Humiliating Defeat Research Articles

«Надо сказать правду»: Ф.М. Достоевский и его современники в споре об итогах Крымской кампании

The paper discusses F.M. Dostoevsky’s attitude towards the Crimean military campaign (1853–1856) and his understanding of the deep meaning of the armed conflict between Russia and the alliance which included the British, French, and Ottoman Empires, as well as the Kingdom of Sardinia. It is argued that F.M. Dostoevsky may be called a “child of the Crimean campaign,” even though he did not participate in it personally, as he remained, all through those months, first a convict and then an exile. However, it was the Crimean campaign that stimulated him to ponder about Russia’s position in the world and about Russia’s geopolitical interests. The Crimean campaign was also well “remembered” by many characters in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novels. The central theme of the paper is the destiny of the three poems that Dostoevsky wrote during his exile in the town of Semipalatinsk. In those poems, the author pointedly presented his evaluation of the events which formed and defined the basis of his worldview. It is sometimes claimed that the main purpose of writing those poems was just pragmatic, allegedly caused by the plight of the author and his desperate desire to come back to literature at any cost. In this paper, this claim is refuted. Especially emphasized is F.M. Dostoevsky’s later avowal that at the very time of the military confrontation he, even though a convict, wished Russia’s victory and not Russia’s defeat. Next, the paper analyses the utterances about the Crimean war by some like-minded contemporaries of F.M. Dostoevsky (the poets F.M. Tyutchev and A.N. Maykov, the historian N.Ya. Danilevsky) as compared with positions of intellectuals and politicians in Europe. F.M. Dostoevsky rejects the assertion that Russia suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean war, an assertion that was firmly rooted in the public consciousness and, for many years, taken almost as a universally recognized truth.

A Memory Sterilized, Utilized, and Realized

After the French suffered a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the conditions were set for proletarian uprising in Paris, resulting in the formation of the Commune of Paris. The Commune’s abortive existence stood as a violent shock across Europe and generated highly charged opinions from the poorest laborers to the wealthiest members of the nobility. The effect of the Commune’s memory on the European political Left was particularly divergent as men and women continued to grapple with the memory of the Commune and determined for themselves how best to render it intelligible. Some decided to pacify the memory, preaching of heroism and class struggle rather than violent revolution and anarchy. Others decided to utilize the memory of the Commune to incite revolts and strikes, and others worked to realize the Commune’s mission by taking tangible lessons from the Communards’ example. This paper focuses on specific socialist movements in France and wider Europe to demonstrate the multiplicity of occasions in which the Commune was centrally remembered and the diverse outcomes of the use of that memory.

"No one can erase the stories": A Review of Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police

