Showing papers on "Expansionism published in 2002"

Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America

Abstract: Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. By Robert E. May. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 426. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $45.00.) Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America is destined to be the standard work on filibustering in nineteenth-century America. Robert E. May, who previously delved into the secret underworld of American expansionism in his prize-winning biography, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (1985), explores nearly every aspect of the private military expeditions that brought notoriety and dreams of empire to generations of adventurers. In this well-written and extensively researched book, he examines the context for filibustering, explores the motivations and logistics behind such schemes, and persuasively argues that the phenomenon was not only linked to the sectional controversy over slavery but also damaged United States' foreign policy and, ironically, limited the nation's territorial expansion. May organizes his study into three parts, with the first three chapters dedicated to providing an overview of filibustering in America. This includes his investigation into the origins of so-called Aaron Burr schemes in the early years of the republic, the growth of such freebooting in the years after the Mexican War, and the place of filibustering in American popular culture. He argues that while other nations also contributed to the nefarious adventures collectively known as filibustering, it was the United States that sent forth the most and best-known expeditions. Though relatively few people actually got involved in such illegal plots (they were in direct violation of the Neutrality Act and other laws), filibustering enjoyed widespread political support and was common enough to be a part of the culture. In the second part of the book, May devotes four chapters to the actual filibustering expeditions. He examines why it was that some Americans decided to join such schemes, how the United States government failed to stop them, the logistics of the expeditions, and what it was actually like to go filibustering. Whether providing support for Narciso Lopez and his attempts to capture Cuba, sending armed parties into Mexico to loot and pillage, or mustering whole armies of mercenaries for the invasion of Central American nations like Nicaragua, a significant number of Americans were caught up in the idea of capturing territory in the name of liberty, although their motivations ranged from sheer love of adventure to ideology to power and greed. The United States government did stop a number of filibusters, although the efforts of authorities often mixed failure with half-hearted attempts to stop expeditions that officers actually hoped would succeed. May concludes that, although some adventures were nipped in the bud by timely intervention, political infighting and popular opinion hampered the government's efforts. Despite popular support, the expeditions were almost always under-funded and poorly organized. …

Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine

Abstract: The article deals with the relations between time and space in the making of modern nations, focusing on conditions of territorial conflicts in general, and on expansionist 'ethnocratic' societies in particular. Under such conditions, it is argued, territory (the 'where' of the nation) becomes a most vital 'kernel' of national mobilisation, while the history of national origins (the 'when') tends to become mythical and homogenous, used chiefly to boost the territorial struggle. A geographical critique of dominant theories of nationalism is presented, focusing on their 'spatial blindness' and analytical fusion of nation and state. These deficiencies are conspicuous in ethnocratic societies, where the 'national project' does not aspire to merge nation and state, but on the contrary, to essentialise and segregate group identities. While the 'when' and the 'where' of the nation are still intimately intertwined, it is the latter that provides the core of nation-building. The claim is substantiated through a de...

A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War

Abstract: The dark side of Manifest Destiny; The Mexican-American War (1846-48) found Americans on new terrain. A republic founded on the principle of armed defense of freedom was now going to war on behalf of Manifest Destiny, seeking to conquer an unfamiliar nation and people. Through an examination of rank-and-file soldiers, Paul Foos sheds new light on the war and its effect on attitudes toward other races and nationalities that stood in the way of American expansionism. Drawing on wartime diaries and letters not previously examined by scholars, Foos shows that the experience of soldiers in the war differed radically from the positive, patriotic image trumpeted by political and military leaders seeking recruits for a volunteer army. Promised access to land, economic opportunity, and political equality, the enlistees instead found themselves subjected to unusually harsh discipline and harrowing battle conditions. As a result, some soldiers adapted the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny to their own purposes, taking for themselves what had been promised, often by looting the Mexican countryside or committing racial and sexual atrocities. Others deserted the army to fight for the enemy or seek employment in the West. These acts, Foos argues, along with the government's tacit acceptance of them, translated into a more violent, damaging strain of Manifest Destiny.

