Why did some states successfully avoid conquest by European empires? Logan Cochrane’s new, co-edited volume tackles this puzzle.
6+1 Questions about Resilient Statehood
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empire
Tweets of the Week #2
Welcome to the second edition of "Tweets of the Week." It was a busy seven days for news and my twitter feed provided much useful information -- in micro-form. The Scottish independence referendum...
A Reminder
The United States is currently fighting wars in lands that, while distant to us, are not so distant to their inhabitants and US soldiers. I am tempted to carry on about the "new normal," or compare...
Popular Culture and Politics: Russian Perceptions of the Near Abroad
 RFE/RL carries an interview with Susan Layton on her book, Russian Literature and the Empire. A sample:Russian national consciousness began developing in the 18th century, on contact with foreign...
More empire Posts
Nein! The EU is not the Fourth Reich!
Why would anyone even suggest such a thing?THE [Irish] GOVERNMENT has complained to the European Commission over the release in Germany of a document disclosing confidential details about new taxes to be introduced in Ireland over the next two years. In a deeply embarrassing development the document – identifying austerity measures of €3.8 billion in next month’s budget and €3.5 billion in budget 2013 – was made public after being shown to the finance committee of the German Bundestag yesterday. The document, seen by The Irish Times , confirms the Government plans to raise VAT by 2...
The Last Mughal
Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe that a careful study of those events are pertinent for American and European students of global politics today as they attempt to contextualize the challenges to American military might and Western cultural hegemony continuously pulsating onto the global stage from the remote corners of South Asia. A chronicle of 1857 is also useful to understand the fragility of a multicultural society in the...
Niall Fergurson, International Many of History
Michael Lind treats Niall Ferguson to the contempt he so richly deserves (via). A sample:The right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson seems to have conquered America: pushing his latest perishable book, "Civilization," this one based on the trendy and quickly dated conceit of the six (or is it seven?) "killer apps" of Western civilization; writing cover stories for Newsweek; debating foreign policy on TV with Zbigniew Brzezinski; and pouting and snarling his way through a debate about economics with Paul Krugman, Jeff Madrick and Bill Bradley. If you missed his Chicago lecture on the...
Beyond the lessons of empire
Not a few people have asked me to comment on Steve Walt's "10 lessons of empire" post. Or, more precisely, they've asked me "why haven't you written anything on Walt's post?" I guess my initial reaction was, more or less, that I've said my piece on empires and imperial dynamics; if a prominent academic wants to blog about the "lessons" for the US he found in a history of the British Empire that he read on vacation, then, well, more power to him. After all, most of the realist scholarly writings that invoke empire don't go far beyond this sort of exercise. But, at the end of the day, I...
Overseas contingency operations
Two months ago -- before the Inaugural -- I blogged "The 'war on terror' is over." At that time, the British Foreign Secretary said that the UK no longer used the phrase.Now, apparently, the US will stop using the phrase as well: The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor.In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use...
Reformed Trotskyites confront the “new great game”
Matthew Yglesias calls our attention to Todd Gitlin's quick summary of Robert Kagan's book excerpt in The New Republic. Kagan's book is prefigured in his same-titled Policy Review essay, "End of Dreams, Return of History," which I blogged about some time ago.Matt points out the most important point: if we treat what might be called "the great game, but now with new globalization sauce" as a titanic struggle between liberal democracy and "new wave" authoritarianism, we're likely to make it so. This is pretty obviously a bad idea, because countries like Russia and China have plenty of existing...
The joys of imperial management
US forces are preparing for operations in Mosul, but can't rely on the Awakening Councils to provide much help. Iraqi and American commanders are preparing for a prolonged — and possibly pivotal — fight against al-Qaida in Iraq in this vital northern hub. But they are missing an essential tool used to uproot insurgents elsewhere: groups of local Sunni fighters.The so-called Awakening Councils remain conspicuously absent in Mosul and efforts to stir a similar movement appear unlikely amid the region's pecking order of groups. Some military leaders even worry that seeking to enlist local...
Surge impedance
Over at Foreign Policy Passport, Blake Hounshell quotes John McCreary:Several retired US military officers explained in an interview on NPR yesterday that the success of the surge is economic, not military. The US pays the 70,000-80,000 fighters better than the tribal elders and al Qaida. Al Qaida tends to pay based on piece work – per operation -- whereas the US has put the tribal youth on salary. Retired General McCaffrey is quoted as saying at $10 per day per fighter the US can pay that indefinitely.The payments began in May and the attacks declined shortly thereafter for the first time...