"No one can erase the stories":A Review of Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police Agnibha Banerjee (bio) Halfway through Yoko Ogawa's novel The Memory Police, books are made to disappear from an unnamed island off an unnamed shore. The unnamed narrator, herself a writer, describes—with the numbing resignation that comes from having lived too long with uncertainty and loss to feel particularly perturbed—how the unnamed residents of the island gather, without much ado, in small groups and light bonfires to burn the books which to them will soon signify nothing more than a bundle of pages. As the islanders stare blankly at the fires lit up against the grey sky, the narrator notices a screaming young woman trying to put out the fires. Even as the woman is seized and arrested by the Memory Police—blank-faced uniformed men whose duty is to ensure that disappeared objects remain disappeared—she shouts, "No one can erase the stories!"1 Re-reading The Memory Police at a time when countless funeral pyres burn unnamed corpses across India, even as the country cowers under the relentless onslaught of Covid-19—fuelled by the complacency and arrogance of those in power—I marvel once again at the persistence of memories woven into stories that linger. While the novel was originally published in Japanese in 1994, it was only in 2019 that it was translated into English by Stephen Snyder. Ogawa's story takes place in an unidentifiable island where seemingly random objects—perfumes, ribbons, hats, birds, books, bodies—are mysteriously made to vanish. Though the material existence of the disappeared object continues, all memories, emotions, and feelings which the islanders associate with that object are totally effaced. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator—herself a novelist—reminisces about her childhood, recalling how her mother explained to her the uncanny process of the disappearances: "It doesn't hurt, and you won't even be particularly sad. One morning you'll simply wake up and it will be over, before you've even realised. […] You'll feel that something has changed. […] And you'll realise that you've lost something."2 The disappearances are never foreshadowed, never explained, and the inhabitants of the island have almost nonchalantly accepted them as an inevitable, inescapable aspect of their lives. They gather in small groups to console each other [End Page 12] and dispose of the disappearing object (if it is a physical object) but "no one makes a fuss," and "soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing had happened, and no one can recall what it was that disappeared."3 Should they fail to do so, the Memory Police will seize and incarcerate the detractors. A nuanced commentary on the fragility and malleability of the memories that constitute us, Ogawa's novel may be read as an allegory for the inexorable erosion of time upon the sedimented layers of identity. With dreamlike poise, subtlety, and muted elegance—interspersed and illumined with tender moments of beauty—Ogawa creates a fable of our effervescent lives, bounded by mortality and chance. Written in Japan towards the end of the last century—a world so markedly different from our hyper-connected, oversaturated times—Ogawa's story of collective amnesia betrays a sympathetic critique of post-World War II Japan's determination to obliviate its traumatic history of military rule, the humiliation of defeat in the war, and the horrors of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As John W. Dower points out in his book on post-war Japan, "victims of the bombings—called hibakusha—could not grieve publicly, could not share their experiences through written word."4 This coerced prohibition of mourning anticipates the enforced disappearances in Ogawa's novel where the Memory Police ensure that "there are no delays in the process of forgetting, and that useless memories disappear quickly and easily."5 They use the metaphor of a diseased body to explain why such a forgetting is necessary: "If your big toe becomes infected with gangrene, you cut it off as soon as you can. If you do nothing, you end up losing the whole leg...

The Memory of the French Centurions: Asia-Europe Connections in the Tragic Memory of Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Films

Inspired by Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, who were French researchers of the mechanism of the memory, and Jean Larteguy, the novelist who gave a voice to the defeated French colonial soldiers, this essay explores the passage of the perilous memories of the veterans of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, which fought in Indochina between 1945 and 1954, based on the regenerative memory of the war and of Asia and on their memories of themselves. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu resulted in the stigma of a dangerous and traumatic memory. Producers of image and rhetorical discourse, such as the French filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer, have undertaken acts of image making through films that transformed the humiliating defeat into a grand and redemptive tragedy. For Schoendoerffer, these acts of filmmaking constituted an unsettling and regenerative experience for both sides, creating a film production of transcultural memories connecting Asia and France.

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 406. $20.00 (cloth).

Martha Hodes, <i>Mourning Lincoln</i>. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 406. $20.00 (cloth).

Vietnamese Farmers That Changed the World: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Cold War

The Vietnam War was the quintessential Cold War conflict between the United States and the Sino-Soviet supplied, nationalistic North Vietnamese. This war saw the world’s most wealthiest and dominant military force suffer a long, drawn out defeat to a poverty-stricken society of farmers, armed with nothing but an unyielding nationalism and outdated weaponry. This paper examines the United States’ involvement in Vietnam throughout the Vietnam War and also explores the ways in which the Vietnam War affected the Cold War. Beginning with President Harry S. Truman in 1945 and ending with President Gerald Ford in 1975, this paper examines the motivations behind each of the six United States Presidential Administrations during the Vietnam War and gives an in-depth explanation for the crucial decisions that were made by the United States Government over the course of the war. The effect that these foreign policy decisions and directives had on the Cold War atmosphere is also heavily analyzed. The faults and failures of the United States that led to their humiliating defeat in Vietnam consequently altered the Cold War atmosphere. In order to fully understand the Cold War, it is necessary to understand the Vietnam War and its impact on United States foreign policy.

The Semiotics of Strategy: A Preliminary Structuralist Assessment of the Battle-Map in &lt;em&gt;Patton&lt;/em&gt; (1970) and &lt;em&gt;Midway&lt;/em&gt; (1976)

This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner's biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight's epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. It is argued that the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. It features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings, giving audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional 'reading' of the map. Conversely, the map is a device of foreshadowing and a sign of command's profound limitations. It is thus resolved that the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as the objective.

