Gaddis: Diplomacy

"A first step toward invigorating the field of American diplomatic history, then, might be to get beyond the tendency to equate synthesis with reductionism. The purpose of a synthesis, after all, is not to exclude but rather to account for complexity." (410)

A second area in which American diplomatic history lacks methodological sophistication has to do with what is, in a way, the opposite of reductionism: it is the tendency to construct a complex and multifaceted series of events, full of causes intersecting and individuals interacting, but then apply it an indiscriminate way. It is what one might call the "crop-duster" approach to history." (410)

"Weakens her analysis by concluding that the resulting policy - which she calls 'liberal-developmentalism' - allowed the United States to dominate those coutnries subjected to it in such a way as to constrict their political, economic, and cultural autonomy." One must be sensitive to its application, recognizing the virtual certainty that consequences will vary from place to place and from time to time.

"Somehow Americans affect what happens to other nations and peoples, but other nations and people seldom affect what happens to Americans."

Does the existence of acknowledged disparities in political, economic, or military power in fact cause influence to flow only from areas of strength to those of weakness? - A comparative study of empires.

These trends make all the more conspicuous, then, the tendency of American diplomatic historians to assume the unidirectional influence when they write about Latin America." Move away from dependency theory where political, economic, and social conditions in the Third World can only be understood within the framework of an international system dominated by mature capitalist economies.

A third problem that causes American diplomatic history to suffer from methodological impoverishment is cultural and temporal parochialsim: we assume the experience of the United States in time and space is unique and therefore defining - experiences of other nations at other times and in other parts of the world shed little useful light upon our own.

Attention to how policymakers think about space and time might help in dealing with such issues. Perceptions after all are to a large part shaped by the spatial and temporal context within which individuals and nations exist. Overcoming spatial and temporal parochialism requires being willing to undertake comparative studies. historians are not particularly receptive to this approach and tend to assume that the comparativist cannot know as much about a particular subject as the specialist.

The United States is and always has been a member of the great power system. America's contribution to international stability, American perceptions of fear, look at the domino theory.

For those who will seek out its patterns, history does have a certain - although limited - predictive utility. it is not like mathematics or chemistry, where the repeated combination of variables in the same amounts and under the same conditions will always produce the same result. It certainly is not, in and of itself, a gudie to the future: those who have sought to use history in this way - by assuming that the future will replicate the past - can count on only two certainties, which are that it will not and they will be surprised as a consequence.

History like a rear-view mirror. History can also make one aware of those long-term patterns that tend to hold up across time and space: that great powers do rise and fall; that empires do overextend; there is a relationship between solvency and secuirty; individuals not automatons; events complex.

Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics"

Does not the grammatical organism depend constantly on the external forces of linguistic change? Whatever the merits of understanding the external environment, to say language cannot be studied from the inside is wrong. Changes in languages can be stuided simply by looking at the relation of one word with the other words inside a system. External linguistics adds detail to detail without being caught in the vice of a system. In internal linguistics, the picture differs dramatically as language is understood as a system that has its own arrangements, like a chess game where the number of pieces rather than what the pieces are made of is what is relevant.

SUBJECT MATTER AND SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS; ITS RELATIONS WITH OTHER SCIENCES:

Linguistics compromises all manifestations of human speech regardless of time or place. Linguistics seek to describe and trace the history of all observable languages which amounts to tracing the history of families of languages and reconstructing as far as possible the mother tongue of each. It should also try to understand universal and permanent forces at work in all languages and deduce general laws to which all historic phenomena can be reduced.

As opposed to history, language is merely a document. Anthropology only studies man as a species: language is a social fact.

Other sciences work with objects given in advance and that can be considered from different viewpoints, but linguistics differs in it is the viewpoint that creates the object, that the way the question is considered alters the outcome of any inquiry. Language is not to be confused with human speech, although the latter is a definite part of the former. Language is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. It is also a convention and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter. Language gives a unity to the study of social phenomena that others fail.

Among individuals linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up where all will reproduce the same signs united with the same concepts. How does this come about? In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating what is social from what is individual and what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental. Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual and never requires premeditation, and reflection enters only for the purpose of classification.

An individual act is willful and intellectual and distinguishing between combinations by which a speaker uses language to express thought and the psychological mechanism permitting him exteriorize those combinations.

Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. It can be localized in the limited segment of the speaking-circuit where an auditory image is associated with a concept. The social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it himself, exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community; an individual only acquires it through sustained assimilation. Language is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images and the associations which bear the stamp of collective approval are realities that have their seat in the brain.

Language is a unique social institution. As a system of signs that expresses ideas, it is the most important of all others. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable as a part of social psychology and of general psychology. Semiology, the study of signs, illuminates what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.

IMMUTABILITY AND MUTABILITY OF THE SIGN:

No human agency in the production of a sign and what it represents. Language provides the best sign that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated rather than a rule to which all freely consent. No society knows any language other than that which was passed down to it by its ancestors. Nothing is explained by saying that language is something inherited and leaving it at that. Can not existing and inherited laws be modified from one moment to the next? The bigger question is how are other social institutions transmitted? We must first determine the greater or lesser amounts of freedom that the other institutions enjoy and then to discover why, in a given category, the forces of tradition carry more weight than those of free action. And why does history dominate the transmission of language?

Succeeding generations are fused with their ancestors. Speakers are also unconscious of the laws of language, and being unconscious, cannot exert agency to alter them, if they even wanted to them.

The arbitrary nature of a sign protects it from interference as people would find no point in arguing over which word works best for a concept. The sheer volume of signs in any language system also renders it immune to rapid change. A system can be grasped only through reflection as we are ignorant of it in our daily use. Imposing change from above will epically fail. Of all social institutions, language is the least amenable to initiative. The weight of collective inertia coupled with time renders all choice subject to arbitrary tradition.

Time wields another influence apparently contradictory to the first in explaining the rapid change of linguistic signs. A sign is proposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself, but what predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance; disregard for the past is only relative. The principle of change is based on the principle of continuity. What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance. Unlike language, other human instituions are all based in varying degrees on the natural relations of things and all have of necessity adapted the means employed to the ends pursued. Language is limited by nothing in the choice of means, for apparently nothing would prevent the associating of any ideas whatsoever with just any sequence of sounds.

As it is a product of both the social force and time, no one can change anything about it, and on the other hand, the arbitrariness of its signs theoretically entaisl the freedom of establishing just any relationship between phonetic substance and ideas. Each of the two elements united in a sign maintains its own life to a degree unknown elsewhere: language evolves under the influence of all the forces which can affect either sounds or meanings.

Time changes all things. Language is a whole set of linguistic habits permitting an individual to understand be understood. This definition still leaves language outside its social context: the realization of language needs a community of speakers. Langugage never exists apart from a social fact. The linguistic sign is arbitrary for language as defined would therefore seem to be a system which is free and can be organized at will. It is not a purely logical basis that group psychology operates: one must consider everything that deflects reason in actual contacts between individuals. Time combined with social force is what prevents language from being altered.

STATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY LINGUISTICS:

Very few linguists suspect that the intervention of the factor of time creates difficulties peculiar to linguistics. Linguists, like economists, are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders, such as labor and wages. Language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms. A value, provided it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations as in economics, can to some extent be traced in time if we remember that it depends at each moment upon a system of coexisting values. Its link with things gives it, perforce, a natural basis, and judgments we base on such values are therefore never arbitrary; variability is limited. Natural data, of course, has no place in linguistics.

INNER DUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS:

Only by concentrating on one state can the linguist hope to comprehend change. The opposition between diachronic and synchronic studies of languages is absolute and allows no compromise. Everything diachronic in language is so only by virtue of speaking for it is in speaking that the germ of all change is found. It is launched by a certain number of individuals before it is accepted by general use. We are only aware of them until the community of speakers adopts their modifications as a whole. The history of any innovation there are always two distinct moments: where something sprang up in individual usage and when it became a fact of language, outwardly identical but adopted by the community. One looking synchronically at Old French cares not for tracing the history of a language from the thirteenth to the twelfth century. He works with similar facts in Bantu, Greek, or present day French. If each idiom is a closed system, then all idioms embody certain fized principles that the linguist meets again and again in passing from one to another. Historical study is no different for whether the linguist examines a definite period in the history of French or any language, everywhere he works with similar facts which he only need compare in order to establish the general truths of the diachronic class.

