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This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland.
At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist.
The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.
 
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.

With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

Of the several regional arrangements that function within the United Nations, the most elaborate in organization and function is the Organization of American States. Although the United Nations holds the primary responsibility for preserving international peace, its charter concedes virtual autonomy to regional arrangements in dealing with matters considered appropriate for regional action. This latitude stimulated a trend toward regionalism which eventually posed the important question of how to preserve legitimate regionalism like Pan-Americanism without impairing the essential overall authority of the United Nations.

Following an introductory description of all existing regional arrangements, this comprehensive case study examines every aspect of security cooperation in the Western Hemisphere in the mid-twentieth century: the historical origins and development of the inter-American system; the perfecting of the security structure; and, most important, the functioning of the system under test by controversies among the member nations, and by two world wars, the Korean emergency, and the aggressive threats of international Communism. Particular attention is given to the Cuban situation.

This volume was the first to recognize, boldly and imaginatively, the overwhelming influence wielded in the OAS by the powerful and wealthy United States. This elastic association of one Great Power and twenty small states, based on a mutuality of interests and a common devotion to the principles of civilized international behavior, can be said to have reached full maturity in 1948 with the adoption of the OAS charter, which articulated the goals toward which it had been striving for fifty-eight years: sovereign equality, nonintervention, and consultation for the peaceful solution of disputes and for hemisphere defense. Ironically, just when the Good Neighbor Policy and the rise of Hitler seemed to have cemented inter-American relations, breaks in the solidarity began to appear. World War II produced new forces destined to profoundly alter the bases and objectives of inter-American cooperation. The “be good” policy began to change to a “do good” policy, and in diplomatic discussions, economic measures began to eclipse those concerned with peril to the peace and security of the hemisphere.

The United States spearheaded the creation of many international organizations and treaties after World War II and maintains a strong record of compliance across several issue areas, yet it also refuses to ratify major international conventions like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Why does the United States often seem to support international law in one way while neglecting or even violating it in another?

The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues analyzes the seemingly inconsistent U.S. relationship with international law by identifying five types of state support for international law: leadership, consent, internalization, compliance, and enforcement. Each follows different logics and entails unique costs and incentives. Accordingly, the fact that a state engages in one form of support does not presuppose that it will do so across the board. The contributors to this volume examine how and why the United States has engaged in each form of support across twelve issue areas that are central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy: conquest, world courts, war, nuclear proliferation, trade, human rights, war crimes, torture, targeted killing, maritime law, the environment, and cybersecurity. In addition to offering rich substantive discussions of U.S. foreign policy in each of these areas, their findings reveal patterns across the U.S. relationship with international law that shed light on behavior that often seems paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. The results help us understand why the United States engages with international law as it does, the legacies of the Trump administration, and what we should expect from the United States under the Biden administration and beyond.

The lazy greaser asleep under a sombrero and the avaricious gringo with money-stuffed pockets are only two of the negative stereotypes that North Americans and Latin Americans have cherished during several centuries of mutual misunderstanding. This unique study probes the origins of these stereotypes and myths and explores how they have shaped North American impressions of Latin America from the time of the Pilgrims up to the end of the twentieth century.

Fredrick Pike's central thesis is that North Americans have identified themselves with "civilization" in all its manifestations, while viewing Latin Americans as hopelessly trapped in primitivism, the victims of nature rather than its masters. He shows how this civilization-nature duality arose from the first European settlers' perception that nature—and everything identified with it, including American Indians, African slaves, all women, and all children—was something to be conquered and dominated. This myth eventually came to color the North American establishment view of both immigrants to the United States and all our neighbors to the south.

The restiveness among some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as to its structure and functions was an indication not of the failure of NATO, but of a need for a new adjustment to the changes that had developed in world conditions since the organization was established. Such was the consensus underlying the comments of five eminent statesmen and political theorists in a series of lectures delivered at the University of Texas in the spring of 1966 on the general theme of “The United States and the Atlantic Community: Issues and Prospects.”

The grave crisis of confidence in the Atlantic Community resulted, ironically, from the success of NATO in combining the resources of thirteen European states with those of Canada and the United States in a common achievement of peace, economic stability, and security in the face of the postwar threat from the Soviet Union. Now that these objectives are obtained, one argument ran, NATO is no longer needed. The Soviet threat still exists, went another, and seems to be dispelled only because of the presence of NATO; what is needed is revision of policies and functions of the organization to fit new conditions.

The changes in the nature of international relations in the two decades after World War II were of two kinds: those inherent in the world international situation—the economic recovery of Europe (which brought new urgency to the desire for more independence from the United States), the disintegration of European colonial empires, the softened aspect of the Soviet threat, and the great advances in modern technology; and those that depended upon policy decisions—whether Europe should be a confederacy (as advocated by De Gaulle) or a federal union (as advocated by Jean Monnet) and what should be the international policy of a united Europe on such issues as a third force between the United States and Russia, unified or separate approaches to the East and the West, German unity, and military security.

A consideration of what these changes implied for the United States was the purpose of the series of papers collected in this volume. The names of the authors and the titles of their papers indicate the variety of views and interests expressed and the scope of the discussion: Henry A. Kissinger, Professor of Government at Harvard, “NATO: Evolution or Decline” André Philip, Professor of Economics at the Sorbonne, “The Atlantic Economy: Partners and Rivals” Hans Speier, member of the RAND Corporation Council, “Germany: The Continuing Challenge” Fritz Erler, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, “Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union” John J. Mccloy, former World Bank president and former U.S. military governor and high commissioner for Germany, “American Interests and Europe’s Future.”

In 1973–1974 soaring commodity prices and an oil embargo alerted Americans to the twin dangers of resource exhaustion and dependence on unreliable foreign materials suppliers. This period seemed to mark a watershed in history as the United States shifted from the era of relative resource abundance to relative materials scarcity.

Alfred E. Eckes’s comprehensive study shows that resource depletion and supply dislocations are not concerns unique to the 1970s. Since 1914, the quest for secure and stable supplies of industrial materials has been an important underlying theme of international relations and American diplomacy.

Although the United States has been blessed with a diversified materials base, it has pursued a minerals strategy designed to exploit low-cost, high-quality ores abroad. Eckes demonstrates how this policy has led to official protection for overseas private investments, involving a role for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some modern historians have neglected the importance of resources in shaping diplomacy and history. This book, based on a vast variety of unutilized archival collections and recently declassified government documents, helps to correct that imbalance. In the process it illuminates an important and still timely aspect of America’s global interests.