Fifty Years since the Six-Day War

The war of June 1967 was a watershed for the Middle East. In just six days, Israel inflicted upon the Arabs their most humiliating defeat in modern times, perhaps of all time. The great promise of revolutionary Arab nationalism, as espoused by Egypt’s charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, proved to be no more than an illusion. In this article, Asher Susser explores the lasting consequences of war, arguing that the Arabs have yet to fully recover, 50 years later.

The Spanish American War’s ‘Most Durable Hero’: Admiral Pasquale Cervera and Popular Heroic Values in the United States, 1898–1909

The United States honored a host of military heroes during the Spanish American War including Pasqual Cervera y Topete, the enemy admiral who had experienced a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Santiago Bay, Cuba (3 June 1898) at the hands of US naval forces. Over the course of the war and in the year that followed, American public opinion of the admiral became positive and increasingly laudatory. By late 1899, Life Magazine, followed by other popular publications, claimed that Cervera was a better war hero then Admiral George Dewey and other American officers who had been wildly celebrated for their wartime heroics. The enemy admiral’s heroic rise was possible because of a fundamental change in the relationship between the press and the nation’s war heroes that sped up each champion’s ultimate decline. In the late nineteenth century Americans sought chivalrous, selfless men of action for their heroes. As journalists began covering each war hero’s daily life as they did other celebrities, however, they discovered character flaws in the nation’s homegrown champions. This examination of Cervera’s gradual rise as an American hero through his death in 1909 includes an overview of the American hero-making process and lifecycle and how celebrity journalism shortened the reign of most war heroes. After identifying the complicated set of values the nation sought in its war heroes at the end of the century, this study will also explain why journalists considered naval heroes as better representatives of those cherished ideals than those from the Army (including volunteer Theodore Roosevelt) until well after the end of the war. Roosevelt was honored as a hero during the war and won the 1899 New York gubernatorial election largely because of his wartime popularity, but was not considered selfless because of his clear political ambitions. American hero-worship of Cervera developed slowly, was considerably more subdued than the public enthusiasm displayed for America’s native-born champions, and was undoubtedly bestowed, in part, as a criticism of the failure of American heroes to live up to the heroic narrative created for them by reporters and biographers. Cervera’s ranking as Life’s ‘most durable hero’ of the war, while seemingly nonsensical, begins to make more sense when the Spanish admiral is reconfigured as a national cultural hero instead of an American military champion. Despite his enemy status, Cervera came to epitomise important military values of the day, because of the rapid decline of the nation’s American-born war heroes brought about by celebrity journalism.

Alexander Hamilton, the Mughal War, and the Critique of the East India Company

Arguably the most influential account of South and Southeast Asia published in Britain before the mid-eighteenth century, Alexander Hamilton's New Account of the East-Indies (1727) has been ignored or marginalized by recent historians of the British East India Company. Hamilton spent thirty-five years in the East Indies as an independent trader, spoke several Asian languages, and offers the only eyewitness account in many cases of critical episodes of British interactions with merchants, officials, and rulers from Arabia to China. This essay examines Hamilton's account of the end of the Mughal War (1686–89) in which the East India Company suffered a humiliating defeat—one that is marginalized or unconvincingly explained away in the EIC's official correspondence. In contrasting Hamilton's narrative to the special pleading of Josiah Child, the director of the company during the war, and John Ovington, a company employee, this essay explores the transcultural complexities of trade and civility in South Asia at the end of the seventeenth century.