Thus, synchronic linguistics is concerned with the logical and psychological relations that bind together coexisting terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers whereas diachronic linguistics will study relations that bind together successive terms not percieved by the collective mind but substituted for each other without forming a system,

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A CONCEPTUAL VIEWPOINT:

A word's value is its property of standing for an idea, but value differs from signification. Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. Outside of langue, all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle: a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing which the value is to be determined and similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value s to be determined. A word can be exchanged for a dissimialar thing, an idea, while also being compared to something of a similar nature, a word. Value is not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be exchanged for a given concept: its content is really only fixed by the concurrence of everything that exists outside of it. It is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different.

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A MATERIAL VIEWPOINT:

The important thing is not how a word sounds, but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish between a word from all others. Every language forms its words on the basis of a system of sonorous elements, each element being a clearly delimited unit and one of a number of fixed ones. Phonics are characterized not by their own positive quality, but by the fact that they are distinct.

THE SIGN CONSIDERED IN ITS TOTALITY:

In language there are only differences. A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set u, but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas, but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign. Maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic instittution.

The alteration of a word occasions a conceptual change and it is obvious that the sum of the ideas distinguished corresponds in principle to the sum of the distinctive signs. When two words are confused through phonetic alteration, the ideas that they express will also tend to become confused if only they have something in common. Comparing signs toward one another, we no longer speak of difference, the expression would not be fitting for it applies only to comparing two sound-images. Difference makes character just as it makes value and the unit.

SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS:

In a language-state, everything is based on relations, but how do they function? Relations and differences between linguistic terms fall into two distinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values. The opposition between the two classes gives a better understanding of the nature of each class. In discourse, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. A word acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both. Outside of discourse, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those having elements in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations.

Levi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth

Anthropologists no longer study primitive religion, inviting amateurs to come into the mix. Crude psychological theories from Durkheim and others misapplied by their successors. Reducing psychological drives resulted in hampering of studies.

Nothing is more misunderstood than myths. Some claim human societies merely express through their mythology fundamental feelings common to the whole of humanity or attempt to provide an explanation for them which they otherwise fail to understand. Psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have have shifted the issue away from natural and cosmological toward sociological and psychological explanations: an evil grandmother in myth means an evil grandmother in society and the myth reflects ths social structure and social relations, or, perhaps an outlet for repressed feelings.

If the content of myth is contingent, then how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? Ancients tried to link the combination of sounds associated with meanings to a reason. It is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides significant data.

Myth is language for to be known it must be told. It is a part of human speech. In order to preserve its specifity, we must be able to show that it is both the same thing as language and also different from it. Myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place a long time ago, but the pattern is timeless: explaining the present and the past as well as the future.

Whatever our ignorance of the language or culture of a people, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world for its substance does not lie in its style, its music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at taking off from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.

Technique entails breaking down each myth indivudally, placing its story into short sentances, and cataloguing them. The problem with previous tudies has been the quest for the true version or an earlier one. If myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take them all into account.

The function of repetition is to render the structure of the myth apparent. For we have seen that the synchronic-diachronic structure of the myth permits us to organize it into columns to be read synchronically. The structure of a myth comes to the surface through repetition. If the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction, an infinite amount of myths will be produced. The thought in myth is as rigorous as that of science, the difference lying not in the quality of the intellectual process but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.

Scribbled Notes

Ulrich: An improbable assembly of objects from different times, places, and sensibilities, as eclectic as a colonial revival house museum or a New England bed-and-break. Not meant to represent a moment in time. A memorial to the people who saved things.

How do ordinary people create meaning out of the world? Words cannot convey what really like, cannot recapture everything.

Introduction: History more than crimes, follies, and misdeeds: physical description of daily life. A democratic education? Hidden hand of history. Conventional narrative freezes out some in favor of another.

Idealizing women in the late nineteenth century justifies the new economic order. Distorted history. The silent work of ordinary people in the pat is like electricity, which, though unseen, goes through and masters thr world, holding all atoms to their places, and quickening even the life of our bodies. Electricity becomes historic only in a storm., though only by tunder. The historian must connect electricity to thunder. Objects nineteenth century Americans collected can help u do that by calling attention to the unseen technologies, interconnections, and contradictions that lie beneath events.

Undersrtanding what people collected reveals why they might have cared. No colonial dame ever wore a dress like hers. Different but a desire to associate with certain virtues. Vision of colonial America saturated in sentiment and encrusted with contradiciton, but they preserved artifacts and documents, rescued old buildings, aroused public interest for historical institutions, revived dying arts, and stimulated new forms of scholarship, contributions too important to be forgotten and question too much with us to be left unchallenged.

Sheep and textile trade as important as guns for taking over America. Artifacts tell us mot when they are imbedded in the rich texture of local history. As a work of pastoral embroidery, the chimmneypiece is a reminder that idealizations of rural life predated the colonial revival. Deeper meaning related to poor kids in spining schools

Basket shifts attention away from the violence of late seventeenth century to our own generation’s hopes for multiculturalism.

Relying heavily on written textual sources limits our capacity to represent reality. All five senses in their intellectual affective, expressive, and communicative practices, with each providing different kinds of information with people creare unique and interchangeable forms in each of these sensorial domains. Objects ae also active agents in the production of history: crowns, scepters, etc make a monarch,

Lets people unable to write have a voice. Psyhcobabble, history would look different if you took objects seriously. The use of material culture for the writing of history entails the use of both theoretical or conceptual work that addresses the relation between people and things in the abstract, that focuses on those relations under particular forms of economy and polity. It also requires careful reflection on the relation of texts and things, how people have represented their object worlds in writing or used textual invocations of objects. In this domain, it is literary scholars who provide the greatest assistance.

Wartime austerity kind of caused it, but lets infer this as well:
Can’t establish with certainty, but it is likely that many objects reflect the convictions of their makers.
“Artisans would not, however, have made these goods if no one wanted to buy them. But who would want such things? Although they were far less luxurious than furnishings and decorative items from the late Old Regime or the Directory, the purchase of such durable and encumbering, yet fragile, items in the middle of revolutionary upheaval suggests both means and a very powerful commitment to republican principles. . . . Consumers could have simply continued using their pre-Revolutionary domestic goods. It would appear, therefore, on the basis of the evidence of material culture that at least some French citizens took the politicization of everyday life further than did those writing law and political tracts, making their domestic interiors stylistically compatible with the political moment in which they were participating.

So what?

paper proposal

In writing my undergraduate thesis, nothing proved more vexing than the lack of attention most senators have attracted from historians examining the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Given the number of orations he delivered on behalf of the Cubans before the war, no omission appears more glaring to a researcher employing the Congressional Record than William E. Mason’s. A freshly elected Republican from Illinois, Mason attracted national attention for his eloquent pleas for a crusade against Spanish barbarity and tyranny in 1897. Unlike the chorus of populist voices also clamoring for intervention, he had no partisan interest in embarrassing the administration, indeed, Mason, according to a colleague, was an old friend of President McKinley’s from their time in Congress together who exploited that connection for patronage appointments. Yet Mason jeopardized that relationship, and his standing inside the Republican Party, with his Cuban position as well as votes on trusts, agrarian interests, and opposition to colonial rule in the Philippines. Recent work by several political scientists investigating Senate have sourced the lack of party cohesion prior to 1913 as the product of high turnover in state legislatures in the six year periods between elections: senators seeking to retain office needed to anticipate how factions would form in those parochial bodies. Other work has pointed to the deadlock between parties in the 1890s as the moment when party discipline began assuming its present form. I will not contend Mason had any real impact on the war nor argue that he held any sway in Washington. I do hope a preliminary examination of the Senator’s papers, kept at the Lincoln Presidential Library, alongside the local political context supplied by the Chicago Tribune, and the day-to-day political beat-writing Washington Post and Star, will aid me in discovering what pressures, if any, influenced Mason’s actions. Such a project may prove useful for future studies examining voting behavior in the late nineteenth century as well as enrich our understanding of the belligerent strand of political opinion in the 1890s.
Few presidents were so dissimilar in executive style and personality than Grover Cleveland and his successor. Much of the literature on Cleveland’s tenure, especially his second term, has praised him for his “honesty” and “courage” for opposing agrarian radicals in his party on grounds of principle rather than political expediency. There is much in Cleveland’s correspondence and papers to validate this assessment, but few have connected the rise of populism in the Democratic ranks to a series of politically maladroit actions by Cleveland in 1893-1894. By contrast, President McKinley is frequently damned as “weak” and “indecisive” because he deferred to a party opinion contrary to his own on many occasions, which permitted him greater control over the outcome of a policy. I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying, but I believe an examination of the means by which Cleveland and McKinley sought to control the nation’s diplomacy with Spain over Cuba could yield a more nuanced understanding of the powers of the nineteenth century executive, the conditions upon which he could go against Congress and his party, and the degree, or lack thereof, to which the character or temperament of the executive impacts the course of events. To make this project manageable, I would focus on the conditions surrounding two overlooked resolutions in Congress surrounding the Cuban question and examine how Cleveland and McKinley responded to attempts by congressmen to subvert their autonomy in diplomatic negotiations with Spain in April 1896 and May 1897 respectively. Presidential papers, the major Washington newspapers, State Department documents, and the Congressional Record should provide a good start for this project.

