The US and China have both benefited greatly from their trading relationship. However, motivated by a US concern that their partner was becoming more of a rival, then-president Donald Trump began a ‘trade war’ in 2018. In US news outlets and, of particular interest here, on American social media platforms, China was represented as a global menace, with extreme xenophobia against Chinese people. Yet less is known about how Chinese people responded on social media to the same situation. This (...) paper explores the discourses carried on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, focusing on the 2021 Alaska talks between the US and China, where negotiations took place. As with their US counterparts, Weibo users comment little on actual trade benefits or damages caused by the conflict. We find a strong sense of nationalism, but this is not based on xenophobia; rather on a discourse comparing the talks to similar events early in the twentieth century, where the ‘Century of Humiliation’ began, and where territories such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Shaoshan were taken by colonial powers. Foregrounded is China’s ability now to end this humiliation. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 9, August 2019, Page 867-870.

Previous studies have shown the operational potential in political discourse analysis from the proximization perspective. This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze political communication across transcultural contexts, especially in the cyber discourse space. Based on the spatial–temporal–axiological model, we compare the journalistic discourses on two social media platforms by China Xinhua News Agency, an official speaker for China worldwide. The corpuses are constructed with microblogs on Weibo in Chinese and Twitter in English containing key words of Sino–US trade (...) war. It is found that the speaker has shaped different realities of discourse in accordance with the cultural contexts and proximized from corresponding dimensions to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

The main aim of this text is to present economic relations between China and the US today. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, significantly redefined American trade policy toward China. Despite the first months of his presidency, which promised an efficient, long-term cooperation between Beijing and Washington, incumbent president decided to implement severe restriction on the trade with China at the beginning of 2018. However, the announced imposition of tariffs on almost all goods coming from this country (...) could interfere with the growth of the single states and the economy of the whole country in the future. Therefore the text is aimed to investigate the dependency of selected states on the inflows of Chinese investments since 2010. Finally, it is necessary to examine the phenomenon of the trade war, which has begun in July 2018, and assess its impact on the growth of both countries. (shrink)

The force of globalization has greatly challenged people’s conceptualization of national identity. The traditional definition of national identity as being distinct, stable and generated by such internal factors as ethnic, religion, citizenship and so on, has been replaced by the understanding that national identity is invested with more dynamic and complex features and is actually constructed differently in different situations. By following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive perspective in critical discourse analysis and drawing on the 47 news reports collected on the websites (...) of People’s Daily Online and Xinhuanet, this study explores how China’s national identities are negotiated in its news reports of the Sino-US trade war. It is found that China’s news reports have constructed three types of Sino-US relations, namely, antagonistic, negotiatory and cooperative relations. Out of these relations, China has been constructed as victim of the trade war, defender of free trade, driver for negotiations and beneficiary of mutual cooperation. The construction of these identities and relations is realized through constructive, destructive, justification and transformation strategies. It is further found that the diversity of both China’s national identities and Sino-US relations in China’s news reports is the result of the political, social and economic differences between the two countries. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The ongoing Sino-U.S. trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has since 2018 attracted much attention from the international media. This study used the approach of corpus-assisted discourse studies to compare how leading English-language newspapers from each side—The New York Times and China Daily — discursively constructed this issue. The findings indicated that while NYT tended to profile the trade conflict as a ‘war’ in line with mainstream hard-line ideologies that emphasize China’s presumed threat to national (...) security of the U.S., CD sought to dial down the rhetoric and showed a preference for defining the matter as a ‘friction’, consistent with the tenet of ‘pragmatic nationalism’ endorsed by the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the two newspapers framed the causes, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment of the issue in congruence with their respective dominant metaphors by means of various linguistic patterns. These differences are interpreted with regard to each side’s underlying ideologies and national interests. (shrink)

Summary In his novel The Adventures of Telemachus, François de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715) presents a utopian society, Boetica, in which the role of luxury, war and trade is extremely limited. In unreformed Salentum, on the other hand, Fénelon shows the opposite image, one in which the three elements reinforce each other in a fatal feedback-loop. I analyse the relationship between luxury, war and trade in the Telemachus and I sketch the background to Fénelon's views, with special attention to (...) the military expansion and the mercantilism of Louis XIV, Fénelon's quietist spirituality, and the development of the concept of self-interest in seventeenth-century philosophy by mechanicist philosophers and economic thinkers. (shrink)

The first sophisticated wargames were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts (...) to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the ‘free’ German wargame, which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history. (shrink)

Throughout the Peloponnesian War, no state remained as aggressively hostile toward Athens as Corinth. Following the affairs of Corcyra and Poteidaia, Corinth successfully argued that war be declared against Athens. After ten years of fighting, when Sparta agreed to the Peace of Nikias, Corinth refused to accept its terms and make peace with Athens. We know that Corinth and Athens were directly engaged in hostilities in 419 and 416 and were on opposing sides in the fighting between Epidauros and Argos (...) in 418. After Athens sent forces against Sicily in the summer of 415, Corinth voted independently to support Syracuse and encouraged Sparta to increase hostilities against Athens in both Greece and Sicily. When the Peloponnesian War came to an end in 404 with the final Athenian defeat, Corinth continued to oppose peace with Athens and urged that the city be destroyed. (shrink)