A Malvinas Veteran Onstage: From Intimate Testimony to Public Memorialization

A Malvinas Veteran Onstage:From Intimate Testimony to Public Memorialization Brenda Werth (bio) The semi-autobiographical1 play Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio (Museum Miguel Ángel Boezzio) premiered in Buenos Aires in 1998 as part of Vivi Tellas's theatre experiment Proyecto Museos (Project Museums). In the framework of Proyecto Museos, directors envision museums as theatrical spaces filled with performative elements and theatres as spaces for memorialization and display. The process of crisscrossing and reconceptualizing the functions and intentions of these spaces draws attention to the politics behind the memorialization and display of past events and experiences. Directed by Federico León and inspired by his visit to the National Aeronautical Museum in greater Buenos Aires, Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio stars Malvinas War2 veteran Miguel Ángel Boezzio playing himself. Boezzio's performance of his life can be interpreted as an act of self-memorialization, and, as I seek to demonstrate here, the discourse of memorialization ultimately provided the lexicon, symbols, and architecture that have proven essential for breaking the public silence that has surrounded the Malvinas War in post-dictatorial Argentina. In the performance of Museo Miguel Ángel Boezzio, Boezzio generates bonds of attachment and intimacy with audience members to create a sense of shared experience that transcends the personal. Drawing on Boezzio's autobiographical performance, I analyze the ways in which affective bonds created through cultural production are not only integral to processes of memorializing the Malvinas War but are also key to negotiating ongoing claims regarding the geopolitical status of Malvinas. In late 1981, as a last ditch effort to regain popular support for the foundering dictatorship, Argentina's military regime summoned the nation's historical identification with the Malvinas Islands and fueled an emotional campaign to reclaim the Islands from the British, who had established a permanent colony in the South Atlantic Islands since 1833. On April 2, 1982, Argentine troops invaded the Islands but the British Royal Navy was quickly able to overpower and force the Argentine military to surrender after just 74 days of combat. Because Argentine media accounts before the invasion promised a certain victory, the fast and crushing defeat left the majority of Argentines feeling stunned, [End Page 83] humiliated and betrayed by a military government, by then much dis-credited. In the months following the defeat, the ostensible rationale of the war (to recover national territory) became overshadowed by what the general public grew to perceive as an attempt by military officials to secure an exit strategy that would detract attention away from the systematic detentions, tortures, and disappearances they had committed during their six years in power (1976-1983). Put simply, the Malvinas campaign was designed to allow the military government to purge their "dirty war" with a "clean war."3 The Argentina the Malvinas veterans came home to was not the country they had left just two months earlier. In the lead-up to the war, they were hailed as heroes shouldering the legacy of the country's founding fathers and Independence fighters, Generals San Martín and Belgrano; upon return they were no longer perceived as future fathers of the nation, but instead were referred to as the "chicos de la guerra" (the boys/children of war), who found themselves re-assimilated into society as victims.4 While the disappeared could not physically reappear to incriminate their victimizers, the Malvinas veterans could and did, and their mere presence made the military uneasy. Eager to bury their humiliating defeat and unethical actions in the past, the military tried to remove the returned vets from the public eye. They loaded them onto covered trucks and sent them to bases in remote locations, where they were confined, sometimes for weeks, and prohibited from contacting their families.5 These tactics for making Malvinas vets invisible after the war were disturbingly similar to the ones undertaken during the operatives to kidnap and detain socalled "subversives."6 How to address the war during the transition presented a unique challenge to government officials, intellectuals and artists; the war was in many ways emblematic both of the dictatorship and of the transition to democracy; the soldiers who were sent to Malvinas to fight were members of the...

REVISITING THE WALL

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is a familiar story, and was widely revisited for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the commonly held Western narrative enshrines a number of exaggerations and myths. Communism did not fall because of Star Wars or firm rhetoric from Reagan and Thatcher. More important were the humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan and collapsing oil prices, which sealed the fate of communist Europe – and the people themselves.

Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris (review)