Vestiges of war : the Philippine-American War and the aftermath of an imperial dream, 1899-1999

Abstract: U.S. intervention in the Philippines began with the little-known 1899 Philippine-American War. Using the war as its departure point in analyzing U.S.-Philippine relations, Vestiges of War retrieves this willfully forgotten event and places it where it properly belongs-as the catalyst that led to increasing U.S. interventionism and expansionism in the Asia Pacific region. This seminal, multidisciplinary anthology examines the official American nationalist story of "benevolent assimilation" and fraternal tutelage in its half century of colonial occupation of the Philippines. Integrating critical and visual art essays, archival and contemporary photographs, dramatic plays, and poetry to address the complex Philippine and U.S. perspectives and experiences, the essayists compellingly recount the consequences of American colonialism in the Philippines. Vestiges of War will force readers to reshape their views on what has been a deliberately obscure but significant phase in the histories of both countries, one which continues to haunt the present. Contributors: Genara Banzon, Santiago Bose, Ben Cabrera, Renato Constantino, Doreen Fernandez, Eric Gamalinda, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jessica Hagedorn, Reynaldo Ileto, Yong Soon Min, Manuel Ocampo, Paul Pfeiffer, Christina Quisumbing, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Kidlat Tahimik, Mark Twain, and Jim Zwick.

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase

Abstract: Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 350. Chronology, illustrations. Cloth, $30.00.)Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause shares both the strengths and the weaknesses of Roger G. Kennedy's other forays into the history of the early republic-Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study In Character (2000), Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (1994); and Orders from France: The Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World (1990). A swirl of environmental, intellectual, political, diplomatic, business, and social history, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause is written in a style that is unmistakably Kennedy's own. Intended for both a popular and an academic audience, it will probably intrigue and infuriate each in its own way.What Kennedy does especially well in this book, as in all of his books, is to revisit a familiar story with an eye to hitherto unseen connections and forgotten characters. Accordingly, this book is as much about Creek nationalism, American expansionism, and British mercantilism as its ostensible topic: the spread of plantation slavery and cotton agriculture across the American South. Kennedy develops often-unexpected linkages between these-and other-developments, creating a rich web of stories. And he finds individuals who personify these linkages. Jefferson may receive top-billing in this book, but Kennedy devotes nearly as much attention to the self-proclaimed Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, the powerful Indian trader William Panton, and the minor American diplomat Fulwar Skipwith.But this book also suffers from the same shortcomings as its predecessors. The organization is idiosyncratic, with the author generally providing little advance warning of its many twists and turns. The citations are to what Kennedy describes, with joyous disdain for standard scholarly practice, as "the most accessible source"-generally partial quotations reproduced in monographs and articles rather than complete documents in microfilmed or published collections (307). As a result, many of his quotes lack the context that would help to explain them. The book also is rife with basic factual errors. Kennedy discusses the end of slavery in Delaware as something that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century (54), refers to Federalist domination of Congress in 1783 (65), and suggests that Jefferson was angling for the presidency in 1785 (75). And, even though all of his quotes on the subject come from early 1804, Kennedy dates the Hillhouse debates over slavery in Louisiana to 1805-06 (210-13). Most distressingly, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause displays Kennedy's tendency to dismiss any evidence that contradicts his own view. The moralizing is heavy-handed, and any mitigating circumstances that might rescue its targets from opprobrium are either heavily discounted or entirely ignored.Kennedy directs his anger at Jefferson, blaming him for the spread of slavery and, ultimately, for the Civil War. According to Kennedy, "the most important choices made by any single statesman for the future of the South arose from the preferences, prejudices, and policies of Thomas Jefferson" (236). "Different outcomes" in the various contests over the expansion of slavery in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, he argues, "might have . …

Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration from Mexico to the United States

Abstract: Preamble In this article we show how the twentieth-century appearance of a Chicano minority population in the United States originated from the subordination of the nation of Mexico to U.S. economic and political interests. We argue that, far from being marginal to the course of modern U.S. history, the Chicano minority, an immigrant people, stands at the center both of that history and of a process of imperial expansionism that originated in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and that continues today.

Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground: The Indian Land Cession Treaties of William Henry Harrison

Abstract: Analyzing Indian treaties in the early republic presents a number of difficulties, especially when they involve the enigmatic third president. Thomas Jefferson wanted to preserve native peoples, but not native cultures. He wanted to treat Indians with justice. Justice, however, always proved secondary to the desire for America's constantly expanding "Empire for Liberty." Jefferson rationalized mightily, deciding that Indians would be healthier and happier as small yeoman farmers, and systematically ignored all evidence to the contrary. In this way, Jefferson convinced himself that Indian land sales provided a scenario where all parties benefited. Although Jefferson publicly insisted that he would only purchase lands that Indians willingly sold, he showed little hesitation in squeezing tribal leaders until they ceded their territory.1 In Jefferson and the Indians, Anthony F. C. Wallace asserts that President Jefferson served as the architect for American territorial expansion and the Indian Removal period. For Wallace, Jefferson's controlling personality proved the driving force behind America's settlement and Indian policy in the early nineteenth century. Though Jefferson touted himself as a beacon of liberty, a malevolent element in his personality showed through in his determination to acquire Indian lands by any means necessary. On the other side of the issue, Bernard Sheehan's Seeds of Extinction and Francis Paul Prucha's The Great Father argue that though Jefferson's Indian policy did treat Indians poorly on many occasions, it emanated from a philanthropic, if confused, set of motives.2 Although not always in agreement, both camps offer compelling insights into Jefferson's abstract motives regarding America's territorial expansion. That they tend to express surprise and regret at the victory of Jeffersonian land hunger over Jeffersonian benevolence, however, reveals that they have privileged the president's seductive prose over the crucial role played by his lieutenants on the frontier. A detailed analysis of the actions of one such lieutenant offers another perspective. William Henry Harrison's career as governor of Indiana Territory demonstrates that Jefferson's lofty ideals for civilization and justice were routinely trumped by his consistent support of ardent expansionists on the ground. The land cession treaties Harrison negotiated in Indiana Territory from 1803 to 1809 provide an excellent case study of how Jefferson's policy, formed in Washington, worked in practice on the frontier. Created in 1800, when Harrison was just twenty-seven years old, Indiana Territory originally comprised the future states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. During Harrison's twelve-year tenure Congress continually pared this territory down to essentially the present-day boundaries of the state of Indiana. Appointed by the president rather than elected by local citizens, a territorial governor wielded considerable power. Harrison also was appointed the superintendent of Indian affairs in the territory, and the U. S. commissioner plenipotentiary for concluding treaties with the Indians north of the Ohio River.3 Thus, as long as he maintained the confidence of the president, Harrison could place his own stamp on Indian policy in the Northwest. Had Indians in the early nineteenth-century Northwest been fully adapted to American concepts of law, authority, and land ownership, they still would have been at a disadvantage because of the unique history of the region. The Iroquois Wars of the seventeenth century depopulated the Ohio Valley, and it was only slowly reinhabited. Northwest Indians simply could not point to centuries-long habitation in one area (though some groups, such as the Shawnees, can trace their pre-Columbian roots there through modern archaeology). Also, villages in this region tended to be conglomerations of Indians from different nations, rather than purely Delaware or Miami. Finally, Indians faced the problem of an American government that arbitrarily accepted one tribe's land claims as legitimate over another's when it proved advantageous for a treaty cession. …

Are We Chimerical in this Opinion? Visions of a Pacific Railroad and Westward Expansion before 1845

Abstract: Although he deserves credit for promoting a transcontinental railroad as early as 1845, Asa Whitney may better represent the culmination of a discourse that had begun over twenty years earlier. Visions of a Pacific railroad originated in the 1820s and evolved into a widely debated issue by the 1830s. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, early promoters not only envisioned railroads to Oregon but also into the Mexican provinces of California and Sonora——suggesting that such visions represented an important element of U.S. expansionism. Relying on romantically charged language, advocates ignored geographical and political realities and wedded their vision with a faith in railroad technology that was yet in its infancy. Wishing to lay claim to the perceived riches of the Asian trade, advocates described the Pacific railroad as a commercial venture, preceding actual settlement. Northerners generally promoted routes to Oregon, while the South sought California and Sonora as destinations, but these contending visions should not be confused with the sectionalism that characterized the debates over the railroad during the 1850s. Instead, the differences present in the discourse of the 1830s largely reflect civic boosterism. While scholars have noted these earlier visionaries, this article analyzes their ideas and places them in the context of U.S. expansion to the Pacific.

