Postwar Reconfigurations of the US Empire and Global Military Occupation: Struggles against Enclosure in Okinawa

This article argues through an examination of an anti‐base struggle that erupted in early 1950 in Isahama, Okinawa that it is necessary to consider the ways that the so‐called new imperialism of the post‐World War II period required the transformation of social relations, even in places like Okinawa that are regarded as exceptional sites where US bases and facilities operate through the suspension of sovereignty. It asserts that a focus on the gendered dimensions of antagonisms that developed in Okinawa as the US built its military complexes there allows us to see how local communities, often led by women, fundamentally challenged the base‐related enclosures and pushed against the constant ideological work that the language of exception played in normalizing capitalist social relations in general. Finally, it claims that while Okinawa's case may not seem meaningful if taken in its singularity, if we keep in mind that the islands were just one locale within a global military empire that was comprised of hundreds of military complexes containing thousands of bases scattered throughout 64 countries at the height of the Cold War, the destabilizing force of struggles against enclosures as material and ideological sites through which capitalist social relations were naturalized should not be underestimated as valuable shapers of the post‐World War II American empire.     

WHAT DO BRITISH HISTORICAL DATA TELL US ABOUT GOVERNMENT SPENDING MULTIPLIERS?

British data from the early 1700s through World War I reflect the results of numerous high‐quality natural experiments of government spending. Britain frequently participated in wars, increasing military spending massively. Wartime distortions were relatively limited because the government generally adopted tax smoothing policy and rarely implemented interventions. Government spending multiplier estimates are low or negative and significantly below unity. This paper finds no evidence that the multiplier was higher in the slack state than in the normal state. (JEL E32, E62)     

Tropic Knights and Hula Belles: War and Tourism in the South Pacific

Through the discussion of a collection of photographs, this paper explores aspects of the relationship between tourism and war in the Pacific islands. These unpublished photographs were taken by a US naval officer stationed on Saipan and Tinian in 1944 and 1945 and are now held in an archive which contains other material from the Pacific War. A brief history is given of the photographer’s military career and of the circumstances in which the images were taken.

The body of the paper considers the politics of representation through which military and tourist sensibilities overlap. Drawing upon the work of John Urry and Teresia Teaiwa and with close reference to the Yeagar collection I demonstrate the symbiosis between the scopophilic gaze of the first world tourist and the gaze of military surveillance. Simultaneously relying upon tourist stereotypes to distract from military violence while using military force to fulfill touristic fantasies, the Yeagar photographs exemplify the complex looking relations of the soldier‐tourist. This hybrid gaze structure offers a conceptual model for more clearly understanding the development of “militourism” in the Pacific islands during, and since, World War II.     

The federal Public Relations Administration: history’s near miss

Given the permanent hostility by Congress to public relations in public administration at the federal level of government, it is surprising how close the federal government came to establishing a wartime agency, entitled the Public Relations Administration (PRA), as part of its administrative structure in World War II.During the interwar years (1918–1941), the civilian and military leadership of the US engaged in elaborate planning for a possible future war, including recommending the creation of a superagency called the PRA. The 1933 version of the Industrial Mobilization Plan (IMP) submitted to Congress by the Army and Navy was the high water mark of institutionalizing public relations in public administration. This one-time opportunity to legitimize and professionalize public relations by the federal government was lost due to the opposition of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. This article relates how that planning effort unfolded and the factors that led to its stillbirth.     

Guns,Money and Justice

In late 2005, Suzette Nicolas, then known publicly only as ‘Nicole’, alleged that on 1 November of that year she had been gang-raped by US Marines in Olongapo City in the Subic Bay area on the island of Luzon, site of one of two former large US military bases in the Philippines. Thus began what was to become an internationally notorious rape case, involving the US and Philippine governments, the US military, the Philippine judiciary and a broad feminist-led activist coalition. The case, played out against the backdrop of the US state's Asian front in the ‘War on Terror’, has become inextricably linked with the ongoing Philippine campaign against the US–Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement. This article looks at the case, its background, its symbolism and the current political debate on the ongoing connections between militarism, globalization, US imperialism and violence against women in the Philippines.     

