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.
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.
Was Weber wrong? Becker, Sascha O; Woessmann, Ludger
The Quarterly journal of economics,
05/2009, Letnik:
124, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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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.
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.
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.
It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance, and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United ...States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the US government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States appropriated Olympic host cities to hype the American economic and political system while, behind the scenes, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat. Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.
This groundbreaking book examines how the notion of "the object"
was transformed in Japanese experimental art during a time of rapid
social, economic, and environmental change.
Reviving the legacies ...of the historical avant-garde, Japanese
artists and intellectuals of the 1960s formulated an aesthetics of
disaffection through which they sought to address the stalemate of
political and aesthetic representation. Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz
draws from psychoanalytic theories of melancholia to examine the
implications of such an approach, tracing a genealogy of
disaffection within modernist discourse. By examining the
discursive practices of artists working across a wide range of
media, and through a close analysis of artwork, philosophical
debates, artist theories, and critical accounts, Adriasola Muñoz
shows how negativity became an efficacious means of addressing
politics as a source for the creative act of undoing .
In examining ideas of the object advanced by artists and
intellectuals both in writing and as part of their artwork, this
book brings discussions in critical art history to bear on the
study of art in Japan. It will be of interest to art historians
specializing in modernism, the international avant-garde, Japanese
art, and the history of photography.
Two preeminent Norwegian scholars of politics and law offer a comprehensive first-hand account of Norway's relationship with the EU and how this affects the country's legal and political system, ...setting out what Britain can learn from Norway's experience and how transferable these lessons are.
Günter Grass has primarily been perceived by research and the public as an author. But he was also an influential political actor. His political work was not just limited to the Brandt era but also ...helped to define the Berlin Republic. By harnessing his communicative power, he shaped public discourses as an intellectual and advised top politicians, as unpublished sources and background conversations show.
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