British Approach Research Articles

Teaching Legal Ethics: Hungarian Standards and Practices

This paper, which is the concluding part of a series of three papers reviewing American, British and Hungarian approaches to legal ethics education, is focussing on teaching legal ethics in Hungary: it examines the related accreditation standards and its place in the curriculum both at the academic and the vocational stage. Compared with U.S. and UK solutions recommendations are made to adapt American and British good practices into Hungarian legal ethics education.

Teaching Legal Ethics: What Can We Learn from UK Standards and Practices?

This paper, which is the second part of a series of three papers reviewing American, British and Hungarian approaches to legal ethics education, is focussing on teaching legal ethics in the United Kingdom: it examines the related accreditation standards, its place in the curriculum, and good practices in the delivery, from the perspective of the Hungarian approach.

欧州政治協力（EPC）の進展とイギリス

The purpose of EPC, launched in 1970, was to coordinate foreign policies among the Member States of the European Community by ensuring mutual understanding on the international problems through regular exchange of information and consultations, strengthening their solidarity by harmonizing their views….The question is why the need to strengthen their solidarity through mutual understanding among the Six arose in the midst of détente? Moreover, why did it happen almost simultaneously with the achievement of British accession to the EC? The reasons can be considered along the two aspects: the way EPC was taking shape under the circumstances of détente, and the way British diplomatic attitude was involved in the formation and the progress of EPC.It is obvious that both aspects were closely interrelated, and promoted by the two different forces of détente, between the two Superpowers, and between the East and the West on the European continent. Because of American indifference toward the problems of Europe, the UK and the Six became active in the formation of European détente where they put emphasis on the Western value of the freedom of movement, against the Eastern insistence on the status quo. As a result, EPC became a driving force in promoting European détente.In contrast to the general understanding of British negative attitude toward supranational European integration, this study presents a different view that the UK is a positive and active participant rather than an observer in the process of European integration in the sphere of Foreign Policy as an intergovernmental character.First, in order to discuss the formation of EPC, the failure of French attempt, early in 60s, to pursue European political framework excluding the UK, is surveyed, while Atlantic attitude of British policies are examined. Secondly, the process of convergence among the UK, France and West Germany, early in 70s, in terms of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is examined. The process indicates the formation of Western approach, through which the importance of EPC as a vehicle of the European détente policy became eminent as compared to NATO. Finally, the process of the confirmation of EPC leading to the Single European Act is surveyed. In the process, British positive approach toward the establishment of European Foreign Policy is examined by analyzing its proposal for the Policy.

Remote, Elitist, or Non-Existent?

This paper looks at how British political elites discuss the European public sphere and citizens’ participation within it. Drawing on 41 in-depth interviews with political elites – including politicians at national and European levels, journalists, political activists, and think-tank professionals – the paper explores interviewees’ understandings of the European public sphere, and their perceptions about its vitality. Our research reveals a great deal of scepticism about the idea of a European public sphere, in part rooted in conventional British Euro-sceptic approaches, and in part fostered by a perception of the remoteness and democratic deficit of the European Union.

‘Savage warfare’: C.E. Callwell, the roots of counter-insurgency, and the nineteenth century context

In his classic book Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896), the military theorist Charles E. Callwell divided small wars into three broad classes: wars of conquest were fought to expand empires; pacification campaigns were internal, and often followed campaigns of conquest; campaigns to wipe out an insult, avenge a wrong, or overthrow a dangerous enemy, often developed into wars of conquest. While all three categories involved major political considerations, Callwell's text is often criticised for its lack of discussion of politics. However, Callwell recognised that, if the ultimate objective of a campaign was successfully to assimilate a people into the British Empire, then ‘military intimidation’ was ill adapted to that end. This article will argue that a strategy of ‘butcher and bolt’ was indeed considered by many commentators, including Callwell, to be the best way to win ‘hearts and minds’. This stemmed from a belief in the all-importance of ‘moral effect’, a recurring theme in small wars literature. However, to view the British approach to colonial small wars as pure and simple brutality, in a ‘dark age’ before a more enlightened period of ‘minimum force’, is an oversimplification.

