International Relations

Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History  is a fascinating counterpoint to Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 . There are some obvious differences -- notably, Westad takes a global approach to the Cold War, with substantial attention to the dynamics of Cold War competition in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as Europe, whereas Judt's book is primarily focused on the politics and bi-polar competition of Communism and liberal democratic capitalism in Europe. Westad is a real expert on East Asia, so his global perspectives on the period are very well informed. Both books provide closely reasoned and authoritative interpretations of the large events of the 1950s through the 1990s. So it is very interesting to compare them from an historiographic point of view. The feature that I'd like to focus on here is Westad's perspective on these historical developments from the point of view of an international-relations conceptual ...

There are a lot of opinions about China today in the United States -- authoritarian, farsighted, effective at economic progress, overly committed to Party authority, challenged by the environmental effects of rapid economic growth, burdened by a corrupt and aging party elite. Some believe China is on the path to becoming a dominant super power, while others think that the suppression of individual freedom and thought is a fatal weakness that will eventually spell serious problems for Chinese stability and progress. Several specific impressions from a recent trip to China leave me with more nuanced versions of several of those thoughts. Here is one: whenever you drive into a parking garage in virtually any major city in China your license plate is immediately scanned and stored. This makes it very convenient for parking -- you don't need a ticket and the parking charge is automatically added to your form of payment when you leave. But it also means the state has the tools necessary ...

At the end of the nineteenth century -- which was also of the end of the Qing Dynasty -- China was not "modern". Its political institutions had crumbled, it had not substantially incorporated new technologies and forms of economic organization, and its military was still equipped with mid-century weapons and tactics. And, of course, the conditions for peasants and landless workers were abysmal; here is J. R. Tawney's description in a review of Chen Han-seng's 1936  Agrarian Problems in Southermost China  ( link ): Not only the whole surplus, but a large part of the cultivator's bare livelihood is skinned off by the landowner. As a result, the peasant falls increasingly into debt, and what the landowner and tax-collector leave, the usurer takes. "We close our survey, then," writes Dr. Chen Han-seng, "upon a note of misery beyond which human experience can hardly go, except in times of catastrophe." So much for the author's account of the fac...