Psychoanalytic Perspective Notes

Pioneered by Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic perspective is unique in that it constructs its perspective independent of all the other traditions in the social science. Building on his experience as an experimental biologist, Freud employs dominant evolutionary themes, including his strongest claim that people are organisms and that the physical human body is the first point of contact with reality and remains in constant dialogue with it. All other understandings of social structures and phenomena are thus incomplete.

Educated in gymansium, Freud was also inspired by the German humanist tradition and employs linguistics, art, poetry, and literature in his work, as well as utilitarian models from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that human behavior is driven by a primal psyche driven around the pleasure principle. In this sense, he breaks with Marx and other materialists in asserting that human ideologies are not completely rooted in economic conditions but are products of tradition and the past as displayed in the replication of the superego from parent to child. But to understand that past, as well as human experience, social structures, language, a researcher must examine how the construction of the psyshce is itself a product of historical and social functions.

Society, for Freud, is the human psyche, which translate better as the soul or mind. The individual may be the methodological unit of analysis, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to generate an understanding of that individual's soul's construction, which requires a dialogue with the dominant cultural and economic structures of the period. External reality is only made known to us through subjective reality, which is something of another order that cannot be merely understood as the product of external or social reality.

Culture and society are thus composed of institutionalized compromise formations, collective defense mechanisms, shared projections and sublimations that both express and manage the necessary and universal conflicts of human life, especially in its unconscious dimensions.

Human nature, conflict, sturggle, etc are not just the infinite desires and finite resources explained by utilitarians, but the product of repressed unconscious with further implications of persistence of all stages of life in psychic reality, including childhood and of intrapsychic conflict.

All of our social behavior is contingent upon a heretofore unacknowledged social reality. Consciousness is a sense organ, preconsciousness is comprised of an attention processor, memory banks, and censor. The unconscious mind is not directly accessible, knows not time, does not know the world no, the contents of which are universal biological drives plus repressed memories and voices.

Transference is the process through which we are able to jump from one system to the next: your capacity to recall on command the capital of certain states or countries is the result of lessening any extneral pressures blocking the way as well as any internal stumbling blocks. The unconscious is inaccessible to the conscious mind because of repression barriers which are the product of an internal conflict forcing a stream of psyhic energy to block our capacity to recall or summon certain impulses or memories. To make the unconscious conscious requires a method of overcoming those barriers.

Unconscious thinking has peculiar characteristics and properties: it is filled with energy from biological instincts for which neither logic nor negation apply. The psychoanalytic project is one through which we seek to build a model of the mind to explain and organize empirical observations.

Freud's earliest model had the ego, superego, and id as a system of places but he scrapped it due to overlapping aspects of unconsciousness in the ego and superego. Repression is the quantom of psyhic energy split off and used to put up a barrier between it and consciousness.

We can not understand the psyche except through inferring its structure from its effects. This is no different than social life for we infer without knowing personalities, backgrounds, etc based on behavior. It is like understanding how a camera works by only glancing at the lens.

Free association is critical for analysis as only when one relaxes the guards of the gates of reason and allow thoughts to arise pell mell can we hope to penetrate events suppressed into the unconscious. This may lead to chaos, but nothing that is said is purely random. Symptoms of socially degenerate behavior have a meaning in terms of an individual's life as well as typical conditions.

How does one go from free association to theory? Well, the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, jokes, and slips of tongue are meaningful ways of viewing the unconscious. We know our interpretation is correct when the person in therapy gets better and the free association and other data points provide sources of evidence.

Clinical data forms the basis of findings, but for judgments of society as a whole we can turn to the aforementioned dreams, jokes, and slips of tongue that are messages from the unconscious and taken together form the collective unconsciousness of a whole set of people.

And what is in that unconscious? Well, what it is to be a living creature, for starters, as drives are really just psychological expressions of instincts. This is a Hobbesian world view through which repression is necessary for society to function. The ego serves to negotiate between internal reality and the demands from external agencies. Social and cultural traditions are internalized super-egos passed down from an older set of super-egos.

Critics are many. The easy one is reduction of human behavior to sexual and bilogical drives. Another is that this is little more than crude utilitarianism and historians levy the same critiques fired at that field as reasoning by analogy supersedes knowing through a close examination of data. Another tautlogical fallacy is pretty apparent: you don't believe us, you're just repressed. The projective theory of culture also allows the observer too much power in defining the outside culture in his own terms. Also, tied to a worldview that was very early 20th century Jewish Vienna.

The reproduction of mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender

Mothering is a universal and enduring element of the sexual division of labor and often taken for granted, which means issues relating to the relationship between mothering and family structure, relations between sexes, ideology about women, and the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality inside and outside of the family are rarely analyzed.

The actual physical and biological requirements of childbearing have decreased but the role of mother has gained psychological and ideological significance in determining women's lives. In the past, childbirth coincided with the household as a unit of production. But with the development of capitalism, home and family became separate things. Families became personal things, rather than productive roles in society. Women now took care of children and men. Women's mothering became less entwined with other ongoing work, it also became more isolated and exclusive. Fewer people live in contemporary homes and children leave earlier.

Women's emotional role in the fmaily and their psychological mothering grew just as their economic and biological role decreased. Mothering today is central for women's lives and social definition. Mothering is a central and constituting element in the social organization and reproducction of gender. Contemporary reproduction of mothering occurs through social strucutrally induced psychological processes, rather than biology or intentional role-training. Women's mothering reproducres itself cycically: daughters and sons are brought up in such a way to produce the division of psychological capacities which leads them to reproduce this sexual and familial division of labor.

The sex-gender system is like any society's dominant mode of production, a fundamental determining and constituting element of that society, socially constructed, subject to historical change and development, and organized in such a way that it is systematically reproduced.

The Psychodynamics of the Family:

An oedipally produced ideology and psychology that propels men into the nonfamilial competitive work world places structrual strains on marriage and family life. Families no longer serve productive, educative, religious, or hospitality functions as only psychological and personal functions bind it together. Boys have a straightforward oedipal relationship, girls are more complicated.

Men provide women with an opportunity to break with the mother, for this and other reasons, men are idealized, therefore men's limitations are denied as long as she feels loved. Due to the social organization of parenting, men operate on two levels in women's psyche. On one level they are emotionally seconadary and exclusively loved - are not primary love objects like mothers. Onanother, they are idealized and experienced as needed, but are unable either to express their own emotional needs or respond to those of women.

For women in love, they are economically dependent, thus it is a survival mechanism. Because men are all about the world, women need them. Women will romanticize economic decisions. Women also are elss dependent upon men for their emotional well-being and have a richer, ongoing inner world to fall back upon, and the men in their lives do not represent the insensity and exclusivity that women represent to men. Developmentally, therefore, men do not become as emotionally important to women as women do to men. Because women care for children, it has different meanings.

Women friendship stuff is the product of their relationship with men being unable to fulfill emotional needs. Only having a child with a man recreates the system for a woman. Women want to be loved or largely self-sufficient, they also want to love someone as an extension of themselves.

Women's mothering as a feature of social structure requires an explanation in terms of social structure. Behaviorialist methodologies are insufficient empircally for imparting these differences. Ongoing social structures include the means for their own reproduction - in the regularized reptition of social processes, in the perpetuation of conditions which require members' participation, in the genesis of legitimating ideologies and institutions, and in the psychological as well as physical reprorduction of people to perform necessary roles.

Psychoanalytic theory provides us with a theory of social reproduction that explains major features of personality development and the development of psychic structure, and the differential development of gender personality in particular. Personality results from and consists in the ways a child appropriates, internalizes, and organizes early experiecnes in their family - from the fantasies they have, the defenses they use, the ways they channel and redirect drives in their object-relational context. A person subsequently imposes this intrapsyhic structure, and the fantasies, defenses, and relational modes and preoccupations which go with it, onto external social situations. This reexternalization is a major constituting feature of sical and interpersonal situations themselves.