The minimum force debate: contemporary sensibilities meet imperial practice

No aspect of British counter-insurgency has been more problematic and controversial than the doctrine of minimum force. This common law principle provided ambiguous guidance for soldiers and police quelling unrest within a global empire and has become the subject of intense scholarly debate in the post-imperial era. The argument divides academics into two broad camps. One group sees minimum force as a vital element of a largely successful, uniquely British approach to counter-insurgency. The other claims that the legal principle never really restrained British security forces and considers the British approach to counter-insurgency neither unique nor particularly successful. This debate appeared in an exchange of views between John Newsinger and the current author in a 1990 volume of Small Wars and Insurgencies and more recently in a similar but lengthier argument between Rod Thornton and Huw Bennett in the same journal between 2007 and 2010.1 Such disagreements are of course endemic to academic discourse. This one, however, seems to be about more than history.

Suppressing insurgencies in comparison: the Germans in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia, 1920

In recent years two theories have emerged in academia with regards to ‘small wars’: A ‘German way of war’ and a ‘British way of war’. The first one believes in a specific German military culture until 1945 accepting mass violence against civilians to quell any form of civil unrest. The second theory stresses a moderate British approach during the twentieth century; in defeating insurgencies the British Army had applied ‘minimum force’. This article challenges both views by looking into two largely forgotten counter-insurgency campaigns by the end of the First World War: The Germans in the Ukraine in 1918 and the British in Mesopotamia in 1920. It will be argued that one cannot speak in general terms about a ruthless German and a moderate British approach during this period – in fact it was quite the contrary in some ways.

Women in Iraq: past meets present

Noga Efrati outlines the first social and political history of women in Iraq during the periods of British occupation and the British-backed Hashimite monarchy (1917-1958). She traces the harsh and long-lasting implications of British state building on Iraqi women, particularly their legal and political enshrinement as second-class citizens, and the struggle by women's rights activists to counter this precedent. Efrati concludes with a discussion of post-Saddam Iraq and the women's associations now claiming their place in government. Finding common threads between these two generations of women, Efrati underscores the organic roots of the current fight for gender equality shaped by a memory of oppression under the monarchy. Efrati revisits the British strategy of efficient rule, largely adopted by the Iraqi government they erected and the consequent gender policy that emerged. The attempt to control Iraq through authentic leaders-giving them legal and political powers-marginalized the interests of women and virtually sacrificed their well-being altogether. Iraqi women refused to resign themselves to this fate. From the state's early days, they drew attention to the biases of the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR) and the absence of state intervention in matters of personal status and resisted women's disenfranchisement. Following the coup of 1958, their criticism helped precipitate the dissolution of the TCCDR and the ratification of the Personal Status Law. A new government gender discourse shaped by these past battles arose, yet the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, rather than helping cement women's rights into law, reinstated the British approach. Pressured to secure order and reestablish a pro-Western Iraq, the Americans increasingly turned to the country's authentic leaders to maintain control while continuing to marginalize women. Efrati considers Iraqi women's efforts to preserve the progress they have made, utterly defeating the notion that they have been passive witnesses to history.

