Foreign Threats Research Articles

The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans

Both geopolitics and eugenics as political/scientific theories emerged during the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries. Although in the literature these remain largely disparate areas of inquiry, many parallels exist. Both reflected a concern over the security of the state and both emphasized the identification of foreign threats and likewise intimated viable solutions to counter these threats. This paper seeks to uncover a geopolitics of eugenics. Specifically, I contend that a eugenically informed geopolitical discourse—and not solely a racist ideology—greatly informed the decision during the Second World War to incarcerate in the United States 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. The liberties and human rights of those incarcerated were violated because, according to this discourse, their sacrifices were necessary for the preservation of a (white) race and nation.

European Perspectives on Intercultural Communication

Some of the major aspects of intercultural communication in Italy in particular, and in Europe in general, are summarised in this paper. In the wake of developments in favour of political and social minority rights in the United States, voluntary movements in Europe arose in the 1970s and became stronger in the 1990s. Among their many activities, volunteers working to further intercultural education have taken on the role of multipliers, spreading the application of intercultural learning. They have served alternately as trainers of young people and students of experts, functioning as hinges between teaching and learning. In many European countries, intercultural education in schools is still left to volunteer initiatives. The peculiarity of intercultural communication lies in its pragmatic approach to reality. It is based on a few abstract general truths, such as the fact that all humans have a culture, value orientation, etc. allowing them to understand and interpret an endless amount of practical experiences. Here, we shall present an anthropological approach to intercultural relations, considering various issues, such as the differences between cultural and national identities, the development of ethnocentrism as a response to perceived foreign threats, and the differences between assimilation, inclusion and integration. The focus on the Mediterranean region provides an example of the intercultural communication that takes place among many western and eastern cultures.

The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres

Using Costa Rica as a example, Longley carefully examines the development of the successful relationship between a nonindustrialized country and the United States, revealing the complex forces at work in resistance and accommodation. During World War II and the immediate postwar era, both the United States and Costa Rica experienced dramatic changes. The United States assumed world leadership and the accompanying responsibilities; Costa Rica encountered far-reaching difficulties that culminated in the Civil War of 1948 and the rise to power of Jose Figueres. Longley examines why the United States supported Figueres and emphasizes the history and role of Costa Ricans, primarily the figueristas, in maintaining good relations in such a difficult era. Figueres implemented economic and political nationalism, which produced domestic and international tensions, and in spite of its rejection of similar policies in Guatemala and Iran, the United States supported Figueres against domestic and foreign threats.

Nationalism and Civil Rights in Cuba: A Comparative Perspective, 1930-1960

For most of the twentieth century U.S. history and Cuban history have been closely interconnected. African-Americans and Afro-Cubans in particular share common bonds of struggle for civil rights and equality in their respective countries. But individuals are products of their environments and African-Americans and Cubans shaped distinct civil rights platforms in accordance with their national, political and social institutions. African-Americans and Cubans learned to respond to their political systems through a series of historical experiences that reaped success or failure over time. Cuba's Hispanic colonial heritage that recognized miscegenation and mestizaje provided a different mode of action than African Americans who lived for most of their history under a segregated U.S. system.(1) This essay will examine the Cuban struggle for social, economic, political and cultural equality from 1930-1960, while comparing those events with the civil rights struggle in the United States during the same period. Citizen's rights, to be sure, are uniquely national, if not constitutional constructions. According to Hegel, right in society is that which the law wills. Those rights, defined by the state, theoretically represent the collective views of the individuals who rule the nation.(2) Civil Rights which often refer to freedom from discrimination based on nationality, race, gender, religious liberty, as well as immunity from brutality must be scrutinized within a national framework. Members of particular nations define civil rights as the rights of citizens to pursue civil liberties within that nation. United States Civil Rights, for example, are based on a constitution dating back to 1789, and which continues to be redefined for inclusively. Part of the U.S. Civil Rights Movements was bent on redefining and reelaborating on issues that would include African-Americans in the citizen's phrase We the people.(3) Owing to the historically weak Constitution in Cuban history and its political and economic underdevelopment, what Cubans have come to expect as their rights as citizens have tended to take on a nationalist focus. Moreover, while nationalism in the African-American community often meant black nationalism and implied racial solidarity, self sufficiency, black capitalism, and often separatism, among Afro-Cubans, nationalism was a patriotic call to bring all Cubans of all races together in pursuit of sovereignty, often against foreign threats. To this end, Cubans passed several nationalist laws which would shape Afro-Cubans' civil rights drive. In 1910, the Cuban Senate passed the Morua Amendment to an Electoral Reform Law which prohibited the organization of political parties based on one race only. The subsequent race war that followed in 1912 was an aberration in post-abolition history.(4) Cubans found a variety of non-political ways to pursue economic and social rights and to attain social mobility. In 1918, Jose Armando Pla explicated options available to Afro-Cubans. First, there was the individualist approach in which educated Afro-Cubans could attain high levels of achievement despite the obstacles of society; second, the collective approach called for Afro-Cubans to join together to affect the political process; third, politically influential men, such as Martin Moria Delgado argued that blacks should associate themselves with established political parties, promoting their interests within the party system.(5) Two decades after the race wars and the passage of the Morua Law, the collective option was limited to cultural and non-political activities which would not challenge the state. Moreover these options must be understood in terms of the new generation of Afro-Cubans. The Cuban Republic had just come of age. Created in 1902, by the 1930's, a new generation born after independence became increasingly interested in national sovereignty and advancement. Patriotism and nationalism ignited the passions of Cubans of all backgrounds, motivating them to seek solutions to pressing problems. …