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ?undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice?. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel (...) between this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone. (shrink)

History-based trade books, such as biographies, narrative non-fiction, and expository texts, are essential secondary sources in social studies classrooms. Research, though, indicates a preponderance of misrepresentations in trade books’ depictions of historical eras and figures. We examined trade books’ historical representation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an iconic American president. The data sample featured biographies targeting various grade-ranges and published in different eras. Including books targeting early grade, middle grade, and high school students enabled comparisons of historical representation (...) within and between different grade-ranges. Incorporating texts published in different eras allowed for consideration of how Kennedy's historical representation changed over time. Mixed methods content analysis—reliant on both open and axial-coding—yielded important findings about how children's and young adult authors depicted Kennedy's family history, particularly during World War II, privileged social position, Catholicism, wife, health, tensions during his presidency, and his assassination and subsequent conspiracy theories. Trade books’ representations appeared to be shaped more by date-of-publication than intended age of the reader. Identified historical misrepresentations included presentism, omission, exceptionalism, and heroification. Significance for teachers and researchers is articulated and practical classroom suggestions are provided. (shrink)

Economic exchange constitutes the basis of many, but not all, aspects of human cooperation. The incentives overlap with, but remain distinct in important ways, from other fundamental aspects of cooperation, including the organization of collective violence for combat. The specific alignment of sometimes-conflicting goals helps inform the construction of political ideology.

Australia and India have had few reasons in the past to develop systematic and significant levels of economic engagement. This was due to very different positions they have held in the world-system since the Second World War. De-colonization, the fall of the British Empire, the weak status of the British Commonwealth, and the realpolitik of the Cold War saw India and Australia located on different parts of the geo-political and economic world map with small demographic and cultural flows, and insignificant (...) economic trade. Both countries developed similar economic policy regimes that were essentially state-led nationalist projects of economic development with concomitant policies of import-substitution, local industry-subsidization, highly-regulated financial systems, and high tariffs. The last quarter of the 20th century saw a radical revision of both nations’ economic strategies, with Australia moving first to drop many of its trade barriers in the 1970s and ’80s. It is now one of the most open economies in the world. India’s liberalization programme commenced much later in 1991 but nonetheless has had a dramatic impact on its economic fortunes and growing status in the world economy. With these changes there are increasing opportunities for bilateral trade and a greater economic enmeshment in regional engagements and alignments in the Indian Ocean and in wider Asian fora. One significant indicator of change in growing Australia-India economic engagement is to look at Foreign Direct Investment (hereafter FDI). Currently, the movement of FDI between these two countries is still not very large but has a strong potential to grow over the short to medium term. This paper looks at the future prospect of this growth and asserts that, by engaging in areas of comparative advantage, it will benefit both national economies. Moreover, economic flows are also indicators of great social and cultural traffic. The movement of FDI between the two countries will not only encourage greater flow of peoples, especially outward migration from India to Australia, but also trigger more Australian expatriates living in India (from a very low base). Greater economic trade promises more cultural exchange. (shrink)

People are typically grateful for medical technologies used in the treatment of illness or injury. This chapter explores how Lucas has led Star Wars audiences astray into accepting false beliefs and fallacies about the value of technology, particularly in a medical context. Via the naturalistic fallacy, Lucas conveys the false belief that most technology is “unnatural” and so is bad, harmful, or associated with the dark side. Lucas is not wrong that technology can be fearful, but its value depends in (...) part on how it's intended to be used. Even the use of some medical technologies that can extend life raise questions about whether they should be used in all cases. Many bioethical conflicts center around whether a seriously ill or injured person would want certain medical interventions used to extend their life, given potential trade‐offs. Lucas's portrayal of technology in Star Wars is biased against its true value in societies. (shrink)

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they (...) would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. -/- It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. (shrink)

When Captain Binger traveled the Niger bend between 1887 and 1889, he saw numerous villages that had been drained of their lifeblood or left in ruins by violent conflicts that had left their mark in the form of fortifications. Above all he was struck by the region's depopulation, which threatened to compromise the potential for colonial exploitation of the country. But these conditions did not prevail throughout the entire area. Prosperous towns were engaged in trade, war parties were living (...) in ostentation, and rulers were collecting taxes from their subjects. The misery of the peasants’ lives contrasted with the opulent luxury of the courts and caravansaries. The black slave trade, and slavery itself, did not exert a uniform effect upon all of Africa. (shrink)

