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Begin New Search Topic War Political Geography Germany Content Type Journal Article Publication Year within 25 Years

11. Evolution and Normalization: Historical Consciousness in Germany

Author:
Felix Philipp Lutz
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
German political culture has been undergoing gradual but significant changes since unification. Military engagements in combat missions, the introduction of a professional army, and a remarkable loss of recent historical knowledge mostly within the younger generations are hallmarks of the new millennium. Extensive education about the Holocaust is still prevalent and there is a strong continuity of attitudes and orientations toward the Nazi era and the Holocaust reaching back to the 1980s. Nevertheless, a lack of knowledge about history-not only the World War II period, but also about East and West Germany-in the age group of people under thirty is staggering. The fading away of the generation of victims who are the last ones to tell the story of persecution during the Holocaust and a parallel rise of new actors and technologies, present challenges to the educational system and the current political culture of Germany.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany

12. The Coming Fiat Money Cataclysm and the Case for Gold

Author:
Kevin Dowd, Martin Hutchinson, and Gordon Kerr
Publication Date:
06-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
A recurring theme in monetary history is the conflict of trust and authority: the conflict between those who advocate a spontaneous monetary order determined by free exchange under the rule of law and those who wish to meddle with the monetary system for their own ends. This conflict is perhaps most clearly seen in the early 20th century controversy over the "state theory of money" (or "chartalism"), which maintained that money is a creature of the state. The one side was represented by the defenders of the old monetary order-most notably by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. The other side was represented by the German legal scholar Georg Friedrich Knapp and by John Maynard Keynes. They argued that on monetary matters the government should be free to do whatever it liked, free from any constraints of law or even conventional morality.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany and Australia

13. Sovereign Debt Crises as Threats to the Peace: Restructuring under Chapter VII of the UN Charter?

Author:
Matthias Goldmann
Publication Date:
06-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Institution:
The Goettingen Journal of International Law
Abstract:
Sovereign debt crises might significantly decrease the level of socioeconomic rights enjoyment for the population in the affected state. According to recent data, they even increase the risk of civil unrest. However, the resolution of sovereign debt crises is compromised by legal obstacles which result from the absence of a statutory, obligatory bankruptcy procedure for states. On the one hand, creditors might refuse to accept an exchange of their debt instrument in the frame of a workout and choose to litigate against the state. On the other hand, states might worsen their situation by unnecessarily delaying inevitable workouts. This article explores whether and to what extent the powers UN Security Council could be deployed in order to mitigate these problems. This requires a reconsideration of the concept of peace in Article 39 UN Charter. The article concludes that, at the request of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Security Council might put a stay on the enforcement of creditors' claims or order workout negotiations.
Topic:
Security, International Law, War, and International Monetary Fund
Political Geography:
Germany and United Nations

14. Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by Michael Burleigh

Author:
Cathal J. Nolan
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Michael Burleigh is a prolific writer on issues of ethics in history, notably the crimes of Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes. In this popular survey of some of the larger moral demands and dilemmas of fighting World War II, he is never boring and quite often right. He is also, far too frequently, surprisingly uninformed.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany

15. Humanity's Law

Author:
Martti Koskenniemi
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
In his draft of the opening speech for Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, Hersch Lauterpacht wrote that the establishment of the tribunal meant that the “sovereign State” had finally been arraigned before the law. In Lauterpacht's mind, Nuremberg signaled the end of the political system of statehood. With other interwar internationalists, Lauterpacht viewed the First World War, and now the Second, as outcomes of an out- dated and dangerous idea of sovereignty that put the egoistic values of the nation over those of a universal humanity. But when Shawcross received Lauterpacht's draft, he coolly crossed out the latter's wording. It is not that difficult to understand why he did so. After all, Hitler's opponents had struggled fiercely, at the cost of many lives, to defend the sovereignty of their own countries. The allied forces that finally crushed Nazi Germany were composed of military and economic resources that had been gathered, organized, and operated by states. The last thing the English, the Russians, or the French wanted to hea was that they would now condemn precisely the sovereignty they had spent five years fighting to protect.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Russia and Germany

16. How Central is Land for Peace?

Author:
Elliott Abrams, Oded Naaman, and Mikhael Manekin
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
A HEALTHY OBSESSION Oded Naaman and Mikhael Manekin In "The Settlement Obsession" (July/ August 2011), Elliott Abrams argues:  In the end, Israel will withdraw from most of the West Bank and remain only in the major blocs where hundreds of thousands of Israelis now live. Israelis will live in a democratic state where Jews are the majority, and Palestinians will live in a state -- democratic, one hopes -- with an Arab Muslim majority. The remaining questions are how quickly or slowly that end will be reached and how to get there with minimal violence. For Abrams, there can be no other end; all that politics can do is postpone this end or bring it about. Although it would be preferable to end the conflict as soon as possible, there is no immediate need to do so. Any sense of immediacy, Abrams writes, is overblown: he claims that nongovernmental organizations and some in the international community unjustly point to a humanitarian crisis to create unwarranted urgency. In reviewing our book, Occupation of the Territories, Abrams attempts to assuage worries about the need for urgent action, going so far as to compare Israel's military behavior during its 45-year occupation of the West Bank -- in which Israel has expropriated land, seized natural resources, and settled its own population there -- to the United States' behavior during in its ten-year occupation and massive reconstruction of Germany after World War II. Abrams then implies that Breaking the Silence does not provide reliable or sufficient evidence for the claim that, in his words, "the presence of Israeli settlers and IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers in the West Bank is laying waste to the area, reducing it to misery."
Topic:
Government and War
Political Geography:
United States, Israel, Palestine, Arabia, and Germany

17. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Author:
Daniel Wahl
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
In 1943, on the coast of Andalusia in southwest Spain, a dead man “washed ashore wearing a fake uniform and the underwear of a dead Oxford don, with a love letter from a girl he had never known pressed to his long-dead heart” (pp. 323–24). It was near the high point of the Third Reich's reign, with Europe effectively under Nazi control; but, owing in part to this dead man, Hitler's days were numbered. Ben Macintyre tells the story of this fantastic ruse in Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. The book may read like fiction, but remarkably, the story is completely true. It begins during World War II when the Nazi war machine “was at last beginning to stutter and misfire.” The British Eighth Army under Montgomery had vanquished Rommel's invincible Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The Allied invasion of Morocco and Tunisia had fatally weakened Germany's grip, and with the liberation of Tunis, the Allies would control the coast of North Africa, its ports and airfields, from Casablanca to Alexandria. The time had come to lay siege to Hitler's Fortress [across Europe]. But where? Sicily was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill famously called the soft “underbelly of the Axis.” The island at the toe of Italy's boot commanded the channel linking the two sides of the Mediterranean, just eighty miles from the Tunisian coast. . . . The British in Malta and Allied convoys had been pummeled by Luftwaffe bombers taking off from the island, and . . . “no major operation could be launched, maintained, or supplied until the enemy airfields and other bases in Sicily had been obliterated so as to allow free passage through the Mediterranean.” An invasion of Sicily would open the road to Rome . . . allow for preparations to invade France, and perhaps knock a tottering Italy out of the war. . . . [Thus]: Sicily would be the target, the precursor to the invasion of mainland Europe. (pp. 36–37) There was a major problem, however. Macintyre points out that the strategic importance of Sicily was as clear to the Nazis as it was to the Allies and that, if the Nazis were prepared for it, an invasion would be a bloodbath. So how could the Allies catch their enemy off guard? The solution was to launch what Macintyre calls one of the most extraordinary deception operations ever attempted. The British Secret Service would take a dead man and plant on him fake documents that suggested that the Allies were planning to bomb Sicily only as an initial feint preceding an attack on Nazi forces in Greece and Sardinia. They would then float their man near the Spanish coastline, making it appear as though he drowned at sea, and hope that one of the many Nazi spies in Spain discovered him and the documents and passed their content along to his superiors—convincing them to weaken Sicily by moving forces to Greece and Sardinia. . . .
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, Germany, Tunisia, Rome, and Alexandria

18. No Marshall Plan for the Middle East

Author:
Amitai Etzioni
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
PRISM
Institution:
Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), National Defense University
Abstract:
At first blush, the idea that the United States, working with other nations, should initiate, guide, and finance economic development and introduce democratic regimes to the nations of the Middle East—just as it did in post–World War II Germany and Japan—is appealing. From a humanitarian viewpoint, one cannot help but be moved by the idealism of helping millions of people who are currently unemployed and poor—including many children and young people, and others who live under oppressive regimes—to gain the kind of life Americans cherish. From a realpolitik viewpoint, military means will not suffice when it comes to ending the terrorism that threatens the United States and its allies, or halting the insurgencies that destabilize the Middle East.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, Middle East, and Germany

19. Strategy "in a microcosm": Processes of tactical learning in a WWI German Infantry Division

Author:
Christian Stachelbeck
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Despite the defeat of 1918, the tactical warfare of German forces on the battlefields against a superior enemy coalition was often very effective. The heavy losses suffered by the allies until well into the last months of the war are evidence of this. The tactical level of military action comprises the field of direct battle with forces up to division size. Tactics – according to Clausewitz, the “theory of the use of military forces in combat” – is the art of commanding troops and their organized interaction in combined arms combat in the types of combat which characterized the world war era – attack, defense and delaying engagement.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany

20. The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle 1918-1939.

Author:
Matt Bucholtz
Publication Date:
06-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
For decades historical research dedicated to the study of the German army, or Reichswehr, before the Second World War has been dominated by a single overriding question: How did the German army create Blitzkrieg? Studies, both popular and academic, have focused on German offensive doctrine and the leading figures responsible for its creation, in an attempt to understand the stunning German victories of the first half of the Second World War. While this has led to a fuller appreciation of the various characteristics of combined arms warfare, it has also generated a skewed vision of the German army that does not accurately portray its operation, activities, strategic outlook, and doctrinal breadth. Matthias Strohn's work, The German Army and the Defense of the Reich provides a much-needed counter-weight to the existing 'Blitzkrieg' centric historiography of the Reichswehr between the First and Second World Wars.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany