scholarly journals Question about the Ethics of Yalta Agreements in 1945. Archaeology of Power in Historiographical Discourses

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Oleg Konstantinovich Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Methodological Guidelines ◽  
Good And Evil

The Crimea (Yalta) Conference is by all means an extremely complex historical event. Any attempt to estimate its role and significance without analyzing its ethical components would unavoidably result in unduly simplifying the historical reality of the time, as well as in forming erroneous assumptions that would necessarily be used in the analysis of the causes of Cold War. A thorough examination will show that as far as the ‘ethical’ issues are concerned, there are significant developments with regard to general methodology, as well as its application to the sources. Generations of historians who have addressed the issue of Yalta Conference, although they have not been able to form a scientific, distinct ‘ethical’ tradition so far, have developed all the necessary prerequisites for its establishment. This is evident in the possibility of segmenting the issue in two parts on the one hand, and on the other in the availability of sufficient sources, structured databases, and selected outstanding works. Still, there are no studies about the Yalta Conference so far that address exclusively ethical issues concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘morality,’ ‘duty,’ and ‘honor.’ Although historiographical approaches are to a large extent dependent upon ethical viewpoints, in the case of Yalta agreements so far there have been no techniques available, so as to connect historical accounts with ideology, and historical facts with their philosophical background. In a sense, the situation is quite the same as it is with the study of prehistory: although there is an abundance of data and facts that can be primarily processed, there are no methodological guidelines, nor any devices to classify and explain them. This is also typical for any question raised about the ethics of the Yalta agreements in February 1945.

Knowledge and Reality in the Historical Epistemology

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Ilya T. Kasavin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Existential Philosophy ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Epistemology ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The One

The article gives a generalized view of the historical epistemology and highlights its main problems: the nature of historical reality, historical knowledge and historical agent. The historical epistemology represents a special philosophical discourse, the purpose of which is constructing historical knowledge for cultural assimilation of the new historical reality at the intersection of science and society. A distinction is proposed between the position of a historian of science and a historical epistemologist in terms of the essence of historical event and historical fact. The historical epistemology reveals its boundaries and a position within modern epistemological approaches. On the one hand, it is the substantialist interpretation of the historical event, which loses its a priori status only by socio-epistemological explanation. On the other hand, a figure of the historical agent (hero and author) keeping the status of a theoretical fiction in historical epistemology, acquires the adequate meaning in the existential philosophy of science.

Reflections on Lawrence Freedman’s ‘Deterrence’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
International Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Social Strategy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

John Leighton Stuart and U.S.-Chinese Communist Rapprochement in 1949: Was There Another “Lost Chance in China”?

1982 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-ming Shaw
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Working Relationship ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
June July ◽  
The Cold War

Reverend John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962) served as U.S. ambassador to China from July 1946 until August 1949. In the many discussions of his ambassadorship the one diplomatic mission that has aroused the most speculation and debate was his abortive trip to Beijing, contemplated in June–July 1949, to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Some students of Sino-American relations have claimed that had this trip been made the misunderstanding and subsequent hostility between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the post-1949 period could have been avoided; therefore, the unmaking of this trip constituted another “lost chance in China” in establishing a working relationship between the two countries. But others have thought that given the realities of the Cold War in 1949 and the internal political constraints existing in each country, no substantial result could have been gained from such a trip. Therefore, the thesis of a “lost chance in China” was more an unfounded speculation than a credible affirmation.

Civil conflicts and the conditions for successful international intervention: a comparative study of Cambodia and El Salvador

1995 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo L. Munck ◽  
Chetan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Territorial Conflicts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

As the Cold War has receded, it has left behind a world system characterized by two divergent trends. On the one hand, as the two superpowers have withdrawn their security umbrellas, a host of ethnic and territorial conflicts have sprouted around the globe. On the other hand, as former rival blocs now create alliances, international mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of contentious issues have proliferated. A central concern of our times, then, is whether, and under what circumstances, these new mechanisms will be successful in dealing with the disorderly aspects of the new world ‘order’.

First Wave Feminism: Craftswomen in Plato’s Republic

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Hulme
Keyword(s):  
Inductive Generalization ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Circular Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
Food Sales ◽  
The Guardian

Abstract Ancient Athenian women worked in industries ranging from woolworking and food sales to metalworking and medicine; Socrates’ mother was a midwife. The argument for the inclusion of women in the guardian class must be read in light of this historical reality, not least because it allows us retain an important manuscript reading and construe the passage as relying on an inductive generalization rather than a possibly circular argument. Ultimately, Plato fails to fully capitalize on the resources he has for a more egalitarian conclusion than the one he settles on, which regards women as “lesser than” yet “similar to” men.

Charlemagne’s Defeat in the Pyrenees

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xabier Irujo
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Chanson De Roland ◽  
The One ◽  
Epic Poems

The Battle of Rencesvals is the one of the most dramatic historical event of the entire eighth century, not only in Vasconia but in Western Europe. This monograph examines the battle as more than a single military encounter, but instead as part of a complex military and political conquest that began after the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and culminated with the creation of the Kingdom of Pamplona in 824. The battle had major (and largely underappreciated) consequences for the internal structure of the Carolingian Empire. It also enjoyed a remarkable legacy as the topic of one of the oldest European epic poems, La Chanson de Roland. The events that took place in the Pyrenean pass of Rencesvals (Errozabal) on 15 August 778 defined the development of the Carolingian world, and lie at the heart of the early medieval contribution to the later medieval period.

Pearl: 1850–1955

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 689-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Garlitz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Order ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Goodness ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Moral Indifference ◽  
The One ◽  
Good And Evil

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

The Role of Deterrence in a new European strategic environment

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Rob de Wijk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Theoretical Foundation ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Complete Overhaul ◽  
Crimea Peninsula

Abstract: The new Russian military doctrine from 2010, the growing international assertiveness of Russia, and eventually the annexation of the Crimea Peninsula in 2014 have forced the West to rethink deterrence strategies vis a vis Russia. Consequently, the old Cold War concept of deterrence was dusted off and the debate picked up from where it had ended in 1990. This article summarizes the end of the Cold War thinking on deterring aggression against NATO-Europe. It explains why the present Western theoretical foundation of deterrence, which still focuses on strong conventional forces backed up by nuclear weapons, no longer suffices, and argues that the new Russian concept of strategic deterrence requires a complete overhaul of the Western approach. It is not only the security of the Baltic member states of NATO or of transatlantic cables that matter, Europe has to cope with desinformation and destabilization campaigns and has to rethink its energy security strategy. Only together can NATO and EU master these challenges.

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