Formulating Japan’s UNSCR 1325 national action plan and forgetting the “comfort women”

ABSTRACT

In September 2015, the Japanese government announced its first national action plan (NAP) to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, just ten days after forcefully legislating controversial security bills that would effectively lift the constitutional restrictions on overseas exercise of military force. Why did the conservative administration embrace Resolution 1325 while propelling militarization? This paper examines the formulation process of Japan’s NAP, focusing on gendered struggle over remilitarization and war memory, especially that of the “comfort women,” or Japanese imperial military sexual slavery during World War II. I will examine how post–Cold War remilitarization in Japan was closely intertwined with the struggle over war memory and the gender order of the nation, and how the conservative administration embraced international gender equality norms in an attempt to identify itself as a powerful liberal democracy engaged in maintaining the international security order, and to erase the memory of imperial military sexual violence in the past. By doing so, I attempt to critically reconsider the framework of the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda, which constructs powerful developed nations “not in conflict” as innocent supporters of women in conflict zones.     

What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action,temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

Theory and Society - The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior...     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

TVA,Appalachian underdevelopment,and the post‐industrial era

Shortly after World War II, the Appalachian coal industry underwent a dramatic transformation which, with hindsight, we can understand as part of a shift in the American economy from an industrial to post‐industrial economic base. A decade of change related to this transformation suggests that the post‐industrial era can create new forms of poverty, new forms of gender‐related inequality, and can exacerbate differences among regions and between rural and urban areas. This conclusion stems from the examination of the policies of the Tennessee Valley Authority from World War II to 1960 which stimulated changes in production processes, the work force and communities of coal mining regions that we now recognize as adverse consequences of de‐industrialization. The TVA's policies aggravated the negative consequences of economic transformation, including inducing competition among regions with depressed economies and surplus labor pools, a result which resembles the global economic competition of our own time. This history tempers the early optimism of analysts of the post‐industrial period by calling attention to the costs of de‐industrialization for working people, their families and communities.     

The never changing story: Eight decades of the government public relations department of Thailand

The Government Public Relations Department (GPRD) of Thailand has existed in various forms since the country’s governing system changed from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one in 1932. This study reflects on how the GPRD’s practices have been affected by the country’s governing and political environments over time. It has periodized the eighty-four-years of development of the GPRD into sequential phases based on a continuum approach. The GPRD’s roles and duties are detailed based on four periods: Beginning Period, Growth Period, Full Expansion Period, and Weak Period. The GPRD was firstly positioned to be the primary government tool for introducing the concept of democracy to the Thai populace and disseminating information about government policies, activities and propagandistic campaigns. Through Thailand’s periods of political instability, World War II, the Cold War and rise of communism in Indochina, globalization, and the current digital age, the GPRD has expanded in its role within the government as the center of communication for a wide variety of governmental organizations. However, even as it has expanded and undergone re-organization, it has been criticized for being a government mouthpiece rather that a reliable source of factual information. Working under the direct oversight of the various governments led by the military, as well as both appointed and elected politicians, the GPRD has struggled to maintain a balanced public relations role at the juncture of Thai politics and public interest.     

From Exclusion to Inclusion? The Legal Treatment of ‘Foreigners’ in Contemporary Japan

This article provides a survey of postwar Japan's policy toward ‘foreign’ settlers, focusing on the case of ‘zainichi Koreans’–Koreans who were taken forcefully, or migrated voluntarily, from Korea to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–45) and settled down in Japan after World War II, and their descendants residing in Japan. The article explores how the Japanese government and society have treated them since the end of World War II, thus showing that Japan's policy toward foreign settlers has been changing from one of ‘exclusion’ to one of ‘inclusion,’ though there still remain some institutional barriers.     

From Exclusion to Inclusion? The Legal Treatment of 'Foreigners' in Contemporary Japan

This article provides a survey of postwar Japan's policy toward 'foreign' settlers, focusing on the case of 'zainichi Koreans'-Koreans who were taken forcefully, or migrated voluntarily, from Korea to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-45) and settled down in Japan after World War II, and their descendants residing in Japan. The article explores how the Japanese government and society have treated them since the end of World War II, thus showing that Japan's policy toward foreign settlers has been changing from one of 'exclusion' to one of 'inclusion,' though there still remain some institutional barriers.     

Some socio-economic aspects of population growth in the USSR

This summarizes population trends in the U.S.S.R. since the early 19 00's. On August 9, 1973, the population topped 250 million, almost precisely double that of Russia at the time of the 1st general census in 1897. Since 1922 it had increased by more than 84%. Russia has suffered more population loss in wars than any other country in modern times. The First World War, the Civil War, and the Second World War took a toll of more than 30 million, more than 20 million during the Second World War alone. The extent of these loses can be judged from the following: between 1897 and 1913 the population of Russia increased at the rate of 1.55% per annum or 34.6 million; if this had continued the population would have been at least 182.8 million by the end of 1922. As it was, the population was 136.1 million by 1922 and the hypothetical 182.8 million was not reached until 1952. More than 4/5 of today's population have been born since the October Revolution. Only 43 million were born before the revolution and only 7.5 were born in the last century. The economic base has grown much more rapidly than the population. For the period 1940-1972 the population increased 1.27 times, national income 9.51 times, fixed assets, 8.76 times, industrial production, 13.65 times, agricultural output, 2.14 times, and capital investment 14.52 times. The birthrate has been falling since World War 1 but total population growth has increased steadily. Birthrates have declined from 45.5/1000 in 1913 to 17.8/1000 in 1972 and a slight upturn is seen. It is expected that the birthrate will continue to increase slightly, then stabilize. Much of the population increase has come from significantly reduced mortality rates. 1st and 2nd children now account for 71% of all births. Family allowances, child care, free health care, and other social benefits encourage births while high employment levels for women, a shortage of men in the marriageable age ranges, and late marriages tend to depress the birthrate. The shortage of men is directly the result of the losses during World War 2. Employment opportunities have changed dramatically. The country has gone from a primarily agricultural nation to one in which 80% of the people are working class wage or salary earners. The current problem is closing the urban-rural gap and equalizing population density. 3/5 of the people are town-dwellers. To fight declining population in the villages and in the areas of Siberia and the Far East, new towns and new industrial and cultural centers are being established such as Bratsk, Ust-Ilim, Norilsk, and others.     

The Causes of World War III: Thirty years later

Dire warnings about the imminence of World War III were common in the 1950s, as the world adjusted to the introduction of nuclear weapons. C. Wright Mills and other critical writers exaggerated the power of the military in American society and the weakness of civilian social forces. In the thirty years since Mills publishedThe Causes of World War III, the mass society has asserted itself and nonnuclear conflicts have been the major threats to world peace.     

A unique collaboration of female medical providers within the United States Armed Forces: rehabilitation of a marine with post-concussive vestibulopathy

Uncle Sam's loyal nieces have come a long way from the days of World War I. The development of occupational and physical therapy was heavily influenced by an early relationship with medical specialists during the First World War. This relationship can be considered largely responsible for the eventual acceptance (by the Armed Forces) of women working in this area. Over the past decade active duty women have seen many changes in opportunities to serve and are now stationed aboard aircraft carriers, performing roles previously considered for male personnel. We report a case study of the medical care provided by both military and civilian women working for the United States Armed Forces. Initial assessment was conducted in a battalion aid station of a United States Marine Corp base and the subject was then referred to a military medical center with highly technical vestibular assessment and rehabilitation services. The subject's case represents a unique collaboration of women therapists, enabling a Marines' access to timely and accurate assessment, treatment and ultimately, successful return to active duty. This case study is one of many examples of the acceptance and successful integration of women as providers of medical care within the Military's medical framework.     

The Imperial Origins of Nation-States: Revisiting Hannah Arendt's Genealogy of Totalitarianism1

Against the backdrop of World War II, Hannah Arendt explores the origins of totalitarian rule, arguing that they date back to as early as the late nineteenth century. Alongside anti-Semitism, overseas colonialism and pan-nationalism paved the way for the totalitarian regimes that crystallized a few decades later by weakening the system of nation-states from within. Using the example of Germany, I will argue in this article that we need to revise Arendt's narrative. It focuses too narrowly on how nationalism turned into its categorical opposite, imperialism, neglecting the complementary dynamics of how empire facilitated the nation-state. Only then can we acknowledge the deep rupture that World War I brought about when it created in its wake a dynamic that culminated in the destruction of European nation-states.     

