For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, ...however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. interests-and the alliance-survive intact? Will the policy be transformed? Or will Japan become more autonomous?
Richard J. Samuels demonstrates that over the last decade, a revisionist group of Japanese policymakers has consolidated power. The Koizumi government of the early 2000s took bold steps to position Japan's military to play a global security role. It left its successor, the Abe government, to further define and legitimate Japan's new grand strategy, a project well under way-and vigorously contested both at home and in the region.Securing Japanbegins by tracing the history of Japan's grand strategy-from the Meiji rulers, who recognized the intimate connection between economic success and military advance, to the Konoye consensus that led to Japan's defeat in World War II and the postwar compact with the United States.
Samuels shows how the ideological connections across these wars and agreements help explain today's debate. He then explores Japan's recent strategic choices, arguing that Japan will ultimately strike a balance between national strength and national autonomy, a position that will allow it to exist securely without being either too dependent on the United States or too vulnerable to threats from China. Samuels's insights into Japanese history, society, and politics have been honed over a distinguished career and enriched by interviews with policymakers and original archival research.Securing Japanis a definitive assessment of Japanese security policy and its implications for the future of East Asia.
Was Weber wrong? Becker, Sascha O; Woessmann, Ludger
The Quarterly journal of economics,
05/2009, Letnik:
124, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading ...the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using county-level data from late-nineteenth-century Prussia, exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism. We find that Protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity, but also to better education. Our results are consistent with Protestants' higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity.
This book is about Bangladesh's first female prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, who served three terms in office and achieved enormous popularity. Her charisma inexorably emanates from her sense of ...dignity, integrity, uncompromising principles, and commitment to freedom, independence, and sovereignty of Bangladesh--a new and small country bordering the larger India, which is always up to its hegemonic designs.
The specific role of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the later nation of Austria within the formation of regional art histories in East Central Europe has received little attention in art historical ...research so far. Taking into account the era of the Dual Monarchy as well as the period after 1989, the contributions analyze and critically scrutinize the imperial legacies, transnational transfer processes and cultural hierarchies in art historiographies, artistic practices and institutional histories. Consisting of 17 texts, with new commissions and one reprint, case studies, monographic essays and interviews grouped thematically into two sections, the anthology proposes a pluriversal narrative on regional, cultural and political contexts.
This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining ...prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it resituates the artistic production of this region within broader socio-cultural currents and analyzes its interconnections with international discourse, competing political and aesthetic ideologies, and continuous discussions over identity.
InPopular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure-characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core ...characters of victim/survivor and perpetrator-and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust clichés, including its political appropriation, the notion of vicarious victimhood, the so-called victim talk rhetoric, and the infusion of the composite survivor figure with Social Darwinism. Readers then explore the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs.Rothe conveys how victimhood and suffering are cast as trauma kitsch on talk shows likeOprahand as trauma camp on modern-day freak shows likeSpringer.The discussion also encompasses the first scholarly analysis of misery memoirs, the popular literary genre that has been widely critiqued in journalism as pornographic depictions of extreme violence. Currently considered the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide, many of these works are also fabricated. And since forgeries reflect the cultural entities that are most revered, the book concludes with an examination of fake misery memoirs.
Based on an extensive range of primary sources - whether they be archival, journalistic or documentary - some of which are exposed here for the first time, the present volume reviews the efforts made ...by the State of Israel to obtain reparations from Germany after the Holocaust, as well as the unprecedented storm which this issue caused among Israeli Jews. It is the most comprehensive research work undertaken in any language on this subject.
Die NSDAP kopierte nicht nur von Anfang an den Stil der Arbeiterbewegung, sondernverlagerte auch den Schwerpunkt ihrer Propaganda ab 1928 von nationalistischer Außenpolitikauf innenpolitische und ...soziale Fragen. Bis 1932 wurde diese Ausrichtung jedoch durchkein wirtschaftspolitisches Programm untermauert. Dies änderte sich in der Endphase derWeimarer Republik, als die NSDAP die politische Bedeutung der Massenarbeitslosigkeiterkannte und als einzige Partei frühkeynesianische Ideen aufgriff. Diese sozioökonomischeAusrichtung mag wesentlich zum Wahlerfolg vom Juli 1932 beigetragen haben, als die NSDAPdie SPD als stärkste Partei im Reichstag ablöste.
The NSDAP not only copied the style of the labour movement from the start, but also shifted the focus of its propaganda from 1928 onward from nationalistic foreign policy to domestic and social issues. Until 1932, however, the new socio-economic focus was not underpinned by any concrete economic policy programme. This changed in the final phase of the Weimar Republic, when theNSDAP recognised the political importance of taking action against mass unemployment like no other party. Ideas for active economi policy using central bank-financed employment programmes, which the leading National Socialist Gregor Strasser adopted from early Keynesian and trade union circles, served as the programmatic basis. The topic was job creation, the slogan was "work and bread"and the explicit main opponent, the SPD, was blamed for unemployment, misery and bankruptcy. This socio-economic focus may have contributed significantly to the electoral success of the NSDAP in July 1932, when it replaced the SPD as the strongest party in theReichstag. The Nazis were able to garner more than a quarter of the workers' votes and became the strongest party - even among the workers. With this, the NSDAP turned into a people's party, which was drawn from all milieus.
This book is a sociocultural history of young people’s sexuality in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s, using the Brook Advisory Centre (Brook) as a case study. The book examines how and why ...cultural and social norms about young people’s sexuality changed over a period that has traditionally been associated with growing ‘permissiveness’ and sexual liberation. It does so by focusing on a pioneering sexual health charity operating on the cusp of voluntary and state-financed sectors. From the opening of its first centre in London—followed by other centres including Birmingham (1966), Bristol (1968), and Edinburgh (1968)—to the present day, Brook has been a major provider of contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people and teenagers. Brook pioneered an initiative that would form the primary model for the provision of advice on contraception for teenagers in Britain. To this day, the charity remains a key player in sexual health services. Although Brook has provoked fierce opposition and triggered recurrent public debates on teenage sexuality, little is known of its history. As a non-governmental organization, Brook offers a fascinating case study to explore the relationship between changing sexual cultures, sexual politics, and young people’s sexual experiences, intimacy, and subjectivities. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published materials, as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book provides a substantial and original contribution to scholarship on the forging of the modern sexual subject.
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