The War Politburo: North Vietnam's Diplomatic and Poltical Road to the Tet Offensive

Why and how the North Vietnamese settled on the Tet Offensive perplexes historians to this day. U.S. policy setbacks in Vietnam and within the country provided the North Vietnamese an opportunity to undertake a major offensive aimed at a decisive victory to drive the United States out of the war, the current historiography goes. Developments inside North Vietnam and its political leadership become largely overlooked: ideological divisions and personal rivalries permeated Hanoi. Some wanted to develop a socialist state peacefully while others refused to let the chance pass to overrun the South with revolution, the former finding solace with the Soviets while the latter received encouragement from the Chinese.

1955-1959: War or Peace, Nation Building and Revolution in the Cold War:

After the French withdrew in 1954, the North Vietnamese undertook a disastrous set of socialist land reforms in the midst of reconstruction following the colonial war. The split between the Soviets and Chinese complicated North Vietnamese reconstruction, socialist development, and the path toward reunification. Given the failures of collectivization and industrialization projects, those calling for a war with the South gained greater clout. As the rift between the USSR and China deepened and resistance to the insurgency in the South intensified, the rifts inside the Politburo became more pronounced. The internal failures of revolution had not yielded absolute power to the South-firsters.

1960 - 1963: War or Bigger War?: Power Hierarchy in the DRV: Victorious "Apparatchiks":

The Communist Party rearranged itself in 1960 so that prowar leaders gained ascendancy and ensured that the government remain in control of the army. In response to the weakening of the Soviet detente posture in the international communist world and added American military presence in the South, the North Vietnamese began abandoning the "Self-Defense" clauses of previous decisions, and actively undertook military efforts in the South. Haphazard economic development in the North coupled with a military stalemate in the South and the necessity to remain on the goodside of both Russia and China presented the North Vietnamese with a quandry in the early 1960s.

The assassinations of Diem and J.F.K. in 1963 brought a new set of choices: negotiate in the South from advances made or go for an all out victory; the North Vietnamese settled for the latter as the state mobilized the entire country for an all-out war, revealing a tilt to the Chinese. The government proceeded to stamp out resistance at home and inside the government to the war effort.

1964-1977: Talking or Fighting?

The go for broke strategy brought a decrease in Soviet aid and a rise in American intervention without achieving anything fundamental militarily. Massing large amount of troops in unit offensives played into the American military superiority. Some began arguing for peace with the United States while others demanded a new military strategy. As the Soviets began sending more aid once America committed itself to the war, pro-Soviet moderates found a greater voice, especially as American bombings damaged development. Rather than negotiate, the hardliners believed a decisive attack launched in an election year could cripple the United States: any offensive would yield a stronger negotiating plank. Thus, the military leaders adopted a massive attack plan focusing on urban centers. A purge of arrests in the North that put many potential critics in jail or worse in 1967 was aimed to appease the Chinese as much as deter the Soviets.

The escalation of the American effort in South Vietnam in the mid 1960s made the war a focal point on the war stage and neither China nor the Soviet Union could be indifferent to it. The split between Russia and China hurt the North Vietnamese War Effort as their desire to appease both for supplies was not always fruitful. Seeking a big offesensive meant greater reliance on the Soviet Union for aid and perhaps a Soviet solution, which angered the Chinese.

Conclusion:

The Tet Offensive succeeded in shocking opinion in the United States, but not in South Vietnam.

The Foreign Policy of the Calorie

In the first half of the twentieth century, the arithmetic of standards of living, revenues, education, and population gained significance in assessments of the relative status of states and empires. As doctrines of development first began to inform the practice of international relations, numerical indicators prepared the way, jumping linguistic boundaries and displacing local knowledge and native informants.

Historians and theorists of foreign relations often associate number with explanatory rigor: realist and revisionist historiographies grew to recognize quantifiable material factors as constituents of international reality exercising an exogenous influence on state behavior no matter what states seek, believe, or construct. Scholars have employed measuarability to distinguish between established analytic methods and cultural or "constructivist" approaches bidding for scholarly credibility. This so-called "hard data" comes laden with presuppositions that were cultural but not superficial.

In the early 20th century, food lost its subjective, cultural character and evolved into a material instrument of statecraft. To do so, it had to be quantifiable, but its numerical index also had to be furnished with a suitable context of goals, analogies, and claims. The calorie is not a neutral, obejective measure of the contents of a dinner plate: its purpose was to render food and eating habits of populations politically legible: a tool for facilitating a widening of the state's supervision of the welfare and conduct of whole populations that has been referred to in different contexts as state-builing, modernism, or regulating the social.

Americans are the first to concieve of a "food problem" amenable to scientific and political intervention and to use food as an instrument of power. Aside from abetting efficiency seekers, the calorie could be used to make precise comparisons between the diets of different classes and nations: assumptions that food was uniform and comparable between nations and time periods and that the state had the obligation to meet the dietary needs of a nation also emerged.

Numerical expression fostered an altered worldview both more definite about solutions to complex problems and more attuned to indicators of rising and falling fortunes, especially among nations: moral and legal arguments began losing authority.

A peculiarly American phenoemana in pushing for industrial efficiency spilled into Europe during WWI. Herbert Hoover and other nutritonists believed peace in the world could be maintained only through preventing scarcity. Hunger and employment will be cured not through law or legal processees, nationalism or Bolshevism, but in progress through raised standards of living. Securtiy rests on the ability to dominate the strategic terrain of global consumption.

Even as stats became standardized, their polticial uses grew more varied as empires, indepedence movements, and modernizing states and agencies validated their distinct heirarchies and ambitions through a numerical medium.

Colonial malnutrition occured when investigations suggested an improved diet might enhance labor efficiency and buying power in rural colonial populations. Formerly tolerable rates of disease and mortality became a heavy drag on prosperity: raising the standard of living necessary and demanded that the British manage markets, irrigation, property rights, social services, and consumption in the name of public welfare.

Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars

L.B.J. had several options between 1963 and 1965 on escalation in the Vietnam War: domestic and international politics afforded him leeway. Political leaders in both parties doubted the wisdom of escalation, in strategic and political terms. No one in Europe, China, or the Soviet Union believed the United States would suffer a crippling blow to its prestige if it failed to defend South Vietnam. The South lacked the willpower and the resources to continue the war.

None of these facts escaped the White House policymakers, although they have belatedly attempted to mask their misgivings through pleading well-intended ignorance. Americanization cannot remotely be considered foreordained, despite the real domestic political costs for "losing" Vietnam. Losing the Great Society, credibility abroad, and a personal loss of face worried Johnson and the other top folks in his administration. On top of this were hopes that America could modernize Vietnam.

Making Sense of the French War

Narrative histories focusing on the French-Vietnamese Wars of the 1940s and 1950s are too concerned with placing the fight in a larger picture of post-war colonial rearguard efforts in the shadow of the emerging Cold War or see it as a stage in the natural revolutionary progression of the socialist state.

New studies cast doubt on the veracity of state-centered perspectives and delve into literary and cultural interpretations of events. Using the Soviet/Chinese endorement of Ho Chi Minh as a stepping stone, American historians tend to conclude Truman's commitment stemmed from economic, domestic, or geopolitical imperatives that rendered his support for the South inevitiable. Rethinking 1950 does not diminish its importance, but adds complexities and ambiguities to the portrayal otherwise obscured by a narrow focus on political events.

Contingency marks U.S./British/French/Communist policies toward Vietnam:

Archival issues in Vietnam

Tensions and doubleness often characterized responses to the war.

"The tensions between official efforts to construct a hegemonic for the French war and the myriad of private and competing responses to it."

"Shared faith in the rational manipulation of human societies and the natural world."

Beneath the veil of official orthodoxies lies a heterodox if submerged vision of the war with the potential to view the multiplicity of meanings through which Vietnamese, Europeans, and American actors sought to make sense of the postcolonial moment in Vietnam"

"Recognizing the stuggles of state and nonstate actors to give meaning to the French war and post colonial moment in Vietnam helps us transcend more familiar Cold War and imperial narratives. The result is an admittedly messier picture, though one probably truer to the period itself, and one that captures the uncertainty, hesitations, and contestations among and between states and peoples."

Max Gluckman: Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa

The modern anthropolgist basing his analysis on detailed observation in the field, is concerned in greater detail with the ceremonial roles of persons, categories of persons, an social groups, in relaion to one another. Distinguishes from Frazer in focusing on sociological evidence in lieu of other sources.


Ceremonies in Africa surrounding farming patterns are latently express social tensions. Women permitted to asert licene and dominance against formal subordination to men, princes pretend to covet the trhone, and subjects vent about authority. Rebellion part of an established and sacred tradition system where particualar distributions of power are disputed, but not the structure of the system itself. The institutional protest renews the unity of the system.

