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6 results

  • 2 - A History of Global Governance

  • from Part I - Background
  • Augusto Lopez-Claros, Arthur L. Dahl, Maja Groff
  • Book:
    Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century
    Published online:
    18 January 2020
    Print publication:
    23 January 2020, pp 30-64
    • Chapter
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  • Summary

    The idea of bringing into being supranational organizations to resolve disputes between states has a distinguished lineage, going as far back as Dante Alighieri’s On World Government, Rousseau’s A Project of Perpetual Peace and Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations operating under the rule of law, and eventually evolving into “a perfect civil union of mankind.” The League of Nations was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of war, a milestone in a long process intended to strengthen the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation. The UN was initially conceived as an international entity founded on federalist principles, with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, but it emerged as a rather less ambitious entity with two fundamental flaws: the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council, both undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization. The chapter also reviews the concerns raised by Grenville Clark and others who thought that if member countries could not agree upon well-defined powers that they would be willing to yield, no global authority adequate to maintain peace would arise in our time.

  • A Necessary Evil: Conceptualizing the Socialist Commodity under Mao

  • Laurence Coderre
  • Journal:
    Comparative Studies in Society and History / Volume 61 / Issue 1 / January 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 December 2018, pp. 23-49

  • This article traces the conceptual lineage of a statement, made by Mao Zedong and published in 1975, describing the contemporary economic system in the People's Republic of China as a commodity economy. Any surprise we might feel in the face of this verdict says more about our own narrow understanding of the (capitalist) commodity than it does about the political economy of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). As I detail in this study, the continued existence and necessity of commodities under socialism had long been an important topic of conversation in Communist circles, with important ramifications for economic planning and political movements. This article focuses on the impact of Stalin's theory of the socialist commodity, as articulated in 1952, on Chinese political economy in the 1950s; Mao's particular engagement with Stalin's work in the context of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960); and the emergence of a new, less benign view of the socialist commodity in the 1970s. I argue that political economic theory and its study were in fact critical to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution as mass mobilization campaigns, calling into question much of what we think we know about modern Chinese history and Chinese socialism. The essay is intended to unsettle enduring and uncritical associations between the commodity-form and capitalism. How might we, following on the heels of the theorists I discuss, imagine the commodity otherwise?

  • 22 - The politics of culture, 1945–2000

  • from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends
  • Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    02 November 2006, pp 605-635

  • Summary

    This chapter tells a convoluted story, or rather stories, spanning five decades and a spectrum of leadership ranging from Joseph Stalin's absolute dictatorship to Valentin Rasputin's technocracy. It depicts a society where politics and culture have until quite recently been intimately, indeed inextricably, intertwined, and where the imperatives of one frequently conflicted with the essence of the other. Even in today's post-Soviet Russia, where artists grope to find a secure footing in the rubble of the old cultural landscape, the nexus of politics and culture has not entirely disappeared. Leonid Brezhnev's reign curtailed much of the dynamism characteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged during Gorbachev's five years of perestroika and glasnost'. Throughout the Thaw, and well into the Brezhnev years, the Second World War became a touchstone of Soviet culture, in part because it represented the single unifying experience of a history otherwise bloody with political and ideological divisions.

  • 25 - The Soviet Union and the road to communism

  • from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends
  • Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    02 November 2006, pp 706-731

  • Summary

    The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy. When the pioneers of Russian Social Democracy looked West in the 1890s, they saw a powerful, prestigious and yet still revolutionary movement. They saw mass worker parties, inspired by the Marxist class narrative that continued to advance despite the persecutions of such redoubtable enemies as Chancellor Bismarck. The man who gave canonical expression to the elaborated class narrative of Social Democracy was Karl Kautsky. The link between the class narrative and Bolshevik thinking about the peasantry is the scenario summarised by the phrase kto-kogo or 'who-whom'. Joseph Stalin presented the mass collectivisation of 1929-30 as the triumphal outcome of Vladimir Lenin's kto-kogo scenario.

  • 8 - Patriotic War, 1941–1945

  • from Part I - Russia and the Soviet Union: The Story through Time
  • Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    02 November 2006, pp 217-242

  • Summary

    Standing squarely in the middle of the Soviet Union's timeline is the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for the eastern front of the Second World War. During the nineteenth century international trade, lending and migration developed without much restriction. The Soviet Union was an active partner in the process that led to the opening of the 'eastern front' on 22 June 1941. Soviet war preparations began in the 1920s, long before Adolf Hitler's accession to power, at a time when France and Poland were seen as more likely antagonists. In June 1941 Hitler ordered his generals to destroy the Red Army and secure most of the Soviet territory in Europe. The main features of the Soviet system of government on the outbreak of war were Joseph Stalin's personal dictatorship, a centralised bureaucracy with overlapping party and state apparatuses, and a secret police with extensive powers to intervene in political, economic and military affairs.

  • 16 - Workers and industrialization

  • from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends
  • Edited by Ronald Grigor Suny
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Russia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    02 November 2006, pp 440-467

  • Summary

    For much of the twentieth century, labour historians conventionally employed the concept of the working class as an objective description of a distinct social group with measurable characteristics and factory workers as the core element within that class. Peasant labour migration assumed huge proportions in the late nineteenth century. Peasants travelled to and found work in the burgeoning metallurgical and coal-mining industries of the south. Joseph Stalin's great turn towards industrialisation, accompanied by the collectivisation of agriculture, provoked massive out-migration from the villages. Paternalism frequently crops up in both contemporary descriptions and historians' accounts of factory relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. Enterprise paternalism had little to do with the social backgrounds or 'party-mindedness' of managers. Having internalised Soviet propaganda's emphasis on the dignifying, self-realising dimensions of material labour, industrial workers tended to have greater respect for production than auxiliary workers regardless of skill level.