"I Saw Everything but Could Comprehend Nothing": Melville's Typee, Travel Narrative, and Colonial Discourse

Abstract: Typee is Melville's "preface to his brief against civilization" (Anderson 132), which he was later to develop more comprehensively and devastatingly in Moby-Dick, Pierre, and much of his later fiction. As the use of the word `preface' suggests, in Typee Melville explores the consequences and ideological implications of capitalism and imperialism, in fact of European civilization, in a preliminary manner, without the apparent depth of subtlety and complexity of his later works. The absence of a fully realized radical critique could be blamed on Melville's position within colonial discourse, (1) particularly as evidenced by his choice of literary genre (the travel story), but such a simplistic analysis fails to fully appreciate Melville's complex negotiation and interrogation of his position within both discourse and genre. Typee recognizes its own implication in the imperialist-capitalist project that is the subject of its critique, yet it maintains the possibility of transcending Melville's imperial subjectivity and, at the very least, of evading personal responsibility for the destruction that Europeans are causing and will continue to cause in the South Seas. Typee works to negotiate this potential contradiction through a subversive misprision of one of the central literary genres of colonialist discourse, the travel story. However, although Melville's book does provide a powerful critique of European behavior in the South Seas in particular, and of European civilization in general, it must be recognized that Typee ultimately seems to work toward the reification of the consciousness of the imperial subject through its internalization of colonialist discourse. As a result, its anti-imperial critique is ultimately imbricated with imperial hegemony. In fact, the very nature of its critique reproduces the very conditions and assumptions that it seems to subvert. Typee, then, is the ambiguous story of Melville's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to subvert European civilization through a self-conscious participation in colonialist discourse, particularly through an often parodic and ironic (re)writing of travel narrative. The travel story is one of the oldest stories of the Western literary tradition; both fictional and ostensibly factual accounts of travel have been produced with great consistency and recurrent popularity over the ages. The centrality of the travel story in the European imagination signals its ideological significance in the production and reproduction of European consciousness, particularly in the period of European expansionism that lasted from approximately the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Mary Louise Pratt illustrates in detail "how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world went (and go) about creating the `domestic subject' of Euroimperialism [and] how they have engaged metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the few" (4). Travel writing was one of a number of literary practices (such as journalism, ethnographic writing, and the adventure story) that not only played a crucial role in representing `the world' to those at `home' but were made possible as a result of the infrastructure necessitated by the institutional support of European expansionism and imperialism. As Edward Said writes, "the arts and disciplines of representation ... depended on the powers of Europe to bring the non-European world into representations, the better to be able to see it, to master it, and, above all, to hold it" (Culture and Imperialism 99). In addition to travel writing's institutional links to the administration of imperialism, travel writers actively participated in imperialism through their attempt to represent the world to the readers at home. The travel writer acted as what Pratt labels the "seeing-man" (7), classifying, assigning value, interpreting, exoticizing, and normalizing those cultures with which he comes into contact. …

Kim : authoritative text, backgrounds, criticism

Abstract: The text-that of the 1901 Sussex Edition-is fully annotated and accompanied by three maps that help students place the novel in geographical and historical contexts. "Backgrounds" explores the novel's complicated issues of multiculturalism, imperialism, and racism, allowing readers to glimpse Kipling's personal thoughts about British expansionism. Included are two short stories, poems, and letters by Kipling, as well as autobiographical and biographical memoirs and contemporary reviews of Kim. "Criticism" collects fourteen wide-ranging assessments of the novel by Noel Annan, Irving Howe, Edward Said, Ian Baucom, A. Michael Matin, John A. McClure, Anne Parry, Michael Hollington, Parama Roy, Sara Suleri, Patrick Williams, Suvir Kaul, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, and Zohreh T. Sullivan. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