The Divergent Paths of British and American Publishing

The Divergent Paths of British and American Publishing James L. W. West III (bio) Publishing is not ordinary trade. It is gambling. The publisher bets the cost of manufacturing, advertising and circulating a book, plus the overhead of his establishment, against every book he publishes exactly as a turf bookmaker bets against every horse in the race. The author, with his one book, is an owner backing his favorite at the best odds he can get from the competing publishers. Both are gamblers. —G. B. Shaw (1945) Commercialism in American book publishing has a long history. It can be traced back at least to the early nineteenth century, a time when American publishers—undercapitalized and struggling with an inefficient distribution system—subsisted on titles pirated from the British market. Because the United States had no international copyright law, American publishers were free to issue British books without paying royalties to authors or permissions fees to originating publishers. The Chace Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1891, established a version of international copyright in this country; but the bill contained a protectionist clause (insisted upon by the printers' unions) that required British books to be typeset, printed, and bound in the United States to qualify for copyright. This clause prevented British publishers from flooding the American market with overruns and remaindered stock. Even after passage of the Chace Act, British publishers remained wary of the U.S. trade. American houses, for their part, bent their energy toward developing their own authors, discovering new readers, and building a more efficient distribution system. This situation persisted through the 1890s and into the early 1900s. The British model of publishing, with low overhead, limited advertising, efficient distribution, and a deep backlist, was viewed by many people in the U.S. trade as a worthy ideal that might be aspired to by a small house but that [End Page 503] would not work for a large operation. The British approach depended too heavily on price control and did not generate a sufficiently rapid cash flow. The American trade took a different course: it became frontlist oriented, with high overhead, large advances, a strong emphasis on advertising, and a pronounced gambling mentality. The period between the First and Second World Wars was a good time for book publishing in the United States. The Great Depression of the 1930s did little damage to the industry; some firms, in fact, grew and prospered. "During the Depression we were sitting in clover," recalls Bennett Cerf in his memoir At Random (1977). "In fact, every year we went a little bit ahead, and there was never one when we went backward." There was a general movement of population into the cities in the 1920s and 1930s, creating concentrated and homogeneous book markets. By 1935 well over 50 percent of American people had settled in urban areas. Public education had increased, illiteracy had declined, and the demand for books of all kinds had grown. The aims of most U.S. houses during this period were to reach middle-class buyers, to expand the reading population, to publish inexpensive books, and to take advantage of developments in printing technology such as the rotary press and electrotype plating. Also important were newly invented methods of distribution. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, both founded in 1926, used blanket magazine-advertising and home-mail distribution to reach buyers who lived far from bookshops. American publishers viewed book clubs initially with hostility (for their discounts) and sought to throttle them by legal action, but by the late 1930s it was obvious that demographic conditions in the U.S. were ideal for book clubs and that they would flourish no matter what the old-line publishers might do. During the 1920s and 1930s American reprint operations such as Grosset and Dunlap, A. L. Burt, Garden City Books, and the Modern Library leased the plates of popular books from trade houses and published inexpensive reissues in long print runs. These books were distributed through drugstores, tobacco shops, department stores, and other comparable outlets. Modern paperbacks made their appearance in 1939 when Robert de Graff founded Pocket Books with the financial backing...

A Civil Rather Than Criminal Offence? Forced Marriage, Harm and the Politics of Multiculturalism in the UK

Research Highlights and Abstract The British preference for civil remedies, rather than criminal measures, regarding forced marriage is examined and an explanation for this approach, put forward. The reluctance in the UK to criminalise forced marriage is traced, in part, to the influence that multicultural ideals have had on current British approaches to the practice. The state's tendency to conceptualise the harms of forced marriage principally in terms of a violation of choice (rather than as a matter of long-term violence against women), is also identified as significant to the British preference for civil remedies, over criminal legislation. A critical feminist analysis of UK government papers, policy documents, and Hansard debates, relating to the 2005 public enquiry on the criminalisation of forced marriage and to the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007, is undertaken. British discussions on the proposal to criminalise forced marriage are noted as lacking consideration of arguments that identify criminal legislation as a critical means of combating violence against women. The question is raised as to whether, by adopting such an approach, the state may be giving rise to a two-tier system of rights, in which minority group women are afforded a lesser protection of their human rights, as a result of their racial or cultural background. This article examines the preference for civil, rather than criminal, measures that has emerged as the favoured policy approach for dealing with forced marriage in Britain. In particular, the article considers why, following much public and parliamentary debate, the option to criminalise forced marriage was rejected by UK lawmakers. It suggests that one explanation for this approach is the influence that multiculturalism, as a set of political ideals, has had on British policy on forced marriage in recent years. The article also identifies as significant the limited conception of the harms of forced marriage apparent in much UK government discourse, which fails to identify the practice principally as a form of violence against women, and therefore as a custom that should be subject to criminal legislation. It draws on a critical feminist analysis of UK government papers and policy initiatives dealing with forced marriage during the period of 1999–2007, in order to make this case. It concludes by raising the question of whether, in adopting a civil remedy approach, the state may be affording some women less protection of their human rights than others.

