Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0029
M. Wight
Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.
{"title":"Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115484026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0005
M. Wight
Wight composed this note to make clear three caveats about his exposition of three main traditions of thinking about international politics in Western societies since the sixteenth century (Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism). First, the sources considered include not only works by theorists and international lawyers, but also statements and policies of politicians. Second, it is imperative to avoid ‘the hypostatization of categories’—that is, ‘taking a classificatory system too seriously and too concretely’ and attributing objective reality to intellectual concepts. The views of specific thinkers are more valuable than generalizations about shared opinions in categories or claims of progress in philosophical understanding over the centuries. Third, the scholar’s role concerning value judgements in this effort to elucidate the three traditions consists of ‘exposition and comparison, not criticism in any sense of propounding theory’ for the critical assessment of the ideas expressed in these traditions.
{"title":"Three Questions of Methodology","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Wight composed this note to make clear three caveats about his exposition of three main traditions of thinking about international politics in Western societies since the sixteenth century (Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism). First, the sources considered include not only works by theorists and international lawyers, but also statements and policies of politicians. Second, it is imperative to avoid ‘the hypostatization of categories’—that is, ‘taking a classificatory system too seriously and too concretely’ and attributing objective reality to intellectual concepts. The views of specific thinkers are more valuable than generalizations about shared opinions in categories or claims of progress in philosophical understanding over the centuries. Third, the scholar’s role concerning value judgements in this effort to elucidate the three traditions consists of ‘exposition and comparison, not criticism in any sense of propounding theory’ for the critical assessment of the ideas expressed in these traditions.","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121683996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0011
M. Wight
In this note Wight describes pendulum swings in opinion about the requirements of justice in war in Western civilization since the Middle Ages. Medieval Catholicism emphasized the righteousness of the ruler’s cause and asserted orthodoxy against infidels or heretics. Prominent writers on international law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Gentili, Grotius, and Vattel) marked a shift toward secularization and rationalism (with both sides usually able to claim justice) and restraint in the laws of war governing the methods of combat. Moser’s study of international law, published in 1777–1780, was representative of an ‘age of positivism’ (1763–1918) in which all sovereign states had a right to resort to war or to remain neutral, while codifying obligations concerning the conduct of war. The Covenant of the League of Nations, signed in 1919, initiated a return to restrictions on the right to resort to war, reinforced by the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, also known as the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, which was upheld by the Nuremberg Tribunals. The Covenant ruled out aggression as unjust, while action in defence of the Covenant would be just by enforcing collective security. The Soviet Union reintroduced Holy War with its view of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the Cold War as just causes that advanced Communist revolutionary objectives. Counter-force strategies of nuclear deterrence may be regarded as strengthening restraint in the methods of war, compared to counter-value or ‘anti-city’ approaches.
在这篇笔记中，怀特描述了自中世纪以来西方文明中关于战争中正义要求的观点的摇摆。中世纪的天主教强调统治者事业的正义性，主张正统反对异教徒或异端。17和18世纪著名的国际法作家(真蒂利、格劳修斯和瓦泰尔)标志着一种向世俗化和理性主义(双方通常都能主张正义)的转变，并在战争法中约束作战方法。莫泽对国际法的研究发表于1777年至1780年，是“实证主义时代”(1763年至1918年)的代表，在这个时代，所有主权国家都有权诉诸战争或保持中立，同时编纂有关战争行为的义务。1919年签署的《国际联盟盟约》(Covenant of The League of Nations)开始重新限制诉诸战争的权利，1928年的《凯洛格-布里安条约》(Kellogg-Briand Pact)加强了这一限制。《凯洛格-布里安条约》又称《放弃战争作为国家政策工具的总条约》(General Treaty for放弃战争作为国家政策工具)得到了纽伦堡法庭(Nuremberg tribunal)的支持。《盟约》排除了侵略是不公正的，而维护《盟约》的行动通过加强集体安全将是公正的。苏联将卫国战争(第二次世界大战)和冷战视为推进共产主义革命目标的正义事业，重新引入了圣战。与反价值或“反城市”方法相比，核威慑的反力量战略可以被视为加强战争方法中的克制。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0025
M. Wight
Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’
{"title":"Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128459639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0001
M. Wight
This volume of Wight’s collected works brings together various writings concerning the political philosophy of international relations. Wight identified three traditions of thinking about international politics since the sixteenth century—Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, which have become well known thanks to his 1991 posthumous volume, International Theory: The Three Traditions. The current volume includes several works on the same ‘international theory’ theme, some previously published and some never-before-published, with ‘Is There a Philosophy of Statesmanship?’ in the latter category. This volume also includes three essays by Wight on the causes and functions of war in international politics. Wight prepared several papers on legitimacy in domestic and international politics, and this volume features five never-before-published papers on this theme. Wight qualified his orderly analyses of traditions of political philosophy, the causes and functions of war, and principles of domestic and international legitimacy by drawing attention to unpredictable ‘wild card’ factors such as fortune and irony in his paper in this collection entitled ‘Fortune’s Banter’. Unintended, unexpected, and ironical consequences abound in international politics, despite efforts to master the dynamics of history. In view of the many factors behind events, including economic and demographic developments, Wight expressed qualifications about the role of ideas. He nonetheless concluded that ‘in historical retrospect, the philosophies of statesmen do seem observably to colour their policies’.