Reviewed by: Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris John A. English Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris. By Olivier Wieviorka. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise.. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-02838-8. Maps. Charts. Notes. Archival sources. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 446. $29.95. This work was first published in January 2007 as Histoire du débarquement en Normandie: Des origines à la libération de Paris, 1941-1944 (Paris, Editions du Seuil) and provides a French perspective on the planning and execution of the Normandy campaign to the liberation of Paris. Wieviorka offers a sweeping account, covering with broad brush strokes the development of Allied relationships, Anglo-American economic and military mobilization, D-Day preparations and logistical arrangements, combat training, bombing and deception strategies, and German expectations, in his first six chapters. He then recounts the invasion and subsequent operations in another five chapters, including one entitled "Psychoneuroses." His last two chapters, arguably the most original and informative in the entire book, describe Charles de Gaulle's struggle for legitimacy and Allied recognition, the role of the French Resistance, and France's resurrection from the humiliation of defeat. Not everyone will agree with all of the detail that Wieviorka impressively weaves together. In a wide-ranging introduction he takes issue with Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe and, targeting Stephen Ambrose, "the curiously naïve view that the Allies fought only for principles." He further asserts that owing to "Roosevelt's credulous attachment to a peculiarly American set of ideals," the Normandy invasion led to a diplomatic Munich. In a more focused thesis statement, he alleges that soldiers and historians alike, "eager to magnify the importance of [D-Day]…have often preferred its heroic charms to the harsh realities of the day, in relegating to the margins of silence everything that contradicts the legend." The sheer violence of the campaign that followed, he argues, has been deliberately downplayed by historians seeking to glorify the exploits of Allied soldiers. In short, "American and British [End Page 1007] authors have propagated a triumphalist image of brave men who unhesitatingly sacrificed their lives to liberate France and crush Nazism." Wieviorka also charges that the specialization of historical writing in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain has tended to obscure the interconnection of political, diplomatic, and economic aspects with the military dimension. Wieviorka correctly points out that the success of the cross channel attack was by no means a forgone conclusion, but he seems to believe that most Anglo-American historians do not share this view. In tracing the decision-making chronology of the Grand Alliance, moreover, he may also have missed the true significance of the ABC-1/ABC-22 war plans and why the Americans chose to ally so intimately with the British alone. As for the rationale underpinning the Operation Torch peripheral strategy, he would have benefited greatly from consulting Douglas Porch's excellent The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (2004). It is also striking that while he used several Richard Overy sources, he did not avail himself of that scholar's acclaimed Why the Allies Won (1995), which examined war production and technologies in depth. Wieviorka's reliance on Ralph Ingersoll's controversial Top Secret (1946) and, for that matter, F. W. Wintherbotham's sensational The Ultra Secret (1974) is also questionable. That said, Wieviorka provides a logically organized and highly readable discussion of the logistical and strategic requirements for the Normandy landing within the context of Russian operations and Soviet peace feelers to Germany. His treatment of Allied deception measures is succinct but thorough, though not particularly new. The same can be said of his discussion of the dysfunctional nature of the German high command as compared to the Anglo-American staff structure for directing operations. The emphasis accorded to the limitation of air strike collateral damage to France and her citizenry in the Transportation Plan is additionally warranted and highly informative. Throughout his work, Wieviorka provides a wealth of statistics on various economic aspects, equipment shortcomings, and troop strengths to challenge "simplistic views about the planning of the invasion." As might be expected...

The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917 by Alex Marshall (review)

