History of International Relations

"This volume is the first detailed study of the emergence of regular and frequent heads of government meetings (summits), covering the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

Summit meetings of heads of government have become 'banal' in today's world. Yet they are a relatively recent practice that took off only in the mid-1970s. The aim of the book is to explore the origins of this new feature of global governance in its historical context. Why did heads of Western governments decide to regularly meet up in the European Council and the G7? What were they aiming at? How were these meetings run and what consequences did they have? How did other actors of international relations – states as well as non-state and/or transnational actors - react to this transformation?

Based on newly released archival material, International Summitry and Global Governance investigates the rise of regular international summitry and its impact on international relations. The volume brings together the best specialists of this new field of historical enquiry in order to explore those features of global governance in their historical context, and open up an interdisciplinary dialogue with social scientists who have studied summits from their own disciplinary perspectives.

This book will be of much interest to students of international history, Cold War studies, global governance, foreign policy and IR in general."

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Historians of Canadian external affairs have argued that Canada played an important role influencing allied policy during the Berlin Crisis of 1961-1962. Newly declassified documents reveal the opposite. Canada opposed much of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contingency planning during the crisis, especially plans calling for the demonstrative use of nuclear weapons. Despite Canada’s efforts to modify NATO’s Berlin Contingency plans (BERCONs), Canadian diplomats found themselves isolated in the North Atlantic Council (NAC) and accepted plans they considered dangerous. Canada had no significant influence on NATO military planning during one of the most serious crises of the Cold War.

This paper is based on a presentation given at Swansea University (Wales, UK) in March 2008. The research which I proposed to undertake was never accomplished due to a lack of funding. The thoughts entailed in the paper may nevertheless be useful for some readers.

""A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement.

The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol's account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.""

"The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that the penetration and reception of the theories of natural law were linked to the strategies implemented by a small state, whose survival seemed dependent on the application of a neutrality policy capable of safeguarding commercial activity, and somehow even on the evoked foundation of a federal system with other small states.

Works by Antinori (1711) and Averani (1721-22) in particular and, most especially, those by Buondelmonti (1737, 1741 and 1755) reveal that a process of selecting  natural law theories was under way; balanced as a result of the expected European circulation of these Tuscan works, this selection process was sometimes politically oriented towards dealing with the questions of succession, at other times to drawing an up-to-date picture of civil society, and at still other times to advocating the neutrality option and a specific role for neutral nations in international relations.

An early result that emerged by my research is that different members of the ruling class used Grotius’s teaching relating to international relations to promote and pay tribute to the Grand Duchy within the international political society. The image of the Tuscan Grand Duchy appears to have been founded on the steady public appreciation of the principle stare pactis: thanks to this norm of conduct, the Tuscan ruling class tried to earn their small neutral State a reputation for impartiality and, above all, trustworthiness.
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""The conflict between the secular Mexican state and the Catholic Church, which reached its heights with the Cristero war of 1926-1929, remains one of the least known chapters of Achille Ratti’s pontificate. Nevertheless, the conflict is of particular interest in an effort to identify certain underlying tendencies of Vatican politics at the time, with particular reference to the magisterium of the Pope and the Holy See’s concrete actions in defending the libertas Ecclesiae.
From an ideological standpoint, the Holy See maintains a “traditional” vision of Mexican secularism, linking it to Russian bolshevism, in accordance with a generally unitary reading of contemporary anti-Christian ideologies. The encyclical Divini Redemptoris of March 19, 1937, offers a clear testimony of how such an interpretation was largely linked to the intransigent strand of Catholic thought. This global vision – confirmed and, in some aspects, anticipated by the local Church – was, on the other hand, combined with direct actions in particular local contexts, aimed at carefully considering the peculiarities of each situation and avoiding generalizations. It is, perhaps, at this level that the more innovative aspects of the Holy See’s politics can be seen, particularly in reference to the vexata quaestio of religious freedom.
Significant to this regard is the attention paid by several clergymen – Mexican bishops, representatives of the local clergy, Vatican diplomats – to the American separation between Church and State, in substantial discontinuity with the Church’s official teaching (held until the II Vatican Council), that attributed the right to “freedom” only to the “truth”. Fifty years after the opening of the Council it is still worthwhile to enquire as to the extent to which the dramatic experiences of persecution suffered by the Church in the first half of the twentieth century, of which the Mexican question represents a substantial chapter, influenced the subsequent evolution of the Church’s teachings.
More generally, a realistic evaluation of the relationship between tradition and innovation at all levels in the ecclesiastical sphere seems to be an ever more essential requirement for a correct interpretation of the Catholic Church’s history.""