Similar employment of sources from ethnographic studies. Dominant role of women in a ceremony contrasts sharply with the mores of the people: a protest against order but nonethelesss eems to embrace it and bless it with progress. Contrast ritual behavior with normal behavior. Women necessary for economy and procreation, but not dominant in system of kinship where they were married off to other families. The group is threatened by two sons and hence women are dangerous.

Changing gender roles for a period was seen as somehow producing a good harvest. Psychological and sociological mechanisms are contained in that somehow - not Concerned. Operates seemingly as an act of rebellion, by an open and privileged assertion of obscentiy acting of fundamental conflict in social structure and individual psyches.

Ceremony makes the king's authority sacred by allowing the airing of tension to achieve unity and prosperity. Problems in who can and cannot be represented through sources solved through similarly organized social sessions. The acting of conflict yields to unity. Women seeking good husbands have an opportunity to act out conflict.

Acceptance of public order as good alloows for unbridled excess, very rituals of rebellion, for order itself keeps the rebellion in bounds. Every social system is a field of tension, full of ambivelence, of co-operation and contrasting struggle: repetivie and developing social systems (diachronic/synchronic)

Alterations of offices, but not a shift in pattern. Contrast with Europe illuminates social setting. Ritual leads to united, is it not possible that civil rebellion itself was a source of strength for these systems. Compare/contrast with Europe.

To achieve anything it values, it must have food, which requires capital and a division of labor, which requires split up of wealth. Peace, good order, and the observence of law necessary for a nation's survival. Individuals vs. political order as a whole demonstrated.

Rebellious rituals may be perhaps be confined to situations where strong tensions are aroued by conflict between different structural principles, which are not controlled by secular institutions. The answer to all these problems lies in comparative research.

Jurgen Habermas

A public sphere is one where people may express ideas freely without their identities exerting too great a control over words or from a fear of violence. For Habermas, these are rooted in the historical experience of the European people. As a state developed its bureaucracy and professionalized armies, public power became a bourgeois phenomena where newspapers permitted criticism of the state and other entities with more or less impunity. That the bourgeois lack power in the state does not stop them from influencing the development of rules that permitted them to exercise free thought and speech directed against it.

Structural Functionalism Notes

Functionalism is a bad term with which nobody wants to be associated, yet it is still relevant to sociology and anthropology today.

Structural Functionalism marked an attempt to provide social science the same legitimacy as natural ones. It has its roots in Auguste Comte. Durkheim draws upon the biological sciences for metaphors to depict organisms in society with attention to evolutionary jargon.

Structural functionalism seeks to explain the development of complex systems through universal laws, or at least acceptable generalizations, through employing synchronic examinations of comparative analysis, thus very critical of social evolutionists.

Adaptation is critical: any organism must adopt externally to its environment and internally to itself. Stability and continuance depends upon an adaptation. Homeostasis is key to development: society is a system endeavoring to formulate regularities.

Of course, it is modeled against ideological histories, moralizing tracts, and antiquarianism. There would be no more speculation on traditional societies as the sources for traditional historians were sorely lacking. History is rejected as ideographic empiricism where in searching to establish everything within a particular context, one cannot compare one thing to any other, it does not seek laws, patterns, or order.

Instead, structural-functionalism will revolve around acceptable generalizations where particular institutions would be interpreted in light of solidarity. Higher social orders and the reproduction of cultural norms are not taken for granted. Society is never merely the sum of their parts: human beings are social individuals inhabiting social institutions which limit and constrain possibilities for making purposive choices. Ideology and false consciousness, so prevelant in Marx, serve no role here, social facts have social explanations.

Society is more than determined by its economic mode of production: systems cannot be reduced to one factor. Cultural values are not ideologies.

Society is corporate, not an aggregate phenomena, and certainly more than the sum of its parts considered as individuals or mere behavior. Society is a reality of its own kind, not reduced. Social structure is distinguished from social dynamics were the former set the conditions and limits of the latter. Society is the total structure of institutions or systems of institutions which are pre-existant ensembales of positions, roles, and rules into which people are born. They are set of role expectations, markers, and values.

A complicated set of institutional roles organized formal relationships, units of analysis in this perspective, part of forming the society.

Society, morality, the presence of obligations, responsibilies that are acknowledged and understood as well as constraints and sanctions on behavior, generates solidarty among its members when its institutions are functionally adapted to one another and anomie when they are not.

Function is not identical with cause, there are manifest and latent functions. Functions do not ask about the origins for or asking about what people mean to do by their action. Bees make honey because people like it.

Manifest/latent function: What is the function of the division of labor? To increase production, according to Smith/Marx, for Durkheim that is the manifest function, but not what is important about it. How the division of labor functions to ensure solidarity is the latent function.

This is not always obvious as a deeper system maintaining social values and functions. For a society as complex and differentiated as ours, it is necessary for people to find reaosns for holding together. Too much order or too little provokes aniome.

Method: Social institutions are nonreductable to aggregates of individual conceptions/choices/behavior/psychology. A tie on with this: social factors can only have social causes and are maintained through existence of constraints. Rooted in the comparative study of social types

Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolts Against Empire in 1919

For a brief interval, Wilson stood alone for mankind. For a moment, there was an extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the globe. No one remembers him that way today save ironically.

For too long, historiography on the League of Nations has focused squarely on Europe and ignored demands from nonEuropean powers for self-determination and rising anti-colonialism. Wilson and what he represented impacted anti-colonial Asian intellectuals. Responses to rhetoric and the construction of images allows one to better capture the broad scope of the "Wilsonian" moment.

World War I deprived colonial powers of their moral superiority. The disappointments from the West and the United States led to widespread disenchantment. Wilson loomed far larger in the imaginations of Asian intellectuals, both as an inspiration for expectations and rhetoric and as a putative source of practical support for self-determination. Wilson's war-time rhetoric was a blueprint for a more peaceful and inclusive international order, one in which Asian nations achieved greater measures of equality and sovereignty. The Bolsheviks also trumpeted an anti-colonial message.

Self-determination more than a phrase: it was an imperative principle of action from which statesmen ignored at their peril, conjuring an international order based around democratic forms of government that would serve as a check against radicalism. Wilson's adoption of a Bolshevik phrase rendered his pronouncements more radical, amplifying their impact. Nationalists recognized the utility of Wilson's rhetoric and a sense of unprecedented opportunity, punctuated with religious terminology, pervaded nationalist press in India and elsewhere. Wilson, with his unworldliness, could break free from these confines as the United States, with its anti-colonial origins, creed of liberty, and wealth represented the potential for something new in world history.

Wilson, of course, ignored pleas from the Indian National Congress for self-determination as he considered it neither possible nor desirable for the peace conference to become a referendum on imperialism. Chinese and Indians felt betrayed by the Great Power game occurring in India, which made Bolshevism more appealing. Expectations for a new and more inclusive world order provoked by Wilson's rhetoric went far beyond the president's intentions.

Back to the League of Nations: Susan Pederson

Literature on the League of Nations following World War II concluded the League was destined to fail as not sufficiently "realist" in orientation. As the issues of failed states and ethnic conflict reemerged in the late twentieth century and the emergence of transnational history in academia allowed new perspectives to come out on the league. The League historical importance extends beyond the realm of its failure to preserve the peace: it existed in a transitional period of world institutions where the collapse of empires coincided with the first attempts at global goverance through legal institutions.

Created to maintain the peace, the League suffered an epic fail. Yet Pederson and other scholars contend the League provided a useful setup for foreign ministers to hammer out great power agreements to that effect. Abandoning Wilsonian rhetoric, the League opened more doors than it shut in the 1920s and was active in economic, political, and transnational issues. The 1930s cannot be blamed on 1919: other factors, especially the Great Depression, wrought them. League reliance on public opinion hampered as well as aided the cause of peace as the public would not always favor peace or the status quo, diplomats might use the organization simply to parrot platitudes while conducting serious negotiations behind closed doors, in other words: realpolitk would remain the course of the day.

Reconciling the ideal world of all states operating on the same ethical and administrative logic to the realities of power disparities in international politics justly absorbed much of the League's attention. With imperial and strategic interests conflicting with self-representation, the League found itself confronting issues of sovereignty. Protecting minorities in Eastern Europe, though not universally, marked a major development in international organizational history.

On the one hand, the League lacked the power to enforce penalties against Poland etc absent cooperation from France and Britain. For some critics, the League's reliance on state actors ensured secret manipulations would impede real protections and impeded petitioners from finding receptive audiences for their claims. For others, the publicity of infringement claims provided political opportunities for irridentists. An attempt at a synthesis illuminated that while serious about protecting minority rights, the integrity of the League and 1919 settlement proved higher goals. Holding the League to a realistic standard rather than an idealistic one reveals adroit professionals sincerely dedicated and often succeeding in preventing ethnic conflicts from simmering into wars.

