Continental War Research Articles

‘Perfidious Albion’? British Foreign Policy in an Age of Strategic Choice

This essay criticises recent calls for the mobilisation of the British Army in anticipation of an ‘immediate’ continental war, and instead asserts that, as the world’s geopolitical centre of gravity progressively shifts south and east, Britain can expect to enjoy a strategic position further removed from the frontlines of potential conflict than at any time in recent history. Re-evaluating threats from Russia and China, Joseph Reilly advocates for a strategic reset, with a greater emphasis on leveraging industrial capabilities to support allies instead of the present focus on building large land forces ill-suited to Britain’s contemporary strategic environment.

Національна стійкість України в умовах воєнного стану

On February 24, 2022, russia unleashed the first continental war in Europe in the 21st century, undermining the system of collective world security established after World War II. The aggravation of hostilities and the scale of the destruction of Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure objects actualize the issue of national resilience research. The aim of the article is to substantiate the national resilience of Ukraine as a necessary condition for countering russian aggression, as well as to identify directions for its support. General scientific and special methods have been used: theoretical generalization, system analysis, systematization, statistical, grouping, and scientific abstraction. Ensuring national resi­lien­ce for Ukraine can be considered as a new stage of state building and restoration of sovereignty. National resilience determines the reaction of the state and society to internal and external challenges and threats. However, in the conditions of war, an important component in the development of national resilience is the international support of partner countries, which can satisfy the key needs of our state with their resources and diplomatic efforts. Such support includes the provision of humanitarian and military aid, financial assistance, and participation in international diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire and restore peace. The russian-Ukrainian war caused a series of global challenges that destabilized the international security environment. Key among them are: food, energy, humanitarian, security and environmental global challenges. Restoring global stability and countering new challenges is a common goal for all stakeholders. Using the Peace Fund’s approach to assessing the level of national resilience, the spheres of Ukraine’s national resilience were analyzed and its vulnerabilities were identified. The process of ensuring national resilience is multi-vector and requires careful planning and financing in all directions.

John Vought and the Preservation Paradox

The War for Independence was both an intercontinental war and a civil war between Patriot rebels and Loyalists. Some colonists, “disaffected” with the war, sought to remain neutral. Especially in the middle colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the tripartite division of the population meant Patriot rebels were often an embattled minority. About two-thirds of New Jersey’s population did not support the rebellion. This raises a preservation paradox. Today, almost all preserved sites are Patriot rebel sites, which promotes a popular, simplistic narrative. The dominant story of the American Revolution overlooks both the fact that Patriot rebels were often in the minority and that most Loyalists were people of integrity, no less than their opponents. The complexity of the revolutionary experience is swept from memory. The story of America’s first civil war can best be told where Loyalists are interpreted as protagonists and as actual people not misguided cyphers. Yet today in all of New Jersey, only two homes, Marlpit Hall in Monmouth County and the Vought House in Hunterdon, are interpreted as Loyalist sites. Tracing the experiences of the Vought family broadens our perspective and complicates our understanding of this crucial time and place. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are challenged to present a fuller, more nuanced account of those who were disaffected, remained loyal, or took up arms, often alongside British and Hessians troops as uniformed New Jersey Volunteers. A more balanced account may also increase appreciation of the hardships faced by Patriot rebels and New Jersey’s distinctive place at the crossroads of continental war and the epicenter of civil conflict.

Appeasement 2.0 - Russia’s expansion in the Black Sea region as a prelude to dominance in the Mediterranean and the Levant

Abstract With Russian troops gathering at the Ukrainian border at the time of writing, Europe and the West are facing a real possibility of a full-scale continental war unprecedented for our generation. The purpose of this paper is to bring forth arguments that the security in the Black Sea area is of vital importance for both the present and future developments in the entire continent. Most recent studies on this topic focus on Russia’s intentions in Ukraine and the weak responses coming from the West. Scholars are divided when it comes to Mr. Putin’s ultimate goals. While some view the recent developments as a bluff, others are concerned that the troop movements might pave the way for a full invasion of Ukraine which will lead to a domino effect. This paper will focus on qualitative analysis. Mr. Putin’s and Russia’s intentions in the Black Sea will be analyzed from primary sources (such as Presidential speeches), while scholarly articles, research papers and policy documents will be used to build a bridge between history, politics and current affairs. The focus will be to establish the extent to which the recent developments in the area are a prelude to an ‘old’ Russian dream of access to the Mediterranean. A compare and contrast approach to appeasement will be used in order to make predictions on the possible outcomes. Our results will show that Mr. Putin is using the Black Sea security as a bargaining chip in his confrontation with the West with the ultimate goal of gaining dominance in the Mediterranean space. This paper will contribute to the recent literature on Eastern European security and how the West continues to misinterpret the dynamics and history of the region.

