Transatlantic Connection Research Articles

Stitching for Material Sensitivity: From Traditional to Activist Embroidery

Cochineal is an insect that has been used for textile dyeing since pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. This exposition discusses the use of the cochineal insect as a natural dye for wool and the bridge between ancient indigenous knowledge and contemporary artistic research. A transatlantic connection is created between the Mexican plateau and the Arctic region, merging traditional knowledge, contemporary art, crafting and conceptualisation through an artistic embroidery initiative involving researchers, craft artists and human rights activists living in the province of Lapland in Finland. Documentary photos of artistic practice and research diaries enhance discussion on sustainability, tradition, craftivism, decolonisation and indigenous knowledge. This exposition embraces collaborative craftivism through a group initiative called Embroidered Stances, discussions about material interconnectedness in a web-of-life conceptual structure that includes sheep wool, cactus, cochineal and ancestral knowledge. The endorsement of material sensitivity is narrated into embroideries by the first author Cervantes and discussed, acknowledging complexities within issues of cultural and ecological sustainability.

Remixing the rules: Black Language and transatlantic linguistic flows

ABSTRACT This study argues for the reading of Black Language from a translinguistic paradigm, one that understands English as a hybridized creole and shifts the attention away from the structures and rules that govern Black Language. Instead, I argue for an emphasis on the effects of Black Language practice as I claim that Black Language gains its legitimacy through the recognition of its movements, performances, and communal relevance rather than by its claims as structural and rule-governed. I then utilize the translinguistic paradigm to extend and remix two scholars who represent two different generations of Black Language scholarship in order to illustrate the political necessity of reading Black Language as a transatlantic linguistic flow. Ultimately, I argue that Black Language’s transatlantic connection lends itself to translingual inquiry and could prove to be a valuable site for future research focused on transatlantic linguistic flows.

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

From «School Buildings» to «School Architecture» – School Technicians, Grand School Buildings and Educational Architecture in Prussia and the USA in the Nineteenth Century

The history of school buildings is commonly written as a history of architecture, focusing on outstanding architects and buildings. However, the connection between pedagogical-administrative prescriptions and educational architecture has been studied less, particularly in the nineteenth century. This article highlights the often-overlooked agency of school technicians and proposes to interpret the nineteenth-century history of building schools as a history of implementing pedagogical-administrative objectives. The design of schools followed the inner differentiation of school curricula, at the same time being affected by the growth of school sizes prompted by school management structures and their efficiency aims. We will show how in larger cities the initial one-classroom schools developed into multiple-classroom buildings, taking on their final form in “grand school buildings”. The organizational developments tried and tested here would later become the national standard, with rural schools following with a certain delay. In order to grasp the emergence of the phenomena of these “grand school buildings” we combine the Prussian and US-American cases in their transatlantic connection in order to comprehend the transnational dimension of school building norms. Being closely connected through mutual observation, the US and Prussian contexts established two decisive aspects: in the Prussian case, the division into separate classrooms as functional units of school construction was implemented, while in the United States additional school rooms such as the assembly hall and specific subject-related rooms were introduced. “Grand school buildings” initiated the interest of the architectural profession, leading to negotiations between school technicians and architects.

Canada-EU relations in political sphere

The article considers the peculiarities of formation and development of relations between Canada and the European Union in political sphere. It points out that the common essence of approaches to modern international relations serves as a potential basis for building bilateral cooperation on the issues of establishing political cooperation. In the course of research on Canada’s foreign policy it was noted that there is a number of features that are due to both internal context and external factors. In particular, it refers the peculiar nature of Canadian statehood, the existence of two linguistic communities, geographical location, and immediate neighborhood with the United States. It emphasizes the similarity of Canada’s positions with the approaches of European countries to solving a number of problems of modern world development. The importance of maintaining the transatlantic connection is among the significant issues. At the same time, it should be taken into account that there are peculiarities of establishing and maintaining relations between Canada and the European Union. On the one hand these are the relations with a strong multinational association and on the other – with each individual member state. It is noted that, despite the long historical tradition in the relationship, the potential for cooperation between Canada and the EU is only partially used. It highlights the need for Canada to reach a new level in its relations with the European Union, provided that it maintains close relations with the United States of America. Areas of mutual interest, as well as problematic aspects of negotiations on a strategic partnership agreement between Canada and the European Union have been identified. Although Canada–EU relations are bilateral, they are evolving in a broader international context. It is analyzed that Canada can be a valuable partner for the European Union in the field of international relations. This country should strive to be involved in the preparation of important international decisions in order to build common positions and ensure a sufficient level of coordination between the parties.

