Rising great powers want others to recognize their greatness. They don’t always get what they want. Leading states sometimes welcome their arrival in a very elite club, satisfying their desire for status on the world stage. At other times, however, the status quo powers are unwilling to offer recognition. Much rests on such decisions, as…
Tag: Germany
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 93: Daniels on Meijer, Awakening to China’s Rise
On both sides of the Atlantic it has become fashionable to criticize the China policies of the West over the last few decades as having been “naïve.”[1] Confronted with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s self-confident, often abrasive and confrontational style of foreign policy, the West’s hopes of “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade)—one of the main…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 85: Dieter on Meijer, Awakening to China’s Rise
Hugo Meijer has analyzed one of the most pressing issues in international relations in the twenty-first century: how do countries deal with an increasingly assertive People’s Republic of China? He examines Europe’s three most important countries: France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The author argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, these countries started to alter…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-16 on Levine Allies and Rivals
Can all modern history be construed as international history? There is hardly a consumer product or social movement or work of art that is not somehow tied to inputs and influences beyond the borders of a single nation-state. Pitched broadly, the concept of international society might encompass all manner of organizations and individuals, from inter-governmental…
H-Diplo Essay 503- Isabel V. Hull on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
The H-Diplo editors have asked about the “formative years” of scholars’ interest in international affairs. I honestly don’t know where it all started. I was a nerdy kid interested in history, natural and (I guess) unnatural, and politics very early on. I was an avid reader of Time, despite its “strange inverted Timestyle” (“Backward ran…
Forum 29 on the 2021 German Elections
Because Germany is Europe’s most populous country (excluding Russia), its most productive economy, and the European Union’s indispensable member, its elections are necessarily significant. Yet even by this standard, the federal election held on 26 September was particularly consequential and unusual. It marked the end of Angela Merkel’s sixteen-year tenure as Chancellor, during which she…
Policy Series: Donald Trump and NATO: Historic Alliance Meets A-historic President
NATO is a unique alliance in world history, outlasting its original purpose of deterring the Soviet Union and, in so doing, demonstrating the persistence of the shared values and interests among its members. Donald Trump is a unique president, rejecting past practice, procedures and principles. The interaction between NATO and this president in just a…
Article Review 79 on “On Provocation: Outrage, International Relations, and the Franco-Prussian War.”
Robert Jervis once claimed that “states sometimes fail to deploy threats that would benefit them and on other, probably more numerous, occasions employ threats that provoke rather than deter.”[1] If so, the field of international politics has done a remarkably poor job of accounting for the latter types of threat. For one, provocation has remained…
Roundtable 9-9 on Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion
The study of military effectiveness in political science has come a long way in a short period of time. When I started graduate school in the mid-1990s, most of the key works on the subject were written by historians and sociologists rather than political scientists.[1] Beginning in the late 1990s, however, military effectiveness began to…
Article Review 60 on “Rage of Honor: Entente Indignation and the Lost Chance for Peace in the First World War.” Security Studies 24:4
Scholars have long studied the causes of World War One. More recently, they have focused on events and processes which occurred after the outbreak of hostilities, including military intervention, war fighting strategies, and especially the war’s duration. In particular, research has explored why the Central Powers and the Entente were unable to reach a peace…