International Joint Ventures and Endogenous Protection: A Political-Economy Approach

This paper constructs a model of international joint ventures (JVs) with political-economy considerations as the main motivation. A foreign firm decides whether to undertake full ownership foreign direct investment (FDI), or to form a JV with a home firm, while the home firm lobbies against FDI. It is shown that the level of lobbying is lower in the JV regime than in the FDI regime if the foreign firm transfer sufficiently advanced technology to the home firm through the JV. However, if the foreign firm anticipates future protectionist threats and forms a JV with the home firm beforehand (quid pro quo JV), then the foreign firm’s profit increases and the home firm’s level of lobbying decreas - es.

Better Ideas: Expanded Funding for Educational Research

ehold, I tell you a mystery. On the one hand, Americans have an abiding faith in research. As perhaps no other people in the world, they embrace the empirical ideal, believe in science, fund engineering, and demand that evidence be obtained before taking action in endeavors they consider important. Moreover, they are willing to fund expensive research on a host of problems they consider important: unearthing the remains of dinosaurs; studying distant nebulae; searching for cures for cancer or AIDS; exploring the human genome; assessing whether tobacco and other questionable substances are addictive; seeking ways to defend our nation from foreign threats. Indeed, research and the evidence it generates are now involved in many enterprises that Americans care about, and they often demand to see evidence before committing themselves to action.

Effects of Anticipated Foreign Military Threat on Arms Accumulation

The literature of competitive arms accumulation based on the intertemporal optimization model has in recent years received considerable attention. For example, some models study the strategic aspects of arms accumulation in a dynamic game [1; 11; 6; 14; 15],' others examine the economic effect of consumption, military spending, and arms accumulation in the presence of a foreign threat [5; 6]. However, these studies focus their attention on the stability, the steady-state effect, and the short-run adjustment of military spending and the domestic arms stock following an unanticipated permanent rise in the foreign military threat.2 It seems that very few efforts have been made to analyze the effects of an anticipated foreign military threat on the defense spending and home weapon stock. As a consequence, the first purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature of competitive arms accumulation through examining the impact of an anticipated foreign threat. There are several examples motivated for such a study. The Middle East is a case in point. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia face the anticipated military threat from Iraq since the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991. Recently, the peace talk between Israel and Arabs is often held, which makes their people anticipate that the enmity between both sides may be lessened and that the military conflicts in the Middle East may be lowered in the future. The South Asia is another case in point. As India insists on developing their nuclear weapons, the public in Pakistan anticipate that the military threat will be increased and hence will engage in an arms race action. Most studies on military spending use two alternative specifications in the utility function. Brito [1], Simaan and Cruz [11], Deger and Sen [5; 6] assume that the utility function is nonsepara-

The role of the military in combatting terrorism in a democratic society

In the continuing quest to combat terrorism, both home‐grown and foreign threats, the role of the military arm of democratic societies is evaluated. While there is an absolute determination to defeat terrorism within the framework of the rule of law and the democratic process, it is very sensitive once the military becomes involved. An intensified effort to bring terrorists to justice by prosecution and conviction before courts of law, however, sometimes necessitates these drastic measures to be taken.

Russia and Estonian security dilemmas

(1995). Russia and Estonian security dilemmas. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 27-45.