This article focuses on the history of the customs laboratories in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s, focusing especially on the decades up to World War I. It pays attention to the various dimensions of these laboratories, in particular the context of their creation. The first customs laboratory was established in New York in 1878, and over the subsequent years, similar laboratories were set up across the country. The evolution of this network was influenced by factors such (...) as the increasing specialization of these spaces, their geographic distribution, and changes in their organization and scope. The article also explores the types of imported merchandise analyzed in these labs; the roles of their staff, especially customs chemists, both within and outside these laboratories; their impact on the circulation of goods and in generating revenue from taxation; and the main challenges faced by customs chemists in adapting and standardizing their work. After discussing the necessity of customs laboratories in the United States, the article examines their progressive specialization, with a detailed study of the customs laboratory in New York. This laboratory was the largest and most significant due to its location and longevity. Finally, the paper considers the relationship between customs labs and the law, and how these spaces adapted to new challenges during the first third of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Public Health Science and practice expanded during the course of the 20th century. Initially focused on controlling infectious disease through basic public health programs regulating water, sanitation and food, by 1988 the Institute of Medicine broadly declared that “public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to. assure the conditions for people to be healthy.” Commensurate with this definition, public health practitioners and policymakers today work on ;in enormous range of issues. The 2002 policy agenda of the American (...) Public Health Association reflects positions on genomics’ role in public health; national health and safety standards for child care programs; sodium in Americans’ diets; the health and safety of emergency rescue workers; and war in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. (shrink)

In international law and just war theory, war is treated as normatively and legally unique. In the context of international law, war’s special status gives rise to a specific set of belligerent rights and duties, as well as a complex set of laws related to, among other things, the status of civilians, prisoners of war, trade and economic relationships, and humanitarian aid. In particular, belligerents are permitted to derogate from certain human rights obligations and to use lethal force in (...) a far more permissive manner than is the case in other kinds of conflicts and in domestic law enforcement operations. Given war’s unique status, the task of defining war requires not just identifying the empirical features that are characteristic of war but explaining and justifying war’s special legal and moral status. In this chapter, I propose a definition of war that captures war’s unique features and can offer insights into when and how some forms of unarmed conflict could count as wars. (shrink)

A shipping war has broken out between two friendly neighbouring countries: Estonia (a rather poor land; liberated of Soviet occupation in 1991), and Finland (a wealthy one; independent since 1918). Led by their trade union the Finnish dockers boycott Estonian ships demanding for Estonian sailors the salary in the same range as that is in wealthy West-European countries. Estonian Sailors'' Union finds that such a war is not for their better work-conditions but against their working possibilities: the cheap labour (...) force is the only possibility for a poor country to entice foreign investments in it.No matter how the shipping war will be solved – the problem will remain. This is the problem of two opposites – cheap labour force of poor countries and expensive one of wealthy countries –, and international enterprises standing between them. Could such an enterprise survive without using the cheap labour force? And if it could, how could the poor countries survive then? Could there be found a clear unambiguous ethical solution? What ought to be the role of trade unions in such international business conflicts? (shrink)

The Calvinist minister Godfried Udemans is generally considered to be one of the more important seventeenth-century theologians from the province of Zeeland. He specialized in writings for a broader public, including, in particular, publications on ethical and religious codes in trade and seafaring. Of his various writings on moral theology, 't Geestelyck roer van 't coopmans schip, first published in 1638, is the most important.The Spiritual helm appeared in print some thirty years after Grotius occupied himself with De jure (...) praedae , but Udemans had already begun articulating his thoughts in 1608. It is instructive to examine the ethical writings of a contemporary of Grotius. It has been claimed that in the early modern period, Calvinism, especially in its English Puritan variety, did much to propagate the medieval traditions of holy war that to all appearances had been laid to rest by Spanish theoreticians during the sixteenth-century Renaissance. In this article, I examine the extent to which Udemans draws upon religion as a means of legitimizing violence on behalf of secular political authorities such as the prince , and, more in particular, the Dutch East India Company and West India Company . If Udemans is representative of the religious tradition to which he reckoned himself, holy war thought did not figure prominently in Dutch Calvinism. (shrink)

The Japanese government maintained protectionist agricultural policies for several decades after the end of World War II. However, it recently introduced a new policy that aims at promoting the export of agricultural products to overseas markets. Agricultural export promotion policy is fundamentally different from traditional agricultural trade policies, as it focuses primarily on the promotion of competitiveness of Japanese agriculture rather than protection of inefficient farmers. This paper tries to explain this intriguing development in Japanese agricultural trade policy (...) by focusing on the impacts of the changes in legislators' incentives since the electoral reform of 1994. It argues that the post-reform electoral environment induced the introduction of the agricultural export promotion policy. It is because the reform made certain particularistic policies, such as the protection of the agricultural sector, less attractive to politicians that politicians must now appeal to a broader consituency. (shrink)

In his main work, The Science of Legislation , the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri proposed a set of extensive political and cultural reforms. These reforms were necessary to free eighteenth-century societies from the remnants of feudal institutions that obstructed international peace and economic growth. Filangieri's ideas were shaped by the international political climate between the seven Years’ War and the eve of the French Revolution. Reinterpreting Montesquieu and Genovesi through the influences of French radical and Enlightenment thought , as well as (...) the economics of Hume, Verri and the Physiocrats, he concluded that European modernity was inherently contradictory.From this perspective Filangieri set out to force a clean break between the technical horizons of mercantilism and enlightened absolutism and a society based on civil rights, a fair distribution of wealth and resources, and free trade. Proper ‘scientific’ knowledge of the rules and principles of legislation would allow governments to balance out the natural and cultural factors that characterise individual states, and to identify the appropriate model for social and economic development. If all states acted on their proper interest, international free trade and peaceful competition between states would emerge and the potential for general economic growth be materialised. Thus, the natural equilibrium and ‘universal consensus’ among nations could be restored. (shrink)