КОНЦЕПЦІЯ «ГОМО СОВЄТІКУС» О.О. ЗІНОВ'ЄВА ЯК СКЛАДОВА ЧАСТИНА Z-ІДЕОЛОГІЇ

The article reveals the peculiarities of the Russian Federation's use of the concept of "homo sovietikus" by the philosopher and sociologist O. O. Zinoviev (1926–2006) as a tool of information warfare in the world media space. The relevance of the problem is determined by the urgent need for the state and society of Ukraine to intensify the search for effective means of countering the influence of socially destructive technologies of the aggressor country. The authors consider the literary work of O. O. Zinoviev as one of the sources of the formation of so-called Z-ideology, that is, a complex of ideas and beliefs aimed at justifying the feasibility of Russia's implementation of the Eurasian geopolitical concept in international relations and the legitimization of its armed expansion in the East and West Europe. The article analyzes the content of O. O. Zinoviev's novels "Homo Sovieticus" (1982) and "Para Bellum" (1982). According to the authors of the study, it is necessary to move away from the satirical genre notion of these works established in literary criticism and, instead, to concentrate attention on the practical aspect of the author's recommendations, regarding methods of education, informational and psychological influence on the mass consciousness of a potential mobilization resource of the aggressor state. O. O. Zinoviev described quite clearly and consistently the process of formation of beliefs and moral priorities of the Soviet "superman", who is supposed to destroy Western European civilization. The main methods of raising "homo sovieticus" are the formation in his mind of an anomalous hierarchy of values, where the most important qualities of an individual are aggressiveness, cruelty, mistrust of others, indifference to the family, adaptability, recognition of the priority of the interests of the state. The obvious inferiority of such a person should be compensated by his ability to quickly adapt to the extreme conditions of the future great continental war, unpretentiousness in everyday life, the ability to build relations with representatives of other nations with maximum benefit for himself. The article states that already in the first half of the 1980s O. O. Zinoviev described certain elements of the "hybrid war", which were later used by the Russian Federation during 2014–2022 against Ukraine and the states of the European Union. The authors of the study hope that their conclusions could convince the scientific and general public of Ukraine in the need for an objective rethinking of the Russian literary heritage, including the works of representatives of the so-called "third wave" Russian emigration from the USSR (1960s and early 1990s) who, due to the mass inertia of the political worldview, often get the image of fighters against totalitarianism.

Stevenson, David 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (review)

REVIEWS 583 be a welcome addition to reading for courses on Jewish history, nationalism and wartime ethnic conflicts, in conjunction with more nuanced studies. Humanities Department Alexander V. Prusin New Mexico Tech Stevenson, David. 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford, and New York, 2017. xxv + 480 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Table. List of principal personalities. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00. This book is ‘saturated with agency’, to borrow Christopher Clark’s phrase from The Sleepwalkers. Like that account of the origins of the First World War, this history of international politics in the pivotal year of 1917 focuses on decision-making, the assumptions of political and military leaders, and the interactions between decisions within the shifting structures of power politics. Stevenson does not apologise for his elite perspective, though his detailed analysis in several chapters pays close attention to social conditions, morale in the ranks and the economic resources of the major powers. His is an argument for the importance of decision-making in understanding why the war lasted so long and why ‘apparently less perilous and less painful’ alternatives were not adopted. He shows that decisions almost invariably produced outcomes at odds with the intentions of political and military leaders. Many of them floundered in the complexity of the war, some remained hopelessly optimistic, and others acted because inaction (wrongly) seemed too risky. The book is divided into three different geographical sections — the North Atlantic, the continent and the rest of the world. Within each section, there are individual chapters on key decisions — from the German decision for unrestricted submarine warfare to the Balfour Declaration and the reconstruction of the Middle East. These chapters demonstrate Stevenson’s forensic skills in reconstructing the decision-making process, his sensitivity to the broader context for decisions, and his appreciation of the systemic character of international politics. About half of the book is devoted to decisions that shaped the continental war, including chapters on the February Revolution in Russia and the illfated Kerenskii offensive. For Stevenson, the February Revolution was the ‘second time-bomb’ under the duration of the war, the first being the German decision for submarine warfare and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war. The February Revolution revealed structural weaknesses in the Russian war economy, particularly in its railway network, designed for moving commodities along a north-south axis in peacetime, not an east-west axis for SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 584 wartime. Comparing Russia with Germany and France, Stevenson shows how the army was more vulnerable to revolution, due to the lack of trained reserves. In this context, political miscalculation exacerbated the strains of war. His deft pen portrait of Nicholas II as a family man, ill-equipped to manage the war effort meshes the personal with the political. After Nicholas II abdicated, the litany of ill-conceived decisions continued. Although Russia stayed in the war, a gulf opened between liberal and middle class elites and the peasantry and working classes over war aims. This gulf widened as a result of the Kerenskii offensiveinJuly1917.Stevensonshowshownarrowtheroomformanoeuvrewas, at least in the eyes of the leaders of the Provisional Government. Increasingly dependentontheAlliesforfinancialandothermaterialsupport,theProvisional Government considered the offensive a signal of commitment to the Allies and an opportunity to establish domestic order. Instead, the offensive petered out, the German army made sweeping gains, and regiments in Petrograd launched a short-lived insurrection. Although Lenin went into hiding following the July Days, Stevenson shows how the authority of the Provisional Government dwindled, setting the scene for the October Revolution. The final chapter of the book places that revolution in its international context, charting the fierce debates amongst the German political and military leaders as they sought to exploit the collapse of the Russian Empire in late 1917 and early 1918. This book presents an international system shaped by the great powers and the political and military leaders of those powers. There is little attention to states in eastern Europe and to important non-state networks and actors, who pressed claims to national self-determination. Nor do ideas play a central role in this study, in contrast to Peter Jackson’s recent argument about a normative revolution in international...

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, by Konrad Jarausch

Reviewed by: Gary Bruce, University of WaterlooAs most travellers to Europe quickly realize, it is hard to sort out one's feelings about the continent. One can, for example, attend Berlin's Philharmonie, home to one of the world's greatest symphony orchestras. Before listening to the music inside, an interested tourist might be drawn to the small exhibition on the grounds of this German cultural icon. Here, she would learn that during the Nazi era, the euthanasia program, which killed more than 200,000 individuals with disabilities (including 5000 children), was housed at the same location: Tiergartenstrasse-4, or T-4 as the program came to be called. To be clear, the Berlin symphony today performs not down the street from the former T-4 headquarters, nor around the corner; it occupies the very same physical space.It is to this frustrating dual legacy that Konrad Jarausch turns in his sweeping synthesis of Europe in the twentieth century. How was it possible that Europe's worst traits materialized in an era when the health, education, and prosperity of most Europeans had improved dramatically? Jarausch frames his answer within the concept of modernity. Although there are many different understandings of the term modernism, most scholars would agree with Jarausch that the European modern age is characterized by large bureaucracies, factory production, nation-states, an almost slavish devotion to science and technology, and an urbanized population. For Jarausch, the challenge that Europe faced in the twentieth century, and continues to face, is how to harness the benign aspects of modernity while keeping its destructive forces in check.Although Out of Ashes is a history of Europe in its entirety, the emphasis is on the main powers of northern Europe. Countries such as Spain, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia appear in the narrative on occasion, but England, France, Germany, and Russia/Soviet Union receive sustained attention. The latter merit a place of prominence by virtue of their substantial economic and military power, but incorporating some of the most interesting aspects of recent transnational history, including the ability of smaller powers to influence larger ones, would have added more current texture to the traditional approach.Jarausch moves quickly from the opening section on European thirst for colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to discuss the path to the First World War. Eager to break free from the tired school question on the origins of World War I, Jarausch focuses on the reasons for the breakdown of peace instead of the causes of war. After all, given the long periods of peace and increasing international ties that had characterized the previous century, there was every reason to believe that Europeans would avoid war. Jarausch pins responsibility for the first of Europe's deadly wars in the twentieth century on the leaders of Europe's major powers who, in their narrow-minded self-interest, made catastrophic decisions that unravelled the European diplomatic order. Spreading the blame equally, with perhaps a touch more finger pointing at Russia for escalating a local crisis to a continental war, Jarausch echoes the view of most European historians that no single country was to blame. …

Counterfactual History and the First World War

In the current article the author aims to answer four specific questions. (1) What would have happened if Austria and Serbia had not gone to war in July 1914, which implies an exercise in counterfactual history, and the study of the probable outcome if events had taken a different course? (2) What exactly was Austria’s war aim? (3) What precisely was Britain’s war aim? (4) What would have happened if Britain had stayed out of the continental war?

An Act Cruel and Absurd: Conrad’s Romantic Aesthetic and Realist Ethic

An Act Cruel and Absurd:Conrad’s Romantic Aesthetic and Realist Ethic G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Conrad’s Midlands breakfast was hardly disturbed when he was told of the “shot heard round the world” on 28 June 1914—“dismissed” because of “a repugnance to consider murder a factor in politics” and “an ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless” (NLL 142). He “attended so little to the march of events,” that on 25 July only three days before Austria-Hungary’s guns opened up beginning the continental war, he set off for Poland with his family and the Retingers. Ten days later on 4 August Britain entered the war. After a harrowing journey across Europe, the Conrads left Genoa in a Dutch mail steamer on 25 October, arriving back in England on 9 November. That they got back at all was a near run thing.1 By 1914 the 19th century’s fin de siècle culture of romance with arms was on the cusp of a new agonized realism. Conrad’s intellectual revulsion for militarism, counterbalanced by a cultural and temperamental predisposition to romanticize warlike pursuits, was about to be tested when his romantic aesthetic would be weighed in the balance by mud-and-blood fact. Even despite his premonitory experience, “Poland Revisited,” first serialized as “The Shock of War” six months later in the spring of 1915, reveals a sense of unreality. The assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were for Conrad simply “a miniature rehearsal of the great world-drama” (143), the thespian metaphor betraying that, for him, there still was no “shock” at all. A drama is an amusement—ghastly maybe, yet still only mimesis of a potentially lethal puppetry of passion. By Conrad’s “ethical sense,” then, the assassination was war in miniature, differing only in the number of “political” murders.2 It followed, then, that duels with fatal outcomes—murder by individual combat—were paradigms of war; accordingly, Conrad could conceive of war itself—mass murder—as a grimly entertaining duel writ large. By this reckoning [End Page 63] the single constant in all these cruel and not unusual absurdities was murder—a grimly jocose and lethally attractive diversion for the existential spectator, disinterested, yet both horrified and fascinated. “The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions,” the contradictorily “ethical” Conrad mused, “that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all” (PR 92); the amusingly murderous humankind Conrad shows us mirrors his cosmos—and himself. Unsurprisingly, the szlachcic Conrad, scion of a vendetta culture,3 did not scruple to cast Napoleon’s campaigns—the first mass war4—in a romantic dueling idiom, not only because of who Napoleon was, but who he, Conrad, was: a proud Nałęcz szlachcic, heir to a warrior tradition.5 “The Duel” (1908) opens, “Napoleon I. [sic], whose whole career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe[ . . . ]” (SS 165). Whatever attraction contests of arms held for Conrad the romantic, Conrad the realist had a pained awareness that genuine honor, fidelity, and solidarity were obscured by the murderous gilding of la gloire. So, Conrad the romantic realist both believed and did not believe6 that war-as-duel, and the dueling convention itself, were murderous farce. The szlachta dueling and revenge conventions were Conrad’s frames of reference encoded throughout his oeuvre. Even the fratricidal Karain (“Karain,” 1897) and his retainer Pata Matara seem like Polish nobles in sarongs, their prototypes likely in Adam Mickiewicz’s szlachta gawęda, “Czaty;”7 for the planned ritual honor killing, Conrad draws imaginatively on the lex talionis of the szlachta’s old revenge culture.8 The szlachta ethos as the source of Conrad’s aesthetic therefore contradicted its own ethic of solidarity and fidelity. Joseph Retinger recalls, “[H]is pacifism did not interfere with his fondness for picturesque pageants of military triumphs and his partiality for displays of physical, brutal vigour” (Retinger, Conrad 165). Conrad’s attitude toward war was Homeric—both tragic folly and heroic endeavour; he mentions (surely not as...

Conservative Revolutionary: Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl and the Ideology of Resistance in Early Modern Austria

SummaryEarly modern Europe experienced an expansion of both governmental institutions and the responsibilities they assumed. These changes were accompanied by protracted conflict. This article traces the philosophy of state developed by Austria's estatist opposition during the early decades of the seventeenth century. In the writings of Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl, especially, an alternative vision of state and governance took shape, whose implementation would have transformed the history of Central Europe. It took a continental war to resolve this fundamental ideological discord in favour of the Habsburg dynasty.

Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, by Michael S. Neiberg.

Dance of the Furies. Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, by Michael S. Neiberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2011. 292 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). This well-researched and well-written, though at times unnecessarily repetitive, book makes six (6) key arguments. Firstly, few Europeans expected, let alone wanted, a war in 1914. More important issues--the murder trial of Henriette Caillaux in France, the Home Rule crisis and the suffragette movement in Great Britain, the strike wave in Russia, and the recent electoral gains of the SPD in Germany--preoccupied them. Furthermore, the recent tragedy at Sarajevo was not the first example of political violence in the Balkans. Previous crises, there and elsewhere, had been resolved peacefully. Why would things be different this time, in the wake of murders thought of primarily in personal rather than political terms? And last, but not least, guarantee of peace: was not a recently emerging international socialist movement, with threat of a general strike, an important force against war? Such certainty that a diplomatic solution would be found and that a continental war would be avoided explains their sadness, their fear, and their shock at outbreak. Secondly, gender, class, and ethnicity were as important as nationality in apprehending the wartime experiences of individuals and groups. Thirdly, Europeans accepted the necessity of war because they saw it as a defensive and existential one, waged against aggressive and barbaric invaders, who threatened their homelands. Tales of violence and stories of atrocities, whether real or embellished, naturally fueled genuine hatred and a desire for vengeance and convinced them that their cause--just and righteous--was worth fighting for. Had not the foe failed to respond to the sincere efforts of their own government to avoid the conflict? Satisfied then that the intentions of their respective government had been peaceful, civilians and soldiers rallied to the flag. Indeed, given such frightening prospects of invasion and occupation, who could legitimately refuse to fight a war that could likely determine a nation's future survival? Even the International Socialist Bureau embraced, in late July 1914, the concept of a justifiable struggle against an aggressive enemy. Fourthly, by the end of 1914--the year that witnessed both the highest casualty rates of any year of the war and some serious allegations of mismanagement and corruption--many Europeans had already become disenchanted with the lofty rhetoric of shared sacrifices and national unity and with the official explanations offered by their governments to justify their entrance into and continuation of the war. Fifthly, Europeans realized quite early that their presumption of a short war--one that explains, if not their enthusiasm, at least their determination in responding to the call to arms--had been inaccurate. A sense of disillusionment, nourished by the lack of decisive victories on land and at sea, set in fairly rapidly among soldiers and civilians. Indeed, Neiberg argues, the massive numbers of dead and wounded as well as the pitiful sight of hundreds of thousands of civilians, who found themselves in the path of enemy armies and who, as refugees, flooded the roads of Europe at the very beginning of the hostilities, brought home the cruel realities of modern warfare, such as its ability to make men feel like sacrificial lambs instead of heroes (p. 189). As a result, the high idealism of the opening days of August 1914 became yet another casualty of war. Finally, despite their concerns, doubts, and suspicions, Europeans kept fighting. They did so, not just because the two sides could not find any common ground for a negotiated settlement, but also in order to avenge the enormous human and material losses suffered, to remove the real threats to their lives that the presence of foreign armies represented, and out of an awareness that anything short of total victory or total defeat was unthinkable. …

A Possible Arthurian Epitome in a Tenth-Century Manuscript from Cornwall

'De raris fabulis,' an early tenth-century text from Wales or Cornwall, preserves colloquies used by monastic oblates to practice conversational Latin. It yields a potential Arthurian context and may represent the first known account of Arthur's continental war against Rome, as detailed in Historia regum and hinted at in the 'Life of St Goeznovius.'