{"title":"Introduction: Martin Wight and the Political Philosophy of International Relations","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This volume of Wight’s collected works brings together various writings concerning the political philosophy of international relations. Wight identified three traditions of thinking about international politics since the sixteenth century—Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, which have become well known thanks to his 1991 posthumous volume, International Theory: The Three Traditions. The current volume includes several works on the same ‘international theory’ theme, some previously published and some never-before-published, with ‘Is There a Philosophy of Statesmanship?’ in the latter category. This volume also includes three essays by Wight on the causes and functions of war in international politics. Wight prepared several papers on legitimacy in domestic and international politics, and this volume features five never-before-published papers on this theme. Wight qualified his orderly analyses of traditions of political philosophy, the causes and functions of war, and principles of domestic and international legitimacy by drawing attention to unpredictable ‘wild card’ factors such as fortune and irony in his paper in this collection entitled ‘Fortune’s Banter’. Unintended, unexpected, and ironical consequences abound in international politics, despite efforts to master the dynamics of history. In view of the many factors behind events, including economic and demographic developments, Wight expressed qualifications about the role of ideas. He nonetheless concluded that ‘in historical retrospect, the philosophies of statesmen do seem observably to colour their policies’.","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129675844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0030
M. Wight
Wight suggests that Aron’s book, first published in 1962, has not won the recognition it deserves, owing in part to ‘Anglo-American intellectual insularity’ and ‘the massiveness of the book itself’. Wight praises Aron for grounding his work in history: ‘Rich in historical reference, it abounds equally in acute analysis.’ The book raises the questions of preventing and containing nuclear war. ‘Cautiously, tentatively, himself a political Clausewitz, Aron accumulates the considerations which may make it possible that a nuclear war would not expand to its fullest violence.’ Wight shares Aron’s judgement that, ‘if war should come, we can still seek to restrict violence. Aron repeatedly asserts the indeterminacy of politics. Diplomacy is the realm of the contingent and the unforeseen, and the statesman’s supreme virtue is prudence, which means acting in accordance with the concrete data of the particular situation.’
{"title":"Review of Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations translated by Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967)","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Wight suggests that Aron’s book, first published in 1962, has not won the recognition it deserves, owing in part to ‘Anglo-American intellectual insularity’ and ‘the massiveness of the book itself’. Wight praises Aron for grounding his work in history: ‘Rich in historical reference, it abounds equally in acute analysis.’ The book raises the questions of preventing and containing nuclear war. ‘Cautiously, tentatively, himself a political Clausewitz, Aron accumulates the considerations which may make it possible that a nuclear war would not expand to its fullest violence.’ Wight shares Aron’s judgement that, ‘if war should come, we can still seek to restrict violence. Aron repeatedly asserts the indeterminacy of politics. Diplomacy is the realm of the contingent and the unforeseen, and the statesman’s supreme virtue is prudence, which means acting in accordance with the concrete data of the particular situation.’","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126612700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0007
M. Wight
This essay surveys the political fluidity and antagonism in the triangular relationship among the main power groupings in March 1939—the Soviet Union, the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), and the Western Powers (Britain and France above all). Rather than focusing on their military capabilities and combat options, the essay concentrates on the ideas expressed in each camp—in the Western Powers, interest in the rule of law and constitutionalism; in the Axis Powers, ambitions for territorial acquisitions and increased might; and in the Soviet Union, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary vision. In conjunction with this three-cornered dialogue, the essay examines factors in addition to ideas that influenced decision-making, including greed, coercion, resentments, power pressures, national egoisms, dependence on allies, and perceived security imperatives. Three combinations were hypothetically possible: a Nazi–Soviet alliance, a Soviet–Western alliance, or a Nazi–Western alliance. In August 1939, Nazi Germany offered the Soviet Union a non-aggression pact that enabled Moscow to seize territories in Eastern Europe and to limit its immediate involvement in combat. Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought about a Soviet–Western alliance determined to defeat the Axis, despite the chasm between Soviet totalitarianism and Western democracy.