The British Approach to COIN and Stabilisation

Alexander Alderson was responsible for the publication of the new British Army doctrine on counter-insurgency in 2009. Three years after its publication, Alderson looks back at how the doctrine was formulated, dissecting its historical and contemporary influences, conceptual framework and practical application. His insider's reflection on the elaboration of UK doctrine illuminates the ongoing nature of the process, and highlights the need for constant attention and innovation to meet the challenges faced by the British Army.

The Alkali Inspectorate 1874–1906: Pressure for Wider and Tighter Pollution Regulation

A tension exists between damage caused to the environment by novel chemicals and the advance in industrial and economic progress based on the same products. This was brought to the fore in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. However, this was not altogether a new story. For some, such as Robert Angus Smith, concerns arose in the nineteenth century with the polluting vapours from chemical processes. Smith and colleagues in the Alkali Inspectorate, with support from medical officers of health and occupational health officers, exercised vigilance and diligence to ensure wider and tighter regulations in order to protect workers and the public. This article reviews the changes in British regulatory approaches adopted during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to the increasing proliferation of harmful chemicals released into the environment.

Massaging the Amateur Ethos: British Professional Trainers at the 1912 Olympic Games

When the Olympic Games were staged in London in 1908, the British organizing committee ensured that the definitions of amateur formulated by individual national governing bodies were enshrined into the regulations for the event. Contemporary newspaper reports comparing British and American attitudes to sport suggest that the amateur ethos, which supposedly incorporated a resistance to professional coaching, was an integral feature of the British approach to this and subsequent Olympics. Taken at face value, it could be concluded that this was partly responsible for the rapid decline in British competitiveness in international sport: but an understanding of the value of practical and experienced coaches was never limited to American and European athletes, and professional trainers accompanied the British Olympic team to Stockholm in 1912. This paper explores briefly the life courses of some of these individuals and argues that the formal appointment of trainers highlights both the fluid nature of interpretations of amateurism in this period, even within national governing bodies, and the widespread recognition of the essential contribution that expert coaches could make to sporting performance. It appears that the elite amateurs who represented their country at the games were just as appreciative of the input of these specialists as were athletes from other nations, although the master-servant relationship engineered by British amateurs contrasted with the levels of control afforded to coaches elsewhere, especially in America.

Electricity Distribution Investments: No Country for Old Rules? A Critical Overview of UK and Italian Regulations

The increase in distributed generation and the increasingly pro-active role of mass consumers demand “smart” distribution networks. To this aim, regulation too must innovate, in order to promote innovative and additional infrastructural investments.This paper develops, first, a methodological framework addressing the relevant drivers for the regulation of distribution network investments. In the light of this framework, we then perform a critical overview of the British and Italian regulatory approach to distribution network investments. Finally, we discuss some policy insights for the Italian regulator.

Unprincipled? The British government's pragmatic approach to the precautionary principle

To assess whether the British government's pragmatic use of the precautionary principle in its environmental policy decision-making is unprincipled or principled, three cases are examined: organophosphorous pesticides in sheep dips; genetically-modified crops; and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE: so-called ‘mad cow’ disease). These cases were chosen because they were particularly difficult to resolve scientifically, and gave rise to heated debates over the merits of the precautionary principle approach to environmental policy. The government's decisions were, respectively: to reject the precautionary principle in the case of organophosphorous pesticides; to adopt a strong version of the precautionary principle in the case of genetically-modified crops; and to adopt a weak version of the precautionary principle in the case of BSE. These decisions were not unprincipled, but principled, in that they applied a consistent and coherent approach to the precautionary principle based on the ethical principle of ‘circumstances’. Drawing on the pragmatic political philosophy of Edmund Burke, it is shown how such an approach is justifiable.