Trading on non-public material information is fertile ground for a discussion of ethical behavior. The long-running legal tug-of-war over what constitutes illegal insider trading delivers challenges to regulatory authorities charged with detecting and enforcing the law, and is likely one of the reasons that prosecution of insider trading events remains rather uncommon. One can observe both increased volume in the equity and option markets and run-ups in the stock price prior to the announcement of the acquisitions; however, the detection of (...) illegal or unethical insider trading can be difficult. Given the legal uncertainty around insider trading and the circumstantial evidence from the trading activity, it is almost impossible to identify unethical insider trades unless there is a whistleblower or trades are large in size and impeccable in timing. Using call option trading around two merger announcements with similar firms that resulted in different ultimate treatment from the SEC, we illustrate the struggle regulators and prosecutors have with identifying and enforcing unethical insider trades. (shrink)

It had been recognized for some time that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably lose their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. Well before 9/11, technical studies had concluded that “a well-planned operation to smuggle WMD into the United States would have at least a 90 percent probability of success—much higher than ICBM delivery even in the absence of [National Missile Defense].†That has become “America’s Achilles Heel,†a study with that title concluded several years (...) ago. Surely the dangers were evident after the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, which came close to succeeding along with much more ambitious plans, and might have killed tens of thousands of people with better planning, the WTC building engineers reported.2.. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with literary justice: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and (...) archival documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiros War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of responsibility in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Hypothesis on the Origin of TradeThe Exchange of Lives for Sacrifice and SexPablo Díaz-Morlán (bio)introductionThe primary objective of this study is to propose a hypothesis regarding the origin of trade that will help to solve the enigma of why human groups, normally each other's enemies, stopped exchanging blows in order to exchange things. The complexity of this crucial step forward in the relationships between hostile primitive groups (...) can be summarized as follows. In order for an exchange to take place, both parties must take part in it voluntarily because they see a mutual benefit in doing so. In turn, both parties should be aware that in order to obtain what interests them, which is closely guarded by the other party, in return, they must hand over what the other party is interested in. The perception of the interest of the other plays a crucial role in trade, both today and in its origins. The next step to be taken after a successful initial exchange was its consolidation, after it had been proved that it mutually benefited groups who had, until then, been enemies. Once established, this pacific exchange would have diversified considerably and its complexity would have increased significantly. An added [End Page 165] advantage, which was unexpected but real, was that its subsequent usefulness in curbing violence contributed to its growing expansion. The emergence of a comparative advantage in the groups that adopted trade would have guaranteed their future progress with respect to those that continued to systematically adopt violent conduct toward their neighbors.1Throughout this study, we will come across the old idea that the market prevents war. Without a doubt, trade and war between individuals and groups are closely connected, but the boundaries between them are fuzzy and their demarcation has proven elusive to researchers. Albert Hirschman studied the intellectual climate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of trade and the express declaration of Montesquieu that "peace is the natural effect of trade."2 Since then, this idea has gained ground among researchers of economics and other fields of knowledge. In L'enfer des choses and subsequent works, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel defend that the economy (the market) is a substitute for the sacred, containing violence through violent means. The market contains violence in the two senses of the term contain: It holds it and curbs it; it is both the poison and the remedy. The consumer society makes all objects available to everyone and in this way deactivates mimetic rivalry, deferring violent conflicts. But it is only a temporary remedy. In the words of Girard, "It is always necessary to find new toys."3Following the path initiated by Dumouchel and Dupuy, with their criticism of the free market economy and their proposal for a new notion of scarcity, in his text The Empire of Value, André Orléan claims that money is at the origin of the market. My analysis alludes to a moment prior to that established by Orléan. He maintains that he does not contemplate the historical origin of money but instead uses the expression "the conceptual origin of money." In fact, when he defends the essential monetary base of the market, he refers to an already developed market system, that is, an economic system for which the operation is structured around the institution of the market.4 Mark R. Anspach also criticized the market system in his book À Charge de Revanche. This author proposes the transcending of the perverse logic of vengeance that defines both war and the market that transforms it into a positive reciprocity based on the gift. This constitutes a type of shift away from looking at the past (settling old accounts) to looking toward the future, embracing gratitude, which gives rise to the initial gesture of giving.5 This study analyzes a time prior to that examined by Orléan and Anspach. It was the moment of hominization, that is, mimicry, the subsequent violence that threatened the survival of human groups and, as we will seek to explain, the market as an institution that has accompanied humankind since its conformation as a species... (shrink)