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (review)

Reviewed by: The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s David Francis Taylor Barrell John , The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 278. £50.00 hardback. 0 19 928120 3. John Barrell's latest book bears all the hallmarks of his exemplary scholarship: meticulous research, a lucid and pacy prose style that renders even the most detailed or difficult material accessible and exciting, and, most importantly, a sustained level of interdisciplinarity. The Spirit of Despotism buildsits thesis upon an extraordinary array of sources spanning the breadth of cultural registers and media: from poems and journals, to maps of London, loyalist medals, political caricatures, and legal and parliamentary proceedings. Such a range of reference represents, for Barrell, a conscious exegetical strategy that seeks to avoid the label and potential pitfalls of 'old new historicism', as he calls it, and to occupy'a space somewhere between political and cultural history' (p. 14). Prescriptions of space, physical and theoretical, are central to the book's concerns. Barrell contends that the 1790s involved the 'politicization of the private' on a previously unseen scale (p. 8), and argues that the reaction of the Pittite administration to the regime of regicide and Terror in revolutionary France, and later to the continental war, involved new forms of state oppression and political surveillance that challenged the late eighteenth-century paradigm of privacy. The reactionism of the Tory government during this period has been well documented and debated by both historians and literary critics, as has its corollary in studies of parliamentary reformism, literary radicalism, the censorship of the press and theatre, and the state treason trials; Barrell's thesis marks a departure from these surveys in that it considers the consequences of institutionalised repression on private spheres such as those of metropolitan geography, cosmetics, and cottage life – spheres that have been largely neglected by current research. Barrell is keenly aware of the two major problems that such an approach entails: firstly, the difficultyof gathering and organising the often sparse and disparate evidential data relating to areas that were,by definition, beyond the apparatuses of regulationor reliable public records; and, secondly, the need to delimit the vast field of potential cultural material invoked in his notion of 'invasions of privacy'. He overcomes the first of these by working his argument around an exhaustively researched and adeptly managed plethora of sources, and the second by selecting just five instances of the aggressive renegotiation of British culture that, he maintains, pervades the decade. Each of these examples, through which Barrell structures his book, embody public incursions into issues or sites that, prior to 1789,were considered domestic, personal, or even trivial.In each case Barrell opens up his discussion by way of an historical or literary anecdote – the Godwinian man of talent pacing the city, the arrest of John Frost for republican sentiments voiced in a coffee house, or the bear's grease advocated in 1795 as a hair-restorative – which he then skilfully unpicks, eliciting complex issues from these brief narratives that serve as the basis for further analysis. His first chapter attempts to reconstruct the political geography of 1790s London. Barrell maps the polarised economic and ideological climate of the period onto the east–west division of the city and notes several occurrences of protests and triumphal parades that functioned as 'plebeian invasions of the west end' (p. 45). He then gives specific consideration to the distribution of divisions [End Page 189] of the London Corresponding Society throughout the capital, highlighting their dearth within the walled City and suggesting several possible explanations for this surprising absence. This discussion is followed by a chapter on the coffee house. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the treason trials and unstable legal taxonomy of the 1790s, Barrell examines a numberof cases in which radicals were tried for seditious utterances made in coffee houses, which, he contends, operated as spaces in which conversation involved a 'delicate negotiation between public and private'(p. 83). Barrell's thesis here is indebted to, and perhaps slightly guilty of repeating, material already covered in the recent studies of the eighteenth-century coffee house provided by Markman...