Peninsularity and patriotism: Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808-14

The Peninsular War until recently has failed to receive comprehensive and critical attention from Spanish and British historians, their outputs having been partial, narrative and ideological in nature. While Spanish scholars have contested the meaning of the ‘nation’ forged during the 1808–14 war so bitterly that they have been slow to establish a synthesis, British scholars have tended not to venture beyond Anglocentrism. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, however, modern historical methods began to change this situation. Since the nineteen-nineties a ‘new military history’ approach has influenced Peninsular War historiography, allowing, for the first time, for a ‘total’ history of the conflict.

Convention Compatible Statutory Interpretation: A Comparison of British and Irish Approaches

Convention Compatible Statutory Interpretation: A Comparison of British and Irish Approaches

Episteologiczny ideał wiedzy i jego odrzucenie

In the paper I try to present what I termed epistheology in its relation to basic concepts of theory of knowledge: the knowledge itself, its unity and systemic character, criteria of truth and selfevidence, and the questions of justification (of knowledge and criteria of knowledge both) and ethical ideal of knowledge as the contemplation of God's design. Epistheology is thus an epistemic discourse based on and warranted by theological concepts. I analyze Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz and the like to demonstrate the way this discourse operates. In the second part of the paper I sketch the British approach: empirical, secular, and most importantly based on the concept of verisimilitude. Humean philosophy is in this way not only seen as antagonistic to its continental predecessors, but also victorious as a foundation of new and fertile paradigm of secular science.

Covert Peacemaking: Clandestine Negotiations and Backchannels with the Provisional IRA during the Early ‘Troubles’, 1972–76

This paper explores the major negotiation initiatives undertaken during the early ‘Troubles’, at the height of Britain's counter-insurgency campaign between 1972 and 1976. It analyses the first significant talks undertaken, namely the ‘Whitelaw talks’ of July 1972, marking the beginning of a tendency towards secret dialogue, permitted again during the clergy-led talks at Feakle in December 1974. Clandestine subtlety characterised the establishment of other backchannels, some undertaken with the knowledge of the political and intelligence communities (such as those developed by chief Secret Intelligence Service officer in Northern Ireland, Michael Oatley), and others that were unsanctioned and individually forged (for instance by retired General Sir John Hackett). Taking these initiatives holistically we can build a picture of both official and unofficial efforts to bring an end to violence in Northern Ireland, particularly given the brief ceasefires that were resultant of both the Whitelaw and Feakle talks. These efforts in the early 1970s belie later political espousals that ‘we don't talk to terrorists'. They will be posited as central to our understanding of the British approach to countering republican violence in the early ‘Troubles’, shifting away from the traditional focus on military aspects.

Fighting Flu: Military Pathology, Vaccines, and the Conflicted Identity of the 1918-19 Pandemic in Britain

This article explores the decisive role of British military medicine in shaping official approaches to the 1918 influenza pandemic. It contends that British approaches were defined through a system of military pathology, which had been established by the War Office as part of the mobilization of medicine for the First World War. Relying on the bacteriological laboratory for the identification and control of pathogenic agents, military pathology delivered therapeutic and preventive measures against a range of battlefield diseases, and military and civilian authorities trusted that it could do the same with influenza. This article traces how it shaped efforts to establish the etiology of the pandemic and to produce a general influenza vaccine. It highlights the challenges involved in both strategies. Understanding the central role of military pathology helps make sense of the nature, direction, scale, and limitations of medical mobilization against the pandemic in Britain and the authority accorded to specific medical bodies for elaborating and coordinating strategies. Crucially, it demands that we rethink the relationship between the war and pandemic as one about the social organization of medical knowledge and institutions.