This paper will argue that Germany and Italy had little in common but common enemies and more significantly the shared aim of both wanting to assert themselves as revisionist powers of the interwar period. Thus, their alliance was one of convenience in that both powers were aware that they needed an ally within Europe as a means of achieving their ambitious and aggressive foreign policies.
In 1946 Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, speculating on the future of the world order. Within it, he described “the fraternal association of the English-speaking people” that meant “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America”[1]. Since that day politicians, academics and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently describe the warm diplomatic, cultural and historical relations between the United States and the United Kingdom as being a ‘special relationship’.
“When I entered the service,” wrote Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, “there was no such thing at all.” Within the six centuries of the French diplomatic system diplomacy evolved from its ad-hoc, temporary status in political society into foreign services that practiced within a distinct profession.
Success in Iraq was primarily the result of conditions prior to the surge. Acknowledging this, the thesis will argue that in Afghanistan the US is faced with a much bleaker picture.
Throughout the war what Stalin wanted most from the Western Powers was their commitment to a second front, economic aid and their agreement to the restoration of Russia’s 1941 borders. Although his methods evolved, these objectives did not change.
The R2P is heralded by many as making political power more responsible and accountable, both to the domestic citizenry and ‘international community’. It has sought to democratise humanitarian intervention in a way which reconceptualises sovereignty as responsibility and looks to protect the ‘victim other’ from imminent mass death at the hands of irresponsible state power.
Hunger is much more than just a physical bodily condition, and therefore food aid cannot be fully understood without a focus on hunger’s human aspects.
The EU, by using non-normative means to diffuse norms and by not being able to detach itself from state self-interest, has regressed from being a normative power in the international system. This repositioning places the EU on a middle ground between ‘normative’ power and political realism.
Theorists conceive of knowledge and its relations to reality differently. Knowledge of the world is ‘reality’, yet this ‘reality’ is socially constructed through discourse. Looking through the Realist lens, the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes an affair of two rationally acting Great Powers locked in a power struggle owing to the inducements of a bipolar anarchic international system.
Intersectionality allows feminist theorists to account for the differences between women and provides a means of cooperation between scholars who have differing theoretical stances.
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