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American Foreign Policy — The Turning Point, 1898–1919 Part 4

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Once war broke out in 1914, each of the European powers felt that its very existence was at stake, and rules of international law were rapidly abandoned. The Germans violated Belgian neutrality because their war plan called for the quick defeat of France, and that could best be accomplished if the German army cut through Belgium. Britain declared a blockade of Germany that was illegal according to the accepted rules, since it was effected simply by laying mines, rather than by closing off German harbors with the use of surface ships. The Germans protested that the aim of the blockade — to starve them into submission by denying food to the civilian population — was also illegal. The British, who held undisputed command of the seas, ignored the German protests. In the United States, public opinion was sharply divided, although ...

Book Review: Conditions of Liberty

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Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals by Ernest Gellner (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994); 225 pages; $25. The Western world is unique. It is the only civilization that has successfully combined liberty, order, and prosperity. We who live in it — even with all of its existing impurities of statist interventionism and coercive redistributivism — take it for granted and unconsciously assume it as the natural order of things. But, unfortunately, it is not. Throughout most of history, all around the world, people have had order imposed upon them by force and intimidation and have known little liberty or prosperity. What the West has had is civil society. This is how it is defined by Ernest Gellner, in his recent book Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society is that set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator between major interests, ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 3

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 The Yalta meeting was the culmination of the wartime conferences between Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt placed a high value on personal diplomacy. Churchill believed in the "great man" theory of history. As John Charmley has recently expressed it in his biographyChurchill: The End of Glory (1993), Churchill believed that "such men could be recognized by the mark they made on their own and subsequent ages, and knowing himself to be one, Churchill enjoyed making contact with others of the same species." He had used personal diplomacy with great effect in his relationship with FDR, first in establishing a stream of war material from America under Lend-Lease and then obtaining American participation in the war against Nazi Germany. While deeply suspicious of ...