REVIEWS I33 Marshall, Alex. The Russian GeneralStaffandAsia, 1800-igiy. Roudedge Studies in theHistory ofRussia and Eastern Europe, 4. Roudedge, London and New York, 2006. xii + 274 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?75.00. Too oftenmilitary history isheld tobe a narrow, specialist subject, sometimes a history of technological change, a litanyof ever-more efficient ways of killing people, sometimes a blow-by-blow account of a battle or campaign. Only rarely is the history of an army, fleet or other military institutionmore fully integrated into thewider social and intellectual history of the societywhich it is supposed to defend. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the military in the Government, diplomacy and administration of the Russian Empire, particularly in the bureaucratic nineteenth-century state, but this is perhaps insufficientlyreflected in the historiography. The most notable con tributions to date have come fromJohn Keep, William Fuller, Allan Wildman and Bruce Menning, and Alexander Marshall's book on theRussian General Staff and theAsiatic Frontier is an immensely valuable addition. Based on extensive research in the Military-Historical Archive in Moscow, as well as on the (often very numerous) publications of the officers of the General Staff themselves, it ispartly a work of institutionalhistory, itselfan under-researched area in Russia, tracing the rise and decline of the Asiatic Department of the General Staffwhilst also covering the development of theNikolaevskii Academy of the General Staff and other specialist educational institutions. Marshall's focus however is the formation of the elite of theRussian military, theGeneral Staff, and the emergence within itof a distinct Asiatic cadre of military orientalists {Voennye Vostokovedy). Given the role of themilitary innot only defending and waging war on the Empire's Asiatic frontiers, but also administering them,Marshall is quite justified in entitling chapter two 'The Emergence of a Colonial Military Elite'. He shows how, as a consequence of the professionalization of the officer corps in theMiliutin era, officerswho won their spurs inwars along theAsiatic frontier were often preferred to aristocrats and courtiers for important com mands and bureaucratic positions, culminating in the appointment of the quintessential Turkestanskii General Alexei Kuropatkin as Minister ofWar from 1898 to 1903 (pp. 44-45). The third chapter deals with Russian military con quests inAsia from the early eighteenth century to the annexation ofKushka in 1885, and Marshall then examines the growth ofmilitary intelligence and the acquisition of 'colonial knowledge' by the officers of the General Staff along the vast Asiatic frontierswhich resulted. China and the Far East, the Caucasus and Central Asia each have a chapter dedicated to them, and Marshall is skilled at showing how developments on one frontier could lead to innovations on another, whilst never forgetting that the amount of attention devoted toAsia was normally in inverse proportion to that lavished on the Empire's vulnerable Western frontier. Marshall is, inmy view, entirely correct to see the lengthywars in the Caucasus as the key to understanding the development of Russian military and colonial ideas in the nineteenth century (p. 43), and inparticular growing official hostility to Islam. When combined with the humiliation of defeat in 134 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g theRusso-Japanese War in 1904-05, which caused Kuropatkin to formulate the doctrine of the 'Yellow Peril' as the greatest strategic threat to Russia (pp. 95-96), this increasing paranoia clouded the judgement of theGeneral Staff. In his conclusion Marshall shows (pp. 183-88) how in theperiod leading up to the FirstWorld War 'The Myopic Guard' was distracted from the more serious threat in Europe by their concerns over pan-Islamism and the modernization of the Japanese and Chinese armed forces, not to mention growing tensions with the British over Afghanistan which (asJennifer Siegel has shown in her Endgame, London and New York, 2002) were not resolved by theAnglo-Russian agreement of 1907.He concludes with some observa tions on the continuities of attitudes and personnel amongst military oriental ists into the early Soviet period, embodied most clearly in thefigure ofAndrei Evgenievich Snesarev, the tsaristGeneral Staffs leading expert on Afghani stan and British India, who would become the rector of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow from 1921until his arrest in 1930 (p. 190). There are the...

