British Journal of Politics & International Relations最新文献

This article

• Contributes to the debate on British Foreign and Security Policy;
• Contributes to the literature on the British National Security Strategy;
• Links international relations literature with domestic policy formation literature;
• Introduces the concept of ‘legitimacy’ to foreign and security policy analysis.

The publication of the Britain's first National Security Strategy (NSS) in 2008 marked a formal shift away from the secret state of the Cold War to the highly public protective state of today. This article is interested in the question of why the NSS and related framework have taken this particular public and explicit form. Both mainstream and critically minded academics have argued that contemporary security discourses and policies are techniques of power and governance and that the public nature of the policies is vital to this function. In this article, I argue that there has been a transformation in the nature of the British state from a representative state in which the state's authority was legitimated through a number of political mechanisms of representation, to one in which state elites and institutions need to forge new kinds of relationships with the governed. This is a key development that has been noticed in political, sociological and legal theoretical literature but as yet hardly addressed in international relations and security studies. This transformation of the state, I will argue, is intimately linked to the form and content of contemporary security policies. The contemporary state is undergoing a process of an erosion of legitimacy, which has a direct impact upon the capacity of the state to govern. In this context, policies take on the role of trying to bridge the legitimacy gap. I will argue that this shift in the state leads to a different understanding of contemporary security policies as representative of a decreasing ability to govern security, a state that is losing legitimacy and authority; that is in effect, losing its sovereignty. This article argues that British national security strategies and policies are representative of this.

This article

• Formulates an ideal-typical model for filling out the implicit content of claims about the national interest;
• Applies a theoretical perspective on the national interest to New Labour's foreign policy discourse, focusing especially on its approach to global order;
• Shows how Gordon Brown, especially, extended the content of the national interest well beyond its traditional association with national security, narrowly construed;
• Provides tools for interrogating claims about the national interest and for holding politicians to account in respect of such claims.

Discussion of the national interest often focuses on how Britain's influence can be maximized, rather than on the goals that influence serves. Yet what gives content to claims about the national interest is the means-ends reasoning which links interests to deeper goals. In ideal-typical terms, this can take two forms. The first, and more common, approach is conservative: it infers national interests and the goals they advance from existing policies and commitments. The second is reformist: it starts by specifying national goals and then asks how they are best advanced under particular conditions. New Labour's foreign policy discourse is notable for its explicit use of a reformist approach. Indeed, Gordon Brown's vision of a ‘new global society’ not only identifies global reform as a key means of fulfilling national goals, but also thereby extends the concept of the national interest well beyond a narrow concern with national security.

This article

• Contributes to the debates applying Foucauldian theory to contemporary British Politics and invigorates the debate through a discussion with Bulley and Sokhi Bulley
• Develops understandings of contemporary British Politics under the Coalition government, particularly in light of the ‘Big Society’ project.
• Compares, through a Foucauldian framework, the differences and similarities between the New Labour (1997–2010) and Coalition (2010–) Governments
• Ultimately argues that the Coalition Government is demonstrative of a hybrid of the neo-liberal governmentality typical of the New Labour governments and a partial reversion to a more rudimentary Thatcherite form of neo-liberal governmentality.

This article is a reply to Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley's recent article on the Big Society. We put forward two main criticisms of Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley's governmentality-focused approach in our alternative reading of the Big Society. Firstly, we argue that, given the ethopolitical strategies Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley focus their attention on are unlikely to produce the kind of transformation in the ethical outlook of citizens they suppose, the real historical significance of the Big Society must lie elsewhere. Secondly, we argue that Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley overlook the lines of continuity and discontinuity linking the Big Society to the forms of neo-liberal governmentality that have preceded it in British politics. In the final section of the article, we argue that the Cameron project amounts to both a partial continuation of the type of neo-liberal governmental rationality characteristic of the New Labour project and a partial reversion to a more rudimentary Thatcherite form of neo-liberal governmentality.

• Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article provides the first nationally representative and systematic study of victims' views on how to deal with the past;
• Focusing specifically on Northern Ireland, it both investigates and provides a comprehensive account of the marked divisions between the various religious groupings—Protestants, Catholics and the non-affiliated—in terms of a range of truth recovery mechanisms to deal with legacy of its violent past;
• It empirically investigates and validates two key predictors—perceptions of victimhood and general attitudes towards the past—in determining the source of these divisions
• It outlines the implications of our findings for other societies emerging from conflict.

Truth recovery mechanisms have become a cornerstone of peacebuilding efforts in societies emerging from conflict. Yet, to date, the view of victims in post-conflict societies concerning such arrangements remains highly anecdotal and often second-hand in nature. Mindful of this omission and using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article investigates the views of victims towards a range of mechanisms to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland's violent past. Based on the 2011 Northern Ireland Social and Political Attitudes Survey, the results suggest some marked divisions in relation to this issue, with victims within the Catholic community being significantly more supportive of such initiatives than either Protestants or those with no religion. Moreover, while perceptions of victimhood emerge as the key predictor of attitudes among Protestants and the non-affiliated, general opinions on how to deal with the past are the key determinant of views among members of the Catholic community.