The book focuses on two pillars of China's economic success: industrial enterprises and the national system of innovation. The first part investigates the nature and evolution of productive enterprises, concentrating on the rounds of transformation of their ownership structure. The second part analyses the structure of China's national innovation systems. The analysis is based on a thorough study of statistical data provided by the China Statistical Yearbook, the World Bank and other sources. Alberto Gabriele emphasizes two key points, which constitute (...) a partly novel interpretation of two aspects of China's unique development. The first point is the crucial role of public ownership of the country's core means of production, in the framework of a harmonious market where different types of property coexist. China, the author argues, gradually abandoned old-fashioned administrative command tools and is relying more and more on indirect and value-based forms of strategic control of productive assets. The second point is China's strategic emphasis on technological progress and innovation, accompanied by an effort to develop national capacity and reduce its dependence on other countries. China's drive to become a first-class technological power revolves around the enhancement of its national innovation system, the author says. Big private high-tech companies play a crucial role; however, the main engines of progress are state-controlled enterprises, universities and research centres. (shrink)

Along with political, economic, ethical, rehabilitative and military dimensions, psychopathological sequelae of war and terrorism also deserve our attention. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre ( W.T.C.) in 2001 and the Gulf War of 1990-91 gave rise to a number of psychiatric disturbances in the population, both adult and children, mainly in the form of Post-traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). Nearly 75,000 people suffered psychological problems in South Manhattan alone due to that one terrorist attack on the WTC (...) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. In Gulf War I, more that 1,00,000 US veterans reported a number of health problems on returning from war, whose claims the concerned government has denied in more than 90% cases. Extensive and comprehensive neurological damage to the brain of Gulf War I veterans has been reported by one study, as has damage to the basal ganglia in another, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in a third, possibly due to genetic mutations induced by exposure to biological and chemical agents, fumes from burning oil wells, landfills, mustard or other nerve gases. The recent Gulf War will no doubt give rise its own crop of PTSD and related disorders. In a cost-benefit analysis of the post Gulf War II scenario, the psychopathological effects of war and terrorism should become part of the social audit any civilized society engages in. Enlightened public opinion must become aware of the wider ramifications of war and terrorism so that appropriate action plans can be worked out. (shrink)

There may not be many points of consensus over what best promotes economic development, but here is one that has formed over the past decade: the institutional context matters a lot. This represents the single greatest shift in economic thinking about development since World War II, for there once was an almost equally clear consensus that institutions..

The article is devoted to I. Kant's views on the problem of war and peace and the possibility of achieving "perpetual peace" on the basis of the pamphlet "To Eternal Peace" and some other late works of the thinker. In particular, attention is paid to the historical background of the appearance of the work as a certain completion of moral philosophy and philosophy of law in the context of developing one's own project of "eternal peace" taking into account the solution (...) of specific problems of foreign policy at the end of the 18th century. The article examines a kind of Kantian "formula of peace", which claims universal significance. It is laid out in the preliminary and especially in the definitive articles of the imaginary contract. It is argued that it is based on three main principles: republicanism, federalism and the presence of a cosmopolitan citizenship limited to hospitality. These principles are complemented by the so-called "guarantees" of "perpetual peace": the progress of law and the spirit of international trade. The article analyzes apologetic and critical responses to Kant's work and its subsequent interpretations in European philosophy and political thought. In particular, special attention is paid to the interpretation of his work as a "pacifist manifesto". Based on this, it was argued that Kant was one of the founders of secular pacifism. The article reasonably refutes such a position on the basis of its anachronism and inconsistency with the views of Kant himself, who considered "eternal peace" only as a higher normative ideal of foreign policy. The influence of Kantian ideas on the formation of modern philosophy of international relations, in particular the theory of democratic peace (DPT), is indicated. It is indicated that the three main principles of Kant's formula of "eternal peace" found their embodiment in the postulates of this theory. At the same time, it is noted that the practice of implementing DPT in US foreign policy has not always had positive consequences. In this regard, the problem of its application to the analysis of the causes and course of the Russian-Ukrainian war is analyzed. There are different positions on this matter, but based on the latest publications and the real course of events. It is concluded that the "militant" version of DPT can be useful for achieving our victory and a just, fair and worthy peace. (shrink)

United States military medical ethics evolved during its involvement in two recent wars, Gulf War I (1990–1991) and the War on Terror (2001–). Norms of conduct for military clinicians with regard to the treatment of prisoners of war and the administration of non-therapeutic bioactive agents to soldiers were set aside because of the sense of being in a ‘new kind of war’. Concurrently, the use of radioactive metal in weaponry and the ability to measure the health consequences of trade (...) embargos on vulnerable civilians occasioned new concerns about the health effects of war on soldiers, their offspring, and civilians living on battlefields. Civilian medical societies and medical ethicists fitfully engaged the evolving nature of the medical ethics issues and policy changes during these wars. Medical codes of professionalism have not been substantively updated and procedures for accountability for new kinds of abuses of medical ethics are not established. Looking to the future, medicine and medical ethics have not articulated a vision for an ongoing military-civilian dialogue to ensure that standards of medical ethics do not evolve simply in accord with military exigency. (shrink)