The Struggle That Never Ends: Reforming U.S. Health Care

From the Editor-In-Chief Health AffairsVol. 24, No. 6: Rethinking Health Reform The Struggle That Never Ends: Reforming U.S. Health CareJohn K. IglehartPUBLISHED:November/December 2005Free Accesshttps://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.24.6.1396AboutSectionsView PDFPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsDownload Exhibits TOPICSSystems of careUninsuredMore than a decade has passed since the ambitious effort of Bill and Hillary Clinton to reform health care went down to a humiliating defeat without so much as a House or Senate floor vote. Many of the same issues that bedeviled America’s troubled health care system in the 1990s and well before remain unaddressed: an uninsured population that numbers some forty-five million people and, by most accounts, is very likely to increase; high expenditures that continue to grow at two to three times the overall economy; and accumulating evidence that the quality of care delivered in many instances is well below optimal. Of course, there are two sides to these issues, given the reality that one man’s expense is another man’s income. In spite of these unresolved issues, societal interest in addressing them remains modest, given their magnitude in economic and human terms. Hurricane Katrina highlighted some of the shortcomings and will provide another test for the American appetite for reform. In this thematic issue we offer a variety of papers that revisit the subject of reform from many angles and also take measure of the role of market-based competition in today’s medical economy. The issue was supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. The RWJF is a private philanthropy that since 1972 has sought to expand coverage as an integral part of its mission to improve health and health care for all Americans. Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s leading model of how group medical practice and prepayment can combine to provide high-quality care to an enrolled population. Over the past three years, during the designated “Cover the Uninsured Week,” the RWJF sponsored or collaborated in some 6,000 local events all fifty states and the District of Columbia in its ongoing efforts to expand coverage. The events generated extensive national and local media coverage and attracted more than one million visitors to www.CoverTheUninsuredWeek.org . This year the weeklong event brought together a wide array of organizations to organize activities that raised awareness about the need for affordable coverage for all Americans. The most tangible achievement of the RWJF and its partners has been to enroll some two million already eligible children and adults in existing public programs that offer coverage, particularly the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid. But that still leaves forty-five million people without insurance. As a rigorously nonpartisan policy journal, Health Affairs cannot be a cheerleader for reform. Instead, the journal’s role is to foster and facilitate informed and thoughtful dialogue. In this issue, part of our strategy for doing that has been to invite papers that explore the foundations of various competing theories of how the health care system might be improved—rather than asking authors to repeat again the familiar arguments for why their vision is the best one. We are grateful to those who have put aside their rhetorical cudgels and answered this call, and we hope that the results will be helpful to readers as they face the challenge of improving the system’s performance in a tense and polarized environment. Along the same lines, we present a group of papers on the subject of competition that do not center on the ideological debate over whether competition is or is not the key to reform. Most of these papers, too, seek to explore and explain, not to exhort. The illuminating result of this approach is that several of these papers focus on the way that consumerism—the linchpin of competitive theory in this decade—could combine and coalesce with traditional insurance and managed care instead of replacing them. The papers on competition include a retrospective look at market changes during the past ten years by Paul Ginsburg, whose services as editorial adviser enhanced this special issue above and beyond the paper he contributed. Loading Comments... Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. DetailsExhibitsReferencesRelated Article Metrics History Published online 1 November 2005 InformationCopyright 2005 by Project HOPE - The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.PDF download

The end of empire in French West Africa: France's successful decolonization?

In an effort to restore its world-power status after the humiliation of defeat and occupation, France was eager to maintain its overseas empire at the end of the Second World War. Yet just fifteen years later France had decolonized, and by 1960 only a few small island territories remained under French control. The process of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria has been widely studied, but much less has been written about decolonization in France's largest colony, French West Africa. Here, the French approach was regarded as exemplary -- that is, a smooth transition successfully managed by well intentioned French politicians and enlightened African leaders. Overturning this received wisdom, Chafer argues that the rapid unfurling of events after the Second World War was a complex , piecemeal and unpredictable process, resulting in a 'successful decolonization' that was achieved largely by accident. At independence, the winners assumed the reins of political power, while the losers were often repressed, imprisoned or silenced. This important book challenges the traditional dichotomy between 'imperial' and 'colonial' history and will be of interest to students of imperial and French history, politics and international relations, development and post-colonial studies.

Campaign Dynamics in the 2000 Canadian Election: How the Leader Debates Salvaged the Conservative Party

Canada's Progressive Conservative Party faced the prospects of electoral annihilation going into the 2000 election. In the 1993 election, the party suffered what must surely be the most humiliating defeat ever visited upon an incumbent party; its share of the popular vote plummeted from 43% to 16% and it was reduced to a mere two seats (1%, down from 57%). So complete was the collapse that the party—one of the two parties that had alternated in power since Confederation in 1867—lost its official status in the House of Commons.A political party must have at least 12 seats to be recognized officially as a political party. This status confers significant benefits, such as being able to obtain funding and to ask questions at the highly visible question period. Meanwhile, the new party of the Right—the Reform Party—managed to get 19% of the vote and, thanks to the concentration of its support in western Canada, this translated into 52 seats.For an analysis of that spectacular change, see Johnston et al. 1996.