The mandate system marked the first point in western history where direct imperial control of extracontinental territory gave an international organization an opportunity to create norms and rules governing international development. While national and strategic interests superseded any others, mandated territories were at times run with placating the League in mind. Generalizations aside, the most League accomplished was articulating that aggressive conquest as an illegitimate form of sovereignty proved enduring and where norms and interests coincided, accomplishments were there.

Refugees, epidemics, and economic crises taxed the power of independent organizations and new states who discovered the great powers preferred a League solution to direct intervention. Institutions created by the League helped set up the United Nations. These technical aspects attracted wider international cooperation than any other projects. States with interests that extended beyond their borders found the League an effective tool to attain them. Where outside individuals not interfering with state projects could make a difference, more often than not, it was individuals inside the organization that mobilized iniative. The international bureaucracy, its professionalism and efficiency, helped make the League more appealing as a tool for advancing interests, and sometimes redefining those interests.

The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950: Mark Mazower

The emergence of the human rights phenomena between 1941 and 1948 is nothing short than amazing given the almost absolute disregard statesman paid the concept for millenia beforehand. To address this question, legal scholars rely too much on legal texts and political scientists take events out of their political context. Historians are too subject to intellectual fashion, too deferential to legal historians, and guilty of failing to examine how human rights have been employed in international politics.

Given that international law implies weakening the state's power, why did the states in the United Nations choose to do so? Recent history circles around a moral teleology stressing the agency of individual activists. State interests and cynicism played a much larger role in events than noted previously.



Fears over minority rights in Eastern European states made international recognition conditional upon guaranteeing all ethnicities collective rights verified by the League of Nations. Following in the pattern of Great Power paternalism from the nineteenth century. Self-interest limited the power of the declaration to Eastern Europe, and once the strategic situation changed in the 1930s, the French and British preferred strengthening Eastern European states as bulwarks against fascism and communism, regardless of the quality of the regime.



The Atlantic Charter outlined the preservation of human rights across the globe as a war aim. The experience of the Holocaust proved that only through international defense could human rights be defended. This meant ending the policy of permitting a state to persecute its own nationals as it saw fit. Enforcibility emerged as the primary obstacle for forming a policy as states would need to commit resources and sacrifice sovereignty over actions to achieve progress.



The British supported the rights movement because it wanted the Americans, moving away from isolationism, to have a reason to remain in Europe post-war. Human rights also offered an alternative vision for minority rights seemingly discredited by the failure of the League of Nations. Czechs, Poles, and Jews believed individual rights better protected their interests than minority rights, the British feared the Russians would ignore any international system trying to supervise his territory while the Americans might nibble away at the Empire. Indeed, a majoirty of states preferred an international organization concerned with rights to focus on "human rights." Minority rights pushed to the side.


Inside the planning meetings, British and Russian delegates worried too much scrutiny on rights would lead to dissent in crafting the postwar international organization. Attempts to backtrack from the rhetoric of the war aims encounter swift and strong resistance from the American public and the smaller nations of the world. The real issue now became ensuring that only a declarion lacking teeth would get through the Charter, so as not to upset American isolationists. Little language on implementation found its way into the charter.

