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Showing papers in "International Affairs in 1982"



Journal ArticleDOI
Ken Booth1

520 citations


Journal ArticleDOI

171 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the theory of the international civil service and the reality of the supra-national staff who are charged with the day-to-day responsibility for international co-operation, and concludes that these same institutions and personnel are increasingly involved in the discussion on numerous issues of importance for the citizens of these countries-hostages in Iran, international economic relations, and the status of refugees in South East Asia.
Abstract: REACTIONS in developed countries to the United Nations system and the officials who staff it are indifferent at best and outright hostile at worst. Ironically, these same institutions and personnel are increasingly involved in the discussion on numerous issues of importance for the citizens of these countries-hostages in Iran, international economic relations, and the status of refugees in South East Asia are recent examples. This article examines the theory of the international civil service and the reality of the supra-national staff who are charged with the day-to-day responsibility for international co-operation. Although international organisations have traditionally been of marginal interest to scholars and national decision-makers not directly connected with the study or operation of international institutions, the situation has significantly changed during the last two decades. Decolonisation led to the rapid expansion of United Nations membership in the 1960s; and raw materials prices and shortages during the 1970s helped developing countries to assert their positions as active members of the international system in which they emphasised the work of the United Nations more than did established, economically developed states. The recognition of new problems and the rush to erect new rhetorical or institutional responses have so far monopolised analytical attention whilst the administrative aspects of these international bureaucracies have tended to be overlooked.'

44 citations







Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article made an assessment of the place of race in international relations, in so far as it is possible to distinguish, in this regard, domestic from international politics, and concluded that today, transcending everything (including even the nuclear threat) there is the confrontation between the races.
Abstract: KE sex in Victorian England, it has been said, race is a taboo subject in contemporary polite society. Conflicts or attitudes that to the simpleminded might appear to be self-evidently racial are explained away as class-based, or as difficulties attending immigration, or as responses to special local circumstances. Certainly, race relations are not an area in which political reputations are easily made, and outspokenness on the subject seems to be the preserve of those who have little to lose, their having either departed the scene or not yet arrived at it. Yet beneath this wish to talk about something else, and perhaps in part explaining it, lurk the largest of claims for the factor of race in politics, and the direst of forebodings about the future of race relations. As early as 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois was already expressing the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of 'the colour-line', and this has been a theme of pan-African congresses to the present day. A recent British prime minister, not noted for his proneness to exaggerate, is reported as having said 'I believe the greatest danger ahead of us is that the world might be divided on racial lines. I see no danger, not even the nuclear bomb, which could be so catastrophic as that." These instincts of politicians are fortified by academic analysis. John Rex, one of the most prominent writers in Britain on race relations, has gone so far as to predict that 'for the next few centuries the problems which will preoccupy men politically more than any other will be problems which they subjectively define as problems of race'.2 Hugh Tinker, in one of the very few works on race in international politics, concludes that 'Today, transcending everything (including even the nuclear threat) there is the confrontation between the races .3 No doubt the rioting that took place in Britain in the summer of 1981 is taken by writers of this persuasion to be bitter evidence in support of their view of the place of race in society. This paper is confined to an assessment of the place of race in international relations, in so far as it is possible to distinguish, in this regard, domestic from international politics. In any event, it may be argued that it is to the history of international relations, during the imperial


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In 1982, the United States and Pakistan were ready to renew a defence relationship that had been in suspension since 1965 as mentioned in this paper, and Congress also approved a foreign military sales transaction of $1 1 billion for forty highperformance F16 tactical aircraft, six of which were to be delivered within one year.
Abstract: B Y the beginning of 1982, the United States and Pakistan were ready to renew a defence relationship that had been in suspension since 1965. Congressional waiver of the anti-proliferation Symington Amendment lifted the aid ban imposed on Pakistan in April 1979 and cleared the way for President Ronald Reagan's Republican administration to move ahead with the first instalments of a six-year $3 2 billion programme of economic and military assistance. By failing to adopt a concurrent resolution to block the administration, Congress also approved a foreign military sales transaction of $1 1 billion (to be paid for, in part, by Saudi Arabia) for forty highperformance F16 tactical aircraft, six of which were to be delivered within one year. The programme dwarfs the Carter administration's $400 million aid offer, made in February 1980, an offer which Pakistan's President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq disdainfully dismissed as 'peanuts'. Divided roughly in half between economic aid and military 'assistance programme credits, the Reagan administration package gives Pakistan access to an array of sophisticated military hardware, including attack helicopters, self-propelled howitzers, armoured personnel carriers, medium tanks, guided missiles and radar equipment.' The decision thus to revive America's erstwhile partnership with Pakistan runs parallel to security agreements which the Reagan administration has been attempting to fashion with other friendly regional powers. No less than in these other cases, Washington's courtship of Islamabad has given rise to debate among United States foreign policy observers. There were several motives for Washington's action-alarm over the chaos in Iran, the shock of Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, and the belief