The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution

The American revolution was the longest colonial war in modern British history and Britain's most humiliating defeat as an Imperial power. This book examines the British public's predominantly loyal reponse to its government's actions in America. The author attributes support for George III's American policies to a combination of factors, including growing isolationism in regard to the European continent and a burgeoning sense of the colonies as intergal parts of a greater British nation. He argues that the public accepted ill-conceived projects, such as the Stamp Act, because theirs was an armchair patriotism based on paying others to fight their battles for them. Drawing on nearly 1000 political pamphlets, as well as broad sides, private memoirs and popular cartoons the book offers an insight into 18th-century British political culture and an account of what the revolution meant to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Modern Communications Technology in Ethnic Nationalist Hands: The Case of the Kurds

This article examines the effect of modern media and communications technology on ethnic nationalist resurgence, using the Kurds as a case example. Television, satellite communications, the Internet and easy access to publishing technology now facilitate ethnic nationalist challenges to state hegemony and monopoly of information. Additionally, modern media and communications technology can turn a humiliating defeat into a catalyst for a more unified, stronger, ethnic nationalist movement. Globally broadcast images of such a defeat arouse the passions and indignation of even those people who only nominally identify themselves with the ethnic group in question. At the same time, communications technology such as telephones, faxes and e-mail facilitate the channeling of such indignation into immediate group protest and action which, in turn, strengthens the ethnic identification of action participants.

Lessons from the New History of the Cold War

INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE NEW HISTORY OF THE COLD WARTHE END OF THE COLD WAR HAS BROUGHT A WEALTH OF MEMOIRS, materials, and revelations from the former Soviet empire that has opened a world that Westerners thought might be closed from view forever. As more of the 'missing pages' of cold war history are found, important questions have been resolved, startling secrets have been revealed, and vexing debates have been settled. What we have found has been on occasion amusing: Leonid Brezhnev's diaries, for example, show that he thought a great deal about his weight, the number of animals he hunted, his naps - and precious little about running a nuclear superpower. Too often, we have encountered the bizarre and tragic: the suspicions about steroid use by the hulking women of the East German Olympic teams turned out not only to be true, but sadly to be only a small part of a larger programme in which innocent children were routinely marinated in dangerous drugs simply for the greater glory of the German Democratic Republic. And at times stories have emerged that are terrifying in their implications: the previously censored pages of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs tell us that even as he was trying to extricare himself from the Cuban crisis in 1962, Fidel Castro was urging him to launch an all-out nuclear attack on American cities.We now have answers - to borrow a phrase from John Gaddis, 'we now know' - but what have we learned? To judge by the reaction of some, particularly in the academic community, we've learned little indeed. While these new revelations have led some to a final overcoming of denial about the dangerous and aggressive nature of Soviet communism, for others they have led to a revisionist retrenchment, in which East and West are somehow both at fault, and that in the end 'we all lost' the cold war. (Obviously, very few Russian communists would accept this relativistic formulation; much of their anger at the regime of Boris Yeltsin is grounded in a distinct feeling that the United States inflicted a humiliating defeat on their Soviet motherland.) Whatever one makes of them, the archival materials pouring out of eastern Europe tell stories of terrible brutality and paranoia behind the former Iron Curtain. Most people seem to have accepted them as establishing beyond doubt the terrible nature of Soviet communism. Those who have not are probably beyond convincing.But there is more to the new history of the cold war than a simple catalogue of Soviet crimes. As morally satisfying as it might be to traditional cold warriors, it is time to forgo debate with the remaining revisionists - who, like the last barricaded Japanese soldiers of World War II, refuse to accept the undeniable - and move on to consider what we might learn, and what lessons we might apply in the future, from the Soviet-American conflict of 1945-91. The end of the cold war does not mean the end of 'cold wars': where conflicting ideologies make confrontation inevitable and nuclear weapons make global war unthinkable, a new cold war can emerge. An obvious possibility is with the People's Republic of China, but there are many other states whose beliefs, combined with the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, could present the West with the need to 'fight' yet another cold war in the near future. It is, therefore, imperative for policy-makers and academic specialists alike to pause at this point in history and to reflect on the origins of the most dangerous struggle in human history and how the West eventually achieved victory in it.LESSONS OF THE COLD WARThree propositions about fighting and prevailing in a 'cold war' emerge from the Soviet-American experience. First, revelations about social and political life, within the Soviet bloc, taken in light of its eventual collapse, suggest that these closed regimes were not only more odious than we knew, but less stable than we assumed. The West, when faced with such opponents, should not miss opportunities to exploit a clear internal weakness: the relationship between the state and society. …