Restraint or Self-Restraint of Russia: Nicholas I, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, and the Vienna System, 1832–1841

Abstract: observers have often considered Russia to be persistently expansionist, especially during the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825-55). When Russian warships entered the Bosporus in 1833, to leave five months later with a Russo-Ottoman treaty of alliance, the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, they helped to turn the British foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston, into a Russophobe.1 This view of Russia's habits, whether attributed to geography, political system, or culture, survives to the present day. To Richard Pipes, Russian expansionism seems ;not a phase but a constant'.2 Similarly, John P. LeDonne, who sees an eighteenth-century 'expansionist urge that would remain unabated until 1917', argues that any apparent self-restraint should be attributed to containment: 'There is no greater misreading of Nicholas Ps foreign policy than to see it dominated by the pursuit of "honor", by respect for treaties and the determination to maintain the status quo.'3 If this is a misreading, it is a common one. For more than a hundred years, it has been acknowledged that Russian policy had shifted by the late 1820s from partitioning the Ottoman Empire to preserving the Ottoman dynasty under St Petersburg's thumb.4 The more interesting question is why. Paul W. Schroeder has recently challenged the notion that the European states' self-restraint during the Vienna system can be explained by the operation of a balance-of-power system. Neither Britain nor Russia, he

Marecheran Postmodernism: Mocking the Bad Joke of "African Modernity".

Abstract: Summary This discussion begins by setting up a critique of the modernisation project of the West as closely entwined with territorial expansionism and the development of racial arrogance ‐ with reference to a range of theorists. The role of modernism (in literature) is recognised as simultaneously an exposure of territorial and racial power factors at work in the European modernisation project, and as (to some extent) complicit in them. The text used here to exemplify the paradoxical role of European modernism is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Since Marechera in carnivalesque fashion parodies Conrad's novella in the opening pages of his novel Black Sunlight, discussing this text introduces the topic of Marechera's particular kind of postmodernism with its focus on the modernisation project, in the African context, as a form of betrayal. The rest of the essay examines The Black Insider ‐ a novel of debate in which the displacement of African intellectuals is addressed in a similar style of grotesque mockery b...

American Beauty, Gladiator, and the New Imperial Humanitarianism.

Abstract: In his essay “Cowboys and Free Markets,” Stanley Corkin historically situates U.S. imperial discourses in the Western film genre. Popular during a time of post-war U.S. global expansionism, the Western re-elaborates the cultural “need for settlement and nationalism” (68). According to Corkin, this thematic appears in all Westerns. But the post-World War II era in America makes particular use of the genre: “the repressed dimension of westerns is their relationship to imperialism—and it is their indirect means of considering such activity that makes them the genre of the period” (71). During the post-war shift toward an aggressive U.S. expansionism (militarily, economically, and politically), a suitable cultural metaphor for explaining national policy to the larger population was found in the frontier trope of the Western. The geography of the old-west is physically outside socialization and civilization, and it provides a place “in which individuals of magnitude can assert their sense of order” (72).

Membership Denied: Subordination and Subjugation Under United States Expansionism

Abstract: This Article discusses how the colonial status of citizens who reside in United States island territories denies them voting rights and representation in the United States government, among other benefits of citizenship. The suggestion that to the inhabitants of United States territories, being a part of the United States does not necessarily mean being a member of this country’s body politic, may appear to be unbelievable because Americans typically cannot imagine that any, let alone millions, of United States citizens are denied key rights. The American psyche does not associate colonialism with the United States, yet in the era of self-determination and in the decade dedicated to the eradication of colonialism, the leader of the free world and great emancipator of the oppressed has maintained a colonial regime. The individuals who exist in this disenfranchised status are the peoples of the island groups of Puerto Rico, the American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. This country has maintained its possessions and fostered the disenfranchised status through the use of certain psychological tools which will be labeled as: (1) citizenship status, (2) international status, and (3) economic dependency and American idealism. These tools have convinced the United States mainland citizens, the international community, and the conquered that the United States’ relationship with the conquered territorial peoples is not colonial. Some labels used in persuading conquered peoples of their membership in the United States body politic are “statutory citizen” and “national.” The United States has also found approval for its fictitious grant of autonomy or sovereignty by using thinly veiled euphemisms for colony, such as “commonwealth status,” “federated states,” and “free association.” These psychological or hegemonic creations have fostered an anomalous and oxymoronic existence because these peoples are neither members of the American family, nor are they members of free and autonomous sovereign nations.