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

Conflict in The Congo: Historical and Regional Perspectives

CONFLICT IN THE CONGO: HISTORICAL AND REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES Ch. Didier Gondola. The History of Congo. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. xxviii + 181 pp. Notable People in the History of Congo. Selected Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Cloth. Kevin C Dunn. Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xi + 196 pp. Works Cited. Index. $79.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Colette Braeckman. Lumumba, un Crime d'Etat. Bruxelles: Les Editions Aden, 2002. 99 pp. euro8.50. Paper. Colette Braeckman. Les Nouveaux Predateurs: Politique des puissances en Afrique centrale. Paris: Fayard, 2003. 301 pp. Chronology. Bibliography. euro19. Paper. Ludo Martens. Kabila et la Revolution congolaise: Panafricanisme ou neocolonialisme. Antwerp: Editions EPO, Tome 1, 2002. 692 pp. Maps. Index. euro38. Paper. Howard Adelman and Govind C. Rao, eds. War and Peace in Zaire/Congo: Analyzing and Evaluating Intervention: 1996-1997. Trenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 2004. x + 344 pp. Index. $29.95. Paper. The Congo (formerly Zaire) is a metaphor for the plight of the whole African continent. Although it is a country richly endowed with natural resources and minerals, its population remains one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden in the world. Sadly, from the first incursions of Portuguese explorers in the Kongo Kingdom in 1482 to the present, the country has constantly been plagued by political strife and ethnic and regional conflict. Currently a war goes on that has claimed about four million lives since August 1998. As some of the works reviewed here show, the Congo's predicament may best be explained in terms of its historical relationship with the West, based on political domination and economic exploitation and the pursuit by the West of a consistent and systematic policy of balkanization or divide-and-rule. In the wake of a recent revival of interest in this country following the publication of books by Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost [Houghton Mifflin, 1998]) and Ludo De Witte (The Assassination ofLumumba [Verso, 2001]), and of the subsequent report of the Belgian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the tragic circumstances of Patrice Lumumba's death, six authors-Congolese, Belgian, and North American-have taken a fresh look at the burdened history of the Congo from both regional and international perspectives. In The History of Congo, Ch. Didier Gondola, a Congolese scholar at Indiana University, makes use of a multidisciplinary and long-term perspective on the history of the Congo, starting with the indigenous kingdoms and empires (Kongo and Luba/Lunda). He surveys in turn the colonial conquest, the brutal rule of King Leopold II's Congo Free State, Belgian paternalistic colonialism, the painful birth of independent Congo, and its uneven development through three republics, including Mobutu's long dictatorial and predatory rule (1965-97), the failed transition to democracy (1990-97), the short and ill-fated tenure of Laurent-Desire Kabila (1997-2001), and finally the ongoing continental war. Besides looking at government and politics, Gondola looks at economy and society, as well as health, education, and culture. He concludes that any Congolese leader who comes between the West and its access to Congo's strategic mineral resources will be eliminated, as the tragic fate of and Kabila clearly demonstrates: Lumumba became the last obstacle preventing Western governments and companies from making Congo their own neocolonial state . . . . It seems. . . that Kabila's death was part of a large, wellorchestrated plan. This plan was probably masterminded by one or more of the foreign governments that still control Congo in a bid to replace him with a more amenable figurehead (123, 173). Gondola's broad, wide-ranging, and well-documented volume, written clearly and from the perspective of the Congolese people, includes many useful features: current and former names of places, a time line of historical events, biographical notes on Congo's most notable leaders, and a chapter-by-chapter annotated bibliography. …

The Winter King: Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years War (review)

Reviews 229 Parergon 21.2 (2004) that Staupitz is not merely a ‘pre-reformer’ or a Reformation ‘forerunner’, but rather a ‘theological front-runner and herald of the Reformation’ (p. 379). This richly documented ‘theological biography’ offers both an invaluable guide to the thought of Staupitz, and a stimulating, sometimes provocative insight into the relationship between early sixteenth-century Catholic and Reformation thought. Although Staupitz’s unique relationship to Luther is of special interest and importance, Posset has convincingly shown that Staupitz must also be taken seriously as a significant theological and spiritual reformer in his own right. Benjamin Myers School of Humanities James Cook University Pursell, Brennan C., The Winter King: Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years War, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; cloth; pp. xvii, 320; 11 b/w illustrations; RRP US$89.95, £49.95; ISBN 0754634019. Frederick V has long been neglected in lacking a substantive modern biography. This highly successful study fills this gap and makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Thirty Years War. Accessibly written and based on impressive archival research, it is conversant with the secondary literature of the War in English, French and Spanish as well as in German. The result is a book likely to remain the standard study of Frederick for a long time to come. Pursell’s portrait of Frederick is both personal and political. One of the principal strengths of the book is the sustained account of the interaction between the elector’s personality and policies. Pursell’s method is to investigate the internal logic of Frederick’s intellectual positions as a vehicle for understanding their wider political consequences. The central theme is the struggle between Frederick and the Emperor Ferdinand II and between their incompatible visions of imperial government and law. The book also locates Frederick and the German war within the wider European diplomatic context. This international contextualisation and interplay gives the book an explanatory richness which enhances its value. Pursell rejects the traditional view of Frederick as a political incompetent. The Elector, according to Pursell, was neither weak-minded nor weak-willed. He was his own man with his own ideas, made his own decisions and mistakes, and created his own personal tragedy. Frederick emerges as a deeply devoted family man, a devout Calvinist, a Protestant ecumenist, and a ruler deeply imbued with 230 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) a high sense of personal honour. For Pursell he represents neither fanaticism nor recklessness but a case study in conscience. His Christianity, however, was very warlike. His ‘personal faith in a warrior God helped to perpetuate the Thirty Years War’ (p. 245). His personal crusade, however, was not fundamentally religious, Pursell believes, but constitutional. He saw the Austrian Habsburgs as corrupters of the imperial constitution, who sought to transform the Empire into an hereditary monarchical possession, to undermine the status of the electors, and to dismantle established religious rights. Religious freedoms, for Frederick, were inextricable from the established constitutional framework but did not dominate his view of imperial affairs. It is a familiar seventeenth-century story: the rebel as self-styled defender of traditional structures who precipitates a political cataclysm. In this case it is part of a revisionist portrayal which gives its human subject a new and credible coherence. Frederick’s worldly skills were not, however, the adequate servant of his moral ambitions. By 1621, after defeats in Bohemia and Germany, he was willing to incite a continental war and a mass conflict over religion to effect his restoration. This, Pursell argues, ‘was the principal cause for the continuation of the Thirty Years War at this early stage’ (p. 153). But Frederick lacked the resources for a policy of such dimensions. Forced to depend upon allies, he found himself at the mercy of the agendas of English, Dutch and Swedish politicians. Lacking diplomatic ability as well as strategic vision, he was, as Pursell makes clear, a chronic political miscalulator and wishful thinker, especially about who would help him. His immaturity and wilfulness are clear in his relations with his fatherin -law James I of England, which are the major sub-plot of the book. Frederick believed...