‘One Chief Letter Office at New-York’: Packet Ships, Imperial Administration, and the Geography of the American Post, 1692–1783

ABSTRACTThe postal system in the American colonies is an understudied arm of the first British Empire. Although outside the main institutions of colonial administration, the post office followed the overall periodisation of imperial affairs, as America waxed and waned in London’s attention. This directly shaped the geography of the post office, because American officials focused on the post’s ability to connect American towns, while British officials emphasised the transatlantic connection of the postal packet ships. The packets, however, were not as important to transatlantic communications as they imagined, which led the American officials to resist when London wanted to make New York City the headquarters of the American post.

Modernist legacies: trends and faultlines in British poetry today

Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today. Edited by Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 263pp. $99.00The book sets out, therefore, to address some of the power imbalances at work within experimental circles, which remain overwhelmingly well-educated and white, if arguably less male-dominated than in previous generations. In this sense it is in line with current critical tendencies: Andrea Brady's essay for Conversation, The White Privilege of British Poetry Is Getting Worse (October 2015); Sandeep Parmar's essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the (December 2015); and the Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) symposium in London (February 2016) all attest to a desire to assess and begin to reverse this longprevailing wind. argument that an anticolonial politics of dialect and accent is especially pertinent and localized within the British Isles, where class and the politics of voice are hopelessly striated and inextricable, is an important one, made obliquely or explicitly by several essays in this collection.Part of the justification for using the genetic language of inheritance is that such a tradition is not self-evident or-at least not yet-self-reinforcing. In comparison with the North American experience, Lang and Nowell Smith write, assembling such a legacy is not straightforward; the dots cannot be easily j oined between dozens of strong poets and movements as in the US. Instead, the connections are those forged between fugitive outriders such as Basil Bunting, W S. Graham, and David Jones and the poets of the 1960s and 70s whose brief stints in charge of the mainstream organs that govern taste-the Poetry Society and Poetry Review-ended in a messy coup and decades of subsequent obsolescence. first section of Modernist Legacies goes over this contested ground. Allen Fisher and Robert Hampson return to the transatlantic connection that catalyzed much experimental poetic practice in Britain from the early 1960s. Romana Huk, meanwhile, sees lying behind British poetry's continual worrying at lyric's political complicities and efficacies a need to let messy materiality into the form. That impulse, she suggests, comes at an often uncontrollable cost to subjective coherence, so that the lyric I is revealed as a fiction constituted all along by those material forces.Of course, part of the vibrant, samizdat feel of British innovative or Revival work since the 1960s is owed to its pelagic presence, gliding below mainstream currents that, by and large, regarded as an historical aberration, thankfully now defunct. In recent years, however, it has been breaking the surface: key figures from the British Poetry Revival, such as J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, and Barry MacSweeney, been published in collected formats by larger presses, and the academy-as this book and the conference that generated it attest-has been catching up. One of the main virtues of Modernist Legacies is that it widens the circle considerably beyond those more familiar names, with work (among others) on Jeff Hilson, Caroline Bergvall, Wendy Mulford, Geraldine Monk, Anthony Barnett, Sean Bonney, Peter Manson, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Tom Leonard. It also shines light on such projects as the cassette series Balsam Flex, which Will Montgomery retrieves from the obscurity of archiving procedures that have never been on a par with those for small press books and little magazines.In his own contribution Nowell Smith groups Monk, from Lancashire and now based in Sheffield, and the Glaswegian poet Leonard along with Anglophone Caribbean and black vernacular poetry from the UK. This is a powerful intersectional move that brings together the exclusions of class, geography, and race where they meet, in accent and the voice. Nowell Smith asks how modernism can be a useful term for thinking about traditions excluded from or peripheral to its central practices. …

