of Vietnam, or indirect support as in the case of Iran, had not worked. Indeed, they had further weakened both the political and economic position of the West. Yet, when the Carter administration briefly attempted to step back from competition with the USSR or the search to control developments in the Third World, the consequences were widely interpreted in terms of a crisis of American leadership.

Thatcher’s German policy was not the high point of her international career. It was premised on miscalculations about Britain’s capacity to influence the European balance of power and, even after it had clearly failed, was kept alive for domestic political purposes. Mitigating circumstances might be pleaded for this latter development. By the middle of 1990, Thatcher’s position within the Conservative party had become very difficult, primarily because her commitment to a new system of local revenue-raising, the Community Charge or Poll Tax, was alienating many Conservative supporters. This had provided her rivals, former colleagues who had suffered at her hands and those who were convinced that Thatcher was past her best with the chance to rally support against her. Playing the German card and, thereby, drawing attention to her credentials as a patriot was part of Thatcher’s response to this pressure. Had she been merely a domestic leader, this would have been understandable, if unwise. For someone who aspired to the status of an international statesman and who took the great power politics of sovereign states seriously, however, it was a major error. Thatcher’s willingness to provoke Germany with no greater purpose than winning a fight within the Conservative party undermined her own claims about the importance of international politics and their emerging character now that the Cold War was coming to an end.