A New Deal For The World by Elizabeth Burkhardt

Introduction:
Elizabeth Burkhardt believes the American government's experience tackling domestic economic issues through government intervention provided the impetus for its decision in 1941 to construct a postwar world governed by international institutions and laws established under the premises of universal human rights. Calling the departure from isolationism a "revolutionary" development, Roosevelt's commitment to a liberal democratic world order only makes sense when understood in the context of American political and economic developments in the 1930s.
The United States would stand for stabilizing and coordinating international currency, economic development, international justice, freer trade, self-determination, social welfare, and a permanent system of general collective security. Its concern with individuals ahead of state interests and a world transcending the economic and political condition that provoked previous global conflicts marked a transformitive moment in the history of human rights and America's national identity.
Historiographically speaking, Burkhardt places her work in the realm of the new international histories concerned with employing concepts from international law, relations, and economics to seemingly insular political development. She places herself in contrast to the 1960s school that sought to explain American involvement in international politics as merely an embedding of national interest in international institutions. Thus far, she concludes the United States had a philosophical and ideological connection to the new world order.The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson:
The failure to keep the peace following World War I loomed over policymakers during the Second World War. Though unamitity eluded planners, almost all high level players agreed that co-opting future domestic resistance through early participation in a lengthy process that sought to integrate political and economic security with international regulations on trade, finance, and labor in a realistic scheme mindful of the unchanging imperfections of human nature. In other words, the United States had more to gain than to lose through participation in a new world order.
With Great Britain fighting a lonely battle through the bleak years of 1940 and 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt strove to provide the island all the resources it could without committing political suicide at home while moving the American public to accept that U.S. diplomacy and national interests could be considered idealisitc as well as hard-headed while setting the record straight for the world that America believed in international law as well as moral and human decency. In crafting the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, the editions to the original draft reveal the president's political acumen trumping his idealism and the prime minister's dexerity at protecting vested British interests. Under close scrutiny, the Atlantic Charter's principles appear less the product of enlightened consensus on postwar order than a propaganda piece crafted to fulfill the immediate needs of two statesmen.
Yet the Atlantic Charter was also the first official statement issued by the American people outlining the war's aims and the shape of the postwar outcome. Some read it as a blueprint for the institutionalization of universal human rights, others an extension of free trade and New Deal principles across the world, still others a strong anti-imperialist message. At the very least it represented a real and symbolic expansion of the U.S. national interest and a rearrangment of conceptions and ideas. At the most, it followed the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address in recasting the aims of the Allied war effort to an abstract ideal society that animated policythinking across the globe in the six decades since.
Forging a New American Multilateralism:
States must provide subsistence to those on the margins of society, not only for moral reasons, but because international security rested upon the eradication of the demogougey fueled by depression and privation that propelled the fascists and communists into power. So President Roosevelt and his supporters in the press and academia concluded.
Encounters with totalitarianism necessitated the elevation of human dignity and life, at least life after physical birth, as outside the jurisdiction of positive international law. Previous conceptions of human rights focused on narrow domestic restraints on governmental authority now morphed into an international creed devoted to providing for what Roosevelt considered the fundamental requirements for freedom. Roosevelt's legalism and institutional problem-solving structures were rooted in older ideologies only gaining wide currency in policy-making circles following the failures of moralism and isolationsim. 1930s New Dealers convinced their efforts to reform America through an activist regulatory state projected this philosophy onto international relations in the 1940s. Rejecting Wilsonian perfectionism, the men occupying key posts were still predisposed to believe their plans for reshaping the world through legal institutions that elevated human rights as the end goal of any state policy. The individual, rather than the state, now became the ultiamte object of protection by the international community.
Key for Burkhardt's understanding of the evolution of nascent internationalism is its connection with the ideology of the New Deal: to separate an evolution of foreign policy thinking from a transformitive moment in American domestic politics would be an error. The New Deal for the rest of the world rested on two assumptions: all human beings are entitled to freedom from oppression by virtue of their humanity and that individuals could be held responsible for acts committed by the name of the state during war. Of course, no one ideology hold sway over all of American policy and the genesis of modern human rights thinking has diverse and interrelated roots. The political resistance to an interventionist foreign policy also lessened as a new generation of Americans reared in the Depression and tempered by war were not constrained by their forebearers parochialism.
Bretton Woods, 1944: The Perils of Economic Planning:
A postwar economic order established by the United States would revolve around stability. Freer trade, freely convertablie currencies, and reconstruction projects not unduly hampered by wartime debts were the economic ingredients for a more prosperous and stable international system. While reliant on Keynesian theory, it had to be packaged in such a way to command domestic support. Yet technical debates over monetary policy were not closely scrutinized by the public or partisans, a fact that Burkhardt believes ensured their passage.
A prisoner's dilemma emerged in the realm of international finance following the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. Bretton Woods was an attempt by the United States to ensure currency manipulation and tariff barriers would never again prolong a recession. Reformers schooled in the Progressive Era and New Deal, organizing the economy into a deliberate process of institutional change carried these conceptions into international relations.
Harry White and John Maynard Keyes led the American and British postwar planning respectively. Handicapped by an interventonist United States Senate, White committed the United States to a form of internationalism that would spread responsible capitalism aborad and render the dollar supreme where Keynes sought to compensate Britian in spite of its economic power.
Bretton Woods: Investing in Global Stability:
In June 1944, British and American delegates at the Bretton Woods conference set out to synthesize American and British proposals on currency stability programs and whip the other allies into line. Their postwar vision of international finance rested on an international monetary mechanism that would encourage trade by making currencies exchangable at stable rates while making short-term credit available with the focus of rebuilding Europe. Broad principles, however, were not easily translated into policy, as previous attempts at coordinating the redistribution of food to impoverished nations illuminated.
The IMF would administer a code of conduct regarding exchange rate policies that would make international transactions more predictible and shelter domestic problems aimed at full employment and expansive social programs. The debate at Bretton Woods surrounded who would contribute how much and on what terms would that money be made available, the extent members would alter currency rates to permit a certain level of flexibility. Trading nations and businesses wanted predictability and systemic stability, but a weak economy would want to devalue its currency to shore up its export industry, which Americans assigned as the source of the Depression. On the issue of contributions, the United States maintained it should possess the lion's share, which would afford it a greater capacity for directing the fund afterwards.
The World Bank would abet the mobilization of economic resources for longterm reconstruction and development projects for projects and regions private capital neglect. Engaged less in direct lending than guaranteeing loans so as to encourage private investment. Other considerations hampered its ability to serve as an independent lender.
While the Roosevelt Administration championed the Bretton Woods agreement as an opportunity to spread economic freedoms and prosperity across the globe while protecting American laborers from international financial conditions by providing an institutions where the United States could impose its will, isolationists attacked it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. The mix of American idealism and power in economic affairs was an unprecedented occurence: its survival in the House and Senate rested upon the prevailing internationalist settlement following the conclusion of the war and the apathy a majority of Americans possessed in considering its appeals. Americans believed they were investing in global peace, prosperity, and stability: Roosevelt saw dispensing sovereignty across multinational institutions as part and process of participating in a functioning international system.
Rather than simply providing freedom from fear, internationalism provided an opportunity for augmenting the happiness of the world and the development of the human personality.
Burkhardt sets herself apart from historians who claim the outbreak of the war marked the end of the New Deal. By the late 1940s, a backlash against the New Deal and state interventionism caused the economic, social, and cultural rights extoled earlier to recede into oblivion. As the realities of the war merged with the maturing New Deal consciousness, Roosevelt sought to internationalize his accomplishments at home through the mobilization of the state's resources to preserve peace and open up greater areas of the world for peaceful advancement into prosperity. Unattained ideological goals enshrined in Roosevelt's planning documents should not be ignored by political and economic historians as irrelevant to the study of his policy.
She provides a backhanded compliment to the advocate scholars in the field of human rights, who in their zeal for expanding the realm of interventionism even further into private society, the dialogue becomes abstract and distanced from historical reality, and hence irrelevant in expanding the limits of knowledge. Burkhardt also worries contemporary debates cannot reconcile non-Western conceptions of "human rights" with the traditional model. Imaginative distance from the subjects under historical evaluation is a prerequisite for a narrative exhibiting deference to the forces contingency in the development of the doctrine. Rather than ransacking the past for familiar sounding concepts, context is necessary for understanding any event's role in the process of historical progress. A historical approach, rather than legal, political, philosophical, or sociological, best sheds light on the novelty of Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter in American political discourse.
The Chimera of Collective Security:
Postwar peace planners believed setting in motion a process an American-led commission composed of apolitical experts aiming to separate the peace treaty from the machinery of collective security while hostilities are still ongoing promised the best solution for a lasting peace. The draft emerging for the initial U.N. Charter in 1944 reflected the principles of the Atlantic Charter and a heightened awareness of the relationship of public awareness to the perpetuation of human rights.
American policymakers crafting the U.N. Charter never lost sight of Wilson's failure to reconcile foreign policy with powerful anti-imperial and anti-multilateral strains of domestic thought and the structural flaws in the League of Nation that impeded effective action.
At the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the scope over veto-power and the voting process on the security council provoked the greatest friction, with the Soviets joined other countries in objecting to America's proposed proportional voting system on financial matters on the grounds such a system would lead to yankee hegenomy. American proposals to support human rights abroad encounter resistance from the British and Soviets, the latter of whom were determined to limit the powers of the body to issues of peace and security with minimal pretexts for interference in domestic policy. In other words, no state decided to entrust its interests to the whims of an international body, and the postwar order would revolve around the power politics of 1945 rather than abstract moral or legal principles.
Learning to Work Together by Working Together:
A lack of literary flourish and details in the Dumbarton Oaks draft deflated idealist dreams, but the proposal for a U.N. Security Council committed to combating aggression and an international criminal court were applauded as steps in the right direction by internventionists. Americans worried over the yet undetermined voting procedures in the Security Council and the implications of force commitments on American political institutions. Small states clamored for greater recognition and a more formal commitment to individual rights as previously articulated in the Atlantic Charter.
Negotiations with the Soviets as the war in Europe came to a close proved vexing for Roosevelt. Power realities in Eastern Europe compromised any American hopes that Stalin possessed any incentive to cooperate along an internationalist perspective against his own interest. Indeed, the United States also behaved in a manner at variance with the principles of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter in promising the Soviets territory in exchange for an attack on Japan. More concerned with Soviet participation in a worldwide body, the dying Roosevelt placed the United Nations ahead of other political and diplomatic considerations.
Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, remained committed to the U.N. and the Conference on International Organization opened on April 25. Friction over veto as an agenda setter evaporated after the Allies bonded againt Soviet intransigence. Smaller nations succeeded in reducing the discretionary powers of the Security Council and the addition of human rights language that still contradicted language on sovereignty and self-defense.
Human rights activists protested the distance between lofty commitments to self-determination, individual rights, and social progress and reality in the Charter's revamped preamble. The presence of language committing the United Nations to equal rights, self-determination, human rights, and fundamental freedoms including language and religion and ends to discrimination on racial and sexual lines marked a vast change from the technical document produced by the legal experts and policy wonks at Dumbarton Oaks.
Policy concerns again superseded ideological ones. The U.S. refused to allow any outside interference with its freshly acquired territories in the Pacific, Colonial powers were clearly uneasy over any timetable to relinquish their possessions: language promising eventual independence for all territories was scrapped from the Charter. Deference to domestic autonomy absent a threat to international peace, ambiguities in the nature of enforcement, self-defense, and the nature of human rights themselves were also the product of political realities of the time.
Nuremburg 1945: The Limits of Law:
Nazis were tried with four major crimes: planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of war of aggression, the commission of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The final count was the most innovative and the product of a merging of ideas, politics, and institutions that drove America to abandon its traditional perogatives and the potential its power provided in favor of mulitlateral solutions. Could individual guilt be established for a state's actions in committing war and crimes and could Germans be prosecuted for crimes against Jews and others before the war began.
Dismissing accusations of victor's justice, Americans hoped a trial would serve an educational function for the German public while providing the world an example of a new world order. The laws lie in context of Allied policy toward Germany, outlaw aggressive war, bring opporbrium and attention to crimes against humanity, and was constructed upon exisiting treaty laws. It also fucntioned as the source of future international courts and annihilate forever fear of aggressive war.
Inside the Executive Department, State, Treasury, and War proposed radically different plans for postwar Germany reflecting a diversity of thought over future American interests in the region. State wanted a strong German state in central Europe economically integrated with the West to stand as a bulwark against Communism, War wanted to maintain much of the German apparatus to ensure a speedy and efficient transition, while Treasury endorsed laying waste to the industrial capacity of Germany, rendering the most powerful state in Europe an agricultural pygmy lacking the capacity or mindset to wage aggressive war.
The latter approach apparently was Roosevelt's personal preference and the grand nature of the reconstruction of a nation by outside agents echoed New Deal reformist motifs. Worries over the collapse of the German economy worried Morganthau's understudies and Secretary of War Henry Stimpson rightfully contended the destruction of a nation violated the Atlantic Charter. Domestic political opinion moved against Morgenthau's proposal, forcing Roosevelt to disown it before the election. By May 1945, the United States accepted the necessity of an ordered German society with a vibrant economy providing a buffer against further Communist encroachment as an overriding national interest, though denazification programs and the destruction of the German military played a serious role in the occupation agenda.
Trials for Nazi leaders were designed to enshrine the principle that wars waged unjustly were a crime. International law protects states and individuals in most circumstances from being subject to answering for actions conducted during war, but the Nazis were out of control in World War II and forfeited their right to protection through atrocious actions.
Internationalizing New Deal Justice:
Although aware of Nazi policies toward P.O.Ws and the Holcaust, their greatest sin in the eyes of American policymakers was drawing the Allies into a ruinous war. Robert Jackson and his fellow New Dealers entered Nuremburg believing they possessed a mandate and the capacity for using the trial to alter forever the great power struggle. While prosecuting the Nazis for aggressive war was a given, finding a way for guilt to be assigned for the Holocaust and other transgressions proved more difficult from a legal standpoint as no international law dealt with extermination and mass murder. Broad language in the Hague Convention abetted their efforts, as did the decision to make the customs of justice applicable as well. Wary of expanding the powers of the international tribunal to German actions against German nationals prior to 1939, the Court limited its jurisdiction.
For its critics, the Nuremburg Trial's focus on crimes against peace was merely a reflection of status quoism while another batch of military men worried the focus on individual responsibility for soldiers obeying orders set a dangerous precedent, especially as the United States, in defeating the Axis, targeted civilians in carpet bombing missions and used the atomic bomb.
If Nuremburg was animated by American production, it is one improbable to emerge from the United States outside of 1945. The emerging mulitlateralist sensibility that sought to ensure peace and prosperity around the world through international institutions. More than simply prosecuting crimes, the Nuremburg Trials were a projection of the New World Order that justified the sacrifices of wartime and whose establishment, reckoning with precedent, and aims bore resemblence with other New Deal programs synthesizing legalism with moralism.
The Nuremburg Trials embodied the first institutionalized, multilateral to use the ideals of the rule of law to give voice to the moral intuition that individuals composing the univere are entitled to equal moral consideration. It legitimized the idea of individual responsibility for crimes against international law, jurisprudential underpinning of the dignity of the individual irrespecitve of local, domestic laws, and an example of the importance of documenting and narrating the specifics of atrocities to creae a detailed and enduring record while moving the yardstick of human rights law toward the protetion of individuals.
No judicial system in a transistional political period can escape social understandings of previous injustice.
Forgotten Legacies of the Atlantic Charter:
History too often makes the Atlantic Charter moment an aberration in a larger Cold War history. Burkhardt proposes a counternarrative of the importance of institutions established in the period for providing the United States the capacity to last through the Cold War. The United States volunatarily constrained its influence through instituional channels and consolidating consent for international order. The Cold War thus becomes the bipolar abberation.
The World Bank and IMF became another Cold War arena or promoting anti-Soviet ideologies for monetary trade, finance, and developmental policies.
F.D.R. succeeded in altering the fundamental concept of government and its obligations to the governed and established a change in attitudes worldwide toward economic stability and the responsibility of the great powers to achieve it.
The U.N. and Nuremburg Trials rhetorically and symbolically puts human rights violators on the permanent defensive and deprives the world of impunity.
Political, legal, and economic developmets indivisibly contributed to the nation's security. An ideological mindset or a similiarly pragmatic approach?
Last Chapter = Annoying
Recapitulating her earlier points and the arguments of other scholars vis-a-vis the importance of the "Zeitgeist of 1945" in altering how Americans concieved of their world, namely, that Americans, in the aftermath of World War II and the Great Depression, were willing to endorse Roosevelt's multilateral schemes as sound policy decisions and that individual human rights deserved protection.
She then rails globalization cheerleaders, sneers at the realists and neoconservatives and contends that because the United States encountered unforeseen difficulties overruning Iraq, it must therefore bow to whim of a global test and submit the implementation of its foreign policy to conditions of human rights. She never argues how multilateralism would aid the United States achieve its objectives abroad, save perhaps as a guard against overextension and make the Europeans like us more, as if the realities of 1945 should instruct us in how to understand those of 2008.

The World In Depression: Charles Kindleberger

If I misapply an economic term or fail to grasp all the macroeconomic stuff, my bad. I think the purpose of reading this piece was to impart a counterargument to Polyami and Friedman while demonstrating how interrelated economic developments in one region are impacted by another while also illuminating why states sometimes fail to act in the aggregate interest of the world economy.

According to Kindleberger, five institutions are needed for the stability of the world economy:
1. A relatively open market for distressed goods
2. Countercylical or at least long-term lending
3. Stable exchange rates
4. A coordination of macroeconomic policy
5. A lender of last resort that discounts or otherwise provides liquidity in a crisis

Kindleberger contends that provided these functions, the economic system could handle and adjust to shocks to the market. Even given the overproduction of raw materials into primary products, the French clamor for strict reparations, the American stubborness for debt-payment, currency chaos, and halts in foreign lending from New York coupled with the Stock Market crash, Kindleberger argues that the United States and Great Britain acted in concert to secure global financial stability, the worst of the Depression could have been averted.

Free trade, the process that sets domestic resources amenable to productive capacities abroad and keeping import markets open, was abandoned in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Rather than incurring some short-term costs by keeping markets open to surplus goods from abroad where demand declined, the United States set off a process of protectionism by raising rates on all kinds of imports. Tariff retaliation and competitve depreciation led to mutual losses everywhere. With no country providing a market for surpluses or willing to incur appreciation of it currency, which would damage export-oriented industries while hurting those competing with imports on the domestic market, or offer capital loans or discounts to nations struggling with debt. In other words, what was good for the one not good for the whole.

Countercyclical lending, as practiced by the British in the nineteenth century, helped stabilize the economy from shocks in the global market. The British would import during boom periods and cut spending abroad, thereby lessening the impact of bad investment on borrowed funds in recession periods while encouraging production abroad. After World War I, the U.S. decided to lend and export during a boom period, which was not a good long-term plan.

In the nineteenth century, the gold standard established the exchange rate for currencies. After the inflation following World War I, the equilibrium for a number of reasons was not correctly established. With export prices going down after the Depression hit, smaller countries in a quasi-competitive manner devalued their currencies, which led to only further deflation as domestic prices remain unchanged while reducing prices in appreciating countries.

Gold standard also allowed for greater coordination of macroeconomic policies. Domestic usurptation of this responsibility subordinates the aggregate interest to the rabble of protection.

The lenders of last resort protect against depositors and prevent widespread panic withdrawal. No one did this in the 1930s. Bed.

Emancipation and the Empire: Sven Beckert

The American Civil War accelerated the transformation of the world cotton economy from one centered between the United States and merchant cities in England to a worldwide enterprise. States, rather than a small caste of merchants and factory owners, set the structure of the economy and enabled local merchants in Brazil, India, and Egypt to exert indirect control over an emerging class of laborers and sharecroppers whose traditional sustenance societies and economies were transformed by the incentives of the global market and the power of the state to enforce contracts and private property laws. For Beckert, the de jure liberation of four million North American slaves led to the de facto bondage of millions more spread across continents.

The American Civil War provoked all of this by creating a shortage of cotton on the world market. The cotton produced through slave labor had catapulted the United States onto the world stage in the early nineteenth century. Cotton exports to Great Britain and other nations in Europe tapered to insignificance in 1862, hurting the textile industry and prompting unemployment and violent riots. Fearing for the social order, the British government exercised its power to open Indian land to foreign investment in cotton, where the crop had previously failed to catch on due to the backward Indian social structure, American predominance in the export industry, a lack of state support for investors, and the difficulties of transporting the crop back to Europe. With the closing of the American market from 1861-65, Indian entrepeneurs jumped at the opportunity to grow and export the suddenly scarce cash crop. A modernizing sultan in Egypt also took advanatage of European demand as did Brazilians. The cotton industry linked areas of the world in manners previously unthinkable as the state interest in preserving social order forced it to ally with capitalists eager to exploit labor on the periphery, thus ending the reign of Anglo-American slave holders and merchants over cotton.

The scarcity of cotton during the Civil War on the world economy did not stop the industry from expanding. New sources flourished at the high prices of cotton, but even after American production began exceeding its antebellum output in the early 1870s, India, Egypt, and Brazil maintained a steady level of exports well above their pre 1860 levels. The Civil War imparted on cotton experts the knowledge that labor, rather than land, constrained production. While some worried the chaos of the post-war South would damage the market for decades to come, the transition from plantation labor to free was made easier by the system of sharecropping. Advances in railways and shipping, to say nothing of the telegraph, lowered transaction costs while individual farmers of cotton incurred debts due to start-up costs and the fluctuations of the world market that made a transition away from producing cash-crops improbable. The British government and local merchants pushed people into producing cotton and much of traditional rural Indian culture and economics died away in the face of the complete transformation of the countryside where local elites lost power to urban merchants who used agricultural debt and methods of extra-economic and political coercion to maintain efficiency.

Given the scope of the textile industry in European nations, the government needed to expand its range in the economic sector to guarantee order at home. In devoting more energy and resources to consolidating empires, the construction of infrastructure, and securing property rights abroad, the European powers overran traditional common land practices and left the livelihoods of millions of people across the globe tied directly to the rising and falling of cotton prices. The Civil War accelerated this process.