This paper aims to show that the Allies of the Second World War formed a major, yet largely overlooked site of mid-twentieth-century internationalism. Historians have tended to tell national stories about this coalition, built around its leaders and their bilateral relationships and conflicts, such as the 'special' Anglo-American relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and their generals. The present study, by contrast, foregrounds the military and civilian planners working underneath them, as well as the inter-Allied institutions that facilitated their cooperation. This is a half-forgotten chapter of the war's history: a series of technical, so-called 'combined' organs designed to plan Allied grand strategy and operations, pool their productive resources, and unify their theatre-level military commands, set up by Great Britain and the United States after the latter's formal entry into the war in December 1941. The planners serving on these boards and committees, the paper furthermore shows, described their work in explicitly internationalist terms. 'Combination', as these insiders called it, meant putting the objective needs of Allied strategy ahead of narrow national interests. Its history is more than merely Anglo-American: involving Canadian, French and other European actors, it encompassed the wider transAtlantic and foreshadowed the later Atlantic alliance. Indeed, since several key shapers of postwar European integration, notably Jean Monnet, were closely involved in the combined experiment, this paper shines new light on a warlike root of European cooperation. Thus, it opens a dialogue between the history of war, internationalism and Europeanisation.
This paper seeks to advance the so-called rising powers debate of the past fifteen years by interrogating its selective use of the past. Key to the debate are the impact of rising powers like China on the international order, and how to accommodate them. Historiography plays a crucial but unappreciated role in the debate, as scholars look to the past to make sense of the future.Especially in the United States, many compare the US now to Great Britain before 1940, the idea being that both faced the same difficulties of decline relative to rising challengers. This is the core case of power transition theory in the field of International Relations. It is also, fundamentally, weak. As I show, it relies on a 'long chronology' of British decline that the past quarter-century of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Britain has undermined. I instead propose a 'short chronology' of the transition away from Britain that emphasizes agency and contingency over structure and the longue durée. Bringing the work of historians to the rising powers debate thus indicates that the key factors to study are not grand systemic forces, but short-term politics and diplomacy.
This is a series of solicited articles requested by the editors of Vol. 51, emerging from a roundtable discussion held at the 2022 International Studies Association Convention. Each short contribution seeks to demonstrate the newest research of the English School of International Relations. These contributions tackle key questions including: the decline of liberal hegemony, the rise of China, the divide between soldaristic and pluralistic ethics, the engagement of the English School with Area Studies, theoretical approaches to grounding English School research and an investigation of the English School’s intellectual legacy.
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