The Making and Putative Implementation of a British Foreign Policy of Gesture, December 1905 to August 1914: The Anglo-French Entente Revisited

Despite tension within the Liberal cabinet between the few partisans of the entente with France and a majority reluctant to admit even the possibility of Britain fighting beside France in a continental war, the minority Liberal Imperialists — R.B. Haldane particularly influential among them — were largely unchecked by their more isolationist colleagues until the watershed of November 1911. Ironically, this earlier period of freedom saw less effective planning to support France than the post-watershed period of closer scrutiny. Using newly available evidence from the Lansdowne and Ilbert papers, this paper examines the means used by partisans of the entente to impose their will on the cabinet during the four “war-in-sight” crises preceding August 1914 — means such as public opinion creation through press manipulation, collaboration with the Conservative leadership, and use of treaty obligations to provide a locus standi. It closes with the argument that the Liberal Imperialists’ earlier lack of interest in Anglo-French planning is best explained by their perception of Russia’s major role in safeguarding France, and the consequent belief that British gestures of support were chiefly that, gestures intended mainly to maintain the connection with Russia, which was of paramount importance to British foreign — mainly imperial — policy at that time.

A Country Divided? English Politics and the Nine Years' War

The accession of William III began a revolution in English foreign policy. Under the Dutch king's auspices England joined a Grand Alliance against the France of Louis XIV and shouldered the burdens of a principal partner in a major continental war. Not only did the war place grave financial strains upon the state; the formulation, administration, and execution of war policy also became areas of continual concern. These concerns combined to raise general questions about England's proper role in European affairs and about the proper application of English power in service of those interests. They also cast William III and the politicians into a constitutional no-man's land in which the royal monopoly over war and peace had to contest with the need to secure annual supplies. It has been the historian's task to explain how William III's “continental commitment” to land warfare, alliances, and defense of European liberties survived this political struggle.

Small and Medium Size Enterprises and Regional Development.

1. Beginnings of Construction, 1862-88 2. Operations Plans Under Stosch and Caprivi 1877-88 3. Wilhelm's Naval Dreams 4. Foreign Policy and Naval Operations, 1888-89 5. Coordination of the Army and Navy for Coastal Defense, 1889-95 6. The New Era and the Rise of Tirpitz, 1890-95 7. Incompetent Naval Planning for an Improbable Continental War, 1895-99 8. The Navy and World Power, I: Transoceanic Tension and Operational Planning Against Great Britain and in Non-European Waters, 1895-99 9. The Navy and World Power, II: Tirpitz and the First and Second Navy Laws, 1897-1900 10. The Acceptance of the Tirpitz Plan, 1897-1905 11. Diplomatic Background to Naval Operations, 1899-1904 12. Naval Preparation for War, 1899-1905 13. Diplomacy and Operational Planning in the Face of War, 1904-06 14. The Challenge to Britain: The Navy Laws of 1906 and 1908 and Increased War Preparedness 15. Foreign Policy from Algeciras to Agadir, 1906-11 16. Groping for Viable Naval Operations Plans in European Waters, 1905-11 17. The Eclipse of the Tirpitz Plan, 1911-14 18. Naval Operational Planning from Agadir to the July Crisis, 1914 19. Epilogue and Conclusions