“‘The light that never was on sea or land’: William Wordsworth in America and Emily Dickinson’s “Frostier” Style

This paper proposes to investigate Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic literary connection with William Wordsworth. Her references to and appropriation of Wordsworth inform her critical understanding of the polarized reception of Wordsworth’s poetry and its potential impact on her own poetic experimentation. Dickinson’s role as a poetic heir of Wordsworth, particularly her relation to Romanticism, has been extensively explored. Critics such as Harold Bloom and Joanne Feit Diehl point out the antagonistic relationship between Dickinson and her male precursors. Robert Weisbuch and Inder Nath Kher, alternatively, see Dickinson’s quest poems as essentially Romantic. Scholars such as Margaret Homans consider Dickinson’s poems as deconstructing the binary structure embedded in the writings of her male precursors. More recently, critics such as Richard Gravil and Richard E. Brantley place Dickinson firmly in the literary tradition of Anglo-American Romanticism. This paper explores Dickinson’s engagement with Wordsworth further through her potential awareness of and response to Wordsworth’s mixed Anglo-American receptions. A number of Dickinson’s Wordsworthian allusions in her poems, such as daffodils, primroses, and the sunlight, borrow and appropriate images that Wordsworth’s poetry had made popular in the cultural consciousness. These poems of Dickinson conjure up the Wordsworthian imagery as objects of rare values or commodities, reflecting the polarized receptions of Wordsworth in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, Wordsworth’s “joyful” message of nature, which Arnold and his contemporaries considered most valuable, played a role in Dickinson’s experimentation with her own poetic voices in the 1850s and 1860s. The paper examines how Dickinson might have been aware of Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and how Wordsworth’s “joyful” nature poems are critically reviewed in the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. I then scrutinize a number of Dickinson’s poems about Wordsworthian nature in relation to Dickinson’s tentative adjustment of her poetic expression for a “frostier” style at the inception of her poetic career. The paper suggests that Dickinson’s subtle engagement with Wordsworth provides a glimpse of how she is concerned about the positioning of herself, a New England poet, in a mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary tradition.

Trans-Atlantic Connection: The Link Between American and Nazi Eugenics

This essay details some of the intellectual and financial links that were present between the eugenics movement found in the United States and the movement in Germany.

‘Transatlantic connection’: K-pop and K-drama fandom in Spain and Latin America

Abstract The global circulation of Asian cultural products has been on a constant rise since the 1990s. However, the arrival to Spanish-speaking audiences is a more recent phenomenon, one that is linked to the consolidation of web-based tools for consumption, distribution and discussion of cultural artefacts. The different stages in which Hallyu, or the ‘Korean Wave’, reached different countries determined the intensity of scholarly interest in the phenomenon. If the research gap between Asia and Europe is wide, the later arrival to Spain and Latin America means that studies on the reception of Korean popular culture, including those dealing with fandom, are quasi-non-existent. This article is a first attempt at mapping the demographics of K-pop and K-drama fans in the Spanish-speaking world, through an analysis of an online survey. Drawing from the uses and gratifications approach in mass communication research, we discuss fans’ appropriation of K-pop, describe their shared iconography and analyse the peculiarities of male fans by studying their self-narratives. We conclude with a discussion on the need for studies of fandom to transcend national boundaries as exemplified by the advent of a ‘transatlantic connection’ linking fans in Spain and in Latin America via South Korea.