The city of Melitene in eastern Asia Minor/western Armenia presents a peculiar case in the study of Byzantine-Islamic commerce in the early Middle Ages, because, unlike Trebizond or Attaleia, its commerce was entirely based on land-route connections, and the available evidence does not identify it as a town deliberately designated as a commercial exchange point by the Byzantine authorities. My purpose is to find an answer to the question of how Byzantine- Islamic trade took place in a location on (...) the eastern land frontier where the coexistence of war and trade was a daily reality. The products and export items as well as the routes of the Melitene zone and its neighboring regions (Cappadocia, Pontos, Armenia) are examined in order to situate Melitene in a larger commercial context. I argue that Melitene prospered commercially in the middle of war zone for centuries and that its commercial fortunes began to improve especially by the beginning of the tenth century, reaching their climax in the eleventh century. (shrink)

This article analyses the evolution of shipping and trade between the United States and France from the end of the American War of Independence to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1783–1815). It argues that commercial relations followed their own, internal dynamic and had scarce connections to statist commercial policies. These relations were, however, deeply responsive to the international context and to warfare in particular. American shipping to France experienced an extraordinary boom after the outbreak of war between France (...) and Great Britain in 1793. The paper explores the nature of this trade and demonstrates that its full understanding requires a global approach to trade flows in the Atlantic World rather than the bilateral approaches which dominate contemporary as well as most historical analyses. A broader analysis must integrate merchant strategies and networks into the Atlantic history. The last part of the paper analyses the specific case of Bordeaux, the major French port for US shipping during the French Wars. (shrink)

The following paper brings together the history of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century and Hugo Grotius’s treatment of slavery, war, and trade in the De iure belli ac pacis. In this paper I focus on the practices of slave raids during the trade in the 1630s through the 1640s in Central and West Africa. The practice of slave raids was often described and categorized by both Africans and Europeans as war or acts of war. (...) I argue that given Grotius’s depictions of a solemn war, it is difficult to legally distinguish an intent to enslave in a raid from an act of war against an enemy nation. (shrink)

War and Nature is an important, cogent, and timely book about the double‐edged nature of technology. Edmund Russell, through meticulous research, establishes a key nexus between the increased use of chemicals in war and peace during several key decades of the twentieth century and the generalized backlash against technology and its unintended consequences that occurred beginning in the mid‐1960s. He clearly places pesticides, rodenticides, herbicides, and chemical warfare agents alongside atomic energy, electronics, massive water harnessing and diversion projects, and other (...) prime examples of America's romance with progress. Thus, he joins his work with a significant body of research examining the United States's headlong plunge to embrace technology, along with sometimes belated efforts to grapple with its effects.The idea of progress has always been a distinctive factor in American identity. However, the fascination with progress was perhaps never so intense, so unreserved, and so naive as in the fifty years from 1914 to the early 1960s. During these years, as Russell points out, the pace of change was accelerated by two world wars that spawned the growth of powerful government agencies as well as commercial companies whose new products benefited richly from government‐funded research. Wartime imperatives hastened development of “miracle chemicals” that preserved the health of American soldiers, as when DDT was widely employed in the Pacific theater of war to kill malaria‐bearing mosquitoes. The result was what President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as he left office, termed the “military‐industrial complex.”Russell uses well‐chosen examples from the archives of chemical manufacturers to illustrate how defense contractors supplying electronics, atomic expertise, and other forms of technological expertise useful in warfare softened their public images by touting beneficent peacetime applications of their products. “Better Living Through Chemistry” along with “Progress Is Our Most Important Product” and other slogans familiar to citizens of the 1950s appealed not just to America's love of convenience and gadgetry. They also appealed to a fundamental U.S. belief that “modern science” would solve age‐old problems, erase perennial blights, and free people to live on a higher plane than any previously experienced by humankind.However, because defoliants, flame‐throwers, poison gases, and other chemical weapons that aided the war effort almost always conjured up negative images in the public mind, manufacturers used analogies of “victory” in war to victory over man's environment to retain a reputable and lucrative place in peacetime society.Perhaps most striking are the parallels between chemicals and atomic energy during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s in the United States. Both chemicals and atomic energy proved their awesome power in hastening victory in World War II, and both needed softer images after the war ended. The promises of disease‐free fields and enormously increased crop yields appealed to the American public, just as did the hope of electricity “too cheap to meter” and nuclear medicine that might cure cancers.When chemicals began to poison birds, fish, and other species recognized as valuable and desirable to man, when fields lost their productivity, and when illnesses arose in certain occupations that could be linked to chemical exposure, the downsides of progress became evident. America recoiled and reevaluated. Russell weaves congressional testimony together with advertisements, popular cartoons, and other ephemera to bring to life this uniquely American story. He compels the reader to ask striking questions about a nation maturing and itself asking complex questions about one of its most cherished ideals.The final irony of Russell's book may lie in the fact that it was written before the World Trade Center attack on 11 September 2001 but published just afterward, in the midst of America's anthrax episodes in the fall of the same year. The world focus on chemical and biological warfare should now provide a whole set of additional readers for this valuable book. (shrink)