World War II and the Transformation of the U.S. State: The Wartime Foundations of U.S. Hegemony

I present an analysis of the history of U.S. expansion and rise to hegemony in World War II, and argue that the concrete global perspectives and postwar ambitions of U.S. state managers were formed in the course of world war itself. They were not the result of preconceived economic or geopolitical policies or aims. I examine U.S. expansion and postwar goals in the military, economic, and political arenas, and show how social processes set in motion by world war in each of these dimensions were central in shaping the distinctive outcomes. I develop a theoretical perspective of world war as a social process, and argue that such an extraordinary period of violence, historical contingency, and state-led expansion involves potentially unique features of macrohistorical development and change.     

Social Integration in Post‐Multiculturalism: An Analysis of Social Integration Policy in Post‐war Britain

Social integration is one of the most urgent issues in Western countries, where cultural diversity has been recognized to make social unity danger. In the past, social integration used to be tackled by multiculturalism, which was an effort to recognize cultural diversity as a positive aspect of society. However, multiculturalism is losing the moral support of society because multiculturalism itself could not be a social glue among different people; rather it is thought to make society unstable. Thus, a new philosophy and policy is required to manage the issues of social integration in a globalized social environment. In order to create social integration, on one hand, people with different backgrounds need to share the same concept of society. On the other hand, people have to become accustomed to cultural diversity. However, this is not easily accomplished because both measures for social integration seem to be politically contradictory and incompatible. How, and by what reasons, could these two conditions of social integration be satisfied? To answer this question, this paper scrutinizes the changes in social integration policy in post‐war Britain. I divide social integration policy in Britain into three stages focusing on the relationship between social unity and cultural diversity: from after World War II to 1979; Thatcher's and Major's Conservative Governments; and Blair's new Labour Government. The social integration policy and philosophy of the new Labour Government in particular is important because it represents post‐multiculturalism discourse for social integration. The Labour Government tried to establish social integration by introducing an abstract common identity, which both the majority and minority groups could accept and which is compatible with various cultural or religious conventions and teaching, as it were, citizenship and Britishness, as a set of liberal values. Although the Labour Government's policy itself was controversial, it is giving us a reference point for the debate on social integration in a post‐multicultural era.     

The case of vegetovascular dystonia: inventing the most common Soviet disease

ABSTRACT

The paper considers the case of vegetovascular dystonia, one of the most typical and common “Soviet” diseases. This syndrome emerged in Soviet medicine after World War II, and very quickly become a popular diagnosis among physicians. The author describes how the construct of vegetovascular dystonia was formed and developed, what changes it underwent, and what affected those changes. The concept and history of vegetovascular dystonia can provide an understanding of Soviet medicine and health science in general.     

In the Long Run We Are all Dead: Hey Keynes, What Is Long in the Contemporary US Case?

The idea of declinism of the US had emerged in every decade after the World War Two and so it was as well after the end of the Cold War. The article argues that such a phenomenon may be attributed to the nature of the international system, where through the globalization the US enables ‘the rest’ to grow on its expense. China and other export led economies, made great benefit of the US open market that is functioning as a ‘big vacuum cleaner’. The focal question of article is two-folded: first, is ‘the raise of the rest’ causing the geoeconomic centre of power to shift from the Atlantic to Pacific; second, is the US in decline? Article presents economic data that show that there are no economic incentives for the geoeconomic shift. The geopolitical centre may indeed by shifting, but not due to the geoeconomic reasons, but rather due to military, political, and ideological power factors. The US has been in relative decline since the end of the WW2—other international actors seized the chance that the international system created by the US provided. Thus, the relevant question about declinism is—is the US in absolute decline? The article argues that the 2008 financial shock was not cyclical in nature, but rather systemic. It is the first time since the WW2 that the US was unable to answer to the challenge adequately. The main reason for that is not external, namely, the relative decline of the US—G8 was replaced by G20—but internal—the US is not tackling the core of its systemic economic problem. This suggests that the US is marching towards an absolute decline. To avoid its demise, the US has to change its Keynesian pragmatic short-sighted economic mentality and do the well needed structural reforms.