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E.Kerry and Matthew S.Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.Benjamin Franklin 's Intellectual World is the latest contribution to the ever-growing scholarly interest in Franklin's life and works. Recent biographies such as Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An Life (2003), Gordon Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and H.W. Brand's The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000) have contributed to the resurgence of interest in Franklin. Both the shadow of these recent biographies and the ensuing debates hang over Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World.The impetus for this collection was a 2007 conference held at the University of Cambridge celebrating the tercentenary of Franklin's birth. The co-editors of the collection, Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, find the conference location in the United Kingdom fitting for Franklin, who was the first as much as he was, for most of life, a loyal British subject. The collection attempts to bring together political thought and intellectual history in order to connect American and European ideas (ix). Some of the most novel explorations of Franklin's legacy in this volume focus on the exchange between the New World and Europe, an important concentration for a transatlantic figure like Franklin. Jurgen Overhoff's fascinating essay focuses on Franklin's often-overlooked trip to Germany in 1766. Overhoff argues that Franklin's visit and study of the Roman Empire was essential to conception of federalism, which went into own Articles of Federation and Perpetual Union of the United Colonies of North America (84). Scholarship on Federalism has often emphasized the example of the Iroquois Confederacy as being the preeminent model for colonists, but Overhoff convincingly argues that the Holy Roman moment may be just as important to early federalism (84).Another interesting transatlantic connection comes in Paul E. Kerry's essay on Franklin's influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While Goethe and Franklin never met or corresponded, they had a great deal in common, as both held experiments, were involved in sute affairs, and helped to support or found civic institutions such as libraries and universities. However, Kerry's emphasis is that Goethe used Franklin's biography, which he read in 1810 prior to writing own autobiography, Poetry and Truth, in 1813-1814, as a model for his own self-fashioning and achievements, scientific and literary (155). …

Translation and Transmission: Modern Poetry and Transatlantic Connection

Ignacio Infante’s After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic offers five case studies of poet-critics working in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese to demonstrate the need for a multilingual approach to studying modern poetry. He argues that modern poetics did not develop in a unilingual or strictly national context. Both within and outside of the Anglo-American canon, many poets worked and wrote in multiple languages, translating, reimagining, and fusing diverse poetic traditions and forms for multiple audiences. By looking to individual poets’ transnational travel and affiliations, multilingual practices, and transhistorical influences, After Translation demonstrates that the poetic forms associated with Anglo-American modernism overlap with or run closely parallel to similar forms beyond geographic or linguistic categories.

Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion

YOHEI IGARASHI Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages ofMediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion We could posit a desire for communication which is so strong, so idealistic and hence so frustrated, that it becomes inevitably a dream-state. —Geoffrey Hartman, “I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication”1 I N A JOURNAL LETTER OF DECEMBER I 818—JANUARY 1819 TO GEORGE AND Georgiana in Kentucky, writing on the cusp of what will come to be hailed as his annus mirabilis, Keats offers his initial thoughts on the recent death ofTom and then meanders into a truly arresting thought experiment: [S]ometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at pres­ ent, a direct communication of spirit with you. . . . Now the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I rememb{er} your Ways and Manners and actions; I known you man­ ner ofthinking, you manner of feeling [sic]: I know what shape your joy or your sorrow w{ou}ld take, I know the manner ofyou walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laugh]ing,} punning, and evey [sic] action so truly that you seem near to me. You will rem{em}ber me in the same manner—and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.2 Keats’s dispatch had begun by assuring his brother and sister-in-law that, in the wake of Tom’s death, he has “scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature of [or] other” (LJK 2:4). Nor has he any doubt that souls in the af1 . Hartman, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 35. 2. To'George and Georgiana Keats, December 16, 1818, in The Letters ofJohn Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:5. Keats’s letters are hereafter cited in the text as LJK followed by volume and page number. SIR, S3 (Summer 2014) 171 172 YOHEI IGARASHI terlife engage in unmediated communication with each other, and enjoy, like Milton’s angels, intuitive rather than discursive knowledge: “That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and conse­ quently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other—when they will completely understand each other” (IJK 2:5). But in the intriguing thought experiment that follows, Keats transposes the ease of immortal interaction to the real world; he imagines a situation whereby he and his correspondents might achieve a similar kind of instan­ taneous, reciprocal “intelligence of each other.” Because each party pos­ sesses an abundant capacity for sympathetic imagination (“I known . . . you manner offeeling” [sic]), ifthey were to engage in a coordinated reading of Shakespeare, they would establish an intimate transatlantic connection and overcome the “immense separation” between London and Kentucky. Re­ membering the name of the ship George and Georgiana took to America six months earlier, the Telegraph—which alludes to the late eighteenthcentury semaphoric communications technology—while looking ahead to Mark Twain’s 1891 satirical treatment of its electric successor, one might name this scene “mental telegraphy.” One might even be tempted to call Keats’s scenario Shakespearean Skype. After all, his proposal of synchronized reading raises the same question about time difference that the railway made newly urgent in the early nineteenth century, and which lives on in the scheduling of today’s planned mediated interactions: “ten o Clock” in whose time zone?3 But even as Keats indulges in this fantasy of instantaneous communica­ tion, he intimates its counterfactual nature and the obstacles to true con­ tact. Note his final simile: he declines to liken his scenario to sighted indi­ viduals each sequestered in far-flung places and hence invisible to one another. That would be the more appropriate simile for the situation he narrates. That would also be a fitting, reflexive image for the very act of postal correspondence in which he is participating; as...