Although the knowledge of war and international conflict has definitely increased, we do not as yet have much insight into why and how wars come about, and especially how war as a certain and comparably rare form of conflict regulation is connected to conflict behavior at lower levels of intensity as military disputes and international conflict behavior in general. Theoretical progress in the study of war demands a significant effort at the level of basic research. It is imperative to spend (...) more energy at the rigorous deduction of testable propositions from general explanatory principles or mechanisms. For the success of such an endeavour it is essential to adopt both a dynamic and systems-theoretic perspective. This implies a vision of war as a certain and one of possible phases in the international political process, concurrently with other injuriousforms of interaction as serious disputes and low level conflict behavior, but also supportive behavior like trade and cooperation. Yet, if we are to analyze and understand the war phenomenon from this perspective, clearly more formalized approaches and techniques are imperative. (shrink)

SummaryThe aim of this article is to shed light on some elements of the context in which the Dutch translation of the British Merchant of 1728 was published. At first sight the translation appears to be a straightforward mercantile handbook. No additions are made to the English language original of 1721, other than a set of tables. Yet, precisely in this mercantile function lies a different political significance. The argument of this article, built up through contextual reconstruction and analysis of (...) a number of pamphlets, trade handbooks and periodicals, is that the Historie van den algemenen en bijzonderen koophandel van Groot Brittannien provided an instrument to its Dutch readers, presumably consisting to a large extent of merchants and politicians, for coming to grips with the reality of international commerce that had emerged following the War of the Spanish Succession. Understanding, and subsequently being able to react to, the recent history of British trade and Hanoverian commercial politics had by the 1720s become a key factor in the development of Dutch trade and of the new outlooks on international politics that were required to preserve the Republic. The article suggests that the publisher of the Dutch translation of the British Merchant, a Huguenot from Delft, along with other Dutch Huguenot publishers tended to translate and publish specific texts that paved the way for a commercial politics that combined allegiance to Britain and Austria with a vision of European trade that was of French origin and contrasted with British principles of foreign trade. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Causes of WarBertrand RussellRussell’s authorship of this anonymously published entry in An Encylopaedia of Pacifism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), pp. 12–13, has only just come to light, thanks to the recent sale at auction of a letter to him from Aldous Huxley. If this determination had been made earlier, the text would have featured in Papers 21. In acknowledging receipt of “Causes of War” on 14 December 1936, (...) Huxley, the volume’s editor, also wondered whether Russell would like to examine his subject “at greater length—say in 1,000 words” (internet print, ra3 1,850). The original editorial plan, to which Russell must have adhered, allocated a single page to each topic, which ranged alphabetically from “Armaments, Private Manufacture of”, to “Women in Modern War, Position of”. But as Huxley explained, such compression was “impossible” for some subjects. Russell evidently declined the offer (no reply is extant), for his published contribution amounted to 300 words only. It nevertheless lucidly distils a complex and contested issue. In the spirit of the publishing enterprise Russell had joined, “Causes of War” is also somewhat didactic. Yet there is little hint of either the psychological predispositions towards war he also regarded as crucial, or the absolute pacifist doctrines he had recently embraced and elaborated in Which Way to Peace? (1936). The latter ground, however, was well covered elsewhere, in entries on “Force” and “Non-Violence”, most explicitly, but also in those disparaging armed revolution, for example, or the use of sanctions to enforce international law.The two cross references at the end of Russell’s entry are probably not authorial. The text presented below is the only known version, from the cheap softcover edition of the Encyclopaedia (priced 6d ) published by Chatto & Windus under the auspices of the Peace Pledge Union—the British pacifist group of which both Huxley and Russell were sponsors, along with, in all likelihood, other of the work’s anonymous contributors. [End Page 83]CAUSES OF WARThe main causes of war are of three kinds (1) the pursuit of wealth, (2) the pursuit of glory, (3) the advocacy of a creed. Usually all three are combined in varying proportions, as, for example in the Book of Joshua. The economic motive has various forms:a. Occupation of fruitful territory—e.g. Whites and Indians in United States.b. Plunder—e.g. Romans in Asia Minor; Cortez and Pisarro.c. Trade—e.g. English and Dutch in seventeenth century.d. Markets and fields for investment—most modern imperialist wars.e. Raw materials—e.g. Japan in China, France and Germany as regards Lorraine.The notion of glory is usually dynastic or governmental—for example, the ancient Assyrians and Persians, and eighteenth-century wars so far as the Continent of Europe is concerned. But it can be made popular by propaganda, and always has been made so since the French Revolution.Creed wars may be religious or political; usually they are both. They almost always also have economic motives. The early Mohammedans, for example, had economic motives (a) and (b); the Protestants wished to secure church lands and revenues; and so on. The English Civil War combined religious and political motives in equal measure. The Albigensian crusade was, on the part of the instigators, more economic than political. The French revolutionary wars, the American Civil War, and the various civil wars since 1815, involved important politico-economic issues, and were all, in a greater or less degree, creed wars.The main causes predisposing to modern war are: first, the competition between States for markets and raw materials; secondly, the competition between classes as regards the distribution of the national wealth. These two causes are intertwined, because different governments stand for different economic systems. (See Economic Reform and Pacifism; Education and Peace.) [End Page 84]Bertrand RussellIntroduced by andrew g. bone Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. [email protected] © 2023 Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster University... (shrink)

