Suchergebnisse

Part I. Duty -- Ascent -- Star power -- Call to duty -- Crusade -- Part II. An age of peril -- Scorpions in a bottle -- Confronting McCarthy -- Dark arts for a Cold War -- Asian dominoes -- A murder in Mississippi -- God, government and the middle way -- To the summit -- A formidable indifference -- Double cross at Suez -- Part III. Race, rockets and revolution -- The color line -- Ike's missile crisis -- Contending with Khrushchev -- Secret wars in the third world -- Shoot down -- Fighting to the finish -- A new generation

Publisher's description: Historians of the Cold War, argues William Hitchcock, have too often overlooked the part that European nations played in shaping the post-World War II international system. In particular, France, a country beset by economic difficulties and political instability in the aftermath of the war, has been given short shrift. With this book, Hitchcock restores France to the narrative of Cold War history and illuminates its central role in the reconstruction of Europe. Drawing on a wide array of evidence from French, American, and British archives, he shows that France constructed a coherent national strategy for domestic and international recovery and pursued that strategy with tenacity and effectiveness in the first postwar decade. This once-occupied nation played a vital part in the occupation and administration of Germany, framed the key institutions of the "new" Europe, helped forge the NATO alliance, and engineered an astonishing economic recovery. In the process, France successfully contested American leadership in Europe and used its position as a key Cold War ally to extract concessions from Washington on a wide range of economic and security issues

Surveying recent scholarship, this article argues that human rights have succeeded in our time because powerful states have called them into being and endowed them with substantial force. Rather than seeing human rights as an epiphenomenon of the global politics of the 1970s, this essay places human rights in a longer historical trajectory and gives special attention to the era of the 1940s. Now that human rights have become ensconced in our politics, the challenge has been to implement human rights protections. Some commentators worry that human rights "interventions" simply hide neo-imperial ambitions and agendas of regime change. This essay argues by contrast that this "responsibility to protect" emerged directly from the historical evolution of the human rights idea since 1945.

Surveying recent scholarship, this article argues that human rights have succeeded in their time, because powerful states have called them into being and endowed them with substantial force. Rather than seeing human rights as an epiphenomenon of the global politics of the 1970s, this article places human rights in a longer historical trajectory and gives special attention to the era of the 1940s. Now that human rights have become ensconced in the politics, the challenge has been to implement human rights protections. Some commentators worry that human rights interventions simply hide neo-imperial ambitions and agendas of regime change. This article argues by contrast that this responsibility to protect emerged directly from the historical evolution of the human rights idea since 1945. Adapted from the source document.

Three scholars offer separate responses to the article by Michael Creswell and Marc Trachtenberg. The responses include some common points, but they diverge sharply in other respects. The first two respondents generally agree with the conclusions reached by Creswell and Trachtenberg, but one of them believes that the article goes too far (in its contention that France's anxiety about the Soviet Union eclipsed its concerns about Germany), whereas the other argues that the article does not go far enough in showing how the United States adapted its policy to accommodate French leaders. The second respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have added anything new to the latest "revisionist" works on French-German relations in the first decade of Cold War. The third respondent, unlike the first two, rejects the main thrust of the article by Creswell and Trachtenberg and seeks to defend the traditional view that France was very reluctant to go along with U.S. and British policies on the German question. This respondent also questions whether Creswell and Trachtenberg have focused on the most appropriate sources of evidence.

This lively survey of the history of conflict between democracies reveals a remarkable—and tremendously important—finding: fully democratic nations have never made war on other democracies. Furthermore, historian Spencer R. Weart concludes in this thought-provoking book, they probably never will. Building his argument on some forty case studies ranging through history from ancient Athens to Renaissance Italy to modern America, the author analyzes for the first time every instance in which democracies or regimes like democracies have confronted each other with military force. Weart establishes a consistent set of definitions of democracy and other key terms, then draws on an array of international sources to demonstrate the absence of war among states of a particular democratic type. His survey also reveals the new and unexpected finding of a still broader zone of peace among oligarchic republics, even though there are more of such minority-controlled governments than democracies in history. In addition, Weart discovers that peaceful leagues and confederations—the converse of war—endure only when member states are democracies or oligarchies. With the help of related findings in political science, anthropology, and social psychology, the author explores how the political culture of democratic leaders prevents them from warring against others who are recognized as fellow democrats and how certain beliefs and behaviors lead to peace or war. Weart identifies danger points for democracies, and he offers crucial, practical information to help safeguard peace in the future