Public Opinion and Foreign Threats: Eisenhower's Response to Sputnik

Renewed attention to the role of public opinion on foreign policy outcomes in quantitative correlational studies indicates that opinion influences foreign policy. However, authors of these studies note that their conclusions could be flawed if elites simply manipulate public opinion, rather than responding to it. Both realist and neorealist perspectives on public opinion are consistent with a manipulation perspective. As urged by those using quantitative data, this article examines a case using declassified archival information in order to examine responsiveness in a situation ripe for manipulation. Specifically, U.S. reactions to Soviet Sputnik launches are scrutinized. President Eisenhower was much less concerned about Soviet actions than was the general public but nonetheless substantially altered many defense programs in order to meet perceived public demands. The President acknowledged privately that at least two-thirds of a spending supplement was used to meet public fears, not real security needs. This finding is inconsistent with prevailing realist theories and standard historical interpretations.

Managerial response to a hostile takeover in an uncertain legal environment: The case of union carbide

Following the tragedy at its Bhopal, India plant. Union Carbide found itself the object of a hostile takeover attempt in 1985. In spite of great uncertainty regarding its final legal liability, Union Carbide's management opposed the offer and began an aggressive program of asset and financial restructuring. From an analysis of the performance of Union Carbide's common stock, Sant and Ferris find that the financial impact of the Bhopal accident was dissipated within a year. Using additional accounting and industry data, they draw universal conclusions regarding the international management of complex technologies and firm valuation in the presence of foreign legal threats.

Good Times, Bad Times, and the Diversionary Use of Force

It is commonly asserted that state leaders, when faced with poor domestic political conditions, have an incentive to engage in diversionary foreign policy behavior. The standard view is that an aggressive foreign policy benefits the executive by leading the public to ignore domestic problems and to “rally around the flag” to meet the foreign threat. In this article, the authors formalize the diversionary argument as a principal-agent problem in which the state executive is an agent under contract to a public whose choice to retain or dismiss the executive is based on whether the agent is judged to be competent. The authors assume that the competence of the executive is private information and that the public makes Bayesian updates of the probability of executive competence based on domestic and foreign policy outcomes. Several implications are derived from the model. First, the competence of executives and their attitudes toward risk are central in the decision to engage in diversionary foreign policy. Second, an executive often can improve her or his chances of being retained only by altering the public's perception of the difficulty of the foreign operation. Third, the model points to the need to distinguish between short-term rally-around-the-flag effects of diversion and the public's long-term assessment of executive competence.

The ethics of aid and trade: U.S. food policy, foreign competition, and the social contract

The traditional military-territorial model of the nation state defines international duties in terms of protecting citizens' property from foreign threats. In this 1992 book about the principles of the US agricultural policy and foreign aid, Professor Thompson replaces this model with the notion of the trading state that sees its role in terms of the establishment of international institutions that stabilize and facilitate cultural and intellectual, as well as commercial, exchanges between nations. The argument focuses on protectionist challenges to foreign aid and development assistance programs, and engages with the views of a variety of economists, commodity organizations, and philosophers on world hunger and development. What emerges is a new interpretation of social contract theory that can determine goals for international trade and development policy.

Political Succession in Thailand

The study of leadership succession in modem Thai politics is vexing because there are no clear patterns to explain the myriad changes of government since the 1932 revolt that overthrew the absolute monarchy. In the sixty years since then, political succession has at times been by peaceful and constitutionally sanctioned transfers of power, such as elections, but more often by nonauthoritative coups d'etat, usually led by dissident members of the military. These governmental changes do not appear to correspond to patterns of economic downturn or improvement, nor to foreign or internal threats to Thai security. Instead, political succession in Thailand, unguided by consistent norms, is best viewed as an unpatterned, ad hoc event dependent on changing allegiances and power advantages held by various elite groups, such as politicians, bureaucrats, capitalist business leaders, and military officers. Although it is too early to evaluate precisely the succession crisis of May 1992, the uprising of Thais against their military rulers suggests a continuation of ad hoc changes in government leadership. In modern Thai politics, the military has played the dominant role in determining succession changes. However, military coups have occurred in nonpatterned ways, as a function of varying perceptions of self-interest, and have resulted in diverse outcomes. Although the military has had the most to do with determining the success or failure of governmental change, the random nature of the succession changes has made it impossible to predict when coups will take place and with what results. Indeed, not only did Thai and Western scholars fail to predict the military coup of February 23, 1991, but they had asserted the conventional wisdom that coups were an anachronistic part of the nation's past, no longer pertinent to the new democratic kingdom. This article seeks to show that Thailand has not institutionalized a systematic succession process but that succession nevertheless has been