Quebec and Latin America Reaffirm Priorities

Abstract: Differing Views of Quebec and Latin America In April 2001, the Summit of the Americas was held in Quebec City and was attended by representatives, high-level politicians, and civil servants of the United States, Canada, and all nations of Latin America save Cuba. The object of this meeting was to continue discussing the principal aspects of a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas, to be negotiated and concluded by the thirty-four countries on the Latin American continent before the year 2005. The fact that the province of Quebec was the meeting place for this summit meeting was not a random choice, since Latin America has been a point of political, social, cultural, and economic reference at different levels of Quebec society for more than seventy years. Added to this line of reasoning is the fact that, when building its identity imagery, Latin America has always been a referential concept for Quebec (Gay 1983; Saragossi 1996). Most analyses of the character and history of relations between the province of Quebec and the countries of Latin America affirm that such interest has appeared even more clearly since the Quiet Revolution. In fact, many principles of Quebec's international policy were born during this period and it is logical, therefore, that Latin America should hold an important place within this vision (Mace 1989,1993; Therien, Belanger, Gosselin 1994; Donneur 1994; Balthazar 1993). But, as I will show here, the origins of this relationship go back to the middle of the nineteenth century when, in 1867, four of Britain's North American colonies--Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island--disputed in Quebec City "the possibilities offered by the Mexican market as a commercial alternative to the expansionism of United States' markets" (Gutierrez-Haces 1997). Even so, Quebec's presence in Latin America cannot be characterized as a continuous one, nor can it be said that its presence has touched most of the countries on the American continent, much less can it be affirmed that it has always manifested the same impetus, or that it has always carried the same weight. This is explained when we take into consideration the traits characterizing its own history, as well as the degree of Quebec's political and economic development during its transit within the confederation of Canada. The purpose of this paper is to draw up an analysis and at the same time a re-reading--from the point of view of a Latin-American intellectual--of the significance of the impact Latin America has had on Quebec in four aspects considered as key to developing its international policy. -- The right justifying Quebec's claim as a province for extending its internal sphere of competence to Latin America. -- The inclination shown in Quebec, both individually and as a society, to consider Latin America, Latin Americans, and everything Latin American as a real space and image, in which it can test its ideals and values, and reaffirm its identity. -- The way Latin America has inspired political and social discussion in Quebec on oppression and its exclusion. -- The possibility Latin America offers Quebec to test its discussion of Quebec as a modem and more aggressive society economically than the rest of Canada. Because other authors in this same issue are analyzing Quebec's international policies and its relations with the United States, Europe, and Asia, my focus here is limited to examining what has occurred in Latin America. Paradoxically, the large bibliography of Canadian and Quebec authors proved to be greater than that existing in Latin America, when counting papers devoted to this type of analysis (Mace and Goulet 1996). In fact, the intellectual interest aroused by Quebec in Latin American circles has been limited mainly to literary and cultural aspects, which for decades have been widely supported, thanks to Quebec's Francophone-linked policy. …

The Russian Drive to the East and the Islamic Eurasia

Abstract: Normal 0 false false false EN-MY X-NONE AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Although the contemporary post-Soviet Russian policy towards the Pacific has changed significantly in the last decade of the 20 th century, the Old Orthodox Slavocentric tradition of “mission in the East” remains unchanged. Russia still did not discover that military might gives only an illusion of influence. And the Russian Peril is still real despite the political, economic and cultural decline of the “evil empire.” This historical survey of Russia’s expansionism in the Northeastern Asia Pacific Rim attempts to look at the realm of colliding cultures, ideologies and religions in a larger context of the hegemonic policy of the Tzarist/Soviet/Neo-Russian empire, from an Islamic civilizational perspective. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}