{"title":"The Balance of Power in The World in March 1939","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This essay surveys the political fluidity and antagonism in the triangular relationship among the main power groupings in March 1939—the Soviet Union, the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), and the Western Powers (Britain and France above all). Rather than focusing on their military capabilities and combat options, the essay concentrates on the ideas expressed in each camp—in the Western Powers, interest in the rule of law and constitutionalism; in the Axis Powers, ambitions for territorial acquisitions and increased might; and in the Soviet Union, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary vision. In conjunction with this three-cornered dialogue, the essay examines factors in addition to ideas that influenced decision-making, including greed, coercion, resentments, power pressures, national egoisms, dependence on allies, and perceived security imperatives. Three combinations were hypothetically possible: a Nazi–Soviet alliance, a Soviet–Western alliance, or a Nazi–Western alliance. In August 1939, Nazi Germany offered the Soviet Union a non-aggression pact that enabled Moscow to seize territories in Eastern Europe and to limit its immediate involvement in combat. Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought about a Soviet–Western alliance determined to defeat the Axis, despite the chasm between Soviet totalitarianism and Western democracy.","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129396154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0024
M. Wight
Professor Carr relies on an antithesis: ‘Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of Utopia and reality, of morality and power.’ Carr provides ‘the most comprehensive modern restatement, other than Marxist or Fascist, of the Hobbesian view of politics. It is from politics that both morality and law derive their authority. For Hobbes, the kingdom of the fairies was the Roman Catholic Church, seducing mankind with its enchantments. For Professor Carr, it is the League of Nations, which is no other than the ghost of the deceased Pax Britannica.’ Carr’s tome is ‘the one lasting intellectual monument of the policy of appeasement’. The first edition, published in 1939, praised Chamberlain’s policy as ‘a reaction of realism against Utopianism’, and defended the 1938 Munich agreement whereby Britain, France, Germany, and Italy agreed to the cession to Berlin of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In the 1946 second edition ‘these passages are omitted’, Wight notes. ‘Wielding the realist critique at the expense of the moral critique, it is natural that Professor Carr should have moved since 1939 from support of collaboration with Germany to support of collaboration with Russia. But the Teheran–Yalta theory of world relationships is itself being swept from present realism into past Utopianism.’ In Wight’s view, ‘The student could have no better introduction to the fundamental problems of politics, provided always that he reads it side by side with Mr. Leonard Woolf’s deadly reply in “The War for Peace”.’
{"title":"Review of E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1946)","authors":"M. Wight","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Professor Carr relies on an antithesis: ‘Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of Utopia and reality, of morality and power.’ Carr provides ‘the most comprehensive modern restatement, other than Marxist or Fascist, of the Hobbesian view of politics. It is from politics that both morality and law derive their authority. For Hobbes, the kingdom of the fairies was the Roman Catholic Church, seducing mankind with its enchantments. For Professor Carr, it is the League of Nations, which is no other than the ghost of the deceased Pax Britannica.’ Carr’s tome is ‘the one lasting intellectual monument of the policy of appeasement’. The first edition, published in 1939, praised Chamberlain’s policy as ‘a reaction of realism against Utopianism’, and defended the 1938 Munich agreement whereby Britain, France, Germany, and Italy agreed to the cession to Berlin of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In the 1946 second edition ‘these passages are omitted’, Wight notes. ‘Wielding the realist critique at the expense of the moral critique, it is natural that Professor Carr should have moved since 1939 from support of collaboration with Germany to support of collaboration with Russia. But the Teheran–Yalta theory of world relationships is itself being swept from present realism into past Utopianism.’ In Wight’s view, ‘The student could have no better introduction to the fundamental problems of politics, provided always that he reads it side by side with Mr. Leonard Woolf’s deadly reply in “The War for Peace”.’","PeriodicalId":126645,"journal":{"name":"International Relations and Political Philosophy","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123378086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0021
M. Wight
In this note Wight provided a brief survey of institutions for the conquest and cession of territories, illustrated by examples in European history since the fifteenth century. Some legal and political forms concealed de facto conquest and cession to spare the amour propre of the losing party and thereby minimize its humiliation. In some cases, enfeoffment combined conquest with continuing vassal status. Other methods of saving face and bargaining over status included granting an imperial vicariate, diplomatically evading the issue, camouflaging the cession, and making the cession conditional. Conquest and cession became more direct and undisguised with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, if not earlier. Since the eighteenth century, however, the consent of the residents of the territory to be ceded has become a more prominent issue. Since 1919 disregard for previous approaches to conquest and cession has led to new political and legal frameworks on recognition involving national policies such as the Stimson Doctrine, international treaties such as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198848219.003.0028
M. Wight
Wight described this book as a ‘primer or introduction’ to American realism concerning international politics, with attention to the views of Halle, Kennan, Lippmann, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Nitze, and Spykman, among others. Thompson highlights continuities with traditional diplomatic theory, illustrated notably by Churchill’s statesmanship and political philosophy. In Wight’s view the book presents ‘original thinking of a high order’. Moreover, Thompson ‘brings out more clearly than some realists the limitations of the “national interest” principle’. Wight concludes that Thompson stands out as ‘a realist of the centre, likely neither to be accused of disparaging morality, nor to be so emotionally disturbed by the consequences of clear vision that he emigrates for Utopia.’
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