Columns

History teaching in a multi‐cultural society was one of the most frequently discussed topics in educational circles in 1990. Anybody who learned history in the pre‐1960 period would, however, have been surprised to learn that it was thought that “multi‐cultural society” was a new‐thing in the UK. To them the history of these islands seemed to be one wave of invaders after another with a sort of English only established as a universal language some 400 years ago. This strand in our history was matched by another in which brave Britons went off in search of fame and fortune, or to head off a foreign threat, overseas.

Domestic sources of alliances and alignments: the case of Egypt, 1962–73

The theoretical and empirical literature on international alliances has tended to support the realist view that the pursuit or tightening of external alignments stems predominantly from external security threats. Consequently, the role of domestic factors has generally been ignored or downplayed. This article begins with the observation that leaders confronted with external threats make trade-offs between the pursuit of external alignments and the mobilization of domestic resources. It then argues that the choice of strategy depends on a combination of systemic and domestic factors, including the perceived degree of external threat to state security, the perceived degree of domestic instability and threat to the government, and the constraints that derive from the domestic political economy. The analysis of Egypt's alignment behavior during the period from 1962 to 1973 underscores the impact of domestic and economic political constraints on the choice of domestic mobilization or alliance formation and the central role of alliances in providing resources for confronting domestic as well as foreign threats.

Government Purchases and Real Interest Rates

Government Purchases and Real Interest Rates

Rent Seeking, Military Participation, and Economic Performance in LDCs

Rent seeking is an attempt to distort prices in order to achieve a contrived transfer. Where rent seeking is on the rampage, there is a serious distortion of incentives. Investing resources in distributional struggles and political conflict looks rewarding, whereas increasing or improving output looks less attractive. Moreover, price distortions interfere with an efficient allocation of resources. That is why we should expect rent seeking and resulting price distortions to be negatively correlated with economic growth. Because there is no reason to assume that the less-privileged strata are likely to win distributional struggles, rent seeking does not contribute to the equalization of the size distribution of income. Ironically, serious international rivalries and threats to national security may result in better economic performance. Foreign threats often produce large armies and high military participation ratios. Because the military teaches discipline and some other useful skills, it does contribute to human capital formation and ultimately to economic growth. As mass armies affect the balance of power between social classes for the benefit of the less-privileged ones, high military participation ratios contribute to income equalization. These propositions have been tested and supported by cross-national regression analysis of data for the 1970s and 31 LDCs.

Foreign Threat and Domestic Reform: The Emergence of the Ritsuryo State

J APANESE history may be characterized by institutional continuity, but it is not without its turning points. Few would dispute that one of the greatest of these occurred in the seventh century when the familially organized Yamato ?ig hegemony was transformed into a 'new centralized order built in the image of the great empires of the continent.'1 This order is referred to by historians as the ritsuryo kokka t or ritsuryo state, because of the Chinese-style penal (ritsu) and administrative (ryo) codes that defined its structure and operation. Its creation has been linked in the minds of generations of students to the Taika Reform (Taika no Kaishin MUMFi) that followed the assassination of Soga no Iruka BRfuAY by Prince Naka no Oe 43t5i (later Emperor Tenji ~it) in 645. As has been observed, however, the Taika period, 645-650, 'neither marked the origin of such reforms, nor witnessed their fulfillment.'2 Nonetheless, there is little doubt that most of the changes postdated rather than predated Taika. As for their completion, one convenient and familiar benchmark is the promulgation of the Taiho Code (Taiho Ritsuryo 7t!~~M-) in 702. While it would be correct to say that the ritsuryO state was a creation of the half-century between Taika and Taiho, such a formulation disguises the fact that the pace of change was far from uniform. John Hall places the greatest emphasis on two periods: the Taika years and the reign of Temmu Bit, 672-686. According to Hall, the coup in 645 'brought about a crucial shift in the balance of political power at the Yamato court and, as a consequence, assured a decisive commitment to certain reform policies.'3 It proved impossible, however, to implement these fully before Tenji's death in late 671. Shortly afterward, a serious dispute, the Jinshin no Ran ??ioL, or Jinshin War,

Opinion: Forbidden Writers-the Foreign Threat in Literary Garb

Opinion: Forbidden Writers-the Foreign Threat in Literary Garb