Phylogenetic relationships of the Eocene percomorph fishes †Priscacara and †Mioplosus

ABSTRACT The early Eocene great lakes of the Green River system preserved a rich fauna, allowing detailed study of the paleoecology of the area. Two genera, †Priscacara and †Mioplosus, are interesting because they are among the earliest well-known representatives of Percoidei sensu lato, and so offer a chance to explore the evolution of the North American fish fauna. A phylogenetic analysis including †Priscacara, †Mioplosus, and representatives of some ‘basal’ percoid families suggests that †Priscacara is a member of Moronidae, and that †Mioplosus has affinities with Lateolabrax, Siniperca, and Lates. †Priscacara is recovered as paraphyletic relative to the rest of Moronidae, primarily on the basis of meristic characters; in the absence of more robust evidence, both †P. serrata and †P. liops are retained within †Priscacara. The phylogenetic position of †Priscacara suggests a trans-Atlantic connection, because Moronidae contain genera from eastern North America and Europe. †Mioplosus is suggestive of an Asian link to the Eocene Green River system, due to its relationship with the Western Pacific Lateolabrax, the Asian Siniperca, and the African/Asian Lates.

A Personal History of Canada-Germany

For almost three decades, I have had the privilege of observing the political, economic, social, and cultural changes in Germany. It was a period that was characterized by such terms as Mittelstreckenraketen (medium -ran ge mis- siles), SS20S, Pershing missiles, and the stationing of nuclear weapons on German soil. All this was accompanied by the NATO debate on the Dop- pelbeschluss, the double-track decision put forward and championed by Hel- mut Schmidt. I was well acquainted with the pioneers of the peace movement and closely associated with the emergence of the pacifist and en- vironmental trends that led to the creation of the Green party in Germany. These are the historical moments that fundamentally shaped and changed the Bonner Republik. Of course all this happened against the backdrop of the Cold War, Ostpolitik, and the normalization of the so-called innerdeutsche Beziehungen, relations between the two German states. In those years, no one could have foreseen the radical outcome of 1989, with the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the emergence of this reunified country, with Berlin once again its capital. What a road it has been. I count myself lucky to have been able to witness these profound changes, which allowed Germany to reconcile itself with the past and to gradually become a normal country again, an important player on the European and international stage, not only economically but also politically and culturally.The end of this long road is in sight. When I think of the consequences of the Second World War and the Franco-German efforts leading up to the signing of the Elysee treaty by de Gaulle and Adenauer, sealing a friendship crucial for the future of Europe, I cannot help but recognize how the various German governments worked relentlessly to realize the dream. Right from the beginning, this involved creating ties strong enough to prevent any repeat of the cruel experiences of the 20th century. This desire to be integrated in a larger entity - beyond national borders - gave rise to the European Union, whose roots lie in the European Coal and Steel Community, the 1957 treaty of Rome, and the decisions to consolidate and expand the EU from the six founding countries to the 27 members today. Germany has achieved its dream of overcoming its isolation and upheaval to create solid ties with its neighbours, large and small, and to become a country no longer on the eastern margins of the European Community but at the geographical centre of the EU. This has been realized peacefully in a reunified Germany and in a continent free of east-west tensions.Does this mean that, its national having been realized, Germany no longer has a dream? What I see today is an adjustment of aspirations and an evolution of realities. Globalization obviously plays a significant role here and certainly explains to some extent why Germany has in recent years been increasingly turning its attention to the east, to Russia, a major energy supplier, but also to the emerging markets, in particular China and India. This inevitably has an effect on the transatlantic relationship, which has lost some of its dynamism, or rather common destiny, since the imminent threat posed by the Cold War has evaporated. Yet the transatlantic connection remains particularly important and has, undoubtedly, been underestimated in some areas over the last few years in the wake of September nth. We are bound by our common destiny: Angela Merkel took the right step in launching a transatlantic economic partnership initiative with the US and Canada, with a view to reducing or eliminating the numerous non-tariff trade barriers hindering the expansion of our commercial and economic links, especially in science and technology and investment. …