• This article focuses on the banking crisis in the US and UK.
• It is essential to understand banker agency and the institutional and structural contexts which shaped such agency.
• Bankers experienced variegated patters of constraint and opportunity. At one level institutional theories that emphasise institutional constraint cannot easily account for the authority and agency enjoyed by key bankers.
• On the other hand, bankers were heavily influenced by institutional change in the shape of market ‘liberalisation’, which produced intense levels of competition and pressures to achieve higher profit returns: an exacting form of market discipline.

Bankers and financiers in the US and UK modified institutions and revolutionised the banking industry prior to the 2007-8 crisis. These agents were however heavily constrained and eventually overwhelmed by institutional pressures and wider structural forces that encouraged high-risk leveraged trading and which generated systemic risk. To account for this, institutional theory needs to incorporate a broader canvas of conditioning contexts, particularly the impact of structural or systemic forces on agents and the way in which these are actualised as a form of ‘ecosystem power’.

• Contrary to conventional analyses, the British Labour Party most closely pursued a ‘median voter’ strategy before 1994, to little success.
• ‘Globalisation-as-inevitability’ was a key organising trope of ‘New Labour’ discourse across the subsequent Blair and Brown eras.
• Globalisation was represented in public texts in a way that buttressed New Labour's new strategic agenda of emphasising economic competence and pragmatism over ideology.
• The globalisation discourse also changed over time, containing greater emphases on the constraining effect of globalisation after Labour came to power in 1997.
• New Labour's risky rhetorical support for the EU was linked to globalisation claims and further served to distinguish Labour modernisation from Tory dogmatism.

At the Labour Party conference in 2005, Tony Blair declared that debating globalisation would be like debating ‘whether autumn should follow summer’. This articulation of the imperatives of a newly-globalised world was central to the creation of ‘New’ Labour. How should we understand this turn from the autonomous socialism promised a generation earlier? In this article, I propose that Labour's discourse was produced in response to strategic demands of political competition. Synthesising Riker's concept of heresthetics with insights from discourse analysis, the article proposes parties as discursive-herestheticians who constructively use rhetorical tropes to achieve concrete ends. This approach is applied to Labour through qualitative textual analysis of speeches and documents, read in the context of electoral strategy. The analysis produces an alternative interpretation of New Labour strategy that serves as a corrective to the ‘cartel party’ account of Labour having abandoned real political competition in favour of the centre ground.

This article

• Examines the global financial crisis through the larger lens of the optimal models of growth for the Anglo-American political economies.
• Offers a concise yet thorough synthesis of two major explanations—the debt-driven growth hypothesis and the financial instability hypothesis—of the global financial crisis.
• Analyzes substantial empirical evidence for both hypotheses, calling into question the utility of the widely cited debt-driven growth hypothesis.
• Offers a novel interpretation of how the financial instability hypothesis can in fact be interpreted as showing the potential for stabilizing the neoliberal model of growth through macroprudential financial regulation.
• Outlines the major elements and institutions of macroprudential regulation and examines both the potential and pitfalls of this approach.

For many, the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) signaled the end of neoliberalism. This article argues that the crash was less the exhaustion of the free market model as a problem of excessive credit. Focusing on Anglo-American economies, this article explores two competing hypotheses—debt-driven growth and financial instability. The rationale and empirical evidence for both are reviewed, showing that the financial instability hypothesis, with its emphasis on financial (credit) cycles, offers the more compelling explanation. The main flaw of the neoliberal growth model is a tendency for excessive credit growth, producing crashes that wipe out gains in the real economy. The solution is macroprudential financial regulations—broad controls on financial markets to smooth the credit cycle. Implementing macroprudential financial controls could ‘save’ neoliberalism by securing its more robust output while limiting the disruptive financial shocks that serve to undercut that dynamism.

This article

• Analyses a major shift in elite-political perceptions of the national identity of the English and current debates on Englishness.
• Is the first major evaluation of the arguments and implications of the McKay Commission.
• Gives a distinctive overview of academic and political debates about Englishness which assesses both sociological and political-science contributions and data, and argues the case for their better integration.
• Provides an original assessment of the implications of debates about Englishness for constitutional debates about the UK and normative arguments about national representation within the UK legislature

This article draws attention to signs of an emerging consensus within British politics about the significance of recent shifts in the national identity favoured by the English. It focuses on the nature and assumptions of this emergent perspective, and critically evaluates the prevalent understanding of the ‘politicisation’ of Englishness and the different kinds of constitutional and normative argument that have become prominent in response to the resurgence of this form of identity. Drawing upon a bevy of recent social-scientific studies of the qualitative dimensions of Englishness, I make the case for a different, interpretive approach to ‘politicisation’, which reflects a richer and broader understanding of the causes and implications of the renewal of English nationhood. The article then explores the findings and underpinning arguments of one particular expression of this new consensus about the politicisation of English identity—the report published by the McKay Commission in March 2013. Attention is drawn to the particular blend of arguments that undergird its proposals for reform in relation to the West Lothian issue. Tensions between some of its main normative claims are, it is suggested, symptomatic of a deeper set of dilemmas facing the UK policy community.