Previous research (e.g., Horiuchi, Goldsmith, and Inoguchi, 2005) has shown some intriguing patterns of effects of several variables on international public opinion about US foreign policy. But results for the theoretically appealing effects of regime type and post-materialist values have been weak or inconsistent. This paper takes a closer look at the relationship between these two variables and international public opinion about US foreign policy. In particular, international reaction to the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) are examined using (...) two major multinational surveys. The conclusions of previous research are largely reinforced: neither regime type nor post-materialist values appears to robustly influence global opinion on these events. Rather, some central interests, including levels of trade with the US and NATO membership, and key socialized factors, including a Muslim population, experience with terrorism, and the exceptional experiences of two states (Israel, Albania) emerge as the most important factors in the models. There is also a consistent backlash effect of security cooperation with the US outside of NATO. A discussion of these preliminary results points to their theoretical implications and their significance for further investigation into the transnational dynamics of public opinion and foreign policy. (shrink)

Summary The article analyses the extensive and passionate responses that the American Civil War and the issues it raised elicited from John Stuart Mill. While it attempts to offer a brief but comprehensive overall account of Mill's influential involvement in debates on the Civil War both in Britain and in America, it focuses particularly on Mill's defence of racial equality for the American ?negroes? both during the war and in the course of debates on reconstruction after the war. Mill's concerted (...) efforts to contribute to the improvement of Anglo-American relations and to influence both British public opinion and how that opinion was viewed from America are also analysed. Detailed attention is paid to Mill's strong views on reconstruction, which have not received the attention they deserve. A number of Mill's views and ?crotchets? were tested in the debates on reconstruction, and, whenever he had to choose between conflicting principles, his uncompromising hatred of slavery and racial inequality took priority over any other considerations (even ones as important as educational qualifications for voters, and free trade). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 179 THE EARLY “IRON CURTAIN” Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4l6, Canada [email protected] Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xvii, 488. isbn 978-0-19-923150-8. £18.99 (hb); £12.99 (pb). In his famous Westminster College (...) address on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill Wred one of the opening salvos of the Cold War by proclaiming that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain” had been lowered across Europe. Patrick Wright’s intriguing and provocative book does not examine the phrase “iron curtain” in its popular Cold War context. Instead, he maintains that many characteristics of this metaphor, “including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the Second World War” (p. 18). Wright divides Iron Curtain into two primary chronological sections, the Wrst covering the period from 1914 to 1920. An iron curtain originally referred to the steel safety screen that descended in English theatres, beginning in the lateeighteenth century, to separate the audience from the often catastrophic Wres that broke out on the stage. The phrase entered the lexicon of international relations in January 1915 when British author and paciWst Violet Page (writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee) published an article lamenting that “War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain” (p. 80) had alienated European nations such as England and Germany sharing a common cultural heritage. But the barrier quickly moved east in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and “took the form not just of exaggerated political rhetoric, but of an economic blockade enforced by naval power” (p. 171), as the Allies sought to contain the infection of Bolshevism. Wright devotes most attention in this section to documenting the 1920 visit to Russia by the British delegation jointly sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which sought to penetrate the dense fog of Allied anti-Bolshevik propaganda and validate the delegation members’ own preconceived views about the nascent socialist utopia in Russia. British delegates witnessed images both of progress carefully stagemanaged by their hosts and of terrible economic dislocation and poverty caused by the Allied blockade and the civil war, which allowed the majority of them to return home to lavish praise on the Soviet experiment that would, in their minds, inevitably fulWl its potential once the Bolshevik government became stable. February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 180 Reviews 1 “The Future of Europe”, European AVairsz 1, no. 1 (April 1949): 3. The second section of Wright’s book examines Western reports of life behind the iron curtain between 1920 and 1939. Here, the author focuses heavily on the theatrical nature of Soviet attempts to create modern-day Potemkin villages that werez—zwith a limited number of exceptionsz—zaccepted as reality by an endless parade of left-wing visitors. A second British Trades Union Congress delegation in 1924, for example, received a dramatically embellished picture of Soviet economic progress that included a train journey past a long-abandoned factory belching smoke created by burning wet straw frantically provided by Russian peasants; the resulting report of the delegation “repeatedly collapsed into the most abject conformity with the Soviet view of reality” (p. 245). The most tragic examples of Western visitors’ blindness to the truth occurred during the 1930s famine deliberately induced by Stalin, and Wright exposes a wide cast of characters who adopted a blinkered view of conditions in the ussr. Among intellectuals, Wright documents the 1931 visit of George Bernard Shaw, who cavalierly dismissed reports of widespread food shortages while dining sumptuously in Moscow’s Hotel Metropole. Among journalists, Wright develops the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Timesz correspondent who knuckled under to demands of Soviet censors to produce sanitized accounts denying or ignoring the famine in order to protect his privileged place in that... (shrink)