The Worst Allies, Except for All the Others: US-European relations in the age of George W. Bush

Any nuanced assessment of current transatlantic tensions requires an awareness of their historical context. An understanding of the legacy of the Cold War in particular helps to answer the following questions: (1) What are the sources of current US-European tensions? (2) Has the transatlantic connection sustained mortal damage, or can it endure? (3) What changes of attitude and of focus might help the transatlantic relationship in the future? The argument is as follows: The US–European relationship is under assault not just because of recent US military actions but also because of a longer-term shift away from a successful US Cold War grand strategy that still had much to offer the post-Cold War world. However, cause for alarm is limited, because the history of cooperation, the lack of alternative partners, and the very real nature of external threats means that neither the US nor the Europeans have any realistic alternative to cooperation with each other.

Towards New Economic Cooperation in Northeast Asia:Lessons from the Franco-German Coalition

Towards New Economic Cooperation in Northeast Asia:Lessons from the Franco-German Coalition

Marking Her Territory: Feline Behavior in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

In the 1980s, critics aligned Charlotte Perkins Gilman's heroine of The Yel low Wail-Paper (1892) with Charlotte Bronte's wild-haired, brutish Bertha Mason, crawling on all fours in the locked attic of Thornfield Hall. Mary Jacobus argues, The woman on all fours is like Bertha Mason, an embodi ment of the animality of woman unredeemed by (masculine) reason. . . . [B]y the end she is all body, an incarnation not only of hysteria but of male fears about women. Perceiving the narrator as a four-legged beast, Jaco bus goes on to posit that the smooch the narrator leaves while crawling along the wall of her nursery prison is a mark of repression imposed not only on female sexuality but on women's writing; the yellow smell signifies menstruation and female genitalia.1 Akin to Jacobus, Judith Fetterley makes the same transatlantic connection between Gilman's narrator and Bronte's

Britain Betwixt and Between: Uk SIGINT Alliance Strategy's Transatlantic and European Connections

Intelligence alliances are among the most intimate and enduring international security relationships. International partnerships have proven to be especially relevant to signals intelligence (SIGINT), where collaboration among allies has been crucial for extending the range and scope of geographic coverage. One of the earliest and most enduring SIGINT alliances dates back to the Second World War, when Great Britain and the United States collaborated in intercepting German and Japanese electronic communications and shared the intelligence product. This Anglo-American wartime partnership subsequently evolved and expanded during the post-war and Cold War eras, and continues up to the present as the core of a wider plurilateral SIGINT alliance involving Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well. Britain's accession to the European Communities, now the European Union (EU), did not, at first, detract from its transatlantic intelligence connection. By the late 1990s, however, European partners had begun to challenge Britain's alliance strategy for SIGINT, in particular, out of heightened concern for their own communications security and in response to the increasing salience of economic intelligence in contemporary international affairs. British statecraft now found itself confronted by mounting pressure from EU partners to reorient the UK intelligence away from its long-standing transatlantic SIGINT connection, so as to undermine American reach and also promote a potentially competing European capability to achieve global coverage in signals intelligence collection. While the 2003 war against Iraq certainly consolidated the trans-Atlantic alliance between the UK and USA, while alienating the Americans from the so-called 'Old Europe' led by France and Germany, the longer term spin-offs from that conflict seem likely to exacerbate those pressures on British intelligence strategy.

The trans-Atlantic connection: `Anglo-American' geography reconsidered

Geography in the United Kingdom and geography in the United States have common roots in nineteenth-century German and French practices. For the first half of the twentieth century they had relatively separate trajectories with few inter-personal contacts linking them. From the 1950s on, contacts developed rapidly, through both greater trans-Atlantic movement by geographers and shared journals. Nevertheless, after some convergence in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the two have diverged again somewhat because of the different contexts within which they operate.