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The link between the international trading order and the great issues of war and peace forms part of the practical, working theories of international relations of academic pundits and politicians alike as discussed by the authors, and it is a link that developed by both Lenin and Cordell Hull' during the First World War, who thought that the fight over world markets led to war.
Abstract: HE link between the international trading order and the great issues of war and peace forms part of the practical, working theories of international relations of academic pundits and politicians alike. The central tradition is that developed by both Lenin and Cordell Hull' during the First World War, who thought that the fight over world markets led to war. Our postwar order is built on the attractive proposition that an open trading system advances both peace and welfare. Only Marxism offers an equally allencompassing and consistent solution to the world's problems. In both cases, idealism, the sheer attractiveness of the ultimate goal, leads its advocates to defend a closed intellectual system with vehemence and intolerance, and to accept even large sacrifices on behalf of others as a relatively small price to pay.






Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Foreign Office was founded only a few months after the battle of Yorktown, and the need was evidently felt for some more professional machinery to run Britain's newly expanded sphere of 'foreign' affairs.
Abstract: M /[ ICHAEL HOWARD, in his earlier lecture in this series, confirmed what I had suspected: that the United States deserves some of the credit for Britain's decision to create a Foreign Office in the first place. The Foreign Office was founded only a few months after the battle of Yorktown. The 'politicians' of the time having just mislaid America, the need was evidently felt for some more professional machinery to run Britain's newly expanded sphere of 'foreign' affairs. Since then, Britain and America have never ceased to play important roles in each other's history. On the whole it has been a productive and creative relationship, perhaps one of the most durable in the history of nations. In the last 200 years, we have approached each other sometimes warily, and dealt with foreign affairs often from different perspectives. Still, on balance the relationship has been of considerable benefit to world peace. This has been true particularly of the period since the Second World War. All accounts of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War and in the early postwar period draw attention to the significant differences in philosophy between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different national histories. America, which had never experienced a foreign threat to its survival, considered wars an historical aberration caused by evil men or institutions; we were preoccupied with victory defined as the unconditional surrender of the Axis. Britain had seen aggression take too many forms to risk so personal a view of history; she had her eyes on the postwar world and sought to gear wartime strategy towards forestalling Soviet domination of Central Europe. Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, and evading responsibility for helping secure








Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In contrast to the practice in Western political, military and academic circles by which the principles and practice relating to the national security of the countries concerned are subjects for open debate, the Soviet theory of Russia's national security is encapsulated in a set of strict, officially established and endorsed concepts and doctrines as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: T HE concepts and theory of national security prevailing in the member countries of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation (WTO)-with the possible exception, to some extent, of Romania-are a direct reflection, or at best an adaptation, of Soviet concepts and theory of the national security of the Soviet Union. This relation applies also to the measures taken in practical application of national security; these, however, lie outside the scope of this article, the main object of which is to provide an insight into what the phrase 'national security' means to Russia by analysing and considering the significance of the appropriate literature published in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the practice in Western political, military and academic circles by which the principles and practice relating to the national security of the countries concerned are subjects for open debate, the Soviet theory of Russia's national security is encapsulated in a set of strict, officially established and endorsed concepts and doctrines. These are formulated and laid down in accordance with the current Marxist-Leninist perspective, in both intellectual and practical terms, on national defence and international relations between military coalitions and countries of-from the Soviet viewpoint-'identical' (socialist) and 'different' (capitalist) socio-political and economic systems. A further factor is the internal situation, in terms of psychological and political climate, of each country belonging to the WTO. The dominant psychological factor in thinking on national security and policy decision-making among Soviet political and military leaders is the dialectical perception of a continuing direct and indirect interrelatedness among social, political, military and economic circumstances in nearly all countries of the world, and the positive or negative influence of these circumstances on the construction of the communist society. At the same time, the political and military leaders of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland are imbued with acceptance of this process of influence. The absorption by the WTO satellite countries of exclusively Soviet concepts of national security and defence can be seen clearly in their corresponding doctrines and how these are taught to the armed forces, as in the following Hungarian example:

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The main reason for the virtual inaction of the United States and the former USSR in the current crisis in Lebanon is due to their concern over the possibility of a general war between Israel and Syria.
Abstract: The Soviet Union may have some questions to answer from its friends and allies in the Middle East at the close of the current crisis in Lebanon. Given the massive material and political support Moscow has accorded both Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the past, it is possible that they, or at least groups amongst their supporters and the public at large, expected something more than the virtual inaction of the Soviet Union. An understanding of this inaction, however, lies with the understanding of the nature of Soviet commitment to Syria and the PLO and where this commitment fits into Soviet priorities. When Israeli forces moved into Lebanon, the primary Soviet consideration was that there should not be a general war between Israel and Syria. The reasons for this were numerous: Moscow was fearful of the tlhreat to Damascus itself and to the shaky regime of Assad; it was concerned that the Israeli blow and these threats would be such as to prompt the Syrians to demand direct Soviet military intervention and that an all-out war, similar to previous wars in the region, would develop with the risk of superpower involvement and confrontation. Accordingly, Moscow has always drawn a distinction in the Arab-Israeli context between terrorist actions or battles of attrition, and all-out wars, opposing the latter because of the concern over superpower confrontation. In the present war, these Soviet preferences presumably caused little difficulty between Moscow and Damascus in as much as the Syrians themselves apparently were not interested in all-out war with Israel. Thus it was not a case of Syria pressing to fight and Moscow holding it back, but, perhaps, Syrian pressure on Moscow, possibly from the beginning of hostilities, to press Washington to restrain Israel. The USSR may have been restrained on this score by their general concern over their relations with the United States at this time of important arms talks. There have been rumours that the Syrians were dissatisfied with Moscow's general reticence during the hostilities and in some circles, presumably the military, there was apparently much grumbling over the poor performance of Soviet weapons systems.' While Libyan and Palestinian leaders openly indicated their disappointment that Moscow did not send Syria concrete assistance, such as a contingent of combat troops, the Syrians themselves, at least publicly, couched their demands in political terms.2 They spoke of raising Soviet-Syrian relations to a still higher plane

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: However, it remains unclear whether this conjunction of arguments is a temporary phenomenon brought about by the strains of recession or by the incompatibility of the current crop of political leaders or whether we are witnessing the symptoms of a much deeper crisis that is unsettling the whole set of assumptions that have governed Western policy-making over the past three decades as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I T is easier to describe the character of the malaise that afflicts the Atlantic Alliance than to explain its origins. The disputes over monetary policy, Middle East diplomacy and all aspects of relations with the Soviet Union provide regular and ample fare for the media. However, it remains unclear whether this conjunction of arguments is a temporary phenomenon brought about by the strains of recession or by the incompatibility of the current crop of political leaders, or whether we are witnessing the symptoms of a much deeper crisis that is unsettling the whole set of assumptions that have governed Western policy-making over the past three decades. This is the question that this article seeks to address. The fact that this question has already occurred to a large number of people is in itself relevant to the answer. The disarray in the Alliance at the start of 1980, caused by the twin crises over the Iranian seizure of American hostages and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, stimulated a surge in seminars, conferences, pronouncements and publications of all shapes and sizes, which has yet to subside, and has indeed recently been given added stimulus by the differences over how to respond to martial law in Poland. Whatever its faults, therefore, the Alliance cannot be accused of sweeping its problems under the carpet. If anything the reverse is true. The foreign policy communities on both sides of the Atlantic ensure that the resources and the personnel are available for instant comment and speculation. The relationship at times suffers from over-analysis which, in turn, carries the risk of justifying itself by over-dramatising the issues. Signs of disagreement lead to solemn warnings that the Alliance will tear itself asunder; minor ailments are diagnosed as symptoms of a terminal illness. Much of the comment assumes that the Atlantic Alliance is the most fragile and delicate of international relationships, unable to withstand significant tension. Yet NATO has so far survived a stormy three decades in international affairs and any number of internal arguments. The arguments across the Atlantic are rarely as fraught or as bitter as those that take place within the